Tag: Politics

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Susan Cohen

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

       after Brueghel the Elder and W.H. Auden

We know what the father did,
aimed too high.

And the son dared too much,
while the ploughman and his stout horse
just got on with business.

But what about the ocean,
Brueghel’s dull green sea, spread
flat as a bolt of fabric?

A few spits of foam
around the boy who cannonballed
headfirst, legs askew,
poor zapped mosquito. A shrug
of polite ripples
and the water takes him in
without the protest of a splash—
Brueghel’s brush applied like a narcotic
to smooth the waves.

They did get it wrong
sometimes, the masters.
Even a painted ocean
can only take so much.

We know now what our ambition
does to seascapes—empties them
of coral and of coho,
fills them with glacial melt
and sends the waters raging.

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Frank Buys Groceries

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David Dodd Lee

Featured Art: “Nectar” by Mateo Galvano

Frank thought pork chops, the way they were
cut and packaged these days,
looked an awful lot like excised angels’ wings.
But he also sometimes just
got light in the head. He was adamant—
I am as fit as a mountain range!
Though Frank may have suffered mania
from too much weightlifting.
Frank bullied his moods.
If he woke up feeling angry at the world
he rowed the demons out in his kayak
or went a few rounds with the heavy bag.
He was so dialed-in sometimes!
A deer fly could make him throw punches in the air.
If he walked to the gym he’d listen to the cars
flying past, how they stuck to the asphalt a little,
asphalt trying to suck up rubber. It was annoying!
Now he heard the fluorescent lights pinging,
lording it over the T-bones and bundles of asparagus.
The natural color of food—
the blood red of the beets, for instance—
seemed to be fading, as if color
were an essence weakly subservient
to manufacturing and chemical abuse.
Red meat, drained of blood, whimpered
from where it was stacked in the meat section,
bloated red by carbon monoxide infusions.
Frank tightened his grip on his grocery cart.
Cans of kidney beans are destined
to be left standing on store shelves
for centuries after the apocalypse,
in which each person will have long ago
been torched from their bone marrow
on outward. When the pleasant checkout clerk said
“Thank you for shopping at Schaeffer’s,”
Frank thought, You don’t know the half of it, sonny,
but said, “My pleasure” instead.
He knew the boy was just a tool, cheap labor,
a cog in something too sinister for words.

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The Year Time Capsules Started Showing Up

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Seth Peterson

it happened fast. Suddenly, everyone had Rubik’s cubes
& Game Boys.

All day, their eyes & hands were busy, waving sepia Polaroids,
lining up kaleidoscopes.

They felt an easing in their hearts, a silence they couldn’t place.
At night, they noticed these things

could still glow, these new old things, humming in their own way.
Humming

the way a mother hums to her child. A wrecking ball revived these things.
A confederate statue

had its head hacked off at midnight. No one could find it, & for months
it stood there, headless,

haunting all their dreams, until everyone agreed to tear it down.
Beneath the concrete

horse hooves, the elaborate part of the monument, was a hollow-slotted base.
There were murmurs

as the steel crashed into it. They remembered the capsule at its heart.
They remembered

what it was to be a child again. They remembered piñatas & birthdays.
The clap of steel

on concrete sent out a splash of color. A Cabbage Patch Kid.
A Walkman.

A pair of hot pink leg warmers. Each one humming like a memory.
The point is,

these were things they wanted to remember. & it happened
everywhere,

all across the country, all at once. & their hearts were eased.
Some boys, soon after,

claimed to have found the statue’s head. It was covered by wintercreeper
in the woods, they claimed.

It was haphazardly spattered with peat moss. The rumor is,
it’s still there,

absorbing knives of moonlight. They say its mask is ghastly.
It is ghastly.

You think it’s gone, but things can change.

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Partition

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Carolina Hotchandani

Featured Art: Fissure, by John Schriner


In your version of the story, people butter their fingers 

with notions of God, splitting India into a smaller India, 

a new Pakistan. The way a single roti’s dough 

is pulled apart, the new spheres, rolled in the palms, 

then flattened. The idea of God—the destroyer of human bonds, 

you will say in the diatribe I know well—the reason for new 

borders, new pain to sprout on either side of a dividing line. 

You’ll go on. I’ll picture the edges of your words blurring 

to a hum as I think of how to wrest your rant from you. 

A rolling pin barrels over dough, widens the soft disc, 

makes it fine. You are fragile. Like a story that stretches 

belief. Like a nation. Like a thin disc of dough that sticks 

to a surface, tearing when it’s peeled back. I don’t know 

how to part the story from the person and keep the person.

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Bumping Around

.Reading time 1 minute.

by Eileen Pettycrew

Featured Art: Vaider, by John Schriner

Then I saw a man sheltering from the rain
inside a concrete circle meant to be
a work of art. I didn’t want to think
he was homeless, just a commuter waiting
for the light rail. Forgive me,
I’ve seen trash spilling from hillsides,
tents popping up like mushrooms in the dark.
Mattresses, ripped tarps, lamps, rugs,
metal and plastic twisted into a pile
reaching the top of a broken-down RV.
Last week I saw a flag flying at half-staff
after another mass shooting,
and underneath the flag, an electronic billboard
that said Walk Away from Joint Pain.
Forgive me for thinking it was a signal
to drag my sorry body up and over the wind,
to rise like vapor, like water cycling
around the earth, sky to land and back again,
one big circle that never ends.
Let me feel a little love for everything.
The steaming pile of wood chips, the barren
stumps, the grove of trees still bearing
open wounds from February’s ice storm.
The days I shivered in a cold house,
bumping around in the dark with a flashlight,
hoping the batteries would last.

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Mango Languages

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Linda Bamber

Featured Art: Still Life with Birds and Fruit by Giovanna Garzoni

—For Chris Bullock (in memoriam) and Carolyn Bernstein

In that world people are not discussing The End of the American Experiment.

Yo soy de los Estados Unidos. ¿De dónde es usted?
(I am from the United States. Where are you from?)

In that world people are not in a rage at their relatives for voting wrong and sticking to it.

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Revising Bosch’s Hell Panel for the 21st Century

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

“Hundreds of couples toting AR-15 rifles packed a Unification church in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to have their marriages blessed and their weapons celebrated as ‘rods of iron’ that could have saved lives in a recent Florida school shooting.” Reuters, Feb. 28th 2018

They come wearing crowns of gold bullets in their hair, bodies drenched

in white satin, white lace, tulle, lining the pews on a weekday morning,

AR-15s in their hands, calling on god to save them. There is no

such thing as salvation, only the chosen and too few are chosen.

Children are told to stay inside, schools locked shut, swings hushed,

even the wind says, quiet, as the guns are blessed, dark O of mouths

waiting to exhale a ribbon of smoke. The children are told to crouch

in the closet, to stay still as butterflies on butcher knives

while the men take their brides and iron rods, saluting the book

of revelation, its scribbled last words, the coming of a new kingdom.

Don’t speak. Don’t breathe. Pretend you are an astronaut gathering wisteria

twigs in a crater of the moon. Pretend the twigs are the arm of a broken mandolin.

Someday, it will speak. Someday it will sing. Dear God, bless the self in the age

of the self, bless this bracelet of rifle shells, bless our god-given individual

right. I know you want to sing. You want to sing like blackbirds escaping

from the mouth of a grasshopper. But remember, we are only here

for a little while, so for now, keep quiet, pretend we are somewhere else.

Pretend we’re practicing our handwriting, the lollipop of a lowercase i,

the uppercase A, a triangle in an orchestra, the different sounds it makes

if you strike it the right way. Practice the slow arch of a R. Now—

form the words. Scribble run, scribble come, scribble mom, scribble when

will this be over? But for god’s sake, be quiet. Don’t cry. Just write. Scribble

on the walls, on your arms, scribble as if it’s the last thing you will ever say.

Pretend it sounds like music. And if the devil comes through that door, remember

to go limp, lie on the floor like a tumble of legos. Don’t move. Don’t speak.

Don’t breathe. Pretend you’re already dead. Remember, this is how you live.

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American Bachelor Party

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Conor Bracken

Featured Art: Star and Flag Design Quilt by Fred Hassebrock

Here I am inside a firing range.

Loading and holding and aiming a pistol

the way America has taught me.

Hitting the paper target in

the neck the mullet the arm the arm.

The old-growth pines inside me

do not burst into orange choruses of flame.

I am disappointed I’m not making

a tidy cluster center mass.

Around me fathers and offspring

as plain as stop signs give

each other tips while they reload.

A man one stall over cycles between a revolver and a rifle

while another draws a Glock

from a hidden waistband holster

over and over again, calibrating

his shift from civilian to combat stance

with the dead-eyed focus of a Christmas shopper.

These could be my people.

If I never talked

about the stolid forest inside me

planted by those I do and do not know

who died because America allows you

however many guns and rounds you can afford—

if I never talked about my manliness

that runs cockeyed through the forest

trying to evolve into an ax or flame or bulldozer

so it can be the tallest, most elaborate apparatus

taming local wind into breath,

they might give me a nickname.

I could practice training my fear with them

like ivy across a soot-blacked brick façade

and they might call me The Ruminator.

Virginia Slim.

Spider, even.

We’d grow so close that they would call me late at night

asking for an alibi again

and if I asked groggily ‘who’s this’

they’d say ‘you know who’

and I would.

Their name blooming from my mouth

like a bubble or a muzzle flash.

A flower

fooled out of the ground

by the gaps in winter’s final gasps.

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