POGUE

a duet-poem

by James Schwartz & Joshua Merchant 

Dedicated to LGBTQ Africa 

Uganda / Iraq / Iran / Tennessee ban

Man / Man / Referendum / Under ban

The streets are red / Throats red

Men of God mock our dead.

bury me under your usages 

of my cousins you told to be 

real enough to see seventeen 

under an underpass pass the school.

Priests / Preachers / Pastors / Political

Queers / Debacle / Death / Ridicule

The streets are silent / Mob violent

The Church is barred / Shamans silent.

loudly calling us everything under

the book bins by burning the cooked 

pens held by our teachers your forefathers 

sent by a ship disguised as emails and hit send.

Scott Lively / Greg Locke / Exporting hate

In AK-America / Always great

In Harvey Milk / David Kato / Frank Mugisha we trust

In rainbow love we trust /

a bloodlust called me by your name. spoke of God. 

my father taught me the difference between 

little and big G’s. I know your wallet knows us well. 

which pocket swells when you hear a bullet shelled? 

Uganda / Iraq / Iran / Florida ban

Man / Man / Under ban

Republicans going rogue

Preachers / Same thing / pogue. 

James Schwartz is a poet & author of various poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America (Kindle, 2011), Punatic (Writing Knights Press, 2019) & most recently Motor City Mix, Sunset in Rome (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He resides in Detroit, Michigan. Twitter @queeraspoetry  

Joshua Merchant is a Black Queer native of East Oakland, CA exploring what it means to be human as an intersectional being. What they’ve been exploring as of late has been in the realm of loving and what it means while processing trauma. They feel as though as a people, especially those of us more marginalized than others, it has become too common to deny access to our true source of power as a means of feeling powerful. However, they’ve come to recognize with harsh lessons and divine grace that without showing up for ourselves and each other, everything else is null and void. Innately, everything Merchant writes is a love letter to their people. Because of this they’ve had the honor to witness their work being held, understood, published or forthcoming in literary journals such as 580Split, The Root Work Journal, Anvil Tongue Books, Spiritus Mundi Review, and elsewhere. Twitter: @ibursailor_dune 

THE AGE OF MAGA HATS AND A DIMWIT VIRUS

by Lyndi Waters                

 

More Than a Feeling by Matt Lubchansky, The Nib, April 22, 2020

Our generation passes
with both hands over our eyes,
yet moving a certain bluster
through the world as owners,

out the other side
as whimpering eye blinks,
departing roughly the same time
realization dawns

of how the world has carved us,
tumbled us in the rapids
until our edges are smooth.
The preachers wave their cleavers,

hack us apart like fresh fish at market,
politicians widen the space
between the halves
then stuff them with our own fears.

How long will we acquiesce
to rock hunters who pass truth by
in search of people to fit their stories,
characters who have already

been ear-tagged through fable,
pressed into service,
handed scripts and dark glasses.
And yet we continue on with a dimwit virus,

MAGA hats, sippy cups of bleach,
protesters demanding haircuts,
and quiet poets, who navel gaze and describe sunsets
while Denise Levertov rolls in her grave.

Lyndi Waters is a Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the 2019 Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award, the 2018 Eugene V. Shea National Poetry Contest, and the 2019 Wyoming Writers, Inc. free verse contest. Lyndi’s poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in literary magazines and anthologies such as The Owen Wister Review, Gyroscope Review, New Verse News, Picaroon Poetry, Unbroken Journal, Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016), and Troubadour (Picaroon Poetry Press, U.K., 2017).