DESPITE MANY EDITS, THIS POEM REMAINS A SCREED

by Devon Balwit

Martin Keep/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images via The New York Times

 

Individualized animal abuse is a crime; systematic animal abuse is a business model. —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, June 10, 2023

 

What we can’t bear to look at, we tolerate hidden:

the living penned with the dead, vivisection,

 

infants torn from their mothers. Already, I imagine

you, reader, lamenting this poem’s wanton

 

cruelty. Or protesting that you don’t eat red

meat or chicken flesh and so aren’t implicated .

 

Unfortunately, milk and cheese also equal

death. I wish it weren’t so, for I was partial

 

to Gouda—and eggs—but the free range birds

we imagine exist mostly in our heads. Farmyards

 

would span entire states were the hens to peck

at will. Back we retreat, then, into our dark

 

ages, some fated to suffer in a preordained hierarchy.

We’d squirm if this logic were applied to our species:

 

Women, brown people, the poor—What

can one do? They just happened to draw the short

 

straw. Surely, mere appetite can be retrained

once we admit animals know pleasure and pain.

 

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. In her most recent collection Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023] she romps through Melville’s Moby Dick. 

BEAR BANDITS

by Claire Matturro

A 500-pound black bear named Hank was partially pardoned after DNA evidence revealed that the furry fugitive did not act alone during a seven-month crime spree in Lake Tahoe. —rdnewsNow, February 4, 2022

Maybe it started with that woman—

the one in the fake Tudor—guiding

her Escalade with Greenpeace stickers

through the drive-thru in her fit of fury

hunger on her way home from her divorce,

willing to slum but when she ripped into

the Styrofoam box, a loose fry shimmied

like some pale thin snake. Figuring that

for a cosmic sign, she tossed burger and all

on her garbage can and forgot those bear locks,

which were all too much trouble anyway.

Hank, who didn’t have a name yet,

was this black bear with a keen sense of smell

who followed that waffling whiff of charred meat

all the way to South Lake Tahoe, then

didn’t see any reason to leave, especially

when the lawyer at the turn in the road tossed out

twenty boxes of old girl scout cookies

he’d purchased so his daughter could get a prize.

Hank didn’t mind stale when he dug

through garbage and snuffled up

those cookies, gorging like a teen with

marijuana munchies. In a sugar rush, Hank

ripped through that lawyer’s patio door

to find cannoli and after practically snorting

them, rolled on the floor in bear rapture,  

slamming a whole shelf of knock-off

Lladro ballerinas into shards on the stone floor.

When that pretty couple on the far side

of the lake forgot to put their quiche

in the fridge, Hank found the four-cheese blend

exquisite and there was no going back

to rooting out grubs or scratching his tender nose

in berry brambles or standing in cold water catching

those salmon with their slimy skins. No,

now dubbed Hank the Tank, he

took up burglary to support his gourmet tastes, 

smashing his 500-pound black bear body through 

doors and windows easy as a wrecking ball to get

those oatmeal raisin cookies and steaks 

left out to thaw and pizza in greasy boxes.

He once eyed some bourbon, but

its sharp smell confused him, yet the

stash of coke in the sugar bowl

drove him mad and he crashed his big head

right through the wine cooler and

that’s how he developed a taste for merlot.

The Tahoe vigilantes plotted and pushed

the game control squads to have him shot,

though of course they called it euthanized

as if killing with a better name

would be any less dead for Hank, but

imagine their surprise when DNA showed

Hank the Tank wasn’t the only thief

but three bears bandits were roaming and raiding

like rambunctious kids on a dare

and with an eye for pizza. People whose homes

were not being trashed rose to defend Hank

and his bear buddies, who after all,

had not bitten or hurt a single person.

Meanwhile, in a cool wine bar with ferns

and folk singers, a California kind of guy

nibbles gouda with gluten-free crackers

and writes lyrics to make Hank a hero.

Claire Matturro has been a journalist, a lawyer, and a legal writing teacher at Florida State University and University of Oregon. She is the author of seven novels, including a legal thriller series published by HarperCollins, and is the co-author of a recent novel. She is an associate editor at Southern Literary Review and lives in Florida.

HOW TO EAT THE MOON

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

With salt, of course,

though there’s the matter of how

to get the salt to stick

without the assist of gravity.

And paired with a slightly chilled sauvignon blanc,

preferably from Marlborough, of course,

with its hints of green pepper and grass.

It doesn’t taste like cheese after all,

but then the experts never seem to be right.

It tastes more like, well, hard to say.

Try another bite.

You never thought you’d be here, did you,

sampling these bits of reflected light.

Almost as unexpected as the apology

earlier tonight from the man in the suit

so blue it looked black.

Maybe not a white. A red.

A cab. Dark fruit. Full body.

One that’s needed time to evolve.

Its complex woody tones will compliment

the moon’s impressive density.

What was it he said? “While

we obviously cannot change

the past, it is clear that we

must change the future.”

Toast to the future

and raise your glass

and take another nibble of moon.

Notice how dark it is, really,

about the color of asphalt, worn down.

It’s only because space itself is so dark

that the moon seems light.

All along you thought it was white.

Where else have you been wrong?

Perhaps between sips

and forkfuls you’ll find an apology

ripening there on your own startled tongue.

Perhaps you’ll dare to speak it.

The night makes its usual rounds.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poetry has appeared in O Magazine, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion and on river rocks. She was recently appointed Poet Laureate of Colorado’s Western Slope used the position to launch “Heard of Poets,” an interactive poetry map of Western Colorado poets. She directed the Telluride Writers Guild for 10 years and now co-directs the Talking Gourds Poetry Club. Since 2005, she’s written a poem a day. Favorite one-word mantra: Adjust.

4 70

by Akua Lezli Hope

In a case that has drawn comparisons to “Les Misérables,” the Supreme Court of Cassation [Italy] threw out the conviction of a homeless man from Ukraine, Roman Ostriakov, who was caught trying to take 4.07 euros — about $4.70 — worth of cheese and sausage from a store in Genoa without paying for it. A trial court sentenced him in February 2015 to six months in jail and a fine of €100. NY Times, May 3, 2016

Not since JeanValjean have we understood
so clearly the wages of steal or starve
damned for either for both for most
punished for manifesting the system’s failure
our e-screens endless disgorgement
of unattainable nutrition  satisfaction  satiation
bloats many, maims more with fatty malnutrition
but this isn’t that, it is about lack  lack  lack
of will to see all sated, to even the baseline
start us all level, fed, when there is food right before us,
or stashed and rotting in shipholds still
why many go hungry and this time there will
be no jail for the body’s keening, there will be no
incarceration for hunger, this time there will be no
ravening relentless pursuit by a mad cop
this time someone listened and injustice stopped

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, and metal, to create poems, patterns, stories, music, ornaments, wearables, jewelry, adornments and peace whenever possible. A third generation Caribbean American, New Yorker and firstborn, she has won fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts,  Ragdale, Hurston Wright writers, and the National Endowment for The Arts.  She is a Cave Canem fellow. Her manuscript, Them Gone, won Red Paint Hill Publishing’s Editor’s Prize and will be published in 2016.