FINE PRINT

by Tricia Knoll

Corporations make it so small you don’t

    read a word of it as if they save paper

    by cramming everything together 

what privacy you give up

hidden costs

contraindications, side effects –

one decreases cognitive abilities

on a drug doctors said I needed

as I age. Getting old

brings out glasses,

prescription or straight 

from the pharmacy rack. 

Woe: when it isn’t 8-point 

type, when it’s spelled out big

with a flaunty signature 

of a President who hates they, them

pronouns, turns the tables on being born

on safe soil, pardons killers, changes

the name of the highest mountain 

on the continent—the Great One. 

And on and on, writ large.  

Might as well be billboards

his words that make

my heart ache—what irony

I can’t even read his floozy signature. 

 

Tricia Knoll is an aging Vermont poet and feminist who hasn't yet conquered the heartache for women of losing the write to choose health care in so many states. She has nine collections in print, both full-length books and chapbooks. She is a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual. She wonders how liberal folks will move forward in the coming years. 

INTOLERANCE DEGREE ZERO: A LETTER FROM HOMELAND SECURITY, THE US ATTORNEY GENERAL, AND THE POTUS

by Roxanne Lynn Doty

As the White House faces court orders to reunite families separated at the border, immigrant children as young as three years old are being ordered into court for their own deportation proceedings, according to attorneys in Texas, California and Washington, D.C. —The Texas Tribune, June 27, 2018

Dear Migrants and Asylum Seekers,

     We are implementing policies to keep our homeland
safe from your scattered bones and disobedient
dreams that traverse la linea between our air and yours.
We have executive orders, vacant Walmarts
and Bible verses on our side.  In the name of sovereignty,
we will send vultures to swoop heavy over the hearts
of your children, seal loopholes in arid scratches of earth
with blood from blisters on your feet. We will erase
your name and bury your destiny in an open grave
on the migrant trail as we watch the sky rain dust
from skeletons of all the crossers we have funneled
into the killing fields of the Sonoran, Mohave
and Chihuahuan Deserts. And if you emerge
from these wastelands, we will warehouse your sons
and daughters behind the stripes of our flag,
as sludge spills from the sewers of our mouths.
God bless America, we are not a sanctuary,
we do not do body counts, and we do not keep track
of where we send your babies.

Roxanne Lynn Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, TheNewVerse.News, Ocotillo Review, and are forthcoming in Saranac Review, Gateway Review, and Reunion—The Dallas Review. Two of her short stories were finalists in the 2012 and 2014 New Letters Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize for Fiction, and the editor of Lascaux Review nominated one of her stories for the 2015 Million Writers Award.

FOR NOW

by Lori Desrosiers

I look out my window
and it is not raining acid
my street is not flooded from erosion
the air is not filled with smog
the herons who fish from the nearby river
are alive and the trout are plentiful
honeybees drink from backyard honeysuckle
gardens grow rich with flowers and new grass
an hour away the ocean is swimmable
the astounding thing is
with one signature
the rain, the air, the soil, the fish
the birds, the flowers, the bees,
the water, and we humans,
not slowly, but quickly
perish

Lori Desrosiers’ poetry books are The Philosopher’s Daughter, Salmon Poetry, 2013, and Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak, Salmon Poetry, 2016. A chapbook Inner Sky is from Glass Lyre Press, 2015. Her poems have appeared in New Millenium Review, Contemporary American Voices, Best Indie Lit New England, String Poet, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene's Fountain, TheNewVerse.News, Mom Egg Review, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She edits Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry and WORDPEACE, an online journal dedicated to social justice. She teaches Literature and Composition at Westfield State University and Holyoke Community College, and Poetry in the Interdisciplinary Studies program for the Lesley University M.F.A. graduate program.

DUNGEONS FROM DRAGONS

by Dennis Etzel Jr.

Asmund wakes me up for another game
as the sun tries rising in another December
morning I try to rise he says he likes to wake up
in a little dark time not too early
looks out the window over our back
yard over our Kansas our country
waking up I’ve never woken up in such a dark time
these gradual small wake-ups to dungeon builders

as our resistance is set to dismantle walls Asmund asks
if this little dark time is okay for me to wake up in
I say yes let’s go downstairs with your brothers to sit
navigate the dungeon together keeping the dragons
from getting further ahead as we search for a secret door
for freedom I show my sons how to throw the dice

Dennis Etzel Jr. lives with Carrie and the boys in Topeka, Kansas where he teaches English at Washburn University. He has an MFA from The University of Kansas, and an MA and Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Kansas State University. He has two chapbooks, The Sum of Two Mothers (ELJ Publications 2013) and My Graphic Novel (Kattywompus Press 2015), a poetic memoir My Secret Wars of 1984 (BlazeVOX 2015), and Fast-Food Sonnets (Coal City Review Press 2016). His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, BlazeVOX, Fact-Simile, 1913: a journal of poetic forms, 3:AM, Tarpaulin Sky, DIAGRAM, and others. He is a TALK Scholar for the Kansas Humanities Council and leads poetry workshops in various Kansas spaces.

LIFE GOES ON

by David Chorlton

He was found dead between two buildings, a homeless man who grew up in town and had been a fixture on the streets of Libertyville [IL] for many years. But it wasn't always that way. Jack Thomas, 48, was a high school grad with college degrees, a talkative sort who loved cars and music. He was said to be a dreamer who went to California in the mid-'90s to be discovered and returned a different person. —Daily Herald, January 27, 2017. Photo: Jack Thomas via Jack Thomas Memorial Fund.

Light in the window blinds marks a beginning
and the historians are busy.
Sparrows in the orange tree
sing morning news
as coffee water wakes up to a boil.
There aren’t enough votes
to stretch the darkness into one more hour of sleep.
The choice is rebellion
or breakfast. Waffles today,
served without discussion
over anything but music. A bad dream
sticks to the plates though,
and won’t wash away. The water swirls
around and around
in the eye of a storm.

*

A wounded train cries out to the rain
that there is still far to go.
The sidewalks are polished misery.
In the park the cormorants rest on their island
with the dripping palms
and hang out their wings to dry.
When the telephone rings
somebody speaks in Spanish, so quickly
the words fly off around the kitchen
where they can’t be caught
and understood. I’d like to be friendly
but this isn’t a day for it. It still feels uncharitable
to simply hang up
and a weak apology is the best I can summon.
There goes my voice
through the wire stretched across the yard
where the pigeons with their cold, pink claws
are waiting, whatever the weather.

*

There’s a somber warning
in the news again, and hummingbirds
flashing their gorgets
against a morning thundercloud.
Weeds take hold
of more territory each day
and legislation of hurricane force
is being signed into law
as we pull them.

*

Between the cats who show up to be fed
and coyotes running wild in the neighborhood
we’re not sure which side to be on.
The yard is eerily still this morning

while the sky fans its feathers
and a talon scratches the silence open.
Families have been divided, friendships

broken, but the homeless men
sitting in a vacant lot
have nobody left to betray them, and nothing

but the cold wind for company.
No use telling them
to join the crowd now gathering to make the best
of the situation, having learned

to laugh away our anger
and play the rain like harp strings when it falls.

*

A Fire Department ambulance blocks two lanes
next to the light rail station
where a man is lying down, too far gone
to appreciate

that the day’s faraway events might
have repercussions for him
when he awakens
and attempts to stand up
with nothing to hold on to. Flashing lights,

a siren, and the ambulance
leaves without him. We don’t know the protocol
for stopping to smell a person’s breath

and test his viability
in a time so burdened with violence and tragedy
that we bleed
from other people’s wounds.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications on- and off-line, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His newest collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press, and late in 2017 The Bitter Oleander Press will publish Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant.