THE WITLESS MAY PROCEED

 by Steven Kent

Hearings, we hold hearings by the score;
In fact, no time is left for legislation.
Our tools are slander, smear, insinuation,
Red herring, shady witnesses, and more.

Ukraine's on hold, and Israel to boot;
The "crisis" we decried down at the border
Seems not so pressing after all: Trump's order
To wait till post-election we salute.

Impeachment, though—Mayorkas—couldn't wait,
While hopes today are really, really ridin'
On hints and whispers aimed at Hunter Biden
(Since we've found zero evidence to date).

Hearings, we hold hearings by the score;
We talk the talk but balk at taking action.
We work instead through media distraction--
Real governance these days is such a bore!

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer, musician, and Oxford comma enthusiast Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Journal of Formal Poetry, Light, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and Snakeskin. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.

SKUNK HOUR

by Martin H. Levinson

 

His lawyers inept,

meandering, defending

the indefensible dimly

and dully, doing everything

they can but talk about the

constitutional question of

whether an out of office

president can be tried for

inciting insurrection, as the

Senators sitting in judgment

suffer their ambling, rambling

arguments made in response

to the House Managers logical,

precedent-based contentions

that a carny US Chief-of-State

can be punished for stirring up

mob violence and an invasion

of the Capitol that a video

montage has detailed in all

its nauseating horror.

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN America; the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics, and a contributing editor to The Satirist. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems.

UNCLOGGING A DRAIN DURING THE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL

by Charles Goodrich

Protesters hold signs near the Capitol during the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on Jan. 29, 2020. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP - Getty Images via NBC News, January 29, 2020

Toilet’s plugged
and the bathroom sink drain’s sluggish.
I was in the dumps already
over national politics.

Abuse of power.
Obstruction of justice.
I’m guessing the septic tank
is overdue for pumping. And meanwhile
we still haven’t seen his taxes.

But even glum and angry
I can still do some minor plumbing.
I run the drain-snake, work the plunger,
get the commode running.

Next, with an arm’s-length of wire,
a little hook bent into the end,
I fish a wet, gray gob of hair-gunk
from the sink’s P-trap
then pour baking soda,
salt, and vinegar down the drain
and wait for the chemical reaction to begin.

Even if the Senate trial
turns out to be a sham,
I love the sound when the blockage dissolves
and the sink drain hisses and foams.

Following a long career as a professional gardener and a decade working with the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, Charles Goodrich now grows poems and composes fruits and vegetables from his Knot House abode near Corvallis. He’s the author of three books of poetry, A Scripture of Crows; Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden; and Insects of South Corvallis, and a collection of essays, The Practice of Home, and has co-edited two anthologies, Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest and In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens. His poems and essays have appeared in Orion, High Country News, The Sun and many other journals and anthologies.

GOVERNMENT 101

by Marsha Owens

This thing called impeachment is a strictly political process I learned when I was 17, this thing is like a hurricane you hope doesn’t happen like you hope every elected official remembers Gov’t 101 too, and remembers that this thing exists like posts supporting the pier buffeted by waves and winds, worn with footsteps from end to end, decade after decade, a sanctuary where you go to feel sunshine, to hear birdsong, to throw out a fishing line, to sit, to dream, to contemplate Ethics 101,

to pray the posts never fail. 

Marsha Owens is a retired educator who lives and writes in Richmond VA. Her poems and essays have appeared at TheNewVerse.News, Huffington Post, TheWildWord, Rat’s Ass Review, and Streetlight Magazine. She is a co-editor of the recently released poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins.

DAYS I REMEMBER

by Tricia Knoll

Donald Trump with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the UN on Wednesday. Democrats said the transcript of the pair’s call represented a ‘devastating’ betrayal of America. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images via The Guardian, Sept. 25, 2019

for the times they portend,
the times we were called to hold in memory.

My old-maid French teacher weeping silently
when the high school intercom announced
     President Kennedy is dead. The horse
     without a rider and the little boy’s salute.

During a beer strike in British Columbia, the radio
     told us Nixon resigned.

A hush in the Yale Law School dining room
    when TV announced we were bombing Cambodia.

Assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King,
Robert Kennedy, the slaughter of so many innocents
   in so many places with weapons meant for war

The piece of the Berlin wall in my desk drawer.

Oh, our parents told stories of Pearl Harbor,
D-Day. Yes, a man landed on the moon.
Yes, we elected a President with a darker
skin color than mine.

Others do not come to mind right now.
Add your own.

Whatever happens next, skullduggery and lies
or the light of truth pushing aside the shadows,

the day impeachment opens into T***p’s world
of bigotry, aggrandizement, and hate

I’ll know this as the day I worked out back
yanking invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle

how hard I had to scrub to remove
the dirt from under my fingernails.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who fears the coming disasters of climate crisis as much as she deplores the political nightmare of the Trump era. Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies. Her most recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for motivational poetry.