ON NOTICING HOW MANY PRO-LIFE MEN ARE SMOKERS

by Julie Steiner

Sing about the sanctity human life has.
Preach with all your passion: Abortion’s murder!
Afterwards, wind down with a soothing ciggie,
     smug in your maleness.

Suck the calming poison that causes cancer.
Taint the perfect organs your Maker gave you.
Human life is precious in women’s bodies.
     Not in your own, though.

Slowly self-destruct, in a way that rules out
making any life-saving gifts to others.
Maim your liver, pancreas, kidneys, heart, lungs.
     Damage them. Waste them.

Vandalize these treasures, so you and others—
patients needing transplants—will perish sooner.
God made women vessels of life, not you, right?
     Men don’t get pregnant.

Smoking? That’s your medicine. Helps you function.
Helps you fight anxiety, which unmans you.
If you quit, you’ll crumble. Complete your mission!
     Think of the children—

millions—who will live when abortion’s outlawed.
(Care about them only until they’re born, though.
Vote against the programs that help support them.
     Kids are expensive.)

Think of justice: women should feel the birth pangs
God assigned to Eve, in His perfect wisdom.
Sin and death were caused by a wayward woman.
     Women should suffer.

Virtue equals maleness. Its root's the Latin
vir, “a man” . . . not homo, “a human being.”
Eve is evil. Punish, control, subdue her,
     adamant Adam.

Let your male self-righteousness rise like incense.
Smoke like that proverbial chimney, built on
hearthstones far beneath you, where women labor.
     Tower above them,

fiery martyr. Fume at the fallen females.
Wheeze your hymns to Him—to Almighty Maleness.
God forbid that women should say, as men do,
     This is my body.

Julie Steiner lives and writes in San Diego. Besides the TheNewVerse.News, the venues in which her poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, American Arts Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, First Things, Rattle, and the Rat's Ass Review.

AWOL

by Rick Gray

Kabul sunrise. Image source: Panoramio

In a locked-down house of disconnection,
this is the hidden room of yellow exclamation.
Outside its mirrored windows dawn explodes the targeted capital
And strikes a starving boy on the corner waving a smoking tin can
Begging for a fragment of fresh luck.

Deserting an endless war of circling thought
I walk away from the blue face of my frozen screen
and step AWOL passed dreaming guards cuddling Kalashnikovs.
Digging down into the animal heat of my thigh
I grip metal jangling against a shriveled coma on antidepressants.

Oh, it’s so nice to stroll in the Kabul Sunrise!
“Give me muddy!” the boy on the corner orders me,
his English broken as my abandoned laptop.
I release my fist and watch Afghan coins drop 
Flaming into the yellow cracks of a hungry human hand.


Rick Gray teaches in Kabul. He has work forthcoming in Salamander and the book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock.