A TrOcitieZ

by Abby Caplin

AI slips into my personal emails, a spying  
Big Brother, peering over my shoulder. Last fall, money
circled  
down the drain, in what might be our last election.
Eight years, I guzzled the news. Now I sip and worry how “Dt” might get 
flagged by Em’s tentacles, if not weirdly written. 
Google renames the Gulph.of.MeXicoh to the Gulph.of.AmeRikaH, our maps  
hijacked by data centers in Dallas. Institutions, 
international alliances, even lowly pennies have not been spared. My neighbor 
Jenna, a vibrant woman with twin two-year-olds, was laid off last Friday by Dt/Em’s  
kangaroo government. AI sums up what’s inside my email: 
Letter of Rejection from The New Yorker; Ruth had surgery; Abby offers advice on 
medications. My mother always told me to   
never underestimate the stupidity of the American people. 
Oh, how she was right! I rewatch 
Pride and Prejudice where a wealthy man learns from a strong female lead, so 
quaint, and You’ve Got Mail, where a 
revenue-oriented man’s heart is softened by a trusting,
spirited woman, but not enough to not destroy her livelihood.  
Tr 
Ump will someday be laid out, like Savonarola, upon his bonfire of the 
vanities. But for now, I should watch 
what I write, for the mighty egos, 
extracted from the ashes of the Third Reich, are celebrating their carnage,  
yucking it up in private jets. Congratulations, Na 
Zis, though you too will fail. 


Abby Caplin's poems have appeared in AGNI, Moon City Review, Mudlark Flash, Pennsylvania English, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, and a nominee for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of A Doctor Only Pretends: poems about illness, death, and in-between (2022). Abby is a physician in San Francisco, California.

EMAIL ADDRESS?

by Helen Buckingham

AI graphic from NightCafé

Helen Buckingham's work appears in journals and anthologies throughout the world, including Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton, 2013). Her most recent collection is Two Haiku Poets (Iron Press, 2023) on which she collaborated with fellow British poet Annie Bachini. It was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Haiku Society of America. 

CONSPIRACY THEORETICAL WITCH HUNTS

by Richard Hacken 

Image source: Unload and Unwind

            Hillary, it has been shown, created ISIS.
            Everything we know shows how that terror crisis
            Came from Clinton’s wicked wish to sacrifice us.
                        It’s not a conspiracy theory
                        If it happened (really)!

            In Libya she only made things worse, because she
            Purposefully waited to send in the posse
            At the embassy when needed in Benghazi.
                        It’s not a conspiracy theory
                        If it happened (really)!

            Email servers were her tools of choice for treason
            As she lured and let the spies of the Chinese in,
            Laughing as she lied about her sordid reason.
                        It’s not a conspiracy theory
                        If it happened (really)!
         
            Shocking to our sensibilities as humans,
            Hillary dropped bombs less ethical than Truman’s,
            Pimping out her husband to young female students.
                        It’s not a conspiracy theory
                        If it happened (really)!

            Hillary remains untouched by House committees
            Searching hard to bring her down by her Achilles,
            While bribes she paid stack up in banks in offshore cities.
                        It’s not a conspiracy theory
                        If it happened (really)!

Richard Hacken enjoys trochaic political satire.  While slightly amused by conspiracy theories and witch hunts, he hates to see them linked to each other. 

AMERICAN LUST STORY

by Penny Perkins

There’s a boy. And there’s a girl.
                                    And you might think just from that set up that this is a story about the attraction between them.
                                    Or at least a story about the boy being attracted to the girl. Because often times in these boy/girl stories we don’t see what the girl wants or feels, only (or mainly) what the boy wants or feels.
                                    But, be relieved, this is not that story.
                                    Because, in this case, the boy is actually a manboy, a damaged boy trapped in the body of a perverted man, and the girl (there are many) is an actual girl, in some cases as young as 13 or 14 years old. The manboy has been soliciting for sex with girls ages 13 through 16. And, in this time and place, what he is doing is technically illegal, technically against the law, but it happens all the time, a lot more than we “good people” want to know about or educate ourselves about. But this specific time with this specific manboy—which is rare given how frequently this type of activity goes on—the manboy is caught. Being the historical moment that it is, the buying and selling of girls is facilitated a lot by technology and the internet, which does leave a footprint (omg, caveat emptor!) that the police can use as evidence to charge him. The manboy has left a thick trail of emails and texts and search engine histories and images downloaded onto smart phones and computer hard drives. The police confiscate these things from the manboy’s home and digital forensics sink him. The cache of electronic artifacts of his lust implicate the manboy on his illegal, criminal proclivities for young flesh. “Middle school girls are hot,” he is quoted as saying to a female reporter. To be sure, he is gross and his statement is gross. But, given the huge numbers involved in the criminal activity of buying and selling young girls, there are clearly a lot of manboys who agree with his assessment.
                                    Probably none of these incidents with the manboy in question would have been any note at all to the general public, except for one thing: The manboy sells sandwiches for a living, and has gotten very rich doing so, but now the sandwiches are mad at him for associating their “eat fresh” product with something that is distasteful and not very fresh at all. As it turns out, the sandwiches themselves also have a digital footprint and they use it against him: their twitter feed washes their hands of him and they tweet tweet tweet to let the public know they are against the eating of underage sandwiches. On the other side of irony town, though, their website proclaims that every sandwich has a story. It’s just that the sandwiches didn’t want the manboy’s story to be their story. Can’t blame ’em. Lo and behold it sucks to make a manboy a millionaire hawking your feel-good sandwich story and then go have him turn around and use that money to sate the appetite of his curious, criminal desires. Yeah, that sucks for the poor sandwiches. Not good for franchise business. But it really, really sucks for the girls, the underage girls, the girls he raped, and it sucks for all the other disenfranchised girls bought and paid for, sold and sliced like sandwiches for the manifold manboys of America.


Penny Perkins holds an MFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Her short story “Car Ride Through Corn Fields (1975)” was chosen by Manuel Muñoz as the winner of Beecher’s Magazine 2014 Fiction Contest. Her short story “Gut Feelings” was a finalist for the Reynolds Price Prize in Fiction as a part of the 2015 International Literary Awards sponsored by the Center for Women Writers. Recent short stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Pine Hills Review, Waxwing #5, and HOAX #10. Other publication credits for fiction, poetry, and non-fiction include Salon, Conditions, The Portable Lower East Side, Curves, Girlfriend No. 1, and Book, among others. She currently lives in northeast Florida and teaches at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

THE WIRETAPPERS BALL

by Deborah Gang

An FBI internet surveillance unit will collaborate with the coming NSA data center in Utah to decipher and monitor email between private citizens. Homeland Security recently began to monitor social media using version 2.1.3 key words & search terms.*

Some are obvious. Do not use assassination, 

Taliban, bomb, bomb squad, bomb threat.

Al Qaeda (all spellings). But electric? Blackout. 

Metro. Power. Smart? Is it worth the risk to say

failure? Dock. Airport. Airplane and its derivatives. 

Cancelled. Delays. Flood. Snow. Blizzard.

Why, these are some of your necessary words--

everyone’s necessary words. If you suffer blizzards

you need to talk about them and if you don’t, you

need to gloat. Wildfire. Ice. Stranded. Stuck.

Temblor. All suspect. Use sleet at your own risk 

along with plague. Plume. Enriched. Collapse. 

They have marked the best words as hazardous. 

Including hazardous. Breach. Mudslide. Grid. San Diego!

Say goodbye to relief and closure. And cyber terror.

Cyber terror is not to be used.         Warning

is on the list. 



*Sources: 

• "The Department of Homeland Security Is Searching Your Facebook and Twitter for These Words" by Joel Johnson, Animal New York, February 27, 2012.
• "The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" by James Bamford Wired, March 15, 2012.
• "Avoid these words to prevent Homeland Security from spying on your social networks"
  --Technology News Blog by Tecca, Today in Tech, Yahoo! News, May 29, 2012.
• "U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens" by Julia Angwin, The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2012.

Originally from Washington D.C., Deborah Gang moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan to attend graduate school and remained there, both for her work as a psychotherapist and the proximity to Lake Michigan. Her research has been published in Education and Treatment of Children and her prose and poems in Literary Mama, Encore, The Michigan Poet and J Journal (CUNY).

JANUARY POEM

by Patricia Davis

When fascism comes
it will come with two

children, a dog,
tell warm, personal stories,
call us Ladies and

Gentlemen, have a
catch in its throat.

When fascism comes
it will raid
the houses of sleeping

children, use stun
grenades, tasers.

When fascism comes
it will seize filmmakers’
work at the border.

When fascism comes
it will study our e-mails.

When fascism comes
the potential hostile
intent of a child

will be reason to call in
a drone strike.

When fascism comes
there will be no lawyer,
no sentence, only

the bars, the dark.
When fascism comes

it will jail exclusively
those who have
spoken the truth.

When fascism comes
it will rise from the ash

of oppression.  On the wall
will hang the Nobel
Peace Prize.


Patricia Davis’ poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Salt Hill, Spoon River Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Quiddity, Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology, Tar River Poetry, and Smartish Pace, which named her a finalist for the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize.   Her translations of Cuban poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol and the New Laurel Review.

AN AFFAIR OF THE HARD

by Wayne Scheer

Sure, General P
should have kept
it in his pants;
sure, Ms B,
wife, mom
biographer,
should have
maintained
journalistic distance,
but these things
happen.
What is
unbelievable,
to me,
is how a man,
whose job it is
to snoop
and oversee
snooping,
would communicate
to his lover
via email.

They
could have
at least
used code.

Now
a valiant general
is reduced
to Newt Gingrich-like
fodder for comics.

No more sex
with his biographer,
one points out,
now he'll only
have sex
with his
autobiographer.

Even people
like me,
who shouldn't be
allowed to breathe
the same air
as General P,
wonders aloud
if he slept
nude with Ms B
or kept
his purple heart on.

The mighty fall
just as the small,
only with
a louder
thud.

I find this
reassuring.

Still,
emails General P?
Really?


Wayne Scheer has locked himself in a room with his computer and turtle since his retirement. (Wayne's, not the turtle's.) To keep from going back to work, he's published hundreds of short stories, essays and poems, including Revealing Moments, a collection of flash stories. He's been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net. Wayne lives in Atlanta with his wife and can be contacted at wvscheer(at)aol.com.