THE REST IS STILL UNWRITTEN

by Katie Kemple

Instead of watching the inauguration,
I conduct a series of online searches
for cast members of The Hills. Because
I heard one of the couples lost
a home in the Palisades fire. Holy shit,
I thought, they're still together?!
A hot mess on the show. I guess
that's the magic of editing. How sweet
to learn they'd had kids, sold crystals,
posted socials together. Now they're
suing the city of Los Angeles. Back
in The Hills days we were new to realty
TV didn't realize playing a villain
could be profitable, a career even.
The lines blurred between villain, 
hero. I think about The Apprentice,
watching that first season with my
husband, trying to decode the language
of boardroom politics, house poor
snuggled into our IKEA sofa.    
You're fired! a phrase we parroted
for laughs. I'm nostalgic for innocence
to be honest. There's no rain today.
My skin, dry. The Santa Anas blow
fire. Who decides what happens next? 

Katie Kemple still gets choked up listening to Unwritten—its optimism and faith in the future. She hasn't lost hope in our country yet. She has contributed poems to The New Verse News in the past. Her poems have appeared in Rattle (Poets Respond), SWWIM, and Maudlin House.

WALKING DEAD

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

The Lakota people  consider the Black Hills to be sacred ground; it was originally included in the Great Sioux Reservation. The United States broke up the territory after gold was discovered in the Black Hills. The mountain into which the Rushmore figures wer carved is known to the Lakota Sioux as Six Grandfathers. Photo: Six Grandfathers circa 1905. Source: Wikipedia.

On the eve of the fourth
in Lincoln’s shadow
on sacred ground
of the Lakota and Cheyenne
downwind of the dust
of an unfinished bust
of Crazy Horse
not one of his kin asked for
a sitting president defending
the Stars and Bars
its politicians, generals and adjutants
to extolling chants of

USA! USA!

What do you say to a drop in
from a fortified copter flying
the Great White Father
over crowds of people whose lands
these stone monstrosities smother
carvings made at the hand of a man
who sympathized with the Klan
a troupe of Confederate brethren
keeping alive the dream of Calhoun
interposition, the antebellum masculine
to thwart a more perfect union?

Carve the face of the great emancipator
beside slaveholders and Teddy R.

I think the fourth is in danger of becoming
a mausoleum because we do not vet
the monument builders
history stalks the land like the undead
in a high ratings show many of us watch
on television.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. Recent work is appearing at Isacoustic, So It Goes, Muddy River, Wilderness House Literary Review, and The Right Life.

DEM(ENT)OCRACY

by Jon Wesick

In retrospect, her symptoms were obvious.
When American democracy mooned her neighbor,
the sheriff didn’t press charges. Who could blame her, after all?
And even though she forgot the last financial crisis,
the last phony war, and the last human rights abuse,
she could talk for hours about the framers’ original intent.

Once books and newspapers filled her study.
Now she spends days glued to reality TV
and only gets out of her easy chair
to answer phone calls from salesmen
offering magic beans and mercury supplements.
Her home smells of rot and petroleum
and since shopping is too much bother,
she simply hands defense contractors her bankcard.

By the time police found her bewildered
at the grocery store, it was too late.
She’d already wired our inheritance
to some Nigerian “prince.”
Guess we just didn’t want to know.

I don’t know what to do.
I search her blank expression.
Something’s in there. There has to be,
maybe a memory of lightning bugs
and backyard barbecues.
Somewhere behind those cataract-filled eyes
is the image     of us
standing on a Florida beach
while the distant, orange spark
that was the first moon rocket
arced into the sky


Jon Wesick hosts Southern California’s best ice cream parlor poetry reading and is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels.

BIG WINDS

by Neil Shepard

by grobles63

Johnson, Vermont

Big winds in the back pasture this morning.
Must have blown in from that dark bluster
in Ohio where the orange-haired dystopian
shouted himself red: a nation broken,
and only himself with enough narcissistic
moxie to fix it. What would be the fix? Short,
as always, on specifics. But the fix, so
far, fixates on anyone who crosses him.
In short, big winds blow from the little mind
of a schoolyard bully, a bull who charges
every flagging patch of red. And half
the nation’s ready to blow in his blowhard
direction. They’re small children who want
a power-daddy to fix what’s broke.
And the big winds in the back pasture
presage afternoon thunderstorms and
a dome of hot air crushing down on us
that feels like the beginning of intolerable
conditions. A whole summer and autumn
of unbearable heat, which will roast the air
to record highs. If there’s a weather god
today, he’s a strongman. All those grass-heads
below are dried-out, hollow, blown in one
direction: his. The one turkey wading
through them is the steadiest creature in the field,
flattening the unthinking reeds, feeding as it needs,
and popping out onto lawn, finally, like a reality
TV star to shake off its crown of fluff and seed,
and now I see he’s no turkey, he’s a red-faced turkey
vulture, perfect for the clean-up work to come.

Neil Shepard’s sixth and seventh books of poetry came out in 2015: Hominid Up (Salmon Poetry, Ireland) and Vermont Exit Ramps II (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear in many places, among them Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), as well as in Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, and Southern Review. Shepard taught for many years at Johnson State College in Vermont and edited for a quarter-century the Green Mountains Review.