A MOUNTAINEER CAN BE A POET AND STILL FIRE A MUSKET

by Kim Malinowski

Hundreds of West Virginia University students wearing red T-shirts and bandanas to symbolize their connection to striking coal miners a century ago staged protests Monday against an administration proposal to cut 9% of majors amid a $45 million budget shortfall. —AP, August 22, 2023

I write WVU into the stars, blue and gold constellations,

my pen shimmering faculty names, even as the administration’s slash

tenure positions, promises, dreams.

I learned that my pen is a magic wand here. 

It has not been so long ago that even mountaineers could be poets

and still shoot muskets and pretend that they had a home.

I met a freshman today that I will paint as glinting diamond,

fourth day confusion, standing on the side with professors,

telling me he is the transition and the PRTs still don’t work.

But he doesn’t cower, ready to swing full into engineering and life.

My mentors are battle hardened past the traditional 10 on the Mohs scale,

fighting, worrying, fighting more. Not able to tell their stories.

I told the university’s president that I could write WVU into the skies,

either as diamonds or as coal, because each are rocks 

on their way to becoming another rock. That freshman, those faculty

can fight and worry and fight.

I can write the stories they are not allowed to.

But we have a choice if we want the story to be about diamonds or coal.

Kim Malinowski is a poet and a mountaineer. She will have six books by the end of 2024 and credits much of her success to her instructors at West Virginia University. She wore red at the August 21, 2023 Protest, lives five hours away, and fights for those that fought for her.

IF THIS WERE A SAM ALITO POEM

by Dick Westheimer

Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision.

Then burn down the house to fulfill the prediction.

—Czeslaw Milsoz

If this were a Sam Alito poem,  it would be written in tidy couplets, matched in beat and time. It would forget that words are born from grunts and battle cries, that swords decide which terms can be used and which are taboo, that the right to cleave your neighbor with a steel blade is her duty to bear Samuel’s baby, the one he so loves, the one that he is willing to render in tersets and turds, to bang and clang the lines into refrigerator magnets with the only words being “life” and “thoughts” and “and” and “prayers.”

If this were an Amy Coney Barrett poem, The First Word In Each Line Would Be  Capitalized, the lines themselves would neatly rhyme, would chime with the rhythm of the Sainted Ones, entrain with the iambs of a military parade—with goose-stepping Aunties’ heads and staffs held high, saluting to the the crowd of Commander’s wives in their hues of blue, and to the Guardians of the Right who know a thing or two about the bump and mad grind, about how we’re all inclined to naughty deeds with the lights turned off with a glory hole chemise cagoule between a woman and the beasts with their hairy parts and the beat of steeple-hatted bigots stomping time on courthouse floorboards.

If this were a Clarence Thomas poem, the meter will be trochee, a hammer hammer hammer double time.  It would be a sestina cycling lines of the before times when men were men and women were not, when guns were muskets and books were sewn with linen thread, when Coke cans shed the hair of the dog that bit us all, when what was written in the age of powdered wigs was wise and there would be a crowning of a New King who’d reign over a land where men who held hands with men were melted down into guns anointed by boys who’d hold lead to the heads of women great with child.

And if this were my poem, the verse would be blank, the words mute, the letters scattered across the page. The white space would be smudged with ash, the margins smudged with blood and pocked with powder burns. The verse would exercise its right to remain silent, cuffed to a chair, pregnant, with despair.

Dick Westheimer  has—with his wife and writing companion Debbie—lived on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. His most recent poems have recently appeared or are upcoming in Rattle, Paterson Review, Chautauqua Review, RiseUp Review, Ekphrastic Review, Minyan, Gyroscope Review, and Cutthroat.