F.I. Goldhaber

STAIN
A Fibonacci poem

You
can
wash blood
from your skin,
walls, and floors. Launder
it from most clothing. But rugs are
problematic. So they removed all the carpeting.


F.I.'s YouTube reading of "Stain"


F.I. confesses nothing.

F.I. GOLDHABER's words capture people, places, and politics with a photographer's eye and a poet's soul. As a reporter, editor, and business writer, 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 250 of their poems appear in almost 100 publications including What Color is Your Privilege?, their political poetry collection published by Left Fork press. http://www.goldhaber.net/

State of The Five-Two

There were no submissions for a few weeks, so I paused the Poem of the Week for March, resuming March 30 to usher in April, National Poetry Month, when the site gets more attention.

As always, I'm open to poems about notorious and little-known wrongdoing, true or fictional, any style or form. Thanks for your consideration.

Caleb Merritt

ALLOW ME

Let me introduce you to Allergens. Let me open the door to invisible vibrancy. Was my name only that? I don’t care for it, that much, after all. It was, I suppose, useful. But did it mean anything? I don’t know. I only visibly support the American people. Their doughnuts. Their donuts. Their Sundays. Their Washington Monuments. A pyramid with a floating eye. The humor of something that Nate Piekos might write. I was delighted, after all, with that short drive, with the community-against-the-war, with the things we bring as parental composites of ourselves. Let me get the door for you.


Caleb's YouTube reading of "Allow Me"


Caleb confesses: "Broadly, I imagine I was curious in a meandering-about way on what privilege makes of allowing, allowances, and what we attempt to change. I wonder in what ways I unconsciously and unfortunately support the American people. And, as the poem notes, 'But did it mean anything? I don’t know.'"

CALEB MERRITT an artist living and working in the Treasure Valley.

Craig Kirchner

SATURDAY AT THE BEACH

I’m driving to the protest at the beach
thinking I’ve become that old man that
so many times I drove by and thought –
I never want to be like that.

I’m not on a walker or carrying a cane
but I hobble now instead of stride
and hunch over instead of strut -
and I realize I don’t have a sign.

I arrive early. A guy with ragged clothes
and scraggly beard has six signs on the ground
and without me asking says, Yeah, take one.
I choose – WE FIGHT FASCISM.

I ask him if he had been protesting long.
Since the sixties, he told me his age,
same as mine, and walked away when
I noticed his left leg was a prosthetic.

It stopped me – me driving here feeling
sorry for myself in my Banana Republic
button down, because I get shots in my knees,
and had out of pocket for cataracts.

After an hour of making friends, waving my sign,
I drag my sore knees back to the car,
turn on the radio to hear ICE killed an ICU nurse,
trying to help a woman avoid pepper spray.

Alex Pretti will not get to bitch about being
an old man, about his gel shots. His life stolen
by a cruelty normal in Nazi Germany,
but until recently not by an American agency.

I’ve become an old man, old enough
to be sure, to have the privilege, to die
as you are supposed to, maybe in your sleep,
hopefully surrounded by family.

I shuffled my bad knees out of the car, threw up
on the parking lot, cried, not much. I haven’t cried
since my father died 30 years ago, got the sign
out of the trunk and went back to the protest.


Craig's YouTube reading of "Saturday at the beach"


Craig confesses: "Minneapolis under siege, innocent citizens being killed by the Federal government with our tax dollars is the main thing motivating most Americans for the past month. Of course, there are also the Epstein victims and files the siege is probably supposed to make us forget. Make America America Again."

CRAIG KIRCHNER loves the aesthetics of writing, has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels, and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart. He has been published in Chiron Review, Main Street Rag, and dozens of others. He houses 500 books in his office and about 400 poems on a laptop; these words help keep him straight. Craig has an interview up at Spillword and can be found on Bluesky.