SPRING (RUDE) AWAKENING

or HANDS OFF MY SHOWERHEAD

President Trump, who has waged a long-running battle against low water pressure, signed an executive order that redefined a common bathroom fixture. —The New York Times, April 10, 2025

by Ann Weil

after Louise Glück’s “October (section I)”
 

Is it Spring again, is it green again,
aren’t we a field of four-leaf clover,
aren’t we coming up posies, 
 
weren't we promised,
aren’t we deserving,
aren’t we special, 
 
wasn’t he strong,
tougher than bullets,
 
didn’t he vow a phoenix nation,
to clean the shop
of waste and scum,
isn’t he bold, isn’t he clever, not telling
the half of his plans 
for ’25—
 
I remember our weakness, our shameful
kindness, our brotherly love, our lead-by-example,
didn’t those values drag us down,
drown us in our Gulf of America,
 
I can’t remember 
which government bloat 
I’m supposed to hate more—
park rangers or cancer researchers,
 
I no longer care
about clean air and healthcare, 
but, man, those egg prices
keep me up at night—
 
who needs allies, free-trade, or 401Ks,
who needs hurricane warnings
or Judy Blume books, 
 
down with DEI, up with ICE,
when was I young there were no illegals, 
no signs in Spanish, my grandparents spoke
only English, swept their Yiddish 
under the rug,
 
when did the taco trucks takeover
and bubble-tea shops spread like a rash,
when did a skirt 
give a guy a free pass
to the ladies room—
a scourge more worrisome 
than measly measles,
 
I blame the Fathers’ faulty foundation—
the Constitution’s lunatic creed,
 
didn’t we thrive without due process, 
without free-speech and fair elections,
 
wasn’t it great
when we were subjects
subject to
the whims of a king,
 
didn’t so-called progress
lead us to this towering cliff,
 
aren’t we jumping, won’t we bounce,
bounce back better like he said,
 
yes, we’re jumping,
isn’t it Spring?  
Yes, it’s Spring, 2025.

Ann Weil is the author of Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2023) and Blue Dog Road Trip (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2024). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2024, Pedestal Magazine, RHINO, Chestnut Review, DMQ Review, Maudlin House, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. A four-time Pushcart nominee, Weil lives with her husband in Ann Arbor, MI, and Key West, FL.

MOUNT PENN (SE ACABO)

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Do the lookout oaks speak English

and remember George Washington

are the spotted beetles from Asia

that people mistake for Lady Bugs

harbingers of a polyglottal future

here in fortress America

Pennsylvania Dutch speak

German

children invent their own

pidgin

Jefferson thought in French

But it’s Spanish that’s spoken all around

the mountain’s foot where you can get a fade

a dye job a shave and look like

you just stepped out of De Leon’s fabled fountain

dripping with what was supposed to have been Florida

Not this Keystone State

No more for the Union Dead on a rainy train ride

to an Adams County graveyard in November

the battle has moved from Lincoln’s beard to the barrio

la bodega si, se puede

The DAR and descendants of Confederate

Veterans, they like their café con leche

se acabo.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada for now but spent election day 2004 working in Reading, PA. Like many, he's watching the US election with nauseated optimism. You can follow him on Substack @sandcounties. 

RITUAL

by Amy Shimshon-Santo

the year crawls toward an end 
sharp knife between its teeth
& bleeding tongue

a year of vowels

displaced from their consonants,
zipped together 

by a three letter word 
that is not good for children 
& other living things

I walk to the edge of language
thin stick between my hands 
holding a makeshift flag

colorless as the memory of water
scavenged from cotton 
clothing of the departed

it is time to place the year inside 
an urn, bury it in the Earth
lie down beside the unimaginable

hear the new year drumming
& dreaming itself into being, wanting
to be born

Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a warm-blooded vertebrate with hair. She writes  poetry, essays, performs spoken word, improvisation, and choreography. Read or listen to her poetry collections: Catastrophic Molting (2020), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (2020), and look for her forthcoming book Random Experiments in Bioluminescence (2024). Teaching and facilitating trans-local community arts projects have been central to her social practice for 30+ years. She is available as a guest artist, arts educator, coach, and editor. Dr. A has been nominated for an Emmy Award and three Pushcart Prizes in poetry and creative non-fiction. She was a finalist for the Night Boat Poetry Prize, and earned a place in the U.S. Service Learning Hall of Fame. Connect with her at @shimshona / @amyshimshon

HUMANITARIAN PAROLE

by Jerrice J. Baptiste

Gone, morsels of light from the island 
       flickering in silent eyes.

 

He waved goodbye last Tuesday
      to the turquoise sea, mid-day sun 

 

choking on tears. His welcome meal

 

sliced papaya, crescent plantains, 

      conch in creole sauce. Smiles. 

My cousin’s soft lashes
       brush American stars. Glow reflects

 

on forehead, cheek bones, bridge of nose.

       Lips speak freedom, a new language.

 

My uncle hears his son’s voice 

       migrated among birds of the white season. 

Night churns slow. How can he keep still?

      One has left his cocoon.

       

Even from gunfire.  

Author’s note: Humanitarian Parole offers an opportunity for people arriving in the U.S to feel like humans. Approved non-residents landing for the first time are welcomed appropriately and can adapt under the right conditions of housing, employment, education, etc. They can be happy even if their family members left behind—in Haiti, in the case of the speaker’s uncle in this poem—miss them terribly. 

Jerrice J. Baptiste is an author of eight books and a poet in residence at the Prattsville Art Center & Residency in NY.  She is extensively published in journals and magazines. She has been nominated as  Best of The Net by Blue Stem for  2022.

ON ART, LINES & EARTH(LINGS)

by Jen Schneider

in honor of James Longenbach (1959-2022)

“Hold the line, please,” the hospital operator says

and all i can think

/ while waiting, wondering, worrying

—mostly wanting

is this must be how poems get made

Longenbach teaches poetry as the sound 

of language (organized in lines)

while physicists teach sound as a type of pressure 

/ a wave & not physical matter 

& that non-physical matter can’t be held  

—but consumed / like a sunburn, a shooting star,

a child’s cry, a first kiss 

/ two people at the end of a dock

/ a gust of wind (of a sea) 

            i inhale / then try

            to hold the line

cup my palm / & imagine

            coiled elastic compressions

            

            pressure creases 

            shadow / then settle

i pull / the line pushes

            all springs (& senses) engaged

Longenbach writes on a poem’s life & death

in concerted arrangements of syllables / patterns 

broken or reinforced

/ line, meter, & rhyme all tools of construction 

/ danglers & run-ons distanced / some say decried

            

            i cry—unexpectedly / 

            poetry is like that / “the sound 

of language organized / in the line”

 

with punctuated breath & cupped palms, 

i consume syllabic beats 

for what feels like forever knowing forever 

is neither a state of physical matter nor finite

/ despite earthling’s desires / all spiral cords 

(& choruses) prone to tangle. all moons cyclical

 

The operator returns & says, “I’m sorry.

We can’t locate the clerk,” at the same time

an overhead speaker buzzes / sound waves press

i hear, “We can’t locate the lyric.”

—& hang up, wishing to continue to hold the line

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. Recent works include A Collection of Recollections, Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups.

THE CHILDREN WHO NEVER CAME HOME

by Donna Katzin

A family walks through a field where flags and solar lights now mark the site where more than 750 unmarked graves were discovered at the former Marieval Indian school in Saskatchewan on 26 June. Photograph: Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images via The Guardian, June 30, 2021.

Indigenous groups have called for Canada’s national celebration [on July 1] to be cancelled over the discovery of more than 1,000 unmarked graves, most of which are believed to belong to Indigenous children. —The Guardian, June 30, 2021.

They were taken for the sin of being born

on a continent ripe with riches

the  white  man  claimed

as his manifest destiny.

 

They were taken for the sin of living

on the land alive with seeds

their parents nurtured

with their own blood.

 

They were taken for the sin of belonging

to peoples who wrote their names

in rivers, rocks and plains,

their songs on the wind.

 

They were taken for the sin of listening,

dancing to their own rhythms,

praying to the Creator

in their own tongues.

 

They were taken for the sin of loving

to snuggle in their elders’ arms,

imbibe their stories

and their dreams.

 

They were taken to forget the ancestors,

learn settlers’ words and ways,

embrace new gods, surrender

to schools of conquest.

 

Mothers, fathers refuse to forget

as machines plumb sacred ground

where children lie in unmarked graves,

waiting to be found.

Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

NARRATIVE

by Colm Ó Ciarnáin

Artwork: Indie

Gibberish       weponised    nonsensity

Obnoxification of society
ratification of cagedness
realization of stupidity
recognition of affirmation bias
nausea at repugnance
aversion to its abhorrence
revulsion at the antagonism
animositic reluctance to truth

                          and traveling abroad we find exciting
                          and It can be life changing enjoying that freedom

and traveling abroad we find exciting
                          and It can be life changing enjoying that freedom

speak fluent moran
crisp without even a sludder
then lean into the suck
as there is a virtue in
broadcasting your amorality at
the highest known volumes of stupidity
trust busting reality of lies

                          and we enjoy new languages
                          and they give us hope
                                                 
                          and we enjoy new languages
                          and they give us hope

untethered to truth
thoughts prayers and cynical gestures in
pioneering of nauseating evention, testifony, fasadism
mythic past warped by
liberal             feminist          or                      immigrant
conjured truths against faith and adjacent reality
decorum trumped constantly by derision
bannonesque divisions

                          and my friends are with me
                          and it's going to be a good day

 and my friends are with me
                          and it's going to be a good day

fetischouce twitter fingers
trust busting realities of lies
I believe him Truth isn't truth but When I can, I tell the truth—
He means it
making hate again
with truths that burned witches
make fake again by self-proclamations testifications
down the slinker hole
otherings untethered to truth

                          and we shall have fun
                          and the future is bright
                                                                           
                          and we shall have fun
                          and the future is bright

Colm Ó Ciarnáin is a cultural worker originally from Ireland but now living in Sweden. He likes to use his emotions to paint pictures with words. He realised early in life that no matter how much he talked around a subject, words didn’t have the power to convey his feelings, being hampered by logical structures. He finds though that words when used in poetry for him paint between the lines. Flowing beyond the confines of realism and logic to bare self. A nudity of the soul inconceivable except in the hope of a poem. His poetry defines his inner self.

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. 

WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN WASHED AWAY

by Dustin Michael

The devastating tsunamis that struck the coastlines of Chile, Haiti, Indonesia, and Japan in recent decades produced waves tens of meters high, unimaginable to most people accustomed to gentle seas. But millions of years ago, a truly inconceivable set of waves—the tallest roughly 1,500 meters high—rammed through the Gulf of Mexico and spread throughout the ancient ocean, producing wave heights of several meters in distant waters, new simulations show. (Photo credit: Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo) —EOS, December 20, 2018

If there had been an Eiffel Tower,
an Empire State Building, a Great Pyramid,
One World Trade Center, a Statue of Liberty,
our house, our cars, and all the plates and dishes
from our wedding registry, our books, our children,
our children’s new dinosaur toys and my old dinosaur toys,
if there had been these things all stacked one on top of the other
like a mighty finger, they would point up to space, and to the terrible foam
of a still-much-taller wave.

If there had been human words to fail,
a rich tapestry of languages, a monomyth,
creation stories from every culture, all involving fire
and water, the name Enkidu in Sanskrit on a shard of pottery,
a diagram of the heroic cycle labeled fig. 2 in a student’s essay
about the earth-diver, the bones of Joseph Campbell
tumbling over and over in a tsunami that scrapes clean
all the bone beds, petroglyphs, an animated film on VHS about 
non-contemporaneous dinosaur friends on a dangerous journey,
drawer after drawer full of carefully labeled fossils all scattered,
all hit with the hose

If there had been a firebox containing the important papers,
passports, proof of citizenship, baptism certificates, bonds,
our homeowner’s insurance policy locating us in a flood zone,
topographical charts predicting sea level rise that the current administration
commissioned and then dismissed, the food and gas receipts from hurricane evacuations never submitted for a claim, fluttering away into a darkening sky like a thousand tiny lab coats

If there were a way to imagine a bullet from space
striking a planet of enormous birds, or to invent an instrument 
to measure emotions from plaster footprints made from casts of stone,
if there were a way to carbon date an animal’s scream and filter it
through a mile-high wave crossing the globe at close to the speed of sound,
or to photograph the world dying from our bedroom, I would reclaim these secrets from the quivering Earth for you and fall asleep with dirt from the backyard grave of our parakeet under my nails, tracing my finger along the crater
in your pillow where your face has pressed,
and discover a new layer of sediment there
composed entirely of thoughts
and prayers


Dustin Michael teaches writing and literature. He lives with his wife and children in Savannah, Georgia.

THE INTERPRETER’S TESTIMONY

by Rebecca Starks


“I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”

–Marianne Moore

How to put it . . . I don’t remember,
I doodle, I’ve done it since grade school—
pencil lines meaning one mood                     
or another, today vague,
yesterday wave; once friend,
now drug. Go ahead,

subpoena the narrow-ruled pages,
make what you can of the illuminated margins.
An eagle gutting a goose, a savage
spiral, a millipede uncurling,
a mushroom in the rain . . .
who’s to say it’s not shorthand for boredom?         
Besides, I’ve burned them.

In the moment it’s like psychosis,
you forget to notice
the voices never surprise you
unless you’re corrected—then it sticks
for a day or two. With them, the introductions,
Mr Man-of-the-Road—sorry, Mr Street-Smart—
shaking hands with Mr Exemplary—
sorry, Mr Winner—and I
the magician’s saw pulled one way
then the other, like the tide, Truth
the lady with the flexible spine.

What couldn’t I tell you
in confidence, which enjoys such nuance
in both tongues, including itself
and its opposite, which is how they sat,
as one must to feel attraction, or not,
Mr Winner offering to remove my jacket
and Mr Street-Smart asking,
was my necklace made of rawhide.
Otherwise I was invisible.

I was the vodka neither touched,
the puck sliding past bodyguards,
the shadow behind the lattice,
the fish hiding under stones,
the poet’s living and buried speech,             
the old man’s marlin stripped by the sea.
I was manly and hangdog, flattery and threat,
throat-clearing and chuckle and gleam,
collar and cufflink, the shakedown
comparing watches . . . I was there.

Do you think it matters what was said?
What was agreed upon?
You can hear it in the question.

When my son was two,
someone asked, watching him play,
Don’t you wish you knew what he’s thinking?
I laughed. He looked at shoes
and said Shoes, he looked at me
and said Up, he looked at nothing
and said More. A cup turned upside down
has no bottom. In truth

I was superfluous—
the two men spoke the same language,
every exchange translating roughly:
You could be useful to me. And also to me.

Though at one point Mr Winner spun a coin
saying In God We Trust, and when I was at a loss
Mr Street-Smart suggested ne doveryat' nikomu,
which means, more or less, go in peace,
as nevedenie means deniability.

Which reminds me that near the end
when I translated freedom, Mr S-S corrected, “freedom”—
as one parent might answer a child, forever
and the other, indefinitely.

What would I say? What wouldn’t I?
What is paranoia but whistling in the dark?
Or, if you prefer the Russian, ostentatious optimism?

Rebecca Starks lives in Vermont. She has poems and short fiction appearing or forthcoming in Baltimore Review, The Hopper, Crab Orchard Review, Ocean State Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Slice, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of Rattle’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor, and her manuscript is a finalist for the 2018 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. 

THEIR FLEEING

by Robert Farmer

“Nearly 60 million people have been driven from their homes by war and persecution, an unprecedented global exodus that has burdened fragile countries with waves of newcomers and littered deserts and seas with the bodies of those who died trying to reach safety.” —New York Times, June 18, 2015

Their fleeing

is from these times
mired in apocalyptic struggle
spread through and by power
coated with ancient enmities and beliefs
brought up to slaughter and stagnation.

Safely sequestered, we trace the ways to today,
tracking back through old empires
and all manner of community
to rest in those imaginary ages
ruled by honored sages who left us

with stories of Tang poet-governors gathered
round wine and evening composition,
calm in the certainty of their world
and accepted sureness
of suffering and death.

Yet even they flaunted rants
on injustice of their times,
satire buried in language
which led them to exile
in far provinces.


Robert Farmer is a retired forester who lives in Cleveland and occasionally publishes poems in small journals.

LEGAL ARGUMENTS

by David Chorlton

Tucson, AZ  -- The Arizona Department of Water Resources has approved a massive groundwater pumping project that will drain the Upper San Pedro River in Southern Arizona. This decision comes despite opposition from the property owners along the river and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and ignores the project’s impact on the birds, wildlife, and local residents and businesses that are dependent on a healthy river. --Earth Justice, April 16, 2013

A river soaks slowly into statutes
piled upon it by way
of the arguments
that a hundred year supply
of illusions is guaranteed.

By paragraph and case law
the current is diverted
while promises are laid
instead of foundations
for houses for whom

the weather forecast is running
dry. With cufflinks shining
like spring runoff
a developer listens closely
to his counsel say

that taking away the water
will have no adverse impact
on the river, begging
the question whether language
can outlast meaning.

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and still sees his surroundings with an outsider's eye. This helps his writing projects, which include a new poetry collection,"The Devil's Sonata," from FutureCycle Press.