English teacher—
it sounds so much like prison guard
with students serving sentences,
exercised in grammar—
the dull round of verb, noun
pronoun, compound direct object.
We serve them with papers,
haul them in by their principal parts,
block them off in regimented rules,
and then expect instant rehabilitation—
we coerce them into Received Standard,
at best a dream that never was.
We have kept watch too long,
drained away their lives and ours,
replaced it with pure prison pallor—
surely, there is a better way.
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Emory confesses:"I am a retired English teacher who has taught in the middle school, high school, and community college level. This poem is my personal observation of how English has been taught."
Dr. EMORY D. JONES is a retired English teacher who has taught in high school and in several community colleges. He has four hundred and twenty-eight credits including publication in such journals as Voices International, The White Rock Review, Cotton Boll/Atlanta Review, Writer’s Digest, SNReview, Jellyfish Whispers, Wild Violet Magazine, Smokey Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Stepping Stones Magazine, Peninsula Poets, Down in the Dirt, The Light Ekphrastic, Old Red Kimono, Common Ground Review, Free Xpressions Magazine, The Storyteller, American Poetry, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, Belle Rêve Review, The Common Journal, The Ibis Review, Deep South Magazine, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Gravel, Pasques Petals, The Pink Chameleon, The Cumberland River Review, and Encore: Journal of the NFSPS. He is retired and lives in Iuka, Mississippi, with his wife, Glenda. They have two daughters and four grandchildren.
Sweet must fills the dim
And shadowed netherworld
Of crates and Ball jars
Row upon row of empty
Bushel baskets, gloves, pickers
All abandoned to another age
An age of ripe abundance
Of glorying in our bounty
And stocking up for the morrow
What comes of this place?
Where no fruit lays and
What usefulness remains?
A mother then is obliged
To dwell there, for a time
Amid must and reminiscence
Of yesterday
“Norman, Norman!
Don’t you put me in that fruit cellar,
Norman. You think I’m fruity, do you?
Norman!?”
Lindsey reads "The Fruit Cellar":
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Lindsey confesses:"Drawn from personal memory of my own grandmother's fruit cellar and from the classic Hitchcock film, this poem has both a sentimental and dark edge, but hopefully, will be greeted with the unexpected humor as intended."
LINDSEY GRANT is an elder from Portland, Oregon, who practices self-care and self-enhancement by engaging in activities of creative expression in Words, Sounds, and Images.
Carefully the surgeon works,
His fingers nimbly move,
Slicing but not dicing,
Yet opening a groove.
Blood no longer irks,
As when first he started.
He no longer employs
Cadavers to him once carted.
Now the surgeon is full-fledged,
His hands are practiced and skilled.
His Hippocratic oath is pledged,
So not many by him are killed.
His fingers cut and suture,
His skill will forge a future
Unlike in former times:
Said fingers in others’ pockets by stealth
Lurked and worked for dollars and dimes,
Relieving the careless of their wealth.
Fingers nimble, fingers quick
Practice, practice makes one a whiz
whether working on the very sick
Or in the perilous cutpurse biz.
Clark reads "Dexterity":
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Clark confesses:"I wrote "Dexterity" about three years ago, as something to amuse my writer group. It had struck me that dexterity –nimble fingers- is needed by both surgeons and pickpockets. Then it occurred to me that medical schools used to pay for corpses on which med students could practice before working on living patients. And the cadavers often were acquired in an unlawful manner. Both dexterity and criminality were involved in both cases."
CLARK ZLOTCHEW's poetry and newer short stories have appeared in literary journals in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Germany, South Africa and Ireland from 2016 through 2020. Three of his 17 books consist of his fiction: an espionage/thriller novel, a military/action novel (under a pseudonym), and an award-winning short story collection, Once Upon a Decade: Tales of the Fifties (Comfort, 2011). This collection was one of three finalists in The Next Generation Indie Book Awards, short story 2011.
I’ve never once sat in a barber’s chair for a shave and a haircut,
the barber’s cape around my throat without thinking about
Albert ‘The Lord High Executioner’ Anastasia.
A twisted kind of red, white and blue. October at
The Park Sheraton Hotel, faded black and white.
There’s something smoking romantic
in a death like that. Iconic. Unyielding and dogged.
A piece of nostalgia wrapped
in celluloid for the mass
consumption of the twentieth century.
Immortalized, bullet riddled, like Jesus splayed covered
with sheets of white while the fedora tipped press men gagged
on the smells of blood, hair tonic, shit and pomade.
They said he attacked his own reflection in the mirror
when the bullets hit home. A final self-evaluation
But what a way to go out? Hollywood scripted for the bad guy
everyone loved to hate. If I could choose, I’d like to catch death
like that. Fast and hard, in public with people gasping shocked
exhalations.The good die slowest and alone it seems,
it’s always better to leave those you love with a slammed door.
The barbershop where he finally caught it
is a Starbucks now. People sip at lukewarm soy lattes and
chat inanely about writing the great American novel on
their overpriced computers made in China.
I think about that sometimes too and it makes me a little sad.
Steve reads "Call Me Morbid, But...":
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Steve confesses:"I’ve always been fascinated by 1950’s and 1960’s Americana. This period in America’s history is so iconic. The music, the people, the events. It’s a period that gave the world a lot and still does today. The American Mafia was at its pinnacle during this time and even those black and white crime scene photos of hits are epic and iconic and add a grim sense of nostalgia to the period."
STEPHEN J. GOLDS was born in London, U.K, but has lived in Japan for most of his adult life. He enjoys spending time with his daughters, reading books, traveling, boxing and listening to old Soul LPs. His novel Say Goodbye When I’m Gone will be released by Red Dog Press in October 2020 and another novel Glamour Girl Gone will be released by Close to The Bone Press January 2021.
Instead of GPS, we need
old jump hour, jive-master,
watches to navigate through
history and hidden economics
as the Victorian era Capitalist
print cartoons showed knee to
worker neck, long before the
Vietnam Conflict film footage
showed infantry soldiers atop
proned out indigenous people
as the unauthorized technique
low crawled under militarized
police policy-procedure manuals
to show up on the highly watched
streets like top grade China White.
David reads "Kneecaps or US":
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David confesses nothing.
DAVID S. POINTER has been an underground poet for many years. David once served in the United States Marine Corps military police. New work will appear in Footnotes #4 from Alt Current Press. David lives in Murfreesboro, TN with his daughters and kitty cats.
It’s the heat that gets you first, the smoke
Follows. Maybe it’s the blanket. It is
Summer, after all. Did I leave the
Stove on? I nudge him. Did I leave
The stove on? Go back to sleep, he says.
The smoke is thicker now and I begin
To cough. Something’s wrong. Crackle. What
Was that? I throw the bedsheet off, run
Open the door. There’s fire in the stairway.
It has a punk haircut; orange and blue
And purple. I grab him by the nightshirt .
It’s too large on him. Fire, I try
I try to say. Then point. His eyes widen
“Open the window,” he screams. I slip and scamper.
I see him. Standing below. My husband. What has he
Done? I deserve it. I sit. The fire burns.
He screams. My husband looks. I don’t look.
He’s charged with manslaughter. I hope he goes to
Hell. Because if he comes up here
I won’t be able to look him in the eye.
A red bird sat squat
beneath my mailbox
like a bomb about
to explode. It gazed up
at me as though it knew
I was capable of falling.
I opened the slot.
It was all junk mail.
The bird shifted tersely
on its plume, waiting to
be left alone. The year
had been a surge of face masks—
a market virus, the
wrath of turgid cops.
My nerves were shot.
I wondered if the bird
was injured or tired or maybe
hiding from the heatwave
of the afternoon.
I sifted through coupons
craving silence.
I blamed noise,
sheep, and those shiny
media pundits. That fiend
on a plane who once
barked, Girl, you need
to brush your hair.
The criminal who told me, It’s easy to pretend
and the militant who shouted, You don’t worship hate
enough, and the truth is
I don’t know how to talk about
cynicism. Five years ago,
I decided to be as moon
as night. Now
my memories of injustice
sleep inside a coven
where innocents burn
like cloistered suns.
The witches croon, On the fractures
inside the skull of America
they’ve built a stripmall
that will get raided by
monks. I want to know how
this red bird sits mute when
the year has been so loud.
Just last week I thought
I saw the same bird
nuzzling its head against
a weeping black tree that had
been reminded how
little we understood
when a postman walked
by wearing a veil,
his bag of junk mail
chanting, Buy two, get
one free, and the city
strangling itself so kindly
as though every
mean bruise were an act
of love, and the
roses suddenly growing
backbones and
shouting, We can no
longer cultivate quiet.
Mehnaz reads "Quiet":
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Mehnaz confesses:"'Quiet' is an introvert’s response to the loudest year in history."
MEHNAZ SAHIBZADA was born in Pakistan and raised in Los Angeles. She is a 2009 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, such as Liminality, Moira, The Literary Hatchet, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, and Strange Horizons. Her first full-length collection, My Gothic Romance, was published in April 2019 by Finishing Line Press. A high school English teacher, she lives in southern California. To learn more about Mehnaz, visit her at www.poetmehnaz.com.
On a steamy July day in the year
2025 a man will set fire to a trash
can in the parking lot of the former
racetrack at Suffolk Downs which will
jump to a nearby pile of wood
and spread to a set of tires
on an old Ford Focus which will ignite
an explosion which will trigger a flame
and a deluge of smoke which can
be seen from incoming planes
forced to reroute for not being
able to see and panic will ensue.
Right now that young man sits in a room
with many other people watching
fires bloom like mushrooms in the
west. He gets an erection and doesn't
know why. Years later it will come
to him that the way of pleasure
is through fire and he will take his
match and light a licking flame
which will heat his hand as he touches
himself which triggers the orgasm
which will pleasure his brain and he will
think: I love it. I love it. Let it all burn.
Rusty reads "Firebug":
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Rusty confesses:"In the late 2010s, the American west erupted with a series of wildfires which I observed from the safety of my tv screen. In my imagination, it happened next door, at the remains of the Suffolk Downs Horse Track, so I wrote this ugly poem about it."
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Terry confesses:"As a police officer, I worked the high-crime hours of 8 PM to 4 AM, and on many summer nights observed spent casings scattered on a city street with a dead victim lying nearby. The simile of dead brass bees having spent their stingers struck me."
TERRY DAWLEY is a retired police officer from Erie, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, The Cleveland Review, Mused BellaOline Literary Journal, Soft Cartel, and Law Enforcement Today. He is an award winner of the Writer's Digest 80th Annual Writing Competition and a six-time award winner of the Pennwriters Annual Writing Contest.
I don’t do divorce work, but Mr. Wynant folds his arms under the harsh office fluorescents behind his lawyer speechless with rage, and his sharp-suited lawyer says, “Mrs. Wynant’s going behind his back,” slides a check for 20 times my usual fee at the moment I’m late with rent, car payments, needed new brogues. “Get the evidence so we can nail her to the wall.” Three nights later, my rent, car payment, new brogues tumble out of Le Petite Crevette, holding hands, radiating chaos, giggling. “Got you,” I say, following them, finding and climbing the cold, jangly fire escape outside the paramour’s Bohemian apartment, filming them kissing, cuddling, clasping each other tenderly by the crimson glow of a lava lamp. At the climax of dawn, having secured my rent, car payments, new brogues, I get a six-pack of Old Düsseldorf, go home, celebrate solo. Next day, Mr. Wynant and his lawyer click “Play” and on the screen is a naked middle-aged man in the yellowy light of an incandescent bulb exhorting himself with a well-oiled Smith & Wesson Special. “Oh no,” I say, realizing something new about slippery flash drives, and the lawyer giggling says, “Is that — is that you?”
Richie reads "...Death #999":
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Richie confesses:"I recently re-saw the 1995 film I Died a Thousand Times, and wondered about what each particular death could be. This poem's death was inspired by cameras everywhere. Everywhere.
RICHIE NARVAEZ is the author of the anthology Roachkiller and Other Stories and the urban thriller Hipster Death Rattle. His next book, the YA historical mystery Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco, is due out this summer.
The White House-
the administration-
is infected
with it-
everyone is symptomatic;
the cronyvirus;
manufactured
to commit crimes
of
excessive-
(including but not limited to)-
narcissism;
half-truths;
distortions;
lies;
favoritism;
nepotism;
greed;
and all that is-
self-serving-
a true "can-demic!"
Paul Churchill Mann reads "Can a Virus Be Criminal?":
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J.H. confesses nothing.
J.H. JOHNS "grew up and came of age" while living in East Tennessee and Middle Georgia. Specifically, the two places "responsible" for the writer that he has become are Knoxville, Tennessee and Milledgeville, Georgia. Since then, he has moved on to Chicago—for a brief stint—and New York City—for a significantly longer stay. Currently, he is "holed up" in a small town where when he is not writing, he tends to his "nature preserve" and his "back forty." His goal is to surround his house with all sorts of vegetation so as to obscure it from the gaze of the "locals." He is assisted in this task by his coonhound buddy and companion, Roma.
Guilt justly anoints
By murderous confession
Clear verdict with sentence quick
Observers sit separate
Victim’s pack from mine
Eager press divides in two
Straining limbs bound
For culpable crimes
Needles unfelt insert
Warden’s head hangs
Chaplain’s voice prays
My heavy last words faintly stammer
I anguish
I anger
I regret
In silence
Eyes close
I repent
If he is
Grant me
God forgives
R.J. reads "Jury Rule":
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R.J. confesses:" An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. Envisage heard the jury rule with no recourse, sat the cell, walked the hall, lay upon the table, silently screamed, desperately prayed. Words traveled where imagery led."
RENA J. WORLEY is a Word Artist residing in rural Michigan. First published in The Five-Two on May 27, 2019.
Somewhere the man
would trap one like Welles' Franz Kindler,
now hidden, having killed again.
Tracing the Nazi terrors
on a movie screen,
he walks into the death projection:
his own dream fabric
where waking would take him.
His prey now dead,
the townsfolk regard him
as another Stranger.
Matthew reads "Edward G. Robinson in Public Domain":
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Matthew confesses:"While viewing The Stranger (1946) recently, I was moved by Robinson’s personal stake in the film, as a Jewish actor playing a Nazi hunter. Writing an exphrastic poem seemed to be the best way to comment on the crime against him: while celebrating Robinson's stance against fascism, the industry still regarded him as a racial outsider, which the HUAC would soon continue. My thanks to fellow film noir researcher Dean Goldberg."
MATTHEW SORRENTO is Editor-in-Chief of Retreats from Oblivion, a journal of noir, crime, and mystery fiction and culture, and Co-editor of Film International. I write about and teach genre cinema at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. The author of The New American Crime Film (McFarland, 2012), I have two books forthcoming, on David Fincher's Zodiac and Film Noir and the Blacklist (both with FDU Press).
It’s going according to my fabulous plan
for re-election: New York collapsing,
all the libbos and minorities who hate my guts
for being richer than them, dying like litter runts,
so scratch their votes in November unless the cheating
Dems get their mail-in wish, which they won’t.
And all those Hispanics and blacks are dropping
in Miami and Tampa: two more Dem strongholds
that never gave me a fair break. And the lying
reporters dying off! I laugh whenever I hear
they’re gasping their last, their laptops silent forever.
And when I give my briefings, better than sinking
a sixty foot putt, to see those lying reporters’ numbers
thinned out to sitting at least six feet apart, though
it won’t do them any good; I’ve ordered my security
guys to smear their chairs with droplets: justice
for when they used to shout unfair questions,
and I shouted back they were hideous, to question Me!
If I can only get Fauci to drop dead! One less idiot
scientist to contradict me, when I say the economy
will be humming in a month, a miracle saving us!
You gotta believe, just like all the Evangelicals,
who love me for wanting to lock up abortionists.
Who knows better than me, skating every time
my enemies try to take me down with bogus claims
my true followers see right through. If my guys
are the only ones left alive to vote, a landslide
like no other, proof I’m the greatest president ever.
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Bob confesses:"This poem was inspired by my rage against the lying rat bastard who has usurped the White House. Rather than write a rant, I thought it preferable to put words into his vile mouth that it wouldn't be a stretch for him to have actually said."
ROBERT COOPERMAN's two latest collections are riffs on The Odyssey: Lost on the Blood-Dark Sea (FutureCycle Press) and The Ghosts and Bones of Troy (Kelsay Books). Forthcoming from Finishing Line Press is All Our Fare-Thee-Wells, a love letter to the Grateful Dead.
As the disease raced through his state
like a wildfire through dry brush,
a stream of gasoline whooshing up in flames,
the brave lieutenant governor of Texas,
a former owner of a failed
string of sports bars,
before he morphed into a conservative
radio talk show host
in the Rush Limbaugh style—
a guy who once painted himself blue
while wearing a big cowboy hat
to support the Houston Oilers—
before they moved to Nashville,
became the Tennessee Titans—
(in other words, a real moral icon,
not a selfish privileged prick at all;
just the guy you want in charge
of life and death decisions)
he took a bold stand against sick people;
let the bleeding hearts care
about their shitty little lives.
Dan Patrick declared,
“There are some things more important than living.”
Charles reads "I Gave You Diamonds, You Gave Me Disease":
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Charles confesses:"The title of this poem is a line that appears on the album cover of The Rolling Stones’ 1972 album, Exile on Main Street, but is not actually a lyric in any of the songs. This is a metaphor for Lt. Governor Patrick’s empathy, which likewise doesn’t actually appear anywhere, though the
disease is all too real."
CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Me and Sal Paradise, was published last year by FutureCycle Press. Two full-length collections are forthcoming in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books.
I stopped believing in Berkeley probably right after
I moved to Berkeley, a city that promises to hold onto
all these supposed ideals but then sings the rent out
of your guts until your chest caves in, so I went to
the park to shoot some hoops, the rim locked with
chains to discourage exercise, arriving to find cops there,
multiple. When the police arrive in Berkeley, they drive
up in droves—a sleuth of cops, a sloth of cops, a litter
of cops, a pack of cops, a cowardice of cops, a drift
of cops, a sounder of cops, a team of cops, a passel of cops,
a grist, a hive, a swarm, a nest, a lounge—I don’t know
how you want to call it. You decide. Based on your
feelings, your opinions, your oppressions, your troops
and scourges and waits. All I know is there was one perp,
one person, one perturbed perplexed personage with
peripeteia and petechiae aching and perched on a park bench,
one cop temp-checking the guy in cuffs, and so I shouted
to the cops to see if they needed an N95, because I was willing
to give them mine, and one cop pointed to the homemade mask
wrapped around his neck, as if his neck was where he breathed,
and I think that meant, “nah, we’re good” and another cop
came out of the woods nearby—this was down by the water,
which is where a helluva lot of crime happens in Berkeley
and Oakland and Albany and El Cerrito, as if H20 stands
for Homicide to Open container, as if water and manslaughter
go hand-in-hand like rhyming—and when I’d go down there
I’d see all the broken glass from all the smashed windshields
from all the smash-and-grabs, homeless desperate for change,
for quarters and nickels, pennies and lint—and I yelled to the cops
asking, “Can I play basketball?” because it was the pandemic
and all the rules change during a pandemic, where even
the basketball courts are locked and chained and imprisoned
and malnourished and PTSDed and there were helicopters over-
head, as if helicopters and pandemics go together like chocolate
and romance, and the cop yelled back, “I don’t know. Can you?”
And I think that meant yes, because I started shooting and the guy
was hauled off hog-tied or beagle-tied or bear-tired or whatever
the term is and then a homeless-y looking guy came out of the other
side of the woods, all clumsy, clumsy trees, clumsy guy, and he had
a ball in his hands, a basketball, and he walked straight at me,
until he was six inches away, not six feet away, doing his asocial
distancing, saying, “You’re done, my turn” and he turned to shoot
and I said I was almost done and he said, “You’re done now”
and he shot and I said gimme ten minutes to finish and he said,
“Get off the court or I’ll kill you” and I said, “What?” and he
said, “Shoot you,” and park guy with his yellow vest biked up
on his bike and I yelled, “This guy just threatened my life and
the park-vest-yellowy guy stopped and I repeated it and he said,
“Then leave,” and I said it’s against the law to threaten some-
one’s life, and the bike guy said, “Follow me,” so I followed
and he went down a path and I went down a path and he was
biking quickly, too fast, so that I started jogging and he stopped
and I said it’s against the law to threaten someone’s life and
the guy on the bike said I should leave and I wasn’t threatening
anyone’s life and then the park-vest guy biked away and I yelled,
asking if he could help me file a complaint against the guy
and the park-bike guy yelled back, “There are police everywhere.
Find some” and he was gone, down the path, on his bike, with his
vest, whistling, his whistling fading, his bike fading, the park
fading, and I walked towards my car in the parking lot, stepping
on glass like fire flickering from the sun, a hundred little bonfires.
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Ron confesses:"I've always been intrigued at how often I hear males threaten other males with death when just those threats alone are assault misdemeanors, so I wanted to write a poem on the topic; it's based on some actual events but with fictionalizing."
Image by Amelie Jumel
RON RIEKKI’s books include U.P. (Ghost Road Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press).
Each mistake is a catastrophe in the offing
Thoughtless and chaotic
Unlike a black hole
Because even those have rules
And their rules, like legalese, apply despite your ignorance.
As the dead were made to plead
So will the killer and his three accomplices
Accomplishing the finishing of their lives
Victims and convicted alike sentenced to die.
Fates sealed between the flop and fourth street
Evidence of a losing hand dumped at the river.
Might is right jacked up to eleven
On methamphetamine in a forge
Smelting prior trauma; yours, mine, and ours.
The conviction of killers that might is right.
Officers on the scene witness the obscene
The stiff stink of meth and death
Officers heading out after for a stiff drink.
Each mistake is a catastrophe in the offing
From the killing to the convicting
No one escapes unscathed. Lady Justice’s stiff upper lip
Witnesses the price every participant pays;
Cadavers, killers, judges, lawyers, and jurors.
William reads "Flawless Conviction":
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William confesses:"'Flawless Conviction' was inspired by a criminal case I read about in the local newspaper in Topeka, Kansas. It occurred to me that the ramifications of crime and punishment likely affect the people charged with carrying out the law in ways that are hard to imagine."
WILLIAM L. DOMME writes in Topeka, Kansas. He has published the western horror novel, The Confluence, and two short story collections. He is a contributor to seveneightfive magazine and works full-time as a scopist proofreading transcripts for court reporters. His work can be found at atypeofwriter.com. Twitter: @atypeofwriter
When I met her in the street
It was horizontally
I swear I saw her spirit escaping her body
"No, get away," she said.
"Just let me sleep."
"Let's get you up,” I pled.
"Don't fall asleep,
Stay with me."
Her eyes floated up into her head like two balloons
I shook her
Stuttering
That she would feel better soon
But then she spilled her guts
She showed me all her cuts
Like ripping out a tooth
To find the truth
An ambulance
Was out of the question
The way her eyebrows raised
When I offered to call her parents
'Cause though she was a victim
They would say she had sinned
'Cause when you cross The Cross
You have crossed your kin
She finally told me her whole name
But she looked at me like it was a mistake
She couldn't recall their names
Just a white van
No windows
Unmarked plates
I carried her into our home
Keeping vigil
With a vigilante tone
Peering through blinds
For a sign
That justice might prevail
Four nameless medium-build males
God Almighty, you've failed
Gabriel reads "When I Met Her in the Street":
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Gabriel confesses:"The poem was inspired by a real encounter and attempt to help a wounded teenage girl. On top of the terror of what she endured, there was the unforeseen stalemate of us urging police involvement versus the consequences of her religious family finding out what happened."
Author-poet GABRIEL HART lives in Morongo Valley in California's High Desert. His debut twin novel Virgins In Reverse / The Intrusion (Traveling Shoes Press) was released January 2019, with a foreword by Avant-rockabilly provocateur Tav Falco. His chapbook Cinema of Life (2016) and novelette Nothing To See Here (2017) will be incorporated into his upcoming desert speculative fiction novel Lies of Heaven, to be released unabridged by Space Cowboy in 2020. His short-fiction and poetry has recently been published by Cholla Needles, Luna Arcana, Black Hare Press (Australia) and will be the noir-flash of the week in Shotgun Honey this coming June 2020. He is a regular contributor to Space Cowboy’s Simultaneous Times podcast, as well as L.A. Record, a Los Angeles underground music publication. Hart also taught the writing workshop for Mil-Tree, a non-profit reach out program for Vets and Active Duty Military to heal the wounds of war.
When the Universe closes one door
a window opens somewhere a thief
can enter. Since the coronavirus came
my home phone rings every hour
with offers from fund raisers to donate
to victims and veterans, extend car
warranty before it’s too late, and,
ominously, speak to an officer before
my social and bank accounts are shut.
Peddlers of miracle cures swarm,
touting benefits of medicine meant for other
diseases, or their drink of silver solution,
snake oil, pressed juice, vitamins, steroids.
Gun sales escalate—so many ripe targets
in rich homes and poor to defend, so many
police on the sick list. One thing's sure:
grifters, grafters, and thugs will find marks.
I suspect it’s always been that way.
Peter reads "You Can't Quarantine Crime":
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Peter confesses:"I'm working from home here in Florida and have had time to field all sorts of class from scammers and contemplate the perilous world we find ourselves in"
PETER M. GORDON won the 2019 Thomas Burnett Swann Poetry Prize. He's published several poems at The Five-Two, along with two collections: Two Car Garage and Let's Play Two: Poems About Baseball. He enjoys watching film noir.
I.
Yep, I’m a sea witch. I tricked Ariel.
But don’t ask me to apologize.
Don’t call me a villain. I’m the last realist left.
I magicked merfolk into polyps. So what?
King Triton knew. You have to fight dirty
to get through. Flotsam & Jetsam,
my electric legs, my true brood, understood.
I might be a crime boss, at least I’m not rude.
II.
Last memory before I died: Heat.
Flames ate my chest as the spar
skewered my spine. Deadwood,
I thought it’d break like a beak
weak from a lifetime of lies. It didn’t.
Plasma gushed where my three hearts
hummed. The deeper the cavity
the harder to plug, like desire,
like the echo of my love,
buried in the sea cave
carved so low
gravity loses track.
Cartography can’t catch it.
No trap can map it.
III.
I invented underwater lipstick!
I was the first artist to store hearts in jars!
I’m the only sea witch in history
who could boil blood into stone!
I bit lightning to the bone!
Rode electricity to the node!
Ariel begged for legs! I gave her legs!
Merfolk wouldn’t know gratitude
if it slapped them in their scales!
I floated graveyards so ghost ships
could sail! I'm the last hope of hydrogen-
hydrogen-oxygen! My mother is Mad Science!
Don’t dress me in that trope! It won’t fit!
IV.
Say my name. Say my name.
In Ursula hides an urge.
I live in whatever world I want. Sea birds
scream on deck as my black hair traps jetstreams.
Thunderclap ripped birth into my body,
like surgery in reverse. Purple killed white
as I spilled myself through my tight
wedding dress.
V.
Wind blows eyes open, fire signs the scroll.
Can you blame me? I wanted to play,
they wouldn’t let me. It was my turn
to try the trident, stir the sea;
water rewound like a redacted vow.
VI.
Charybdis flung the gold rings back to ore.
Every sundial lies. Only a whirlpool
can tell time, devour hours.
Haha, precious Ariel! Counting seconds before dusk.
Days nest into weeks, months into years.
Yes, time is invisible, but the end stills pulls
her, me, all of us, like an underwater waterfall.
VII.
I died, but it was not for naught.
As the sea burned, my death fed
eye-less nits burrowed in silt.
Now I’m marooned on lunar sand
so taut & dry I can’t cry.
I miss ocean, my hammock of tide,
coral reef under feet.
I miss the tickle of gills.
Crying underwater is underrated.
I hope Ariel tattoos fins on her wrist
so she never forgets the price of fame.
VIII.
From here I watch it all spin—
Earth’s secret moons, coronet of sun.
I know now why the globe is a ball—
orbs can roll away, always stay lost.
Margot reads "Autobiography of Ursula":
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Margot confesses:"Does a criminal differ from a villain? Which one has more cultural currency for women? Watching The Little Mermaid with my niece, I wondered if isolation drove Ursula's depravity. My poem, divided into eight sections representing the witch's limbs, imagines her motivations, contours, and contradictions."
MARGOT DOUAIHY, PhD, is the author of “Scranton Lace” and “Girls Like You,” both published by Clemson University Press. Her true-crime poetry project, Bandit Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, is forthcoming with Clemson University Press. Douaihy’s work has been featured in PBS NewsHour, The Colorado Review, North American Review, The Tahoma Review, The Wisconsin Review, and The Petigru Review. She is the editor of the Northern New England Review.
