NO JUSTICE

by Mary Saracino 

Source: Pinterest

In what pocket of my heart do I shove my grief  

over vigilante white boys being exonerated?

In this land of justice, justice was not served.

The scales of Lady Justice have been upended. 

The blindfold covering her eyes has been torn asunder.

She weeps with outrage.

She wails with sorrow.

She sees the abuse of power.

She calls us to resist.

And for the preservation of humankind

we must act

for love is a verb

and resistance is the antidote

to evil, to fear, to hatred,

the only medicine that

can heal

what festers deepest in the wounds of America's inglorious story.

No shining city on the hill,

a nation founded on unspeakable atrocities

must tourniquet its bleeding limbs

suture its oozing lesions 

nurse its traumatized people back to wholeness.

Together we must embark on this  

beautiful and necessary mending.

Or die trying. 

Mary Saracino is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet. Her most recent novel Heretics: A Love Story (2014) was published by Pearlsong Press. Her novel The Singing of Swans (Pearlsong Press 2006) was named a 2007 Lambda Literary Awards finalist in the Spirituality category.

ONCE AGAIN REALITY

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Source: Puzzle Warehouse

Once again reality

Has collided with fantasy.

Once again the truth

About America

Has crashed into 

Our pretty beliefs

About the basic goodness

Of our nation under God.

And once again 

All the old cliches

Will be hauled out—

“Sure, we’re not perfect,

We make mistakes sometimes,

But at the end of the day

We’re still lucky to be living

In the Land of the Free

The Home of the Brave

From Sea to Shining Sea

Amen.”

And little by little

Memory of the latest grotesque injustice

Will fade.

We will go to the movies,

Watch the Super Bowl,

Have dinner with friends,

Take our kids to the park,

And recede back into 

The collective dream

Of America the Good.

And we will be shocked 

All over again

The next time a cop murders a black kid,

The next time a governor

Poisons a whole city with contaminated water,

The next time a hospital 

Throws an indigent patient 

Out onto the street,

The next time

A vigilante gets away with murder.

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals.  His most recent book is At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging, Memory, Mortality, from Main Street Rag Publishers.  He podcasts poems on aging at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife, Cynthia, in northern California.

JELLO JUSTICES

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

keep silent at night, and greet the day with judicial voice,

to make bounty hunters rejoice,

to welcome them to set new laws

that follow judicial and personal flaws

thinking they can sell it

if they can gel it

but we are women voters, not quivering or breaking

not wavering or shaking because

vigilante justice will not stand, 

you can't invade our bodies like a foreign land

we don't buy your brand.

 

Lucille Gang Shulklapper lives in Florida where she writes poetry and fiction.