WE LOVE GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE

by Cecil Morris

Supreme Court seems ready to uphold ban on gender-affirming care for minors. —NPR, December 4, 2024

Here’s gender-affirming care in my hometown: 

We give our boys some guns—long guns like ARs 
and shotguns and semi-auto handguns—
which, at first, are really just pointer fingers
and sticks and trigger-controlled hose nozzles
and, really, anything vaguely phallic.

We give our girls baby dolls and plush toys
and encourage them to hug and comfort,
to placate and coo, and, later, aprons
and play kitchens with miniature pots and pans.

We give our boys hammers and nails (of course)
and drills and fucking big four-wheel drive trucks
and dump trucks and fire trucks with screaming sirens
and teach them privilege and damage control
and the righteousness of conquest and noise.

We give our girls sixty watts of light and need
and teach them the virtues of silence and grace
and a thousand and one ways to cook a chicken,
to make repairs, and to turn tears on and off.

We teach them all manifest destiny.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) will come out in 2025.  He and his partner, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

I CAN'T VOTE

by Marsha Owens

“Sorted” by Pia Guerra at The Nib, August 17, 2020.

Blue mailboxes thrown onto truck beds
helter-skelter like toy soldiers tossed
onto a playroom floor, except I see
pictures—this is not make-believe—
but a real-time story much like the one
Anne told in her diary except by this point
in Germany trucks and trains carried people,
her father, other fathers, mothers, gone
to god knows where, and still Anne
believed her father would come back
someday, just stroll through the door
like coming home from work. . .but
we all know that’s not how her story ended.
So where is the mailbox graveyard?
Is someone burying
these mailboxes
next to Democracy
and the 2020 election—
they were such a fine
couple in new jersey just
a few days ago—but now
they lie close to my friend
who died from COVID-19,
just across from
Sweet Liberty
and Blind Justice
in a spot near
an eerie gravesite
that echoes
a lament into each
dark night,
i can’t breathe.


For her bio, Marsha Owens samples Nikki Giovanni: "I've been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?"

BERLIN, DECEMBER 19, 2016

by J.D. Smith





Much reading renders dust the myth
Of some past golden age,
As rust and tarnish, canker, rot
Have flyspecked every page.

Outlines emerge, though, that describe
The wax and wane of powers
And which times had the wit to build—
Or only tear down—towers.

As on a crowded street one sorts
The harmless from the threat,
Some stories stand out from the day
And mark a turn, so that

If we can’t quite assay this age
Or what it is replacing,
We still can feel the flames and smell.
The swart smoke of debasing.

J.D. Smith’s third collection of poems Labor Day at Venice Beach was published in 2012; his first humor collection Notes of a Tourist on Planet Earth the following year.. His poems have appeared in journals and sites including 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Texas Review, and Dark Mountain 3.

FITS AND STARTS ON THE BIG YELLOW FISH TAXI

by Tricia Knoll

Image: A pool in the Sacramento River where young salmon were stranded last year (Fish and Wildlife Service via KQED)

                           California Drought Has Salmon Hitching Rides in Trucks 
                                                                 --Bloomberg News, March 26, 2014


Oh, as rare as hen’s teeth, or when pigs fly
under a rain of cats and dogs and the horse in my pasture
is purple.

Or as surprising as the black President
and peace in the Middle East.

When fish ride bicycles,
there are so many fish
so far to go

thirty million salmon grab taxis
from Sacramento to the sea.


Tricia Knoll had a salmon omelet for breakfast. She writes poetry in Portland, Oregon and has a chapbook Urban Wild coming out in May from Finishing Line Press.

BUFFALOED

by Susan Vespoli

Use this link to the Sierra Club to send a letter to the Department of Interior Secretary Jewell and President Obama today telling them we must protect public lands from fracking.

Big shoulders, dark and burly like Mike Tyson,
2,000 pounds of bull that’s bred with Harley,
some think I’m buffalo but I’m a bison,
an herbivore who’s getting pissed and snarly

at lack of media blitz—where is the news?
Cameras should be filming this whole story
of Badlands, Bakken shale now fracked by crews
near national park, in remote parts of prairie.

Holding tanks, pump jacks of wells surround
my habitat at Roosevelt National Park.
Damn noisy trucks and Amtrak roar through town
with oil; pit flares scare away the dark.

Will someone witness for me, snap pix with phone?
Please save me. Fracking’s fucking up my home.


Susan Vespoli recently traveled to North Dakota where she met a bison at a porta-john. She teaches English and Creative Writing at a couple of Arizona colleges. Her work has been published online, in print, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.