HE TOO

by James Cronin




Who could expect they’d get it right,
as if the crimes weren’t crimes before?
From couch to floor, to any site,
each claims she chose, and asked for more.

Rich men, power, office as hotel,
the scene was set so long ago.
Does beauty lust for age? In hell.
Some drugs, of course, to make it go.

Novice trust sets a satyr’s ease,
then a forceful push to get his fun.
From “seduce” to “rape,” a few degrees,
too dark to tell when all is done.

Moguls, solons and comics may
regret they let their morals skive.
Shame might not be enough today,
when indictments and the cuffs arrive.

The days of grace, of men to men,
are gone thank God and here’s the pitch:
found guilty, you’re in jail and then,
whose turn is it to play the bitch?

James Cronin facilitates a course in the art of the short story for The Second Half, a lifelong learning institute in Fall River, MA. His first book of poetry World of Shadows is scheduled to be published this summer by The Poetry Loft Press of Cranston, RI.

A CHRISTMAS SONNET

by Cally Conan-Davies

Aleksander Reed "Alek" Skarlatos is an American actor and Oregon Army National Guardsman specialist who, along with fellow Americans Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler, a Briton and two Frenchmen, stopped a gunman on a Paris-bound train travelling from Amsterdam via Brussels in August 2015. He has been awarded the United States Army Soldier's Medal from U.S. President Barack Obama, and has received France's highest decoration, the Legion of Honour, from French president François Hollande as well as the medal of Arras, France. Skarlatos competed on season 21 of ABC's Dancing with the Stars with pro dancer Lindsay Arnold (pictured), and finished in third place.

I won't let the good men go unsung
Good men throw their bodies on the lives
of their mothers and their children and their wives
and the unknown. Good men don't die alone

Each day this year, my soul has been punched and stunned
by bullet-men ripping through the dance we do
by bully-men raping girls or threatening to
by barging-men pushing first through the doors of power

while good men act as if nothing mattered more
than to restore the faded elf to the christmas tree
to greet you every morning with toast and tea
to be the hand pressed in the hole the bullet tore

I refuse to let the good men go unsung
They are not many. They are one and one and one . . .


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who expresses here her complex feelings of rage and powerful gratitude.

INGLORIOUS BASTARDS

by Kathleen A. Lawrence





Acting badly,
boorish comics
coax deranged egos.
False good-guys
going Hollywood,
icons indecently
jones and jerk,
kindling lascivious
meager manhoods.
Nihilistic ogres, odd
paunchy producers,
quibble ruthlessly.
Ransacking solicitors,
sleazy thieves
undressing virtue,
these villains wither,
when exposed,
yanking zippers
ad nauseam.

Kathleen A. Lawrence continues to write poetry in upstate New York. Recently she received word that two of her poems have been nominated for 2017 Best of the Net awards, and another was nominated for the 2017 Rhysling Award of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). She has also  had poems published in Rattle (Poets Respond), Eye to the Telescope, haikuniverse, Silver Blade Magazine, The Wild Word magazine (Germany), Altered Reality Magazine, Undertow Tanka Review, and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, among others.

COALS

by Elizabeth Johnston

Image source: DonkeyHotey

“[He] is being raked over the coals in the press right now. People are trying to destroy him”

—Glen Beck in “Witch Hunt: Bill O’Reilly Deserves the Benefit of the Doubt” 

“We will not be staked this time.” 

–Cari-Lee Miller, “Granddaughters”

Myth smokes with the corpses we’ve inherited,
simpering seventy-times-seven girls:
Gretel, escaping the oven to wrap arms around her dead-beat Dad.
Persephone in a singed bikini boarding the bus for Spring Break.
Corn-woman begging for the stake so bellies might be fed.

We are the granddaughters of the witches you burned
and our tongues won’t, anymore,
wrap around the lie:
            Once, Long Ago, Far Away

Like fugitives of Pompeii
we’ve borne the blistering surge,
been arrested mid-joy, fixed
to the earth for centuries, lain airless,
buried under soot, cocooned
our voices like fingers
cast in their clawing.

But go ahead, storytellers.  Rewrite.

Return to the scene shouldering your excuses like shovels,
dismissive as a pickaxe.
Fill the void with your plaster white,
your sight-seer-safe.
Stake your claim. Charge your fees.

There’s profit in bigotry, big money in violence.

Stand over the volcano’s mouth piece,
sermonize, ejaculate,
make your pithy sacrifice.

Never mind the ghosts
who sneak up from behind,
palms facing forward.


Elizabeth Johnston teaches writing, literature, and gender studies in Rochester, NY. A past contributor at TheNewVerse.News, her most recent work appears in The Atlantic, Feminist Formations, and The Boiler.

I'M WITH HER

by Marsha Owens

Image source: Redbubble

I stood in the school lunch line, the boy behind
me snapped the bra buckled across my back,
an awkward restraint on my vanishing childhood.
My face flushed crimson, my shame hot without words
to fling into the high-pitched laughter of pimply boys.

I remember quiet talks about bleeding from wherever
so a girl could do what only a girl could do—give birth,
bloody and magnificent pushing forward a heart,
lungs, fingers, toes—in a man’s world, honey, Mom
said, a man’s world.

I heard a school principal explain how his interview
process involved breasts, how he told young women
to bend their elbows, place them against the wall
so he could determine—A, B, or C cup—all the better
to teach with, I suppose.

Years, centuries even before this 21st Century brought me
to her and her and her, the daughter, still plump with maternal
juices, smiling the mother-love of daughters and mothers, a
raucous cry trickles down my face, “Hot damn! I’m with HER!”


Marsha Owens says, “I am a child of the sixties, and my home state of Virginia still has not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. “