HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON

by Suzette Bishop

Go ahead and come on down to Alamo, Texas

To admire me, the wall at the border,

Go ahead and come on down to brag

About building me to keep the country safe,

Go ahead and come on down to praise me

And yourself,

How strong we are,

How big and beautiful we are,

How much we cost taxpayers,

How no one can scale us,

How we keep out criminals,

How we cage children but keep them warm

With foil blankets.

Let me help you have a photo op

Before you leave office,

A mic, a platform,

Since you were walled out

After breaking down the doors

And smashing the windows of the Capitol.

As you know, I may be incomplete,

But I’m great,

So great that at night under the stars

This section of me coils

Into a circle,

Tighter and tighter

Around you and your golf cart,

The ocelots staring at you

As they run from one border to the next,

Walling you in,

Keeping the country safe again.

Suzette Bishop teaches at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. Her books include Horse-Minded, She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes, Hive-Mind, Cold Knife Surgery, and most recently, a chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead.  Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Poems about living on the border, animals, and endangered species are highlighted in her most recent poems and books while her favorite way to enjoy the borderlands is by horseback. 

THIS IS NOT NORMAL

by Jeremy Nathan Marks 

I will not forget what happened earlier today/last night/yesterday/

last week/last month/last year/this past decade 

I will not un-hear “I can’t breathe” I will not un-see “I can’t breathe”

Now I can hardly mouth “take a knee” 

I will not overlook the seizing of children from the arms 

of their mothers and their fathers at the border

met with a jacket that said, I really don’t care do u?

I will not pretend there was no Merrick Garland 

Birtherism, “Lock Her Up,” “Commie,” “Monster” 

and “Nasty Woman” 

I won’t overlook Access Hollywood and Charlottesville 

Muslim Bans and “Stand Back/Stand By”

I do recall Russia, Ukraine, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn

William Barr, the emoluments clause, impeachment and tax returns

I won’t forget “Send Her Back” or ignore all those phoney words of outrage 

by Senators and Representatives who now walk in complete lockstep 

playing the country for fools with Judge Barrett and how “he’s learned his lesson” 

I will not un-see the Second Lady of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

accosted buying groceries, called the n-word because she’s of color 

I cannot reconcile how Covid became a “blessing from God” 

because the right man contracted it at a hugging party for a judicial coup d’état 

This is not normal

none of this is normal 

there is more to democracy

than just the news cycle

There is the world 

and our place in it 

there is a country, burning

This is not normal 

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. New work appears this fall in So It Goes, Boog City, Unlikely Stories, The Journal of Expressive Writing, The Last Leaves, Chiron Review, Dissident Voice, Ginosko, and Bewildering Stories.