RED TEAM VERSUS RED TEAM

by Shannon Anthony

Sounds like your party has a civil war

or self-implosion theme. Unfriendly fire:

Your taco bar comes with razor wire.

So now briefly, you are chiefly

claiming that your camp is

against the heartland champs

because the one point of Barbie, that doll,

is to be here to cheer, not cheered at all.

And because she once spoke

and you're proudly unwoke

you're rooting for the 49ers

to kiss the ring where the sun don't shine

forgetting every bad thing you ever said

about the city that gave you Nancy.

Cognitive dissonance and decline: Go red!

Knock yourself out with your bash (nothing fancy).

I think you'd agree I've got that right.

(I'm not male, but not pregnant, and I'm white.)

If you come to (such as they are) your senses

you'll see that concussions have consequences.

You're not immune, and this isn't a kingdom.

What happens in Vegas is just a symptom,

another test we'll hear he aced. Remember

the Big Game: That happens in November.

Shannon Anthony lives in Minneapolis.

NEW BEGINNING IN ISRAEL

by Lenore Weiss

Menachem Begin (Mark Reinstein/Getty Images)

Menachem Begin was Dodo’s first cousin.
She and my mother were best friends.
Dodo lived on the ground floor.
We lived on the other side of the apartment building.
Sometimes I babysat her dog Cocoa who pooped
on the living room rug before she returned home
from vacationing in Israel where she drank coffee
with her cousin, the same Menachem Begin.

Dodo’s mother was Mrs. Bagoon who lived
under the elevated near Southern Boulevard
and painted her veins purple with Gentian Violet
wearing support stockings that made her feet sweat.
Her brother was Menachem’s son
whose family came from Russia, and as far as I knew,
Israel was a collection basket for the poor and huddled masses
all yearning. Sharon, from third-grade, went to Israel
with her mother every summer to plant a tree
in her father’s memory, and Aunt Clara sent money
through her women’s organization.

I never remember my mother or father
sending money to Israel even though Menachem Begin
was Dodo’s first cousin, but they did send me
to a Zionist sleep-away camp
because that’s where Dodo sent her daughter
who really liked it. My father didn’t talk much
about Israel, at least not in English, or about the family
he’d lost in Hungary, but made it clear
he didn't think Zionism was the same winning ticket
others hoped for, not the same
new beginning for the Jewish people
even though Menachem’s
last name was spelled like that.

Lenore Weiss serves as the Associate Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Editor for the Mud Season Review and lives in Oakland, California with Zebra the Brave and Granola the Shy. Her environmental novel Pulp into Paper is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press as is a new poetry collection, Video Game Pointers from WordTech Communications.

CHRISTMAS PAST WITH THE TRUMPS

by Alan Walowitz

Image source: Pinterest

The Q17 would take me past Jamaica Estates—
though I didn’t know then of Trump,
whose pop already was a big deal in Brooklyn,
but I knew this was where the rich folks lived.
And I’m sure young Donald, though a bully even then,
wasn’t the one who pushed me aside
and shook me down for a couple of dimes
in the arcade at the Jamaica Terminal
just to get at the shooting range,
with a rifle that shot light at the little metal ducks that
would shut with a snap like a flock of cheap valises.
A guy like him didn’t take the bus, I learned,
and would have pocketsful of dimes to fill his own machines
that lined his basement finished in teak and kingwood—
and had real guns to shoot at summer camps
with riflery and riding, Western and English,
and cloth napkins that came with service
and they didn’t dare call it mess.

My father would drive us through Trump’s part of the world
this time of year to see the Christmas lights of the rich,
and we probably went by his house a couple of times,
though the really well-to-do never put up lights,
while the newly rich installed just one color—a melancholy blue—
on their mansion’s outer edge so passersby like us might be awed by its size,
in the winter dark, while the family that might have lived inside
was off on a cruise, though they likely left the curtains open,
and the white lights shaped like candles on the huge tree
would illuminate those ten foot ceilings, in those cavernous front rooms
that otherwise were never permitted to reveal
even a shadow.

Alan Walowitz has been published various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in Queens, NY. Alan's chapbook Exactly Like Love is available from Osedax Press.