MUSHROOM BY ANY OTHER NAME

by Rikki Santer

Image combines illustration by Thomas Gaulkin / DonkeyHotey (Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0) / VectorStock with photo by Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Sputnik, via Associated Press and NYT.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia formally announced a new nuclear doctrine this weekend, but the response in Washington was just short of a yawn.Credit...—The New York Times, November 19, 2024

Trump has a strategic plan for the country: Gearing up for nuclear war. —Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists —July 2, 2024

On the precipice of historical near misses who 

will go first, six or so decades of strange love

for hair trigger alert, are we on the clock feeling 

for the light switch, heads submerged in a cloud

of unknowing, more nuclear-weapon states 

on the chess board, silos loaded with missiles, 

armed submarines wander deep into oceans

and 47 plans to twist treaties, accelerate warheads,

once launched no recall, the mad mad 

mad mad world of it,  bunker down

In 2023, Rikki Santer was named Ohio Poet of the Year. Her forthcoming collection, Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books.

PRAY

by Jean Varda

This video contains black and white footage after the liberation of Buchenwald.

I light a candle for peace and everywhere I go I pray

in my room on my bed on the street in my car,

when I breathe each inhalation is an image of hope

that the bombs will stop falling, the tanks will turn around no nukes will rain down, and those who are fleeing will reach safety and not die on their way.

How can one bear the thought of the little girl in blood

stained pajamas her mother running with her for help

then dying when she reached the hospital.

Even before I was born my mother protested war,

after the horrors of serving as a nurse in WWII

“How could they have kept from us Buchenwald,

Auschwitz, Treblinka?” She would repeat as she showed

me black and white footage of the camps and told me

how lucky I was to be born where I was with my Jewish

blood. She took me on my first peace march to protest

Vietnam, we stayed up all night on an old school bus,

I had never seen so many people at one time

as we marched on Washington.

My father taught me the Russians weren’t our enemies

that they wanted peace just like we did.

It didn’t match what I learned in school. He went to Cuba and Nicaragua, he loved the countries and the people. He was accused of being a Communist before I was born. I took my daughters to protests when they were small and showed them what I believed in, 

still we pray for peace.

          

Jean Varda's poetry has appeared in: The California Quarterly, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Speckled Trout, The New Verse News, and The Boston Literary Magazine. She has led poetry writing workshops and Open Mics around the country. She presently resides in Chico, California where she is working on an anthology of her poetry.

UNCOMBABLE

by Melissa Balmain

Locklan Samples, diagnosed with uncombable hair syndrome (UHS), a rare genetic disorder of the hair shaft.

Uncombable hair? Well, of course it’s a thing:

we’ve arrived in uncombable times

with uncombable dangers, umcombable ills,

and uncombable thought paradigms.

 

Nuts with guns are uncombable (so we’ve been told)—

we are doomed to uncombable grief.

Piles of nukes are uncombable; superbugs too,

and decay in the Barrier Reef.

 

Our hatreds? Uncombable. Ditto our loves

of red meat, SUVs, fossil fuel,

and the systems permitting too few of our kids

to be nourished and housed and in school.

 

Yes, it’s all so uncombable: that’s what we’ll hear

as we fall and the rising sea foams—

unless our uncombable powers that be

can agree on some new fucking combs.

Melissa Balmain edits Light, America's longest-running journal of comic poetry. Her newest book of verse is The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults (Humorist Books). @MelissaBalmain

HOW TO FLATTEN THE CURVE

by Mike LaForge

You know the military, our great military, greatest military in the world,
has weapons that could, I mean, they have, what, machine guns
that fire an incredible number of rounds per second, per SECOND,
very powerful, and I think those weapons could really do a number
on a virus. Maybe there’s a way, I don’t know. What have you got
to lose if they’ve tried everything else? Just shoot the patient
in the lungs with a machine gun. Cuz it’s the lungs that you have to
get. That’s where the virus goes, am I right?  I’m not a doctor,
but many people tell me that I have a tremendous understanding
of this stuff. It’s incredible when you think about it.

Mike LaForge lives near Vancouver, BC, Canada, teaches English to non-native speakers, and has been writing poetry as a hobby for most his life.

SAME OLD MOTIFS, SOUNDING OFF AGAIN

by George Salamon

The Washington Post, April 22, 2018

Only old folks and children
Do no harm to the present
By thinking of the future.
In the corridors of power in Washington,
In the bunkers of Pyongyang
They plot our future
For which we'll pay the usual price
In corpses, cripples and orphans,
In poverty, disease and despair.
During our long march of folly
We have rarely allowed history
To become our teacher,
Preferring to gulp the snake oil
Of one ism or another.
Like fireworks on the 4th of July.
Teachable moments soar and sparkle.
And then, in a puff, they are gone.

George Salamon would like to be but does not expect to be surprised by headlines. He lives and writes in St. Louis, MO.