DON’T FORGET TO VOTE

by Steven Kent

Republican congresswoman Kay Granger from Texas has not cast a vote in the US House since July while she has been grappling with “dementia issues” and residing at a senior living facility, according to her family – something she did not disclose to the public before a Dallas media outlet figured out where she was during her prolonged absence. —The Guardian, December 22, 2024

I'm a fan now of Congress's Kay,

Who does so much less damage this way—

To remain in absentia

(Forget the dementia)

Is true public service, I say!

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.

MUNDUS NOVUS

by Pauletta Hansel

In this Oct. 27, 2020 photo, artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg walks among thousands of white flags planted near RFK Memorial Stadium in Washington in remembrance of Americans who have died of COVID-19. Credit: Patrick Semansky, AP via The Detroit News, December 14, 2020.

300,000 US dead, I read

this morning (old news

by the time you read these words).

This pandemic’s

in month nine, fully gestated.

The curve of it ready to pop.

My husband, the historian, 

looks across the table at me,

tells me this won’t be the last pandemic

of our lifetime, this won’t be the worst.

We’re in our sixties now. How much longer

does the next one have to find us?

Twenty, thirty years?

How many of them would we choose

to claim, years not given up to pills and tubes,

the cancer that his mother didn’t fight,

the dementia that wrote the ending

of both my parents’ stories?

I pick up again the book

that names my New World kin—

Ezekiel, Margaret—

newlywed and not among

300 grisly dead that year,

Jamestown, 1622, settlers

with their own weapons slain,

the Powhatan’s wasted dose

of our own medicine

to rid themselves of our encroaching whiteness.

Rapacious is the word

the author gives to my ancestral 

plundering of the world 

that was not new or ours,

and even now we thrust our will

across this landscape, not unlike the virus

we no longer call novel.  

Pauletta Hansel’s eighth poetry collection is Friend, epistolary poems written in the early days of the pandemic; her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, and The New Verse News, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (2010-2020).

SIGN OF OUR TIMES

 by Lylanne Musselman

Collage by Edutopia; Photography by Al Rendon, John Halpern, Todd-Bingham Picture Collection and Family Papers, and Everett Collection

Discussions of dead
sycamores, dancing
doves, piecing together
puzzle skies,
mom’s dementia, and
America’s downfall:
too many guns,
too many dumbasses
to mention,
a deranged
president of U.S.
but not for us:
the humble,
the stressed,
the open-
minded,
kind
poets
who dig
deeper
during
dark
times.

Lylanne Musselman is an award-winning poet, playwright, and artist, living in Indiana. Her work has appeared in Pank, Flying Island, The Tipton Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, Rose Quartz Magazine, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others, and many anthologies. Musselman is the author of five chapbooks, a co-author of the volume of poetry, and author of the full-length poetry collection It’s Not Love, Unfortunately (Chatter House Press, 2018). She’s currently working on another volume of poetry.

FIRES THIS TIME

Clackamas, Oregon, September 12, 2020


by Carolyn Martin

Dozens still missing in Oregon. Burnt roses are seen outside a destroyed home as destructive wildfires devastate the region on Friday, Sept. 11, 2020, in Talent, Ore. (AP Photo/Paula Bronstein via OregonLive)

While I check out evacuation routes
and pray our packed cars are precaution,
not necessity, thousands have lost
all there is to lose except each other
and maybe a treasure or two:
a dog, a cat, livestock raced
to fairgrounds, a child’s diary.

They don’t see what we—
the hunkered-down-in-place—see:
miles of ash heaps, contorted
cars and trucks, war-weary firefighters
who breathe the unbreathable.

Meanwhile, my mother lies in a NJ nursing home.
She can’t remember if she ate her lunch
or how to answer her phone. I watch her mind
slip into the smoke that wipes out
our Douglas firs and seeps into our home.
Today she doesn’t know her air is clean
or that nineteen years ago, she breathed
the ash of 3000 souls drifting
through another blackened sky.


Carolyn Martin is happily retired in Clackamas, OR where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. She is the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation.

DEMENTIA TEST

by Gus Peterson

Person, woman, man, camera, TV.
A thousand names written off today.
Now who will speak for me?

Phase-10. Skip-Bo. Niece, giver, EMT.
Eight shots. No more cards to play.
Person, woman, man, camera, TV.

Mentor. Driver. Athlete. Father, see:
he took a knee. Nothing more to say.
Who will speak for me?

In Portland, Chicago, New York, DC:
the unnamed, the masked, gassed away.
Person, woman, man, camera, TV.

George. Tamir. Trayvon. Sandra. Bre.
No one said their names today.
Please, someone speak to me.

Thoughts come, they stay, they flee.
A thousand more names to say.
Person, woman, man, camera, TV:
speak for us. We can’t breathe.


Gus Peterson lives in Maine.

TOO LATE, WE THOUGHT

by Lisa Vihos

July-August 2016 issue, The Atlantic

It was that autumn of hurrication
and blusterment, when kings fought
for their crowns, and beasticals awoke
to shake loose their brassy manes.
Geese flew every which way but south.

There was hatertude in the air
and a forbading sense of miserdom.
There was a feeling that something
had been lost; I’ll call it humankindlyness,
gone the way of the Mohican and the dodo.

It was a time when be equaled seems
and no one knew what the definition
of is was, or will be, or will have been.
It was a topsy-turvy time of extreme poshity
and abjectionable going-withoutedness.

The best minds of our generation
went missing in a moragmire
of interpetude and degenerance,
feigning some kind of wonderful;
some kind of altruistica merviosa.

It was a time when lachromosis set in
and a distinct hardening of arterial material.
We thought we had the answer. We thought
we could fix things with a bludgeon. We thought,
but it was not enough, and it came too late
to rectifiliate our dementia.

Lisa Vihos is a poet living near Lake Michigan in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She is the Poetry and Arts Editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal and an organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change. She recently received a grant from her undergraduate alma mater, Vassar College, to design and build a children's reading garden in Malawi in 2017.

AGAINST PURITY

by Judy Kronenfeld

My father slipped out of Nazi Germany 

in history’s hidden pocket, but the sister

and her family he never talked about stepped 

over the crack between everyday

and juggernaut (deportiert 1942, verschollen
in Auschwitz, or für tot erklart

in the same hell). 

Briefly paused in Recife

on the way to Ascension Island,

courtesy of the U.S. Army, 1944, my father took in

the faces in gradations of brown,

and said, according to family legend:

“We should all intermarry

until we blend.” As if, to fuse 

the blacks and whites, the us

and them tense in his newly beloved

America would move us towards

a gene-pool Esperanto, one flavor, nothing

sticking out, nothing to hoist

a flag, or cross or crescent on.

Even a star. 

        

He dipped his pinky

in the Passover wine to spill the ten drops 

for the plagues God visited on the Egyptians,

and with his post-retirement

congregation, bowed to praise

the Creator “who has set us apart.”

But never held himself

apart or wished a plague

on anyone. In his decline, when congregants

visited the dementia wing, he could still mumble

the Hebrew prayers he’d learned by rote

as a kid, though almost everything 

in his life—including Paula, Mendel, 

Hermann and Charlotte—

was by then verschollen.

But someone is always saying

We’ve fallen from our ancient  purity—
take back our country!

        

Someone like Anders Breivik, self-trained in pure

ruthlessness, whose bomb and bullets 

shattered the charm enclosing open Norway. 

I remember  all of Oslo—like a village—

celebrating light in the dark 

of the autumnal equinox, 

gathering for the River Walk, 

the mud-slick banks of the Akerselva glowing

with candles and torches, spangles flickering

off the silver foil the school kids used 

to decorate the trees, all families—adopted African

or Asian children, Muslim mothers

in their sculpted head-scarves—

safe as houses.

And someone else, afraid to disagree,

will wave a torn and faded

flag, so long suppressed,

and holler yes!         

        

Like the proud father who bows

to God when his wife-and-kids-abandoning son 

fighting for Islamic State in Syria

is killed, who celebrates that son’s

martyr’s wedding (though the mother says

‘it’s a funeral for me’) in a great tent 

draped with black. 

        

It makes me want 

all things maculate, muddied

mottled, pocked, all things

tainted,     

stained,

blotchy, motley,

mongrel, splotched,

hybrid, scrambled,

half-caste —

If that’s what it takes

to defy Ein Volk, Ein Reich
Ein Führer, the wished-for

Caliphate, Judea and Samaria,

Trump’s Muslim- and Latino-

free America.         

Judy Kronenfeld’s most recent books of poetry are Shimmer (WordTech Editions, 2012) and the second edition of Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (Antrim House, 2012), winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her fourth full collection, Bird Flying through the Banquet, will be published by FutureCycle Press in the spring of 2017. Her poems have appeared widely in  print and online journals including American Poetry Journal, Calyx, Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, Connotation Press, DMQ Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Louisville Review, Natural Bridge, The Pedestal, Portland Review, Sequestrum, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stirring, and Valparaiso Review, and in more than twenty anthologies. She is Lecturer Emerita, Dept. of Creative Writing, University of California, Riverside, and Associate Editor of the online journal, Poemeleon.

PUTIN'S STRIDE

by Bill Petz

George W. Bush infamously claimed to have looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes and gotten a “sense of his soul,” but perhaps he would have learned more by watching him walk. A recent paper in the British Medical Journal takes up the unexpected question of why Putin, as well as several of his subordinates, walk with an unusual gait, swinging the left arm normally but keeping the right arm close to the hip. Bastiaan R. Bloem, a neurologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands, says he was first tipped off to the strange gait by one of his former instructors, who noticed it in a video of the Russian president. For Bloem and his co-authors (all “movement disorder enthusiasts,” as he puts it), the video, and others in which Putin walks the same way, set off alarm bells since “unilaterally reduced arm swing” can be a sign of several neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease. . . . Videos of other senior Russian officials show the same unusual gait, including Prime Minister (and former president) Dmitry Medvedev, former defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, and current chief of the presidential administration Sergei Ivanov. “The first thing that came to mind is, ‘What the heck? Is there a Parkinson’s epidemic in the Kremlin?’ ” says Bloem. Another possible explanation surfaced when one of Bloem’s colleagues found a KGB training manual, which instructs operatives that “[w]hen moving, it is absolutely necessary to keep your weapon against the chest or in the right hand. Moving forward should be done with one side, usually the left, turned somewhat in the direction of movement.” The authors have called the ex-KBG agent’s John Wayne–esque walk a “gunslinger’s gait.” This doesn’t mean, literally, that the president is packing. Putin probably never did much gunslinging in the KGB, where his job was to recruit potential operatives in East Germany, but the walk may be a tough-guy affectation akin to his often-coarse choice of language. “Putin is a macho leader who kept his gait to show that he is a KGB veteran,” Bloem says. --Slate, Dec. 15, 2015

Look at Putin's walk.
Right arm doesn't swing,
left does the usual thing.
Seems kinda awkward.

Dutch neurologists took a look.
Nothing new they say,
just a gunslinger's way.
It's in the KGB training book.

Faster to go for their guns.
It might just be,
but let's wait and see
if it's not Parkinson’s.

A loss of control,
dementia and depression
explain his aggression,
lack of soul.


Diagnosed with Parkinson's 10 years ago, Bill Petz' right arm doesn't swing without meds. He lives and writes in the mountains of western North Carolina. His work has been published in Status Hat, The Ashevillle Citizen-Times, The Chronicles of Higher Education, Artists & Writers Quarterly and TheNewVerse.News.