Rick Campbell: Two Poems
the first bird sings that it’s time
to walk the beach, where gulls don’t sing
and herons stand silent, waiting
for a pilchard to offer itself to God.
Mary B. Moore: Ab Ovum
could say anything’s inside me, Gloria, Dad, Mom,
the old Royal typewriter, Xs, Ys, a blue ’58 Hudson . . .
but I Wiki-checked the car and learn they quit making them
in ’57 so then I wonder if I mean the Hudson River
Robert Wrigley: A Certain Man
For in the loop of this hell there’s a farcical rule,
that says when certain men find a certain man
of use—one that’s spiteful, vacant, and cruel —
he becomes for his purposes the perfect tool…
Video: GOP Jesus
Right-wing conservative Christians who see this video may think it’s an attack on Christianity. They’re wrong. It’s an attack on hypocrisy.
Barbara Huntington: Our Big Toes
I’d let that old woman repeat her crime if
I could see
Fred’s happy faces
one more time
Abby Zimet: A Disaster Of Idiocy | So This Penguin Came Up To Me
Several tariff targets are in fact remote outcroppings of ice and rock populated by no humans but many freeloading penguins and seals, who thank God won’t be “looting and pillaging” us any more.
Barbara Hamby: The Word
In the beginning was the word, fanning out into syllables
like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas
Video: The Tornado Outside
Anna lives in a perfect house at the edge of a tornado. When she needs to go outside, she is forced to face the chaos of life that she usually hides away from.
Abby Zimet: For Cruel, Stupid, Dastardly Deeds Done and Proposed
Gandhi famously said, “Civil disobedience therefore becomes a sacred duty when the State has become lawless.”
Christopher B. Daly: The New Yorker turns 100 − how a poker game pipe dream became a publishing powerhouse
A big part of the magazine’s eventual success was Ross’ genius for spotting talent and encouraging them to develop their own voices.
Barbara Hamby: Nose
Suddenly, I feel as if I have no nose, like Gogol’s Kovelev
riding around St. Petersburg looking for his proboscis.
Gerry LaFemina: Last Report Card before High School
Do I have to say I never kissed her?
Sure, I could solve for X but still nothing
seemed to add up. That was the sum of my knowledge.
My whole life then was about what I wasn’t doing.
Desne A. Crossley: Rolling in the Aisle
In Nashville in 1950, my mother boarded a city bus. She didn’t go to the back. She didn’t act like her place was the outermost fringe of a world ruled by whites.
Video: Wildmen of the Greater Toronto Area
In response to rising costs of living the citizens of Toronto begin renouncing their personhood en masse to legally become animals, forming a society of “Wildmen” in the city’s vast ravine network.
