A.C. Perri

BEDDING ENEMIES

You once led an army, bled them,
Used them till they no longer served
Your purpose.

You once led a nation, spirited,
Willing to do almost everything
Until that too came undone.

You once promised us a future,
One secured with wealth and
All things golden, we got pewter instead.

You once swore to allegiance,
Watch you cross your heart
Did you cross your fingers behind our backs?

You once walked our paths,
Said you were one of us
Were they all just lies?

You once led an army, bled them
Dry, skinned their flesh for your
Own bed, how do you sleep at night?!


Gerald So's YouTube reading of "Bedding Enemies"


A.C. confesses: "This poem was inspired by dire images flashing across screens, in particular, the so-called leaders who promise so much, yet deliver so little; leaving most of us wondering what the $#@!."

A.C. PERRI has been writing creative works for over three decades; her works have been published in local and international journals including Bootleg Magazine, Gems Zine, Brilliant Flash, and several Moonstone Press titles.

Fatimah Akanbi

WHIPS

Their backs are laden with loads
They are held at stranglehold
And dragged by hefty ropes
Away from their homes

Then the dictators
Watch from lofty windows
As their sweat sizzles in the sun
And their skins succumb
To the lash of callous whips


Fatimah's YouTube reading of "Whips"


Fatimah confesses: "The inspiration for this poem came from a course I recently took on slavery and colonial history in school."

FATIMAH AKANBI writes fiction and poetry. She has been writing since she was five, and is currently pursuing a degree in Information Technology at the University of Ilorin. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming on Sudden Flash, Star*Line, and Academy of the Heart and Mind. She is @legendary.scribe on Instagram.

Robert Cooperman

HARVARD'S UNOFFICIAL COPY OF MAGNA CARTA IS ACTUALLY AN ORIGINAL

Eighty years ago Harvard Law School
purchased it at auction for $27.50
and let what they thought was a copy

barely worth the parchment it was scrivened on
languish in a vault, the story begins.
But rather than reading how the artifact

was recently verified as one of the original
seven “Magna Cartas,” what I’m curious about
is how much it would go for today, my head

ringing like Wile E. Coyote hit by an anvil,
to think the last Original sold at auction
for twenty-one million, and how, fittingly,

all those zeroes could help Harvard battle
the current regime: trying to strip us
of Habeas Corpus: the right not to be thrown

into prison (or exile) on the whim of a man
who can snap his fingers or bark at an underling,
and have anyone he pleases, or who’s displeased him,

tossed into prison in a country that will gladly torture
or just kill the poor bastard. As for King John
signing that document, a traitor to his brother-rulers.


Gerald So's YouTube reading of "Harvard's Unofficial Copy..."


Cooperman confesses: "There's a Looney Tunes cartoon I saw as a kid: about a mountain lion and another animal (can't remember what it is, but a prey animal) chasing each other through the Grand Canyon, the former wild to eat the latter, who's wild to escape. Anyway, they manage to destroy the Canyon in about a hilarious minute. the park ranger upbraids them both with: what took Nature millions of years to create, you both destroyed in a minute, to their heads hanging in shame. Sound familiar about someone who's currently occupying the White House and what he's done to the country? Except the shame part."

ROBERT COOPERMAN's latest collection is The Death and Rebirth of Ophelia, a retelling of Hamlet, with a slightly happier ending, at least for Ophelia. Steerage is the highly fictionalized story of his grandfather's misadventures on the Lower East Side of New York in the early 20th Century. An Oar for Odysseus is the final collection in Cooperman's lifelong love affair with Odysseus and The Odyssey.

F.I. Goldhaber

GET OUT

Get out while you still can, they scream.

But where am I supposed to go?
Even the purple state I live
in provides no refuge from threats.
I can't escape fascists willing
to kill me for being queer; white
supremacists who find my choice
of pronouns problematic; the
anti-Semitic Zionists;
xtian nationalists who have
targeted me all my life for
refusing to embrace someone
whose teachings they ignore; anti-
masking/vaxxing terrorists to
whom my life is worth less than brunch
reservations, concert tickets.

Where in the world can I go to
escape Nazis, bigots, and the
deadliest of them all, climate
catastrophe? One pandemic
never ended, more keep starting
as public health is tossed in the
garbage can of austerity
politics and every day
around the world refugees are
turned away, drowned, sent back home to
die, just as my kin were in the
nineteen thirties. I'm privileged
enough, unlike many, to have
a passport and resources. But
even so, travel is not safe
especially for anyone
disabled or chronically ill.

No matter, where else could I go?


F.I.'s YouTube reading of "Get Out"


F.I. confesses: "Many of us warned that the reactionary, right-wing SCOTUS would reverse decades of civil rights progress. Few believed us. When Roe was overturned and we noted that was just a first step, they scoffed. Now the only -- utterly impractical for many, impossible for most -- solution they offered is to leave?"

F.I. GOLDHABER's words capture people, places, and politics with a photographer's eye and a poet's soul. As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, they produced news stories, feature articles, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now paper, plastic, electronic, and audio magazines, books, newspapers, calendars, broadsides, and street signs display their poetry, fiction, and essays. More than 240 of their poems appear in almost 90 publications including What Color is Your Privilege?, their political poetry collection published by Left Fork press. http://www.goldhaber.net/