“PENISGATE” AT THE OLYMPICS

by Diane Kendig

 

Illustration from Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology: Premium source for made up science

The Guardian begins with the obvious question:
“Why inject acid into your penis, and what are the health risks?”

If ever there were a serious misuse of the second person,
here you go. I won’t inject anything into myself, or,

as my sister said, when doctors ordered her to give herself
her own shots, “This is why I went into Speech, and you into Medicine.”

And actually, the athletes aren’t injecting their own, uh, organ,
because they are into Skiing and their doctors into Medicine.

Even for the men among us, though, says my husband, it's unimaginable.
Still ski jumpers go to great lengths and with hyaluronic acid, even further.

That is, they want their crotch at greater lengths for suit measurement—
which happens nine months before the games, so they get like a little

maternity ski suit, a tad larger, getting a slight lift, just 5% more surface,
but this is the Milano Cortino 2026. Competition amounts to centimeters.

The World Anti-Doping Agency is investigating. One urologist says,
the rarest case would be gangrene and loss of the penis.

No athlete has been willing to comment on that.

Diane Kendig  is the author of five poetry collections. Her latest is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in Cider Press Review, Comstock Review, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County Public Library weblog, Read + Write. 

POEM IN AUGUST

by Julian O. Long

“August Painting” by Ivan Kolisnyk

First day of my eighty fourth

year to heaven, I got up

turned off the O2 machine, hung

its canula over the arm of the walker

beside my bed, intimate with

these acts as I am with my hand

on my thigh the last thing before

throwing off the covers,

                                       intimate too

with comorbidities (only recently

learned that word) my troubled heart

remembered from recent echoes, aftermaths

of strokes that stopped parts of my brain

and legs (maybe other things

as well—hard to tell with all

the medicines.

                        Still, one more stick

and I’m boosted, at least in a qualified

sense; I’ll continue intimacy

with covid fully vaccinated, as I

was those childhood summers with series

of asthma shots, but this birthday

I am choosing as well to quarantine

myself—better that than bronchial

spasms, since this virus kills.

Writ large does the covid pandemic shed

light on die ups such as the great

reptilian? Chances are it will run

its course and become endemic among us

like the flu. But what if it doesn’t?

And what if unlike plagues of past ages

this is the one big one? Will it

usher in new times of dearth,

strife, and loss driven by vicious

death-demanding ideologies?

Will we humans learn care for one

another in such new times, or will we

follow the worst among us and in

ourselves? Chances are we’ll do

the latter.

                        Cogito ergo sum,

unassailable formulation, works

both ways, Latin doesn’t care

it’s the perfect sum of being, balking

at prospect of its own quitclaim

consciousness cannot fail to name

itself, but no heuristic can

afford me knowledge of my death;

I am intimate with that absence.

Conversely, no perception affords

me knowledge of another’s. In these

times it’s a forced option to choose

intimacy as well

                           —with that absence.

Julian O. Long’s poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

JOHN PRINE

by Meghan Sterling




How fragile is the human body,
all cells and skin, tissue-thin,
light as filament in the center of the bulb,
as quick to flicker and go out.
Another one gone. Lungs to shreds,
voices done in one by one
as we lose a generation of lovers,
people with grit to bear hard things,
all that disappointment like bitters
in the throat, fire as it goes down,
medicine as it heals. O, these songs
that cradled us as we wept and were alone.
I remember a snowfall so deep
the very white of it was dark as death,
and I listened to records that sustained
my tender hold on life, each day another day
I soldiered through.  And I have you to thank
for many of the moments that I chose to go on.

Meghan Sterling lives in Portland, Maine with her family. She is co-editor of the anthology A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis published by Littoral Books. Her work has been published in Rattle, Balancing Act 2, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Driftwood Press, Sky Island Journal, Literary Mama and others.  Her chapbook How We Drift was published by Blue Lyra Press. She is a poetry reader for the Maine Review, Featured Poet in Frost Meadow Review’s Spring 2020 issue, and a Hewnoaks Artists' Colony Resident in 2019 and 2020.

A GHAZAL FOR VENEZUELA: PRESIDENT MADURO DENIES HUMANITARIAN CRISIS

by Elane Gutterman

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Red Cross volunteers distributed the first shipment of badly needed emergency supplies in Venezuela on Tuesday after months of feuding between the government, which has denied the existence of a humanitarian crisis, and opponents who have been seeking to use the delivery of aid to force President Nicolás Maduro from power. —AP, April 16, 2019

A father hugs his child good night, his nightmare, her dwindling insulin doses.
For love of his country, Maduro turns down aid, insists “We aren’t beggars.”

A mother sells her thick, braided hair to buy rice, beans and chicken for her children.
With chants of venceremos, Maduro raises his fist “We aren’t beggars.”

A mother grieves for her older child stabbed when they grabbed his cell phone.
With hatred toward his enemies, Maduro resists “We aren’t beggars.”

A pregnant teen reveals there were no contraceptives or money to buy them.
In his embrace of the dead Chavez, Maduro can’t desist “We aren’t beggars.”

Now a father lines up by a Red Cross van for water purification tablets.
As a maid pours his fine wine, Maduro shifts yet persists “We aren’t beggars.”


In the latest issue of Journal of Global Oncology, Elane Gutterman, a health researcher, read how cancer care in Venezuela has been transformed from an advanced level of diagnosis and treatment to rudimentary services through government policies and indifference. In addition, she credits her friend and former Spanish teacher, Ana M., with making the needless suffering of the population personal through sharing stories of her Venezuelan family. Elane has published poems in Patterson Literary Review, U.S. 1 Summer Fiction Issue, Kelsey Review and TheNewVerse.News.

A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Piles of dead bodies steam. Cremation reeks
like an all-day bar-b-que.We shift disease
from one mouth to another, one penis,
one vagina to another. We wait for plagues
to pass—Zika, insane cows, the bloody spume
of Ebola and long guns. Contagion will be
the end of us, or else we'll be ill all over
from the atmosphere, from the lead water.
Perhaps epidemics, pollution and violence
will slump, new drugs, new hope emerge.
But they seem out of reach in these first days
of the celebrity Republic when we are cajoled
to believe medicine or the administration
will lessen the lesions, the tension of being
a high risk population under the politics of dying.


Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She apologizes for her state's administration.

STOPWATCH MEDICINE

by E.F. Schraeder

Image source: Kikim Media

By the time I sat down I was
exhausted from my last patient.
Fifteen people a day

deserve full attention. 
Fifteen minutes
per consult.  Period. 

Sorry I kept you waiting, I say,
but look at her: perched
on that flat table beneath

a thin paper shroud, brown eyes pleading,
really? like a trapped field mouse.
She says nothing.  Good.

Don’t accept it, the thing
this medicine machine turns us
into greedy little monsters.


E.F. Schraeder's creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Corvus Magazine, New Verse News, Five Poetry,  and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Hunger Tree, was a semifinalist in the New Women's Voices series at Finishing Line Press and is forthcoming in summer 2013.