JANUARY 6 SLUSH FUND LIMERICKS

by Paul A. Freeman

 

 

Cartoon by Clay Jones

DOJ official told GOP ally that big payouts were coming for Jan. 6 defendants: Months before the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund was announced, Ed Martin predicted Capitol rioters would get millions, even if it took until 2028, two people told NBC News. May 20, 2026

 

 

They climbed up to Capitol Hill,

Mike Pence they were going to kill;

and now, for their crime,

’gainst reason or rhyme,

their pockets they’re hoping to fill.

 

The criminals of January six,

are getting a monetary fix.

Yet women abused

and sorely misused

by Epstein and friends still get nix.

 

Paul A. Freeman is the author of The Movement, a dystopia-Americana novel set in a future United States of America. The book is available from Amazon as an ebook download and as a paperback. His first book, Rumours of Ophir, a crime novel taught at ‘O’ level in Zimbabwean high schools, was also translated into German. In addition to having two novels, a children’s book and an 18,000-word narrative poem (Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers!) commercially published, Paul Freeman is the author of numerous published short stories, poems, plays and articles.

BALTIMORE CARGO

by Patricia Jakovich VanAmburg

Image source:  A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland (The Maryland State Archives, Annapolis MD and the University of Maryland College Park, MD)

Why did we not see cargo arriving
with the first slave ship whose
rotten timber roiled the harbor
leaving tobacco in our pockets…

cargo of manumission’s
low skilled “quasi-freedmen”
filling local factories for
twenty percent cheaper wages
and a city of transient pockets…

cargo of professional
“blood tub” rioters and
Know Nothing fraud
dividing a city until
free Blacks were pocketed
into segregated education…

cargo from World War II
steel Liberty Ships promising
jobs for thousands of poor
white southerners while
expanding corporate pockets…

cargo from decades
of racial blockbusting
depreciating neighborhoods
building heroin ghettos
bulging pockets of crime…

We should keep in mind
what we put in our pockets.


Patricia Jakovich VanAmburg teaches literature at Howard Community College in Columbia Maryland where she is also affiliated with The Little Patuxent Review. Her most recent chapbook is titled Watching for Birds.