GRAB-'EM-BY-THE-PUSSY ℞: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

by Steven Shankman

The former guy and a detail of “Oedipus and the Sphinx” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, part of the collection at the Louvre in Paris. (Trump photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images; “Oedipus” image by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images via The Los Angeles Times) 

King Oedipus was certain he alone

Could fix it. When he heard his Thebans groan,

Then die en masse, he offered his expert

Advice. Blame Creon, blame the seer! Hurt

By the grim news, he vowed to find the cause

Of the great plague, to act at once, not pause

To look within himself. It soon was clear

He was himself the cause, his pride, his fear

Of self-examination. Sophocles

Saw Oedipus as Athens, her disease

A plague of arrogance. Our former leader

(Unlike King Oedipus), a bottom-feeder,

Has none of the ancient king’s nobility

But like King Oedipus he fails to see

He is the plague. Devoid of empathy,

Obsessed with money and celebrity,

He feeds red hats to haters. USA!

USA first! We’re winners, led the way

In COVID-19 deaths! The plague will stay

Until the voters make it go away. 

 

Steven Shankman holds the UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue, and Peace at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Classics Emeritus. His poems have appeared in a number of journals including Sewanee Review, Literary Imagination, Tikkun, Literary Matters, and Poetica Magazine. He is one of the co-editors of The World of Literature (1999), an anthology of world literature from a global perspective that contains some of his own poetic translations from Chinese, Greek, and Latin. His Penguin edition of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad appeared in 1996. His chapbook of poems Kindred Verses was published in 2000. His book of poems Talmudic Verses (Finishing Line Press) appeared in 2023. He is the author of many scholarly books, including Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies (SUNY Press, 2010), which contains some of his own original poetry, and Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (Northwestern UP, 2017).

P-22

by Barbara Parchim

The famous Hollywood-roaming mountain lion known as P-22 is drastically underweight and was probably struck and injured by a car, wildlife experts who conducted a health examination on the big cat said on Tuesday. The male cougar, whose killing of a leashed dog has raised concerns about its behavior, probably will not be released back into the wild and could be sent to an animal sanctuary or euthanized, depending on its health, the California department of fish and wildlife said. —The Guardian, December 14, 2022

you overstepped your allotment

designated when we took over the landscape—

 

wandered into the backyards of

designer dogs that scamper like prey

 

crossed the wrong freeways—

a concrete grid overlaid on the land

 

meaningless, artificial boundaries

not mapped in your DNA

 

how could you know

only certain spaces were allowed?

 

how solitary your existence

far from the Santa Monica mountains

 

the occasional park,

a checkerboard of wild between our constructs

 

what happens next is our decision

as we decide everything in our dominion

 

your celebrity may evoke some empathy

as the wild slips away

 

 

Barbara Parchim lives on a small farm in southwest Oregon.  She enjoys gardening and hiking and volunteered for several years at a wildlife rehabilitation facility.  Her poems have appeared in Allegro, Isacoustic, The NewVerse News, Turtle Island Quarterly, Windfall, Front Porch Review, Jefferson Journal, Cirque, and others.  Her first book What Remains was published by Flowstone Press in October, 2021.

IT ISN'T EASY BEING FAMOUS THESE DAYS

by Michael Cantor

I wonder how it feels to be inned;                              

named as a closet straight, extinct, passé,

who never played the games you seemed to play.

What if some sleaze-bag-tabloid-bag-of-wind

rescinds all notions that you’ve ever sinned,

and hints and winks and rumors all convey

the message from Manhattan to L.A.

that you’re sober, steady, disciplined.

And if the vicious rumors multiply –

no drugs, no drinks, no series of affairs –

if out is in, and in is forced to lie,

and nothing quite makes sense, and no cares  

about you, just about how you appear,

what impact would this have on your career?

What impact could this have on your career?

You’ve worked so hard to make yourself seem twisted –

the haggard pouts and all night flings, two-fisted

slugs of drugs and booze, a constant sneer –

your photos and your tweets helped engineer

a life whose self-indulgences were listed

as evidence that you, indeed, existed,

if only on the tube, out there, somewhere.

But now it seems exposed as parody:

or so the critics claim – and they should know –

your singer-dancer-fashionista show

is dead as dead can be on Junk TV,

for in a world that dines on out and in,

being inned means you can never win.

Michael Cantor’s full-length collection, Life in the Second Circle (Able Muse Press, 2012), was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry.  A chapbook, The Performer, was published in 2007; his work has appeared in The Dark Horse, Measure, Raintown Review, SCR, Chimaera, The Flea, and he has won the New England Poetry Club Gretchen Warren and Erika Mumford prizes.  A native New Yorker, he has lived and worked in Japan, Latin America and Europe, and presently divides his time between hurricane-threatened Plum Island, MA, and drought-threatened Santa Fe, NM.