LOOK

by Mary McCarthy

It’s no fun to go to the circus

waiting for the high wire

dancer to fall

the lion tamer

to lose his head

to a fed up angry cat

the joy is in the crazy

risk and the win

always the win

the clowns tumbling

out a pantomime

of the ridiculous

how we all want

entertainment without pain

I can’t waste time estimating

just how bad it will be

how much damage

we’ll have to witness

as all these wheels

break away from their axles

and go careening

wildly into the crowd

disaster may be the only thing

we can depend on

But remember

there is no joy in retribution

you will only bury yourself in ash

feel your heart break

as consequences spread

past anything you bargained for

Remember

even the greatest crimes

the worst offenses

even those who sowed

acres of bones

burned the libraries

broke the backs of cities

scuttled the glories

of art they had no use for

never really won

from those bare salted fields

new crops arose

shedding tears and bitterness

eager to bloom and set fruit

in a world past catastrophe

always there waiting

ready to return

Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic World edited by Lorette Luzajic, The Plague Papers edited by Robbi Nester, The Memory Palace, edited by Lorette Luzajic and Clare MacQueen, and recent issues of Gyroscope, 3rd Wednesday, Caustic Frolic, Inscribe, the Storyteller Review, and Verse Virtual. Her collection How to Become Invisible chronicles a bipolar journey and is now available from Kelsay Books.

AFTER THE ELECTION OF 2020

by Richard Kravitz

No one laughs at the orange 

monster, the clown 

outside the circus tent. 

In the open air he is frightening 

or pathetic. Clowns 

come and go. The enterprise, 

the circus itself, with its three-ring

allegories of the rugged individual,

the self-made man, southern hospitality,

the land of the free and the home of the brave,

the circus persists. The ringmaster

departs, barking his ugly song. We know

there is another, waiting, sprouting

from the sweat of armpit,

covered in greasepaint. 

The show must go on, does go on. 

If we so choose,

we will pay the price of readmission. 

Richard Kravitz is a psychiatrist in New Haven, Connecticut. He has published poems on medical themes in JAMA and other medical and psychiatric journals.  

NO BOTTOM

by Ed Shacklee

There is no bottom here, I’ve found:
the water’s swirling round and round.
We’re going down the drain, I fear,
for there’s no bottom here.

We have a circus but no bread.
There is no heart, there is no head,
the end, however, can’t be near:
there is no bottom here.

Our leader leads us from behind.
He tells us that we shouldn’t mind
attempts to make us disappear,
for there’s no bottom here—

there’s only down, and down we sink,
too dumb to care, afraid to think.
What’s brinkmanship without a brink?
Don’t worry, for it’s very clear
there is no bottom here.


Ed Shacklee is a public defender who lives on a boat in the Potomac River.  His first collection The Blind Loon: A Bestiary was published by Able Muse Press in 2017.

THE CLOWN CAR

by Kyle Norwood

The clownishness of evil sometimes seems
To parody itself―buffoonish stare,
Garishly painted skin, foam-rubber hair―
Caricatures from circus-haunted dreams:

You’re in the stands and join in the applause;
Here comes the clown car, tiny as a toy,
While speakers blast Beethoven’s Ode to Joy,
But you don’t see how odd that is, because
You’re watching as the little car spits out
Clown after clown, burlesques of vim and pep,
With fake pink smile or red audacious pout.
One pounds a drum; the others dance in step
With flying feet in giant floppy boots.
Some moon the crowd, and some are even cruder,
Insulting us with boorish pantomime.
 (A choir sings Alle menschen werden brüder
Over the speakers, deafeningly loud.)
Looking around, you see that half the crowd            
Are dressed in frilly polka-dotted suits,                      
Hooting and stomping.  Clearly they approve.          
Meanwhile the clown car crew is on the move:  
Some run to block the exits; others climb  
Into the stands; two of them seek you out,
Surround you, grab you, lift you from your spot,
And drag you toward the ring of blinding light.
“Why me?” You cry.  “Why me?  What did I do?”
The folks in normal clothing turn their backs.
Last from the clown car steps a black-and-white-
Faced, bulging-muscled hulk, wielding an ax:
His hate-filled eyes are staring straight at you.

Kyle Norwood is the winner of the 2014 Morton Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review. His poems have also recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Devilfish Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Lake (U.K.), Light, Right Hand Pointing, and the anthology Poems for a Liminal Age. He lives in Los Angeles, where he earned a doctorate in English at UCLA.

FILTH, BLOOD, AND NOISE

by Andrew Levy





The player is a liar when he says sometimes wind and sometimes
women, sometimes waves and sometimes seals.  The player is a liar
when he says one’s environment is a key to one’s identity, but that his
environment is a lost key.  The player is a liar when he says jealousy
in men is as good as dollars in the soul, that men’s souls are oriented not
to miss things. The player is a liar when he says one’s environment is
the key to one’s identity, and that his environment is the master key.
The player is a liar when he says an ounce of genuine interest would be
a start, and steadfast resolution is thicker than water.  The player is a liar
when he says a worm returned to soil, and wished he were it.
The player is a liar when he says I want dynamite under my car seat, but
there’s another wheel turning.  When he says all the news without fear
or favor, the kiss of death is good.  The player is a liar when he says
innumerable unseen spirits kick metaphysical footballs in a different
cemetery than the cemetery he lives in.  The player is lying when he says
no one sees a subtextual reference to scrutinizing the remotest corners
most carefully guarded secrets, to pushes into the East Siberian Sea
and the Transpolar Drift, the rocky distant rim of the Canadian Shield.
The player is lying when he looks into the world of inquisition, when
he separates one integral part of any work from another. When he says
he was promised a world of lost forests, folded mountains, and labyrinthine
hiding places, a snack, something serious to eat, a mirage of salvation,
ascension sharp enough to consume sanity.  The player is lying when
he says winter thaws to summer, the pack ice breaks up into the Chukchi Sea,
where warm Pacific waters join the gyre as it turns in its grinding cycle.
The player is a liar when he says he is falling back to earth in the form
of pine needles, that he is no better than those other clones.  The player’s
soul is at work disappearing in lies, communicating its isolation as total.
When he says that the wings of the news are a malady, and the finalist
became a doctor of philosophy.  He is a liar when the extermination
of the underclass is harvested on his tongue, when the processing line
will be cleaned and silent.  He is lying at the end of the lane, slowly turning
in the dirt.  His thoughts and actions are elegiac fragments, mechanisms
which flicker above the wrong note. When the circus in any labor wishes
to act not as a condition of membership but synthesized in underground
factories the requisite neurochemicals of cautious steps, an abyss
of crop-duster dictums spoken by twenty-first century revolutionaries
via minor routes, filth, blood, and noise.


Andrew Levy has published 14 books of poetry, including The Big Melt (Factory School), Cracking Up (Truck Books), Ashoka (Zasterle Books), Values Chauffeur You (O Books), Don’t Forget to Breathe (Chax Books), and Nothing Is in Here (EOAGH Press). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Writing From the New Coast, The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, and Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. He was editor, with Roberto Harrison, of the poetry journal Crayon. He lives in New York City.

GOVT DISARRAY

by David Radavich

Barnum & Bailey Circus Congress of Freaks c. 1924

Holiday Finds Congress Well Short of Goals  — The landmark Senate vote this week to end the minority party’s ability to filibuster most presidential nominees is just one symptom of the deep level of dysfunction coursing through the 113th Congress . . . The list of unfinished tasks . . .  is daunting — and time is just about out. The House will be back the week after Thanksgiving, but the Senate is taking a two-week break. - NT Times, November 23, 2013



The circus animals
have all run loose.

They can’t be seen
in the night,

but their smell
permeates the fetid air.

Some of them
must be preying

now that the
keepers have gone home.

I can’t report
any more
than what you’ve heard.

The feeding pails
are empty

and water
has been scattered
in every direction.
                                              
Don’t expect cages
to be open

in the morning.


David Radavich’s recent collections include America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Canonicals: Love’s Hours (2009), and Middle-East Mezze (2011). His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe. His new collection is The Countries We Live In.