AUTUMN ELEGY

Photo source: Plimouth Patuxet Museums

Howie Good is the author most recently of the poetry collections Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press).

PASSOVER IN PLAGUE-TIME

by Betsy Mars

after Saeed Jones’s “Boy in a Whalebone Corset”  in  Prelude to Bruise

“The acre of grass is a sleeping swarm of locusts,
and in the house beside it,
tears too are mistaken” for a dark sea,
into which we dip our egg
hoping it will ignite in fertility,
that it will part, a million times—
or whatever is needed—

dividing into heart, lung, legs,
the brain and whatever refrain
we choose to utter
on this, one of the holy days,
to mark our division, and our coming together
a tribe in the end, passed over,
we find our bitter herbs
our unleavened bread

our toilet paper and paper towels shared:
the treasures of this day,
when we marked our doors,
hid inside and hoped to God
he’d pass us by.

Betsy Mars is a poet, educator, photographer, and occasional publisher. Her Kingly Street Press published its first anthology, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife, in October 2019. Her work has recently appeared in Verse-Virtual, The Blue Nib, The Ekphrastic Review, and Silver Birch Press. The daughter of a professor and a social worker, she has had a lifelong interest in issues pertaining to social justice.

FEAR ITSELF

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks Various Lies, Lion Hunt, and Water Weight are available from Finishing Line Press, Plan B Press, and Right Hand Pointing respectively.

STEVE KING: THIS IS YOUR NOT SO WONDERFUL LIFE

by Michael H. Brownstein

      King said. "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"
      Hayes asked: "Than white people?"
      "Than, than Western civilization itself," King said. "It's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization."

—USA Today, July 18, 2016

So Congressman Steve King of Iowa woke on Monday morning.
The first thing he did was go to the bathroom—outside in a small wooden shack. (1)
He wiped his behind when he was finished with leaves and other weeds. (2)
Then, like a dog, slapped water onto his face, dug his tongue into the pond and drank. (3)
In the house he put on a smock of leaves (4) after a cold snack of simple food. (5)
He walked to work (6) down crooked pathways to his office in a city without focus (7)
and entered a small office in the capitol of no pattern (7 again) —you get it now—
just about everything was designed or invented by someone who was not white.


1. A typical example is the Indus city of Lothal (c. 2350 BCE). In Lothal all houses had their own private toilet which was connected to a covered sewer network constructed of brickwork held together with a gypsum-based mortar that emptied either into the surrounding water bodies or alternatively into cesspits, the latter of which were regularly emptied and cleaned. (Khan, Saifullah. "Sanitation and wastewater technologies in Harappa/Indus valley civilization 2600-1900 BC")

2. 50 B.C. The Chinese first made paper with short lengths of bamboo and then later added cotton linen rags which were soaked in water and pounded into swollen pulp. This was then formed into sheets and dried.
105 A.D: Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese court official, has his name linked to the invention of paper. Most likely, Ts’ai mixed mulberry bark, hemp, and rags with water, mashed it into pulp, pressed out the liquid, and hung the thin mat to dry in the sun.
8th Century: Arabs were known to make writing paper and were the first to use linen in the process. (The Toilet Paper Encyclopedia)

3. Bamboo tubes sealed at the end with clay provided a usable container in Asia, while the inhabitants of the Tehuacan Valley began carving large stone bowls that were permanently set into a hearth as early as 7,000 BC. (Cookware and Bakeware at Wikipedia)

4. Cotton was used for clothing in Ancient India from 5th millennium BC. Linen cloth was made in Ancient Egypt from the Neolithic period. (History of Clothing)

5. The earliest evidence for fire associated with humans comes from Oldowan hominid sites in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya. The site of Koobi Fora (FxJj20, dated 1.6 million years ago) contained oxidized patches of earth to a depth of several centimeters, which some scholars interpret as evidence for fire control. At 1.4 million years of age, the Australopithecine site of Chesowanja in central Kenya also contained burned clay clasts in small areas. Other Lower Paleolithic sites in Africa that contain possible evidence for fire include Gadeb in Ethiopia (burned rock), and Swartkrans (270 burned bones out of a total of 60,000, dated 600,000-1 million years old), and Wonderwerk Cave (burned ash and bone fragments, ca. 1 million years ago), both in South Africa. (K. Kris Hirst, "The Discovery of Fire")

6. C.R. Patterson, born slave, built automobiles before Henry Ford. (Monette Bailey)

7. President Thomas Jefferson recommended Benjamin Banneker (an African-American) to be a part of a surveying team to lay out Washington, D.C. Appointed to the three-man team by President George Washington, Banneker wound up saving the project when the lead architect quit in a fury – taking all the plans with him. Using his meticulous memory, Banneker was able to recreate the plans. Furthermore Banneker invented a perfectly timed working clock. No wonder Steve King was never on time.


Michael H. Brownstein was the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam, 2011.