HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY 2020

by Mary K O'Melveny

Once again three old white
men will mansplain about
child care, abortion rights,
how pregnancy pratfalls
can stall a fine career.
No one questioned their
electability,
told them to lean in, smile
more. Or less. Or back off.
Be more charming. Sound less
smart. Dress up. Dress down.
Pretend their lives were not
history lessons. About
a bazillion women
know more than these guys, laugh
at their careless presumptions,
clueless, charmless speeches,
responsibility
denials.  We weep too.
Because change never takes
place.  It seems that pinky
promises are made to
be broken. Everyone is
so, so sorry.  No one
feels like celebrating.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

POLITICS AND PICASSO

by Ed Werstein

A Facebook friend posts: Any blue
will do! and I comment: What if
Picasso had had that attitude?
We may be entering another of our
periodic blue periods. I want to scream
across the internet, No! Not any blue will do!
According to the founders, we are
the architects, the artists, of our own
future. (If we have one).
We mustn’t just dip blindly at the blue
palette we’re offered to cover the orange
we’ve been putting up with lately.

Some blues bend toward green, while
others appear blue, but quickly turn
yellow when applied to the canvas.

Artists! Let’s amaze our many critics around the world.
Let’s choose a new revolutionary blue
(or at least a reformist one), a blue
we haven’t dabbled in in decades.

Ed Werstein is a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In 2018 he received the Lorine Niedecker Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. His latesT chapbook is Benediction & Baseball.

ANY FUNCTIONING ADULT 2020

by Marc Swan




On a lawn down a side street off a main drag
in Portland Maine, it catches my eye—
simple phrase in red, white and blue
with a big bang center stage
to that intact region our current leader
can’t claim—a brain that thinks, acts,
feels with compassion, caring, humanity.
A sign in a yard can’t change the world
but it can open thinking beyond
media thrum and whimper—
insult, injury, uncertainty, and help us feel
we can make a difference
as clichéd as that may be. Grab your pen,
paper, keyboard, text, phone, load up
the information highway with a message
echoing these immortal words—
Yes We Can.

Marc Swan has poems forthcoming in Stonecoast Review, The Nashwaak Review, Channel Magazine, Floyd County Moonshine, among others. His latest collection today can take your breath away was published by Sheila-na-gig Editions in 2018. He lives in coastal Maine with his wife Dd, an artist, clothing designer and maker.

GODZILLA VS KONG

by George Salamon


Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday officially filed as a candidate for the Alabama Democratic presidential primary … Bloomberg could jolt the Democratic primary race with his late entry and a personal war chest estimated at more than $50 billion.” The Hill, November 8, 2019

If two money monsters will fight
For the nation's greatest might
Yankee Doodle Dandy  has put
A feather of another color in his cap,
The one flying for democracy will
Have given way to one celebrating
The piracy of buying and selling,
Making business the only business
Of our fading political institutions.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO and has most recently contributed to The Asses of Parnassus, One Sentence Poems, Dissident Voice and TheNewVerse.News.

AND NOT THAT ONE, EITHER

by Devon Balwit

Cartoon by SIGNE WILKINSON, The Inquirer, February 13, 2019

Abrasive, ambitious, unlikable—
(truth is, you remind me of my mother,
or of those women who have “other
things to do” when I call) in short, unelectable,
no matter your platform. You remind me
of that girl in class who always scored
a point or two higher, who looked bored
when I spoke. You seem angry—
Why are you so angry all the time?
And who, if I may ask, is watching your kids
while you get uppity? Besides, bids
for President, for a place in the lime-
light should go to those with a prettier face—
(and who’d choose “pretty” for a Presidential race?)


Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found here as well as in The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Fifth Wednesday (on-line), Apt, Grist, and Oxidant Engine among others.

KARMA COMES FOR CARL

by j.lewis

Carl Paladino, a western New York builder, one-time Republican candidate for governor of New York and political ally of President-elect Donald J. Trump, came under fire on Friday for racially offensive comments about President Obama and the first lady, who Mr. Paladino said should be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe. Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford,” said Mr. Paladino, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2010, making an apparent reference to the Hereford cattle breed. He said he hoped the disease killed the president. Asked what he most wanted to see “go away” in the new year, Mr. Paladino — who has a reputation in New York political and business circles for speaking in an unfiltered manner reminiscent of Mr. Trump’s — answered, “Michelle Obama. I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla,” he said. —The New York Times, December 23, 2016. PHOTO CREDIT: HANS PENNINK/REUTERS via HuffPost, December 26, 2016

the knock at the door
startled him from half-dreams
into an irritated shout
who's there?
who's there?

no answer

thinking perhaps the single knock
meant, what else, but opportunity
his curiosity carried him
to the door where he queried
'that you, trump?'

again no answer

so it had to be, just had to be
something special for him and him alone
door opened slowly to quell his questions
and there they stood
gorilla on a hereford led by karma
who urged them forward
'get him, my loves, he's yours'

no answer

but with a shove into the room
the hereford took a mad stance over paladino
while the gorilla waited patiently
to drag the terrified peddler of hate
to a cave in zimbabwe where things

require no answer

j.lewis is a nurse practitioner, musician, and internationally published poet, as well as a contributing editor for Verse Virtual. His poems have appeared online and in print in numerous journals from California to Nigeria and the UK. His first collection of poetry and photography A Clear Day in October was published in June 2016. A chapbook is forthcoming from Praxis Magazine in early 2017.

NOVEMBER'S FEAST

by A.S. Coomer

Airwaves shocked full of jingoist jingles,
ones & zeroes blinking red & blue & filtering fuzzy hatreds into you.
Sing me to sleep, America. Put me on out, lay me low, down,
somewhere green, somewhere dark, out of my misery.
November’s laid out like a feast, plates & platters of curated misinformation,
prepped prejudices propped up, steaming & juicing, on hot beds of hostility.
The feast seems to be never-ending but not all are invited.
The few will dine then trickle scraps unscrupulously down
to us mangy mutts, waiting with wide eyes & wagging tongues
for whatever it left of the land we stole to begin with.


A.S. Coomer is a native Kentuckian serving out a purgatorial existence somewhere in the Midwest. His work has appeared in over thirty publications. He’s got a handful of novels that need good homes. He also runs a “record label” for poetry.

ODE TO AN OPTIMISTIC FRIEND

by William Aarnes

Image source: The Never-Ending Nightmare That is This Election by Tom Tomorrow

“nasty, brutish, and short” —Hobbes

You tell me to stop
being so pessimistic

so I’m going to start the morning
by ignoring the news

and focus on something random
like cutting my toenails

in hopes that early in the day
someone will see my toes

sticking out of my sandals
and admire my feet,

such lovely, lovely feet,
a compliment so charming

I might stop worrying
about how, despite years

of seeming stability,
it’s conceivable, that—boom!—

by the end of the week
the country’s domestic tranquility

will have collapsed into clashes
in the streets, at times the fighting

among swiftly mustered militias
so intense that the corners

of houses fall in rubble,
nobody bothering to care

who’s caught in the crossfire,
most of us come to grief,
                                                                                             
and I’ll be cowering
(with my lovely toes)

in the plaster-dusted tub
without much hope

of your trying to cheer me up
till—pray we’re among the living—

some well-armed force
imposes peace.


William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.  His latest collection is Do in Dour (Aldrich Press).

ELECTION DAY APPROACHES

by Joan Mazza

Image source: “The Never-Ending Nightmare That is This Election” by Tom Tomorrow

Anxiety is a necklace of barbed wire, ankle bracelets
shackled to a boat filling with water. We know we’re
going down. I wake gasping, unable to tell dream
from reality, my bed a rocking sea. That muffled
sound of a crying cat—locked in a closet? —
an owl on this chilly night. I open the window
to listen, but he hoots only once more. Autumn scents
drift in with the cold, heat vent blowing at my feet.
In bed, fragrance of old dog and woolen blankets,
shadows of barking. This isn’t Mineral or Richmond,
but unnamed rural Central Virginia, oak trees and crows
content in their ignorance of news and election polls,
unable to comprehend the concept of email or fraud.
No, they understand fraud, who cheats and misleads
instead of warning of danger. The crows know who’s
a friend because even birds show their true colors.

Who goes there? No one answers. Silence—
the gift of second sleep. Today, I’ll be part of a panel
of writers talking to those who want to be published
but don’t write. Hopefuls with empty notebooks ask
about agents and fees, not about craft. They could win
the Pulitzer, Booker, and Nobel for their ideas alone.
They’ll be on TV, have their own show. About what,
they don’t know. No one asks, Joan, how can I become
a better writer? What books might be instructive by example?
This trend toward magical thinking will ruin us, as if
the most bombastic white men could offer salvation,
a cure for bad judgment. I whisper, Mon Dieu! although
I don’t believe in any Dieu, not Thor or Zeus
or even Aphrodite. My old dog makes her little cough
that means, Come back to bed, and I do, wearing fleece
and flannel, not barbed wire, my mind still shackled.


Author’s Note: Based on Twenty Little Poetry Projects by Jim Simmerman.


Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Slipstream, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.

THE JOYS OF SUMMER

by Frank De Canio




For once a year a level playing field
obtains for millions of us baseball fans.
No legislation works like bats men wield
for getting us to join disparate hands
in making sure the same ground work is done
that candidates are loath to do. One ump
enforces rules until the game is won.
Nor is there fear the losing team can trump
the outcome. Players get to base on balls
that otherwise are wanting in some pay
to play receivers heeding donor’s calls,
instead of those constituents convey.
And universal suffrage simply means
that all have access to their tv screens.


Born & bred in New Jersey, Frank De Canio works in New York. He loves music from Bach to Dory Previn, Amy Beach to Amy Winehouse, World Music, Latin, opera. Shakespeare is his consolation, writing his hobby. He likes Dylan Thomas, Keats, Wallace Stevens, Frost, Ginsburg, and Sylvia Plath as poets.

READING HOUELLEBECQ THE NIGHT BEFORE EARLY VOTING BEGIINS

by Katherine Smith

If this emptiness were all that was left
I would spend the rest of my life reading
paranoid fantasies late into the night.

Instead of going out early to see the leaves
of the cherry trees turn a creamy peach
I would read every night till three the words of the hero

who rarely stepped out of the Sixth Arrondissement
of Paris, a place I happen to know quite well.
I would drink cocoa and fall under the spell of a clash

between fascists and the Muslim Brotherhood
the critics call satire. But I’m pretty sure
the writer believes far more in his dark story

of veiled women, cowardly professors, conspiracies,
than he believes in me, his American reader,
a middle-aged woman in the suburbs. This morning

I regret losing myself in his tale. Dew has already dried
from the late blooming roses. My face sags. I shower,
and accept that my thoughts are unlikely

to persuade anyone. Dependably sane
and despicably naïve, I start my car, drive
to the Frederick Senior Citizens’ Center

to cast my ballot during early voting.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003; her second Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press, appeared in 2014.

REFLECTING ON MOBY DICK A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION

by Wilda Morris

Image source: aNewDomain

We still have not learned
all the lessons that Melville taught:
the Union is not as united
as we once thought,
how easy it can be to drop prejudices
when we get to know
and love the pagan stranger,
the risks of empire building,
and how bowing to a self-absorbed
and vindictive leader puts us all in danger.

If Melville were writing today
the crew would grow from thirty
to fifty, as many as the states
that could sink into the abyss
if we leave this election to the fates.
We may be on the brink.


Wilda Morris has a doctorate in political science from American University in Washington, D.C., but instead of becoming a political scientist, she ended up as a poet. Her blog provides a monthly contest for other poets.

TOO LATE, WE THOUGHT

by Lisa Vihos

July-August 2016 issue, The Atlantic

It was that autumn of hurrication
and blusterment, when kings fought
for their crowns, and beasticals awoke
to shake loose their brassy manes.
Geese flew every which way but south.

There was hatertude in the air
and a forbading sense of miserdom.
There was a feeling that something
had been lost; I’ll call it humankindlyness,
gone the way of the Mohican and the dodo.

It was a time when be equaled seems
and no one knew what the definition
of is was, or will be, or will have been.
It was a topsy-turvy time of extreme poshity
and abjectionable going-withoutedness.

The best minds of our generation
went missing in a moragmire
of interpetude and degenerance,
feigning some kind of wonderful;
some kind of altruistica merviosa.

It was a time when lachromosis set in
and a distinct hardening of arterial material.
We thought we had the answer. We thought
we could fix things with a bludgeon. We thought,
but it was not enough, and it came too late
to rectifiliate our dementia.

Lisa Vihos is a poet living near Lake Michigan in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She is the Poetry and Arts Editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal and an organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change. She recently received a grant from her undergraduate alma mater, Vassar College, to design and build a children's reading garden in Malawi in 2017.

WORDS

by Wayne Scheer




The American presidential election
has come down to a
words matter candidate
and her
it's only words opponent.

One uses words
the way a munitions expert
approaches a live grenade,
the other
tosses the grenade
to see
what will happen next.

One respects,
considers, even fears words
while the other
sees words as fuel
and acts surprised
when an explosion results.

One selects words
as carefully
as one chooses a diamond ring,
the other
loves only the sound
of words,
unconcerned with their appearance
or meaning.

One will be elected president
and speak
for America.

Wayne Scheer has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net. He's published numerous stories, poems and essays in print and online, including Revealing Moments,  a collection of flash stories. His short story “Zen and the Art of House Painting” has been made into a short film.

THE SKELETON RIDES SHOTGUN

by Charlotte Jones

Deathocracy Mask

The night arrives,
that single night of the year,
when the sleigh
pulls free of the underworld,
dragged through the ether
by hellhounds
reined and guided
by the unholy ghost
while the skeleton rides shotgun.

The mission is not to
distribute gifts to
undeserving children,
but to harvest the souls
of those who have bargained
with the devil—
the proud,
the greedy
the politician
who takes away
the rights of the masses.
Their souls in exchange
for power and dominion
over the poor, the weak,
the unsuspecting.

They walk among us,
smug in their undetectability.
You see them on the nightly news,
read about them in the papers,
they sometimes run for president
and rarely, very rarely
they wind up in jail.

But rest assured,
hell awaits.

Charlotte Jones writes poetry and flash fiction in Houston, TX.  Her work has appeared in over eighty literary and commercial magazines including The Bellevue Literary Review, Nerve Cowboy and Barbaric Yawp which nominated her for a Pushcart Prize.  When not writing, she loves to travel, golf, sing and play the piano.

SHE'S A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW

by Paul Smith


Yes, the magic words


‘Extremely Careless’ comes to mind
Let me interrupt
She didn’t know what “C” meant
See?
Every classified document has a header
But there was no header
The “C” was in the body
She just saw a “C”
See?
C C Rider?
See what you have done
No!
Can’t you see can’t you see
What that woman
Is doin’ to me
That would be a reasonable inference
When you see a “C”
And by the way
It isn’t just a “C”
It’s a “C” in parentheses
It doesn’t matter
You don’t need a header
What does it matter?
There was no “A” or “B” or “D”
There were no other letters
To suggest alphabetical order
There were other emails
Other court orders, but
No bodies
None to speak of
What are words anyway
Just approximations
An integral of convergence
That stretches from Delaware to Nowhere
To Somewhere
From the coal mines of Kentucky
To the California Some
Nobody can deny
That he’s a jolly good fellow
That she’s a jolly good felon
That everyone can deny
That’s what the footer said anyway

Paul Smith lives in Chicago and tries to write poetry/fiction that is apolitical, but sometimes circumstances create a perfect storm where peoples' words are so glorious in their non-meaning, he feels obliged to share his wonder at their mystery, convolution and unimportance.

A LEGAL CASE AGAINST AUTUMN

by Jo Ann Steger Hoffman

Bold Autumn Colors Abstract is a photograph by Carol Groenen which was uploaded on November 2nd, 2013 at fineartamerica.

Bold autumn steals light from summer.
Even dumber
he strips trees of lavish green dress,
forces excess
of brilliance to camouflage dying.
He’s lying.
He plans to prove summer is trying
to falsely convict him of stealth,
of hiding vice beneath radiant wealth.
Even dumber, he forces excess. He’s lying.

Jo Ann Steger Hoffman is a writer, editor, and former communications director whose publications include a children’s book, short fiction and a variety of poems in literary journals.  Her 2010 non-fiction book, Angels Wear Black, recounts the only technology executive kidnapping to occur in California’s Silicon Valley.  A native of Toledo, Ohio, she and her husband now live in Cary and Beaufort, North Carolina.

DARK FORESTS

by John Ziegler

The sky is an old shawl
of mumbling gray
resting on the rounded hills.

In the east, ancient trees
decompose in mist and moisture
that feeds wild mushrooms
along their rumpled trunks.

The campaign plods on.
Espousers spit turds,
sport tooth-cracking grins,
obscene innuendo,
outright lies,
in your face,
I’m talking here,
you shut up.

Out west, the fallen pines
unpack in corky chunks
on the dry forest floor.
They smell clean.

In the night forest,
a primeval rhythm
pulses with certainty.


John Ziegler is a poet and potter living in State College, PA.

A CACOPHONY OF CRANES

by Janet Leahy




Sandhill cranes prance the fields
of the Necedah Wildlife Refuge.
They relentlessly clear their throats.
Is this an attempt to find a softer song
to replace the rough ratcheting
that is their call—an attempt to fine-tune
the echo chambers in long necks
to find a kinder music for sky travel.

It is fall of 2016
politics of the season reverberates
with ratcheting calls.
The election draws near
there is no gentle music
air waves guzzle with discordant
degrading language.
Sandhill cranes whisk away,

we rush out to cast an early ballot.

Janet Leahy‘s poems have been published in print and online journals.  Most recently her poems have won second place and honorable mention in the 2016 People and Ideas Poetry Contest.  She has published two collections of poetry, The Storm, Poems of War, Iraq, and Not My Mother’s Classroom. 

ELECTION ANXIETY

by Susan Vespoli 

Swallow election anxiety
like tea;

feel its ant
hill teem, its nit

specks cling; watch it nix
your calm, axe

your peace, tie
you into a zillion tiny

knots, with no exit
so just breathe into the anxiety.

Susan Vespoli lives in Phoenix, AZ where she works a couple of jobs, writes poetry and prose, which has been published online and in  print. These days she is breathing heavily into election anxiety.