STICK BOYS

by Lynne Schilling

© Bidouze Stephane | Dreamstime.com

Like a tower of graceful giraffes, Ethiopian  

boys on bamboo stilts walk high over the land.

 

The boys smile; some have intricate designs

painted on their faces or long, straight legs. 

 

Their aerial travel allows them to spot the cows 

in high grass, avoid the bites of venomous snakes.

 

It makes me think of those who bend the knee,

smudge the line between right and wrong—

 

the bottom-lined CEOs, the well-endowed

university presidents, the media moguls,

 

the politicians and puffed-up agency heads, 

the bonus-hungry citizens—

 

They look weak and cowed on the ground

among the vipers.

While Lynne Schilling has been writing poetry on and off for forty years, she began writing  seriously four years ago at age 75.. She has published in Quartet, The Alchemy Spoon, Rue Scribe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Lucky Jefferson and others. She has a poem forthcoming in contemporary haibun online. 

DEMOCRACY WITH SCISSORS AND LOOPHOLES

by David Lee

Original cartoon of "The Gerry-Mander.” This is the political cartoon that led to the coining of the term “gerrymander.” The district depicted in the cartoon was created to favor the incumbent Democratic-Republican party candidates of Governor Elbridge Gerry over the Federalists in 1812. Public Domain. —Wikipedia

They call it redistricting,
like moving furniture for better feng shui.
But the map on the table
looks like it’s been drawn by a toddler with a sugar high
and an eraser for a conscience.

The district snakes down one block
just to loop around a donor’s backyard.
Three neighborhoods vanish into
a comma-shaped voting island
where ballots get counted
only if the tide’s out.

Meanwhile, in the Capitol,
the same lawmakers who swear
the system is “by the people”
are day-trading defense stocks
before breakfast,
and exempting themselves
from every law they praise in speeches.

When asked why the rules don’t apply to them,
one Congressman grins like a cat on a warm hood
and says,
“Well, the pen is mightier than the ballot box,
especially if you own the pen.”

David Lee is a physician, poet, and occasional troublemaker who moonlights as a satirical commentator on the absurdities of modern politics and culture. His poems have been called “provocative, playful, and just unsettling enough to make you think twice before laughing a third time.”

DEDICATED TO THE UNKNOWN: A HURRICANE MARKER FOR LIFE OR DEATH

by Susan Terris

KBTX, September 27, 2024

Florida’s venomous snakes:

Her mother gave her a marker to put

Name & birthdate on her torso

 

She promised   swore they'd be all right

Today is not all right   She’s not okay

Her mother’s missing   ghostly   gone

 

In a glass she stares at ink-black ink

Backwards & snake-less

Remembers how stupid it seemed

 

Where is she now this day when she

Has not seen even one killer snake

Who is she now    and who can she be

Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 8 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, 2 plays.  Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review,Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Blackbird, Swwim, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Spring 2024, her eighth poetry book Green Leaves, Unseeing was published by Marsh Hawk Press, May 2024. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway & an editor at Pedestal.

OF SNAKES AND STONE

by Olivia Fortier

 

“Self-portrait in the style of Medusa” by Andrea Mantegna c. 1474 Uffizi Gallery. 
Photo via Web Gallery of Art

 

Though afraid of the water, 

my mother hand-scooped the lake 

to wet my skin before she blew up 

water wings, and slid them to the tops

of my arms. 

 

I floated on the surface of a calm lake, 

the flotsam of a failed marriage;

my father had sided with the man 

who’d raped my mother, when he, 

the rapist, denied any wrongdoing, 

as rapists often do, and it was then 

my mother lost her head.

 

From the water, I watched my mother 

walk the beach in search of driftwood 

for garden ornaments. An hour later, 

her pile was small, her harvest thin, 

so I swam back to shore to help her, 

my skin burned from the sun’s reflection 

on the lake’s mirror top. Seeing her error, 

my mother glossed me with sunscreen. 

Then, stony-faced, as single mothers 

must be at times, doing everything alone, 

she removed my wings, deflated them, 

and withdrew into herself.

 

When it comes to driftwood, 

gnarls and knots are lovely decorative 

features. Dead tree roots are rare finds; 

initially disturbing to look at, yes, but 

given a couple coats of shellac to bring 

out their natural beauty, they transform 

into octopi, or staghorn coral. Or, as 

my mother explained to me as I grew,

the rape survivor Medusa’s head of snakes—

 

snakes being her punishment for Poseidon's

assault against her body with his venomous 

viper; the rape turned any future hopes she had 

for normalcy to stone, which is to say, as Medusa

lied under his shadow, Poseidon projected himself 

onto her—a terrifying appearance, a petrifying gaze.

Then she was called monster while he continued 

to reign freely. Any man who slayed Medusa 

with his long, sharp blade would be called hero, 

and brave; her severed head and deadened mind, 

a trophy. But until then, she was forced to withdraw 

from society and live alone in a cave,

 

for shame. Before Mother died, she told me nothing 

has changed for women, and that I am Medusa’s daughter, 

and that statistically speaking, I will also become

Medusa.

 

I am Medusa.

Olivia Fortier’s work has appeared in multiple literary journals. She is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate.

DRAG SHOW FUNDRAISER TO SUPPORT LGBTQ TEENS CANCELLED BY CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS

by Cecil Morris

When the evangelical Christian group objects

to the drag show fundraiser at my high school

I think about the layers and layers of clothes

that drag queens don to hide and reveal themselves,

the revelation there disguised as camouflage.

I think of the teen performers, their happy hearts

aflutter, swelling at doing good for their friends

and, maybe, speaking their own truth this one night,

free at last of fear. I think, too, of the swim team

I coached, the high school boys and girls in Lycra suits

so tight, their all revealed to minimize their drag,

the chlorinated water streaming over all 

those athletic kids, their genitals (whichever ones)

on sanitized display. And the cheerleaders at games,

the girls at school dance shows in scanty costumes clad,

their gyrations, their undulations, their high kicks, 

the boys dressed as cheerleaders at powder-puff games

(with balloons for breasts inside those too-tight sweaters), 

all well and good and part of God’s great plan I guess

for no tsunami of e-mailed outrage floods

the school board and threatens to bring their righteous faith

to fill the board’s next meeting with the fear of God.

I think of our school board members, no Moses-es

to part the Red Sea, their elected hearts hardened

against LGBTQ kids, those two-faced pols

who applaud the group for supporting our LG

BTQ students who struggle for acceptance

but thank them for not doing it on our campus

where Pentecostal flames yet burn. God, they are snakes.

Cecil Morris wiles away his retirement—after 37 years of teaching high school English!—reading, writing, and riding the bike that doesn’t move through scenery of podcasts and boredom.  His recent publications include "The Nine Ways of St. Dominic" at Amethyst Review, "after our daughter passes, we go camping" at Neologism Poetry Journal.  He also has poems in or forthcoming in Carmina Magazine, Evening Street Review, The New Verse News, Sugar House Review, and other literary magazines.

MEDUSA

by Akua Lezli Hope

AI-assisted images by the poet.

First lady Michelle Obama considered wearing her hair in braids while living in the White House. But then she thought of the American people. —The Washington Post, November 17, 2022

U.K. Tells Schools They Can’t Ban Afro Hairstyles. School rules about what styles are allowed that mostly affect Black and mixed-race children are likely to be illegal, a government rights commission said. —The New York Times, October 27, 2022

Almost half of Black and mixed-race women have experienced race-based hair discrimination at school, according to a new study. Of these, more than half (57 per cent) say they continue to deal with hair-related trauma today. —Independent (UK), October 7, 2022

Medusa was the serpent-goddess of the Libyan Amazons, representing "female wisdom". (Sanskrit medhas, Greek metis, Egyptian met or Maat ).  She was the Destroyer aspect of the Triple Goddess. Called Neith in Egypt, Ath-enna or Athene in North Africa.  Her inscription at Sais called her "mother of all the gods, whom she bore before childbirth existed." —Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

You think god cursed me, 
that this morphing nimbus petrifies beholders
when it is only your eyes seeing snakes 
and being struck by a beauty you cannot decipher 
 
These S&Z curved electric antennae 
are defense against the gray arts, 
channeling, channeling ancestral energies 
an armor of creation’s forcefield and being 
 
Remove your transgressive hands 
or feel the casual, stinging shrapnel
from misbelief shattering against truth

 
Author's Note: I ache for the children who have been abused for their hair styles. I had a corporate career and wore my hair in what is now called protective natural styles, along with my suit, pumps and—a tie from 1979, until I retired in the 21st century. Here it is another century and the same old stupidity.
 

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music,  sculpture, and peace.  A paraplegic, third-generation New Yorker, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, NYSCA, SFPA, Elgin, & Best of the Net, Rhysling & Pushcart Prize nominations. 

IT'S THE EXOTIC, THE FOREIGN...

by Phyllis Wax

who rouse fear—                                                           

the Egyptian cobra, the black mamba,                                                  

the pit vipers of Pakistan and Afghanistan—                                        

and nativists lump the unfamiliar benign 

with these toxic snakes, want to fence them all out. 

                                                         

But what about the homegrown “patriots”—the domestic

side-armed sidewinding rattler, chattering and clattering           

its venomous views, sowing discord wherever  it chooses?

What about the skin-headed southern cottonmouth

with its deceptive languid accent and aggressive

lashing out?  The klanned coral snake, venomous,         

yet anonymous?  The paranoid tea-                                

stained copperhead?  The credulous shrug them off,                        

consider them crazies,

not dangerous species

to be monitored and tracked.

They slither from under rocks and brush piles                            

in the western hills, cluster in nests in lowland swamps,

ooze out of slimy mics all over the homeland.

The willfully oblivious ignore them—              

even when they rear back and strike.                                                                                                     

Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee, WI, where she is now watching in horror as the homegrown snakes are all slithering out at once. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, both online and in print.

SNAKES IN AMERICA

by Angie Minkin

Two days after he read this poem critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) before the Kern County Board of Supervisors in California, Jose Bello, a father, farm worker, and Bakersfield College student, was arrested by ICE. The ACLU sued. On July 29, 2019, PEN America filed a friend of the court brief urging a federal appeals court in California to immediately release Jose, arrested and detained for publicly reciting a poem. Visit facebook.com/FreeJoseBello for updates.

Snakes slither from deep crevasses
in harsh, gray dust.
The earth splits, shakes, and shakes again.
We lock children in cages,
tossed away like broken birds.
Is this our America?

Our skins shaded
by cloud forests, mountains, deserts.
We kneel in the dark,
seek light beyond clouds,
cry for our babies.
Dear America, what are you afraid of?

Hollow-eyed families abandoned on the streets,
old cans kicked down the road.
Our country in tatters,
our leaders hiss lies.

A poet arrested—
heed the oracle.
Take to the streets, America.
We are in battle for our souls.
                                                                                                                     

Angie Minkin is a writer currently living in San Francisco, CA. A Poetry Editor with Vistas & Byways Review, her work appears or is forthcoming in that journal as well as The Pangolin Review, Oh Mama, Bach in the Afternoon, and These Fragile Lilacs. Angie is inspired by the political landscape, poetry of liberation, and the voice of the wise woman.

DORSIMBRA FOR COURTLAND SYKES

by Diane Elayne Dees

In Missouri, an acolyte of President Trump is running for the U.S. Senate and denouncing “manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils.” The candidate, Courtland Sykes, . . . is worth quoting as a window into the backlash against #MeToo and empowered women: “I don’t buy into radical feminism’s crazy definition of modern womanhood and I never did,” Sykes wrote on his campaign’s Facebook page. “They made it up to suit their own nasty, snake-filled heads. . . . I don’t buy the non-stop feminization campaign against manhood. I want to come home to a home cooked dinner at six every night, one that [my fiancée] fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix.” —The New York Times, January 31, 2018

My head is filled with snakes of many kinds—
huge pythons, cobras, moccasins, and corals.
Unlike Medusa’s, mine are hard to find;
they lurk within and poison my morals.

The venom of equality
is stored in my fangs,
paralyzing your patriarchal limbs,
rendering you unprivileged.

The reptiles crawl; they hiss, prepared to strike
at monsters who are deadlier than they
could ever be. You hold me in contempt,
for my head is filled with snakes of many kinds.


Editor’s note thanks to the Poets Collective: The dorsimbra, created by Eve Braden, Frieda Dorris and Robert Simonton, is a 12-line poem consisting of (1) a quatrain of iambic pentameter rhyming abab, (2) a quatrain of "short and snappy" free verse, and (3) a quatrain of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). The final (12th) line is the same as the first line. The form's creators suggest the use of enjambment, interlaced rhymes, and near-rhymes to bind the three stanzas.

Diane Elayne Dees's poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women's professional tennis throughout the world.

CLOAKED IN CLOUDS

by Meryl Baer

Washington Post, May 17, 2017

The Man seduced the people,
Spilling warped words of wisdom.
The crowd kowtowed to their savior.
They yelled, they screamed
They jumped for joy.
The Man came forth to save them
Roaring Admire me! Adore me!
Love me evermore.
Crushing competence and candor,
The Man proclaims his Word.
The people say:
The Man understands our woes.
He speaks what's really in our hearts
Of hatred, fear and foes.

Meanwhile:
Snakes slither,
Squinting in the light,
Spreading venom.
They grab they stifle
The other, the unfamiliar, the foreign,
The ones abhorring The Man.

I wait, hope, anticipate one morning when
Clouds scatter and
Seeds sprout
Strangling those gnarly, nasty rascals
Unfurling hate and fear.


Meryl Baer is a recovering financial geek now freelance writer and blogger.

TERRIFIED

by Marsha Owens

Image adapted from Scott Brundage Illustration.

Who are you? roared the Cyclops.

I’m terrified, I whispered back.

And well you should be, Cyclops said, because it’s like snakes in the baby’s crib.

We are babies, you know, we haughty Americans, two-year olds running around aimlessly, peeing our pants, little boy babies pulling their diapers down to gawk at their penises, all self-absorbed, too young to understand how grown-up 21st Century countries behave, grown-up men and women, you know, the ones who build high-speed rail, and grow a belief system that says YOU, you, and you, all of you will be educated and be able to pay for your blood pressure medicine and be able to have food enough, and YOU, you, and you will live in houses, unlike stray dogs scrounging downtown, still some say YOU, you and you are undeserving because you don’t pray to our father who is in heaven, you don’t speak English, you wear a scarf on your head, you walk with a limp, you run away from bullets shot at your back.  Yes, YOU . . . be afraid, feel the dead of the darkest night, guiding stars dimmed, voices of reason gone underground, black faces smashed, bodies dumped on the trash heap beside McDonald’s wrappers, throwaways, mountains of loss, and the red truck sits in the yard outside my window, says nothing, all metal and strong.

Marsha Owens lives and writes in Richmond VA. #Resist

THE SNAKES

by Carolyn Gregory

The Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a day after Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine congregants following a Bible study. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RAEDLE/GETTY via The New Yorker.

The snakes are slithering
from under the rocks
where worms and old bodies
lie buried.

The bones are not stopping them
from venomous thoughts
of squeezing innocents to death
or sinking their fangs in.

For they have been hungry
in their hiding holes,
thinking of the red meat
of their prey running quickly
across the prairie

to their own small caves
between mountains and cactus,
fearful for their families
and children.

Nothing will paralyze the snakes
save the hatchets good men wield
in the dead of night
to save our people's freedom.


Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Seattle Review, Cutthroat, Borderlands: Texas, Main Street Rag and Wilderness House Literary Review. She previously won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has published two full length volumes of poetry through Windmill Editions in Florida: Open Letters (2009) and Facing the Music (2015).

AT THE SIGHT OF THE WATERS

by Cally Conan-Davies

Flooding in Boulder, Colorado on Wednesday evening, September 11, 2013. Photo posted by brandish on Instagram @photogjake

(An Australian in Colorado relives . . .)

Bring your pillow, what comfort you can carry,
when you evacuate. You wont be home
any time soon.

Keep clear.

Revise your estimate. You will be caught
in a matter of minutes.
Pontoons and yachts are breaking from their moorings,
mangled hulls are hurtling downstream,
battering at the bridges.

Although we sunk our sandbags in the heart
of city streets, and braced against the waters,
the city’s pride— its cafes, party-barges—
powers down the river to destroy us.

The river is collecting all our junk,
rushing away with bathtubs and backyards,
broom-handles, buckets, pots and picnic benches.
Things become missiles when they’re in the flow.

Never cry for what can’t cry for you.

Bury the thought of what waters might unearth;
forget what you’ll recall—
stench, stains, stuff you never thought
would have to be replaced; and despite all
the waters everywhere, we must preserve
our water from the waters.

Find high ground because you cannot know
what lurks inside the waters – snakes, car doors, bodies
wrapped in tarps and blue pool-linings.

Below, backwater bubbles up through drains;
disease will come this way. Sever everything
you thought you knew of water, except for this:

when all revising up and down is done,
and levels finally marked, and mess is cleared,
and rivers shrink from us, and we look back
to praise the volunteers, think of the dead,
and honor the man who held a woman’s son
when the line holding her in his other hand went slack,

we’ll only know how far this flood has spread
when boy and man (see his eyes! how wild the water!)
drown again in the dream where he had caught her.


Cally Conan-Davies taught and practiced bibliotherapy in Melbourne, Australia before moving to the United States in 2012. Her poems have appeared, and are forthcoming, in Poetry, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Raintown Review, The Sewanee Review and The Southwest Review, among others. She lives in both Colorado and Oregon.