HOW TO BE A BILLIONAIRE (TAYLOR’S VERSION)

by Diane Elayne Dees

Taylor Swift attends the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards. PHOTO: 

JAMIE MCCARTHY/WIREIMAGE

Publicly acknowledge your peers
and show pleasure in their creations.
Make little girls happy at every opportunity.
Everywhere you go, stock the food bank 
for a year, and send emergency money
to our states before the government 
can even fill out the forms.
Show women and girls how to take 
ownership of their own lives.
Show little girls that tears and rage
and poetry and making money
and red lipstick and ass-kicking
are all feminine pursuits.

Don’t cheat your vendors, defraud
your customers, or insult your fans.
Don’t incite violence wherever you go,
and don’t endanger the lives of others
because they are black, brown, female,
government officials, or journalists.
Don’t sexually abuse anyone,
don’t pretend you don’t know
anyone or anything connected to you,
don’t threaten people.

And do whatever it takes to guide 
us out of this Cruel Summer.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books), The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press), and The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press). Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.

EPITAPH FOR ALICE MUNRO

by Gifford Savage

My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him. In the shadow of my mother, a literary icon, my family and I have hidden a secret for decades. It’s time to tell my story. —Andrea Robin Skinner, Toronto Star, updated July 15, 2024. Photo by Steve Russell.

We mourned her passing,

those of us eclipsed by her shadow,

who place words on pages

in vain attempt to come close 

to her masterful levels of wit,

humour and care.

Amongst the greats of short-story fiction,

she was honoured and celebrated,

commemorated in glowing eulogies.

Lifted to the heights of genius

in obituaries dwelling on achievement.

Perhaps we can understand

why they didn’t mention the unmentionable,

those writers who loved her words so much,

for whom Her stories are life itself.

A month later it all fell crashing down to earth. 

What the tributes had carefully left unsaid,

what they had known since the verdict in 2005.

This mother who wrote so powerfully

about the complications of everyday life,

who wrote from a feminine perspective

of girls and boys, of men and women—

while all along, beyond the pen and page was

the guilty abuser she protected,

the dirty secret held close,

the terrible reality denied,

the Nobel prize gathering dust,

the little girl she had betrayed,

no longer a child, bravely breaking her silence—

along with our delusions of greatness.

Gifford Savage is from Bangor, Northern Ireland. His poetry has been published in various journals, including The Storms, The Bangor Literary Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Agape Review, and previously in The New Verse News. He was included in the Community Arts Partnership anthology "Across the Threshold," has performed his poetry on local television station "Northern Visions TV," and was winner of the Aspects Festival Poetry Slam 2022.