MAUS IS A NEW BEST SELLER

by Tom Bauer

(CNN) Within weeks of a Tennessee school district moving to ban "Maus," a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel depicting the horrors of the Holocaust, readers are propelling it to the top of best seller lists more than 30 years after it was first published.

Maybe we should ban everything good? Like

inequity, peace and restraint? Let’s ban

fairness, truth and care while we’re at it; and

freedom and justice. Make them bestsellers too!

We could make the world a better place and ban

apple trees, sunny skies and clean fresh air.

And any kind of universal income.

And transparency. Veganism! Ban that!

What else would work? What else could we ban

to make it come back stronger? Listening? Sense?

Any efforts to hear the other side?

Definitely ban green new deals and wealth tax,

and progressive politicians most of all.

Ban it all and make the world a better place!

Tom Bauer grew up playing violin and listening to spoken word recordings. When he was ten, he rashly announced he was going to be a poet. He did a bunch of university and stuff. He's had some poems published. He lives in Montreal and plays board games.

MISERIES

by Tricia Knoll

Protesters in Chicago on Saturday.(Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press) The photo accompanies the essay that prompted this poem: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Op-Ed “Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2020

they come down with barbs
on flashing tails    or as slime
on the slope you slipped downhill

did you try to connect them
to a machine to measure amplitudes
and heard gut-punched moans

when they shook their rattles
in your dreams, did you wake,
cower, throw bricks

or put them in a drawer
where they roll like marbles
until ground-shaking stops

and TV spits them out
to chew on with worn-down
molars under cracking klieg lights

until we saw tonight
how they churn to burn
the deepest anger and hurt

so deep you can only guess at
the darkness of an abyss and
smell the smoke into daylight

to give them names they’ve earned
for decades: injustice, racism,
inequity and mourning.

Tricia Knoll is an aging white woman of privilege isolated from COVID in the woods of Vermont. Her poetry collection How I Learned To Be White involved three years of introspection into how privilege manifested in her life—and she is  not convinced she learned everything she must learn. She is grateful for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's op-ed.

KARMA PLUS

by David Radavich





See what pure narcissism
brings forth: a great rot
in the communal apple.

The body politic
spoils top to bottom
and back again.

Every inequity
becomes deadly
as a snake.

We have long since
been thrown out
of the garden.

We roam streets
like zombies
in search of medicine
and care.

How can we be
one family

and not hug
our neighbors
as ourselves?

Pathogens know
our vulnerabilities
and strike
with clear knives.

In the dark night

we become
what we do
for one another.

David Radavich's latest narrative collection is America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery (2019), companion volume to his earlier America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007). Recent lyric collections are Middle-East Mezze (2011) and The Countries We Live In (2014). His plays have been performed across the U.S. and in Europe.