THE ALARM

by Pepper Trail





I was looking forward to this evening
After long hours of work
Sitting quietly in the upstairs room
Gazing out at the waning day
The sun bright on the eastern hills
At peace, a glass of wine, a book

But the news of the day has gutted me, again
I slump, hollowed out, unable to escape
Or, for this moment, to resist, the horror
The endless horrors, one following the other
The government-orphaned children, lost
Huddling in the white tents, torn from their mothers
The Supreme Court, that I somehow still believed
To be the last defender of the powerless, their last refuge
In a time when the weak are scorned and dehumanized
When justice is bought, the Supreme Court
Blesses the President’s power to demonize and exclude
(T***p v. Hawaii)
Upholds the racists’ right to disenfranchise
(Gill v. Whitford)
Allows religion the sanction to discriminate
(Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission)
Attacks unions while allowing corporations unlimited power
(Janus v. AFSCME)
And now, the last “moderate” justice gone
The last hope for balance lost

Night has fallen. Up and down the street, the cicadas
Begin to sing.  We call it singing, but it is not
It is a sound of drums, an urgent percussion, it rises
To an almost unbearable pitch and intensity
The shriek of an alarm, echoing against the shut-up houses
Will the doors open? Will my neighbors come out
To stand on their porches? Will we look at each other
Speechless in that din?  Will we come down our steps
Approach, shake hands, acknowledge this extremity?
Will we, at last, awake?

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. In his spare time, he leads natural history tours around the world.

WOW! HE TWEETS

by Ron Riekki

When he writes “Wow!”
he really means
the opposite of Mom,
the word flipped
upside-down
like families
he’d love to drown.

Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and Undocumented (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).

CAN IT HAPPEN HERE?

by  Jon Taylor

Image source: Newspaper Rock

Ask a Native American
declared a “merciless Indian savage”
in the country’s founding document
taught with reverence to schoolchildren.

Ask a descendant
of slaves from Africa
who isn’t behind bars with two million
others of his inheritance.

Ask a Mexican
who had the temerity
to resettle in the land Anglos stole
from his ancestors.

Ask an Arab immigrant
who was removed from an airplane
because his fellow passengers
felt uncomfortable in his presence.

Ask a six-year-old
taken from school in handcuffs
because he pulled the pigtails
of the girl in front of him.

Ask the parents
who lost custody of their children
because they let them walk home
from school by themselves.

Ask the old boy
shot dead in his armchair
when the law broke down his front door
looking for someone else.

Ask yourself
while being cavity searched
at the side of the road
for rolling through a stop sign.

Jon Taylor is the author of Berry Picker’s Blues, a book of Michigan/Northwoods/Upper Peninsula poems. He can be reached at taylor.jon440[at]gmail.com .

THEY DON'T REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE . . .

by Maria Lisella

… the immigrants, the sharecroppers,
the unskilled laborers standing on corners
waiting for work, maybe it was the Hell’s Gate Bridge
or the dangerous bowels of the subways.

Sharing low-lit tenements with men piled high
swapping pillows, sheets and beds as they returned
from the morning shift, the evening shift

The stench of those men-filled quarters
No women to dress for, to clean for,
to shave for, a society of men clammy

in winters, sultry in summers, saving
meager wages split with padroni
and landlords, before sending bits and pieces

Home to bring wives and children
here to this foreign place, trying
to remember why they left home,

Was it that bad? Yes it was, wives don’t tell
the men in their letters, of the famine,
the deaths, a silk thread of hope spanning

The Atlantic, to feel whole again
not so alone, to be human instead
of imitating animals in the daily routine:

Wake, work, sleep, nothing in between
no rises or falls or celebrations or
clean towels or bread on the table

Set for four, six or set at all.
Eating while standing becomes a skill
on the corners waiting for the work

If the policeman doesn’t move them
to another corner, stepping into strangers’
cars, a dangerous deal for a day’s work

Now the men speak with accents from:
Mexico, Guyana, India but they are not
so different from our grandfathers and uncles

Shifting from one foot to the other to keep warm
expecting a day’s pay by nightfall, but who can tell?
they have no choice.

My mother recalls the stories of her father, brothers.
She cannot understand the nieces, nephews
who don’t see their ancestors’ faces before them.

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate 2015-2018. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize, her collections include Thieves in the Family, Amore on Hope Street, and Two Naked Feet. She co-curates the Italian American Writers Association readings, is a NY Expert for USA TODAY, and contributes to La Voce di New York.

GENEALOGY AND THE BAN

by Judith Terzi

Demonstrators waited outside the Supreme Court on Monday, when it was announced that a limited travel ban would be allowed until the justices could hear arguments this fall. Credit Al Drago for The New York Times, June 28, 2017

And just for the record,
close family does not
include half sisters but
stepbrothers, not step-
fathers but second cousins
once or twice or thrice
removed on the father's
side if they can sing and
third cousins on the mother's
side if they can tango nuevo
with a son-in-law on no
one's side but not first
cousins unless they're chefs,
and not step-grandmothers
if their hair is short and
white and if they write.

Judith Terzi's poems appear in a wide array of journals and anthologies including Caesura, Columbia Journal, Raintown Review, Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Web and Net and included in Keynotes, a study guide for the artist-in-residence program for State Theater New Jersey. Casbah and If You Spot Your Brother Floating By are recent chapbooks from Kattywompus Press.

COVFEFE

by Martin H. Levinson

He was always a thug with a coarse mouth, peacock swagger,
   and a proclivity to break rules like his paterfamilias who
wouldn’t rent to African Americans but sent his misbehaving boy
   to military school to learn how to play football, stick it to losers,
and escape the draft so as to not serve in Vietnam or praise
   John McCain for being captured rather than killing the enemy
in real estate deals that were too big to fail or have T***p

put into jail for hiring undocumented workers to mount his name
   on glitzy Gotham towers and gaudy gambling casinos that
went bust in New Jersey where busts are bounteous and
   pussies can be grabbed for the asking if you are a celebrity
palling around with Russians, wrestlers, and rapscallions from
   Fox and Friends who want to make America great again
like it was in the eighteen fifties when blacks were chattel and

nativist numbskulls were not considered nattering nabobs of
   negativity by their supporters but impassioned Neanderthals
capable of challenging Obama’s citizenship and backing a
   Muslim ban and a Slavic first lady who under our nation’s new
immigration rules would have been a deportation priority during
   the nineteen nineties when her husband did not report hundreds of
millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tenuous tax maneuver

later outlawed by a Congress that is now led by a Cheesehead from
   Wisconsin and a prune face from Kentucky who loves coal more than
the proles who work the mines in a state which ranks forty-seventh in
   educational attainment, is solidly Republican, and has a constituency
the POTUS respects as much as Marla Maples who learned she was
   being divorced by reading about it in the New York Post rather than
seeing it on TV where Jim Comey found out he had been fired as

Director of the FBI and students from T***p University discovered
   they had been defrauded by a corpulent con man who thought
climate change was bogus, Mexicans were bad hombres, and
a nasty woman was making life difficult on the campaign trail
   by calling the star of the Apprentice Putin’s puppet, a teller of
untruths and a fellow unfit for the highest office in the land
   of the me, the home of the knave, and the dockets red glare,

lawsuits bursting in air, gave proof through the night that
   our hate was where it has forever been—gays, the elites,
liberals, immigrants, people of color and those perceived as
   getting a good deal in a global economy that features
home runs for the rich, strikeouts for the poor and
   lies hit down the foul line that T***p always calls fair.  

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems in various publications. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.