BLAZING SLIPPERS

by George Salamon

The choreographer Marco Goecke with his dog 'Gustav' in a photograph from his Instagram account.

Marco Goecke has been suspended from his position as ballet director at Hanover’s main opera house after he smeared excrement on a critic’s face." —The New York Times, February 13, 2023

High culture's going

to the dogs, to the

dachshunds in Germany

this time, where once the

learned scholars

marched step in step with

thugs in brown shirts.

Vulgarity can still be bracing

or honest, at its most violent

expression it often swings

from rhetorical bullshit 

to the berserk Bolshoi 

acted out in Hanover.

George Salamon thinks Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles is one of the funniest movies ever made. The real violence on the Frontier was not too funny, perhaps only to those who conquered it by the gun.

AND SOMEBODY LAY THIS BOOK DOWN

A found poem of lines selected from the transcript of the January meeting of the McMinn County, Tennessee School Board considering the removal of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Maus from their curriculum teaching about the Holocaust.

by Dick Westheimer

Cartoon by Andy Marlette, Pensacola News Journal, January 29, 2022

     “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.” 

― Hannah Arendt

You see the naked pictures. You see the razor.

You see the blade where the mom is cutting herself. 

You see her laying in a pool of her own blood.

Please, somebody lay this book down.

Sure, we do the Holocaust, but we have

processes and procedures in place here. 

We can tell the kids what happened, but we don’t need 

all the nakedness and all the other stuff.

Can I lay that in front of a child?

It ain’t happening. It is not happening.

It’s like when you’re watching TV 

and a cuss word or nude scene comes on

and you don’t look at it. You don’t look at it.

Again, reading this to myself, it was decent 

until the end. Until the end,

I really enjoyed it. I liked it. 

The end was stupid, though.

It shows people hanging, it shows them 

killing kids. It is not wise or healthy

Somebody lay this book down and say 

Look it was taught! Look it was taught! 

Say! Look! It was taught!

If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, 

this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just so, 

this vulgarity, and the kids, they soak it in.

We don’t need the scene of the mice hanging from the tree.

We don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.

We don’t need the curse words and foul language.

I never had a book with a naked picture in it! 

I never had a book with foul language!

So I vote to do away with the book.

I Vote To Do Away With The Book!

And somebody lay this book down, because

somebody will say look, it was taught in the classrooms. 

So, Madam Chairman. I’m going to bring this to a head. 

I started it so now I am going to bring it to a head. 

I move that we remove this book.

I move that we remove this book!

Dick Westheimer has—in the company of his wife Debbie—lived, gardened and raised five children on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. In addition, his recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Rise Up Review, Sheila Na-Gig, Snapdragon Journal of Art and Healing, and Cutthroat.

THE 18-KARAT GOLD

by Howard Winn

An image created by the artist Maurizio Cattelan of his solid-gold toilet. It is to be installed in a bathroom in the Guggenheim Museum in May. Credit Maurizio Cattelan via The New York Times, April 19, 2016.

The 18-karat gold
potty at the art museum,
entitled America in irony,
throne for one in an exclusive
rest room reserved for a
sit down shit on that
cool gold seat while out-
side the line in the gallery
waits and twitches in need
not merely to piss or defecate
but to view this elaborate
priceless commode as a
comment on the pop
art that is kitsch beyond
value summing up what
life and art has become
in the postmodern world
where ostentation and
vulgarity have triumphed.

Howard Winn's work has been published in Dalhousie Review, The Long Story, Galway Review, Descant.  Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Main Street Rag, Evansville Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, 3288 Review, Straylight Literary Magazine, and Blueline. He has a novel coming out soon from Propertius Press. His B.A. is from Vassar College. his M.A. from the Stanford University Creative Writing Program. His doctoral work was done at NYU. He is Professor of English at SUNY-Duchess.