PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS

by Anita S. Pulier

The campaigns are almost over.
The talking heads are on rerun.
I feel a strong urge to mop the bathroom floor.

Things are far from perfect 
and I am not sure
where the fix should start.

The ads have worked. The politics of fear grip me.
Clearly we are not who we were,
but I am not sure who or what we hope to be.

Wide awake I dream of raw power,
calculated intolerance and wrenching violence. 
Surely things were easier

before technology wired the globe,
when the world was vast,
unknowable, exotic.

Wasn’t life once lived day to day
by gut instinct, luck of the draw
take it as it comes?

A parade of bogus claims
line the mantle of my mind cluttered
by endless campaign puffery.

Do I understand so much more now,
about truth, deception
and the fickleness of time?

Still, I yearn for order,
for comfort, truth,
for simple decency,

for the strength to bother
caring, the naivete to believe
a single political promise and
 
the grit to mop the bathroom floor
at midnight, clear my head,

grapple with the paralysis of deep REM sleep.

Anita S. Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butchers Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press. Paradise Reexamined came out in 2023 (Kelsay Books). Her new book Leaving Brooklyn is due out in Jan '25 from Kelsay Books  Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.

TALKING ABOUT TREES

by Bonnie Naradzay

The Great Conjunction of 2020 will brighten the darkest day of the year as the two giant planets of our solar system draw closer together in the night sky than they have been in centuries. By chance, the day that Jupiter and Saturn will appear closest for Earth-based stargazers is Dec. 21, the winter solstice, which is the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. Photo: The galactic core area of the Milky Way over Maskinonge Pond in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta on July 14, 2020. Jupiter is the bright object at left, with Saturn dimmer to the left (east) of Jupiter.Alan Dyer / Universal Images Group via Getty Images file via NBC, December 9, 2020.

What kind of times are they, when

A talk about trees is almost a crime

Because it implies silence about so many horrors?                       

—Bertolt Brecht, “To those Born Later”

 

Thin ice limned the pond early this morning

and a slick of frost dazzled the green fields

yet pink blossoms still drifted across a few limbs

of the lone ornamental cherry tree.

In the slant of sun, the great blue heron stood

knee deep in water, and ducks have returned

among reflected shapes of pondside trees – 

bare branches outstretched like hands of penitents.

I have been arguing all evening with my friend

via email about Odysseus. He says Odysseus 

could have built that raft any time he wanted 

to escape from Calypso’s island, but I say not until

Athena persuaded Zeus to send Hermes down.  

I see Odysseus down by the seashore, weeping there,

as the great hexameters roll out in the receding waves.

Then we spar about the Suitors. They must be killed, 

he says, for their conspiracy. I ask, what about diplomacy?  

(It is Advent. The people are armed for insurrections here, 

spouting obscenities. “Sir, have you no sense of decency,” 

someone finally asked McCarthy, not so long ago.)  

My friend mentions Thersites. He has me there.

Jesus healed the blind man and asked him what he saw.

He said, “I see men like trees walking.”

Tonight I see two planets grow closer in the night sky.

(I have grown numb about the latest attacks

on civility.) Priam came for Hector’s body 

in the dead of night. Achilles welcomed him

and stopped the war for Hector’s funeral rites.

Recently I read about the Christmas truce in World War I

for the burial of the dead. Someone brought lights.

Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

       

Bonnie Naradzay's recent poems are in AGNI, the American Journal of Poetry, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Tar River Poetry, EPOCH, Tampa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Potomac Review, Xavier Review, and One Magazine. For many years she has led poetry workshops at a day shelter for the homeless and at a retirement center, both in Washington, DC.                                          

SHOOTING THE LAST FEMALE WHITE GIRAFFE

by Martin Willitts Jr 

A white female giraffe, thought to the last of its kind in the world, has been killed by poachers, conservationists in Kenya have announced. The rare giraffes were discovered in 2016. Independent (UK), March 11, 2020

It has come to this:
everything wrong
is someone else’s mistake.

We need to resolve whatever we can.
We cannot let the world get set so far back
it appears intractable, beyond re-setting.

You have to be sensitive to have common sense.

Already, the polar ice caps have retreated,
exposing bare rock. We should have suspected
negative consequences when we tracked the dodo
into non-existence. Once, the sky was blackened
by carrier pigeons, and forest were crowded
out the light. Once, we practiced the love
we preached and summoned our decency.

Everything has led to this:

we consider it a triumph
if we live through each day.
We’ve turned the corner, turned our backs
when Adam and Eve cast out of Eden
never glanced back, learning why bother
preserving what you can’t ever keep.


Martin Willitts Jr has 24 chapbooks including the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award-winning The Wire Fence Holding Back the World (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 16 full-length collections including the 2019 Blue Light Award-winning The Temporary World. His recent book is Unfolding Towards Love (Wipf and Stock).

NOTE TO SELF

by Thomas R. Smith

Well, we die whether we stay together or fall apart.
Finally the world goes on its way without us.
The most scourge-like name alive today will one day
be spoken seldom if at all.  To what purpose
this sighing and raging?  To what purpose this pain?
The main thing is to be a part of one's time,
no matter which side seems to be winning.  It's OK
to be a noble failure, a fool in the eyes of the world,
to die in the relentless faith of a Pete Seeger
or Rachel Carson.  The big truck taking up so much
space will one day come to the end of its road.
Insults will be forgotten.  Offended decency
will be forgotten.  In a hundred years, new
people and new problems.  And we can be
sure there will be some glory in being alive
in just their moment, as there is in ours.
Even as I write and as you read, the termites
of ruin are chewing day and night at the under-
side of the hypocrite's mask that shines with
such shameless intensity in the national
spotlight.  The time to speak is always now.
Say your truth if only for those who may be
listening from the galleries of dead and unborn,
if not the childish public locked in their
death tango with destruction.  Reserve for yourself
days of uninterrupted silence in which to hear
those things that have settled in your heart most deeply
sing their faithfulness beneath time's altering sky.


Thomas R. Smith has had hundreds of poems published on three continents.  In the United States, his poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.  His poems were included in Editor's Choice II (The Spirit That Moves Us Press), a selection of the best of the American small press, and in The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner).  His work has reached wide national audiences on Garrison Keillor's public radio show Writer's Almanac and former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. His most recent book of poems is The Glory from Red Dragonfly Press.

MY FLAG

by Marilyn Peretti

At the mic on the sidewalk
some kids say justice
is the meaning of the Fourth,
some say fireworks, some
some say cookouts,
but some say justice.

Did they mean fairness,
decency, moral rightness,
equity, abiding by law?
Is this taught to children now?
Fourth of July means justice?

Maybe these wise children know
that the Fourth does not mean
burning churches of black folks,
battering a man in a police van,
giving up on finding prison escapees,
denying the poor health insurance,
or shooting pray-ers inside a church.

I wave my American flag
for what the children have learned.


Marilyn Peretti, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, is published by The New Verse News and by various journals; nominated for Pushcart Prize; and publishes poetry books on www.blurb.com/bookstore. She writes with fellow poets in Chicago's western suburbs. 

THE STUBBORN OLD NOTION

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Image source: United Posters

for Tony Robinson, Anthony Hill, and !Presente!

For a few months now
Six of us have stood on a busy corner
Once a week
Holding signs that read Black Lives Matter
In solidarity with the movement of that name
Protesting police murders
Of unarmed African Americans
And endemic racism in our country
We are in our ‘60s, 70s, 80s
And doing what we can
As our time grows short
To stand for the possible world
And not surrender to the despair
We increasingly feel
Not only about the tenacious cancer of racism
But also about the savaging of the poor and disempowered
And the plunder of Earth’s bounty
By the felonious elite

When we were young we thought
That revolutions were about to occur that
The tumult and turmoil we were part of
Would lead to a new more peaceful
And more just world
Any minute now
But over the decades we have watched our dreams
For that the new world
Go tumbling backwards down the stairs
And we find it increasingly difficult
To remain positive

Today as we stood with our signs
A man walked up to us and said
Fuck niggers fuck Jews
And the driver of a passing truck shouted
That we were nothing but a bunch of aging hippies
With meaningless lives
If he’d stuck around for a chat
We would have explained that
Standing on a street corner
Witnessing for justice and human decency
While enduring the blast and blare of traffic
The stinking miasma of exhaust fumes
And the scorn of foolish folks like him
Was meaning enough for us thank you
Whether on any particular day
We can muster up hope for the future
Or not

Just a few days ago
A nineteen-year-old unarmed black teenager
In Madison, Wisconsin
Was shot and killed in his own home by a white police officer
And yesterday
A twenty-seven-year-old black man in Georgia
Behaving erratically
Parading naked in public
Was also gunned down by a white cop
Maybe the long moral arc of the universe
Bends toward justice
And maybe it doesn’t
Maybe it isn’t optimism we need in order to persist
Maybe just the stubborn old notion
That to do nothing and remain silent
Is to give our consent
Which we cannot do

Buff Whitman-Bradley is the author of four books of poetry, b. eagle, poet; The Honey Philosophies; Realpolitik; and When Compasses Grow Old; and the chapbook, Everything Wakes Up! His poetry has appeared in many print and online journals. He is also co-editor, with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley and Sarah Lazare, of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.  He has co-produced/directed two documentary films, the award-winning Outside In (with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley) and Por Que Venimos (with the MIRC Film Collective).  He lives in northern California.