WE’RE BACK!

by Karen Marker

“We are not going to let the communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation’s capital,” [Stephen] Miller told the crowd near Shake Shack inside Union Station. “And let’s just also address another thing. All these demonstrators you’ve seen out here in recent days, all these elderly white hippies, they’re not part of the city and never have been. And by the way, most of the citizens who live in Washington, D.C., are Black. So we’re going to ignore these stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old.” —The Hill, August 20, 2025

All of us old white hippies 

are showing up at Union Station 

Shake Shack and every

street corner

we don’t want to miss 

a love in sit in heckle

right here wherever

they are we are 

wearing our long gray

hair in braids 

like Patti Smith

singing "People Have the Power"
we’re blowing smoke rings

into their smirking faces

as they buy their burgers

for the National Guard

here so this won’t be another

Kent State we’ve come to town 

in massive numbers rocking

not rolling over
we’re wearing our tie die

tee shirts in protest chanting

Hey Hey We’re the Hippies 

Come back and we’re not alone 

look closer you’ll see we’re rainbow

colored, we’re stripping off 

their vulgar masks

smacking their faces with kisses
this is just the beginning

we’re making it a race

to the finish see what happens 

when we all get naked

let our full glory 

be exposed that’s how 

we’ll catch them 

off guard take over

by giving away the Abundance 

of our flourishing gardens 

throwing bouquets of chard and roses

Oakland, CA poet Karen Marker is a social activist and retired school psychologist whose poetry has been published in numerous anthologies and journals. Her first poetry book Beneath the Blue Umbrella came out recently with Finishing Line Press. She has recently been engaged in a project of writing a poem a day off hope and protest in response to the news. The presence of the  national guard in our cities has recalled her experience as 9th grader at Kent State University High School where she was witness to the horrors of May 4th. Her poetry is in the May 4th Archive at KSU. 

HISTORY OF A BIGOT

by David Spicer

“*trigger warning* Rabid Trump supporter” by alex674 at Deviant Art.

I never learned to love
a butterfly’s wings, the ripple of wavy hair.
My old man numbed me with buckles of belts,
along with barbed-wire insults and blame
he loved to wrap around my sensitive head.
He watched with glee when I winced and cried,

a weak kid. As an adolescent I didn’t cry
but with those lack of tears I couldn’t love
myself anymore than a turtle that swallows its head.
I began my journey of odium by growing long hair:
I felt kinship with hippies who blamed
society for their alienated rage and dodged belts

from fathers, who thought nothing of belts
of Jimmy Beam and Johnny Black before they cried
and always found their sons to blame
for being losers in life and love.
Ten years later, I buzz cut my hair,
joined a gang of skinheads

who grunged guitars and cracked heads.
This didn’t happen in Frisco, but the Cotton Belt,
where haters despised long hair and short hair,
but I loathed rednecks— they never cried,
didn’t know the meaning of love
since they never accepted self-blame.

As children, their mothers told them, You’re to blame—
I ought to bash your stupid head
in. Fifteen years later, I still didn’t know love,
so I joined right-wing crackpots who swung belts
at smaller victims, young men we kicked until they cried,
slashing their faces with swastikas, hacking their hair.

Twenty years later, I wonder what happened to my hair.
If I could, I’d find some cretin to cut with blame.
I’d feel better if the whiner whimpered and cried.
Then I’d notch it up and grind his head,
tie up his arms with rusty chains, poison-laced belts,
and after I finished him, I’d call his death my act of love.

I’m not prejudiced. I hate everybody: long hair, bald head.
Who cares, as long as I can blame and whip with a belt?
I can’t cry. I hate myself. I think I’ll buy a gun to love. 


David Spicer has published poems in Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, Oddball Magazine, The Literary Nest,The Tipton Poetry Journal, Synaeresis, Chiron Review, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press), Homeworks: A Book of Tennessee Writers (The University of Tennessee Press), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press). He has been nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart once, and is the author of one full-length collection of poems, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press), and six chapbooks, the latest of which is Tribe of Two (Seven CirclePress). He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books.

LILY PAD LOVER

by C.L. Quigley

Image source: Pauses&Clicks

I fall in love with photographs,
mustachioed Union soldiers,
baby faced and hopeful hippies,
or late-Romantic composers.
I wake to find my lovers dead,
better off dead or immortalized.
Everywhere I look — graves,
if I see a mound, a ditch
or a pile of dirt, a cairn.
I breathe radiation,
my cilia singed, the sun
a merciless master.
All I see are graves,
another casualty, a number,
an obituary (or not)
blowing in the wind
or waiting for a Google search.
I’m advised to wait —
for my Marine with one leg,
control issues, or
a weekly therapy appointment.
He’ll be fighting evil
from a Lily Pad.
Who would disagree with that?


An artist and naturalist, C.L. Quigley grew up in the capital of Nevada, where she began writing in the sagebrush from a young age. She now rides her bicycle through tiny Northern California towns, abides near Lassen Volcanic National Park, and she's working towards her educational goals.