SHEEP-KILLING DOG

by Michelle DeRose

Texas AG Ken Paxton steps in to make a woman’s life hell. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Big hats welcome but not a Texas uterus
they won’t probe, tell you how
you can wear it in public,
a watched portal to the baby chute
they need it to be. I guess
to make future bullseyes? Because
there’s also not a barrel
they will look down, keep out
of campuses. In Texas
all depends on the tunnel. 
Barrels determine themselves but canals
are hyper-policed. At the end of every story
is a woman bleeding, empty, and an Attorney
General smug and whole as he always was.

Michelle DeRose hopes she can retire from teaching at the college level before she must relive a school shooting, and she is grateful she doesn't live in Texas. She teaches creative writing and African American, Irish, and world literature at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

SHUTDOWN SHUT-UP

by David Feela

Cartoon by Mike Marland

We talked, then complained.
Now the why about what happened

deserves a reasonable explanation.
Fifteen days seems ample time

for tunneling under his wall of
obfuscation, finally into sunlight.

See the paunchy groundhog,
still afraid of his own shadow.

Tell him no, we’ll have no more
weeks of political winter.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. A Collection of his essays, How Delicate These Arches, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Unsolicited Press will release his new chapbook, Little Acres, in April 2019. He's tired of winter.

CORVIDS

by Jonathan Travelstead

Image source: WebEcoist

Want to catch an illegal alien? Study the crow,
its shiny things. Foil hat. Mirrors, chewing gum wrappers
wadded in nests.

We haven't been family for three hundred million years.
Their minds are closer to the lizard brain
where we parted ways, descending different trees.

Yet watch them make tools from straws they use,
solving riddles which require up to eight steps of critical thinking
to deftly pincer out the strip of raw beef.

Crafty. Pistachio, floating in a glass. I watched a crow fly
between an alley and a picnic table, plinking pebbles
and small stones until enough water

displaced the nut to within reach of its beak.
They're smarter than you. We haven't evolved in the right direction
to distinguish their motivations.

Pepper them with shot, and they remember, tell the next
generation about the change in route and elevation.
Screen a dome over the tomatoes walled within your garden

and a few tunnel the fence, but first send scouts
proficient in the killdeer's portrayal of a broken wing
along your flank, divert you while a murder

marches on the front gate. They'll rob you blind. In Arizona,
I hear blackberry pies vanish from windows.
Sheets hanging on the line disappear.

Canadian fishermen drop lines into holes
rough-cut in ice, later report their lines drawn up in a spaghetti tangle
of nylon, scales, and black feathers on the red snow.

Crow, rook, blackbird, raven- call them what you want.
Hell, my Chevy broke down near Roswell and one completed
my solenoid's broken circuit with a flat-head,

then wouldn't take a dime! Each can do the job of ten men.
They don't think like we do.

They don't need much.

Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will one day get him to the salt flats of Bolivia. He has published work in The Iowa Review and on Poetrydaily.com among others, and his first collection How We Bury Our Dead by Cobalt/Thumbnail Press is forthcoming in February, 2015.

'NAM POSTSCRIPT

by Richard O'Connell

Veterans Day Weekend 2014

Now the tunnel at the end of the light
Perceived: no one won, no one was right;
No one lost, but the dead and maimed
Suffered all for the armistice gained.


Richard O'Connell lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Paris Review, Measure, Acumen. 

'NAM POSTSCRIPT

by Richard O'Connell

Image credit: dinhhang / 123RF Stock Photo

Now the tunnel at the end of the light
Perceived: no one won, no one was right,
No one lost, but the dead and maimed
Suffered all for the armistice gained.


Richard O’Connell lives in Hillsboro Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in  The Paris Review,  The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Measure, Margie, National Review, The Texas Review, Acumen, The Formalist,  Light, etc.