AN OPEN LETTER EXPLAINING ELEMENTS OF OUR NEW, IMPROVED, AND DECIDEDLY UNWOKE CURRICULUM

by Dick Westheimer

Dear Parent,

 

We believe in children. We believe 

in padded playgrounds and unscuffed knees 

and helmets and a bubble wrapped curriculum 

lined with velvet and free from troubled ideas.

 

We believe our teachers should teach

that enslaved Africans got vocational skills

like painting and planting for their personal benefit,

that residents of Auschwitz knew the trick of how 

to lose weight and look so fit, that members 

of the Five Tribes, removed for their own good, 

got to “pursue happiness in their own way.”

 

We believe those seeking refuge (whose boats 

overturn) might learn to swim, that those 

with black-lung get to sit in front of their TVs

in their BarcaLoungers with their very own 

government issued oxygen tanks, that Catholic 

boys get personal tutoring in anatomy from 

respected men in their white collared shirts, 

that trafficked girls get to travel the world 

and meet new friends.

 

We believe children should learn nothing

about those pre-teens head-bent in sweatshops

sewing their shoes, or two-year-olds toddling 

in electronics junk yards recycling their PCs

or tweens armed and taught to harm their kin. 

 

We do this for you, dear parent 

because, we are committed to protect 

you from Judgement Day when 

Johnny or Susie asks what 

you could have done and why, 

dear parent, you didn’t. 

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Innisfree Journal, Gyroscope Review, Banyan Review, Rattle, Ritual Well, One Art, and Cutthroat. His chapbook A Sword in Both Hands: Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine is published by SheilaNaGig.

ELEGY FOR THE FRENCHMAN

by M.F. Nagel   

The Butte. Good Friday.

The Frenchman is dead.
Bow your head.
Say a prayer.

The Frenchman is dead.

Hopped a train -- age eight.
Joined the carney,
Challenged
The wall of death.

The Frenchman is dead, bow your heads, say a prayer.

                               Went to sea
Became a sailor
Seller of moonshine
Turned creator of gold-plated contraptions
Lost on the moon.

The Frenchman is dead.
                                        Bow your head. Say a prayer.

Married.
Moved his wife to a gravedigger shack
Near the Butte
Next to the Queen of the Angels
Cemetery,
Eying
Rivers and mountains and glaciered filled skies.

The Frenchman is dead.
-- Self-proclaimed:
Proprietor of
Boot Hill Auto Salvation.
(Antique and classic)
                                        His life’s ambition
Read and written
In the Holy Grail of
Abandoned car parts
                     -- A creaking
Harrisville Ferris wheel reaching to heaven,
And
Trunks and hoods -- and
Tires
And horns, and headlights.
Twisted skeletons of wasted steel.
Junkyard dreams.
Waiting . . .
All waiting in the weeds
For the salvage of judgment day.

The Frenchman is dead.
Bow your head. Say a prayer.

“Brother of The Third Wheel,”
He was
Iron crossed.
Road a pan head
223-pieces of gold.

The Frenchman is dead.
Today.
Took his last custom-made ride
On the wild Matanuska winds --

The Frenchman is dead.
Bow your head. Say a prayer.

M.F. Nagel was born in anchorage Alaska. Her Athabaskan and Eyak heritage gave her a love of poetry. M.F. now lives and writes near the banks of the Matanuska river in the Palmer Butte, Alaska, where the moose, wild dog-roses and salmonberries provide unending joy and inspiration.