NOVEMBER

by Jenna Le

November Rain - Contemporary Blue Abstract Painting by Gordan P. Junior 

November is a mammal, smoke-gray, meek.

Its lumbering body uses weighty flippers

to paddle, making short-lived silver streaks

in the surface of the bay where it’s immersed.

 

It loves the brackish waters of year’s end,

where black-green tufts of daydreams toss and seethe,

the fodder that it munches till it’s fattened

and farts its way up toward the sun to breathe.

 

At times, its blimp-like bulk, incautious, crashes

into our worries, our hurry to complete

our home improvement plans before the fractious

first snow, our human habit to mistreat

 

each other, our campaign ads, our work stress.

It wears those scars from one year to the next.

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), a Second Place winner in the Elgin Awards, and Manatee Lagoon (forthcoming from Acre Books, 2022). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch.

PORTRAIT OF WARPAINT

Pencil on paper with typed spoken word by Deidra Suwanee Dees

Dr. Deidra Suwanee Dees is Director/Tribal Archivist at Poarch Band of Creek Indians. She teaches Native American Studies at the University of South Alabama, initiated by the Tribe. She earned her doctorate at Harvard. She is the author of a chapbook, Vision Lines: Native American Decolonizing Literature. Heleswv heres, mvto.

WHAT FEEDS US

by Amy Strauss Friedman

Each morning I reach into a bag of broken hearts
to feed my dog. Chicken biscuits in fragments
from freighting. He devours them whole
as if his survival hinges on love, on ancestry,
an ancient civilization that still remembers him.

He chews them rabidly as news of Las Vegas
bleeds through the television screen, another omen
of our dying planet. Our stars have left the scene
for the night, and in their wake the smoky scars
of the newly dead. We feast on broken hearts.
It’s all we have to feed us.


Amy Strauss Friedman is the author of the poetry collection The Eggshell Skull Rule forthcoming from Kelsay Books, and the chapbook Gathered Bones are Known to Wander (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). A two-time Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Escape Into Life, decomP, and elsewhere. Amy lives in Denver, Colorado where she teaches English at Columbia College.

HAPPINESS, THE A-BOMB, AND WHY I DON'T MARCH ANYMORE

by Lynnie Gobeille 

AMERICA IS TAKING A STAND FOR EQUAL RIGHTS. JANUARY 21 AT 1:00 PM EASTERN TIME, RISE FOR ONE MINUTE OF SILENCE FOR WOMEN'S EQUALITY. Saturday, January 21, there are women’s marches and rallies planned in all 50 states. At 1:00 PM in Our Nation's Capital and at the exact same moment in every time zone across the United States, stand up for equality in one minute of silent solidarity. From Hawaii to Maine, Alaska to Florida, and every great state in between, for one shared silent minute, we rise for our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, and ourselves. 1@1 is a small, symbolic act in support of the American ideal of one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. It is one powerful minute to connect, reflect and recommit to making that American ideal a reality. Whether able to attend a rally or not, all Americans can join this unifying action on behalf of women, girls and the future of our nation.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black." —Robert Kennedy, April 4, 1968

Let’s just say
For the sake of argument
That this is the last poem
I’ll ever write—
(having just shoveled an entire driveway
. . . good lord at my age, that’s quite the feat . . .
feet- no pun intended)
And there's a good chance I might die tonight . . .
Would I want this poem to contain
A seagull?  A fence?  An open gate?
Perhaps my sister’s new garage door happiness?
The draining of the swamp?
Toss in the news of the Ft. Lauderdale Airport shooting
A line or two just to prove I was still aware—
Of the total lack of kindness every where.

I would, of course, want to include a stanza
To clarify Why I no longer march . . .
Not against or for—
make love not war.
Yet I find it difficult to phrase
To sum up all those years and causes
Crossing those picket lines—
yes . . . I have the scars to prove it—
carrying signs.

Every where a sign—
Long haired hippie freaks need not apply,
Power to the People
Four dead in Ohio,
and it's 1, 2 , 3
What are you marching for, don’t ask me.
I don’t give a damn—my last stop was in Vietnam
We shall overcome—
We Shall Overcome.

But let’s get back to the A-bomb in this title.
Oppenheimer was merely a scientist—
or perhaps he was a poet just like me—
Creating and solving the huge man-kind mystery.
Ay, there’s the rub in life.


Lynnie Gobeille is passionate about  poetry.