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.

NO SPOILER ALERTS

by Dawn Corrigan

Young German adults hold “corona parties” and cough toward older people. A Spanish man leashes a goat to go for a walk to skirt confinement orders. From France to Florida to Australia, kitesurfers, college students and others crowd the beaches. . . . “Some consider they’re little heroes when they break the rules,” said French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner. “Well, no. You’re an imbecile, and especially a threat to yourself.” —PBS News Hour, March 22, 2020

Having a husband
with respiratory issues
leaves me no patience
for the kids who flooded
the beach on Spring Break,
peers who sneer it's
no worse than a flu,
Boomers who snap Don't ask
me to cancel my plans!
I have things to do!
But when I think
in terms of plot
I can almost understand.
We're used to the world
ending, or not,
in 90-minute increments
and even then I often
have to go online
and read a summary
before I can bear
to watch through
to the final scene
and learn whether
we'll divert the asteroid
or defuse the nuke
or develop a vaccine
in time.


Dawn Corrigan has a black belt in social distancing.

SUBLIMINALITY

by Gary Glauber

More U.S. service members have been transported out of Iraq for medical treatment and evaluations following Iran’s missile attack on military facilities there, the Pentagon said Tuesday, nearly two weeks after President Trump and defense officials initially said no one was hurt. —The Washington Post, January 22, 2020. Photo: U.S. soldiers stand at a spot hit by Iranian missiles at Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq days after the Jan. 8 attack. (Qassim Abdul-Zahra/AP)

In those not-so-olden days,
they might kneecap you into submission
or try to shame you into changing your ways.

Today, the persuasion’s more subtle,
minds are changed without realizing
things encountered in media stream.

They float by like invisible balloons,
banners that point the way with
bold exclamations you’ll never remember.

Alone in the voting booth,
just you and your conscience
and inexplicable urges compelling you.

Foreign powers are acting poorly,
proving psycho-statistical truths,
gaining control from within.

Reading a mind isn’t necessary
when subtle control is relinquished
and a shocked world wonders

how nuclear winter has emerged
from within, not without,
fighting wars no one ever sees.

The new truth is contrived fiction.
Believers vehement with denial
conjure revisionist history,

spew touted party sound bites,
and daily break what others revered
on battlefields of public opinion.

This wall of boulders
grows larger over time
until no one quite remembers

or cares who it was
that cast the first stone
or the life we had before.

And we the unsure
in the chaos of uncertainty
fear the worst world war,

not knowing that bombs
of ultimate destruction
have already dropped.

Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He champions the underdog, and strives to survive modern life’s absurdities. He has two collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) and Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press).  A new chapbook of surreal poetry, The Covalence of Equanimity, a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize, is now available from SurVision Books.

AMERICA IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE MUELLER REPORT AND THE ANGRY TWEETS THAT FOLLOWED

by Ariana D. Den Bleyker

Graphic: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES NEWS/GETTY IMAGES, TWITTER via Elite Daily

I.

She swallows the news, a lump in the back of her throat,

watching all the armies who rally to save her gather,

seemingly defeated, their hopes hanging 

upon the delicate flesh of failed ghosts.

Balance of possibilities can go either way:

with just a whisper of wind, touching hand giving strength

to moments of truth swinging gently, leaning, anchored, swaying, 

rediscovering & restoring, though always permanently rooted. 

A new furnace burns brightly, metal ablaze, wrapped in red heat;

sweat pouring, glistening brighter than molten steel, boiling her people

until the day is done & lions roar by the hearth-fire. 

The sun briefly shines, allowing moments for thoughts

& strange songs of what will happen 

tomorrow that may never be real.

II.

She grits her teeth & makes a home far away—

deep within caves within caves, farther back until blue becomes blackness.

She returns to her mother, to nothing,

for inside Plato’s ultimate form illusions of illusions demystified & ugly

rely on her starkness—this & all that she saw

when he crawled in her bed unworthy of sitting by her side,

her form easy enough to reach, as if an object of his desire

left alone to bruise & soil while lying beneath the earth,

left with angry words unable to differentiate

the stomping with supposed compassionate feet, 

the head held down feeling no regrets. 

III.

She can see the revolution from her window,

the small orbits, when they turn away & return 

& sometimes a star falls, a blazing fire shot down,

a demigod dying & it comes down on her—

the thing that once was but is now lost inside her,

borrowing girder, salvaging safety for others, 

relieving the pressure amid weary shoulders grasping

for strength, taking refuge in sacrifice & pain

of her people giving what they’re willing to never receive,

as they walk breathlessly into the ether,

surveying the fact or fiction placed in their hands.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, including Wayward Lines (RawArt Press, 2015), the chapbooks Forgetting Aesop (Bandini Books, 2011), Naked Animal (Flutter Press, 2012), My Father Had a Daughter (Alabaster Leaves Publishing, 2013), Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014), On Coming of Age and Stitches(Origami Poems Project, 2014), On This and That (Bitterzoet Press, 2015), Strangest Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015), Unsent (Origami Poems Project, 2015), The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Knee Deep in Bone (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015), Birds Never Sing in Caves (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), Cutting Eyes from Ghosts (Blood Pudding Press, 2017), Scars are Memories Bleeding Through (Yavanika Press, 2018), A Bridge of You (Origami Poems Project, 2019), Even the Statue Weeps (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2019), and Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Between Where Birds Collide with Windows (Ghost City Press, forthcoming 2019). She is also the author of three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.

EQUILIBRIUM FICTION

by Michael Brockley

 

Atlas Shrugged. Trickle down. Glass-Steagall. Laffer curve. Hidden subsidies. Citizens United. Corporate welfare. Cognitive capture. Nickel-and-dime. Incentive bonuses. No-bid contracts. Risk aversion. Safety net. Privatized profits. Efficient markets. Predatory lending. Booms. Busts. Bubbles. Wall Street bailout. Goldman-Sachs. Lehman Brothers. Distributional consequences. Socialized losses. Retention bonuses. Austerity. Sequestration. Gridlock. Middle class. Too big to fail. Entitlement cuts. Right-to-work. Minimum wage. Jobless recovery. Golden parachutes. Too big to jail. Capitalism and Freedom. Moral hazard. Rogue markets. "Curiosities."

Michael Brockley is a school psychologist who works in rural northeast Indiana. Recently, his poems have appeared in The Tipton Poetry Journal, So It Goes, Facing Autism in Muncie and The New Verse News.