THE OLYMPICS OF TESTIMONY

by Elaine Sorrentino

He’s given no warmup.

Tossed into the arena
with hungry litigants,
he pulls a timeline of horror
from under his fingernails,
pain mired in memory,
entertainment for the bloodthirsty.

From inside the stadium
and in front of home screens,
spectators judge the recounter
as he details the unforgiveable:

“Where are the kids?”
“They’re in the basement.”

His head remains in the lion's jaws,
he’s questioned over and over
until he's bloodied and defeated
and they are satisfied.

You may leave the witness stand now.

Elaine Sorrentino, author of Belly Dancing in a Brown Sweatsuit (Kelsay Books, 2025) has been published in journals such as Quartet Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The New Verse News, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Gyroscope Review, Sparks of Calliope, Sheila-Na-Gig, Poetry Porch, Ekphrastic Review, and Haikuniverse. She is facilitator of the Duxbury Poetry Circle in Duxbury, MA.

IS IT ABOUT THE SURVIVORS OR ABOUT THE TAO?

by Raymond Nat Turner

“Laws grind the poor and rich men rule the law”

 — Oliver Goldsmith

“What does the Tao have to do with anything? Are you kidding?”

Epstein-class—pedophile protectors—RICCO racketeers agree 

to pee on survivors. Deploy entire capitalist state apparatus coming 

at us: D. C., Cali, Chicago, Pacific, Caribbean, Canada, Greenland!

Depends on nothing, does not change 

operates everywhere, free from danger

Mother- of the universe—We didn’t have

a name for it—but she called it the Tao.

Keeps to the Mother-  fed by the Mother-

source of all being; life and death are the

same—We didn’t have

a name for it—but she called it the Tao.

Multiple meanings include ‘way,’ ‘path,’ ‘road,’

‘doctrine,’ ‘principle.’ Undifferentiated, yet complete.

soundless, formless, existing before heaven and earth—

We didn’t have a name for it—but she called it the Tao.

Kamikaze pilot crashing into committee hearing—burn

book in hand. Firing triggering rounds at survivors’ scars;

bootlicking, brown-nosing, on behalf of apex predators—

We didn’t have a name for it—but she called it the Tao.

 

Talentless student of Theatre of the Absurd, contesting every word—

stonewalling, gaslighting, sowing wild quotes, burn book notes at 

child scapegoats, like secondhand smoke—

We didn’t have a name for it—but she called it the Tao.

Ball-less Roy Cohn. Consigliere believing JD’s Junkyard Dog,

rather than Juris Doctor. Degree granted by corrupt, defunct

university of sole client?—We didn’t have a name for it— 

but she called it the Tao.

What does it take to get a disbarment date in the Sunshine State?

Empire State disbarred J6-inciter, election worker-harasser, Count

Ghouliani. Golden State disbarred loony theorist, J6-agitator and

former Thom-ass Clarence law clerk, Eastman …  And some say 

MAGA means Make Attorneys Go Away—

We didn’t have a name for it—but she called it the Tao.

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

EVERYTHING MARJORIE MAY HAVE NEVER SAID

by Chad Parenteau

We swore an oath. Does anyone remember the oath?

Free speech is essential, whether or not we recall it.

They continue to take our freedoms away. Can anyone

tell me what those freedoms were? I don’t recollect 

putting any of those freedoms back on when my mask 

came off. Who took my mask off? I can’t remember 

everyone who voted for me, but I know everyone did, 

and the only way I can win is if everyone forgets that 

I won. Protect the integrity of elections. If this could 

happen during the time of my election, whenever that 

is, I would really appreciate it. Remember when Black 

Lives Matter and Antifa fought over who would storm 

the capitol,  or so I’m told by people I can’t recall. Political

power  comes from the barrel of a gun. Mumia Abu Jamal

said that, according to my notes. That wasn’t free speech 

when he said that. Has America proven those words 

to be true? I’ll have to get back to you if the smoke 

ever clears. There’s two schools of thought to research. 

One of them is CNN, which lies about me. The other 

is NewsMax, which uses my complete sentences

but omits everything else I’ve ever said in my life, 

which I may or may not have said. I don’t remember.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, and Nixes Mate Review. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His second collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award.

A FUGUE

by Martin H. Levinson




is a contrapuntal composition in
which a short argument or fight,
like the one we had on Wednesday
over the meaning of Mueller’s
testimony as to who will get to
govern this great nation that
wasn’t so great for blacks,
women, and gays when I was
growing up in the fifties on
a tree-shaded block close to
Ebbets Field, home of the
Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that
left the borough of churches and
underdogs to watch the McCarthy
hearings on television where a
senator who saw Reds under every
bed got his comeuppance but not
before we took cover under our
desks at school so we wouldn’t
die when the Russians dropped
nuclear bombs on New York City
where short arguments or fights
didn’t stop us from to thinking it

was worse during the Civil War
when instead of quarreling on cable
and social media about whether you
can indict a sitting president or what
constitutes fake news, people were
killing each other, blowing up bridges,
and burning down Atlanta where the
traffic these days makes getting from
one end of town to another a nightmare
in our nation’s history that seems to

some to be coming to an end because
even if a new president is elected the
damage to civil discourse and shared
norms has been so eroded that only
poetry and a knowledge that America
has weathered other crises in its past
will be able to save us, but who these
days is writing poetry or knows much
about our nation’s past?


Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published ten books and numerous articles and poems. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

JUST THE FACTS

by g emil reutter

The shade is always drawn
bland as a meadow hiding from the sun
robin pecks at cracks in dirt
worms deep in hardened soil.

This poem could be about window shades
a meadow, a robin or worms but it isn’t.

Coffee maker gasps and chugs, good to the
last drop, I pour my morning fix. Sun is shy
today, humidity at 83%.

But this poem isn’t about a good cup of coffee
or the weather today.

On Wednesday I watched as the old man spoke
baggy eyes, drawn face. A serious man encircled
by the circus of sound bite panelists. He spoke
the truth, did not perform.

Not a hoax he said, integrity he said, obstruction
true he said, no conspiracy with the enemy he
said, contacts he said. Although there was a
sputter here and there, his just the facts response
reflected courage, the search for the truth.

The Russians are coming again in 2020 he said.

In this time of chicken-hawks, cowardly pols
self-important talking heads, this old man
pushed up the blind, let the sun in.

Down Pennsylvania Avenue, President Bone Spur
squints from the light, speaks of performance
distorts facts, criticizes the heroic old man whose
shoes he could never wear.

And so it is, moisture from the air seeps into the
ground, unrelenting robin hops and listens, plucks
a fat worm through the softened surface. Much as
the old man did on a Wednesday in July of 2019.


g emil reutter can be found at here.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE MUELLER REPORT

by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose

Cartoon by Steve Sack Star Tribune Jul 23, 2019

“We chose these words carefully, and the words speak for itself. The report is my testimony.” 

—Robert Mueller announcing his resignation at the DOJ, May 29, 2019

“I’m just going to leave it as it appears in the report.”

—Robert Mueller before the House Judiciary Committee, July 24, 2019

I

Among so many rapid-fired questions
The only obvious thing
is Mueller would prefer to refer us to the Mueller Report.


II

We are of three branches, broken
Like a felled tree
In which there caws the Mueller Report.


III

The Mueller Report spun in the extreme heat and tornados.
(no small part of climate change—but who cares?)


IV

A president and an attorney general
are one.
A Robert Mueller Testimony and a Robert Mueller Report
are one.


V

No one knew which parts to read first
The parts on collusion
Or the parts on obstruction
The Mueller Report in its entirety
Or just the CliffsNoted testimony.


VI

Pundits twittered
after the barbaric wait.
Whole sections of The Mueller Report
Crossed out.
The omissions
deduced in skittled sentence fragments
   An impeachable case?


VII

O dim subjects of T***pworld,
Why do you dream of singing canaries?
Do you not see how the Mueller Report
Hops all over you?


VIII

I know the difference
between careful words and testimony;
But I know, too,
That the Mueller Report is involved
In what I know.


IX

When Mueller flew the coop
It marked the end
Of many chattering hopes.


X

At the thought of The Mueller Report
steaming on a platter,
the frenzied mobs readied their forks.
Would they eat crow?


XI

The president rode over Washington
In a military parade.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his leaked Access Hollywood tape
For the Mueller Report.


XII

The President and his cronies are celebrating.
The Mueller Report must be flying south.


XIII

We’ve been waiting all year.
They are snowing us.
And we are going to be snowed.
The Mueller Report flapped
For 400 pages. Then nose-dived

            A cooked goose
            A mockingbird
            A raven cawing Never More.


Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose's work appears in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, TheNewVerse.News, The Weekly Humorist, The Satirist, The Belladonna, and many others.  She lives in Rochester, NY and is a founding member of Straw Mat Writers.  Twitter: @libbyjohnston74

COLORING

by Laura Lee Washburn

This drawing is part of an exhibition in Tucson, AZ of original watercolors and other artworks by kids whose families have fled to the U.S. seeking asylum. Casa Alitas operates a refugee shelter in a former Benedictine Monastery and offers art-making classes to traumatized kids released from detention.

“It’s not what you look at that matters,

  it’s what you see.”

—Henry David Thoreau

In the blue pool with jogging women
every morning this month I’ve seen
in distant tree yellow busted balloon.

I have ridden the packed dirt
on a brown three-speed bike
almost into long black snake.

I have been to the marsh
where green leaves reflect
from brown tannin waters.
I will go there again.

I have felt unease, eaten
too much sugar, sagged
at the loneliness of bad friendships.

I’ve helped light one hundred and forty candles
after dark, listened to testimony, heard
the names of six dead migrant children:

Darlyn, Jakelin, Felipe, Juanito, Wilmer, Carlos.
I’ve read the judicial arguments on soap
and sleep, toothpaste, blankets.

When the green leaves blow,
I watch through bamboo blinds,
live action but dim impressions of bright.

I have driven in blind white
sun on the turnpike’s upward curve
and made it south enough to see again.

I have driven twenty in storm
shocking white water rains
when the pea-sized summer hail
begins to tap.
I have not turned
around at the lake in the road.
 —I have judged and been judged—

Stupid people    this local woman
hosted a vigil because of “images” she saw.
How does she know [How does she know?]
the images are really detention centers?
    people who serve the DARK!
    scum invading      disease and violence
our president taking down the evil
Stop believing or search for the truth
everything is really a lie!

Laura Lee Washburn has taught how to tell creditable sources from biased sources, has never been held in a cell, and donates her time to a Southeast Kansas organization that helps women in poverty resolve crises.

THE FIXER’S TESTIMONIAL

by Mary K O'Melveny

Michael Cohen by Ross Studio

I am not a bad man
and yet
I am not a good man

I knew the road’s rules
and yet
I went off the rails

I loved my family
and yet
I brought them pain

I am not an angry man
and yet
I am not a satisfied man

I am a problem-solver
and yet
I caused complications

I am a loyal man
and yet
I betrayed everyone

I know what truth is
and yet
I used to lie for a living

I am not a sorry man
and yet
I am a man filled with regrets

One does what one can
until that is no longer an option
Then one becomes someone else

and yet

Maybe it is better
Maybe it is worse
My guilt may set me free

and yet

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press.

THE INTERPRETER’S TESTIMONY

by Rebecca Starks


“I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”

–Marianne Moore

How to put it . . . I don’t remember,
I doodle, I’ve done it since grade school—
pencil lines meaning one mood                     
or another, today vague,
yesterday wave; once friend,
now drug. Go ahead,

subpoena the narrow-ruled pages,
make what you can of the illuminated margins.
An eagle gutting a goose, a savage
spiral, a millipede uncurling,
a mushroom in the rain . . .
who’s to say it’s not shorthand for boredom?         
Besides, I’ve burned them.

In the moment it’s like psychosis,
you forget to notice
the voices never surprise you
unless you’re corrected—then it sticks
for a day or two. With them, the introductions,
Mr Man-of-the-Road—sorry, Mr Street-Smart—
shaking hands with Mr Exemplary—
sorry, Mr Winner—and I
the magician’s saw pulled one way
then the other, like the tide, Truth
the lady with the flexible spine.

What couldn’t I tell you
in confidence, which enjoys such nuance
in both tongues, including itself
and its opposite, which is how they sat,
as one must to feel attraction, or not,
Mr Winner offering to remove my jacket
and Mr Street-Smart asking,
was my necklace made of rawhide.
Otherwise I was invisible.

I was the vodka neither touched,
the puck sliding past bodyguards,
the shadow behind the lattice,
the fish hiding under stones,
the poet’s living and buried speech,             
the old man’s marlin stripped by the sea.
I was manly and hangdog, flattery and threat,
throat-clearing and chuckle and gleam,
collar and cufflink, the shakedown
comparing watches . . . I was there.

Do you think it matters what was said?
What was agreed upon?
You can hear it in the question.

When my son was two,
someone asked, watching him play,
Don’t you wish you knew what he’s thinking?
I laughed. He looked at shoes
and said Shoes, he looked at me
and said Up, he looked at nothing
and said More. A cup turned upside down
has no bottom. In truth

I was superfluous—
the two men spoke the same language,
every exchange translating roughly:
You could be useful to me. And also to me.

Though at one point Mr Winner spun a coin
saying In God We Trust, and when I was at a loss
Mr Street-Smart suggested ne doveryat' nikomu,
which means, more or less, go in peace,
as nevedenie means deniability.

Which reminds me that near the end
when I translated freedom, Mr S-S corrected, “freedom”—
as one parent might answer a child, forever
and the other, indefinitely.

What would I say? What wouldn’t I?
What is paranoia but whistling in the dark?
Or, if you prefer the Russian, ostentatious optimism?

Rebecca Starks lives in Vermont. She has poems and short fiction appearing or forthcoming in Baltimore Review, The Hopper, Crab Orchard Review, Ocean State Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Slice, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of Rattle’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor, and her manuscript is a finalist for the 2018 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. 

AMBASSADOR OF GOOD WILL

by Edmund Conti

When meeting with Sergei Kislyak
Your memory falls through the crack.
There’s so much to discuss
With this welcoming Russ
That it’s awfully hard to keep track.

Edmund Conti is always happy to meet with the Russians to discuss the high price of vodka, have a few laughs, and trade military secrets.

LORDY, I HOPE THERE ARE TAPES

by Alan Walowitz

Image source: Canadian Business

You call up the stairs to tell me what we’ll need
to make it through the long night ahead.
The water’s running and I can hardly hear,
though you’re known to assert
that to listen and to hear were never meant to be the same.
No matter, we know this part always ends in a caustic, Nevermind.
I do hear you slam the door
and imagine your short sigh before heading off into your day.
I’m alone now and can make mine any way I’d like--
though, Lordy, I hope there are tapes
for later when I get to the grocery
and this great forgetfulness is bound to come over me
surrounded by the bounty of America:
shelves stacked with goods, no one could ever use, given even a lifetime;
the produce shaped into so many pyramids
we’d once hoped to visit, but now know we never will;
the prepared foods, chilled, and ready to be reheated and consumed
but where should we put them if left uneaten when our day is done?
This is a great land with so many choices
of who to believe and why, and infinite possibilities of what to buy,
so please don’t berate me when I call
to ask what I need to bring.
I know we already have everything
and are likely still to feel we’ve been taken, and underserved,
and finally and fatally, misunderstood.
Though, Lordy, I hope there are tapes
of the long night so long ago when we first fell for each other.


Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan’s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing.