DISTRACTIONS

by Mary Saracino

 

 

They want us to look away,
forget about the pedophiles
the wars,
the ICE raids,
the killing of nonviolent protesters,
the abduction and incarceration of children,
the deportation of immigrants
who are not criminals,
the grifting and the lies,
the evil that spews forth every day,
trying to silence us,
eviscerate the truth
that we see with our eyes,
bully us into abdicating our rights,
turn us against one another
so they can continue their unholy alliances
retain unwarranted power,
feed their insatiable greed,
make money off of countless atrocities.
But we are not distracted.
We are focused, lightning bright,
brave and unstoppable.
We will not look away.
We will not pretend that
war crimes are not being committed.
We see that cruelty is the law of the land.
We believe the women and children
who have been raped, silenced, forgotten.
We stand with the men with integrity who fight for justice.
We the people march to demand an end to the horrors,
to honor truth and decry genocide,
racism, misogyny, xenophobia
and all the many uncivil actions
and policies that seek to undo us
deny us our sacred humanity.
Together we shout: “No kings. No autocrats. No Oligarchs.
Never, ever again!”

 

Mary Saracino is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet. Her book of poetry Motherlines was published by Pearlsong Press (February 2026). She is the author of four novels: Heretics: A Love Story (Pearlsong Press 2014), The Singing of Swans (Pearlsong Press 2006), No Matter What (Spinsters Ink 1993), and Finding Grace (Spinsters Ink 1999), and the memoir, Voices of the Soft-bellied Warrior (Spinsters Ink 2001). She co-edited (with Mary Beth Moser) She Is Everywhere! Volume 3: An anthology of writings in womanist/feminist spirituality (iUniverse 2012), which earned the 2013 Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Women-Centered Literature from Sofia University.

EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH TURNS TO RUBBLE

by Raymond Nat Turner

Tiny backpacks, bloody body parts litter pulverized apartment and charred-

car-streets. Stolen lives litter flattened hospitals and schools. Litter crimson

coffee shop floors. Litter blackened fields of vaporized crops.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Over and over Earth’s saddest symphony plays. Harrowing screams, wails, moans.

Same timbre, same tones. Same saline Palestine tears in Sudan. Same in Ukraine, 

Lebanon, Venezuela, Iran. The same 1% is at war with workers of the world—and

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They bomb, they strut. They prance and ‘dance,’ and bomb and bomb again.

They bomb abroad shouting, “stay sheltered!” Lucrative explosions silence

music of whining saw, pounding hammer raising roofs, housing the unhoused.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Hubris high off homeland invasion, hostile takeovers weeks before, they dream

of easy money. Quick work of weekend war. But weekend morphs into weeks. 

And weeks into months. And months into long and lean years.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They send holy warriors striking Saturdays, Sundays, holidays ‘round Epstein news

cycles like pyrite wrecking balls revolving around orange planet, Pedophilia. ‘Round

its death smell. ‘Round sulphur scent and white phosphorus fragrance anointing them.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They strike when Essential Workers catch fleeting winks on speeding trains roaring

beneath snoring cities. When countrymen and women dreaming of better worlds are

not yet woke. Over and over again Cruel Reich Cult strikes under cover of darkness and

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Cruel Reich Cult strikes when working ones are doubled over panting, catching

blitzkrieg breaths. Or, when they meditate, chant, or pray protecting souls, spirits,

minds from repeated trauma of sadistic Psy-Ops on our damn dime.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

One Big Beautiful Bank Job body count equals wreckage in the wake of DOGE:

Department Of Grifter Enrichment. And drowned, frozen, burned bodies pile up 

at feet of climate deniers battling Mengele Medicine Men for roadkill recognition.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Ugly omen, J6 white supremacists storming Capitalist Hill, ransacking offices, shitting in

halls, foreshadowed shredded social safety net. Scuttled science and education. Heralded 

War House-Offal Office golden grift; Kennedy Center shuttered; redacted Bill Of Rights.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

EMPERATORI PARS VE GHARB (THE PERSIAN EMPIRE AND THE WEST)

by J. P. Linstroth
 

To Our Armed Forces 

 

 

Combat between a Persian (left) and a Greek (right), depicted on a cup at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Credit: Wikipedia

 

I.

A vision of armies of men in thousands kicking up dust in white puffs in ordered unison files

                        Marching forward, beating rounded shields of Athenian owls and Spartan Lambda letters

            Their burnished Corinthian helmets, their fierce eyes peering through almond bronze slits

Aeneous and glinting bronze in the sun, horsehair plumes of varying colours, waving from zephyrs

                        Metallic and muscular cuirasses shining aurulent and golden in harsh sunlight

 

Emperatori Pars under Darius the Great and his son, Xerxes, the existential threat to Greek isles

Legends, the Athenian General Miltiades at Marathon, King Lionidas at Thermopylae Pass, with no betters

            In ancient times from the West, even with acrimony among Hellenes, and all their splits

Moving as one at the Battles of Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis, against Persian aggressors

With bronze swords drawn, a chiliad of pointing dorata, gleaming helmets behind shields tensed to fight

 

            Cleverness of the Greeks tricking Persians in battle even with their formations across many miles

Outnumbering the Hellenes in the thousands and the weightiness of death in all its bellicose fetters

            If it were not for these brave men, then what of Western civilization, and all its benefits

To win the day, again and again, and many times at great loss, the sacrifice of war, and all its tethers

            For empire, for glory, for homeland, even with Pars Bozorg (Persian Empire), the Greeks never bowed to their might

 

II.

            And more than two thousand and five hundred years forward a war against old Persia continues

Having become part of Islam and Shia from the martyrdom of Husayn Ibn Ali and following the Imams

Reaching back to the death of Mohammed and at one time British and following the Shah

With all its oil riches and arcane monarchy and then the Iranian Revolution and American hostages in ’79

            And the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and advent of an oppressive Iranian theocracy

 

And so our past repeats, again and again, from ancient times til now regardless of disparate epochal venues

Every time and place, men in continual discord, even against the House of David, and revenge of Absalom

            How soon we forget after unity against Great Persia, Athenians and Spartans brawled in awe

Of brother against brother, Greek to Greek, the Peloponnesian War, how civil wars intertwine

            From Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, of voids to the destruction of Republics and Democracy

 

Can you not see we are the same brethren, those of the reds, whites, and blues

            The same from Washington, the same from Gettysburg, but now directives from Jerusalem

Across Zagros and Alborz ranges and deserts, against Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and their Allah

            To contend with ourselves, and not think Poland 1939, but reverse time, and save our demokratia

 

III.

            For all our technologies and our missiles and our Artificial Intelligence and aircraft carriers

War is no less terrible and spontaneous circumstances no less unforeseen and death death death

            Young men struggle for generals’ musings far removed and clash in arms on land, sea, and air

Often far from homelands, for fellow brothers, for fellow countrymen, for the flag under God

            And Persia once more erased, once more conquered by armies as powerful as Hellenic hordes

 

 

Lest we forget ourselves in conquest and lose our values and our Republic, lest we remove such barriers

            For ours a Constitutional Republic and much celebrated, lest we drink from the waters of Lethe

Lest we forget red poppy fields of the Somme, or white crosses of Normandy, and markers en plein air

            As our Arlington and Tomb of the Unknown, so many Medals of Honour, so many left abroad

Lest we forget how the Iranians ignored our pleas to avert a day of war by dismissing all our accords

 

But remember this one and all, we are Americans, our nation is still true, our jets as raptors and harriers

Ripping azure skies, missiles through azuline heavens, across Strait of Hormuz, against Iranian shibboleth

From Mullahs and their enforcement of Islamic law, at the expense of the Iranian populace and its despair

            May ours be a road to freedom, away from Shiite clerics, a regime heavily flawed

By waging war in the name of God, supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis, their demise by swords

 

IV.

            And while the thousands marched and thousands more gunned down for their freedom

Lest we forget ours in these uncertain times and living with mendacity and profiteering

            At the expense of our dignity of our community of our brotherhood of our common sense

Lest we forget our Independence from tyranny, lest we forget our lacking representation

            And we remember Locke and Montesquieu and Rousseau and our Enlightenment

 

Now some two-hundred and fifty years, from independence to civil war, now extremam corruptiem

            Of our leaders to whom we entrust with our lives, but who seem immune from sneering

And directing us toward wars and away from personal investigations and forgetting our tariffed expense

May we uphold the pillars of our democratic oaths by not scapegoating the newest from migration

While understanding hyper-capitalism undermining our social welfare from Neo-Gilded Age Entitlement

 

To our brave soldiers, brave men and women, who fight for our Republic, not as vassals for a fiefdom

Lest forgetting Spartan might won over Athenian intellect, and protect ourselves with judicial hearings

            If necessary and to use our laws and our cameras and checking imbalances in our defence

So, to the breach against armies and foes, now the Iranians, we ask to pray for victims in supplication

            Likewise remembering who we are and our history, and not the spoiled life of a political miscreant

 

To America, to America, forever the brave and the bold

            Across the seas from now and remembering times of old

                        May we remember our fallen heroes always, their fearlessness not to be cajoled

 

To America, to America, the beautiful and the bold

            May we always protect our sea shining shores, may your glories always be extolled

 

                        To America, to America

                                    Now and forever as many have before foretold

                                                About the land of our brave and our bold

 

 

J. P. Linstroth has a PhD (D.Phil.) in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK with several awards for his research concentrating on the Spanish-Basques, Brazilian urban Amerindians, and Cuban, Haitian, and Guatemalan-Mayan immigrants in South Florida. He is an Adjunct Professor at Palm Beach State College (PBSC) and the author of several books: Marching Against Gender Practice: Political Imaginings in the Basqueland (2015, Bloomsbury Books); The Forgotten Shore (Poetic Matrix Press, 2017); Epochal Reckonings (Proverse Publishers HK, 2020, Winner of Proverse Prize 2019); Politics and Racism Beyond Nations: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Crises (2022, Palgrave Macmillan); and Swimming in Blue Shadows: A Collection of Short Stories and Poems (2022, Proverse Publishing, Proverse Supplemental Prize). He was awarded a J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholar Grant (2008-2009) to study urban Amerindians in Manaus, Brazil and he received a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award for his accomplishments toward peace, conflict resolution, and social justice. 

FROM THE FIELDS OF MINNESOTA

by Mike Bayles

 

an old watercolor believed to be of Grand Marais, Minnesota

 

 

Each winter fields rested

and in spring they found

new life. My uncle raised

cattle and crops with pride.

 

News played on television

during simpler times

while families sat together

and talked at the dinner table.

 

We had our dreams

of going to the moon

and in quiet times

we looked into clear skies.

 

Buildings in downtown

Minneapolis glistened

our pride, a mecca for most

 

while in St. Paul

cattle displayed at the State Fair

won ribbons while young boys

learned to farm.

 

My cousin and I walked

through pastures and we said

our uncles would never die.

 

We talked of wars,

as soldiers fought

on the other side of the world.

Little did we know that they

would be fought on our streets

 

Back then a man dressed in a cape

could leap over the tallest building

with a single bound. I long

to hold onto that dream.

 

The farm where my cousin once lived

was torn up for a highway

and we’ve fallen out of touch.

Our fathers have died.

 

Now I cry for them

and innocence lost

when the news says

we are killing each other

on the streets I once loved.

Mike Bayles, a lifelong Midwest resident, is the author of seven books of poetry and fiction. His most recent book is The Siouxland and Other Dreams, with poems about Northwest and surrounding areas, and mythology of the land. His writing is informed by his travels when he worked as a flagger/traffic control for construction and utility crews. He is expecting to publish his next collection of poetry this spring.

THE PROMISE OF NOTRE DAME

by Micheline Ishay

Notre Dame over Paris towered.  
Her spire inspired and empowered,           
Sheltering the beggars across time. 
Shockingly, a fire burned its spine.            
The top fell: crackling, 
Crashing, and blazing…                               
 
Such collapses come always fast,
As other tragedies of recent past.
Plagues, floods, and worsening storms. 
The plundered planet in an altered form.
Choking air, winds swirling,                        
Sweltering, drowning…
 
Wars destroy lives even faster, 
Slaughter peace-loving dancers,
Bury children under rubble,
Entrap peace in an endless tunnel. 
The music was thrilling, 
Then shooting and shrieking…
 
Their screams drowned underground, 
Lost in Pluto’s crowded underworld. 
Vile geniuses dug a cave of hell  
While humanity failed to prevail.                                                   
Wrath unleashed the dogs of war, 
Fangs flashing, growls and gore.                             
 
In the “City of Lost Children,”
Thieves stole youthful dreams
Staving off aging by any means.
Schooling generations for revenge.
In cycles of never-ending violence
Interrupted by dreadful silence.
                                                
They say miracles cannot be ignored.                    
Notre Dame is almost restored; 
Its iconic rooster found under debris,
Remade for a world to be free.
It took less than a day to crumble, 
But years for artisans to reassemble.
 
A step at a time: 
Sweating, Swearing,

Longing, Laughing, laughing… 

Micheline Ishay is Professor of International Studies and Human Rights at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She is Director of the Center for Middle East Studies and was founding Director of the International Human Rights Program. She is the author of half a dozen of books, including Internationalism and Its Betrayal (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), The Nationalism Reader (Humanities Press, 1995; Prometheus, 1999), and The Levant Express: The Arab Uprisings, Human Rights, and the Future of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2019). Her books, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (2004, 2008) and The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents from Ancient Times to the Present (1997, 2008, 2022) have been translated into multiple languages and published in second or third editions. 

YEAH, I’M WOKE

by Gordon Gilbert

        My eyes not closed
 
to all the colors of the rainbow;
         this world is not just black and white
 
to men telling women how to live their lives;
         they can’t even manage their own
 
to the rich getting richer;
the rest of us, poorer
 
to the racism everywhere;
how to some, others’ lives don’t matter
 
to the worship of the gun;
some even willing to sacrifice our children
 
to those who have the one, true religion;
they want to impose it on us all
 
to those who profit from these endless wars;
         they are never the ones who fight them
 
    My eyes have been opened
    I see the world more clearly
as it is
                         not
                             as it never was
 
            and so,
              I say it proudly,
                     yeah,
 
       I’m WOKE !

Gordon Gilbert is a writer of poetry and prose residing in NYC's west village. Actively involved in NYC spoken word events since 2008, he has also hosted programs celebrating the beat writers, several African American poets and other poets as well,  including William Carlos Williams. During the pandemic, Gordon found solace and inspiration in long walks along the Hudson River. 

BLOODY SUNDAYS

by Julie A. Dickson

50 years ago:

Derry, January 30, 1972; Selma, March 7, 1972

 

Why—these days are described as

bloody, massacres to mark history, crimson

streaks run down pages of time, to remind

that violence, oppression from the past can

stay, outlast, repeat in supreme efforts to

suppress those deemed weak or less?

 

How long must we sing this song, how long?

 

Today marches against memories we

cannot fathom but in reality exist, bloody

Sundays describe fragility of humanity,

pounded down, shot and hung, blood banners,

flags of wars not won, remind the masses

conflict flows, exsanguination rivulets, lives lost.

 

There's many lost, but tell me who has won?

 

 

Julie A. Dickson is a poet whose work addresses bullying, environment, current events and personal memories. She holds a BPS in Behavioral Science: Gerontology and works with the elderly. Dickson is a past poetry board member and Push Cart nominee. Her work appears in Blue Heron, Misfit, Ekphrastic Review and other journals or in full length on Amazon.

WHAT STILL BELONGS TO US

by Sean J Mahoney

“Tangled Roots,” a painting by Wayne Doyle.

Offer the dark and far side of the house as stilled
prey to light and wind. Sky filled with weather
balloons, a story of openings and the dishrag
calamities of coming wars fought not between
soldiers but callous ideologies. My neighbors
crossing waters caught aflame, sown with
stench of powder, predatory hint of pheromone.
Those boat holds packed with coffins of kin.
Fragments of lovers. Loads of hurt, spray-painted
time, viral loss of speech coming fast, loose.

Clothed people with weathered skin, sitting and
waiting for apples and a humanity of eyebrows.
Decent beings most, stripped for their good deeds,
their mutual bonds and returns, for grid coordinates
of physical love and further acid rain bombs.
As though a brush stroke across the sky could
cure the vicissitudes of storms, of the prickly
aftermath where many headed in the days and
years that followed. Brush and slow stroke.
Spiritual tech and the uncaged graphic stations

of the body. This they say is art. Street magic.
Lord of hands digging trenches through rubble
and dirty clothing of unfamiliar beings. Postcards
of a land in better times; tourists, culture, and
radiant sunshine. Blue house on a block of narrow
mildewed homes. Bloated curbs and skinny
streetlamps illume familiar strain: a colored side
and the other side, a have side and a have next
to nothing side. Storm drains usher ill promises
and leprous iguanas to a cold sea amid tangles
of tree roots promulgated by water and by state.

Sean J Mahoney has had work published at Poets Reading the News, The Good Men Project, Nine Mile Literary Magazine, Antithesis Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Wordgathering among others. He lives in Southern California with Dianne, her mother, 3 dogs, and 4 renters. There is a large garden and two trees with big, bitter oranges that look more lemon-like. Sean co-edited the 2nd and 3rd volumes of the MS benefit anthology series Something On Our Minds and he helps to run the Disability Literature Consortium booth at the annual AWP bookfair… lit by crips.

FLYOVER

by Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory




As the F-16s flew over Newark,
I wondered how many of my grandfather’s friends
who, too, lied about their ages in order to enlist

flashed back to Normandy,
whether the walls of ICU rooms at University Hospital
dissolved into the photographs he’d kept
Matryoshka-ed within boxes in his attic
until they were discovered by me,

exhaustion-emptied and grasping
for any signs of him I could still see
after both he and his Emily left the Earth,
but before the house was shuttered.

How many prayed
to trade one invisible war
for another,

the virus for vanishing neurons,

and wished
to change their ages
this one last time
to escape the draft?

Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory is a defense journalist and poet who was born in New Jersey and subsequently transplanted in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and Writing from New Jersey City University and an M.S. in Journalism with a Health and Science Reporting Concentration and a National Security Reporting Specialization from Northwestern University's Medill School.

LAW RAP

by Ian Patrick Williams

We fought the British army to create a new democracy
But it turned out just to be a lesson in hypocrisy
Instead of having freedom in the new Home of the Brave
All the Founding Fathers got to hold on to their slaves.
So as our brand new nation was then starting to be shaped
African-Americans faced lynching or were raped
Abolitionists did what they could to raise a legal fight
But all the slavers said it was a matter of state’s rights.
Dred Scott escaped into the North and thought that he was free
His owner followed, claiming he was just some property
The Court agreed and sent him back, said he was not a man
And all the racists cheered: it was the Law of the Land.

The population grew and so the pioneers moved West
Looking for whatever land might suit their interests best
Killing all the Native tribes wherever they would go
They found themselves in what was then called Northern Mexico
From Texas, Arizona, all the way to California
They turned their guns on Mexicans and said, “We gotta warn ya
That it’s time for all you brown-skinned folk to cross the Rio Grande.
This is white people country, that’s the Law of the Land.”

The Civil War was fought and won and stopped the South’s secession
But they simply organized a new form of repression
The Jim Crow laws would still repress the black community
But that was not the only form of inequality
Only men would have a say in forming legislation
Women couldn’t vote, though they were half the population.
The Suffragettes went marching, but the men said they were wrong
“Go back into the kitchen; that’s where all of you belong.
To vote requires mental work, you couldn’t understand.
Only men can vote ‘cause that’s the Law of the Land.”

The fight went on for years and years till Civil Rights could pass
We thought we had equality for every single class
But greedy corporations came up with a new solution:
They’d simply buy up all new laws with campaign contributions.
Crush the unions, cut their taxes, only pay low wage
And sure enough they had themselves another Gilded Age
With ever-growing profits, keeping all that they could get
Dumping on us peons twenty trillion dollars debt
The one-percenters cheered themselves and said, “Oh, ain’t it grand
When all us billionaires can buy the Laws of the Land!”

This struggle for control goes on, we’ve seen it all before
Deregulation, planned recessions, Middle Eastern war
All designed to line the pockets of the profiteers
The money-grubbing warmongers who’ve ripped us off for years.
There’s only one way out of living under their command
We have to come together and united, take a stand
We cannot have democracy until we all demand
That only We the People make the Laws of the Land.

Ian Patrick Williams won the Chicago Emmy award for co-authoring the teleplay Bleacher Bums for PBS-TV; the script was later purchased and produced as a M.O.W. by Showtime. He has also written and directed seven One Act plays for young people that toured Los Angeles Unified School District schools through the not-for-profit firm Enrichment Works. His one-act play "Provenance" was produced last year at Ensemble Studio Theater.

YOU SAY YOU WANT ME TO LOVE YOU, AMERICA

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

You say you want me to love you, America
To plight thee my troth till death do us part
To suit up proudly in your flag
And proclaim your grandeur and goodness
To the Angels and the Ages

And I did, I did love you
When I was a boy, America
Although I had never been anywhere
Except the National Geographic
I knew there was no place like you
My blue-eyed country 'tis of thee
No freedoms like America's freedoms
No Fords and Chevys
And toasters and TVs
Like good old made-in-America's
No righteous history
Of ordinary guys
Standing up for the underdog
To knock chips off the shoulders of bullies
Like fair-play-and-peace-loving America's history
No valor like America's
No Gary Coopers and John Waynes like
Hollywood, USA's
No amberwavesnationunderGodindivisible, except America
Oh I did, I did love you, America
When I was a boy

But when I became a man, America
I began to notice that your behavior
And the story you were telling me about yourself
Did not match
All the way back to the beginning
When you defended yourself against the peoples first here
By wholesale slaughter, introduced epidemics
And theft of their lands
Then went on to steal millions of humans from Africa
Enslave them
And build vast wealth upon their bleeding backs
And broken hearts
I noticed your habitual military interventions, America
And the unprovoked wars you engaged in
For the sake of grabbing more land, more wealth, more power

I noticed, oh royalty-free and classless America
That from the outset you arranged yourself vertically
With meager lives for the many at the bottom
And obscene opulence for the few at the top
I noticed, oh Great Melting Pot
That racism had burrowed its way like a canker
Deep into your psyche
Your public policies and institutions
So that those you once enslaved
And others who fit the profile
You managed to maintain in the bondage
Of ghettos, unemployment, terrorist violence, denial of rights
And in the good old American hoosegow
Where the slavery you claim to have abolished
Is still legal

I noticed the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee and Bear River, America
The bone yards of Hiroshima and Dresden, America
The killing fields of the Philippines and Viet Nam, America
The vicious little invasion of Panama
The senseless bombing of Yugoslavia
And I notice now the ceaseless and convulsive nightmare of Iraq
I notice how you wage wars constantly these days, oh Hegemon
How you have built military bases all over the planet
How you bomb civilians with abandon
In hospitals and schools, at wedding parties and community gatherings
How you torture because you can
And assassinate those who do not do your bidding
And subvert and undermine elected governments
That are insufficiently malleable to your purposes, America

I notice, America, that you have no compunction
About letting millions of your children go hungry
About blaming the poor for their poverty
The homeless for their lack of housing
The unemployed for not having jobs
I notice how you turn all life into commodities-for-profit, America
How you gobble up vast amounts of resources
And vomit the wastes into our water and our air

I realize now that you are an addict, America
You are addicted to yourself
You are stoned on empire
On military might and economic excess
And like all addicts you are deluded about who you are, America
So blinded to your own character by your trillion-dollar-a-day habit
That you cannot see you are not
As you imagine yourself to be, America
A beacon unto the world
A shining city upon a hill
You have become a quantum vortex, America
A black hole no light can escape

So you say you want me to love you, America
But how can I trust a junkie with my heart, America?
First you need some serious work on yourself
You need primal therapy
You need a 12-step-program to recover
From your implacable greed your habitual mendacity
Your homicidal hubris
Followed by a few millennia in a half-way house
Where you will clean the toilets and scrub the floors
And listen to the ghosts of those you have crushed
And when you've done all that
When you've cleaned up your act, America
When you've made yourself decent and presentable, America
Then maybe we'll talk


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesday and others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

OH, MOTHER EARTH

by Gil Hoy

Boston, MA. Photo by Sarah Levy via National Weather Service, January 28, 2015.

Oh, mother earth,
Is this global warming
or climate change?

Atop this particular Goldilocks
planet, on this particular 22nd
day of February, in this city
this particular hour

: "Frankly, my dear, I don’t
give a damn." I’m freezing
My toes are cold. Where

the hell is the Congress
Did it think the Tennessee
senator's words an inconvenient
truth?  I’ve got ice dams in

my living room  Snow statues
surround my home. Oh, mother
earth,  To lie down on one
of your sizzling beaches.  With no

Headless Coptic Christians
in orange death masks,
Where the hot orange sun

never glistens on freshly

red-tainted steel. My gutters
are filled with frozen things
Sixteen minutes exposure to
life-giving air causes corporeal

damage  Eight feet of God’s
cold stuff already on the ground,
But    Boston

is a tough nut to
crack.

Oh, mother earth,
Americans have hardy souls.
Terrorists, beheadings, cruel wars
Snow cannot stop Us.  Frozen crystals

of atmospheric vapor have their
redeeming qualities, although to this
particular poet, in this particular state

of mind, on this particular Sunday,

they seem few and far between
in the New England tundra.


Gil Hoy is a regular contributor to The New Verse News.  He is a Boston trial lawyer and studied poetry at Boston University, majoring in philosophy. Gil started writing his own poetry and fiction a year ago.  Since then, his poems and fiction have been published in multiple journals, most recently in Third Wednesday, Stepping Stones Magazine, The Potomac and The Zodiac Review.