HOW TO BE A BILLIONAIRE (TAYLOR’S VERSION)

by Diane Elayne Dees

Taylor Swift attends the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards. PHOTO: 

JAMIE MCCARTHY/WIREIMAGE

Publicly acknowledge your peers
and show pleasure in their creations.
Make little girls happy at every opportunity.
Everywhere you go, stock the food bank 
for a year, and send emergency money
to our states before the government 
can even fill out the forms.
Show women and girls how to take 
ownership of their own lives.
Show little girls that tears and rage
and poetry and making money
and red lipstick and ass-kicking
are all feminine pursuits.

Don’t cheat your vendors, defraud
your customers, or insult your fans.
Don’t incite violence wherever you go,
and don’t endanger the lives of others
because they are black, brown, female,
government officials, or journalists.
Don’t sexually abuse anyone,
don’t pretend you don’t know
anyone or anything connected to you,
don’t threaten people.

And do whatever it takes to guide 
us out of this Cruel Summer.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books), The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press), and The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press). Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.

ESCAPE

by Paul Hostovsky

He crab-walked up and out of there
and I can’t help admiring him a little for that

especially since they keep replaying it on TV 
and thousands of cops are combing Pennsylvania 

and they haven’t found him yet. And I can’t help
rooting for him a little as though he were

the underdog, and not a killer who stabbed
his girlfriend to death in front of her children.

My God. They will never get over that. Have you
ever found yourself rooting for the wrong 

side? Crab-walking is moving sort of sideways
and diagonally in an awkward, furtive manner. 

Please pass the popcorn. I wonder if they’ll ever
find him. Voyeurism is sort of furtively taking

pleasure in disaster, catastrophe, pain, and without
ever feeling the pain, or ever getting caught.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.

THE PLEASURE I’D TAKE IN THE ANY-AGE DEATH OF ONE WHO REMAINS UNNAMED

a truncated trenta-sei

by Jacquelyn Shah

Spoofing that poetic form of John Ciardi 

used for his “A Trenta-Sei of the Pleasure We Take in 

the Early Death of Keats”

“Still Life With Skull, Leeks, and Pitcher, March 14, 1945” by Pablo Picasso

I will not pretend to be sad
thinking about his death. A treat
it would be—(the species-truth? We are glad
to have a death to munch on.)
to wake some morning soon to a Tweet
reporting his demise. Why, oh why
am I so moved to pray he will die?

Thinking about his death is a treat

I allow myself. To be spared the bother of hearing,

day after day, his merely bitter, never sweet,

falsehoods, fabrications; watch his sneering

and his huff and puff, huff and puff

would constitute, for me, a quite-enough.

Re: Ciardi’s “species-truth”—yes, we are glad

to have a death to munch on. But truth to tell,

I’d forgo the munching; is snarfing up too-too very bad?

When it comes to lying, this unnamed guy does it well,

and his performances, so brash, his smear and jeer

deserve no curtain calls, despite the fools who stand and cheer.

To wake some morning soon to a Tweet 

reporting death, underscoring had he lived, my own remaining time

could be not merely dull but dreadful… how Sweet!

O beautiful, the death of one whose power-grubbing lifetime’s

gone. And gone would be, ungenerosity, extravagance, and full-

blown pretense, double-crossing, treachery, cock-and-bull!

Jacquelyn “Jacsun” Shah, nonbinary iconoclast holds A.B. & M.A. English and M.F.A. & Ph.D. English/creative writing–poetry. Her publications: chapbook, small fry; full-length book, What to Do with Red; individual poems in various journals. Literal Latté’s 2018 Food Verse Contest winner, she has now won a non-fiction book award contest and her memoir-essay collection will be published this summer. 

DESPITE MANY EDITS, THIS POEM REMAINS A SCREED

by Devon Balwit

Martin Keep/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images via The New York Times

 

Individualized animal abuse is a crime; systematic animal abuse is a business model. —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, June 10, 2023

 

What we can’t bear to look at, we tolerate hidden:

the living penned with the dead, vivisection,

 

infants torn from their mothers. Already, I imagine

you, reader, lamenting this poem’s wanton

 

cruelty. Or protesting that you don’t eat red

meat or chicken flesh and so aren’t implicated .

 

Unfortunately, milk and cheese also equal

death. I wish it weren’t so, for I was partial

 

to Gouda—and eggs—but the free range birds

we imagine exist mostly in our heads. Farmyards

 

would span entire states were the hens to peck

at will. Back we retreat, then, into our dark

 

ages, some fated to suffer in a preordained hierarchy.

We’d squirm if this logic were applied to our species:

 

Women, brown people, the poor—What

can one do? They just happened to draw the short

 

straw. Surely, mere appetite can be retrained

once we admit animals know pleasure and pain.

 

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. In her most recent collection Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023] she romps through Melville’s Moby Dick. 

WHY DO DOCTORS IGNORE THE CLITORIS?

a found poem by Diane Kendig

derived from the article “Half the World Has a Clitoris: Why Don’t Doctors Study It?” by Rachel E. Gross, The New York Times, October 17, 2022

Anatomy of the Clitoris and Penis—3D Model available from Etsy.

Compare the vulva

to a small town in the Midwest.

Doctors tend to pass through it

barely looking up

on their way to their destination,

the cervix and uterus.

If the vulva…is

an underappreciated city

the clitoris is

a local roadside bar

…a deep structure,

made up largely

of erectile tissue

reaching into the pelvis

encircling the vagina.

Documented injuries to the clitoris

could be prevented…

if doctors just spent more time

getting to know the clitoris,

…intimately bound up

in female pleasure and orgasm,

not high on medicine’s priority list.

[One urologist] recalled that

in medical training

the clitoris barely made

a cameo.

The medical textbook

Last’s Anatomy omitted

the clitoris entirely.

Descriptions of the penis went on for pages.

Diane Kendig is the author of five poetry collections. Her latest is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in J Journal, Wordgathering, The New Verse News, 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. 

AMERICAN HERO

by Dawn Corrigan

Officer Daniel Hodges gained notoriety after footage of him circulated being crushed by a door during the capitol riots. Photo: CNN via WCVB.

Dawn Corrigan has a crush on an American hero.

WHAT WE CALL NEWS

by Joan Mazza

Nambia, a shock! was in the news, and now
the town of Pleasure, burned so hot that cars melted.
Families hope for messages of bones of those
who didn’t escape, an answer, end to their search.
A president not mine promises Great Climate!

advises raking forests. Behold! His followers follow,
like those who thought they’d board Hale-Bopp,
dressed for this special occasion in jeans and sneakers,
pockets filled with quarters, plastic bags over their heads.

Ho-hum to a journalist’s murder, dismemberment.
His memory dissolved in acid. Business as usual
for those who value money over integrity and human
rights. Let’s carry on and kill those turkeys, worry
about stuffing and whether it’s safe to eat the lettuce.

I can smell those foul family members arguing
from miles away. It’s the age of FFS and WTF, when
evidence provides the excuse to dig in deeper, yell,
Fake News! when you don’t like the turn of events

or intelligence communities that bring facts. Ho-hum.
We carry on like those in Poland, not Jewish, not gay.
No risk of being chosen, hauled off. What’s for dessert?
Here it’s apple pie with ice cream and whipped cream.
We’re grateful, and we write our long list of blessings.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and has taught workshops nationally with a focus on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her work has appeared in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Streetlight Magazine, Valparaiso Review, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia.

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.

THE PEDICURE CUSTOMER'S DILEMMA

by Catherine Wald

Across the country, countless workers in the nail salon industry, mainly immigrant women, toil in misery and ill health for meager pay, usually with no overtime, abused by employers who show little or no consideration for their safety and well-being. It is a world of long days and toxic chemicals, where the usual protections of government have failed, at all levels. —NY Times, May 11, 2015; Photo: A pedicure at a salon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times. 

Time to choose: should I deprive you of your
livelihood or your unborn children?

Do your lungs need air as badly as my toes need to be
decked out in glorious colors that never existed in nature?

Is it frivolous to pay another human being to caress the
arches and balls of my feet in a way no lover ever will?

In your hands, oh modest Korean or Chinese or Thai woman,
shy, unsightly appendages, emboldened, grab the spotlight.

For two dollars apiece, you give me ten hand-crafted
oriental miniatures, perfect and miniscule as gemstones,

sparkling harbingers of summer, delightful butterflies
birthed in a cloud of formaldehyde, ethanol and XX.

Pedicurists, like most winged creatures, enjoy a short
lifespan: but we all know beauty demands sacrifice.

In this world where gainful employment is hard to come by,
where aesthetic pleasure is so desperately needed, is it

time to turn off the tap?


Catherine Wald's books include poetry (Distant, burned-out stars, Finishing Line Press, 2011), nonfiction (The Resilient Writer: Stories of Rejection and Triumph From 23 Top Authors, Persea Books, 2005) and a translation from French of Valery Larbaud’s Childish Things (Sun & Moon Press). Her poems have been published in American Journal of Nursing, Buddhist Poetry Review, Chronogram, Exit 13, Friends Journal, Jewish Literary Journal, The New Poet, Society of Classical Poets, The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly and Westchester Review.