Mother’s Letter to Her Best Friend

By Penny Perry

June 5, 1942

Dear Isabel,

I drove my sister to the doctor’s
in Los Angeles. It all happened
so quickly. I promised to bring her
a chocolate phosphate when
it was over.

She joked with the nurses.
Told them if she puked
from ether she would buy
each of them a pair of nylon
stockings.

She insisted on ether because
her friend Hannah had told her
an abortion would be too
painful without it.

In the waiting room, I picked
up a movie magazine.
During the next ten minutes
I heard a harsh breathing
as though she were gasping.
I told myself she would breathe
differently under ether.

A nurse rushed to the telephone
to call emergency.
My knees collapsed.
I remember the sounds of sirens
on the street, footsteps on the stairs,
the horrible hissing sounds
of the oxygen tent.

I remember words like
“her pulse rate is low.”
“She has a seven-month-old baby
at home.” “Isn’t it a pity?”

Finally, the doctor came out
and said “Your sister is dead.”
The bastard didn’t even have
the sense to shut the door.
I could see her head thrown back
on the table.
He told me to stop screaming.

Penny Perry has received six Pushcart nominations. Garden Oak Press published her first novel, Selling Pencils and Charlie, and a collection of her poetry, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage. New poems are forthcoming in Earth’s Daughters, Lips, the Paterson Literary Review, and the San Diego Poetry Annual. She is the fiction/nonfiction editor of Knot Literary Journal online.

Your vote is your voice. Su voto es su voz.

Be loud—vote!

We are often told that our votes don’t matter. But if our votes held no power, no one would try to silence us. That’s why we partnered with artists and MoveOn to create “Your Vote is Power,” an art-centered initiative to inspire young people and people of color to register and vote in November. We want to reclaim our visual landscape with messages of empowerment, with images reminding us that we are stronger when we act together and that our democracy depends on us all taking to the polls this November.

Poster art by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya.

Please support Amplifier Art.

Stringing Them

By William Palmer

He catches them each day,
stringing them through their gills,

his trumpeteers
trailing in dark water,

mouths drawn open,
eyes puckered shut.

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in J Journal, Poetry East, and Salamander. He has published two chapbooks—A String of Blue Lights and Humble—and has been interviewed by Grace Cavalieri for The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress. Recently he published an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel on the need for political candidates to embody a life-giving core. He lives in northern Michigan.

Photo credit: Helen Penjam via a Creative Commons license.

Unknowns

By Robin Q. Malin

There’s a lot of things I don’t know.

I don’t know what I believe.
I don’t know who I love.
All I know right now is that
when I look into her eyes
I long to trace her cheekbones,
to touch her lips,
to stroke her cherry colored hair
under the stars.
I know that she is beautiful,
that I am not supposed
to want what I think I might want.

I want to write to my father’s god,
to tell him that
I just want to dance with her,
to ask him why the sound
of his silence is so deafening.

I’m sorry.
This poem was supposed
to be about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
That’s where I started,
because I remembered
the soft sighs, the dissenting
voices of my parents
on the day when marriage
became a fuller and more
encompassing word,
and I don’t remember their
words but I remember
that they felt heavy
and red and broken
and I didn’t know why.

I remember a debate,
a debate that should not
have needed to be a debate
about if because
my name is Woman
it is also Meek, it is also
Equal (But In A Different
And Lower Way).
I remember that Ruth
said let there be nine,
there’s been nine men,
and I wonder if the disciples
were all women,
would scripture be called
blasphemy?
I don’t know.

So now I will tell you what I do know.

I know that the divinity I know
is there in the flickers
of light that shine on her hair,
in the sunset heavy clouds,
in the weight of words
that deny hatred a place
of power.

I know that if there is a heaven,
I want to weave a crown of flowers
and send them up to Ruth,
and ask her how she knew
that life was worth the tears
it took to make it worth living.

Photo credit: Miss Ayumaii Kawaii via a Creative Commons license.

Welfare Check East of Downtown

By Christie Valentin-Bati

“It is 2020. Everything is canceled except for police terror.”
–Nick Estes

They said close down everything
non-essential: The coffee shop,
blue trimmed with a green porch,
white-potted flowers that hung down
from the awning,
closed – so I roasted my own coffee.
The outlet mall
with high-waisted jeans,
gold-plated, pearl earrings
I’d been saving up to buy
closed too. So I wore nothing
in my ears, dug deep into my closet
and cut my own shorts instead.
They told me to stay home. I stayed home.
I used Instacart. I worked remotely.
I bought surcharged surgical masks off Amazon
though I knew, it wouldn’t help much
to block the droplets should they come.
Still, I was young, white.
I washed my hands regularly,
soaping around the thumb,
between the fingers,
even around my wrists,
I scrubbed clean.
I sexted, watered the plants,
and when I tired, I turned on the TV,
watched the news do its count
of another thousand people dead,
which meant only 100,000
were left to die.
Every now and again
I would peak over the fence,
happy to see my neighborhood
silent and unmoving,
the cars parked, quiet, in the driveways.
If any noise ever did pass through,
a construction truck, police sirens,
I’d pull down my windows
to mute out the sound,
certain that the noise was headed
to another place. I never worried
about any strangers in uniforms
coming to knock on my door,
carrying with them
something more deadly than a virus.

Christie Valentin-Bati is a poet and photographer based in small-life suburbia Hollywood, Florida, and soon big city Chicago. She is a co-author of Existential Quandary, a book of haikus from the perspective of a chicken, and her poetry has been featured in Columbia Journal. More of her work can be found on Instagram @_christieos_, Twitter @christiee0_0 or her website christievalentinbati.com.

Photo credit: Alachua County via a Creative Commons license.

The Spectators

By D.A. Gray

We’d grown thin during the pandemic.

I don’t know when it began. Years ago, I think. When we began to look at neighbors with contempt, to walk head down into the house from the car, looking neither left nor right. Something broken in us and we would enter the house and lock all three locks behind us, and turn on Box—the friend who understood us.

We would post jokes about lost drivers on Robertson Road, the coworker who couldn’t seem to do anything right, Texans and their beer hands that kept them from reaching the turn signal, or the lady in her bunny slippers at the H-E-B.

It was funny then, right? We meant no harm.

Faces from our angle seemed forever stuck in a moment of worry, or maybe lostness.

When the pandemic hit we noticed more in the mirror—or less—the way we almost disappeared from the side was cause for slight alarm. We vowed to eat better, to exercise. Then we sat down with Box, who loved us as we were and flashed pictures of pets, of stories curated for us.

Anyway, there’s still this pandemic. But it’s been so long since you’ve taken in a game.

In the stands, we notice faces frozen, you might say with “pasted on smiles.” Or frowns. Or maybe screams. Who knows. Everyone is silent here.

We’ve forgotten how to enjoy a simple game.

But the game itself is good, right? Slow moving, sure. But we watch the strategy unfold. There are outfield shifts, signals from the sides, pitcher and catcher in their esoteric talk. We never noticed when we used to talk.

Now the action has us glued to our seats.

And the sky has become an orange haze.

Players run through the motions. The stop and start drama, the overthinking, the occasional sprint after a collision of hickory on cowhide. Someone yells “Yes” as the ball drops onto the green grass.

Here the orange sky gets brighter.

Back home, Box tuned to something more pleasant. I hope it’s just conspiracy talk.

My skin is feeling thin, papery, which has me a little unsettled. My chances of surviving a combustible world were not good before this development.

What was that? Another crack of the bat. Maybe. No one’s moving. Perhaps the crack of timber from a nearby hill.

We keep watching. No one’s speaking to each other anymore and the faces seem to carry a look of perpetual anxiety. I think of the time we could have spent talking but never did. We assumed those around us were nothing but cardboard cutouts of something we feared. Now I fear we’ve become that, while watching other things.

And outside this place an orange menace lumbers—I can’t ignore it anymore—slow and clumsy, but steady. Its fingers—it seems to be feeding—grabbing at everything, as if our silence were consent.

D.A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (2017). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Writers Resist, Comstock Review, Still: The Journal and Wrath-Bearing Tree among others. He holds Master’s degrees from The Sewanee School of Letters and Texas A&M-Central Texas. Gray now teaches, writes, and lives in Central Texas.

Photo credit: Eric Drost via a Creative Commons license.

What Gnaws My Bone

By Ronda Broatch

“Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country,” Mr. Trump said. “This is a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality.” – New York Times 5 June 2020

There are days that ache
so loud.

I see from a distance
a black man deprived
of the rest of his life

because : :

he fits the description, is a person
of interest

Sometimes the poem is not ready to be written.
Sometimes I need to just shut up and listen.

“Please, I can’t breathe.”

Sometimes I’m driving alone in my car yelling
Whose fucking great day is this?

(the president)
(who has no decent bone in his body)
(can’t hear me)

And how detached
his words

. . . looking down right now
and saying this is a great thing
that’s happening for our country . . .

how disembodied Floyd’s words

“My stomach hurts.”

“My neck hurts.”

“Everything hurts.”

I fog up my windows, yell NO NO NO
it’s Fucking. Never. A. Great. Day.

to be dead —

“They’re going to kill me.”

and how disconnected
I am in my green garden
paradise, my adult children
here with me,

and no one worried about going out
into the world, save for COVID-19
which doesn’t discriminate

from my little patch of privilege
I see
from a distance

the fires the broken glass the rubber bullets the flash bang the water

They’re going to kill me.

and milk to douse the sting. These facts

(They’re going to kill me)

gnaw
and gnaw and gnaw and gnaw —

Poet and photographer Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press, 2015). Ronda was a finalist for the Four Way Books Prize, and her poems have been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. Her journal publications include Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, and Public Radio KUOW’s All Things Considered, among others.

O Captain! Some Captain!

By Mark Williams

after Walt Whitman

O Captain! Some Captain! Our fearful trip’s not done,
The ship is foundering, front to back, the prize we sought’s not won.
The port is far, the chants I hear, the people all protesting,
While follow eyes the unsteady keel, the vessel grim and shaking;

But O heartless, heartless heart!
O the beating blood as red
As the MAGA hat that lies,
On your self-serving head.

O Captain! Some Captain! Rise up and hear the news;
Black Lives Matter flags are flung, for you the bullhorns shrill.
Not for you, bouquets and wreathes—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you we call, the marching masses, our angry faces burning;

Some Captain! Some leader!
You nearly fell on your head.
It’s a nightmare: if on this deck,
You wobble yet next year. O dread!

You Captain answer not our questions, your lips are pale, speak swill.
A leader who intends us harm, your pulse beats all for ill,
The ship’s not anchored safe and sound, its voyage far from done,
If from this trip this vanquished ship does not come in, you’ve won;

Exult not O shores, ring not O bells!
I walk with mournful tread, where
If you steer this ship next year,
our nation sinks cold and dead.

Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. His poems in response to the Trump administration have appeared in Writers Resist, Poets Reading the News, The New Verse News, and Tuck Magazine. He lives in Evansville, Indiana.

Photo by zhao chen on Unsplash.

Presidential Seal

By Jennifer Shneiderman

Slipping into Cadillac One
Gliding on lies and half-truths
Trump greets supporters
waving off warnings
and all that is humane.
He is the clear and present danger.

The SUV
a mobile panic room
used for political theatre
could be the Secret Service
Presidential seal of death.

The truth is a ghost
a shadow
an inconvenience
an artifact
dismissed out of hand.
Turn around and
White House portraits have been replaced
with funhouse mirrors.

Secret Service
doing their duty
following orders.
Only an enemy
would define them as expendable.
The devil is in their detail.

Before the fate is sealed
the future insular, fanatical
overrun by white supremacy
ruled by the stunningly irrational—
Vote like Jim Jones is standing over you
with a syringe.

Jennifer Shneiderman is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Indolent Book’s HIV Here and Now, The Rubbertop Review, Writers Resist, the Poetry in the Time of COVID-19, Vol 2, anthology, Variant Literature, Bright Flash Literary Review, Wingless Dreamer, Trouvaille Review, Montana Mouthful, the Daily Drunk, Sybil Journal, Unique Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Terror House, Thirteen Myna Birds, Potato Soup Journal, Awakened Voices, GreenPrints, and The Perch. She was the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Laura Riding Jackson poetry competition.

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash.

When I Am Asked to Be More Like the Good Women of Sparta in the Movie ‘300’

By Abby E. Murray

The colonel sends a letter
to the families of Tiger Battalion
at the onset of global pandemic.

I am a Tiger spouse now,
which means I am dignified,
according to the colonel.

The tigers in the zoo closest to us
have paced so long in their habitat
they communicate in sunken spirals,

insane, glaring past their fence
with eyes the color of honey
or fossilized sap, the color

of sweetness or preservation,
maybe both. I assume they
continue to speak in circles

without shrinking from human chaos
not because they are dignified
so much as they cannot shrink.

But this is not about tigers or a name
thrown to me like a new toy,
a bloody chop to chew.

The colonel asks us to remain calm,
be more like the good women
of Sparta in the movie 300:

supportive, exemplary,
confident in their warriors.
He says we must be the foundation

upon which our soldiers succeed
and I imagine myself painted
in orange and black on an urn

in some museum,
my placard purring about
how I’m allowed to be wise,

allowed to own land,
allowed to speak,
permitted, given, blessed.

Now I’m pissed. Now I’m hungry.
On behalf of Spartan women
I want to ask the colonel:

what is there for me to praise here?
Is it the good of the state,
balanced on my head like poisoned meat?

or is it my beloved himself,
who lets me grow strong?
I send no response to the colonel,

who probably translates silence
as agreement, the sound of a tame woman
pacing the earth—fearsome

but composed in her containment.
See how I wear a grave into the earth
just by walking on it?

Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She teaches rhetoric in writing military strategy for army officers on fellowship from the Army War College at the University of Washington, and she offers free creative writing workshops for immigrants, soldiers, veterans, and their loved ones around Tacoma, Washington, where she is the city’s poet laureate. Her book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was released in September 2019. You can reach her at www.abbyemurray.com.

Image of Greek amphora, 540 BC, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

For E.G.

By Matt Barnsley

there’s a drip
drip
drip
that comes with being
american

it soaks DuBois’ veil
and smothers the mouth
the nose
a personalized waterboarding
half dead, half alive

there’s a gasping
gasp
gasp
that echoes in our
ears

it drowns out the cries
the gunshots
the standby videos
and a man who can’t breathe

Matt Barnsley is the editor and founder of New American Legends, an online literary journal aimed at uplifting underrepresented voices in the genres of sci-fi, horror, and adventure. He is also the author of several plays, most notably The Play My Mother Hates, which garnered positive reviews from City Pages, A/V Club, and others. He holds an M.F.A. from Concordia University and his work has also been featured in SPIRES, and NGY Review. As a freelance copywriter, his words have been featured on product packaging, social media platforms, and advertisements. He is currently working on his second novel. He resides in Minnesota with an assortment of domesticated animals.

Photo by Raphael Lovaski on Unsplash.

Women Wearing White

By Carol Sadtler

not just for purity but justice
as suffragettes wore white
for the vote, as Hillary’s
white pantsuit honors them,
as all the women of every
color in the House wear
white one night and the
Speaker claps back to power,
as on the day Madame Speaker,
in white bespoke pantsuit, begins
to impeach, as a pushy newsman
tries to put the word hate
in her mouth, as she says
“Don’t mess with me
when it comes to words like that”
as she strides away
her white suit unsullied.

Carol Sadtler is a freelance writer and editor who does her best thinking on, near, or in the water. She lives in Chicago with her family. Her poems have appeared in Rhino Poetry, where she served as associate editor 2018-19; Pacific Review; The Tishman Review; and other publications.

Photo of the Victory Column by Goke Obasa on Unsplash.

Sonnet for the Woman in Walgreens

By Diane Elayne Dees

It’s been a week or two since our encounter,
yet your voice haunts me, and I see your face
in waking dreams. There, at the checkout counter,
you yelled and gestured as you made your case:
“It’s all a hoax!” you shouted, while the clerk
delivered a lecture on government regulations,
declaring—as she put aside her work—
that we are so much cleaner than other nations.
I wonder if you’re staying safe inside,
washing your hands, and canceling your cruise—
or are you spreading the virus far and wide,
and getting tips from experts at Fox News?
I think of you, your rage, your blind belief;
there’s no vaccine for that, and no relief.

Diane Elayne Dees has two poetry chapbooks, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died and Coronary Truth, forthcoming. Her microchap, Beach Days, can be downloaded from the Origami Poems Project website. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Visit her author site, Diane Elayne Dees, Poet and Writer-at-Large.

Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash.

I Do Not Wait

By Trish Hopkinson

—for Walt Whitman

nor am I dismissed.
I set myself apart, do not tremble
beneath terms—cold

manly, butch, ball-breaker
bitch—do not determine my worth
by whom I am kept.

I ratchet skyward
take my place at the sun’s table
lifted by turquoise bone & bladed wings.

My scarab shell snubs boot heels
scurries and flutters solo
& yes, I possess myself.

I will not be held in a fist
pinned or stuffed in a case
pierced beneath glass.

I seat you in a room waiting
nude, simple & flaccid, unable
to siphon one more drop of sap.

My body is not yours to be dammed
instead, it releases grace in white waves
& demands nothing of anyone

but myself. I penetrate no one.
I illuminate the paths
of the unwaiting.

Trish Hopkinson is a poet, blogger, and advocate for the literary arts. You can find her online at SelfishPoet.com and provisionally in Utah, where she runs the regional poetry group Rock Canyon Poets and folds poems to fill Poemball machines for Provo Poetry. Her poetry has been published in several lit mags and journals, including Tinderbox, Glass Poetry Press, and The Penn Review; her third chapbook Footnote was published by Lithic Press in 2017, and her most recent e-chapbook Almost Famous was published by Yavanika Press in 2019. Hopkinson will happily answer to labels such as atheist, feminist, and empty nester; and enjoys traveling, live music, and craft beer.

Photo by Ines Álvarez Fdez on Unsplash.

Good Night

By Angela Costi

In 1993,
I walked the night
through Alma Park, St Kilda, from 10 pm
to 4 am, no chaperone, no iPhone,
the poetry gig would end
I would leave
take the tram
no taxi, no text-talk, no self-talk,
and walk
for blocks
through city lanes, urban parks, industrial streets
half a city and two suburbs of walking
to clear the day’s debris.

It was night who befriended me
when my house was slashing and stabbing,
I kept clear of the family room,
unpacked my tantrums
with insomniacs, nurses
and night feeders.

Now 2019, I walk
with no moon for witness
my steps are the loud protest,
I hear muffled blasts
of his outrage
her resentment
in a house I pass.

A hunched figure
sparks the path,
slows down
to show
a girl.

We nod
like soldiers
at the frontline.

Angela Costi’s poetry collections are: Dinted Halos (Hit&Miss Publications, 2003), Prayers for the Wicked (Floodtide Audio and Text, 2005), Honey and Salt (Five Islands Press, 2007) and Lost in Mid-Verse (Owl Publishing, 2014). An award from the National Languages Board in 1995, enabled her to study Ancient Greek drama in Greece. She received funding from the Australia Council to work in Japan on an international collaboration involving her poetry, which she documented as poetic narrative and essays at: http://cordite.org.au/author/angelacosti/

Photo by Krzysztof Kowalik on Unsplash.

Letters Then and Now

By Patricia McTiernan

A few weeks after a stay-at-home advisory was issued in Massachusetts, I turned 60. As someone with a chronic illness, I felt I had jumped head first into the high-risk pool. With a long-planned vacation cancelled, I reconciled to staying home a lot and tackling projects I had long put off.

There are, for instance, the letters. My father wrote them to friends at home while serving in the Infantry during World War II. I’ve wanted to transcribe them, to share with family. They have faded with time, but his handwriting is clear. With no deadline, I work in the quiet of my suburban home’s third floor at my makeshift desk: a heavy, laminated board set upon two metal file cabinets.

My father used to say, “I was no hero,” whenever he spoke about the war. He did not rush to enlist after Pearl Harbor, as many younger men did. He was drafted, spending the first two years training stateside before shipping overseas. His company arrived at Omaha Beach two weeks after the famous D-day landing, to fight in the Normandy countryside and on into Austria and Germany.

I often think of World War II as the last great challenge that truly affected everyone in one way or another. Certainly some sacrificed more than others, and inequities abounded. But unlike other wars and national crises that followed, in WWII, no one was completely shielded from the effects—whether food and gas rationing or being sent overseas to battle.

In the letters from Europe, my father is 34 years old and single. He is writing to close friends, a married couple who live in the same small town where my father grew up. He is chatty about their shared acquaintances, happy for another young couple expecting their first child.

But when he writes about the Army, which is often, he is frustrated. The best years of his life are being consumed by war. The point system used to determine when enlisted men can be discharged is unfair. He is having no luck in getting an emergency furlough to visit his sick, aging father back home.

When he recovers from injuries sustained in the Battle of the Bulge, he is sent, not to H Company, the comrades he has been with since the start, but to a tank battalion. “I know as much about a tank as you know about running a submarine,” he writes.

This summer marks 35 years since my father died. I’ve spent far more time on the planet without him than with him, yet he hovers as an influencing presence in my life. I knew him as congenial and calm, the peacemaker in our family. He was the brother that his siblings called upon when they needed help, the father who read three newspapers every day and wanted more than anything for his daughters to love the game of golf.

Yet the voice in the letters, for the most part, is not a voice I recognize. He is 11 years away from becoming a father, and 15 years from becoming my father. He is stuck. His life is not his own. He has no control—over the war, over his place in it, over his father’s health.

This summer also marks 75 years since the end of World War II.

Here in the pandemic, I feel a kinship with the lack of control that my father and others must have felt back then. While my comfortable life is nothing like war, I am stuck in a situation not of my own making. I embrace the privilege of staying home to be safe, yet I also feel the constraints of not being able to do much else.

But in the heat of summer afternoons, I move to the first floor. Sitting at the dining room table I work in the present, writing my own letters. Like my father, I am no hero.

Unlike my father’s letters, mine are addressed to complete strangers. I channel my horror at my country’s decline over the past three years into something I have to still believe in: voting.

Through get-out-the vote organizations, I am writing to people in Texas and Michigan. I’m sending postcards to Pennsylvanians.

I write the same message again and again. I’ll never meet the people I am writing to; we’ll never get to celebrate a victory together. And as deaths from the virus mount, I have to wonder: Are they still healthy; are they still alive?

Many will no doubt toss my correspondence in the recycling bin. But it’s possible that my efforts, however small, may be meaningful to some.

In one of his letters to his friends my father wrote, “I am well and have gotten thru a lot and hope to be lucky enough to continue thru the battles that lie ahead.”

That’s the voice I knew. And the hopeful message that resonates today.

For now, I am safe and well. The country has gotten through a lot. But in this time when so much is uncertain, I hope that those who receive my letters will understand how important they are to winning the battle that lies ahead.

Patricia McTiernan recently retired as a communications director in the nonprofit healthcare sector. She is an editor and writer in the Greater Boston area. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, The Sun magazine, and The Examined Life Journal. Follow her on Twitter: @AceMct.

Photo by Kari Sullivan on Unsplash.

Humanity

By Steven Croft

Wants to believe kindness, its namesake, can still a morning rain
of bombs, calm the lightning strike of artillery shells on cratered streets
scorched hot and unlivable as the surface of the sun

Wants to believe foresight will quiet the chainsaws’ outcry against
ancient trees in the last remaining rainforests, make abandoned
the coal-fired cooling towers as monuments to itself, leave at least some
of the fish in the sea

Wants to believe in the white sorcery of hope: we will never be starving
animals on a dying planet, we are not tongueless to stop a world’s
unraveling, wants to believe in good hearts joining us together in time
like a savior walking out of a desert, the world as scry bowl of better angels

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. For the last thirteen years he has worked in a library. He has recent poems in Sky Island Journal, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Poets Reading the News, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, and other places.

Photo credit: Xavier Vergés via a Creative Commons license.

The Fire Still Burns

By Gary Priest

Fire makes us all believers.

There’s a unity in fear that allowed science and religion to merge into a rational hysteria that swept us all along on a wave of koala memes and apocalypse FOMO.

The eco-inspired crimewave started in the mid 2020s. This was not just shutting down airport runways or protest hashtags. This was something darker, primal and all persuasive.

My first assignment as a rookie eco-cop was crowd control at the murder of an oil company CEO. He was castrated and hung from a lamppost outside a petrol station on New Year’s Eve, 2028. Six months later, I found myself first on the scene of a luckless idiot who discarded a burger wrapper on a Soho street and was kicked to death by a passing group of vegan death metal kids.

Ten years after those first deaths, “ecoslaughter” was written into the rule of law. By the early 2040s, it was impossible to get a conviction on any death that could show a motive related to saving the planet.

The skies got a little bluer and the oceans were more saltwater than cellophane again.

We saved the world.

Twenty years came and went. I remained on the force.

On a dull evening patrol, I drove past a group of teens waited in an orderly line to get into the hippest of the town’s vice-free nightclubs. I could probably find some reason to take them in. The smallest violations were now offences. Sneaking an outlawed carbohydrate, wearing leather shoes without a permit, and, of course, loitering with intent to pollute, which could be twisted to cover anything anyone did and was great for keeping arrest numbers up.

Hoping there might be some meatier infractions inside the club, I parked my bright green smart car and with one flash of my badge at the door, strode inside the large hall. The whale song and bird tweets were a long way from the old days of EDM and rock ’n roll, but after the Bank Holiday Modular Music riots of ’44, the influencers decided that all human-made music was ecologically unsound.

I still remember the day they executed Keith Richards. The lethal injection didn’t work, so they beheaded him live on the nine o’clock news. The tattered illusion of humane deaths for musicians was put aside. They crucified Miley Cyrus, fed Alfie Boe to a pack of feral hogs and kept going until every last one of them was dead.

Groups of pious youth swayed back and forth to the somnolent sounds of nature. These were the inheritors of the planet.

I hated them and I hated what the world we saved had become.

That was my secret.

Back in the early 21st century, there was a gestalt shift that left no room for doubt in anyone’s mind. They called it Twitter-logic. You never expressed doubts, you never backed down, and if there was a mob, you had better be part of it or you would find yourself its next target.

That shift pulled us back from the brink of global catastrophe. Who’d have thought all those armchair environmentalists would one day bring about the Plastic Purges of 2042, the Meatless Monday Massacres of ’55.

I played along, said all the right things and became the perfect symbol of the new age of woke warrior.

Don’t get me wrong, I was glad the planet had been saved, and I admit that the draconian means were probably the only option we had left by the end of the 2020s. But now that the planet was yet again an Eden, it seemed we had forgotten how to enjoy its bounty and grace.

I clocked up a few arrests in the club. Minor violations of recycling laws and dental hygiene directives. The Prius prison vans came and took the offenders away, and I went back to my patrol.

It was a quiet night and I was nearing the end of my shift when the call came in to investigate a code 411, “possible youthquake in progress.”

She sat alone on a wall by the burnt-out shell of a public library. Hardly a youthquake, but certainly a curfew violation to start with.

She wasn’t much older than fourteen. Her hair was a messy nest of blonde and pink. I could have taken her in for the hour and the highlights, but those abuses were the least of her transgressions.

Smoking a cigarette. In public! A goddamn roll-up! That was a twenty-year minimum sentence right there. At her feet, a small pile of cigarette butts, an empty bottle of bootleg vodka and what looked like the remains of a highly illegal kebab.

I got out of my car. She didn’t look up, just puffed out a plume of smoke and started singing.

Instinctively, I drew my gun. Still, she didn’t react.

The song came from way back in the 1980s. “Are you singing a Russ Ballard song” I asked.

She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall and tossed it to the ground.”‘The Fire Still Burns,” she said. She did not smile but assaulted me with eyes granite grey and defiant.

“How do you even know music? It was outlawed before you were born.”

Her laugh was flat and without warmth. “It’s all still out there in the dark cloud if you know where to look.”

Another violation.

“And is that how you want to die? Singing some forgotten power ballad from the eighties?”

She shrugged. “You remember it.”

“That’s not the point, you dumb fucking kid. I have to kill you now. You get that, right?”

After the first few years I no longer enjoy the killing, nor did I feel anything other than a grim certainty that to disobey an eco-statute would mean my death as well as the offender’s.

“I have to kill you”’ I repeated.

‘Of course, you do. Been waiting half an hour for one of you green-booted arseholes to come and end me.’

My grip tightened on the gun. There was no arrest protocol for this many violations.

“Why are you doing this”’ I asked.

The kid smiled for the first time. “Because extinction is the only rebellion I have left, green-boot.”

I shot her twice in the head and once in the chest. Her smile reddened as she toppled over the wall to the ground. I called the cleanup squad and went home.

For the first time in years, my heart soared. I was too old and too scared to rebel, but that kid hadn’t given it a second thought, and if there was one of her, there were probably more. One kid smoking cigarettes and singing outlawed songs might do little else but give hope to her embittered executioner, but a thousand of them could become a trending topic, a hashtag, a movement, and that was how the world changed these days. In her grey eyes I saw the rebirth of the natural revolt of youth. Our generation saved the world, and now maybe, just maybe, the next one could save us.

Later, in the surveillance dead-spot of three a.m. I started singing “The Fire Still Burns,” softly, in the cold solitude of the night.

Gary Priest writes short fiction and poetry. He has over thirty publications online and in print including Daily Science Fiction, The Eunoia Review, and Literary Orphans. He lives in the UK at the end of a dead-end road, which may explain everything.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

Donald Trump’s Titanic

By Cassandra Henken

The world today
is like watching a shipwreck in slow motion.

Donald Trump
is the iceberg, and America is
the Titanic. We laughed
about being able to smell ice
when it’s near—

Iceberg, right ahead!
We elected him anyway.
Just as they said,
“God himself could not sink this ship!”
when they knew there were not enough lifeboats,
it takes someone equally cold-hearted
to hold the Bible in one hand
and smite the lowly with the other.

Now we’re bobbing in the water,
our ship asunder,
and still, there are those
who say the ship is unsinkable,
even though thousands of people have died,
(even as the cold settled in
choking on their own breath
and they swallowed the Atlantic).

Listen closely enough,
and bullets sound like Morse code.
Men desperate to get into a lifeboat,
to live,
were shot even as they drowned.

Imagine the headlines—

“Titanic Hits the Same Iceberg Twice!”

We accept prayers via memes
or monetary compensation.

Cassandra Henken is a mother of three living in Minnesota. She has her Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology and Early Childhood Development. She worked for almost five years as a Behavior Therapist for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Now she is going back to school for a Bachelor’s of Arts in English and Fiction Writing. She has always loved the written word and been interested in politics, the culmination of which resulted in “Donald Trump’s Titanic.”

Photo in the public domain.

¡Despierta!

By Ada Ardére

She lies rotting in saltwater that thrashes about white resorts
that in their time and in their place drown out her voice
as it would otherwise be heard begging, pleading, screaming
for the lives of her children as they sit in wards without power,
diabetic comas consuming the elderly and children equally
while Brooks Brothers suit clad Epstein socialite collaborators
avert their eyes from her teary visage in slave-maintained
golf clubs across the sea refusing to acknowledge her
in any way but kicks and spit upon the whore they sell,
upon the bloodied lips and cracked teeth of a mother of millions
without water or food or even the dignity of acknowledgement!

She is remembering for them all the counts and strikes upon their bodies
in the century since forced annexation where experiments
upon illiterate women gave rise to mainland women’s endless fucking and
the cessation of hormonal migraines and acne for little girls in elite schools
who would never see the effects of nuclear testing on her northern coasts,
oh she remembers for them, she refuses to let death or time erase
the millions of hours of modern indentured servitude that her
children were deceived into for the cost of a boat ride to a land
they were already citizens of but still not yet seen as anything
but the dark skinned/too pale inbetweeners of a failed negro kingdom
the lazy, laid-back rapists, thieves of virtue, papists thirsting for jobs!

She is listening to the century long echoed call and response of the tired
cry from Lares whose drone was cannons and drums from
the hearts of those who still remember the Taíno name, to those
as they roar the name of both tormentor and consoler, ¡Maria!,
to the silence of supposed compatriots in congressional halls
whose only gestures are public prayers for miracles they
could manifest themselves in otherwise forgettable acts
of mercy if only they did not reduce her and her people
to lesser than dogs, and she listens to the swelling response:
a beast cannot be made more beastly nor can its cry
be muted as it awakens to the only means that is left to it!

Ada Ardére is a Puerto Rican poet from New Orleans, who now lives in Kansas City. She studied philosophy of art and Plato, and loves beat poetry. Her poems have recently appeared in 34th Parallel Magazine and online in Wussy Mag.

Map of 1863 Puerto Rico from New York Public Library.