LORDY, I HOPE THERE ARE TAPES

by Alan Walowitz

Image source: Canadian Business

You call up the stairs to tell me what we’ll need
to make it through the long night ahead.
The water’s running and I can hardly hear,
though you’re known to assert
that to listen and to hear were never meant to be the same.
No matter, we know this part always ends in a caustic, Nevermind.
I do hear you slam the door
and imagine your short sigh before heading off into your day.
I’m alone now and can make mine any way I’d like--
though, Lordy, I hope there are tapes
for later when I get to the grocery
and this great forgetfulness is bound to come over me
surrounded by the bounty of America:
shelves stacked with goods, no one could ever use, given even a lifetime;
the produce shaped into so many pyramids
we’d once hoped to visit, but now know we never will;
the prepared foods, chilled, and ready to be reheated and consumed
but where should we put them if left uneaten when our day is done?
This is a great land with so many choices
of who to believe and why, and infinite possibilities of what to buy,
so please don’t berate me when I call
to ask what I need to bring.
I know we already have everything
and are likely still to feel we’ve been taken, and underserved,
and finally and fatally, misunderstood.
Though, Lordy, I hope there are tapes
of the long night so long ago when we first fell for each other.


Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan’s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing.

GAY PRIDE

by Scott Wiggerman

Images source: Cycle for the Cause

May we bike a wide expanse of untidy sands,
of outliers and isles of desert brush.

May we ride and ride, our eyes primed
to an iota of wild, a mite of wine

among the tumbleweeds and idle browns:
a bind of thriving cacti. Divine!

May we smile and find a vital prize,
a sign in the uncivilized silence,

a blooming lighthouse, a riot of pink fire,
our desired life, our private tribe.

May we ride inspired while our kind expires.
May we rise above the spineless of these times.

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga, and Bearing the Mask.  Recent poems have appeared in A Quiet Courage, Calamus Journal, Red Earth Review, Rat’s Ass Review, shuf, and Chelsea Station. He is an editor for Dos Gatos Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

FALLEN HERO QUILTS

by Alan Catlin

Each square represents
another life lost in

middle eastern war zone—
eight in the series
shown here in early June

Some panels are hand
sewn, artful, professional,
with pictures, testimonials

from loved ones

Others are hand written
scrolled with mistakes

but the feeling of loss
and emotion is clear

Next year more panels
will be sewn

another quilt
assembled

Maybe two


Alan Catlin is poetry editor of online journal misfitmagazine.net. His latest book of poetry is American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press.

ON REJECTING THE PARIS CLIMATE ACCORD

by David Radavich

Photo by Ivan Vargas at Gizmodo.

Ashes gather
at the bottom
of the fire
we have made.

It is a weekday
night like any other,
an announcement
of denial,
a death of desire.

Somehow our soil
and vegetation
must survive
without us.

Somehow we
want to die alone
and small.

We fly toward
this conflagration
like widows,
like moths.


David Radavich's recent poetry collections are America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Canonicals: Love's Hours (2009), and Middle-East Mezze (2011).   His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe.  His latest books are The Countries We Live In (2014) and a co-edited volume called Magic Again: Selected Poems on Thomas Wolfe (2016).  He has served as president of The Thomas Wolfe Society, Charlotte Writers' Club, and North Carolina Poetry Society.

COVFEFE

by Martin H. Levinson

He was always a thug with a coarse mouth, peacock swagger,
   and a proclivity to break rules like his paterfamilias who
wouldn’t rent to African Americans but sent his misbehaving boy
   to military school to learn how to play football, stick it to losers,
and escape the draft so as to not serve in Vietnam or praise
   John McCain for being captured rather than killing the enemy
in real estate deals that were too big to fail or have T***p

put into jail for hiring undocumented workers to mount his name
   on glitzy Gotham towers and gaudy gambling casinos that
went bust in New Jersey where busts are bounteous and
   pussies can be grabbed for the asking if you are a celebrity
palling around with Russians, wrestlers, and rapscallions from
   Fox and Friends who want to make America great again
like it was in the eighteen fifties when blacks were chattel and

nativist numbskulls were not considered nattering nabobs of
   negativity by their supporters but impassioned Neanderthals
capable of challenging Obama’s citizenship and backing a
   Muslim ban and a Slavic first lady who under our nation’s new
immigration rules would have been a deportation priority during
   the nineteen nineties when her husband did not report hundreds of
millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tenuous tax maneuver

later outlawed by a Congress that is now led by a Cheesehead from
   Wisconsin and a prune face from Kentucky who loves coal more than
the proles who work the mines in a state which ranks forty-seventh in
   educational attainment, is solidly Republican, and has a constituency
the POTUS respects as much as Marla Maples who learned she was
   being divorced by reading about it in the New York Post rather than
seeing it on TV where Jim Comey found out he had been fired as

Director of the FBI and students from T***p University discovered
   they had been defrauded by a corpulent con man who thought
climate change was bogus, Mexicans were bad hombres, and
a nasty woman was making life difficult on the campaign trail
   by calling the star of the Apprentice Putin’s puppet, a teller of
untruths and a fellow unfit for the highest office in the land
   of the me, the home of the knave, and the dockets red glare,

lawsuits bursting in air, gave proof through the night that
   our hate was where it has forever been—gays, the elites,
liberals, immigrants, people of color and those perceived as
   getting a good deal in a global economy that features
home runs for the rich, strikeouts for the poor and
   lies hit down the foul line that T***p always calls fair.  

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems in various publications. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

TICK MAGNET

by Laura Rodley

When President Donald Trump announced last week that he was pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord, Yale epidemiology researcher Katharine Walter felt gutted. “[Global warming] is already happening,” she said, “and the effects are already here.” Walter studies Lyme disease, the tick-borne illness that’s spreading frighteningly quickly in the Eastern and Midwestern US, due in part to climate change. Lyme cases have more than doubled since the 1990s, and the number of counties that are now deemed high-risk for Lyme has increased by more than 320 percent in the same period. 2017 is also shaping up to be a particularly bad year for Lyme. “These effects of climate change will be felt globally, but also here in the US,” Walter said, “and here in New York, in Trump’s backyard.” —Vox, June 6, 2017

So quick these late springtime ticks
brown ones, tiny black ones, ones
with orange bellies, crawling
on my pants, on the underbelly
of the horse, attaching themselves
even to the paws of my dog.
Relent I ask, but there’s no
connection to the mind of a tick,
no telepathy, they have only one
thing in mind and that’s appeasing
their hunger, fast, and they’ll
climb anywhere to get there;
they are not even afraid of your hand
reaching down for them:
they have no fear,
maybe they have no eyes.
Certainly I haven’t seen any eyes yet,
but boy, they know how to march
carrying lyme and anaplasmosis
in their bite. Relent, ticks, relent.


Laura Rodley's New Verse News poem “Resurrection” won a Pushcart Prlze and was published in the 2013 edition of the Pushcart anthology. She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee, won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

ANTENORA

by Alejandro Escudé

after Dante Alighieri

There is Jared Kushner encased in ice
Packed close to Trump gnawing

On Kushner’s head, the two shades
Wrapped in ice sheets reflecting

A mounting body of dishonesty,
A gold, Cyrillic script disappearing

As it appears, the demons awake
Long as the scroll takes, unwinding

Then winding again while the brute
Chews his son-in-law’s brain casing.

Silent, the pale skull, save for murmurs
Of a backchannel to Satan’s wing.

Beside these, Michael Flynn pecks
The bodies of wicked soldiers offering

Themselves to the stern-faced bird
Whose frozen beak prevents dining.

All this I see, with my poet guide,
Walt Whitman, beside me, the fattening

Of America, its undoing, still circles
Ahead of us, more furies unfurling.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

LONDONER'S VOW

by Devon Balwit

Source: Twitter

I will not put my beer down.
Run me into the goddamn ground,
but I will finish the glass I earned
even as my old assumptions burn.
Over my tongue will slide the bitter
swallows, and I’ll return to pay the tab, better
than all destroying bastards. I’ll not
stay home tomorrow either, nor ought
you. Up and out to pubs and bridges,
resistance a sword, our presence its edges.


Devon Balwit teaches and writes in Portland, OR.

LIKE YOU, MARGARET COURT

by Diane Elayne Dees

“Court, 74, now a pastor in Perth, has reignited debate about her legacy and how the sport should celebrate her by making a series of inflammatory comments recently about gays and same-sex marriage. Her beliefs are not new — her public comments first stirred protests in 2012 — but her unflinching remarks have provoked some current players to say they would object to playing on a court named after her.” –The New York Times, May 31, 2017

I wonder if you know your Kinsey number,
or is it just too scary to report,
and might it go a long way to encumber
the zeal of someone like you, Margaret Court?

It's a rare thing to be a Kinsey zero,
whether you're in business, school, or sport,
and though you claim that Jesus is your hero,
I'm not sure he would like you, Margaret Court.

The last I checked, no lesbians were seducing
the players who you say were not their sort.
Besides, it doesn't take too much deducing
to conclude they wouldn't like you, Margaret Court.

Too bad for you, gay marriage is in fashion,
and your words of fear and hate do not comport
with your Bible's call to love and show compassion—
But isn't that just like you, Margaret Court?

Diane Elayne Dees's poems have been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane, who lives in Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women's professional tennis worldwide. (In December, Women Who Serve featured a re-write of A Christmas Carol, in which Margaret Court appeared as Scrooge.)

WISDOM TAKES A HOLIDAY

On T***p’s Withdrawal from the Climate Agreement

by Jon Wesick

Lincoln plants cotton on the White House lawn.
Rachel Carson sprays Agent Orange.
Martin Luther King hoists the confederate flag.
Gandhi stops at a steakhouse
on his way to the shooting range.

Crick and Watson blow their Nobel Prize money
on swizzle sticks and lotto tickets.
Jacques Cousteau moves to Arizona.
Einstein downs a six-pack of PBR
before getting behind the wheel of his GTO.
Jonas Salk shares dirty needles in Haitian crack houses.

Picasso enters his finger-painting period.
Mozart releases his 99 Bottles of Beer Symphony.
e.e. cummings WRITES IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
Julia Child dazzles guests with beef jerky à l’orange.
Dave Brubeck and McCoy Tyner embark
on their International Chopsticks Tour.

Stephen Hawking competes
in the Ultimate Fighting Challenge.
Bobby Fischer takes up checkers.
Elon Musk trades space flight and electric cars
for Pez dispensers. Warren Buffet
wires money to an exiled Nigerian prince.
Jean Paul Sartre guest stars
on Jackass.

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels.

EMBARRASSED BY PARIS

by David Feela

Let the Eiffel Tower
dim its lights,
not in tribute
to the victims
of terrorist bombs,
but let it go dark
as a reminder
for any who counts
on light that it will not
be found in America,
home of the coal-fired heart,
where a dull intellectual climate
muffles the air,
and where truth
has turned into
a stale commodity
only fit
to feed the poor.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays How Delicate These Arches released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

THE GERMAN LESSON

by George Salamon

Politico

“'The Germans are bad, really bad,' Donald Trump tells EU officials.”

          —The Telegraph, May 26, 2017

"What Germany can teach the US about democracy.”

          —Financial Times, February 8, 2017

Say it ain't so
About our old foe:
While in the home of the brave
We've gone from sweet liberty
To Donald T***p's entropy
In his limitless calamity.
But the Germans, baby,
Have come a long way
From the Kaiser's aristocracy
Via Hitler's atrocity
To celebrate democracy.

Ain't history grand?

For two decades George Salamon taught German language and literature at several East Coast colleges. This German lesson was not on the syllabus of his courses.

SPELL CHECK

by Jennifer Hernandez

Image source: REDBUBBLE

The constant covfefe
leaves me breathless,
when you voceffe
so close to me, makes
me want to run to our
special effecov and sip
a coffeev.  My evoceff—
so hip, so now—mingles
with ecoveff—so green &
environmentally friendly.
If I wasn’t suffering from
fecovef, didn’t have this
lingering evecoff, I wouldn’t
effvoce like I do. I’d be my old
voffcee self, singing voceffe
at the top of my fefevoc lungs.

Jennifer Hernandez lives in Minnesota where she works with immigrant youth and writes poetry, flash, and creative non-fiction. Much of her recent writing has been colored by her distress at the dangerous nonsense that appears in her daily news feed. She is marching with her pen. Recent work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Dying Dahlia, TheNewVerse.News, Yellow Chair Review, and Writers Resist.

COVFEFE

by Jonel Abellanosa

Image source: Joey Mancuso

If you want to wag the dog, covfefe!
If you want people to take their eyes
            off your hands, covfefe!
If you want to distract the FBI, covfefe!
If you want to distract the media, covfefe!
If you want to calm yourself, covfefe!
If you want anger management, covfefe!
If you want to enrich yourself from
            the environment’s degradation
            without people noticing, covfefe!
If you are just simply dumb, covfefe!
If you are faker than the news you peddle,
            covfefe!
If you are corrupt as hell, covfefe!

If you want to covfefe the planet, enjoy!
If you want to covfefe NATO, enjoy!
If you want to covfefe yourself,
            don’t bring the rest of us
                        with you!
Just covfefe yourself !

We don’t give a covfefe!

Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, the Philippines.  His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Marsh Hawk Review, Anglican Theological Review, Star*Line,  Poetry Kanto, Spirit Fire Review, Carbon Culture Review, The McNeese Review, GNU Journal and Dark Matter Literary Journal.  He has two chapbooks, Pictures of the Floating World (Kind of a Hurricane Press) and The Freeflowing All (Black Poppy Review).  He is a Pushcart Prize and Dwarf Stars Award nominee.