I HEAR PEOPLE ARE MEMORIZING POEMS AND PRAYERS AGAIN

by Janice Lloyd

Janice Lloyd is a former editor and writer at USA TODAY. She has taken poetry seminars with Danusha Lameris, Richard Blanco, and Major Jackson and is working on her first chap book. 

THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

If you can see the moon from your window
even through the wall of branches
then it is calling you to worship.
Hard to stay in bed,
impossible to stay in the house.  
If you can see the moon from the front porch,
you can see raccoons and the seven doe
in blue shadows. The owl wonders
what you are doing here.  Thick
wandering roots reach from the trees, 
dusted with a skin of snow, like veins 
on the backs of your hands going 
where they must go. 
If you can see the moon from Earth,
the cataclysm is still in the future.
Your breath is a cloud without shape.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

THE GOLDEN CALF

by Gordon Gilbert

At CPAC.

He spoke appropriately enough

(although misspoken)

of a herd “mentality.”

He could have been speaking of

his own followers,

this super-spreader,

deliberately infecting their bodies

and their minds.

 

Now they wander in a desert of their own making,

mindless in their worship

of this golden orange-coiffed calf,

and at his bidding

they have set aside

the ten commandments,

for only one that now all must obey:

 

“Bow down

&

worship me!” 

 

Gordon Gilbert is a long time resident of the west village in NYC. He only took up writing seriously and performing his work in public in 2008. Since then, besides poetry, he has written many prose pieces (short stories, monologues, short fiction) and one play, Monologues from the Old Folks Home, which he has produced and directed eight times in the past seven years at various venues in lower Manhattan. He has hosted over a dozen programs celebrating the beat generation writers, as well as some other writers, including William Carlos Williams. Gordon is also a member of the Irish American Writers and Artists, and has occasionally hosted their bimonthly salons as well.  

COST

by Neil Creighton

Parkland students watch as Florida legislators vote down a resolution to discuss a ban on assault weapons.

So Sam rose early, saddled his donkey,
and took his children up the mountain.
And his children said
“Where is the offering, our father,
and who is this god we praise?”
“You are the offering, my children.”
Then hail of fire descended
and bright blood flowed until all were gone.
Sam sighed, thought he would pray,
wept a little as he descended the mountain.
A congregation waited below.
“It’s hard,” he said, “so hard.
But what can we do?
We don’t wish it but we must worship.”

And the great congregation shouted “Amen”.

Neil Creighton is an Australian poet whose work as a teacher of English and Drama brought him into close contact with thousands of young lives, most happy and triumphant but too many tragically filled with neglect. It also made him intensely aware of how opportunity is so unequally proportioned and his work reflects strong interest in social justice. Recent publications include Poetry Quarterly, Poeming Pigeon, Silver Birch Press, Rat's Ass Review, Praxis Mag Online, Ekphrastic Review, Social Justice Poetry, Peacock Journal, Poets Reading the News and Verse-Virtual.

THE SURVEYOR'S REPORT

a belated Pi Day (3.14) poem
by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

It's a cruel people.
Barbarians, they keep dead trees
among the struggling living, shocked green,
though they must know
the hate they cause.

They ignore the stars,
prefer five-armed simpletons,
castrated travesties
of those scalding selves.

Not utterly beyond redemption, though.
They worship pi,
even dedicate a day,
prepare charmingly symbolic pastries.

These, also called pi, are imperfectly round,
contain round foods,
and, like these primitives,
are perfectly irrational.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya's first book The Book of Knots and their Untying came out last fall. She co-hosts Fourth Sundays, a poetry reading series in Claremont, California.

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BISON

by Peg Quinn

“On Monday, May 9, 2016, President Obama signed into law the National Bison Legacy Act, which designates the bison as the official mammal of the United States. . . . Lobbying for the official mammal designation was a coalition of conservationists; ranchers, for whom bison are business; and tribal groups, such as the InterTribal Buffalo Council, which wants to ‘restore bison to Indian nations in a manner that is compatible with their spiritual and cultural beliefs and practices.’ . . . Before the mid-1800s, bison (also called buffalo) lived mostly in the Great Plains, but were also found throughout the continent. . . . The U.S. Army led a campaign to wipe out bison as a way to control [native] tribes. . . . Columbus Delano, secretary of the interior, wrote in 1873: ‘I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western plains, in its effect upon the Indians.’ —Elahe Izadi, The Washington Post, May 9, 2016.  Image: A colored-pencil drawing by Peg Quinn of a bison’s head.

A bison's bladder holds seven pounds,
about one gallon, enough
for indigenous people to use
for storing water, clothing,
or food when hunting

Horns sufficed as drinking cups,
or carrying hot ash from one fire
to start the next

Fur became blankets,
papoose and moccasin lining

Skin became saddles, or, when
stretched over low lying branches,
sewn to form teepees, clothing,
quivers, drum heads and ‘canvas’
for recording the year in pictures - their
‘winter count’ during freezing blizzards

String was pulled from sinew
then threaded into carved bone needles

This is no metaphor:
drumming sticks were made
by dropping a round rock into
a testicle then wrapping with tendons
to the end of a stick

Sinew binding teeth and hooves
made door rattles outside the teepee
for announcing a visitor

Bones were carved into knives,
scraping tools, and toys while
tails had second lives swatting flies

Eyes, brains, tongues and organs
were reserved as treats for tribal elders,
meat, berries and fish the daily diet
Snacks were made from intestines
packed with dried herbs and jerky

Though no one knows how they used the nose,
it’s no wonder they were worshipped

Peg Quinn grew up in a rural area outside Lincoln, Nebraska. As a child, she once got her head stuck between the tail and rear-end of a life-size buffalo statue in a public park. Today, she teaches art and paints theatrical sets in southern California, always wearing a bison ring made from an Indian head nickel and morns how they were slaughtered as a means of controlling indigenous people. Her Great-Grandmother was Sioux. 

THE THIRTEENTH STATION — CHARLESTON 2015

by Janice Lynch Schuster

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America

If only the women had carried
Guns in their Bibles and prayed
With rage, not love

If only the children had carried
Guns in their backpacks
Their teachers might
Have been spared

If only the boy playing
In the yard had something
Real to fire

If only the suffocating
Man had had gunpowder,,
Not tobacco

If only we armed us all
Who worship at the glamorous
Fortresses of our fears

Brought to us
By the NRA and Congress afraid
Itself to say no

If only we let the bloodbath
Baptize us daily in horror
While our blue hearts
Beat on and we tweet

Hashtags of despair
As if to absolve ourselves
Of the killings we did not stop
And the ballots  we failed
To cast


Janice Lynch Schuster is the author of a collection, Saturday at the Gym, and has been published in various print and online venues, including Poet Lore, Your Daily Poem, and The Broadkill Review. She writes about health care and public policy, lives in Annapolis, MD, and works in Washington, DC.

DST

by  Gerard Sarnat

Image © Sheri Zimmerlin. You are welcome to copy for non-profit use.

4:57, first dusk since Daylight Savings Time lapsed,
we live on

the shore of the Pacific’s rim.
Fibrillating bloody yolk broken,

orangetemple shapeshift greenflash goldenbrownmuffin
done, I’m so happy

sharing this moment with a grandson
who says there are forty billion

habitable earths and at least one
has volcanos that spout chocolate.

Elliot gestures as a red-hot flotilla
of crockodilios

punctuated by wellfleets of pointillist ember prey
makes its way

across the horizon
only to disappears into a cloudbank

never to come out.  At the storm's
critical juncture, the boy wonders,

Why thunder has jagged zigzags
or is it the other thing -- and why?

Rose-colored polarized lenses
are the closest I get to worship.


Gerard Sarnat splits time between his San Francisco Bay Area forest home and Southern California's beaches. He is a seeker and Jewbu, married forty years/father of three/grandfather, physician to the disenfranchised, past CEO and Stanford professor, and virginal poet at the tender age of sixty-two. Gerry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Aha!Poetry, AscentAspirations, Atavar, AutumnLeaves, BathysphericReview, Bird&Moon, BlackZinnias, BlueJewYorker, ChicagoPoetry, CRITJournal, Defenestration, Etude, EZAAPP, Flutter, FurnaceReview, HissQuarterly, Jack, Juked, LanguageandCulture, LoudPoet, MyFavoriteBullet, NewWorksReview, Nthposition, OrigamiCondom, PensonFire, PoetsAgainstWar, Rambler, RiverWalkJournal, SlowTrains, SoMa, Spindle, StonetableReview, SubtleTea, SugarMule, ThePotomac, ThievesJargon, UndergroundVoices, UnlikelyStories, and WildernessHouseReview among others. Just Like the Jones', about his experience caring for Jonestown survivors, was solicited by JonestownAnnual Report and will appear later this year. He is currently working on an epic prose poem, The Homeless Chronicles. The California Institute of Arts and Letters' Pessoa Press will publish his first book. Gerry is a member of Poets and Writers, qualifying in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry.