MANIFESTO OF AN ANGRY LIBERAL

by Alex Silvestri

Love your neighbor.

Even the loud one with the truck flags and no brake lights.

Even the banker.

Even the bureaucrat.

Even the kid at the drive-thru who got your order wrong again.

Pay your taxes,

but don’t forget to ask

why billionaires don’t.

Plant tomatoes.

Support public schools.

Wave at the mail carrier.

Vote.

Raise your kids to tell the truth,

then tell them why the world sometimes punishes people who do.

Don’t let that make them bitter.

Let it make them brave.

Live as if healthcare were a right.

Live as if no one should die of a treatable disease

in the richest country on Earth.

Live as if your neighbor’s insulin is your business.

(It is.)

Stand up for public libraries.

For school lunches.

For clean water.

For the kid who comes out in a small town.

For the mother who can’t afford day care.

For the dad who took a second job to afford rent.

For the old man choosing between heat and food.

Get mad.

But not so mad you stop seeing people.

Especially the ones who disagree with you.

Listen longer than is comfortable.

Then speak clearly, without apology:

No, I don’t believe poor people are lazy.

Yes, I think workers deserve a living wage.

No, I don’t think guns are more sacred than children.

Yes, I believe Black lives matter.

No, I don’t think being queer is a threat to anyone’s freedom.

Yes, I think women are people.

No, I don’t think corporations should write our laws.

Yes, I still believe in democracy, even when it’s messy.

Protect the wild things:

the wetlands, the whistleblowers,

the bees, the books they try to ban.

Refuse cruelty,

even when it’s dressed in law.

Refuse greed,

even when it calls itself freedom.

Refuse hate,

even when it wears a flag.

Don’t just resist.

Build.

Build coalitions.

Build gardens.

Build unions.

Build broadband in the holler.

Build policy with working people in the room.

Don’t get cynical.

Cynicism is a luxury belief.

Hope is cheaper, but costs more effort.

Hope plants itself anyway.

So should you.

Love the country like you’d love a sick child—

not blindly,

but with everything you’ve got,

because you know it can get better.

Walk into rooms where you’re outnumbered

and say it anyway:

We can take care of each other.

We can build something decent.

We are worth saving.

Be stubborn in joy.

Radical in kindness.

Unyielding in truth.

Start with what you know:

We belong to one another.

Let’s act like it.

Alex Silvestri is a Michigan poet whose work is rooted in place, nature, community, and the ordinary experiences of daily life. This poem was inspired in part by Wendell Berry’s writing on community, neighborliness, stewardship, and our obligations to one another.

WE’RE RIGHT, BEHIND YOU

by Steven Kent

"Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani's supposedly radical policies as 'normal'" —The Guardian, November 6, 2025

It's Communist, beyond the pale

Of all our freedom-loving norms,

To look at European forms

So goshdarned guaranteed to fail.

Free healthcare? Transport? Daycare, too?

We ain't about to spring for those,

Since everybody 'round here knows

They can't succeed--oh wait, they do?

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, The Dirigible Balloon, Light, Lighten Up Online, The Lyric, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, The Pierian, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collections I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) (2023) and Home at Last (2025) are published by Kelsay Books.

SPRING (RUDE) AWAKENING

or HANDS OFF MY SHOWERHEAD

President Trump, who has waged a long-running battle against low water pressure, signed an executive order that redefined a common bathroom fixture. —The New York Times, April 10, 2025

by Ann Weil

after Louise Glück’s “October (section I)”
 

Is it Spring again, is it green again,
aren’t we a field of four-leaf clover,
aren’t we coming up posies, 
 
weren't we promised,
aren’t we deserving,
aren’t we special, 
 
wasn’t he strong,
tougher than bullets,
 
didn’t he vow a phoenix nation,
to clean the shop
of waste and scum,
isn’t he bold, isn’t he clever, not telling
the half of his plans 
for ’25—
 
I remember our weakness, our shameful
kindness, our brotherly love, our lead-by-example,
didn’t those values drag us down,
drown us in our Gulf of America,
 
I can’t remember 
which government bloat 
I’m supposed to hate more—
park rangers or cancer researchers,
 
I no longer care
about clean air and healthcare, 
but, man, those egg prices
keep me up at night—
 
who needs allies, free-trade, or 401Ks,
who needs hurricane warnings
or Judy Blume books, 
 
down with DEI, up with ICE,
when was I young there were no illegals, 
no signs in Spanish, my grandparents spoke
only English, swept their Yiddish 
under the rug,
 
when did the taco trucks takeover
and bubble-tea shops spread like a rash,
when did a skirt 
give a guy a free pass
to the ladies room—
a scourge more worrisome 
than measly measles,
 
I blame the Fathers’ faulty foundation—
the Constitution’s lunatic creed,
 
didn’t we thrive without due process, 
without free-speech and fair elections,
 
wasn’t it great
when we were subjects
subject to
the whims of a king,
 
didn’t so-called progress
lead us to this towering cliff,
 
aren’t we jumping, won’t we bounce,
bounce back better like he said,
 
yes, we’re jumping,
isn’t it Spring?  
Yes, it’s Spring, 2025.

Ann Weil is the author of Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2023) and Blue Dog Road Trip (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2024). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2024, Pedestal Magazine, RHINO, Chestnut Review, DMQ Review, Maudlin House, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. A four-time Pushcart nominee, Weil lives with her husband in Ann Arbor, MI, and Key West, FL.

COVER IT

by Ron Riekki

“Everyone keeps saying 'apocalyptic,' but that doesn’t begin to cover it.” —CNN’s Karina Tsui from Pacific Palisades, January 8, 2025

 

My sister texts me saying she is sorry

to hear about my long disease [sic] and I

think of the long history of fire, how often

our world wants to be held instead of this,

now, how it’s helled.  And in the military

they put me in the burn pits, not to help,

but for punishment, no mask given, and

 

forced to stand there with the ash now

that owns me, apical scarring, and this

is the world now, scaring me, the news

where I see fire in the Ukraine and fire

in Gaza and fire in Sudan and fire in

Myanmar and fire in Haiti and I look

online at a “current large wildfire map”

 

and it looks as if all of California is on

fire and I worked in California during

COVID, a disaster healthcare volunteer,

going to all the worst-hit cities, raged

by COVID and, always, driving in, I’d

see countless TRUMP signs [sick],

almost as if COVID went wherever his

 

supporters were, a nurse yelling one

time that the OR needed to have at

least two sets of negative pressure

respirators, and I remember a shift

where all of the staff was sick, how

nobody showed up but me, and, out-

side, the horizon was ablaze, rooms

 

packed with COVID patients, one

dying every other shift, and I could

go outside for my break, but couldn’t

take my mask off outside either, not

with the planes dropping fire retardant,

and a medic telling me that the UV

in L.A. was deadly, is deadly, and this

 

doctor screaming something about

a CT scan, and a COVID patient who

came in with no ID (we took him),

and an MP from a nearby military

base who died in his 20s, drowned

in the water of his own lungs, and

how someone came in and a nurse

 

was asking if the patient couldn’t

breathe because of COVID or be-

cause of the fires and the fires were

COVID and COVID was a fire, is

a fire, and my father is in bed and

he’s flicking through the news and

it’s orange-red on the screen and

 

red-yellow on the screen and it’s

yellow-orange, all these different

hells we create—bombings and

wildfire and a Republican’s pool

in his mansion backyard drowning

in flames and the fires in Burkina

Faso don’t make our news and

 

the fires in Cameroon don’t make

our news and the fires in Mali

don’t make our news, but fires

of the wealthy are all over our

screens and the mansions are so

quickly eaten by Hell.  My son

googles the words Who invented

 

fire? and the A.I. answers, Homo

sapiens and we invented all of

this, all of this ash and smoke

and I remember when I was

standing in the middle of my

lungs being destroyed for

the rest of my life and there

 

was fence all around me and

I thought of incarceration,

how we are getting so good

at war that we are turning our

whole entire world into a prison

and the only way out of this hole

is to stop everything we’re doing.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).