COMMON-TATER COMMENTATOR

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

A book-keeper whose boss repeatedly shouted the word "potato" at her "in a strong Irish accent" has been awarded more than £23,000 by an employment tribunal after it found she had been racially harassed. —BBC, March 11,2026

Potato is

The racial slur

An Irish Ms

Got hurled at her

Repeatedly:

Her spud-brained boss

Turned out to be

An albatross.

But Bernadette,

Though sore abashed,

Refused to let

Her worth get mashed

And went to court.

Now judgment's sealed.

Long story short:

His spud got peeled!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His poems have appeared in Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, WestWard Quarterly, and several other journals. In 2025 he won the Children's Unpublished category of the Eyelands Book Awards with Flora’s Flock and Other Stories to Read Aloud.

ADAM NAMING THE AMERICAN BEASTS

by Eric Fisher Stone




Adam cupped a narrowmouth toad
in hands oiled by prairie loam and named him
Narrowmouth Toad, chickadees he called
Snuggle Pandas. The Kiowa told him
not to christen bison while their scraggly clouds
hooved the booming plains. They belong
to the Creator, as does their names.

The peccary he baptized Gruntsnout
and the Gila monster, Lavatooth
before the natives banished Adam
to South America where Cortez walked
gonging in steel and helped add
Spanish words to llamas, capybaras,
comet-long arapaima fish
in the Orinoco, poison frogs like blue fire,
tapirs dancing through green chapels of ferns.

With all local words replaced, they were free
to varnish crowns from Incan gold,
blush Naples’ gardens with tomatoes, claim
man’s dominion over gulls and bitterns
and erase the world with their tongues.

Eric Fisher Stone lives in Ames, Iowa where he is a graduate student in Iowa State University’s MFA in Writing and the Environment program. His poetry has recently appeared in Poets Reading the News, Strange Poetry, The Hopper, Dime Show Review and is forthcoming in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry.