Tag: hegemony

Abecedarian for Billionaires

By Chiara Di Lello

Amazing year for rich people says the headline announcing
billionaires like the latest bumper
crop. Congratulations to the proud capital
daddies drooling over their offspring, as liable to
eat their own in next year’s acquisitions as to
feed their cornflower blue-collared shaven throats.
Go on, clap for them while we dance like bears for
healthcare and an hourly fifteen.
I’m sure TSwift needs it more, and trickle down is
just a matter of time. If only we
knew how to trade stocks
like U.S. senators, beating the
market at every turn, a Congress of
net worths five times the median
of us average Joes
poor saps.
Question: Was it also a good year for
RSV? Pinkeye?
Strep? Malaria? Aren’t they also
tumors on society?
Unlikely. As we know,
viruses only breed themselves, til every other organism is
wiped out of their niche. How many of us will they
X out, come next year? Who knows. Maybe
zillions.

Chiara Di Lello is a writer and educator who loves coffee, art, and bees, and unequivocally supports the movement for Palestinian liberation. Her poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Okay Donkey, Stanchion Zine, and more. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Visit her website at necessarymess.wordpress.com and follow her on social media: X @thetinydynamo, IG @whereskiwi, and Bluesky @chiaradilello.bsky.social.

Photo credit: Richie Diesterheft via a Creative Commons license.

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hegemony: footnotes in future history

By Yvonne Patterson

 

bookended with blood, The Reaving Era births in the conflagration
of Origin Crusades, subjugates the populace and banishes science,
ending in funeral pyres of anti-pogrom riots: The Reclamation Years.

closing scenes, unlike the exuberance of symphonic finales, manifest
in discordant notes. bright allegros falter. sonorous glissades collapse
in coarse staccato. dark notation seeps into public view. audience exits.

the Great Court assumes sombre hues: meticulously carved mahogany
chairs line the High Bench in a barren row. the antique red carpet, woven
with faded battle sigils, colloquially known as the river of blood, stagnates.

only stalwart readers remain, squinting, hunched over Library manuscripts
chained to tables. the edifice, deeply veined with cracks, blackened
with ingrained dirt, brittled with fetid breath of centuries, suffocates.

fables of self-proclaimed hegemony, echoing former eminence, lie
embalmed in stained glass windows. glass shards, encrusted with grime,
colours leeched by vicissitudes of relevance, obscure daylight, mute hubris.

 

Yvonne Patterson is New Zealand born, living in Perth Western Australia, proving that kiwis do fly. She enjoys the freedom of poetry after a career in human services in clinical psychology and policy in mental health, disability, community and justice areas and holds an M.Psych (Clin) and MBA from UWA. Her poetry explores borders and fault lines around us as human beings living within social and political contexts. It asks questions about the ethics of how we behave towards each other and our environment. It draws from career experience and personal interests in arts, science, politics and especially social justice and equity. She has poems published in Anthologies and Journals including Not Very Quiet, Grieve Anthology, Writers Resist, Creatrix, the Australian Rationalist Journal.

Photo credit: Marco Orazi via a Creative Commons license.

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Male Bias

By Katherine D. Perry

 

Waiting five years to adopt a daughter,
I had time to carefully consider the impact
of male bias on foreign shores,
where, when you can only have one, girls
are left on the steps of schools and libraries,
and if they survive, they might be sent away,
to western countries, where women
can have as many as eight babies at once.

I look into her eyes and ache for a mother
who felt forced to let her go,
who had to break the mother-daughter bond
because of money and laws and culture and the need for a male child.

Now that I’m pregnant with a son,
I see my naiveté.
When I tell my friends that he is a boy,
I watch as eyes light and listen
to the long list of reasons why sons
are better than daughters: easy and calm
among the most common.
But then they add: simple pregnancies,
less dramatics, even a unique mother-son bond
that will somehow overtake my life.

I think of my feminism training,
of the penis-baby who, according to psychoanalytic theory,
will make me whole.
I look at the pay stubs stacked next to each other: mine and my partner’s
and consider the defeating weight of that common inequity.

Here in America, we claim equality.
Here in America, I walk without hoods or chains;
I drive my car; I vote in every election; I work.
Here in America, my son is expected to be
my easy child, the love of my life,
the missing key to my life’s mystery.
He will make more money than she will;
he will get promotions more quickly.

But I as I hold my Chinese daughter,
and share with her the pain of our two cultures
that leave our girls behind,
I am sure that we are not meant to be seconds.

……………………………………………………

Katherine D. Perry is an Associate Professor of English at Perimeter College of Georgia State University. Some of her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Dead Mule of Southern Literature and 13th Moon. She works in Georgia prisons to bring poetry to incarcerated students and is currently building a prison initiative with Georgia State University to bring college classes into Georgia state prisons. She lives in Decatur, Georgia with her spouse and two children.

Reading recommendation: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.