TAX SEASON

by Jennifer M Phillips

Confess—you'd prefer the other partner, death.

Even, perhaps, the dentist, than to have joy creamed off

the top of your good or mediocre year. Stealing breath

from your lungs, so it feels, though reason scoffs

 

about social good and duty and infrastructure.

A hundred to one, poets prefer death as their topic—

the old adversary, its weapons known and sure;

grief well honed; mourning, politic.

 

 But taxes! What's to say? It's impolite,

like defecation. We may complain with a wink

and shake of the head when processes back up tight—

everyone knows what that's like. But I think

 

the tragedian may find good meat for musing

on the rectitude of civic debt and the virtue

of paying one's dues and sorting out the confusing

archival tangle of what wealth did and didn't do.

 

Unlike religion, it is no use to protest

agnosticism. Tax gives no fig for belief

or its lack, just the ignoble quest

for loopholes, exemptions and write-offs for relief.

 

Each Spring, it is the other "little death”—a ration

of dispassionate accountancy, facing the music

of peccadillos, waste, or procrastination.

We make amends with our checkbook's antiseptic.

 

A touch self-righteous, I find I'm glad to say

to myself, watching firefighters fight

a blaze, or a town hall be built, I helped to pay

for that with my puny widow's mite.

 

So of the old pairing, I think I prefer

taxes, which come with certain resolution. I admit

it's annoying the way they increase and recur,

and possibly, after all, both come with an audit,

 

and after both, our wallet may end up thinner;

but after death, we miss our own reception

while our guests enjoy a character-dissection.

After taxes, the refund could take us out to dinner.

 

Both invite us to a reckoning self-examination

but death puts paid to our chance for amelioration.

A sage once said, by inspecting your checkbook stubs

I can see at a glance what you have valued and loved.

Jennifer M Phillips is a  bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower. Two chapbooks are Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022, Phillips' work appeared in over 100 journals, and is currently twice-nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize.

ICE CREAM ACTIVISM

by Alisha Goldblatt

after “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens

Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images via The New York Times.

Lick the sins of countries past,

the thrown stone, and gather your pints

in unbleached paperboard, crisp waffle cones.

Sell hazelnut play on words that

signal virtue and decadence, and

slick the tongue divine, smooth on spoon.

Let slingshots rile the bull market.

The only flavor is a flavor of fear.

In the modern white freezer, vats 

blister thumbs from the plastic scoop

whose spring-back lever neatly cleaves the ice.

The Green state, the Holstein cows, the fourteenth star.

Shirtsleeves cuffed, tough and chocolate stained

to show how cold we are, and numb.

Let the melting be violent and swift. 

The only flavor is the flavor of fear. 

Alisha Goldblatt is an English teacher and writer living in Portland, Maine with her two wonderful children and one lovely husband. She has published poems in the Common Ground Review, Literary Mama, and Burningword Literary Journal, among several others. Alisha writes whenever she can and gets published when she’s lucky.