LEGACY

by Jim Hanson

He finally was voted away
but left with the flick of a match
a wildfire burning across the land
turning once fertile fields of green
barren and black under a cloud,
as institutions smoldered from
forces of heated hate and malcontent
leaving behind for generations ahead
the remains of a republic uncertain
to rise in an unforeseeable future.

Jim Hanson is a retired university researcher and sociologist who lives in the St. Louis area. He has published three poetry collections titled Endless Journey, Ruminations of Living and Dying, and Perspectives, also some thirty single poems, and is a member of the St. Louis Poetry Center and Illinois State Poetry Society Southern Chapter.

ELECTION NIGHT AFTER DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS

by Jan Steckel

A blazing stateroom of clapping blondes. 

The President dropped the match. The windows 

blew out like a thousand Kristallnachts.

 

My husband slept through the little Hiroshima.

In the morning we’d have to pour into the streets.

I tried to curl up like the cat and snooze.

 

But voices whispered, “Anyone can march. 

Take up your pen. Write an anthem we can

sing again.” Dead poets filled my bedroom.

 

Victor Jara lifted broken hands.

García Lorca slid down a bullet-riddled wall.

Mandelstam starved and shivered in a transit camp.

 

My dead friend, Berkeley poet Julia Vinograd,

read new poems in my dream, turned to me. 

“Open your mouth,” she said. So hear me:

 

Tomorrow some will march, some write, 

and others sing. Though glass and bone shatter,

America will never bear another king.

Jan Steckel’s book Like Flesh Covers Bone won 2019 Rainbow Awards for LGBT Poetry and Best Bisexual Book. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital also won awards. She lives in Oakland, California.

CHOSEN VENUES

by Joan Colby


Where you are dancing.
Where you celebrate.
Where the bands play.
Where you congregate for coffee
Or conversation. Or to view the match
Or the marathon.
Anywhere you go to enjoy
Invites the strike. The explosive vest
Or car aimed at the thick of things.
What they seek to destroy is this:
Free pleasure. The authoritarian shift
To beheadings in an arena
Where you learn what to expect.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.