ON FINDING JESUS TOTE BAGS AT BRANDY MELVILLE

by Lisa Seidenberg 

The Jesus totes were hung

from a bare nail in the store

among the tables of baby tees 

and short shorts seen 

by tweens who pause purposefully

at the offerings of each station

Not a full body Jesus 

Not a loving Jesus—

It was only the head

tilted slightly—quizzically even—

sporting the brambled crown 

of thorns he wore 

with signature aplomb

An odd sight, nevertheless

as Brandy Melville is a brand

for the body-con set

with its “one-size-fits-most" 

if you are young and female 

with a bikini-ready silhouette.

With doleful eyes cast downward, 

the tote bag Jesus regards 

the teetering mountains of

drawstring sweatpants

In soporific shades

of gray and blue and sand

A fitting attire for the desert breeze 

of Bethlehem 

or the Sea of Galilee

One wonders what thoughts 

might cross his mind, aware 

that Brandy M permits no returns 

of any kind? 

Lisa Seidenberg is writer and filmmaker and a Pushcart nominee (2025). Her writing has been published in Rattle, Asymptote Journal, Gyroscope Review, Rain Taxi, Third Wednesday Magazine,  Anti-Heroin Chic, Atticus Review, The New Verse News, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Delta Poetry Review, and New England Review;  she is also a poetry reviewer for the Whale Road Review. Her documentaries and experimental films screened at international film festivals inc. Sundance, Berlin, Athens and London. 

INTIMATIONS OF DEMOCRACY

by Gus Peterson

Credit: Tannen Maury/EPA, via Shutterstock in The New York Times.

after "Intimations of Immortality" by William Wordsworth

There was a time I glimpsed our declared decree

            and a people, its common block and seam

                        swam with visionary sight—

            e pluribus unum, the American dream.

It is not now as it was before.

            Scroll however I may, by night or day,

                        the might of eagle flight   

I once recalled I call upon no more.

Yes the red rose thorns and goes,

                        a blue wave ebbs and flows,

                        and the old man beams his light

as signs are pulled and lawns made bare,

            the tears that November night

            fell past our fellest despair.

Now with slow labor glorious rebirth,

and yet I know, whither this go,

the city upon a hill has passed from the earth.

  And as networks exalt their united song,

              and the hopeful young stream

                        inside insistent screens,

    I mourn alone that fleeting aberration—

                        once among the throng

   of certain inalienable nations.

Gus Peterson lives in Maine. 

SNOT

by Katherine Smith

President Donald Trump stood alongside House Republicans in the Rose Garden Thursday to applaud the narrow passage of legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. The bill, also known as the American Health Care Act, aims to effectively gut health care coverage for millions, cut Medicaid funding by 25 percent, and allow states to deny coverage for a slew of pre-existing conditions. —Mother Jones, May 4, 2017

Suspended in the blue horizon like a pale blue sea creature
we sing.  We sing of crown vetch rising from ditches like a minor god
that will still be here in a billion years, a music
we make each day. We believe in our solidity
like sea creatures under the ocean
in their geometric palaces made entirely of mucus,
whirling shells, transparent rooms that filter water
to feed pinkie sized larva. We build our cathedrals,
in love with monuments, marble columns,
the Nautilus of our constitution. In the Rose Garden
Americans have dragged a palace from under the water—
two children sleeping under a blanket on a beach
tended by a woman with a brain tumor who will die in a week—
heaved it onto the thorns, drip under collapsed walls.

Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.