DONALD TRUMP, KATE MCKINNON, LEONARD COHEN

by Jaimee Hills





Are people safe? You've struck a chord
as we become an angry horde.
Appreciate the optics, now you’ve stopped her.
With painted signs, they chant, they sing,
the minor crowd, assembling,
as cloudy skies compose a helicopter.

A vote inside a vote machine
meaningless but for what it could mean
felt like gambling in a bankrupted casino.
The votes rolled in, in waves like water;
the careless don’t care about my daughter,
heat rising like the shock of jalapeño.

Though someone else's dream is you,
dream on we do, dream on we do,
hardy as the gardens of Pompeiians.
The flowers find the seasons strange,
there’s a changing to their change,
squalled shorelines and the stooping Himalayans.

It’s not illegal just to breathe.
We’ve always struggled. Always seethe.
It feels the wind is howling, blowing through you.
Within the ocean's current form
a shifting rage, a stirring storm,
the bitter burning tongue of Hallelujah.


Jaimee Hills is the author of How to Avoid Speaking, winner of the 2014 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She has been a featured reader in the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She teaches at Marquette University and lives in Milwaukee, WI.

THE WEEKEND AFTER

by Katherine Smith





The quiet of the street’s
Unbroken, except for
The intermittent roar

Of leaf-blowers beneath
The maple trees next door,
The sound of aluminum

Bats struck against a ball.
The shouting near the school
Not far from where I live

Grows louder as I walk
Towards it, past the park.
The light this afternoon

Filters through crimson rain
Of walnut leaves to chips
Of bark beneath the slide,

Merry-go-round and swing.
A sheepdog with my Thai
Neighbor passes by, and he

Scoots his dog’s white rump
To mulch beside the curb
So I can pass. In DC

The protests have begun
And a cold front moves
If not through autumn sky,

Quite yet, then through the hearts
That thump within the half
Of us like a blade. I think

Of the writing prompt,
Abandoned for a walk,
That asked us poets to devise

A proper response to one
The history books will call
Winner. But here I pause

To watch a team of girls
At the softball pitch,
A group of dads, who coach

The way to swing a bat.
I contemplate the courage,
Dignity, and grace,

The beauty, human, flawed,
Of course, as all beauty is,
Thrown towards us like a ball

We couldn’t catch.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014.

ON PRESIDENT DUTERTE'S PROMISE TO CEASE CURSING

by Jim Bartruff

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has made a solemn promise: no more swearing. Duterte, who famously cursed the pope and used a slang term that translates as “son of a whore" while denouncing President Obama, said he was flying back from Japan late Thursday, looking at a vast expanse of sky, listening to his colleagues snore, when he heard a voice say, ‘If you don’t stop epithets, I will bring this plane down now.’ “And I said, ‘Who is this?’ So, of course, ‘it’s God,’” he told Filipino journalists late Thursday. “So, I promise God,” he continued, “Not [to] express slang, cuss words and everything. So you guys hear me right always because [a] promise to God is a promise to the Filipino people.” . . .  Asked if he would really stop cursing out his allies and opponents alike, the president demurred. 'There's always a time for everything, a time to be foul-mouthed,” he said. —Washington Post, October 28, 2016

He descended as Manila's infested
laundry lines and drug dens began to shadow
the landing strip beneath our Tokyo flight,
and I was made to hearken, certain The Lord
had personal messages for my ears only.
The vernacular obscenities
I speak as easily as I lift the safety
and assassinate a sewer village,
these little slips creating images
of untouchable dictatorship,
were not for me, according to Our Father.
Once one accepts the crown, what one projects
profanely through the Age of Distractions reflects
a crudeness on our Catholic island states,
diminishes the purity of our trials,
our power, to the circumspect worldly.
I had for far too long allowed flechettes
too petty to be seen to enter my body
and combine into a hammered metal
like the Roman spear that ended Christ,
and in the pain cried out, "Ecce homo,"
in the language of a prostitute
whose john had used her hole and refused to pay.
The jet's tires hung suspended above the tarmac
when His words extracted my soul and tore it,
so that every rent in the fabric mouthed
my idiocies and insults as we screamed
to touchdown or to death. He said to me,
"Thou shalt not curse again. This promise Me,
or I will scatter you in hellfire fuel
across the landscape of your coming home."
What can one do when God himself instructs
but obey? When the imminence
of His threat is so Old Testament
and by the balls but yield and moan, "Yes, Lord."
                         
Of course, our tires scorched down the dotted lines,
and flagmen led our armored Humvee to where
the palace porticos, the Doric columns,
the air-conditioning, cigars and desks
recovered us from such a holy squalor.
In those few seconds, when He spoke to me,
and I agreed to terms, I uttered nothing
untoward to any stewardess
or bodyguard. I truly kept my words,
He His. Now that is done, and lifted is
the interdiction and collar at my throat,
with conscience cleared of any bargain, I say
what must be said about that American bitch
senator who blocked the sale of weapons
needed to protect our innocents—
"You son of a whore, how dare you interfere,
how can we cleanse our country of the crude
without those thousands of assault rifles
rusting on a freighter in fucking Newark?"

Jim Bartruff's work has appeared in Gambling the Aisle, Fat City Review, TheNewVerse.News, Two Hawks Quarterly,  American Tanka, JAMA, Canto, Barney, and many others. He is a past winner of the William Carlos Williams prize while attending the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and Academy of American Poets prize as UCLA undergraduate. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

CHELSEA MANNING, NOT JUST HERSELF

by Devon Balwit

Chelsea Manning tried to commit suicide last month as she was starting a week of solitary confinement at the prison barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., her punishment for a previous attempt to end her life in July. —The New York Times, November 4, 2016. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters/Newscom via The Intercept.

The constraints are multiple:
Chelsea jailed inside Bradley,
Bradley penned inside the military,
a deployed soldier inside a perimeter

The voices are multiple:
of wrongness, of rage, of never
belonging, of DADT, her security
clearance no security.

The postures are multiple:
curled over a desk, curled fetal,
clenching fists, crying, screaming,
flipping tables, flipping the bird.

The labels are multiple:
MOS, 35F, PFC, Specialist,
gay, trans, gender dysphoric
traitor, victim, hero, woman.

The reactions are multiple:
bullying, scorn, vilification,
compassion, incomprehension,
indifference, pity, respect.

The wishes are multiple:
to move on from being traitor
or whistleblower, to die, to live,
to be heard, to define herself.

Devon Balwit is a poet and educator in Portland, OR.  Her work has appeared before in TheNewVerse.News and elsewhere, in places such as Unlikely Stories Mark V, Five 2 One, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Rattle.

HILLARY'S SONG

by Sue Fagalde Lick

Margot Gerster poses for a photo with Hillary Clinton on a hiking trail in Chappaqua, New York on Nov 10 2016. Photographer: Bill Clinton. Credit: MARGOT GERSTER, The Huffington Post, November 10, 2016

On Day Two, she wakes up late.
No alarm, no phone, no car waiting,
just rain streaking down the window
beyond the white lace curtains.

She hears her husband’s scratchy voice
talking downstairs to the dog,
a clatter of cups, the microwave.
She stretches and sighs, it feels good.

She reaches to turn the radio on,
then stops. What for? No.
It’s over and she didn’t win.
Still no Madame President.

She pictures her opponent’s day,
at dawn already in his suit,
the media, the press of aides
calling him president-elect.

Her followers are all in tears.
They’re holding protests in the streets
while the gun-toting, woman-hating
winners have stolen their country back.

She snuggles in her flannel sheets
and sighs again. We cracked
that old glass ceiling more
but didn’t quite break through.

They called her “Crooked Hillary,”
his voters chanted, “Lock her up,”
they displayed her husband’s mistresses,
hit her hard and yet she stood.

She stood tall, a chubby woman
in designer pantsuits and heels,
with styled hair and painted face,
looking up at all those men.

All the girls and women thought
now our voices will be heard,
but did she really want the weight
of an entire country on her back?

She could do it, and do it well,
better, in fact, than any man,
but the spotlight burned, her feet were sore.
She’d seen the job turn young men old.

Today while Trump is getting briefed—
the wars, the codes, the protocol—
she can take a bubble bath
or sit and watch the world go by.

She puts her slippers on and stands,
looks into the mirror and smiles.
It’s someone else’s problem now.
And I don’t have to style my hair.

Sue Fagalde Lick returned to poetry after a long detour in the newspaper business and a better-late-than-never MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in New Letters, Tenemos, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Windfall and other publications. Her books include Stories Grandma Never Told and Shoes Full of Sand. 

CALIFORNIA THE MORNING AFTER

Simon Hunt’s first collection of poems Lesser Magi will be published by Hummingbird Press in 2018. He was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and raised in England and the United States.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Homestead Review, Light Quarterly, Measure, Poetry Quarterly, The Raintown Review, The Seventh Quarry, The Sewanee Review, and other journals—as well as in the online publications 14 X 14, Garo, and The Chimaera.  He teaches in Monterey, California, where he lives with his wife and two children.  He is a member of the Board of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, where he has served as a volunteer docent for more than a decade.   

FIVE EXPLANATIONS

by Gilbert Allen

Kudzu kills or damages other plants by smothering them under a solid blanket of leaves, encircling woody stems and tree trunks, and breaking branches or uprooting entire trees and shrubs. Once established, kudzu grows at a rate of one foot per day; mature vines can be 100 feet long. Kudzu was introduced into the U.S. at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. From 1935 to the mid-1950s, farmers in the South were encouraged to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion. Kudzu is spread by vines that root at the nodes to form new plants. To successfully control kudzu, its extensive root system must be completely eradicated by cutting vines just above the ground and mowing every month for two growing seasons—all cut material must be destroyed. The U.S. Forest Service is searching for biological control agents for kudzu. —The Nature Conservancy

1. Next to that red American clay, bare
and beckoning as a billionaire’s
baseball cap, it seemed
like a giant green blessing.

2. What else to eat in Nagasaki
in September, 1945,
but its white
indestructible roots?

3. Without kudzu, April in South Carolina
would be too full of blue
skies, flowering dogwoods, azaleas
and itself.

4. Men planted it.
Pigs love it.
Why can’t men be pigs?

5. After the first cold Tuesday in November
it still gives death
a good name.


Gilbert Allen has lived in South Carolina for forty years. His most recent books are Catma and The Final Days of Great American Shopping.

THE AGGREGATE

by Rick Mullin

Somewhere out there, not so far away
from all the inconsolable commuters
solemnly interred beneath a day
they’d warded off on personal computers,
wakes the shadow of catastrophe
and rage. Certainly in Tobyhanna,
Pennsylvania, there is little laughter.
Promise fades into a knotted red bandanna
in Wisconsin on the morning after.
In New Hampshire, Pyrrhic victory
suggests a mere alternative to death.
My morning walk to Wall Street, out of phase,
slow-motion, almost out of breath,
is interrupted by a stranger’s gaze.
And I don’t like the way he looks at me.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.

WHITE MAN'S BLUES

by James McKee

Musician and Trump supporter Kraig Moss sings and plays his guitar as South Carolina voters line —WNYC

Well I’m walking down the street,
There’s no English to be heard;
Yeah, I’m walking down my street,
Ain’t no English, not one word.
I was born in the First World;
Looks like I’ll be buried in the Third.


First they take away your job,
Send the factory off to Mexico;
Then they go after your woman;
Where she’s got to, I ain’t know;
Now they’re coming for what’s left,
Time for another Alamo.


I hear them say white man
With that look on they face;
Everybody saying white man
Like it have some nasty taste;
Seems like they forget
Who it was built this place.


Our daddies had it good,
Everybody knew God was white;
Our daddies kept it simple,
You were black if you weren’t white;
If that means they done wrong,
I got no use for doing right.


Prisons are full and getting fuller,
Because the law is the law.
How come we got so many prisons?
And who is it makes up the law?
Ask too many questions,
You find out what prison’s for.


In New York they call me racist,
Mock my accent and my state;
To L.A. I’m just a redneck,
Love two things, guns and hate;
But I’m the first to get a call
When there’s a war that can’t wait.


Had a dream last night:
A river of strangers rushing by;
No one hears me or sees me,
And then that flood, it runs dry.
I knew when I woke up
Nothing changes till I die.

James McKee and his wife live in New York City, in a neighborhood where the 1% seldom go.  A New Yorker by birth (and likely by death), he enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Manhattan.  After taking a degree in English & Philosophy, he held a number of ludicrously unsuitable jobs before spending over a decade as a teacher and administrator at a small special-needs high school. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Raintown Review, Saranac Review, The South Carolina Review, THINK, Mobius, The Road Not Taken, The Worcester Review, The Lyric, The Rotary Dial, and elsewhere; one of his poems recently won the Sow’s Ear Review Poetry Contest, another is a finalist for the Dana Award for Poetry, and a third has been nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize. He currently works as a private tutor and spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.

MORNING IN MT. HOPE CEMETERY

Melissa Balmain lives, writes, teaches, and grieves in Rochester, NY.

VERITAS VANISHED

by Bob McNeil

Source: Politifact

Aphorists say that

The truth is old—
Bristlecone-pine-tree-old,

And the truth is cold—
Cadaver-in-the-arctic-cold.

Granted, the truth is a lot of things,
But it’s the thing
That’s not being told.

I believe
The truth is a stranger
That’s about as foreign as an extraterrestrial.
It will never land on the lips of politicians.

That’s the truth.

Tenaciously, Bob McNeil tries to compose poetic stun guns and Tasers, weapons for the downtrodden in their effort to trounce oppression.  His poems want to be fortresses against despotic politics.

HAIKU

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: Flickr

yesterday

small holes somebody shot

into the stop sign

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley. Her chapbook Various Lies is available from Finishing Line Press.

THE YEAR THE CUBS WON THE WORLD SERIES

by David Spicer

I celebrated my 68th year without

steak, because I never cared for it anyway.

I listened to Fats Domino sing "Blueberry Hill"

over and over again day after day because I could

see him ambling down the New Orleans

sidewalk as he sang, his voice echoing in the night,

and I loved to think about the day I saw

Hank Aaron break the Babe’s record to boos.

Years before the Cubs won the Series,

I didn’t follow baseball like I did

when I was a kid: Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub,

was beautiful flicking the ball toward second

as the first part of a double play to end the inning,

and Willie Mays beyond beautiful the day he hit four

homers and a double when I was eleven.

Now, I plug for the Cubs and hope they’ll win.

But hell, I don’t even know who their stars are.

The year the Cubs won the Series

a racist, misogynistic, xenophobe billionaire

ran for president and almost won, would’ve

if he hadn’t stepped into his own stink

too many times, his opponent an alleged liar,

cuckoldette, and e-mailer extraordinaire hated

by millions because she was an aggressive woman

destined to capture the holy grail of modern politics

and break through the wall of male white lawyers.

The year the Cubs won the Series

I began reading and writing again, attended

readings where gifted wordsmiths read poems

about the day their mothers died, or the cold night

the Titanic sank. They stood at podiums, glancing

down at a published book too few people bought,

staring out at small groups of poetry lovers and poets.

I enrolled in a workshop—many times—and learned

more about craft from a master and other poets.

The year the Cubs won the Series

millions jogged streets for miles and miles

to get a high unique to themselves, millions

more received blessings of a few states

to smoke dope or eat pot brownies and giggle,

and I kept waiting for my state to bless me,

while millions breathed their first breaths

after billions made love to each other hundreds

of times, and millions breathed final breaths.

The year the Cubs won the Series

celebrities passed away, kicked the bucket,

expired, refused to be, bade the world farewell,

or just dropped dead. My favorites: David

Bowie, who sang "Young Americans,"

Patty Duke, Muhammad Ali—the Greatest—

Guy Clark, and Gene Wilder. They left

the scene, skedadled, died, like all of us do,

when it’s time to howl at Pluto and say goodbye.

The year the Cubs won the Series

Bob Dylan received the Nobel Literature Prize

and the hoity-toity crowd scoffed and griped:

He’s not a poet, he’s a singer-songwriter

or Why didn’t the Swedes give it to a minority?

Dylan remained silent, toured the country,

aloof as a spoiled cat, singing his songs

with his back to the audience, strumming his axe,

and never committed to attend the awards ceremony.

My wife almost bled to death on our porch

the year the Cubs won the Series:

On a sunny day, the corner of the steel door

slammed into her Achilles heel, the red porch

a different shade of red and the sun suddenly pale.

I broke three mops cleaning up her life liquid,

used two bottles of bleach to make sure it disappeared

after I drove her to the ER and waited ten hours,

hoping she’d live almost forever with her new blood.

I drank two glasses of Pinot Noir

the night the Cubs won the Series,

ate too many potato chips over five hours

and a rain delay. I watched a disgraced manager

wearing a bow tie hold a mic crowding his

little lips comment on the game with other

experts about the freshly minted World Champs

from the city of the first black president

crying, hugging, and jumping up and down.

The day after the Cubs won the Series

I promised myself I’d lose a few pounds

the next year by not eating potatoes or rice

or cow or pig but just fish and fruit.

I told myself I’d walk three miles a day and smile

when the sun climbed the trees to the sky

and shined while it still could, while clouds

caressed its hot cheeks. I wonder how

that’ll go for me as I sweat and starve?

David Spicer has had poems in In Between Hangovers,  TheNewVerse.News, Gargoyle, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,  Mad Swirl, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, The Laughing Dog, Easy Street, Ploughshares, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press, 1978), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Best of the Net twice and a Pushcart, and is the author of one full-length collection of poems, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press, 1987), and four chapbooks. He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

ODE TO AN OPTIMISTIC FRIEND

by William Aarnes

Image source: The Never-Ending Nightmare That is This Election by Tom Tomorrow

“nasty, brutish, and short” —Hobbes

You tell me to stop
being so pessimistic

so I’m going to start the morning
by ignoring the news

and focus on something random
like cutting my toenails

in hopes that early in the day
someone will see my toes

sticking out of my sandals
and admire my feet,

such lovely, lovely feet,
a compliment so charming

I might stop worrying
about how, despite years

of seeming stability,
it’s conceivable, that—boom!—

by the end of the week
the country’s domestic tranquility

will have collapsed into clashes
in the streets, at times the fighting

among swiftly mustered militias
so intense that the corners

of houses fall in rubble,
nobody bothering to care

who’s caught in the crossfire,
most of us come to grief,
                                                                                             
and I’ll be cowering
(with my lovely toes)

in the plaster-dusted tub
without much hope

of your trying to cheer me up
till—pray we’re among the living—

some well-armed force
imposes peace.


William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.  His latest collection is Do in Dour (Aldrich Press).