HOW JOURNALISTS KEEP SCORE

by David Feela

For Gail Binkly & the 4CornersFreePress 9/2003 - 2/2024

Sitting in the back row 

at another public meeting 

listening to what’s spoken

hearing what’s not said 

measuring the distance between these goals 

where truth gets kicked around

to make a few cheap points

Every meeting is a scrimmage  

moving a pencil or pen 

pushing a digital button 

collecting every word 

rewinding & fast-forwarding 

late into the night 

until the players are realigned 

in an orderly fashion

As paragraphs emerge 

on a plain white field

the story’s noise gets hushed

an extended replay

an understanding

as if the game depended on more 

than who simply won or lost

David Feela writes monthly columns for The Four Corners Free Press and The Durango Telegraph. Unsolicited Press carries his latest chapbook Little Acres. His out-of-print collection of essays How Delicate These Arches—a finalist for the Colorado Book Award—is available once more, but this time as an ebook.

DANIEL

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Daniel Ellsberg, Whistleblower Who Exposed Top-Secret History of the Vietnam War, Dies at 92 —Slate, June 16, 2023. Photo: Dr. Daniel Ellsberg speaks to reporters Dec. 22, 2011, at Fort Meade, Maryland. PAUL J. RICHARDS/Getty Images via Slate.

I believe that to be a proper critic 
you need to lead a platoon through 
the shit 
 
and sit on every side 
of the table 
read the cables 
from embassies and fire 
bases 
compose a dissertation
on aptly named Decision 
Theory 
 
then join a think tank that took 
its name from something as light 
as Research and Development. 
 
Nor would it hurt to graduate 
from Harvard 
and possess an IQ north 
of the notes a Stradivarius 
hits in the hands of prodigious 
digits that can clean an M1 
beneath a blindfold 
like Jim Brown’s men 
aboard the U.S.S. Tigerfish
in one of those Cold War consensus 
flicks.
 
Daniel had it all 
Ooh Rah 
entering the Corps 
because he was no paper 
lion but under General Lansdale 
read every last word emitted by the Pentagon 
and courted charges under the Espionage Act 
from men who believed the original sin 
of American freedom was journalism.
 
But before people say 
he was just another Eastern
Establishment Jew like Kristol 
Bell Glazer or Chomsky 
bear in mind Harvard had quotas 
 
and Daniel grew up in Detroit 
the same city where Philip Levine 
discovered Garcia Lorca 
who spoke of what was inside 
forgotten little animals 
 
when he lived in Gotham 
 
but that could have been Hanoi 
Hue or the Iron Triangle where Annam 
Chorus Frogs warned peasants by their silence 
 
Daniel defoliated the pretensions 
of National Security 
and for interests of state 
we cannot now forget to say 
 
Requiescat in pace
or better yet 

hold for him a Minyan.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. Recent work appears/will appear in Rattle, Terrain.org, Belt Magazine, and Poetica Review among other places. 

KINESIS

by Andrés Castro

For Julian Assange

Under a falling red sun, 

     in the stench of decomposing

leaves and muddy 

dark earth,

     He turns over a stone. See!

     Circling white centipede—

Dancing black spider—

     Tangle of worms

 scrambling.

 

Andrés Castro, a PEN member, is listed in the Directory of Poets and Writers. His work appears in the recently released anthology We are Antifa: Expressions Against Fascism, Racism and Police Violence in The United States and Beyond and he keeps a personal blog, The Practicing Poet: Dialogue to Creativity, Poetry, and Liberation. 

THE CAPITAL

by Alejandro Escudé

I know what the journalists were doing the second the glass doors shattered,
each shard like a news story broken, a gun loping in from the lobby
like a wounded wolf.

Now journalism itself shatters like those glass doors.

I worked at a paper just like the one shot up in Annapolis,
slaving away there in my twenties, first as secretary
then as a full-fledged writer making eleven hundred dollars a month.

The editor and I smoked cigarettes and drank coffee mornings
outside a building just like the one shot up in Annapolis.

Oh how that gunman took their lives—breezily—as the traffic flowed by.

The writers proud of their by-lines
and of the by-lines to come; their stories like headstones
in the rolling cemetery of the news.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.