I CAN’T HEAR YOU

by Chad Parenteau

the chief 

of sticks

proclaimed.

Too busy

turning on

faucets

 

hoping to

sluice away

immigrants

 

back down

to Mexico. 

Water. 

 

It goes 

right down

the hole.

 

Know that

from pre-k

diarrhea.

 

Excuse me.

Listening

for cracks

 

and all of

the people

falling through.

 

Once screams

finally stop

close hole.

 

Not right now.

Reapplying 

ear stigmata.

 

Need to have

gold card to

reach in here.

 

Have these 

documents 

to soak out

 

in deep south

salted by tears

of crocodiles 

 

that are now

jealous of 

our alligators.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His latest collection is The Collapsed Bookshelf. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and anthologies such as French Connections and Reimagine America. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine.

IDIOT YEARS

by Thomas R. Smith

Our Mayan friend Martín says we’re sick with
a collective “unmetabolized grief.”
Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, the list goes on.
Our response? Build higher psychic dams
to hold the tears. Those dams, ridiculously
expensive, bulge above every town, city,
and farm—few notice the supports straining,
the hairline cracks webbing the concrete poured
by profiteers grown fat on our denial.
Will it be said of us that we did not
possess the curiosity to inquire
what was being done to the world in our name
with our tax dollars? That we also were
mad to allow the mad to lead us?
Mad or, worse, indifferent? Dylan called
us an idiot, babe. When we’ve bombed
the earth to rubble, shall we then bomb
the rubble to sand? There’s beachfront property
for you rich to enjoy in your idiot years
before the dammed tears sweep you away.

Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.

RIFFS ON "POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN"

by John Minczeski

"poetry makes nothing happen"

—W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

Some nights, like this one, something  

thuds against the house, a tennis ball or branch  

from the shrub below our bedroom window.  

  

Poetry makes nothing happen.  

I mean, we lie awake   

as a bitter wind slashes at the house.   

  

We have no need to shelter in a mosque or subway,   

but still my heart aches. Poetry makes nothing   

happen. It could be a deer  

  

that got into fermented crabapples.  

It could be a deer gnawing the shrub  

below the window. Some windows  

  

crack from the cold. Some explode.  

Poetry makes nothing happen  

and life goes on as if there’s no bounty  

  

on our ordinary world. Remember when the oracle  

said a great general would win the battle?   

The moon continues its unhurried changes  

  

as it has in the small forever of my life.  

It makes nothing happen, poetry. Skin cracks  

in the cold, like a tax on breathing.  

  

Stepping inside to instant warmth  

from the wind, we tell each other  

what we already know about brutality   

  

and winter. Once again poetry has made   

nothing happen. People go on dying daily  

for lack/ of what is found there.   

John Minczeski is the author of A Letter to Serafin and other collections. Recent poems have appeared in Tampa Review, The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Cider Press Review, Bear Review, North Dakota Review, and elsewhere. 

IN THIS SEASON

by Anne Myles

On the boulevard, strange markings have appeared:

white dots in the corner of some sidewalk segments.

The mystery intrudes on us, unsettling.

A neighbor stands looking but she doesn’t know either.

Later, a letter from the city informs us

they show each section that’s heaved up, sunken,

cracked, uneven; we must replace them or the city will.

The segments lie in earthen beds

that breathe and toss across the seasons.

Why can’t they just remain, I wonder,

bearing their own flawed histories?

The dying ashes were cut down in December;

now in July we hear the roar of stump-grinders.

Beside the bare dirt circles left behind,

saplings of different species stand between their guys

like shy children in an unfamiliar class.

On TV I watch the skycam pan

over the mountains and lavish fields of France,

roads winding, dazed with so much past,

while the peloton grinds upwards. A rider falls back,

grimacing; the announcer cries out, oh, he’s cracked!

Outside, my neighbor Roger walks by slowly with his dog;

I’ve been watching them for years.

Now both will die soon, only one of them from age.

He relates his sentence calmly.

Whenever he appears, I can’t stop wondering

what he sees in the evening sky now, in the trees.

An artist, he has painted the fields of Iowa

and over them a plot of faint ruled lines,

as if seeing left a trace on what is seen.

This is a time of seeing, isn’t it.

This is a season of waiting for what comes.

The plot laid bare at last, and then what happens?

As the child asks her mother reading a story.

And this is not simply a thing that happened once.

This is a thing that is still happening

and will continue to happen.

This is an incredible, unprecedented moment—

that’s what I read in the news today.

The crickets have begun to sing at dusk,

reminding me of every summer I have lived—

that smell in the breeze as the leaves lift—

and everything that won’t happen any more.

I want it back if only to look at and remember.

I want my country back. I want to step

on every sidewalk crack and tilt as if

there were no question, as if it all were just what is.


Author's Note: The italicized lines in the penultimate stanza are from the opinion piece "Trump, Treasonous Traitor" by Charles M. Blow, New York Times, July 15, 2018.

Originally from New York, Anne Myles is associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. A specialist in early American literature, she has recently rediscovered her poetic voice, one effect of the present troubles she is thankful for. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Ink and Nebula, Friends Journal, Lavender Review, and Thimble.