THE WATER COOLER

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

Blood stains and a small section of police tape show the scene where multiple people were injured following an overnight shooting at the Dior Bar & Lounge in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday, Jan. 22, 2023. Credit: Michael Johnson/AP

Gather round the water cooler

For the latest on the latest mass shooting

How many dead, how many critical

 

Let’s put our heads together and get the facts

Where the wounded hid, how many rounds

What the cops did and didn’t do

 

The victims have our thoughts and prayers

They have our attention

We are talking about it, talking and talking

 

Until talk turns to the next one

 

 

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island, and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and has had many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured several of her poems during the past year, including “How to Silence a Woman,” and “If I have loved you,” both of which won “Moon Prizes.” Melanie grew up in Vermont wandering the woods and fields and has never stopped wandering.  She leads nature and history field trips for Smithsonian Associates, the US Botanic Garden, the Nature Conservancy, Politics & Prose Bookstore, and many other organizations in the Washington, DC area.

WORD

by James Gage

 

Word is the best

four-letter word

of them all—

the most effective

and least obscene.

 

I prefer the sound

of human voices speaking

with one another

with the gift of our forebears:

the bilabial smacks

and glottal stops,

the carefully wrought thoughts

in place of haste

or wind-drift spasms.

 

Our words are aural evidence

of true evolution

beyond the harnessing of fire

or the hammer-ready thumb.

And the silencing of words

is a recipe for ruin.

James Gage is a poet whose work has been published in Main Street Rag, Inkwell, Oyster River Pages, The New Verse News, and others. Finishing Line Press published his first book of poems True If Destroyed (2015).

AS THIS ELECTION APPROACHES, I PUT MY THOUGHTS IN SMALL PLACES

by Penelope Scambly Schott

The green birdhouse
has a high tin roof

The green birdhouse
hangs crooked on the fence

The green birdhouse
has a hole and a perch

but I am too heavy
to perch on the perch

and I am too wide
to squeeze through the hole

and look, the birdhouse
is packed with sticks

which is why I can’t hide
in the green birdhouse 

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

THE POPE IS LIKE A REPUBLICAN SENATOR

by James M. Croteau

Apologies are like prayers
without action. Catholic claims
of intrinsically disordered and
contrary to natural law are like
allowing Sig Sauer MCXs and
AR-15s to be purchased with
no restrictions. Sorry's not enough.

James M. Croteau lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his partner of 31 years, Darryl, and their two Labrador retrievers. Jim grew up gay and Catholic in the U.S. south in the 60’s and 70’s and his writing often reflects that experience. His poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Right Hand Pointing, Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry among others. His first chapbook will be published by Redbird Chapbooks in 2016. He occasionally blogs about writing at talkingdogsholymen.blogspot.com.