THE SUPREME COURT COURTS ITS OWN SUPREMACY

A Modern Petrarchan Sonnet 

by Kimberly Russo

The Supreme Court on Friday reduced the authority of executive agencies, sweeping aside a longstanding legal precedent that required courts to defer to the expertise of federal administrators in carrying out laws passed by Congress. —The New York Times, June 28, 2024. Above is an excerpt from Justice Kagan’s dissent.

History names you as “Final Arbiter,”
To eagle-eye each branch, limit its power
and strike down laws in violation of our
country’s pact. You are humanity’s harbinger.
“EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW” leans starboard
erasing civil rights from their ivory tower
with six of nine lying disavowers
dumb to the public’s dreams dearly harbored.

All women, surrender your uterus,
lovers and race and Affirmative Action
flee in disgrace and die in the closet.
What ill minds embrace rulings ludicrous?
Judges, pious in self-satisfaction
perished in politics’ pockets, I posit.

Kimberly Russo is an English teacher in Aurora, Colorado where she resides with her husband, Tony.  She is the mother of four children, Nicholas (Stephanie,) Audrey, Grace, and Maritza, and grandmother to Doc Wilder and Willa Cassidy. Kimberly spends her free time gardening & bird-watching. Much of her writing is dedicated to marriage/family, social issues, including the perpetuating inequality among genders/races, and the stigma associated with mental illness. Her poetry has appeared in River Poets Journal, Open Minds Quarterly, PDXX Collective, Sixfold (Summer 2016,) Sixfold (Summer 2018,) Sixfold (Winter 2022,) Cricket Media: Spider Magazine, ACM, Another Chicago Magazine, and Backwards Trajectory.

ON MAGRITTE'S LOVERS IN 2020

by Jack Kristiansen

"The Lovers II" (1928) by Rene Magritte

For years we were sure
there could be little joy

in their passion,
not much of a promise

in their commitment.
But what did we know?

Now that we see
why the veils

the kissing lovers wear
make some sense,

we still worry
about the risk.


Jack Kristiansen exists in the composition books and computer files of William Aarnes who lives in South Carolina.

THE KNITTER OF GENTLE DARKNESS

by Sean Lause

Self Portrait Along the Boarder Line Between Mexico and the United States, 1932, by Frida Kahlo

A Mexican girl sits knitting
as the night spreads out in dreams,
and old women dream of Autumn winds.

She knits time to space,
warmth to cold, love to
alone, strength to innocence.

She knits moons to their orbits,
needles clicking with the certainty of stars,
webbing the known and unknown.

She knits sweet shadows
that breathe a calm to longing,
and drink the emerald waning of the moon.

Her darkness rounds the world with sleep,
past crouching walls of fearful lands,
with the graceful wave of parting lovers.

Sean Lause is a professor of English at Rhodes State College in Lima, Ohio, United States.  His poems have appeared in The Minnesota Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Alaska Quarterly, Atlanta Review, The Pedestal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, European Judaism, Illuminations, Sanskrit and Poetry International.  His first book of poems Bestiary of Souls was published in 2013 by FutureCycle Press.