DRONES

by Alejandro Escudé

Bright lights over the evening sky near Lebanon, N.J., this month. Federal officials have said that most such sightings were airplanes, helicopters, stars or drones being flown legally. Credit: Trisha Bushey/Trisha Bushey, via Associated Press via The New York Times, December 24, 2024

In a way, I write for the drones.

Those asterisks in the sky—blown about

Over the heads of Americans craning upward,

Awakening from their electronic sleep.

Maybe this poem is a little drone, buzzing

Over the armpits of the city, shadows blending

Like metaphors and allusions pending. 

Oh Triborough night! Sophisticated stars,

Billboards tolling silently like clocks signifying

The end of another lifetime. No one knows

What they are, these drones, and at the same time

Anyone can purchase them online. But we like to say

We don’t know what they are more than the fact

That we know them as our own. Drone, 

The very word conjures up a verse simulacrum,

A swarm of contiguous phraseology, eyes

Like microphones sensing each ironic property.

I’d like to see a drone fly into a cathedral,

Buzz the altar, leaving a trail of alien scripture,

Then blend into the largest fresco, a smudge

In the faded sky, like a wet smooshed cockroach 

The size of a large pizza box. But for now,

Let’s be content to observe these melancholic

Visitors, pointing at their axis, the X and the Y,

Their orange lights bifurcating the moon, each 

Triangulated monster pulsing into the distance,

That otherworldly strangeness we crave.

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.

BLESS

an abecedarian

by Susan Vespoli

Photo source: DeMilked

Holiday depression feels a lot like regular depression, but it’s triggered by the onset of holidays, holiday get-togethers, large family gatherings, and attending or hosting social events. Holiday depression is similar to “winter blues,” but it may come and go in quick bursts as one event ends and another begins, or it can linger for the days or weeks leading up to and beyond the holiday season. —Cleveland Clinic, December 13, 2023

all the shiny

baubles and brouhaha of

Christmas. Seasonal

depression. Air-filled

enormous plastic Santas bobbing 

front yards. Fairy lights

glittering rooftops. Guy in tight 

holiday pants, knit like a sweater,

in Safeway.

Jubilant crimson poinsettias. My daughter

Kate hospitalized again. Oh,

let it work this time, I hear

myself beseech the sky.

“No,” the

omnipotent ozone replies,

“power.” Oh yeah. Powerlessness. 

Quiet morning sun

rises, turns navy gray into orange

sherbet. I

tilt my head back and there

undulates a 

vibration of grackles 

waving and wafting like winged

eXclamation points, black dots

yodeling squawks, pepper grinder of

zest that, in unison, settle on an electrical wire like musical notes.

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, AZ and believes in the power of writing to stay sane. Her work has been published in The New Verse News, Anti-Heroin Chic, ONE ART, Gyroscope Review, Rattle, and other cool spots.

BROKEN WORLD

by Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of The Dark, a poetry collection forthcoming from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

NAVALNY, RAFAH

by dana yost

burning cars.

gas in the air.

navalny dead.

someone lights

a cigarette.

marley’s words.

bottle of teeth

on the vanity.

navalny dead.

arctic nights.

while we stand

aside and look.

forgive them?

not yet.

pick at the meat

with your 

squirmy fingers.

roasted logs

by the missouri.

fog in daylight,

doorways

and dust.

in rafah

women

and children

are the real

poets.

Dana Yost was a journalist for 29 years and, still, sometimes, when news happens he can’t help but comment on events as they happen. He wrote the poem in lower case to try, in some way, a mode of protest or a bit of anarchy in response to too many strongmen and would-be strongmen. We have to speak against them.

THE GREAT AMERICAN AMISH POWER TRIP

by James Schwartz 

Now, some Amish across northern Ohio find themselves clashing with a new state law designed to reduce accidents and enhance traffic safety by requiring flashing yellow lights on Amish buggies and other animal-drawn vehicles. …officers have been issuing citations, and some Amish have been summonsed into courts across northern Ohio on minor misdemeanor charges punishable by a roughly $150 fine. In Ashland County, some Amish are citing their religious beliefs and have told a judge they don't plan to obey the law and that "paying a fine is not an option." —The Daily Record, November 18, 2022

Memories of Monarch butterflies amid spring songs, clover flowers behind the old weatherbeaten shed, the Gregorian-esque voices in praise, the harmonies to heaven, the crisp white shirts, stark black pants & dresses, descendants of martyred interpretations, heretics of our own making, motherless rebels inter-bred in a defiant democracy. We will not guard the Holy Father. We hustle our humble wares amid warfare, bloody handed Bishops playing God, #AmishTikTok survivors. The sinful government wants to lower the body count. Ohio Bishops flex, above the law, statistics be damned, warning signs on dark roads & lost harmonies to the Lord. 

James Schwartz is a poet & author of various poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America (Kindle, 2011), Punatic (Writing Knights Press, 2019) & most recently Motor City Mix, Sunset in Rome (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He resides in Detroit, Michigan.

HEAT WAVE

by W. Luther Jett

Muffled staccato—
summer voices
too distant to be
understood—I try
not to stress the
circuitry mid-day—
douse the lights,
draw the shades.
A song from fifty
years ago plays on
my radio of memory

at 103 on the dial.


W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals as well as several anthologies. He is the author of five poetry chapbooks: Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Our Situation (Prolific Press, 2018), Everyone Disappears (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Little Wars (Kelsay Books, 2021), and Watchman, What of the Night? (CW Books, 2022).

TALKING ABOUT TREES

by Bonnie Naradzay

The Great Conjunction of 2020 will brighten the darkest day of the year as the two giant planets of our solar system draw closer together in the night sky than they have been in centuries. By chance, the day that Jupiter and Saturn will appear closest for Earth-based stargazers is Dec. 21, the winter solstice, which is the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. Photo: The galactic core area of the Milky Way over Maskinonge Pond in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta on July 14, 2020. Jupiter is the bright object at left, with Saturn dimmer to the left (east) of Jupiter.Alan Dyer / Universal Images Group via Getty Images file via NBC, December 9, 2020.

What kind of times are they, when

A talk about trees is almost a crime

Because it implies silence about so many horrors?                       

—Bertolt Brecht, “To those Born Later”

 

Thin ice limned the pond early this morning

and a slick of frost dazzled the green fields

yet pink blossoms still drifted across a few limbs

of the lone ornamental cherry tree.

In the slant of sun, the great blue heron stood

knee deep in water, and ducks have returned

among reflected shapes of pondside trees – 

bare branches outstretched like hands of penitents.

I have been arguing all evening with my friend

via email about Odysseus. He says Odysseus 

could have built that raft any time he wanted 

to escape from Calypso’s island, but I say not until

Athena persuaded Zeus to send Hermes down.  

I see Odysseus down by the seashore, weeping there,

as the great hexameters roll out in the receding waves.

Then we spar about the Suitors. They must be killed, 

he says, for their conspiracy. I ask, what about diplomacy?  

(It is Advent. The people are armed for insurrections here, 

spouting obscenities. “Sir, have you no sense of decency,” 

someone finally asked McCarthy, not so long ago.)  

My friend mentions Thersites. He has me there.

Jesus healed the blind man and asked him what he saw.

He said, “I see men like trees walking.”

Tonight I see two planets grow closer in the night sky.

(I have grown numb about the latest attacks

on civility.) Priam came for Hector’s body 

in the dead of night. Achilles welcomed him

and stopped the war for Hector’s funeral rites.

Recently I read about the Christmas truce in World War I

for the burial of the dead. Someone brought lights.

Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

       

Bonnie Naradzay's recent poems are in AGNI, the American Journal of Poetry, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Tar River Poetry, EPOCH, Tampa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Potomac Review, Xavier Review, and One Magazine. For many years she has led poetry workshops at a day shelter for the homeless and at a retirement center, both in Washington, DC.                                          

MISERIES

by Tricia Knoll

Protesters in Chicago on Saturday.(Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press) The photo accompanies the essay that prompted this poem: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Op-Ed “Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2020

they come down with barbs
on flashing tails    or as slime
on the slope you slipped downhill

did you try to connect them
to a machine to measure amplitudes
and heard gut-punched moans

when they shook their rattles
in your dreams, did you wake,
cower, throw bricks

or put them in a drawer
where they roll like marbles
until ground-shaking stops

and TV spits them out
to chew on with worn-down
molars under cracking klieg lights

until we saw tonight
how they churn to burn
the deepest anger and hurt

so deep you can only guess at
the darkness of an abyss and
smell the smoke into daylight

to give them names they’ve earned
for decades: injustice, racism,
inequity and mourning.

Tricia Knoll is an aging white woman of privilege isolated from COVID in the woods of Vermont. Her poetry collection How I Learned To Be White involved three years of introspection into how privilege manifested in her life—and she is  not convinced she learned everything she must learn. She is grateful for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's op-ed.

WORTH

by Pepper Trail





The New York Times, March 5, 2020:

“Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race”

“If American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do around the house and caring for relatives, they would have made $1.5 trillion last year.”


In front of the bright lights
You carry a lifetime of learning
Lightly—for you it must be lightly
When you try, you are given nothing
When you succeed, you earn—fear

In the dark silent hours
Your cool hand comforting the feverish child
Your words calming the confused grandfather
What you have to give is taken
What is demanded of you is – more

Visible, invisible, there is no place of safety
To be loved, be silent
To be listened to, be quiet
When you ask, the answer is no
When you do not ask, there is no answer

In front of the lights, in the dark hours
Hold fast to your worth
Someday, rocks will crack
Someday, a wave will rise
Someday.  Someday.  Someday.


Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

CHARLOTTESVILLE 8/11/17

by Jan Steckel

Several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists were met by a small group of counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson on Friday night at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. 

—The Washington Post, August 12, 2017

O my America!
What are these phosphors
borne in the hands of men
wearing polo shirts and swastikas?

The pastor flees her church.
She hasn’t seen Klan with torches
since she was five years old.
Here they stride with baseball bats,
dressed like college students
or fresh from the boardroom.
She fears for the black man walking
alone the streets of her town,
where bands of predators roam.

“Blood and soil,” they chant.
”White lives matter.”
”You will not replace us.”
”Jews will not replace us.”

Where are the streets of gold
my great-grandparents came looking for?
Now it’s blond men who brandish flambeaux
surrounding a circle of antifascist students,
hands joined around a monument,
facing outward against the slavering pack.
The Nazis throw their torches,
mace the kids. Afterward a girl
tweets that she’s safe,
but she’s not okay.
Where is the God in whom she trusted?
Out of the many, where is the one?

Charlottesville, tonight the dream
of a shining city on a hill
shatters into points of light
marching along your occupied streets.

Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who left the practice of medicine because of chronic pain. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards for LGBT writing. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. 

CHRISTMAS PAST WITH THE TRUMPS

by Alan Walowitz

Image source: Pinterest

The Q17 would take me past Jamaica Estates—
though I didn’t know then of Trump,
whose pop already was a big deal in Brooklyn,
but I knew this was where the rich folks lived.
And I’m sure young Donald, though a bully even then,
wasn’t the one who pushed me aside
and shook me down for a couple of dimes
in the arcade at the Jamaica Terminal
just to get at the shooting range,
with a rifle that shot light at the little metal ducks that
would shut with a snap like a flock of cheap valises.
A guy like him didn’t take the bus, I learned,
and would have pocketsful of dimes to fill his own machines
that lined his basement finished in teak and kingwood—
and had real guns to shoot at summer camps
with riflery and riding, Western and English,
and cloth napkins that came with service
and they didn’t dare call it mess.

My father would drive us through Trump’s part of the world
this time of year to see the Christmas lights of the rich,
and we probably went by his house a couple of times,
though the really well-to-do never put up lights,
while the newly rich installed just one color—a melancholy blue—
on their mansion’s outer edge so passersby like us might be awed by its size,
in the winter dark, while the family that might have lived inside
was off on a cruise, though they likely left the curtains open,
and the white lights shaped like candles on the huge tree
would illuminate those ten foot ceilings, in those cavernous front rooms
that otherwise were never permitted to reveal
even a shadow.

Alan Walowitz has been published various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in Queens, NY. Alan's chapbook Exactly Like Love is available from Osedax Press.

OH! CHRISTMAS TREE!

by Lynnie Gobeille

Rhode Island Holiday Tree: State To Leave 'Christmas' Out Of Lighting Ceremony-- Huffington Post

I live in the State of Rhode Island

A place governed by folks refusing to see –

That no matter -  what you call it

It’s still a Christmas tree.

The food pantry shelves are empty

Sandy’s “Homeless” remain in the cold

Let’s all hold hands, raise our voices together

Sing the story that needs to be told.

Flip the switch! Go ahead turn the lights on

Gaze at the beautiful Tree

You can call it whatever you want to

It’ll still mean:  HOPE : to me.

Lynnie Gobeille is passionate about poetry. She is one of the co-founders / editors of The Origami Poems Project, a world wide “free poetry event” based in Rhode Island . Her micro-chapbooks can be found there. Her work has been published in various journals and on-line poetry sites. Her mantra?  “We can change the world, one free poetry book at a time”.