X

by Rob McClure

X Is The Biggest Source Of Fake News And Disinformation, EU Warns —Forbes, September 26, 2023

A great Antarctic ice-wall girds our world

and JFK Junior flies his plane there

first across Idaho, false flags unfurled,

where Bigfoot is a forest-ranger bear.

Junior’s chemtrails stream upon 51

where the freemasons faked the moon-landing 

and spaceship dismantling has just begun,

for alien tech gets swift rebranding.

Soros builds birds there, makes 5G fluoride,

listens to tunes penned by surrogate Paul

who offed Diana on that fateful ride

(9/11 sonic death-waves installed),

while adrenochrome demons mixed vaccines,

fixed birth certificates, voting machines…

Rob McClure’s creative work has appeared in many magazines—Gettysburg Review, Manchester Review, Barcelona Review, New Ohio Review.

UNDER SUBPOENA

by Michel Steven Krug

Cartoon by JOEL ORFF, SONOMA INDEX-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL CARTOONIST, October 11, 2021

I.

 

Exiting the house select

Committee revolving doors

 

The Sergeant at Arms has eyes

For each witness under subpoena

 

Not ready to defy the privileges of

A defeated Executive whose policies foreign

 

And domestic are personal, useful,

Promoted to deceive,

 

American idolatry

Useful sabotage propagated

 

By the nouveau KGB

Useful USA, for re-re-election

 

US Useful idiots

To serve a majesty.

 

II.

 

Servile to posted democracy,

Offering truths of the click bait asserted.

 

Espionage at law when

In defiance of domestic channels

 

And congressional oversight

His majesty’s attorney general

 

Exacted deals to debase his rival

By erasure with stabbed glass

 

That avenges

Opaque defeat.

 

III.

 

We are informed by heavy flag poles.

We are all under subpoena,

 

Freedom of disinformation

Overwhelms veracity,

 

Its volume too temperate

Its tone too coherent

 

Its fidelity too rigid, too conventional

For an era that discounts reason.

 

IV.

 

2021:

Democracy has not been so degraded

That its franchise is mere debris.

 

The corrosion has been a cruel aberration

An arc necessary to sober

Cynicism and incredulity.

 

Exquisitely appalling, helium packaged,

Like ice melts in the spring,

Exposing all of its menacing emptiness.

Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He’s Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News (PRTN) literary magazine and he litigates. His poems have appeared in JMWW, Cagibi, Silver Blade, Crack the Spine, Dash, Mikrokosmos, The New Verse News, North Dakota Quarterly, Eclectica, Writers Resist, Sheepshead, Mizmor Anthology, 2019, PRTN, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven's Perch, Main Street Rag, the Brooklyn Review with poems forthcoming in other journals. 

READING THE TEA LEAVES

by Kit Zak 

Since our first report, the massive campaign against climate science – and action on climate, funded by oil barons the Koch Brothers has come to light. And while fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, whose very products are causing global warming, continue to fund think tanks driving the campaigns, much of the foundation funding has now been driven underground, masked by a funding front-group called the Donors Trust – and its associate Donors Capital Fund, two “donor-advised” funds created to hide the real givers and thus shield them from negative exposure of their support for these campaigns. Funding to the organizations that comprise the denial machine has risen during the Obama presidency, just as the urgency of climate solutions and promise of policy advances also rose. --Greenpeace, September, 2013

three falls later
traces of Sandy's wrath linger
losses top 50 billion
in a swath from Norfolk to Maine

Tacloban's cyclone
bodies line roadsides
the unnamed dumped in mass graves
thirst  hunger  disease stalk
the half-dead search for Mom and Son
among shack-splintered debris

tornadoes blight Illinois
tearing through twelve states
the highest winds ever
telephone poles stuck in trees
cars flipped upside down, found two lots away
500 homes in one town rubbled

fossil fuel moguls sigh
calculate their rising costs.


Kit Zak lives with her husband in Lewes,  DE. She has most recently had poems published in an anthology about motherhood as well as in the following journals: Avocet: A Nature Journal, The Blue Collar  Review,  and A Time of Singing.