LOOKING BACK AT THE TIME . . .

SENATOR JEFF FLAKE ASKED SUPREME COURT NOMINEE NEIL GORSUCH WHETHER HE’D RATHER FIGHT 100 DUCK-SIZED HORSES OR ONE HORSE-SIZED DUCK

by Kathleen Latham

In hindsight, it seems the Senator was onto something, since Washington today is certainly overrun by plenty of duck-size horses—all of them tripping the tourists and shitting on monuments and generally wreaking havoc in the heart of democracy—which is bad, I agree, and incredibly frustrating, but not nearly as disturbing as that one gelding-sized, orange-feathered, fowl-mouthed lame duck currently digging for grubs in the Rose Garden, snapping at shadows with his wedge-shaped bill while he tramples the truth with his big, webbed feet and scares the hell out of the rest of the free world while simultaneously making them laugh at us, which, I suppose, was the original intent of the question? I’m sure three years ago it was tempting to make puns like Stop ducking the issue before playfully pointing out that you can remove half of a duck’s brain without any obvious difference in its behavior or that ducks can turn their heads completely backwards to preen themselves—both facts which now seem remarkably prescient, although the latter will undoubtedly lead to unfortunate thoughts of The Exorcist. And speaking of movies, doesn’t it feel like Washington has become the rich kids’ lunch table in a John Hughes’ film, if the rich kids were out of touch birdbrains who laugh at other people’s misery while the entire school is going to shit—a comparison that inevitably brings to mind Duckie in Pretty in Pink. And maybe that’s what we need right now, a loveable poor man who lip syncs "Try a Little Tenderness," or maybe it’s just tenderness we need or hope or the simple recognition that this isn’t funny anymore because real lives are at stake and our country is being torn apart and when I try to understand how anyone could possibly believe more of the same is a good idea, I’m reminded of Justice Gorsuch’s response three years ago to the above-mentioned duck-themed question and strangely, my answer is the same: I’m very rarely at a loss for words, but you got me.

Kathleen Latham is a poet and short fiction writer living outside of Boston, MA whose work has appeared in Fictive Dream, River Heron Review’s Poetry Now issue, Chestnut Review, Constellations, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Flash Fiction Magazine among others. She can be found on social media as @lathamwithapen.

KAKISTOCRACY

by Susan Terris

THE ONLY WAY TO WRITE ABOUT THIS IS TO USE ALL

CAPS FOR THE RAGE I FEEL ABOUT HAVING A GOVERNMENT

 

FILLED WITH INLAWS. EX-LOBBYISTS, STOOGES AND A PRESIDENT

WHO IS UNQUALIFIED FOR THE JOB. IT’S THE WORST OF

 

THE WORST. My husband, who has left this world, used 

to say what we needed as a president was not 

 

a politician but a businessman. I may have to dig under

the birch tree to find his ashes and try to tell them 

 

just how wrong he was.

Susan Terris’ recent books are Familiar Tense (Marsh Hawk) 2019; Take Two: Film Studies (Omnidawn) 2017, Memos (Omnidawn) 2015; and Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk) 2012. She's the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and one play.  Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. A poem of hers appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXI. A poem from Memos was in Best American Poetry 2015. Her newest chapbook is Dream Fragments, which won the 2019 Swan Scythe Press Award. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal.

THEY PROPPED THE DEAD MAN UP: AN ALLEGORY

by Sandra Anfang

We were waist deep in the big muddy

and the big fool said to push on. 

—Pete Seeger, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”

A man I used to know

who knew a man I used to know

told me a story about

the old man’s funeral.

How they propped him up

in his single bed like a child’s

dressed him in his favorite

cowboy shirt, hat, & boots.

How their feet carved circles

in the small front room

of his cabin, how they passed 

around the punch, dished up

the casseroles, poured the wine.

All the while, he lay in his bed

in the corner, where it had been wheeled

watching them enjoy the feast.

He didn’t miss a beat.

He looked great—alive as you or me

said the man I used to know.

Maybe a little ashen.

“They propped the dead man up”

cycles through my brain

like a country refrain.

If they hadn’t heard the story

of how his Kawasaki overshot

the freeway bridge, a suspected 

heart attack the cause

you might have thought he was

enjoying an afternoon nap.

This scenario would not

be hard to replicate:

(an old man waving from

the window of an SUV; 

the steel-spiked wall of his dissembling).

During the parsing of the meatloaf

the news, the deviled eggs

they propped the dead man up 

and life continued

more or less

as it had before.

Sandra Anfang is an award-winning poet, poetry teacher, and editor. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including San Francisco Peace and Hope, West Trestle Review, Spillway, and Rattle. Her two chapbooks, Looking Glass Heart and Road Worrier, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Xylem Highway, a full-length collection, was published by Main Street Rag in 2019. Sandra teaches with California Poets in the Schools and hosts Rivertown Poets, a monthly reading series, in Petaluma, California. She is spending her sheltering-in-place days writing poetry and haiku, taking long walks, and texting for MoveOn.org to defeat t***p.

NEW MATH

by Tricia Knoll

We have to assume other people do his math.
Fill out the multiple lines on multiple forms
with different answers depending on to whom
he is giving his tax returns. Maybe he is even
math challenged and would never check
those figures for exaggerations. How would
he know one from the other; his life is base-ten
on bloat. We know he thinks parts per million
of CO2 in the atmosphere are not proportionate
with disturbing one fraction of a second of his time.

The military did the recent math for him,
he hadn’t asked until late in the game
about the rules: how many people could die
to balance the loss of a drone. He says
one hundred and fifty is too many.
Not proportionate. (And ludicrously
low we suspect.) So are they sitting
around right now trying to decide
what is the right proportion? A figure
that works for a world teetering
on the brink of another war disaster?
Math you can explain to a child
who can hold up two fingers
to tell his age?

He might be able to handle the old daisy oracle.
It’s pretty simple. Pluck a petal. Pluck a petal.
He loves me. He loves me not.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies. She is spending a lot of time pulling up invasive species in a woods, thinking about math and probabilities.