ON THE DEATH OF A CEO

by Lori D’Angelo

We don't trade one life for another or

a thousand. With every loss, the universe

cries out and also keeps on. Nothing, not 

yet, stops it. So, yes, whether your mother

just found out she has cancer or your father

has just entered hospice, the clock still tick

tocks, minutes go by. Every year, around this

time, we watch Dickens' A Christmas Carol

and think, Ah yes, even a miser had a soul. 

But yet when a man whose company did 

some shitty shady things dies, don't join in

the chorus of he deserved it haters. It's not 

much different to do that than it is to weigh

worth by a claim denied algorithm. If you say

all of them, mean all of them, even the maybe 

he deserved it bastards. In earth, their bones, 

our bones, all rot the same. The minute you 

forget, you become what you thought you’d

never be: callous, jaded, alive but also dead. 

Instead,                                      mourn it all. 

Lori D'Angelo is a grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a fellow at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and an alumna of the Community of Writers. Her work has appeared in various literary journals including BULL, Gargoyle, Drunken Boat, Moon City Review, and Rejection Letters. Her first book, a collection called The Monsters Are Here, was recently published by ELJ Editions. 

THE CON MAN AND THE DEVIL

by Scott Talbot Evans

Graphic via Red Bubble

There once was a con man of ill-gotten wealth.

Many counterfeit trophies cluttered his shelf.

He prided himself on his great mental health,

And made known to the world he’d done well for himself.

 

He built monuments, palaces, and towers so high,

That they threatened to poke God Himself in the eye.

The man was so crooked, unscrupulous, and sly,

That Satan decided to give him a try.

 

“Nice to meet you. I’m the Prince of Perdition.

I can see you’re a man of blinding ambition.

If it’s not too much of an imposition,

I offer a once in a life proposition.”

 

“What are you bothering a busy man for?

Can’t you see I have houses and women galore?

What could you possibly add to my score?”

The devil grinned widely and simply said, “More.”

 

“You will boast and brag. Your horn will be tooted.

The masses will fall for you as if struck by Cupid.

They won’t even notice their pockets you looted.

They will believe every word you say, no matter how stupid.”

 

“You will split the world in chaotic division.

Your critics will charge you with crimes and derision,

But my lawyers will twist every fact and decision,

So you won’t spend a single minute in prison.”

 

“I need more. I want banners to herald my name,

In bold proclamation of my unequaled fame.

The public must shower me with so much acclaim,

That it puts Alexander and Caesar to shame.”

 

“You drive a hard bargain. I find you quite droll.

In return for all that, you must pay a small toll,

A possession you won’t even miss on the whole,

A little thing commonly known as your soul.”

 

“Is that all?” The cheater started to squeal.

His eager excitement he tried to conceal.

“Looks like I found myself quite a steal.

Okay, buddy, you’ve got yourself a deal!”

 

They smiled and squinted. Their slimy hands shook.

Lucifer wrote the fool’s name in his book.

And that little scribble was all that it took,

For somewhere in hell an ember started to cook.

 

The man’s fame suddenly started to rise.

Half the world believed all his terrible lies.

His power and ego increased to king-size.

He was hailed as a savior in his followers’ eyes.

 

He invented false dangers to control people’s fears

And inflamed their angers to arouse their cheers.

His empire grew on prejudice and smears,

And contempt from his critics was music to his ears.

 

He hobnobbed with hoodlums, gangsters, and whores.

Tyrants and despots were his secret mentors.

He suppressed opposition with threatening roars,

And brought discord and riots to once peaceful shores.

 

He had unholy power to swindle and cheat.

Honesty and integrity took a back seat.

In no time he rose to the world’s highest seat.

But he could not rest ‘til his gluttony was complete.

 

Every ruler and judge was under his heel.

At his feet, the world’s nations were obligated to kneel.

All the lands and possessions were marked with his seal.

And then he sighed, because there was nothing left to steal.

 

He heard a crack, and there was a puff of smoke.

The demon stood before him in a long flowing cloak.

From the heart of darkness a raspy voice spoke.

“The dream is over. Time for you to get woke.”

 

Beelzebub grinned like a fiend and he said,

“The clock has run out, now. Guess what. You are dead.

Forget all the dreams in your silly head.

Fall to your knees and fill yourself with dread.”

  

“I have kept my bargain to the final dot.

The whole world and everything in it is what you got.

You had your fill, and that is saying a lot.

And now I shall take what is mine on this very spot.”

 

The snake’s eyes glowed and he sounded a gong.

A choir of demons sang a tormented song,

But the whole thing went on for a little too long.

“What is happening here? Something is wrong.”

 

The serpent looked for the man’s pain to begin.

But there wasn’t any, to his great chagrin.

From the corpse’s eyes arose a sparkle from within,

And his wrinkled lips curled into a wicked grin.

 

“I told you I was the best dealmaker bar none.

You shoulda read the fine print when you first begun.

I agreed to give you my soul when all was done,

But the joke’s on you, Satan, because I never had one.”

 

The cheat convulsed with laughter to the point of tears.

The joyful sound burned like acid on the devil’s ears.

“This is the first time I’ve been swindled in all my years.

He bowed. “From one con artist to another, cheers!”

Scott Talbot Evans' poems are published in Poetry Salzburg Review, Samjoko Magazine, and Straight On Till Morning. He was twice a finalist in The New Yorker caption contest and won the GEVA Theater 2 Pages/2 Voices competition and the Script Studio Scriptitude Competition. His work appears in Amazing Stories, Weekly Humorist, Shoreline of Infinity, Creepypod, and Crimeucopia. His novel The Love Police was released last year. He is working on his sixth book.

HENRY KISSINGER’S CV

by Sean Murphy

David Levine's caricature of Henry Kissinger.

Ambassador:
Tainted midwife to travesty, a perverted Prometheus, bestowing agency to perfidious officials in conspicuous places.
 
Instigator:
Slick devil whispering nothing’s sweet, so many iniquitous seductions into the eager ears of meager men.
 
Bootlicker:
Fattened tongue sucking the leathered paws of a cur whose wet scent still befouls a nation’s hollow halls.
 
Confessor:
Aberrant principles unshackled by access to brokers of action breaking worlds like sadistic gods with glimmering eyes.
 
Profiteer:
Thirty pieces of soiled silver times thirty a thousand times, it profits a man immeasurably if he has no soul to lose.
 
Sloganeer:
Peace through power, clarity through chaos, obedience through atrocity, efficiency through occupation, et cetera.
 
Impregnator:
Malevolent proposals polluted by your corrupted seed, so much ruthless sperm seeking attainment in lethal deeds.
 
Clock-Ticker:
Grown engorged like an unkillable tick, the mother’s milk of abandoned empires a mainline to an obstinate heart.
 
Idolator:
Squatting on the shoulders of moral dwarves, the not-so-complex imprimatur of Napoleon your obscene escutcheon.
 
Kissinger:
This crass pageant, at long last, expired: ignominy awaits and History’s already at work, unkindly revising the Final Cut.

Sean Murphy has been publishing fiction, poetry, reviews (of music, movie, book, food), and essays on the technology industry for over twenty years. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and elsewhere. His chapbooks The Blackened Blues (Finishing Line Press) and Rhapsodies in Blue (Kelsay Books) were published in 2021 and 2023. His next poetry collection, Kinds of Blue, and This Kind of Man, his first collection of short fiction, are forthcoming in 2024. His novel Not To Mention a Nice Life was published in 2015, followed by his first two collections of non-fiction, Murphy’s Law, Vol One and Vol. Two. He has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, twice for Best of Net, and his book Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone was the winner of Memoir Magazine’s 2022 Memoir Prize. He served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha's Vineyard, and is Founding Director of 1455, a non-profit that celebrates storytelling.

IN DREAMS, DEATH

by Dick Altman

The death toll of migrants who died after they were abandoned in the back of a tractor-trailer that was discovered Monday in San Antonio rose to 53 on Wednesday… —CBS News, June 29, 2022

 

The land of the free...

 

I write this today – in America –

thanks to grandparents who heard

in heart and spirit that phrase echo

in Russian – Yiddish – perhaps

even German – Echo as they escaped

the poverty and oppression of Eastern

Europe in the 1900s – crossed mostly

by foot the continent – to land

at the magic portal of Ellis Island –

opening a door to life that until

this moment existed alone in letter

and rumor and what the mind

conjured as America

 

The land of the free... 

 

From lowlands – highlands – jungles

and shores they came two days ago –

walking – struggling – like my forebears –

this time from Mexico and South America –

leaving mothers and fathers – leaving birth’s

land and language – leaving with visions

that America would somehow – as it had

in the past – open its arms – offer – as it

had in the past – another chance at life –

Except the door – which had for

decades swung so freely – creaked on

its hinges –budging barely an inch

 

The land of the free... 

 

How many times did the refrain echo

in the minds of the sojourners – who –

no longer on foot – stood packed

in an airless – overheated subway

car of a semi-trailer – sworn to open

America’s locked heart – How many times

before the refrain turned from dream into

breathless prayer – How many times –

as one by one – the precious cargo lost

consciousness – calling – screaming

to the heavens – crying out to America’s

indifferent soul

 

The land of the free... 

 

 

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad.  A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry forthcoming from the New Mexico Museum Press.

MOURNING IN AMERICA

by Joanne Kennedy Frazer

I.
no vaccine for this condition

ever present     sucks out life
      soul      erases biographies

one knee
8 minutes, 46 seconds
   Momma, I love you

II.
lifeless daughters, sons of God

our grief       anger
   guilt       emptiness

ache    
to resurrect
     to re-breathe you

Joanne Kennedy Frazer is a retired peace and justice director and educator for faith-based organizations at state, diocesan and national levels. Her work has appeared in several Old Mountain Press anthologies, Poetic Portions anthology, Soul-lit Spiritual Poetry, Postcard Poems and Prose Magazine, Panoply Literary Zine, Snapdragon Journal, Whirlwind Magazine, Kakalak, Red Clay Review and Gyroscope Review. Five poems were turned into a song cycle, Resistance, by composer Steven Luksan, and performed in Seattle and Durham.  Her chapbook Being Kin (CreationRising Press) was published in 2019.  She lives in Durham, NC.

FAITH

by David Chorlton

The lady’s hair protests
too much; it shines against her age
with glitter in the green
dye cresting on her head. She holds
a cigarette between her first
and middle fingers, exhaling into
the morning just now
clearing from the early clouds
as she walks with her breast on display
by way of the five bold
letters silvered on her black shirt that proclaim
her FAITH.
                     In what
remains unstated. And all the upper case sparkle
gives nothing away
as to what or why she believes,
but inspires a guess regarding which sea
her soul is sailing on
in these impeachable, divisive
and uncertain days within sight
of Christmas. The pigeons
circling overhead have faith
that someone’s crumbs will fall for them,
the traffic lights
that cars will stop when they turn
red, the president that every lie
will one day be a jewel
in his legend’s crown. But faith
is a blind man’s mirror,
                                          a step in the dark,
the makeup on a woman’s face
when she is past her prime
and needs it to steady
her walk. She’s sitting now, on a stool
looking across the parking lot, while
the country teeters
on a tightrope and the great
questions just hang in the air like
the scarf of smoke around her face.
Whether there’s a god
                                           and who
he’d vote for; how old
is the mountain draped beneath the northern
sky; what kind of pen
was used to write the Constitution?
These careless moments
spent gazing
at life’s passage end
with a tobacco stub trodden into the ground.
There:
something finished, over
and done with. What comes next?
                                                                Maybe read
a few pages of the King James version, or
the National Enquirer. A cough
to clear the throat, a storm to clear
the air. Walk a little
up and down, practice how it feels to doubt
which direction is the best. Look
into the clear light for rain,
check for bargains
at the Safeway, light another
and inhale the belief that nicotine
can heal. A little bell
                                     keeps ringing
charity, charity.  At her place in the arcade
here’s a warrior fighting time alone
while the starlings on the power line
chatter strength in numbers
and when she strikes another match
on the year’s shortest day
the flame reflects
upon the word by which she lives,
taking comfort in uncertainty.

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant. Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird is from Hoot ‘n Waddle, in Phoenix, and a long poem Speech Scroll comes from Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library.

A "PERFECT" BARGAIN

by David Feela

Trump Dingell published December 20, 2019 by Rick McKee politicalcartoons.com

Feigning sincerity from the podium
in Michigan, staring straight into
the camera, our White House storyteller
fabricated a Faustian fairytale

about his role as benefactor to
the late John Dingell, a dedicated
man who occupied the U.S. House
of Representatives for sixty years.

Whether the soul arrives at birth
or tempers over time is impossible
to say, but one of these men
certainly possessed a soul,

while the other more than likely
sold his to a foreign government.

David Feela writes columns for The Four Corners Free Press and The Durango Telegraph. Unsolicited Press released his newest chapbook Little Acres.

TARZAN HAS A TAN

by Alejandro Escudé 

During a faculty meeting icebreaker, when I raise my hand to volunteer the song I’ve had stuck in my head, one man yells out: “Ahh. Sing it!” in front of my colleagues. I hear his voice as brassy, sarcastic-toned. Simultaneously, I think of the photograph on the news site today

of the three people (a family?) witnessing the nuclear explosion in Russia—the fire cloud off in the distance, like a huge, rotten orange. 

There are moments when 

you realize you’re job is like that too, a rotten orange. Only you’re stuck inside of it, pushing up against the rind. Or, maybe your job is like Russia and its oligarchs. And sometimes, you and your colleagues are like that family watching the explosion of a missile pregnant with a nuclear reactor. A whale carcass. A room with bones for support beams. Hanging flesh. 

We were asked, at the faculty meeting, to recall a song we had stuck in our heads this summer. And I said I had the Tarzan camp song repeating in my head; that call and response song I had to lead my second graders with— when I was a twenty-year-old camp counselor. 

“Tar … zan,” it began, and they repeated. “Swinging on a rubber band … Tar … zan … fell into a frying pan.” 

I sang it again with my daughter, seven years old, now that she’s in summer camp. The words have changed, slightly. But I think once more of that colleague who sarcastically yelled out that I, sing the song, 

as if I were telling some untruth, or trying too hard impress the room. 

Maybe, later on, someone informed that man that I had kids. That I’d just gotten divorced after seventeen years of marriage. That my kids visit me on weekends and it feels as though half my soul were missing from my body and I only become whole again when I am with them. 

But I don’t think 

anyone told him. He probably thought I was just trying to be cute. I guess, I’ve always tried to be cute. I guess the Russians are trying to be cute as well, installing nuclear reactors inside of missiles that have the ability to reach Alaska, and beyond. 

“Fell into a frying pan,” my daughter repeats. 

“Now Tarzan has a tan. Now Tarzan has a tan.”

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

MY GREAT-GRANDPARENTS & THE BURKINI BAN

by Judith Terzi

Image source: Judith Terzi

after “What people are saying about ‘burkinis’ in France” 

—L.A. Times, August 18, 2016

Zipporah. She is covered from head to toe 

with an apron & layers of cloth. 

There is the idea that . . . women are 

immodest, impure, that they

should therefore be completely 

covered. Wool scarves swirl around her 

hidden neck in the black & white 

photo. A headscarf, or a tichel, hides 

every strand of great-grandmother's 

hair. [This] is not compatible 

with the values of France and 

the republic. Zipporah––a bird in Hebrew.

She flew from Russia to a brownstone 

in Baltimore. She sits on a stoop. Even her 

hands are invisible; we see only her 

withered face. She is over a hundred. 

I issued this order . . . to ensure the safety 

of my city . . .  am only prohibiting 

a uniform that is the symbol of Islamist 

extremism. Zipporah––a bird who 

flew to the heavens before I was born. She 

sits next to my great-grandfather 

in the black & white photo. Hasidic white 

beard, a yarmulke between him and 

his God. It is the soul of France that is

in question . . . France does not hide half 

of its population under the . . . odious

pretext that the other half would be 

afraid of temptation. An oversized wool suit 

envelops his body & his fringes. 

In the 32mm film, he blesses my mother 

& her sisters. His body rocks. Back 

& forth, back & forth, as he recites prayer. 

Pious great-grandfather who gave me 

my name. The beaches, like any 

public space, must be  preserved 

from religious demands. Great-grandparents 

covered in faith & fabric.

Author’s Note: Italics indicate direct quotes from French governmental officials, including the Prime Minister, the Minister for women's rights, and the Mayor of Cannes.

Judith Terzi's poetry has appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies including Caesura, Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai, Raintown Review, Spillway, Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. If You Spot Your Brother Floating By is her most recent chapbook from Kattywompus Press. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Web.

THE MOON'S SURFACE

by Austin Alexis


Devastated long ago by asteroids,
and now stark—
a grim, gray landscape filled with unease.
That's the damn sad moon in bereavement,
resembling the American spirit
after one-too-many catastrophes:
a harbor blasted by bombs dropped from the sky;
a mass shooting
and then another, another;
an attack—terrorist or otherwise—
on a random June morning.
Ragged, scarred, the moon replicates the American soul
stumbling from one tragedy to another,
another, and the another.



Austin Alexis's full-length collection is Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, 2014).  He has poetry and fiction most recently in the anthology Rabbit Ears: TV Poems and in the journals Home Planet News, J Journal, TheNewVerse.News, and Chiron Review. 

AMERICA'S DIVIDES

by Gil Hoy

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, 

All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old, 

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, 

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love . . .  

Embedded into this video is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman's voice reading four lines from the poem "America:”  Recording: Copyright Eric Forsythe, 2012–2013. Made available on the Whitman Archive with permission of the rights holder. Audio may be reused for non-commercial purposes, with credit to Eric Forsythe and the Walt Whitman Archive. For more information on this recording, see Ed Folsom, "The Whitman Recording," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 9 (Spring 1992), 214-16.

                         I.

I see you, Walt Whitman---an American
Rough, a Cosmos!  I see you face to face!

I see you and the nameless faceless
Faces in America's timeless crowds of men
and women who you saw in your mind's eye.

I see you crossing the river on your ferry.
I see you walking down the public road

Where everyone is worthy. Neither time,
Place nor distance separates.
     
                         II.

You once saw the currents of corruption,
Fast flowing into the land that you loved.
You once saw that which had departed

With the setting sun, half an hour high,
For when another is degraded,
so are you and I.

You once saw what had flowed in with the
Rising flood-tides feverishly pouring---

Tides saturated and soaked with exploitation,
Bribery, falsehood and maladministration.

                         III.

When you saw the motionless wings of
Twelfth-month sea-gulls, When you walked

Along Manhattan Island---When you watched the
Ships of Manhattan, north and west---

Could you see Wall Street banks
Seizing the homes of your beloved countrymen,
Voyaging in their fragile ferryboats? The carpenters,

Quakers, scientists and opium eaters; The immigrants,
Squaws, boatmen and blacksmiths; The farmers,                        
Mechanics, sailors and priests?                                                

                          IV.

Could you see the monstrous megaton corporations
Feasting on America's flesh blood bones, those
Nameless faceless parasites

Sucking the soul from your loved land,                                            
Like a malevolent disease?                                                              

                            V.
For you saw quite clearly the political and
Economic malfunctioning mutant ties that connect us.
Neither time, place nor distance separates.

And you saw very clearly the sickly green sludge
Secreted by lobbyists to their bought and sold

Henchmen soldier baby-kissers, to slow and
Stop the flow of nourishing rushing sea tides
Into your dear, revered democracy.

                            VI.

You saw the evil dark patches---the clinging selfish
Steadfast pernicious grasp of the flourishing one
Per cent oligarchs, Who lusted, grubbed, lied, stole--

Were greedy, shallow, sly, angry, vain, cowardly,
malignant--Seeking only to hold onto their fool's
Gold and preserve the status quo.

                           VII.

Each still furnishes its part towards the death of
America's democracy. Each still furnishes its part

Towards destroying her soul. The mocking bird
Still sings the musical shuttle to the tearful

Bareheaded child, and the final word superior for
America may still be her death, death, death,
Death. The sea has whisper'd me, too.


Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer who is currently studying poetry at Boston University, through its Evergreen program, where he previously received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Hoy received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy started writing poetry two years ago. Since then, his work has appeared in Third Wednesday, The Write Room, The Eclectic Muse, Clark Street Review, TheNewVerse.News , Harbinger Asylum, Soul Fountain, The Story Teller Magazine, Eye on Life Magazine, Stepping Stones Magazine, The Penmen Review, To Hold A Moment Still, Harbinger Asylum’s 2014 Holidays Anthology, The Zodiac Review, Earl of Plaid Literary Journal, The Potomac, Antarctica Journal, The Montucky Review and elsewhere.

NEW DEAL

by George Held

Image source: DonkeyHotey

The Thirties, the Honest Decade,
When the Depression made the US nation
Face its ragged heart and wretched soul.

The Obama Era, the rotten eight years
When the US nation let racism,
The feral cat, out of the bag again

And refused to face its ragged heart
And wretched soul, and let them fester
Like a million dreams deferred so long

They colored the land with blood
Spurting from myriad wounds inflicted
By AK-47 or Glock 9,

And now it’s time to choose whose
Name will label the next four or eight
Years, which flawed candidate

Is toxic enough to scare the US
Nation into facing its wounded fate,
Its ragged heart, its wretched soul.


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

PUTIN'S STRIDE

by Bill Petz

George W. Bush infamously claimed to have looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes and gotten a “sense of his soul,” but perhaps he would have learned more by watching him walk. A recent paper in the British Medical Journal takes up the unexpected question of why Putin, as well as several of his subordinates, walk with an unusual gait, swinging the left arm normally but keeping the right arm close to the hip. Bastiaan R. Bloem, a neurologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands, says he was first tipped off to the strange gait by one of his former instructors, who noticed it in a video of the Russian president. For Bloem and his co-authors (all “movement disorder enthusiasts,” as he puts it), the video, and others in which Putin walks the same way, set off alarm bells since “unilaterally reduced arm swing” can be a sign of several neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease. . . . Videos of other senior Russian officials show the same unusual gait, including Prime Minister (and former president) Dmitry Medvedev, former defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, and current chief of the presidential administration Sergei Ivanov. “The first thing that came to mind is, ‘What the heck? Is there a Parkinson’s epidemic in the Kremlin?’ ” says Bloem. Another possible explanation surfaced when one of Bloem’s colleagues found a KGB training manual, which instructs operatives that “[w]hen moving, it is absolutely necessary to keep your weapon against the chest or in the right hand. Moving forward should be done with one side, usually the left, turned somewhat in the direction of movement.” The authors have called the ex-KBG agent’s John Wayne–esque walk a “gunslinger’s gait.” This doesn’t mean, literally, that the president is packing. Putin probably never did much gunslinging in the KGB, where his job was to recruit potential operatives in East Germany, but the walk may be a tough-guy affectation akin to his often-coarse choice of language. “Putin is a macho leader who kept his gait to show that he is a KGB veteran,” Bloem says. --Slate, Dec. 15, 2015

Look at Putin's walk.
Right arm doesn't swing,
left does the usual thing.
Seems kinda awkward.

Dutch neurologists took a look.
Nothing new they say,
just a gunslinger's way.
It's in the KGB training book.

Faster to go for their guns.
It might just be,
but let's wait and see
if it's not Parkinson’s.

A loss of control,
dementia and depression
explain his aggression,
lack of soul.


Diagnosed with Parkinson's 10 years ago, Bill Petz' right arm doesn't swing without meds. He lives and writes in the mountains of western North Carolina. His work has been published in Status Hat, The Ashevillle Citizen-Times, The Chronicles of Higher Education, Artists & Writers Quarterly and TheNewVerse.News.

SONG TO MYSELF

by Gil Hoy




Where is the iron
Brahmin, traitor
to his class,

Man of
The people---

You can’t cajole
You can’t frighten
You can’t buy?

With bones
stronger than
All of them
on the stage,

Please stop
the rain from
falling down.

It's time to rise up,
It's time to rise
up.  It's time
to rise up!

Grit those big
teeth, hold
assassins’ bullets
in your chest,

Until you are
drowned out by
the faithful sea.

Listen to
the bells ring,
Listen to
the robin sing,

Until the hail
washes your soul,
away.


Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer and writer. He studied poetry at Boston University, while receiving a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Gil received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. His writing has appeared most recently in The Montucky Review, The Potomac, The New Verse News, The Boston Globe and The Dallas Morning News.

BRIAN WILLIAMS

by Dennis Mahagin

Brian Williams, suspended anchor of NBC Nightly News, with American troops at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, Iraq, in March 2007. Credit Photo by Jeff Riggins/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images accompanying “Was Brian Williams a Victim of False Memory?” by Tara Parker-Pope, NY Times, February 9, 2015

You got fourteen seconds
To make it
Right … INCOMING ! Heh he he he heh, just
Kidding, guy, I like a little
Lie, good
In the sky.
It’s like listening to a
Vacuum, the next
One and the next,
It’s like
Anti-Macassar,
Hezbollah, black flak
Cleaner in another room,
One down the hall
A whopper in the hopper
And knowing
Will come to an end
Soon. I want you to take five
No eight
Months, be chilling in Cancun,
Wait for my call, wait for it
This will all blow away
Like an Andover squall
One of those big bruise colored
Motherfuckers grin
Like Oz
@ the rim, ask God
Ask him
How it’s all done
With mirrors, a little white one
Now and then. You’re our
Man, you have always been
I played a little cornerback
Myself, have I told you?
NYU, then Cornell, no quarter
Back quarterback !  heh heh
How I learned my best
Dance steps, sweater vest,
Show you my
Gene Kelly
Someday, this is fading, fading
Away, already, the truth
Is a voice
In an air vent, it
Drips from the eaves, hits
Rockefeller’s
Pavement
… look fuckit, take
A year, will ya?
Search for
Your Soul, go where
it meant.


Dennis Mahagin’s poems have appeared in Evergreen Review, Absinthe Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, Everyday Genius, elimae, The Nervous Breakdown, Corium, Stirring, Juked and Night Train. His latest poetry collection is called Longshot & Ghazal – available now from Mojave River Press.