CHECK YOUR PHONE!

by Roderick Deacey

Check your phone—

it’s full of messages,
all are saying
check your phone.
Check your creek—
it keeps on rising,
so do temperatures,
the tundra’s melting,
ice floes are melting,
ice caps are melting.
It appears that ice
is getting scarcer.
Check your freezer—
it’s full of polar bears!
That’s not funny,
they are homeless,
so are penguins.
Check your oceans—
coral’s dying,
sea-weed’s dying,
whales are dying,
fish are dying,
even octopi
are saying bye-bye.
Sea’s full of plastic—
that can’t feed us.
What’s going on here?

Check your phone—
it’s full of fascism,
it’s caught a virus,
it’s caught fanaticism,
anti-Constitutional
Christian nationalism.
The leading candidate
has set a camping date
to rehouse us vermin
soon as he is back in,
billionaires back him,
better believe him!
Hey, great-grandad,
those Nazis you fought—
they’re back again.

Check your phone—
it’s bleeding bargains,
don’t buy bargains,
but buy a bunch
of solar chargers.
And download books—
many, many books—
for long, dark evenings.
Are they coming?
What do Boy Scouts say?
Be prepared! But first,
download this handy volume:
"Edible Plants for Eating;
How to Find Them."
It’ll help you forage
in field and forest—
the hunter-gatherer diet,
you may have to try it!

Check your phone!
Computer projections
predict who’s winning—
no one’s winning!
We’re all sad losers,
no cause for mirth
on screwed-up Earth.
The Washington Post
confirms we’re toast,
The New York Times asks
“It’s really that time?”
CNN says start again,
while Fox whines Biden
should have known.
I wrote The Guardian—
they just groaned.
As for M-S-N-B-C,
they say truth will set us free—
that’s not proven to be true…
so now, what should you do?
You know, don’t you?
Check your phone!


Roderick Deacey recently discovered his bio had been replaced by instructions on how to turn himself in. He remembers regularly performing beat poetry with bass-player and drummer. He also remembers sending poems to literary magazines and occasionally having some published. He has decided not to turn himself in but to turn in a few spare poems instead.

IF AMERICA FOUGHT WORLD WAR II LIKE COVID-19

by Jon Wesick

More people in the United States have died this year from Covid-19 than were killed in four years of fighting on the battlefields during World War II, according to the latest NBC News data. —NBC News, December 11, 2020

The President calls it Fake News

and urges Americans to buy Japanese.

As hundreds of thousands die

in Guadalcanal and Normandy, the public

adopts swastikas and Hitler salutes

in disdain for the “liberal media.”

 

No scrap drives, no Rosie the Riveter, just Emperor Hirohito

on the cover of Life Magazine. Gilligan and the Skipper

shadow convoys across the Atlantic

and radio their positions to lurking U boats.

Calling him an “Antifa terrorist,” Gomer Pyle  

mails Audie Murphy death threats. Barney Fife

kidnaps General Eisenhower and tries him for treason.

 

A lot of people, really important people,

say this is a terrific generation, maybe the most terrific

of all. Terrific is better than greatest, okay.

It’s huge. Better than the generation that freed

the slaves, too. Bunch of losers, so sad. 

Why terrific? Winning. It’s true.

So much winning

 

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, The New Verse News, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his stories “The Visitor” and “A Story for the Rest of Us” for Pushcart Prizes. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collections Words of Power, Dances of Freedom and A Foreigner Wherever I Go as well as several novels and short story collections. His most recent novel is The Enigma Brokers.

SOMETHING ABOUT NERO

by Lois Marie Harrod

Dave Whamond, Canada, PoliticalCartoons.com

Though writing poetry
often seems like fiddling
while Rome burns,

perhaps we should remember
violins were not invented
until the 15th century,

long after the Great Twiddler died.
Neither pencils or pens then,
nor ballpoints and computers

on which we’ve been fiddling
since confined long term
to our virtual prisons.

In fact  (it’s nice to have a fact)
if Nero played on anything at all,
it was on a cithara—

though Tacitus claims
Nero did not scrape the strings,
but warbled The Sack of Troy

in his best operatic voice
while Rome burned faster
than California.

Tacitus offers no eye-witnesses
to confirm his story, just as now
no known epics attest

how many times or in what situation
Nero referred to his legions as losers.
It is has been corroborated though

that this Nastiest of Emperors
used the land cleared by his fire
to build a Golden Palace

with surrounding Pleasure Gardens—
and that perhaps is worth noting
in a poem or two of toppled monuments.

Lois Marie Harrod’s latest collection Woman was published by Blue Lyra in February 2020. Her Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton and at The College of New Jersey.

FOOLS AND LOSERS

by Michael L. Ruffin

My Fools
My grandfather (Army fool, Europe, WWI)
My father (Navy fool, Pacific, WWII)
My father-in-law (Marine fool, Pacific, WWII)
My uncle (Army Air Corps fool, Europe, WWII)
My three brothers-in-law (Air Force, Army, and Marine fools, Vietnam)

My Losers
My mother's (before she was my mother) fiance (Army loser, killed in France, WWII)
My cousin (Army loser, wounded in Vietnam)
My fifth-grade teacher's husband (Army loser, killed in Vietnam)

I know, and I hope
you know, that
they aren't really
fools and losers.

I also know, and I hope
you also know, that
anyone who thinks they are
is a fool and a loser.

It takes a real fool to think
of service as foolishness.

It takes a real loser to think
of sacrifice as losing.


Michael L. Ruffin is a writer, editor, preacher, and teacher living and working in Georgia. He posts poems on Instagram (@michaell.ruffin) and prose opinions at On the Jericho Road. He is author of Fifty-Seven: A Memoir of Death and Life and  of the forthcoming Praying with Matthew. His poetry has appeared at TheNewVerse.News, 3 Moon Magazine, Rat's Ass Review, and U-Rights Magazine.