ANOTHER CHAPTER

by Peter A. Witt

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge to a Texas county’s removal of 17 books from its public libraries, leaving in place a lower court ruling that allowed the purge. —Newsweek, December 8, 2025

On the second Monday in December,
the Supremes sang a song
of banishment and dark days ahead,
as the Enemies of the Public Library plotted
what volumes to next remove from public view.

Gutting school libraries wasn't enough
for your local paragons of illiteracy,
who meeting in the dark corners
of McDonalds over cheap coffee
and an egg on your face McMuffin,
nominate books, one vote
enough for a frontal assault
on the collective knowledge
available for children, teens,
adults, seniors to read.

When challenged these keepers
of the gates of darkness proclaim --
you can still buy a copy, get
gifted a copy for Christmas
(there has to be some irony here),
or loaned a copy by a friend.

So goodbye Gender Queer,
All Boys Aren't Blue, The Bluest Eye,
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,
and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

Not to mention the classics:
To Kill a Mockingbird,
The Catcher in the Rye,
The Great Gatsby,
Animal Farm, and
The Grapes of Wrath.

Next year the Enemies
will switch their focus
to the Amazons
and the Walmarts,

and the year after that
to independent bookstores,

until nothing's left
but official books
of the thought police class, 
though even those
may be axed some day
as too woke.

Peter A. Witt by chance lives in Texas and is a recovering university professor who lost his adjectives in the doldrums of academic writing. Poetry has helped him recover his ability to see and describe the inner and outer world he inhabits. His work has been twice nominated for the Best of the Net award and has appeared in a variety of online and print publications. He also writes family history.  His book about his aunt was published by the Texas A&M University Press (Edith's War: Writings of a Red Cross Worker and Lifelong Champion of Social Justice). He is also an avid birder and wildlife photographer.

FIRST CONTACT POST ELECTION

by Susan Martell Huebner

Yesterday, my neighbor offered cranberries, 

an ordinary gifting, one baker to another. She chanced the wet, slick grass

between our houses. I put down my anger, unlocked my back door.

Susan Martell Huebner lives and writes in Mukwonago WI. Her work has appeared in many online and print journals. She writes across the genres. Find her printed work at Finishing Line Press, Kelsay Publications, and Amazon.

LETTER BY LETTER

by Bill Meissner

That morning of my tenth birthday, I expected
a game, comic books. Instead,
my father lowered an American Heritage Dictionary
into my open palms,
told me he’d give me a small allowance
if I’d learn the definitions from A to Z.
I felt the weight of the book, its embossed leather cover
holding in those 225,000 words.

Caught in the middle of Iowa,
I knew nothing of aardvarks or zzyvas.
So each night, instead of watching TV,
I leaned close to the gold-leafed pages,
studying definitions that often eluded
me, meteors that glowed a few seconds
in the dome of sky before they faded.

     I can picture him now, after work at the used car lot,
     his beige dress shirt creased like the lines in a county map.
     He’d lean back on his La-Z-Boy in the den,
     paging through the latest National Geographic,
     marveling at the ancient mariners who navigated by the stars.
     As a young man, he dreamed of jumping on a freighter
     to ports in Anchorage, Buenos Aires, Caracas.
     Instead, he got a steady job. Instead,
     he wanted his son to learn the world,
     letter by letter, and then
     go there.

Months later, I gave up at F.
I even skimmed some of the blurred pages
just to get all the way to that failure,
then slid the dictionary into a mute dresser drawer.

Dad, I’m sorry. The universe was just too big for me
and I grew away from those words.
But I’m finding them now, years later, for this poem.
Here they are:  each one
like the light from a small, distant
star, finally reaching the earth.

Minnesota writer Bill Meissner is the author of five books of poems.  His forthcoming book of poetry The Mapmaker’s Dream will be published in early 2019. "Letter by Letter" will appear in that collection.  Meissner is also the author of two books of short stories and the novel Spirits in the Grass.

CHRISTMAS SONG

by David Feela

Image: Toycome

  —for Ta-rum-pah-pum-pump— 

This earth
is a package
wrapped in tissue.

Stars
glitter and drift
in its globe.

Hold it
and ask why
it feels so small.

Shake it
and worry
it will break.

Put it
back under
the tree.

Believe in
this gift
you don’t know.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays How Delicate These Arches released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

IN PRAISE OF GEORGE READER

by Lex Runciman

George Reader, the dockmaster at Watchet marina in Somerset, who dived into freezing cold waters to rescue the baby boy after his buggy was blown in by strong winds. Photograph: Ryan Hooper/PA via The Guardian, Monday 28 January 2013

Wind blows a baby stroller right off the edge
and three feet down to water.  It sinks
as a woman shouts, as you jump in.
You do not stop to empty your pockets
or remove your shoes, only your coat.
You do not notice the water's temperature,
only that you cannot move as surely
or quickly as you wish.  The stroller
floats with a current, does not entirely
disappear.  At last you grab a handle,
kick and scull, pulling it, stroller and child,
to where someone else has let down
a rope, which you knot with fingers that
have thickened.  The stroller passes you
as they haul it up, and the child buckled in
looks slumped asleep, soaked.
You are cold now.  You have climbed out
and put on your coat
as a woman you have never seen
kneels, hair in her face as she works
and works, pumping that small chest,
until she stops, leans back a little,
the child moving an arm, the child crying,
water running down your face,
the mother who has had to watch this
sobbing, covering her mouth, and even now
a helicopter angles in against the wind,
with the wind, and the mother and the child
are taken inside and lifted away.
It is the purest thing you can remember doing,
and anyone would have – this bright gift
a privilege you'd wish on no one.


Lex Runciman’s most recent book, Starting from Anywhere, was published by Salmon Poetry (Ireland) in 2009.  A new book is forthcoming in 2014.   Runciman teaches at Linfield College.