THERE ARE LIGHTER DAYS AHEAD

by Marc Swan

Cartoon by Clay Jones

a wise philosopher said

to the man in the white coat

who nodded his head

as the wind began to howl

and small creatures skittered

into their holes 

thunder roared

rain fell

The river current

shifted its flow

from coursing into a chasm 

of uncertainty and dread 

as all of us

who care about this world

laid smooth hands

on a thoughtless bickering 

destructive old man

Marc Swan lives in coastal Maine. Poems recently published in Ropes, Chiron Review, Sandy River Review, Crannóg, among others. His fifth collection all it would take was published in 2020 by tall-lighthouse (UK).

FOR THE OLD WHITE POETS

by Joan Colby

     “But I’m also torn between my pleasure at seeing part of American culture take significant strides toward equality and my sorrow due to the diminishment of interest in my work.” —Bob Hicok (above left), "The Promise of American Poetry,” Utne Reader, Summer 2019.

     “Why did a white poet see the success of writers of color as a signal of his own demise?” —Timothy Yu, “The Case of the ‘Disappearing’ Poet,” The New Republic, August 7, 2019

Dedicated to Bob Hicok

So now you know how those sonneteers
Must have felt, quietly posting along the
Bridle path with their rhyming dictionaries
And penchant for inversions, when you came along
Riding your free verse helter-skelter, breaking
Lines without regard like a mounted militia
In full rebellion. With your red wheelbarrow
And petals in the metro. White men of privilege,
You’re passe as the people of color race by on motorbikes
Down the crowded lanes where you used to
Summon a rickshaw. Plus ça change. And women
Shouting hands-off! Poems by non-binary
People who use the pronoun they
And where are you now with your forlorn
Confessions that cannot be absolved. This
Is penance contributor: the immigrants
Crossing the river on innertubes
Taking the risk you took once
Writing the word fuck flat out as a racehorse
Hitting the wire and snorting blood.

Joan Colby’s Selected  Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage was awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Her recent books include Carnival  from FutureCycle Press, The Seven Heavenly Virtues from Kelsay Books and Her Heartsongs from Presa Press. Her latest book is Joyriding to Nightfall from FutureCycle Press.

THEY SAY AND WOMEN IN WHITE RESPOND

by Tricia Knoll

While magnetic north has always wandered, its routine plod has shifted into high gear, sending it galloping across the Northern Hemisphere—and no one can entirely explain why. —National Geographic, February 4, 2019. EARTH PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA/JSC

They say north shifted as if we didn’t know
something bigger than big moved sideways
while liars lied and the thieves of night
hung plastic LED stars from phone lines.

They say it is almost too late when we know
too late came and passed like the reverb
gong on the sacred brass bell in the woods
where they want to fence the Pando

as if a fence is any way to save anything
except an illusion of privacy. Some say
they will feed the hungry and a few
are fed. Some dressed in white to stand

out and up, to be counted among the mix
of red ties and blue suits and to cheer
their presence in the mix. We aren’t sure
why north shifted in a molten globe.


Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who has been writing snow poems for the past six weeks. Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies. Her recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the received the Gold Prize for Motivational Poetry in the 2018 Human Relations Indie Book Prize.