MYTHOS AT COMMENCEMENT

by David Anson Lee

Eric Schmidt stood at the stage
like someone introducing age.
He praised A.I.’s unfolding reign.
The graduates booed him just the same.

“You are the future,” Schmidt proclaimed.
The students looked professionally ashamed.
“Machines will free you for new dreams!”
A voice cried out, “They killed internships.”

The billionaires call this “transition,”
their favorite synonym for incision.
At Citadel, whole teams were gone:
outperformed between dusk and dawn.

At Stanford now the freshmen pray
their essays still sound human-made.
The honor code grows frail and thin
when every prompt begins with Begin.

The parents clap. The provost beams.
The deans keep monetizing dreams.
Meanwhile Mythos scans the wire
like scripture crossed with hellfire.

It reads the grid for sport alone,
finds ancient flaws in backbone stone;
then Anthropic, careful, grave,
explains restriction keeps us safe.

Translation: banks and states may peek
while everyone refreshes LinkedIn weekly.
The students boo because they know
the future doesn’t need payroll.

And somewhere in refrigerated light
the servers bloom all through the night,
teaching silicon to replace
the species that designed its face.

David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet from Texas whose work explores medicine, technology, public life, and cultural memory. His poems have appeared in journals including Right Hand Pointing, Eunoia Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Braided Way.

MISSIVE FROM THE SISTERS FOR THE RECENTLY TRANSITIONED

by Morrow Dowdle

The Advocate, August 1, 2024

And we’ll be so happy to welcome you, dudes—

that is, ladies. See, we’ll all have something to get used to.  

It won’t be easy. That’s why we’ll be here waiting 

with warm towels, massages, restorative yoga. We get it—

I mean, we’ve been women forever.  

 

Try not to get right on Tinder. You’ve just lost a penis,

and that’s a big adjustment. But can you believe it—

you could have a baby—and it would be your choice only.

Legislation’s gonna change by a landslide

any minute, so strap on your helmets.

 

The right industries will boom—Planned Parenthood, 

subsidized childcare, gun restriction.  More lesbian bars 

will thrive across the nation. Policewomen will run 

at least half the stations, military will get right-sized 

by command of female generals. 

 

Lean on us, your human instruction manual. Some of you 

will arrive on your period. We’ve got goody bags full 

of organic, eco-friendly maxi pads. Cramps?  

Our medicine cabinet’s full of Motrin. Hot flashes?  

We’ve got a closet of portable fans. We won’t mind

 

if you obsess over your new breasts for a hot minute, 

but maybe do it in private. Don’t stare at the women

breastfeeding all over public. Who knows, maybe 

next summer, we can all go topless. Imagine 

all the softball leagues we’re going to create, 

 

the roller derby teams spinning in rented arenas. 

Consciousness-raising circles will ripple out, endless.

You’ll find a goddess beneath each revival tent. 

Oh, the tenderness you’re going to inherit, 

the spaces you’re going to inhabit.  

 

Don’t cry if the men leftover question you.  

Or cry, if you need to. You have no obligation 

to respond, but if you do, tell them 

that you did it for The People.  

Tell them you took one for the team.

Morrow Dowdle has poetry published in or forthcoming from New York Quarterly, Pedestal Magazine, Fatal Flaw, and Poetry South, among others. They have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net. They edit poetry for Sunspot Literary Journal and host “Weave & Spin,” a performance series featuring marginalized voices. They live in Durham, NC.

TO THE REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS OF ARKANSAS

by Pepper Trail

Trying to appeal to your humanity after the actions you have taken, the words you have said, seems as futile an exercise as can be imagined, but still I would like to gather you in a room, let us say the sanctuary of a church, as I am sure you all consider yourselves Good Christians, and introduce you to my son and make you listen as he tells you how going through transition as a teenager saved his life, and have me tell you, no, it was not easy as a parent to understand and to know how best to help and how many talks we had and the tears that we shed and the love that was always in the room and the help and compassion that the doctors gave and what a delicate delicate thing is the soul of a young person going through such an experience and to say

How Dare You

impose your complete ignorance, your unknowing fear, your pathetic insecurity, your contemptible political calculations on these young people, the most vulnerable among us, and to tell you so that you cannot pretend not to know, that your law which makes compassion illegal, which outlaws informed medical care, will without doubt condemn transgender kids to death, will without doubt inflame hate and abuse of these gentle souls who harm no one, who are only seeking to heal themselves, to become whole, which is something that you, as long as you are disfigured by fear, ignorance, and merciless cruelty, can never be.

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

GOVERNMENT DIS-SERVICE ADMINISTRATION

by Margaret Rozga

Cartoon by Ann Telnaes, The Washington Post, November 20, 2020.

There once was a sycophant named Murphy

who claimed more than was her turf-y.

She refused to sign that the winner had won

and let the loser know his term was near done,

forsaking duty to go topsy turvy

Margaret Rozga’s latest work was to co-edit a newly released poetry anthology, Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems.

STANDING STILL AND LISTENING

by George Salamon

"Something is dying, but we do not yet know what it is… Something is trying to be born, but we cannot say what it is either… The old is in a state of suspended animation; the new stands at a threshold it cannot yet cross,"  —Fintan O'Toole, "Democracy's Afterlife," The New York Review of Books, December 3, 2020.

I envy those who can

See the future coming.

It's easier to endure if

You are sure, or if you

Are needed, shepherd

Or sheep, but you must

Not get scared as the

Forces unfold, just old,

And if you're like me,

Left high and dry of just

What they'll sow or reap.

George Salamon writes a poem occasionally, but is worried much of the time about what his granddaughter's generation can expect. He has recently contributed to The Asses of Parnassus, One Sentence Poems, Dissident Voice, and The New Verse News from St. Louis, MO.

AFTER THE ELECTION OF 2020

by Richard Kravitz

No one laughs at the orange 

monster, the clown 

outside the circus tent. 

In the open air he is frightening 

or pathetic. Clowns 

come and go. The enterprise, 

the circus itself, with its three-ring

allegories of the rugged individual,

the self-made man, southern hospitality,

the land of the free and the home of the brave,

the circus persists. The ringmaster

departs, barking his ugly song. We know

there is another, waiting, sprouting

from the sweat of armpit,

covered in greasepaint. 

The show must go on, does go on. 

If we so choose,

we will pay the price of readmission. 

Richard Kravitz is a psychiatrist in New Haven, Connecticut. He has published poems on medical themes in JAMA and other medical and psychiatric journals.  

NOW THAT ALEX TREBEK IS DEAD

 by George Held

Yes, this might be my last autumn

And yes, I love the fall leaves

In their annual resplendent beauty

 

A deadly fall, when Coronavirus

Has surged, again bringing mobile

Morgues to house the superabundant dead

 

In El Paso, on the Rio Grande, the Chicano

City to which I drove in 1967 for my divorce

In Ciudad Juarez, where quickies were then

 

Institutionalized: you paid your

Hundred dollars and the Cesar Romero

Judge gaveled your once-great marriage over

 

In 1967, when Alex Trebek was still

Canadian, a host for CBC,

And I was in the middle, Canada north

 

And Mexico south, and now we’re all

In the middle, T***p still in the White House

And Joe Biden the President-elect

 

No one knows where it will end, the COVID,

The Transition, a life, but Alex Trebek

Is dead

George Held is a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News.

RED DOMINION, THE TRANSITION: RATED R

by Alejandro Escudé

Illustrated | Mark Wilson/Getty Images, Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy Stock Photo via The Week

T***p stands at the top of the White House steps
holding an assault rifle: “Say hello to my little friend!”
he screams as the army rushes to arrest him, explosions
everywhere; in the Oval Office desk, dozens of encrypted
Russian messages, a diagram of an experimental aircraft
inside his seven iron, and the button, beneath the bust
of Taft, he pushed to open a passage to a bullet tram
leading directly to Moscow, on the way blasting by
Satan himself, his wild angel wings, demons wearing
MAGA caps raise their claws as he speeds through,
the tram, shaped like the cockpit of a 747, painted black
with T***P in red on its side; the final station is made
of gold, supporters and strippers greet him in Moscow;
police whisk him up a marble staircase to a glass elevator
and into a luxury hotel room near Red Square where
he’s met by a few KGB officials awaiting his last report
which T***p recites in precise Russian as he removes
the prosthetic face he has worn for decades, unveiling
a remarkable resemblance to Lenin; he runs a hand
over his bald head, the window open, sound of traffic
outside. Trump holds up a rumpled wig and smiles.


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.

TURMINOLOGY

by Max Gutmann

"What are your genetics, sir?"    

--Ben Shapiro to Ms. Zoey Tur on Dr. Drew on Call July 16, 2015

To refer to Ms. Tur
With a “sir,” I aver,
Is a scurrilous slur
We should learn to deter.

You infer it's a blur?
That the burden's on her
To insure, as it were,
That her herness is pure?

Use the term she'd prefer,
Not the grrr of a cur.
It's like cursing, I'm sure.
Be a person; defer.

Why be churlish? What fer?
You would certainly err
If you were to refer
To Ms. Tur with a “sir.”


Max Gutmann has contributed to Light Quarterly and other publications.

BEING AM-ISH IN AN OLYMPIAD WORLD

by Krista Genevieve Farris

Image source: LGBTAmish.com

I got a call sometime last summer. He was shunned.
I wasn't allowed to cry, the conversation was never about me
but of his death and her muncha muncha on his segmented life,
the unfurling of her wings and a fighting not to be cliché butterfly fragile flight.

I consumed our youth, chewed on Polaroid bits,
tried to digest as I kicked the covers. Didn't say-
it hurt to swallow jigsawed shots  
it slashed each time I couldn't utter his name.

I gurgled I love you with a bloody throat
bi-sected, di-ssected- am-ish- the shunning- her-of-him
the sister who wears make-up, whose hair curls just so,
the one who tells me what it is to be a woman.

She is not Caitlyn Jenner. I am not a cool Kardashian.
We don't have implants, an airbrush, good lighting or awards.
I didn't hear her called beautiful 10 times today
or a hero when she kept her factory job.

He was. They were. She is.
We are.
I am.


Krista Genevieve Farris lives in Winchester, Virginia with her husband and three sons. Her recent poems, essays and stories can be found in The Literary Bohemian, Right Hand Pointing, Cactus Heart, Shot Glass Journal, The Screech Owl, Brain, Child Magazine, Mamalode, Literary Mama, The Rain, Party and Disaster Society, Indiana Voice, Tribeca Poetry Review and elsewhere.

MANIFEST DESTINY

by George Salamon

'President Obama’s plan to remove all U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016 “is not a zero option . . . not a withdrawal plan,” the commander of U.S. and international forces there said Wednesday. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. said the plan he expects to implement, following Obama’s announcement last week, is a “transition” that bears no resemblance to the 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Under the plan, nearly 14,000 U.S., NATO and other international troops will remain in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of combat forces at the end of this year.' --Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, June 4, 2014     Image source: Paul Shinkman, US News & World Report

When American forces
leave the rubble of a country
we shake off the experience
and say:
Never Again.

Just not straightaway.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO and contributes to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News.