GENOCIDE

by Alan Hardy

In a week when Americans delivered historic wins to Palestinian-American and pro-Palestine candidates in a rebuke of the U.S.-Israel relationship, Israel, unsurprisingly, continued its U.S.-funded genocidal war and apartheid policies in Palestine (American voters were clearly not fooled by Donald Trump’s election-morning announcement about “ending” aid to Israel). In Gaza, Israeli strikes and gunfire killed nearly two dozen Palestinians, including children, and the UN made a dire warning as winter approaches. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers stole Palestinian houses, and the Israeli military forced Palestinians to demolish their own homes. —Zeteo, November 7, 2026

There’s no need for politicians 

to put a stop to their crimes.

They start wars, kill and maim, 

commit genocide, without risk.

So long as there's no end in sight

time forgives them everything.

While they smile their televisual smiles, 

the people turn to discussion of inflation rates,

quickly forget 

their masters' other naughty little tricks.

The evil the government has done doesn't matter

provided it hasn't ended,

and the slaughter of the innocents

becomes just another day in the week

that comes round.

Alan Hardy has for many years run an English language school for foreign students (in UK). Poems recently published in Red Poets, Militant Thistles, Outposts, Ink Sweat & Tears, Sideways Magazine, The Candyman's Trumpet, Orbis, Forge Zine, The Argyle Literary Magazine, Alien Buddha, Spillwords, Chewers, Feversofthemind  and others.

TOTALLY ALLOWED

by Mickey J. Corrigan

ProPublica

He says of the son's 
garish wedding parties
bankrolled
by a Russian oligarch
three days of celebrating
on a private island
a no-strings gift
from the corrupt to the corrupt
from the superrich to the superrich
is totally allowed

like threats and trolling
other NATO countries
border towns, blue states
whistleblowers, journalists
judges and civil servants
and voters everywhere
anyone left standing
or speaking or writing
anything he doesn't like
is totally allowed

like his lies, lies, lies
and public fits of pique
misogyny and bigotry
hatred and rage
let the whole world see
what we've let lead us
into corruption and destruction
war crimes and home crimes
and crimes against humanity
into autocracy, kleptocurrency
meme coins and data monsters
right smack into end times
is totally allowed.

Mickey J. Corrigan writes pulp fiction, literary crime, and psychological thrillers. Poems have appeared in literary journals, chapbooks, and collections. Her most recent novel is Lazy Palms, a controversial look at life inside an experimental euthanasia trailer park.

MARCH OF THE POSTER BOYS

by Scott LaMascus

for Robin Davis

He Took His 68-Year-Old Secret to Court and Finally Confronted His Ghost: Robin Davis (above) spent a long career in finance and philanthropy haunted by what had happened to him as a boy. Could an unusual trial on Long Island help him find peace? —Michael Wilson, The New York Times, August 5, 2024

The poster boys for this malady 
each stare into their mirrors hoping to see the ghost
they would be able to fight now
their feet are no longer frozen to the spots

of their only crimes — the car ride with a coach, 
an after-school job, a church’s back room. 
They gather now in a spectral locker room of boys
chosen by chance and dark intention, charged 

and armor-plated by twenty, thirty, sixty years
of silent shame driving them to something else.
However much success they find, the juries snicker
and some doze, nodding away at lack of blood

and gore, for they cannot see the fright of spirits
gathered on each side of the glass, a throng of 
poster boys facing ghosts who picked them out 
of the schoolyards of time. No justice can redress 

the fraids on either side of the mirror, peering 
in with one hand on gavel and one on a scale, 
sometimes seeing the wispy victims, sometimes not,
I suspect. All velocity has settled now into sleep.

The pardon Robin seeks is in that mirror, too,
as he speaks before the harsher judge and jury all in one,
a lone poster boy standing again before his ghost
testifying now into the wisp of time he cannot unimagine.

Author’s Note:  This poem puts Davis (and me) into the company of a myriad of ghostly perpetrators and ghostly victims. A “fraid” is the technical name for a gathering of spirits, in this poem’s vision a two-sided confrontation of ghosts of perpetrators and of survivors. The poem also turns on found language from the Michael Wilson article including the three F’s (fight or flight or freeze) quoted by Wilson from the courtroom testimony of the psychologist, Valentina Stoycheva.

Scott LaMascus is a writer and public-humanities advocate living in Oklahoma City. His recent work may be found in World Literature Today, The Writer’s Chronicle, Bracken, Red Door, and Epiphany.

SHISHI-ODOSHI IN THE CONSTITUTION GARDEN

by Richard L. Matta 

A bamboo pipe

sun-bleached to parchment paper white

trickles water like truth

makes deliveries to a receiver pipe,  

and when it’s had enough, it doesn’t lie still 

but sounds an alert. 

Big red dragonflies 

alight on the pipe, as if to refute the value

of the water, and all the while 

little blue dashers 

zigzag for attention. The lower rocker pipe 

fills and pivots and spills 

and smacks a rock and

who should stay in place 

but the big red dragonflies. 

The device is like a gavel for everyone to hear

but despite the crack 

it’s become background static.

Not even a deer or boar

would hesitate to spy and steal 

and disrupt the plentiful garden 

where a shishi-odoshi 

is just an artful design. 

Richard L. Matta grew up in New York and now lives in San Diego. Some of his work is found in Ancient Paths, Dewdrop, San Pedro River Review, Third Wednesday, Gyroscope, and many international haiku journals. 

WITHOUT APOLOGY, WILLINGLY I DO IT

by Jacquelyn Shah

"Him" by Paula Rego

Because there is no one else to do it, no other woman willing

able  qualified  skilled  articulate

(and certainly no man capable or inclined)

I’ll be the one to do it.

Not only do it but delineate the how and why of it.

Because it’s so extreme  widespread  persistent  long-term  deep-rooted––

violence in our world, persecution  torture  abduction   

rape  incest  murder  war  subjugation  massacre  annihilation

     (our language is rich with words for various brutalities)

and because it’s carried out by those who hold the power, men––

I hate them. I hate men. 

Hate men fervently!  Hate them for all the damage they have done and do.

And continue doing and doing and doing... 

it never stops: the constant brandishing of weapons

like hands  gun  rifle  rope  knife  dagger  sword  bomb  penis, etc.

the never-ending violation and violence

of women (yeah, and men), children, babies––yes, babies!  Jesus!

Serial murders   mass murders   executions   sometimes necrophilia.

And ongoing destruction of the earth––

Hate them. With all my heart and soul and, especially, brain––

for I have observed, considered and concluded.

I’m willing to hate men.   Willing to say I hate them.

Their behavior merits it.  But my hatred will never MANifest in violence–– 

I won’t suppress  rape  torture  murder  abduct men.

Though men deserve everything bad they ever get,

I will never give it to them,

but hate them, yes, vigorously, steadfastly! 

          And dismiss them.

Men. They’re targets of nothing from me

except this quiet  hopeless  worthless  toothless  futile

statement made. And repeated, repeated with candor, vehemence: 

I, a pacifist, hate  men.

All of them?    No, not quite all.

Those undeserving get no such ardor,

just a cold shoulder––

because they’re all complicit, especially those in positions of power

who do nothing to change the current killing in our pathetic country.

How they all love guns and how I hate them!––men and guns.

Jacquelyn Shah—iconoclast, feminist, pacifist. A.B., English, Phi Beta Kappa; M.A.–English; M.F.A., Ph.D.–English lit/creative writing–poetry. Publications: chapbook, small fry; full-length book, What to Do with Red. Poems in various journals; Winner of Literal Latté’s 2018 Food Verse Contest

FINAL JEOPARDY

by Darrell Petska

Zellyart

The formerly democratic
North American republic
despoiled by an authoritarian regime
that ruled through extrajudicial measures
typified by deploying masked,
heavily armed federal agents
to suppress violently
civil protest and political expression,
consequently instilling a sense of fear

as in the bureaucratic authoritarianism
of Pinochet’s Chile
where federally dispatched agents
violently swept citizens away
to unknown locations
for intimidation, humiliation,
interrogation, and abuse—
acts later adjudged to be
crimes against humanity.

What was America?


Darrell Petska is a Middleton, Wisconsin writer.

POLITICS IS DOWNSTREAM FROM CULTURE

by Howie Good

Image source: Wicked Local Harwich

This is beginning to feel
like the worst place to be.
Donald T***p just won’t
leave us alone. He howls,

“You die!” He wags
his veiny dick. He clinks
glasses with despots. He brags
about his astonishing ability

to avoid reading. Meanwhile,
the sign over there says,
“Do not swim near seals.”
Of course, people, being people,

do it anyway. I’m suddenly tired
of waiting for the shadow
of archangel Michael to climb
the Empire State Building

or even for ambient sounds
to relay meaning. It’s 12:24 p.m.,
on a Friday, and we’re still no closer
to solving the many crimes of fire.

Howie Good is the author most recently of What It Is and How to Use It from Grey Book Press. He co-edits the journals Unbroken and UnLost.

TRUTHS AND LEPIDOPTERA

by David Chorlton

Andrus Nichols in The Saintliness of Margery Kempe directed by Austin Pendleton at The Duke on 42nd Street. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

A hawk against the dawning clouds
moves high and dark
as the city underneath him
awakens. On this day the news
breaks with a louder
crack than usual, and even
the quail who spill out
from the neighbor’s bougainvillea
walk a nervous line.
The television screen lights up
with happiness and Earthly delights
before names
start to be named
and analysts dissect the crimes
they are suspected of. But it’s early
and the shadows of the palm trees
lie wet across the ground. It’s hard to believe
in such joy as advertisements show
while subterfuge and scheming are the order
of the day: also a day
in which lizards flash
across the back yard wall, hummingbirds
fly constantly
from bush to bush, and a Funereal Duskywing
trembles at  the Coral Bells
that silently ring the hours
rolling along the wash and up
the mountain to the ridge
where they rub their cheeks against
the timeless moon.

—

Another day: another cog
clicks in the universe. The sun rolls
into place. It’s hard to tell so early
whether that’s a Cabbage White or Southern
Dogface, but the nascent flowers on the milkweed
are a marker on the winged way
to truth.

—

The jasmine draws its power from the rain
recently fallen
and the air feels as though
it were smiling as we breathe it,
even in this tainted world
where sin remains popular
centuries past the age when heretics
were burned, although
defining it depends on which
side you’re on, and being accused
just generates more mystics
like Margery Kempe, who the more she was mocked
the more she believed she was right.
Some people believe
the sulfur floating on the scents just now
is someone’s soul; a proposition
kind enough to merit acceptance.
When in doubt
take beauty’s side, even
when the hawk marks its path
with a talon drawn across the midday sky.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and often reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. A recent collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press. The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant. A new book Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird is due from Hoot ‘n Waddle, based in Phoenix.

RUDY! RUDY! RUDY!

by Darrell Petska

Caricature by Josh Ferrin

Hey, He could've shot james comey
and not been prosecuted:
He's the President.
He can say what He wants,
do what He wants:
more power to Him!
He can sleep with your lover if He wants,
steal babies from their mothers,
hell, He can rob an armored bank car
for all I care, and not be prosecuted
while He's the President.
He can pardon chuckie manson,
lee harvey oswald, the golden state
serial killer—whomever He damned well pleases:
He's the President.
He can put jeffy sessions out of his misery.
I mean permanently.
That turncoat trey gowdy, too.
He can cop a feel on sarah what's-her-face
sanders and what could she possibly do?
He's the President.
Just try to indict Him. He'll pardon Himself.
Besides, He can't be guilty of collusion or obstruction
when recollections keep changing.
What are facts, anyway? After three days
they begin to smell.
Allow me, your beloved prince of new york,
to spare you that terrible stench
by uttering the stupidest things—
just as He hired me to do.
(Praise god! I'm relevant again.)
I represent the President,
the One, the Anointed, the Boss,
so take it from me:
you'd better toe the line, amigos,
or He'll strip you of the rest of your rights,
and there'll be nothing you can do about it
while He's the President.
Capiche?


Darrell Petska often doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry at the news. So he tries to laugh.