DISAPPEAR

by Mark Danowsky

Art by Alex Bennett

Who? They insist
some darker other
 
We give 
the real villains 
too much rope
 
Time is on
the wealthy side
 
Don’t ignore
matters of class
 
Call out
all the horrors
& misdirection
 
If you wait just
a moment too long—
 
Knock knock knock

on your door

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry and Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine. He is the author of several poetry books. His latest poetry collection is Take Care (Moon Tide Press).

MARSH GAS

by Martha Deed

“The court will set a new schedule if and when the mandate is returned.”

—Hon. Tanya Chutkan, Groundhog Day 2024

Usually the worse it is

the longer I take

to say anything about it

but today

is not one of those days

Today is not a shock

Today rests upon absence of surprise

after decades of seeking fruit from the tree of justice

and finding only sick worms and fungi

feeding upon the softened spoiled

core of a tree failing to thrive

in a rotting swamp

that exploded long ago

as anyone knows

who was wronged in a lower court

say—family court

where a child’s future

was dangled over

the bubbling glop

so that even when

a rotten judge was later removed

it was too late for the child

and for at least one parent

or from a class

(yes, “class” in the United States)

whose voice is smothered in the court

while the other is entitled

(yes, “entitled” in the United States)

to call the shots in wars designed

to defeat the weaker class

through unequal monetary weaponry

and finding oneself trapped at the bottom of a bog

while the wealthier ones walk away

Justice like rich organic matter

sinks to the bottom

then deprived of oxygen

rises to the top

forms a hard crust

that leaves justice

trapped below

for the bottom feeders

Anoxic gases bubble to the surface

and singe the air

A thick crust of contaminate

preserves deep destruction

as marsh gas in the court grows and stinks

So it is that spoiled judges

rise through the judicial system

and prevail

We who have seen the lower courts

stood close enough to smell the smell

we knew this would happen

that it would lead to a decision that

rots to form a crust that prevents

oxygen from reaching

the organic material trapped below*

i.e. unthinkable

not merely spoiled

Poisoned

*Marsh gas.

Martha Deed’s third poetry collection Haunted By Martha was released by FootHills Publishing, July 2023. She has published ten books (poetry, mixed media, non-fiction) and ten chapbooks along with inclusion in more than 20 poetry anthologies. Individual poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Earth’s Daughters, First Literary Review—East, Shampoo, Gypsy, and many others.

TEACH TO THE TEST

by Phyllis Frakt

What is “rule of law”?

What stops one branch of government

from becoming too powerful?

What is the supreme law of the land?

What does the judicial branch do?

 

I slip through a distorted looking glass

to prepare the class for US citizenship,

to speak, read, write simple English,

and recite answers to 100 questions

about American history and government.

 

On their side of the looking glass,

I simplify revered founding principles

that most of their American neighbors

learned in school, then forgot.

But the class must learn and remember.

 

So, we thrash through a verbal thicket –

pursuit of happiness, colony, revolution,

Civil War, civil rights, Constitution,

democracy, Confederacy, emancipation,

declaration, representation, discrimination.

 

They grasp at historic words and principles

as keys to permanent homes in America

with steady income, education for their children,

safety from vicious gangs or husbands,

freedom from fierce dictatorships.

 

Feliz once was a high school teacher.

She escaped violence, and cleans houses now.

Selim and his family fled their country,

running from false government accusations.

No job back home for Abeo, a stutterer.

 

On my side, I cringe at lessons about

civic ideals now sullied or out of reach:

no one above the law? checks and balances?

The class waits patiently for me to explain,

and I slip back through the looking glass.

 

Phyllis Frakt's poem "Recoveries" will appear in the upcoming edition of Worksheets 67. She lives in New Jersey, where she has volunteered as a citizenship teacher for ten years.

IN THE CLASSROOM

by LouAnn Shepard Muhm

I mention Eric Garner.

All the usual tropes are in attendance.

This was not his only arrest, is in the front row,
wondering when we will get back to
what matters: graded things, things with points.
Her anxiety manifests in demands for rubrics
and in her bouncing leg, her rolling eyes.
She does things right, has no mercy
for digression, for mistake.
She will go home tonight and listen
to her brother and her father fight,
each so disappointed in the other’s
imperfection.

Next to her sits if he hadn’t been doing anything wrong
nothing would have happened to him,
fingering the cross she wears,
this Catholic girl who wants to be a nun
but likes a boy in class. It pains me
to watch her clumsy, unsuccessful bids.
The war inside her is constant
and unrelenting, but she has the naïve
trust in the world that so few
sixteen-year-old girls have anymore.
It’s hard not to envy her,
harder not to cringe against
the ways her knowledge may come.

Everybody knows not to talk back
to a police officer no matter what
is headed for the military, and
I can feel him wondering
what he would do:
chokehold or no chokehold,
chokehold or no chokehold,
can feel the adrenaline jolting him
at the thought, graduation
only two months away
and everything so suddenly looming.

It’s sad, but I don’t see how
that makes it OK to riot
keeps looking at his phone,
waiting for his girl to text him
from the math class three doors down,
waiting for her to tell him
where they can go later to fuck,
waiting for her to confirm that they will
again today, after practice, as they do
whenever they can, because they can
and because they are young
and because it is new
and all-consuming.

Maybe there’s a lot of racism
in other places, but
I just don’t see it here
has a hard time sitting in the desk
at six-foot-two, and wonders
how long he can lift
in the weight room after school
and still get his chores done before dark.

Meanwhile, just last year two people
in this class called me nigger
slides down in her chair,
trying to disappear out of this
conversation that is focused on her
without being focused on her,
as so many conversations have been

and stop asking me if I live on the rez
remains silent as always,
pulls the hood of his sweatshirt
further down his forehead,
turns his music
up.

LouAnn Shepard Muhm is a poet and teacher from northern Minnesota. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and she was a finalist for the Creekwalker Poetry Prize  and the Late Blooms Postcard Series.  Muhm is a two-time recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in Poetry and has been awarded scholarships from the Key West Literary Seminar, Vermont Studio Center, and Sierra Nevada College. Her chapbook Dear Immovable was published in 2006 by Pudding House Press, and her full-length poetry collection Breaking the Glass (Loonfeather Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Midwest Book Award in Poetry.  Muhm holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Sierra Nevada College, and was recently granted an 18-month Artist's Fellowship by the Region 2 Arts Council of Minnesota.

SMACKED DOWN

by Bill Sullivan

Congress has historically treated drug abuse as a malady afflicting mostly poor, minority communities, best dealt with by locking people up for long periods of time. The epidemic of drug overdose deaths currently ravaging white populations in cities and towns across the country has altered this line of thinking, and forced lawmakers to acknowledge that addiction is a problem that knows no racial barriers and can be best addressed with treatment. —NY Times Editorial, Jan. 25, 2016. Photo: A 20-year-old heroin addict agreed to go to detox through the Gloucester [MA] Police Department Angel program in January after he overdosed. Credit: Katherine Taylor for NY Times, Jan. 24, 2016

blue nails  ashen skin
                                           pin size pupils
barely a breath
                                           another flat line looms
his savior if found
                                           a narcan syringe
white brown or black
                                           a teen or thirty something
or an aging boomer
                                           who went from prescriptions
pushed by physicians
                                           to bags of scag

he might collapse
                                           on a city street
or in a country lane
                                           be clad in a suit
or laborer's boots
                                           be an absent father
or live in lover
                                           once a dreamer
or a pragmatist
                                           now possessed
he rides a demon horse
                                           over a cliff
will it be a hospital
                                           or the morgue
for the man
                                           with the opioid eyes

for years jeered
                                           as a crackhead
or junkie
                                           he was left to die
or tossed into a cell
                                           but when the disease
infected the suburbs
                                           the country lanes
the club house
                                           and the gated estate
it was rehab for the addict
                                           progress no doubt
but too late for the poor
                                           who had no care or aid
who filled a grave
                                           or crawled around
a prison cave


Bill Sullivan is from Rhode Island where in the past five years over a thousand residents have overdosed on opioids, mainly heroin.  He is the co-author two books on twentieth century poetry, co-producer of two films and his poems have appeared in a number of on line and print publications.  His latest publication is Loon Lore in Prose and Poetry.

SONG TO MYSELF

by Gil Hoy




Where is the iron
Brahmin, traitor
to his class,

Man of
The people---

You can’t cajole
You can’t frighten
You can’t buy?

With bones
stronger than
All of them
on the stage,

Please stop
the rain from
falling down.

It's time to rise up,
It's time to rise
up.  It's time
to rise up!

Grit those big
teeth, hold
assassins’ bullets
in your chest,

Until you are
drowned out by
the faithful sea.

Listen to
the bells ring,
Listen to
the robin sing,

Until the hail
washes your soul,
away.


Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer and writer. He studied poetry at Boston University, while receiving a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Gil received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. His writing has appeared most recently in The Montucky Review, The Potomac, The New Verse News, The Boston Globe and The Dallas Morning News.

IN TEXAS THE WORD WAS REDNECK

by Martha Kaplan

Image source: NPR code switch: “The Secret History Of The Word 'Cracker’” by Gene Demby, July 1, 2013

we sat on a wall above a bayou
on the edge of a large public square
thronged with the night crowd, neon
lights reflecting kaleidoscopic colors
on my fair and his dark epidermis,
when we were surrounded by white
thugs, threatening him, threatening
me, no one in the witnessing multitude
moving, when in an exchange of words
with the ringleader, I uttered, cracker,
and he blushed, surprising me, surprising
him, surprising those others, ignorance
of the meaning of that word deflating
him, dispersing the others; and I wonder
was it gender, class, or race that lent ignorance its sting?


Martha Kaplan now lives in Madison, WI. She has published with Branch Redd Review, Blue Unicorn, Hummingbird, Verse Wisconsin, Hospital Drive, Möbius The Poetry Magazine, and Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources among others.  She has received a number of awards and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.