DREDGING

by Barry Foy

in the manner of Noël Coward, with tinkling piano

Like a blowtorch to asbestos,

The Almighty’s keen to test us

In a way that nearly always entertains.

With a knowing smile He chastens, He

Takes aim at our complacency

To guarantee we won’t turn soft, or vain.

 

It’s as if, at His own pleasure,

He employed a cosmic dredger,

That was poised at any time to scrape and plow,

Just in case we thought we’d bottomed out,

Had reached bedrock without a doubt,

And were sure it couldn’t get much worse than now.

 

But there always is tomorrow,

And we’ve found out, to our sorrow,

That the worst can worsen worser than expected.

Take our current situation—it defies amelioration,

Till it seems like God Himself could not correct it. 

 

Oh, we oughtn’t to be scandalized

To find the White House vandalized

By rogues and chancers, plutocrats, and cons,

But this latest iteration boasts a record concentration 

Of the sort of scum that floats atop a pond.

 

With the drone of putrid tweetings

And the endless unhinged bleatings,

It is all enough to render one quite solemn.

It would seem—of course, one never knows—

That to try to keep us on our toes

God’s dredged us up a soul-destroying golem.

 

He has lies for each occasion

And a list of depredations

That his lackeys all are willing to abet,

And he says he’ll make this country great,

But indicators indicate

That’s not about to happen—(ahem) not quite yet.

 

As he mocks, maligns, and threatens,

He inspires ranks of cretins

To intimidate their neighbors brown and black.

With their slogans and their marches,

And their swastikas and torches,

They survey what isn’t theirs—and want it back.             

 

They’ve decided that the man next door

And total strangers at the store

And worshippers in temples are their foes,

And that out of all the sundry types

The right to claim the Stars and Stripes

Is theirs alone. How could they? Heaven knows!

 

In the days of brutes long fallen

Such as Mao Zedong or Stalin,

They at least could cite doctrinal points of view.

They’d explain away atrocity

With political philosophy,

And only do what dogma bade them do

(Or so they claimed).

 

But compare this clown shambolical,

In his helmet formed of follicles,

Who measures out his neckties by the yard.

He’s possessed of a psychology

So riddled with pathology

That he’s nasty just to make his penis hard. 

 

I don’t hesitate to shame him,

But in truth I do not blame him,

After all, it’s just the way that he was fashioned.

In the manner I was raised, at least,

They said if you can’t praise, at least

Accord that sort your pity and compassion.

 

He can’t help it if he’s not too bright

And doesn’t read and barely writes

Or hasn’t much to live for but his wealth,

Or that, eyeing his reflection,

It bypasses his detection

That there’s pocket lint where others have a self.

 

But no similar forbearance

Can we grant to his adherents,

Who’ve forsaken everything they learned from Mother,

And allied themselves with rot and sleaze,

Made governance a foul disease, 

And behaved as turncoats even to each other.

 

Let them proffer no excuses for the insults and abuses

They as cynical enablers heaped upon us,

For the way they cruelly cursed us all

By daring to immerse us all

In something that’s so toxic and dishonest. 

 

They’ve disgraced themselves and me and you,

Their chain-migrated forebears too,

And descendants through the next five generations,

Yet pouring poison down our well

Has not, as far as I can tell,

Inspired in them the least self-condemnation.

 

So, once God has had His little joke,

What say we take these dreadful folk

And board them on a fleet of little boats,

Where, as they drift for mile on mile,

Without an outlet for their bile, 

Eventually they’ll cut each other’s throats?

                                              

Let’s carve their names in tuna,

Fly the pieces to Bermuda,

And then stand upon a pier and chuck them in,

Where at depths of many fathoms

We will let the sharks have at them

In the hope we’ll never see those names again.

 

We, the upstarts who protest today,

Were none of us born yesterday,

And we know, with hist’ry’s lessons well in mind,

That it’s not a liberal fantasy

That crimes against humanity

Quite often sprout from seeds of just this kind.

 

Be it we who made this thing occur

Or God (or Zeus, if you prefer),

Empow’ring all these wolves in sheeps’ apparel,

There can be no further dredging

Of the sort that I’m alleging,

’Cause we’ve truly reached the bottom of the barrel.

 

If you lie with dogs, you wake with fleas,

If you lie with germs, you get disease,

If you lie with poison, you’ll pick up the toxin.

It’s a fine, imperfect nation

But it cries for fumigation—

It’s our henhouse, and we’ve gone and let the fox in.

Barry Foy is a musician, song lyricist, and the author of Field Guide to the Irish Music Session and The Devil’s Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies. His “Rabbit Story” was selected for Paul Auster’s anthology I Thought My Father Was God, and Mr. Auster read it on NPR. Recent/current/upcoming venues for Foy’s poetry and prose include The Offing, Defenestration, Tough Poets Review, and Syncopation Literary Journal.

MIDDLE AGES CONTEMPORANEITY

by Judith Skillman

Herr Drumpf fastened by the feet

to a wooden panel, drawn behind a horse

as illustrated in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora,

hanged almost to the point

of death. Watch as Drumpf’s emasculated,

disemboweled, beheaded, quartered.

 

See his remains on display (as depicted in the execution

of Hugh Dispenser the Younger),

where a crowd of brightly dressed 13th century men

gather to view a ladder. A fire

blazes on the ground,

logs crisscrossed like bound limbs.

 

Another ladder holds green capped executioner

with his short sharp knife. I watch 

Mr. President’s flesh gape, pulled apart 

at collarbone and genitalia.

At the base of these Elizabethan ladders

placed in perspective by the painter, Froissart of Louise of Gruthuse,

 

a group of top-hatted gentlemen gesture.

Bulldozers sit where the ballroom

would have been, heaps of dirt piled. A group of giant moles

unearthed the newest labyrinth a la Hamas. 

And here we are, dressed to the nines,

wearing ballet-like slippers,

 

talking in low tones, holding not iPhones but harmonicas.

Let this be an example

for any would be high treasonist’s,

as well as Matthew Lambert,

the Irishman who suffered this punishment

as little ago as 1581. 

 

If he’d been a woman

he’d have been burned at the stake 

for reasons of public decency.

Judith Skillman is the author of twenty collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in Commonweal, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Zyzzyva, and numerous other literary journals. She has received funding from The Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust, among other organizations. Her new book is Oppression, Shanti Arts, 2026.

YEAR OF THE RANT

by Robert Knox

In a year in which only personal realities 
are consulted by humans, 
in which only over-sized creatures are heard 
and they merely grunt

In a year in which the hogs that grunt 
are only human, 
in which it can be seen that 
their blinkered eyes are rightly suspicious
and monitor the intrusive attentions 
of folks with cameras,
who are neither journalists nor tourists, 
but uniformed executioners bearing witness on themselves
 
In a year in which the words of the truly reproachable  
bear witness against themselves,  
in which the words of the prophets 
are everywhere and too numerous to recall
amidst the blinding lights of the next enormity,
too large for even the wiser among us to believe, 
or the most gullible
 
In which even the loudest of unsanctioned mouths 
fall silent,
for there is simply too much to say
 
and no lack of overpaid oath-breakers 
clamoring to bear witness against themselves.

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of a novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, titled Suosso's Lane. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as Off The Coast, The Journal of American Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Califragile, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed in 2018. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

WHEN JESUS TOOK A KNEE

by Alejandro Escudé

When Jesus took a knee
beside the palm tree
and the Romans there
paused, gulped the air,
no one could believe
Pontius Pilate’s decree
that all those who
did the same, who
took a knee as Jesus
did, those dividing us,
meaning the Romans,
should be treated as
traitors to the empire
and be set on fire
or hung upon a cross
which is cut of cypress.

A vision was bestowed
to those alive, glowed
a white H upon a field,
with a ball, oval-shaped,
alighting over the center
emitted by a gladiator
below, a ball or a skull,
one couldn’t really tell
but watched it soar high
as a crowd sprang nigh
to cheer the spectacle,
the human-like tentacle,
a wingspan to the bars
and then the long limbs,
finally the head, eyes
like blackened starlight,
the man hanging there
for all to witness, bare
save for a shoulder pad
nimble and heavy, a hood
red-gold, an eagle spread,
a man who cried, bled.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE HORSES

by Tricia Knoll

Horse Statue by jellobuster at DeviantArt

One million dead in the Civil War,
if you count the mules.
Which I do.

I say, blowtorch the rebel statue
men off their mounts and keep
the horses striding on their pedestals.

They were not traitors
to their country, showed no sign
of caring who they carried,

black or white, male or
female. Their integrity
is without question.

They did the work
they were asked to do
without a nod at glory.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet with a deep fondness for horses. I can see these statues with newly installed saddles replacing the old white men, perhaps ladders for children to climb up on. 

THE BOATS

by Joan Colby

Mithridates survived 17 days before expiring.

Head, hands and feet stuck out
Between two wooden boats.
The face, the extremities smeared
With honey for insects, stinging wasps,
Flies. Force fed so that he lives
In the torment of worms and maggots
Eating him from the inside out. A death
Reserved for traitors.

A cordon drawn. He needs to hide.
They’d walked from the blast
Satisfied. Now it’s gone wrong.
His brother’s body beneath wheels.
Bleeding, he crawls under the tarp
Of a white boat in someone’s yard.
All day, silent, Trapped in torment
eating him from the inside out.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.