LETHAL INJECTION PROTOCOL

by Ilene Millman

An easy-to-follow recipe really, the original from 1977. Just three required ingredients,

but be sure to check you have them on hand, in case

that one you thought you had is unavailable since the manufacturer

dislikes the way you're using it.

Be sure to check your equipment: two intravenous cannulas, one a backup,

plus a line leading to an adjacent room,

saline, hypodermic needles, alcohol for sterilizing just in case

someone suddenly says the word “Stay” as happened in the case

of James Autry in 1983.

You may experiment with substituting alternative

ingredients although one is banned in some states since the botched

batch in the case

of John Marion Grant, who convulsed two dozen times and puked

although he did breathe 12 more minutes. Administer in the sequence set here:

first injection to cause unconsciousness followed by the one for paralysis and the last

cardiac arrest.

Watch for these procedural problems: needle applied in the wrong direction, drugs

injected into tissue and not vein, or inability to find a vein as in the case

this week of Tony Carruthers, or the case

two years ago, of Marcellus Williams where 

evidence is strong

that he just might have been

innocent.

Ilene Millman writes about memories, mud, music, modern times, anything her abiding and determined fascination grabs onto. Her first poetry book, Adjust Speed to Weather, was published in 2018, and A Jar of Moths, in March,2024 (Ragged Sky Press). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022 and 2024. A speech/language therapist, she published two therapy games designed to help school-aged children with language development problems.

POST MORTEM: THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

The history of a planet in sixteen lines

by Greg McClelland

Source: Mail Online

It all began when a molten mass,

boiling within,

battered from without,

barreled through a gaping void.

 

Peaks of solidity surfaced;

tectonic hands and burning digits

designed antediluvian bone:

basalt, sandstone, granite, schist.

 

Through five hundred million years,

from Ordovician to Cretaceous,

our mother birthed and killed five litters

of living tissue.

 

Then she birthed a sixth,

which brewed its own poisons—

digital, solid, nuclear, microscopic—

leading to the first synthetic holocaust.

Greg McClelland is a retired government ethics attorney. He has published poetry in Ancient Paths, The Road Not Taken, All Around the Mulberry Bush, and his college alma mater newsletter. Besides writing poetry, he spends his retirement working in political activism, helping to ensure that Trump will never see the inside of the White House again.

OLD POISONS

by Jack Romig

The Texas Freedom Caucus—a group of Republican lawmakers—sent a letter to the State Board of Education ahead of its Tuesday meeting, noting that they were watching the changes to history lessons closely. Legislators “will not hesitate to intervene during the next legislative session, should the need arise, to protect Texas children from being further indoctrinated and taken advantage of,” they wrote. The caucus celebrated on Twitter Tuesday night, saying: “The board voted to scrap the wokeified proposed changes to the TEKS.” —The Dallas Morning News, August 30, 2022

If we must stand nostalgic by the crusted rivers of our past,

forgetting how we took the land from other folk,

made belles and cavaliers of those who drove the slaves,

erased a second time those killed for human difference;

 

if we have only mists of vaguest sentiment  

to hide from us the questions that our history asserts,

then let us also keep alive our feelings for old poisons,

 

mercurochrome our mothers painted on our cuts

and used its toxic salt to draw hearts on our knees,

insecticides that fogged the wake of tanker trucks

as we, unknowing, trotted in the spray.

 

Jack Romig was a longtime manuscript editor with Book-of-the-Month Club in New York City. His poems have appeared in Common Sense 2, The Fourth River, and Philadelphia Stories. He lives in Huff’s Church, Pennsylvania.