RUNAWAY COVID AND THE HAVE NOTS

by Terese Coe

"Did Trump Say More COVID-19 Testing Makes the US Look Bad? The president has been accused of forgetting the people behind the coronavirus case numbers. True." —Snopes

With the poor, poc, and seniors dead,
the Dotard and Bojo are raking in bread.
Few testing sites means few revivals,
no masks or meds, then no survivals.

The people spoke, but they were clawed
by racist, ageist dotard frauds.
The people spoke, the people died.
Covid was oversimplified.

Did Vladimir think of everything
for the cliques of the turkeys à la king?
It’s hardly a story you’ll find is new:
more for the toffs and nothing for you.

Terese Coe's poems and translations appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Moth, New American Writing, New Scotland Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Threepenny Review, and the TLS, among others. Her collection Shot Silk was short-listed for the 2017 Poets Prize, and her poem "More" was heli-dropped across London for the 2012 Olympics Rain of Poems. Her most recent book is Why You Can’t Go Home Again, and her black comedy Harry Smith at the Chelsea Hotel was recently presented at Dixon Place, NY. 

TROPES

by Sarah Russell

Left: Four policemen in Rome cooked pasta for an elderly couple after their loneliness and television news caused them such distress they were overheard crying. —The Independent, August 8, 2016. Right: Mary Knowlton, 73, holds a fake blue training firearm prior to a Punta Gorda (FL) Citizen Police Academy role-playing exercise during which she was shot and killed by K-9 Officer Lee Coel. Punta Gorda Police Chief Tom Lewis said authorities were “unaware” that live ammunition was available during the exercise. Photo source: Sue Paquin/Charlotte Sun via Wink News, August 10, 2016.

      "'Sometimes the loneliness melts into tears...'

say the Rome police in a statement.”

— The Independent, August 8, 2016.

Italian police still use metaphors in their reports.
In Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, guys with guns
(or not) scare the tropes out of cops, make voices
strident in the no man's land of barred windows,
triple locked doors.  A librarian in Punta Gorda
volunteers to play the law in a “shoot/don't shoot”
like on TV, but the bullets aren't a simile.  In Italy,
the police make old folks pasta with cheese and butter,
sustenance assuaging isolation.  In Punta Gorda
the trope gets tangled, like on the streets
in the allegory of black and white.

Sarah Russell has returned to poetry after a career teaching, writing and editing academic prose. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Kentucky Review, Red River Review, Misfit Magazine, The Houseboat, and Shot Glass Journal, among others. Her poem “Denouement” won the monthly Goodreads poetry contest.