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/

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.