THIS IS NOT NORMAL

by Jeremy Nathan Marks 

I will not forget what happened earlier today/last night/yesterday/

last week/last month/last year/this past decade 

I will not un-hear “I can’t breathe” I will not un-see “I can’t breathe”

Now I can hardly mouth “take a knee” 

I will not overlook the seizing of children from the arms 

of their mothers and their fathers at the border

met with a jacket that said, I really don’t care do u?

I will not pretend there was no Merrick Garland 

Birtherism, “Lock Her Up,” “Commie,” “Monster” 

and “Nasty Woman” 

I won’t overlook Access Hollywood and Charlottesville 

Muslim Bans and “Stand Back/Stand By”

I do recall Russia, Ukraine, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn

William Barr, the emoluments clause, impeachment and tax returns

I won’t forget “Send Her Back” or ignore all those phoney words of outrage 

by Senators and Representatives who now walk in complete lockstep 

playing the country for fools with Judge Barrett and how “he’s learned his lesson” 

I will not un-see the Second Lady of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

accosted buying groceries, called the n-word because she’s of color 

I cannot reconcile how Covid became a “blessing from God” 

because the right man contracted it at a hugging party for a judicial coup d’état 

This is not normal

none of this is normal 

there is more to democracy

than just the news cycle

There is the world 

and our place in it 

there is a country, burning

This is not normal 

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. New work appears this fall in So It Goes, Boog City, Unlikely Stories, The Journal of Expressive Writing, The Last Leaves, Chiron Review, Dissident Voice, Ginosko, and Bewildering Stories. 

AUNT JEMIMA

by Betsy Mars

Cartoon by Matt Davies, Newsday, 

“Brands Pretend They Just Learned Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben's Are Racist” 

—VICE, June 18, 2020

Stripped of her name
and branded,
her onyx pearls
dropping
one by one.
Backlash.
Corporate fathers
take a knee
in insincere
solidarity.
A belated Mea Culpa,
treacle spilling
from the lips of execs
once the deck was stacked
like flapjacks, they scurried,
transparent as lace,
finely collared,
ready to erase
the mammy
they embraced
in the race to be virtuous,
awakened just in time—
the tortoise at the finish line—
when it impacts their bottom line.

Betsy Mars is a poet, educator (prior to the pandemic), photographer, and occasional publisher. She is currently working on her second anthology to be released by her press, Kingly Street Press, this summer. She is also finishing a book co-written with friend and poet Alan Walowitz entitled In the Muddle of the Night, coming soon from Arroyo Seco Press. She has one chapbook, Alinea (Picture Show Press), to her name, as well as numerous publications on the web and in anthologies, most recently in Verse-Virtual, The Blue Nib, Kissing Dynamite, and The Poetry Super Highway. Her childhood years in Brazil gave her a deep appreciation for language and culture, a love of travel, and an early awareness of the disparities that exist throughout the world. 

STAGING AREA

by Mark Danowsky

News of another shooting—

This time folks in a Walmart in El Paso are unlucky

I listen to the hourly recap while I wrap my ankle—seems I rolled it
in the process of loading the U-Haul

Tomorrow I’ll drive the 15’ truck 300 miles from West Virginia to almost safe
suburbs 9 miles outside Philadelphia

9 miles is the space I’ve been driving strangers all over this mad college town
more than a year now

I’ll drive strangers in the new space, too, though I hope to avoid airport staging
in spite of the possibility for decent fares

While packing, I called the $20 Walmart coffee table and the $8 Walmart shoe rack
my “staging area”

We carried that staging area to the trash earlier

Now on NPR they’re talking about a staging area outside Walmart—
families trying to find each other after the terror
forced upon them by an active shooter

I don’t know if they’re still putting children in cages at our southern border but
the images I’m conjuring are horrific enough

A man with a gun enters a public space to disrupt as many lives as he can

Another man with a gun takes a child from his father’s arms because
he says the father failed to properly change a diaper on their endless journey

Remember when we started to build that bridge to nowhere? It’s hard
to think badly of a bridge when for years now there’s been so much talk of walls

After unloading the U-Haul at the new place I’m going to get a few necessities
at the local Walmart

I’m going to go because America gets back on the horse
even if we forget what caused us to fall

I’m going to go to Walmart because it can’t be like Aurora
when the cashier at the A-Plus says I look a little like the shooter and I don’t
enter a movie theater for the next four years

I’m going to go to Walmart because sometimes
going to Walmart isn’t about class or flag-waving or quality or luxury

Sometimes Walmart means America and we just have to nod and take a knee

Mark Danowsky is a writer from Philadelphia and author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Eunoia Review, Gargoyle, The Healing Muse, Kestrel, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. He’s Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.