Chad Parenteau

RUDY GIULIANI MUTTERS DURING HIS LAST RITES

If I could get
building-big
like I did for
that Time Man
of the Year cover,
I could finally
get a look at
Lady Liberty’s
underpants.
That’s the one
problem being
an inside man.
No more time to
grope underneath.
I’m not finished
yet. I just want
to stay around
and do one last
act, something
only I can do
to changes lives
forever. Good
bad, does that
matter anymore?
Just give me
one last clasp
to undo before
they undo unto me.


Chad's YouTube reading of "Rudy Giuliani Mutters..."


Chad confesses: "This is my newest poem about Rudy. I’ve become obsessed with his legacy, which took less than two decades to completely shatter when it seemed like 9/11 made him forever untouchable. I don't we don't have to wait another twenty years for the rest of the gold-plated calves to collapse."

CHAD PARENTEAU hosts Boston’s long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Crossroads, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review, and The Ugly Monster. He has also been published in anthologies such as French Connections, Sounds of Wind, Reimagine America, and The Vagabond Lunar Collection. His newest collections are All's Well Isn't You and Cant Republic: Erasures and Blackouts. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine and co-organizer of the annual Boston Poetry Marathon. He lives and works in Boston.

Robert Cooperman

ICE SOLVES THE LINE DELAY DILEMMA AT MAJOR AIRPORTS

We examine drivers’ licenses,
passports, and faces, and listen
to them talking, or if they stink
of garlic, and if the name’s
Hispanic or Arabic, or just weird,
we hustle them to a remote site,
and quietly dispose of them.

Saves a lot of time and trouble,
and gets rid of the bullshit need
for immigration lawyers: trained
to break the law on behalf of illegals,
who, by definition, are all criminals,
sneaking into our great country
like rats gnawing into flour sacks.

Of course, this info is all hush-hush.
If it ever got out, we’d be up to our asses
in bleeding heart libbos bleating,

“Murder!” And other nonsense.

And since we’re not paid
for this patriotic and civic duty,
we get to keep the confiscated luggage.
Hell, the rollies alone go for hundreds:
perfect for transporting illicit drugs
into and out of the country.

God Bless America!


Gerald So's YouTube reading of "ICE Solves..."


Cooperman confesses: "After ICE murdered three American citizens and after seeing newspaper photos and TV footage of the lines to get through security at airports, it hit me that a Swiftian "Modest Proposal" solution for the TSA bottlenecks was in order. Hence, my suggestion for ICE to do what it does best (or worst): just kill anyone who doesn't look sufficiently American to them."

ROBERT COOPERMAN's latest collection is An Oar for Odysseus; his latest chapbook is August 24, 1957.

Peter M. Gordon

CARNY

‘Scuse me while I light up.
You want one? Ain’t a lot
of jobs that lets yiz smoke

and work. ‘Course that ain’t
the only reason this Midway’s
the best job I ever had.

When I hustled the short con,
a mark squealed and I spent
two years in the can. Here,

marks pay admission just so’s
we can take them. I’ve seen good
looking guys drop fifty just

to win their girl one of them stuffed
gorillas that cost us three bucks,
an’ when they don’t win, go get

a beer and drop another fifty.
All I gotta do is stand here
an’ hand ‘em three softballs.

We ain’t in town long enough
to get in real trouble an’ if we
got a small beef, local bulls

we pay for security just say
to leave town. Oh, this carny
life’s for me. If I gotta hit

the pie-car, say, for a snack or pack
of ciggies, another carny covers.
I got food, family, an’ a job for life.

Some say carnivals are dyin’
but I see more marks than ever
linin’ up to stuff green in our

grouch bags. I ain’t quittn’;
I’m gonna die here. Lemme light
up again. Sure you don’t want one?


Peter's YouTube reading of "Carny"


Peter confesses: "I've spent a lot of time over the years at the Central Florida Fair here in Orlando and enjoy attending county and state fairs when they're on in towns I'm visiting. I've long been fascinated by the people that work the fairs, traveling from town to town, and even though they are often suspicious of locals, some have opened up to me. The voice of this persona poem is an amalgam of several different conversations I had."

PETER M. GORDON is an award-winning poet with over 200 poems published in various journals. He's authored three collections, and is a founder and past President of Orlando Area Poets, a chapter of the Florida State Poets Association. Peter has taught workshops on writing and publishing poetry in several Florida cities. He teaches in Full Sail University's Film Production MFA program.

Charles Rammelkamp

DONALD TRUMPSKY

“I have never rated Stalin
so highly as to be able to hate him,”
Leon Trotsky once observed,
the best-known leftwing critic
of Stalinism in the world,
dismissing his rival as tawdry, unworthy,
no doubt pissing off thin-skinned Uncle Joe,
who invoked Trotsky’s name
throughout the Moscow show trials,
the Great Purge of the late thirties:
Leon the sinister source of all disloyalty, sabotage,
the classic purveyor of fake news.

Founder and commander of the Red Army,
Trotsky lost the power struggle
after Lenin’s death in 1924,
ended up in exile in Mexico,
after a year in Alma-Ata in Central Asia,
then Turkey, France, Norway.

Stalin’s agents tracked him down.
But he survived a machine-gun attack
just as he’d survived prison and Siberia
as far back as 1900,
a proverbial cat with nine lives.
But on August 20, 1940, 
NKVD agent Mercador did him in
with an ice-ax blow to the skull
outside his compound in Coyoacan.
So Uncle Joe finally got his revenge
against the fake news.
Take THAT, Crooked Hillary! Take THAT, Sleepy Joe!


Charles's YouTube reading of "Donald Trumpsky"


Charles confesses: "Donald Trump seems to have the same brutal instincts and lack of self-humor as Joseph Stalin and given the opportunity will no doubt exercise the same ruthlessness; he already has. Talk about “show trials” – Trump’s (against Letitia James, Jim Comey, Mark Kelly, etc., etc.) have basically been joke trials."

CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His collection, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, was recently published by Kelsay Books.