BETTING AGAINST THE HOUSE

by Rick Ehling

Almost overnight an entire 

country reeks of three AM 

in Las Vegas’ seediest casino

Few truly smiling, everything feigned

All that fatigued desperation

Smoke and sweat settling heavy 

in dayless, temperature controlled space

Coin cups and wallets emptier

Perhaps a bit drunk  Bleary eyed 

Certainly sleepy  Blinking, 

yawning  Or were those sighs

Remembering prior buffet

A feathered line of showgirls

Well past joy’s equinox 

This crash after faux sugar 

Clinks and flashes finally 

overwhelming  Triggering 

a headache or tinnitus  Most 

clinging to whatever chance 

they no longer believe in

Many wishing they counted cards

Rick Ehling is a physician living in the SF Bay Area, working in what was once called a “safety net clinic.” He writes most mornings when he can’t sleep; this started after a family illness but has continued for much of the last decade.

THE TIN MAN

by Matthew McDermott

Coco Fusco: Twilight at The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL. 

Beauty makes me long to build hotels.
Dorothy stood here once, her hands on her slaphappy hips.
She spoke glowingly of Kansas. I thought of her milky white tits.
She cast my advances aside, wanting true love from my heart.
I mimed my felonious advances, knowing of no other art.

The therapist sailed in confidently and tied three volunteers to me.
He rolled me down a mountain slope, trying to set a new side of me free.
We headed west, until, one day, we came to the great Muddy.
Surrounded by prairie dog dens, he sought to introduce America to me.

Off, off, off! I whispered, but we were tied together like a bundle of sticks.
The therapist flew above us in a balloon, watching to see if my mind was cleared.
My parents were killed in a car crash when I was twelve, said the man strapped
to my back. I cleared my throat as one is supposed to when sympathy is required.

I have breast cancer, said the woman on my front, but I couldn’t get a look
at her, no matter how I writhed. I gave up and threw my weight to each side.
Come on, I said. What’s your deal? I’m waiting. You better not be dead.
I can’t take the smell, the bugs, the worms! Just then, I heard the therapist’s voice.

This worked before on a man with a heart of coal, but here we only have an absence,
a tin chest acting as a relic of our forgotten humanity. I wash my hands of you,
there’ll be no rebirth; for here strides our grifter-in-chief, the Tin Man. To feed his ego
he would sell the earth, or your sister, your dog, your child: all are casino chips to him.

I shrugged at his pronouncements. And smiled. Why am I so lovable then?
There’s one thing, I, as a grifter, know. It’s not me, it’s you. I couldn’t do
any of this without you. I will remake this nation in my image: hollow men.



Matthew McDermott is a poet and nonprofit manager who lives in the Chicago area.

THE DONALD SONNETS

by Llyn Clague

IMAGE OF OUTFIT VIA DEAGOSTINI / GETTY; PHOTOGRAPH OF TRUMP BY JOHN TAGGART / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY. Detail of photgraphic result published in The New Yorker, Daily Shouts, October 28, 2015.

Sonnet LXXI

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than flitting across your screen you see my obit
Announcing I am gone.  No smarmy op-ed
Will weep that I have left this hypocrite
World.  No, if you peruse these lines, do not think
Of me who wrote them: so great is your love
Of self I would not give them cause to wink
At you for my shortcomings, and so shove
You off the cliff of their so precious hauteur.
If, I say, you look back upon this verse,
My smallness must not reduce your superior
Vision of greatness, of better, not worse.
Let not the wise world mock your glory
By tying you to my too ordinary story.

Sonnet XCI

Some glory in their birth, some in their wealth,
Some in their cleverness, or in a pretty face,
Some in bodily strength or personal health,
Or cars and yachts boosted in this rat race.
Every type has its particular niche
Where it finds its special gratification.
But these trifles – even, Donald, your riches,
to me but means to ever greater action –
Are nothing: with your love of self you trump
Smooth cleverness,  a beauty-pageant chest,
The bulge of biceps, and arrogant assump-
Tions of birth certificates. I boast I’ve the best:      
Wretched in this alone, that, losing, you take
Self-love away, and wretched my heart will break.

Sonnet XXIX

When, disgraced by boss, society, and fate,
Along with others filled with helpless rage,
I cry to heaven with my unbounded hate
And look upon myself as a rat in a cage,
Haply, Donald, I think on thee, and my heart,
Like hope in a gambler in your casino,
Leaps up into a sweet realm apart,
Made magic by almighty, endless ego.
When I revel in the inebriation
Of your inspired take-downs, smears and sneers
And abandon myself to the elation
Spreading far and wide with all your cheers,
Then, bathed in the glow of your Caesarian
Narcissism, I scorn compassion from any man.

Llyn Clague is a poet based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.  His poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.