I LIVE IN A COUNTRY

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

"Oil and Distraction" by Ann Telnaes

I live in a country
Proud to invade
Proud to destroy
Proud to kidnap and murder
The leaders of other sovereign nations
 
I live in a country
Too brutal
Too lacking in a sense 
Of our shared life on the planet
Too impatient and inarticulate 
To negotiate its aims
So it vociferates instead
Using bunker-busting bombs.
 
I live in a country 
With an embedded elite
That controls massive amounts of wealth
And leaves millions
Lacking in the wherewithall 
Necessary for a decent 
Productive and creative existence.
 
I live in a country without leaders
Only capos
Without a vision of a better world
Only hackneyed slogans
And faded old Batman comics
Without the music of hope
Only the cracked ballads of despair
Played on one-string shoebox guitars.
 
I live in a country
That fervently worships
Only itself
Mad with the fear
That it is rapidly losing its place
As the hegemon
A country that is 
Flailing away hysterically
Demanding that the rest of the world
Keep paying tribute and obeisance
And endlessly fawning
Like a Hollywood lacky
Assuring the fading star
“You are still beautiful.”
 
I live in a country whose mountains
And prairies and woodlands
Rivers and lakes and streams
Are beautiful
Whose ordinary citizens
Are still mostly good and kind
But whose leaders
Are a pack of craven 
Crooks and scammers and parasites
Who use their positions and powers
To bully the populace
And upholster their own pockets.
 
I live in a country whose leaders
Make it a very difficult land
To love
But let us all keep standing 
With our neighbors against
The cruelty and criminality
The self-absorption and toxic greed
That prevails in high places
And raise another banner on the flagpole
The banner of universal humanity.
 

 Buff Whitman-Bradley podcasts his poetry at thirdactpoems.podbean.com

A RUMOR OF WAR

by Jennifer Davis Michael

Jennifer Davis Michael is a professor of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her work has appeared previously in The New Verse News and in such journals as Think, NELLE, Raintown Review, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. She is the author of the chapbook Let Me Let Go (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and another, Dubious Breath, forthcoming this year.

AFTER THE SHOOTING IN EL PASO

by Tina Barry

Image by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Invade with your            hot mouth   lie

uncovered among the fragrance      of the world!  

Look at what comes    Look at them    An invasion 

what marches toward us    marches with night-

eyes   An invasion   To be invaded       To be  

“simply defending my country” To deafen

To defend “from cultural and ethnic replace

ment”   The rest are in the light that bursts

into secret        Where what are?  

Things that begin  when fire-

blue waves open fire on 

                    the poor

                parched heart

Author’s Note: The poem’s lines are borrowed from Pablo Neruda’s Love Sonnet “I” in his 100 Love Sonnets and from “El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language,” by Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear, The New York Times, August 4, 2019.

Tina Barry is a freelance writer, poet, short fiction writer and curator. She is the author of Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Tina’s writing has been included in The Best Short Fictions 2016, Drunken Boat, Inch Magazine, Yes, Poetry, Connotation Press, and several anthologies including Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, Feckless Cunt and A Constellation of Kisses. In 2018-2019, Tina conceived and curated “The Virginia Project,” a collaborative written word and visual art exhibition that celebrated Virginia Haggard, the partner of the artist Marc Chagall, and Haggard’s daughter Jean McNeil. Beautiful Raft, the writing that launched the exhibit, will be published this fall. Tina is a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn and Gemini Ink.