HOW TO SPOT A FASCIST

by Helen Jones

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Don’t think they come with jackboots in the dawn
Or kick your door in on a freezing night.
Now fascists take control with Facebook ads
And Tik-Tok videos to make you laugh,
Let you believe that facts can just be changed,
Decide reality is just a trick.
 
Then suddenly your job has disappeared
Raw work-experience kids have wiped you out,
Universities are threatened, books are banned,
Medicaid blown apart and foreigners locked up,
Poor people die and old alliances break.
 
          Fascists begin with elections
          When you are not paying attention.

Helen Jones was born in Chester, U.K. She gained a degree in English, many years ago from University College London and later an M.Ed. from the University of Liverpool. She is now happily retired and spends a lot of her time writing and making a new garden. Her poetry has been published in several journals in the U.K., and she is currently working on a novel set in fifth century Deva.

LOSING MY MOTHERS

by Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely

Detail of a Boomf greeting card.

I'm mother to a mother and the mother
she is married to. I love their way with Lilly, 
child whose mysteries will not be plumbed. 
The picture of her father shows him 
blond and serious at 8 
and that is all we know of him except that 
Lilly's smarter than her mothers can account for
and given to a fear of dark and a ready shame
they do not suffer in themselves.
But they are gorgeous in their mothering.
Asked “How Are You Unique?”, the daughter writes
I HAVE TWO MOMS. All caps.
 
I love these mothers, too, so much I miss them
when we’ve been apart a week. I am ridiculous.
They live five miles away.
 
And now I contemplate a brute and sudden loss.
I picture Jackboots hauling, shackling them
in such a way they cannot touch.
I see their neighbor, welcoming with cookies last July,
now watching from an upstairs room,
bitter with contrition, fearful for herself.
 
I’m powerless against the monstrous threats.
My terror, even loneliness, begins ahead of time.
Perhaps I am ridiculous, but if I lose my mothers
and their child, I'lI will myself
to swallow memory
or die of it.
 

Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely's first book Letter from Italy 1944 was noted by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books published by Connecticut writers in 2013. It provided the libretto for an oratorio of the same name which was performed by Connecticut chorales and symphony orchestras. Her second book Simple Absence (Antrim House) was nominated for The National Book Award.