A CORPORATE ANTHEM

by George Salamon

60 Profitable Fortune 500 Companies
Avoided All Federal Income Taxes in 2018

—Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, April 11, 2019

To our fellow Americans who are the
Backbone of the country, its working
Families, the average Joe and Jane.
We say: our aim is to share the
Wealth of this great nation.
Here's how we do it:
Please close your eyes.
They're closed, Good.
Now, what you see;
That's what is yours.

George Salamon contributes verse to Dissident Voice, Poetry24, TheNewVerse.News, Proletaria (upcoming) from St. Louis, MO. He once worked for eight years for a corporation.

BEHIND THE MILLION DOLLAR AD

by Devon Balwit

Believe in something even if it means sacrificing

everything. We read the words, and that part of us

suckled on tales of heroes rallies as behind a pennant

on the battlefield or before splintering city gates

                                                            —and yet

we are reading ad copy, a sly way to light a match

beneath our purchasing power. Fight the machine,

we’re prompted by the machine itself, so vast

as to be almost invisible.

                                                            —a galaxy

of nodes. This time, proceeds go to charity,

yet still we wouldn’t trade places with a worker

in this corporation’s factories, live off their wage,

raise children by their dumps. How deep does good go?

                                                            —How deep

is deep enough? Better than nothing,

some insist. With eyes keen enough to see

such a fraction, we must trace the whole web,

alert to its snag, the hypnotic vibration as the spider

                                                            —approaches

Devon Balwit has six chapbooks and three collections out in the world. Her individual poems can be found here or are forthcoming in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, Cultural Weekly, Triggerfish, Fifth Wednesday, The Free State Review, Rattle, Poets Reading the News, etc.

LOOKING BACK

by David Rosier

“But perhaps what’s most scary about this scorching summer is how little concerned Americans seem to be. So far, climate change has barely registered as an issue in the midterm elections, and, where it has, the optics couldn’t be worse: 'Trump Digs Coal' was a slogan that appeared on placards at a West Virginia rally with the President, staged on the day that the new power-plant rules were published. As a country, we remain committed to denial and delay, even as the world, in an ever more literal sense, goes up in flames.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, September 10, 2018 issue

There was a time when summer wasn't hell.
The way to know is simply to remember
before our avarice had grown so well,

before the weather changed, when snowflakes fell
just as they should and did in deep December.
There was a time when summer wasn't hell.

Recall the April rain when you could tell
that day was spring.  Recall a cool September
before our avarice had grown so well,

before self-serving progress spread pell-mell,
exchanging peace for strife for all Earth's members.
There was a time when summer wasn't hell.

The season did not pass as sentinel
on watch for flames and smoke and end in embers
before our avarice had grown so well.

For wealth and ease appeal to us, but sell
out Earth, which sends us August in November.
There was a time when summer wasn't hell
before our avarice had grown so well.

David Rosier lives in a small town in the American West, which has suffered through the worst drought and worst fire season on record. This poem hopes to put blame where it belongs.

SONG OF THE MOUNTAINTOP, REMOVED

by Peggy Turnbull

Mountaintop Removal Site in Pickering Knob, West Virginia. Image source: iLoveMountains.org

Coal sparkles
where the miner’s lamp hits  
plants wait in darkness
millions of years
transform into sequined shards
burn
become electric

no more easy pillage
no more bolts of velvet
crammed into caverns

thin black ribbons
weave beneath
Appalachian forests
too small to mine underground
too precious to ignore

where clouds hang
between branches
where the mystery
of day unfolds
say good bye
to the tree frog’s song
clear cut these trunks
explode the earth’s crust
let machines like carnivorous insects
rip off the mountain’s head
eat its slender bituminous bed
toss leftovers
into rushing creeks
alongside

a higher intelligence
wills it
for jobs
for corporate wealth
mountains
become flatland
coal
exists no more

Peggy Turnbull has been recently published in Eunoia Review, Rat's Ass Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and is forthcoming in Muddy River Poetry Review. She made her home in West Virginia for 26 years, but now lives in Wisconsin, where she is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.

CORPORATE HEAVENARCHY

by Sonya Groves

Citigroup and the Justice Department have agreed to a $7 billion deal that will settle a federal investigation into the mortgage securities the bank sold in the run-up to the financial crisis. “The bank’s misconduct was egregious,’’ Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. “As a result of their assurances that toxic financial products were sound, Citigroup was able to expand its market share and increase profits.” --NY Times, July 14, 2014

  “His main man Satan planting the learning trees of consciousness” --Miguel Piñero

And the Devil attended the dance

of the button downs, he was surprised

by their invitation.

God normally attended

their balls.

But God had grown bored.

Extortion,

greed,

fraud,

poverty

had played out their songs,

so God gave way to Satan.

Typical of management, Satan thought

to pass the shit to a farmer of human

sorrow and expect more profit 

with the same staff.

He wanted a raise
and a promotion.


Sonya Groves is a teacher of English and History in San Antonio. She has published a short story in the Abydos Education Journal, has poetry publications in La Noria, The Voices Project, Aries, and Cliterature.  She has been a conference presenter at the East Carolina University Multi-Cultural Literature Review Conference.  Currently she is pursuing her Master’s degree in English at Our Lady of the Lake University.

BEAK BREAKERS

by Lylanne Musselman

Cartoon by Chip Bok.

Man-made
wind turbines
stand erect
in farm fields
like robotic soldiers
on high alert for
a spin at certain
death.

Bodies
of unsuspecting
victims collect –
bloodied
at the base
of these warlords;

the ones
that harness the wind,
to power human interests,
but strip the life
from natural flight –

collateral damage
in a war to save
the environment
from toxins and
corporate greed.


Lylanne Musselman is an award winning poet and artist, who lives in Toledo, Ohio. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Literary Brushstrokes, Pank, New Verse News, Cyclamens & Swords, and The Prose-Poem Project among others, and many anthologies. She is the author of three chapbooks, and a co-author of Company of Women: New & Selected Poems (Chatter House Press, 2013). Presently, she is Coordinator of Creative Writing at Terra State Community College, and teaches online writing courses for Ivy Tech Community College, while diligently working on a full length poetry memoir.