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/

Robert Plath

HIDEOUT

as a boy i remember
in winter
on long car rides home
after visiting aunts & uncles
it’d be dark
& i’d stretch across the backseat
first secretly cracking the window
curling up in the heat
the scent of cold starry air
& burning wood from fireplaces
sneaking in around me
imagining i was running away
hiding in back of a strange
old drafty truck
heading to some faraway place
no aunts or uncles
no mother or father
no brother or sister
just an abandoned hut
on a mountain top
where there was no more screaming
or things smashing against walls
or knuckles
or people alone in rooms weeping, etc.
trees would be my friends
& i’d braille pinecones
& talk to the wind
& sit in the company of ferns
& wink back to fireflies, etc.
but then my father would scream
roll that window up
you’re letting the goddamn heat out
waking me from
my happy tinroof hideout
orphan nighttime daydreams


Gerald So's YouTube reading of "hideot"


Rob confesses nothing.

ROB PLATH has been prolific in the underground lit. scene since 1995. His most recent poetry collections are Walking Across The Shards Of My Soul, 2021 and Batter the Keyboard Like A Raptor Is Behind Your Back, 2022. A long awaited full-length collection is due out in 2025.

Allison Whittenberg

THE VAMP

her dark hair short,
confused, with Louise Brooks,
Lya de Putti, Hungarian born
silent era actress
danced and went nude, per request
studied English for the talkies transition
but died to Hollywood
long before that chicken bone
could be removed from her throat

the cruelty of a factory that lures
promising eternal sunshine
yet, slaps with a backhanded
compliment in Cabaret
and, a handful of bubbles,
glistening and gone.


Allison's YouTube reading of "The Vamp"


Allison confesses: "Drawn to this subject, overall, I have never seen a Lya De Putti silent movie or talkie. I know her only of her penciled-in eyebrows and her underdrawn lips from stills."

ALLISON WHITTENBERG is an award winning novelist and playwright. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Review, Feminist Studies, J Journal, Obsidian, and New Orleans Review. Whittenberg is a nine-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

Peter M. Gordon

THE DEUCE - 1978

How I miss that drug dealer chorus chanting, “Acid and grass,”
all wearing black suits, sunglasses, fedoras, occupying every doorway
between Seventh and Eighth Aves. Tongues darted between teeth

like snakes trying to mesmerize me into buying their wares. Women next
to them wore bright, tight shorts, low cut blouses, in orange, hot pink, red,
to stand out from bustling crowd, cries of “want a date?” brassy trumpets

to pimp’s baritone sax helped create the symphony, along with car horns,
calls from strip club touts, “Twenty girls, no cover charge!” punctuated
by beat of walking feet. In the thirties, the song sang Forty-Second Street

was where underworld met the elite. Moviegoers from then would have
been stunned to see theater marquees offer martial arts double bills
or straight porn like Horny Stewardesses, a triple X delight, lines of furtive

men in dark glasses, hats low, lined up to buy tickets. Block between
Seventh and Eighth Aves always mobbed with people, some commuters
walking the shortest, most dangerous route to Port Authority,

tourists with cameras slung around necks wondering what went wrong
  with their guidebook, con men seeking their next mark. Once plain
clothes cops arrested a dealer three feet in front of me, shoved

him up against a wall to frisk, just like in the movies. They pulled
  a .22 handgun out of his pocket, while I gaped but most of the crowd
kept walking. Why did I love it so? Why does the toreador confront

the bull? Those dens of vice gone now, replaced with legitimate
Broadway theatres and first run films; even a Madam Tussaud’s
Wax Museum. The Lion King plays at Seventh and Forty-Second Street

in a theatre once owned by Flo Ziegfeld, now restored. Today’s ripoffs
limited to overpriced pretzels and ‘I Love New York’ tee shirts. I sip decaf
in my Florida kitchen, feeling nostalgic about long-ago bravado,

my walk past bums, whores, drug dealers, junkies, pimps, runaways,
and realize I never lifted a finger to help any of them. I did not see them
as people; they were just part of the show. Guess I was a tourist after all.


Peter's YouTube reading of "The Deuce - 1978"


Peter confesses: "I was watching Taxi Driver on cable and was struck by the thought that young people watching it today might think the film's view of New York in the seventies was a fantasy, made up just for movies. That made me reflect on my experiences on 42nd Street during those years, and why I kept going back there."

PETER M. GORDON is an award-winning poet with over 180 poems published in various magazines and websites, He's authored three collections, and his latest is Middle Age Spread, available on amazon.com. Peter founded Orlando Area Poets, and is involved in several other poetry groups. He teaches in Full Sail University's Film Production MFA program.