"A MESHUGGENEH IS ON THE LOOSE"

by Judith Terzi

& I'm sitting here with my morning

coffee watching a cockatiel 

slip tail feathers through his beak. One by

one. The ends have become ragged

with so much preening. "Rumba Poderosa"

by the band Incendio is playing 

on a cd. The bird begins to sing along, 

dance on his perch. He scurries

to the left, then rushes back to his usual

place in front of his big purple

mirror. You see, he imagines the music 

emanates from his constant mirror 

buddy. His identical twin. The bird is in love 

with his own image. I am in love 

with the bird. He sways back & forth to any 

music, but especially to a Latin beat. 

A rumba. A bolero. A tango. It's a kind 

of bird praying, a bird davening, 

you might say. While all this sashaying 

is going on, a committee is meeting 

in a sedate space on the opposite coast. 

You could say the nine members 

of the committee have been placed in a different 

kind of cage. One with carafes of

hot water & coffee, sweet rolls, bottled water.

No ladders, no pinwheels, no miniature 

crystal balls. The committee is subpoenaing 

witnesses, scratching every surface 

for any evidence anywhere data can be found. 

The bird is biting its cage bars in between 

chirps to "Rumba Poderosa." Rumba of power 

in front of his own image that he adores. 

I think he's calling me. I hear a wolf whistle 

while I'm writing this. "Let's get it 

over with," he's saying. "What's the holdup? 

A meshuggeneh is on the loose." 

Now he's started to preen his feet. He's biting 

his nails. The music has stopped. I'm 

eating a whole wheat bagel with cream cheese. 

I'm having a second cup of Joe. 

Judith Terzi is the author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay) as well as of five chapbooks, including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By and Casbah (Kattywompus). Her poetry appears in a wide array of journals and anthologies. A poem, "Ode to Malala Yousafzai," was included on a "Heroines" episode of BBC/Radio 3's "Words and Music." She taught French for many years in Pasadena, California, as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria. A new chapbook, Now, Somehow, will appear later this year. 

UNDER SUBPOENA

by Michel Steven Krug

Cartoon by JOEL ORFF, SONOMA INDEX-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL CARTOONIST, October 11, 2021

I.

 

Exiting the house select

Committee revolving doors

 

The Sergeant at Arms has eyes

For each witness under subpoena

 

Not ready to defy the privileges of

A defeated Executive whose policies foreign

 

And domestic are personal, useful,

Promoted to deceive,

 

American idolatry

Useful sabotage propagated

 

By the nouveau KGB

Useful USA, for re-re-election

 

US Useful idiots

To serve a majesty.

 

II.

 

Servile to posted democracy,

Offering truths of the click bait asserted.

 

Espionage at law when

In defiance of domestic channels

 

And congressional oversight

His majesty’s attorney general

 

Exacted deals to debase his rival

By erasure with stabbed glass

 

That avenges

Opaque defeat.

 

III.

 

We are informed by heavy flag poles.

We are all under subpoena,

 

Freedom of disinformation

Overwhelms veracity,

 

Its volume too temperate

Its tone too coherent

 

Its fidelity too rigid, too conventional

For an era that discounts reason.

 

IV.

 

2021:

Democracy has not been so degraded

That its franchise is mere debris.

 

The corrosion has been a cruel aberration

An arc necessary to sober

Cynicism and incredulity.

 

Exquisitely appalling, helium packaged,

Like ice melts in the spring,

Exposing all of its menacing emptiness.

Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He’s Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News (PRTN) literary magazine and he litigates. His poems have appeared in JMWW, Cagibi, Silver Blade, Crack the Spine, Dash, Mikrokosmos, The New Verse News, North Dakota Quarterly, Eclectica, Writers Resist, Sheepshead, Mizmor Anthology, 2019, PRTN, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven's Perch, Main Street Rag, the Brooklyn Review with poems forthcoming in other journals.