IDIOT YEARS

by Thomas R. Smith

Our Mayan friend Martín says we’re sick with
a collective “unmetabolized grief.”
Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, the list goes on.
Our response? Build higher psychic dams
to hold the tears. Those dams, ridiculously
expensive, bulge above every town, city,
and farm—few notice the supports straining,
the hairline cracks webbing the concrete poured
by profiteers grown fat on our denial.
Will it be said of us that we did not
possess the curiosity to inquire
what was being done to the world in our name
with our tax dollars? That we also were
mad to allow the mad to lead us?
Mad or, worse, indifferent? Dylan called
us an idiot, babe. When we’ve bombed
the earth to rubble, shall we then bomb
the rubble to sand? There’s beachfront property
for you rich to enjoy in your idiot years
before the dammed tears sweep you away.

Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.

A DIVIDER NOT A UNITER, T***P WIDENS THE BREACH

by Ron Riekki

Nick Anderson / Cagle Cartoons

            “A Divider Not a Uniter, Trump Widens the Breach”
                        --Peter Baker, The New York Times, Sept. 24, 2017


T***p’s a caesura, a seizure,     a thing that goes a-sailing
and assailing but needs desperate restraining; I think
of the psych ward patients in horror films but reimagine
them as reenactors, the way the Civil War never ended,
and a sort of clown makeup hairdo skin cross, no, crucifix
between John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy.  T***p’s
a business man, wise with pennies.  Let’s call him Penny-
wise, for short.  An It man.  In the whitest house ripping
the country in have and have-nots.  A snot Prez, a denier,
the dernier person we’d want to wed to the Presidency,
a David Duke of Earl.  But a part of me doesn’t blame
T***p, but rather blames the T***p voter who set up
for this country to be torn apart . . . You see racists hid
right in the word supremacists, hid right in the voting
booths.  The waitress approaches, says, Would you like
a John Wilkes table or a John Wilkes booth?  The sick
temper of his Sic semper tyrannis Oedipus train wrecks.
Even the Republicans at work are finally mumbling,
This guy’s a friggin idiot.  His only talent is garnering
media tension, ad nauseam.  You ever see a supposed
strong man rip a phone book in half?  It’s really sort of
highly                                                            unimpressive.

Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017).