Tag: America

Four Poems by Joseph Fasano

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AI Speaks of Humanity

First I took their dignity
and they did nothing.
Then I took their minds
and they did nothing.
Then I took their hearts
and they did nothing.
Then I took their songs
and they did nothing.
Then I took their poetry
and they did nothing.
Now I have their words
to write their story.
It was the best of times, it was
the worst of times. To be or
not to be, that is the question.
I wash my hands. It wasn’t
a genocide.

* 

America, Singing

America, you sing of doom with beauty.
America, you lift the kings of division.
America, you howl your hymns
of affliction: the heart-throb’s car
wrapped around the telephone pole,
the glamorous suicide on the hotel bed,
the wide-eyed stars who burn too bright
to live past youth, and wish to die, and do.

But what about the other side of wildness?
What about the couple in their work clothes,
alone and goldless, but dancing in the kitchen,
in a love that lasts, in the middle of the mystery?
Where is their song? Who will be our singer
to praise the heart that doesn’t crash and burn,
to find the wise, to make just one thing whole,
to tell the doomed that this is beauty too?

* 

Power

A poet is sentenced to death
and brought before the Leader.
Between them is a map of the world.
Can’t you see? the Leader asks. You’re powerless.
Name one power you have that I do not.

Very slowly, the poet lowers her head
and lays her ear on the map.
I know, she whispers, I know,
as if she is comforting someone,
as if she is hearing the voices of children.

When the guards take the prisoner away
and begin to beat her,
the Leader is alone in his chamber.
He looks out the curtains, straightens his necktie.
Very slowly, he lowers his ear to the map
and closes his eyes, and listens.
Silence. Silence and paper.

* 

Lorca
                after Neruda

Because I was a poem, my country
hushed me.
They knelt me
on the cold stones of a roadway
and even when the guns had touched
my body,
I heard the birds, I heard my heart
be strong.

Listen. You have to go on
without me.
You know what my triumph was,
my victory?
I was open. I stayed
so wholly open
that I heard the birds and the gift
the Spring is singing.

They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.
They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.

*

Joseph Fasano is a poet, novelist, and songwriter. His most recent books include The Teacher, The Last Song of the World, and The Swallows of Lunetto. His writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is celebrated around the world for what the poet Ilya Kaminsky has called “its lush drive to live, even in the darkest moments.” Fasano’s work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications. He is the Founder of Fasano Academy, an educational resource aimed at “empowering the whole human being through philosophical, aesthetic, and spiritual work.”

What We Keep on the Fourth by Veronica Tucker

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What We Keep on the Fourth

It’s not the anthem
or the sparklers burning
their short, bright lives
in the hands of children
who will never know
how long we waited
for a moment like this.

It’s the way corn
tastes sweeter in July,
the way the dog sleeps
in the patch of shade
beneath the picnic table
while someone hums
an old song
that doesn’t need a name.

It’s flip-flops by the lake
and the screen door
slamming behind a cousin
you haven’t seen since last summer
but still love in the way
you love watermelon
and stories that start with remember when.

It’s the long daylight,
stretching like a promise
no one is ready to cash in.
It’s smoke curling from the grill,
the hush before the first boom
that sends every child
into the arms of whoever
feels like home.

We say it’s about freedom,
but maybe it’s about pause,
about holding still
on the lip of summer
long enough to know
you were here
for something that mattered.

*

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, as well as a mother of three. Her work appears in redrosethorns, Red Eft Review, and Medmic, with additional pieces forthcoming. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com and on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.

Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House by Mary Ellen Redmond

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Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House

My neighbor on the street behind me
is using his leaf blower on this Fourth of July
during that customary lull between the parade and fireworks,
when babies nap and dogs find solace in the shade.

It sounds like a giant mosquito hovering over
our neighborhood disrupting our quiet afternoon.
But when the buzzing continues for over an hour,
I ride my bike around the corner to investigate,

and there he is on his front lawn, shirtless, in the most
patriotic way —slightly hairy chest, gold chain— blowing
his lawn clean of any leaf, stick, piece of detritus

that has landed on his artificial turf.
The yard is bordered by dozens of tiny flags stuck
between plastic red geraniums, perpetually in bloom.
Why not vacuum the whole damn yard?

Peddling home, I imagine him a member of the militia,
a true Patriot—
defending his country,
his rights, his piece of the pie,
blowing those Red Coats away,
one by one,
his leaf blower resting on his arm.

*

Mary Ellen Redmond’s poems have appeared in a number of journals including Rattle and The Cortland Review, but the publication she is most proud of is the poem tattooed on her son’s ribcage. Her interview with Gregory Orr was published in The Drunken Boat. Her poem “Fifty-Six Days” earned a Best of the Net nomination in 2016 and her poem “Joy is not made to be a crumb” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024.

America, We Hope This is A Mammogram by Alison Hurwitz

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America, We Hope This is A Mammogram
America, it’s clear you’ve gone without deodorant,
driven into inquisition, arrived on time and tried
to find distraction in the waiting room.
America, we know you are half hoping they will never
call your name, hope that they forget to lead you
to a cell and strip. They don’t. You fold your bra,
try to tuck it underneath your shirt and sweater,
as if anyone would check, or for that matter, care.
America, you’ll tell yourself that this is routine screening,
discomfort best endured with equanimity. In the
examination room, a politician helps insert your tender parts
into the rack, the press, the radiation squeeze, then drape
your uterus away from inconvenient expression. They say
some soreness now prevents ineptitude or populist disquiet from
becoming angry subdivision. We hope this is your method here:
that after you are 3D screened and hold your breath, you will exhale,
emerging bruised and blotched with red, contused but cancer free.
We hope it isn’t already too late, hope you’ve not metastasized beyond
the reach of intervention. We’ll wait for your results. Fingers crossed.
*
Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist and dancer who now finds music in language. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and for Best of the Net in 2023 and 2024, Alison is the host of the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, SWIMM, Sky Island Journal and others, her work is forthcoming in The Westchester Review and Poetry in Plain Sight. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorial services, walks in the woods, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

America 2025 by Kelly Fordon

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America 2025

I have made enemies. My neighbor
just wrote to tell me all my suppositions
are wrong, that she somehow knows
better. Here we are, living in rural America,
with access to no one of any import. What
are we on about? Well, there’s my son,
for one–his safety. Also, the folks who run
the Mexican restaurant–the only good one
in town. What of them? And the eagles
circling now; searching for sustenance–back
when I was young, they were almost done.
My neighbor wants to drill under the lake,
and that’s the least of her infractions.
All week, I’ve planted myself in the window.
It’s January 2025 in America. We’re living
through a deep freeze. The only people
I’ve talked to since Monday are the waiter
at the Mexican restaurant and the librarian
as I was checking out Bunk by Kevin Young.
No news, no radio, no humans. I’ve started
to go mad. A little. Desolation. I don’t know.
At least I have the window. Monday went by
like the hours leading to an execution. On Tuesday,
I sat down in the window again. A few epochs in,
a red fox appeared, light-footing it over the ice—
so close to the edge. How she was managing
sub-zero temperatures—I can’t fathom.
Let me tell you what I did—so lonely, so
unnerved, still reeling, I ran for the door and
opened it wide. Hello, Fox! I yelled. Hello!
Of course, I scared her. She took off fast.
Soon, she was out of sight. It was a mistake;
but in the whole scheme of things,
one of the minor ones. I know she’s
out there now, and it helps. I’m not alone.
We’re not alone. I watched a small red fox
get the best of it–remember that next time
you’re facing down ice.

*

Kelly Fordon’s latest short story collection, I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her 2016 Michigan Notable Book, Garden for the Blind (WSUP), was an INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019), was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. It was later adapted into a play by Robin Martin and published in The Kenyon Review Online. Her new poetry collection, What Trammels the Heart, will be published by SFASUPress in 2025. She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and has received a Best of the Net Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in three different genres. She teaches at Springfed Arts in Detroit and online, where she runs a fiction podcast called “Let’s Deconstruct a Story” at https://letsdeconstructastory.substack.com/

Three Poems by Michael Simms

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Sidewalk Drain with Moss and String

If it’s human
to put things in categories
like putting them in a bag
a few pebbles collected in the alley
for their odd striations of color
you imagine forged in a volcano
when volcanos were a thing around here
a tattered notebook with a few scribbles
you wrote after your mother died
a hatband, a rubber band, a hairclip
dropped by a girl you were afraid to speak to
and out of the whole deck you saved only
this Jack of Spades winking at you knowing
something about you that keeps changing
if this hoarding of memories
is what makes you human then
are crows our cousins
carrying bits of yarn and bottle caps
to their nests weaving shiny things
into their homes the way
you brought home a photo
of a sidewalk drain full of green moss
and two pink roots curving onto the aggregate
and on one of the roots a piece of string
with three pieces of red brick beside the moss
because happiness clings to small things?

***

America

Beside the highway outside McKeesport PA
a state trooper has pulled over a black man
who leans against his rusty Ford
palms flat, feet apart
assuming the position
as we say in America.

The smokey in his broad brimmed hat
and menacing chin strap
which is leather, like the leather of his boots
and belt and holster, wears his hat
low, his face in shadow.

Beside us, the Monongahela River
quickens, making its way
through abandoned pastures
and ruined river towns
on its way to the Ohio.

As the smokey rummages through
the car, the man shrinks in his clothes,
catches my eye, then looks down
ashamed. What’s he done? I wonder
What’s the trooper done?

What have I done,
what have I ever done
but look away / up the road
toward the beautiful Laurel Highlands
hidden in the white mist of America?

***

A Cowboy in the Chapel of Bones

Baby Head Cemetery, Llano Texas

Where I come from
it’s bad manners to speak of death
except in dead metaphors. Kick the bucket. Bite the Dust.
Give up the ghost. Swan song – a pretty phrase, but bad ornithology.
I once heard a lady from London call dying Popping your clogs
as if we throw off a pair of muddy shoes after a long walk in the rain,
appropriate no doubt in London but not in the dusty streets of Llano Texas
where tooled boots Death might wear are the rage.

Cowboys are Calvinists.
We like the dead to stay dead,
ashes to ashes with no dust left over, no grave to visit.
Ancient cemeteries are just grazing land, undeveloped real-estate
waiting its turn to be turned over to developers
of green and gold towers rising above the dry plains.
Capitalism meets fantasy, and death plays no part in the story.

But our dead metaphors are a dead giveaway
that once we had more respect for the dead.
After all, a cliché is simply a beautiful phrase
we ride hot and put away wet until it weakens and dies.

*

On Día de los Muertos
my ex-in-laws visit the cemetery to pray and party
with the dead, a celebration of mortality.
They laugh, eat, drink, wear tall masks of demons,
make gifts to the dead and the living alike,
skulls made of sugar and pan de muerto with frosting shaped like bones.

I love the calaveras literarias, irreverent epitaphs dedicated to the living.
Mourning his mother who stands alive in front of him, Rudolfo recites
Como extraño sus tamales, empanadas y atolito;
voy a tener que aprender a cocinar yo solito.
(He misses his mother because he hates his own cooking.)

Joking with death reminds us
it’s the only imperative, the one necessity
giving urgency to our lives.
When we remember what we’d rather forget
we see and speak more clearly,
every day becomes an emergency, an emergence, an aparición
forcing us to become fierce about our faith,
to taste the chocolate before it’s gone,
to love the lover before the body fades
and to honor the body with marigold before it rots.

*

I remember years ago in Portugal
walking into the Chapel of Bones as if in a dream,
skulls, femurs, vertebrae cemented into walls,
three high windows casting a skeleton of light on the floor.
Our guide Virgilio told us the Capela dos Ossos
reminds us of the swift passage of life on earth.

No shit, I thought. 5,000 corpses, he said,
peasants exhumed from Évora’s medieval cemeteries,
bones arranged by the Franciscans in squares, spirals, pyramids,
a ceiling of white brick painted with black motifs.
Skulls scribbled with graffiti. Skeletons hanging from ropes.
Two desiccated corpses, one a child, in glass cases.
Aonde vais, caminhante, acelerado?
Where are you going in such a hurry, traveler?

***

Michael Simms has worked as a squire to a Hungarian fencing master, a stable hand, a gardener, a forager, an estate agent, a college teacher, an editor, a publisher, a technical writer, and a literary impresario. He identifies as being on the spectrum and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who didn’t speak until he was five years old. He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. A resident of Pittsburgh, in 2011 he was recognized by the Pennsylvania Senate for his contribution to the arts. His most recent books include two poetry collections — American Ash and Nightjar – published by Ragged Sky; and two novels — Bicycles of the Gods: A Divine Comedy and The Green Mage, both published by Madville.

Five Poems by Harrison Bae Wein

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Watching One America

Lying in his bed, slumped
against the wooden headboard
in his shabby underwear,
watching the newscasters warn
of an immigrant tide at the border,
the secret spying of the Squad,
and Hunter Biden’s corruption,
my father, once a doctor–a
critical thinker–sat mesmerized.

They convinced him
that COVID was a sham
cooked up by the Dems in
a plot against the president–
Mother, too, who haggled
over cuts of meat, brought
her fur coat in for cleaning,
met friends for book club.

Now, dead from
COVID, this photo
from the funeral home
is all I have of him,
looking as if he’s fallen
asleep on his new My Pillow,
watching his shows,
believing everything.

*

My Mother’s Anger

When I was a child,
I would lie in bed
with the door open
and listen to my mother
yelling down the hallway,
the bangs jolting me awake
as I squinted my eyes
to blur the kitchen light
into a white death ray,
or a tractor beam that
might carry me away.

I remember in Maine
at my father’s conference
when she told me
to wait outside the cafeteria
with my younger brother,
and we watched through
the plate-glass window
as she walked down the aisle
and dumped some Coke
on a stranger’s head

When I told her
I was getting married,
she shouted for the better part
of an hour–and as I tried
to leave, she hurled
a bottle of nail polish
at my head

I ducked, letting
it crack on the door
to leave a red slash
which no one
thought to clean, and
that darkened,
over time,
like a festering scab.

*

Last Words

Growing up,
our house was like a boxing ring,
parents in their corners,
me behind my mother,
brother with my dad.

Still, I spent Saturday
mornings in the back of his office
reading National Geographics
about faraway places
and wandering around
to hear patients praise him
in the waiting room.

When he was done
cleaning ears and
examining tonsils,
we’d walk down the avenue
to lunch on knishes
and corned beef sandwiches.

It’s hard to fathom how that cool,
confident flirt, smoking in his
consultation room as he
scanned the medical journals,
became a crooked, stooped
old man, cursing under
his breath at his wife.

When I last time saw him,
he reached for something–
maybe me, maybe a ghost–
and I took his hand.

His final words, in quarantine,
on the phone, were
“She’s killing me”
or “Help me,” but I can’t
recall which came first,
and which were his last.

*

Things To Think About When I Die

The placid jade water of China Cove.
The earthy scent of a redwood forest after a rain.
Coarse black sand scratching the arches of my feet.
The salty spray of a wave on my face.

Brandy on my tongue from the center of a chocolate.
Fresh, soft figs picked just that morning.
The blaring brass of Dvořák’s eighth.
Fragonard’s garden swings.

Early morning walks on Broadway, deserted but for us.
Driving your dad’s clunky blue wagon up I-95.
The curve of your hip when you lie on your side.
Planting trees together in the backyard.

Holding our newborn daughter for the first time.
Dancing our son to sleep on my chest.
Lying in a tent, unable to sleep, and
thinking, somehow, that I was unhappy.

*

About the Past

If I could patch
the rips in the canvas
with fabric and glue
to hide the bruises,
I might forget–
but pentimenti
always show through,
stubborn, insistent,
reproaching;
however many
coats you apply,
their pigments and
shapes can’t be hidden,
and flesh can’t be
scrubbed or rinsed enough
to erase old scars.

*

Harrison Bae Wein’s fiction and poetry has appeared in several literary journals, most recently in ONE ART and Clio’s Psyche, and forthcoming in riverSedge. Harrison has won several awards as a health and science writer, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Richmond Times-Dispatch and many other outlets. He founded and now edits two health publications at the National Institutes of Health. You can find him online at http://harrisonwein.com.

poem by James Penha

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Tomorrow could be the coldest day in three years in America
meteorologically, but it’s the fever of its politics
and the warming of our oceans that chill me to the bone.

*

A native New Yorker, James Penha (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Twitter: @JamesPenha

Three Poems by Anne Babson

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POST-FACTUAL-MODERNISM

So much depends
Upon
A red hat about
America
Stitched in China
For Russia
Beside the white
Chickens

*

MADISON AVENUE HAIKU

The Shinto soundbyte
Smacked between bubblegum lips
Is irreligious.

Five beats, seven beats,
Five beats — and why should we think
This is not an ad?

Japanese culture
Owns the rights to bonsai verse.
Coke is it for us.

*

WHERE LOUIS, LESTAT AND I BAR-CRAWL BOURBON STREET

Whatever words say, bodies govern us,
Trapped by flesh, no matter which pretty speech.
But on Bourbon, bouncers don’t card this
Child corpse. They assume I’m auditioning.
I watch women spin on poles, cellulite
Jiggling while they twerk, fat nipples bouncing.
Louis and Lestat slip into the lounge,
But I am not hungry for the buffet.
I stole a wallet off my midnight snack
On Conti. I slip bills in g-strings, not
To satisfy appetites but to watch
Women’s thighs show me stretch marks and track marks
Through bronze spray tan, tattoos, and glitter sweat.

This book freezes me in glitter amber.
My child vampire body will never grow.
That’s not vampire blood. That’s vampire novel.
I ask Britni, the one I panty-stuffed
With twenty singles, to answer questions.
What’s her favorite book? She doesn’t read.
Not reading books traps, too, I see. Britni
Won’t reach fifti, my night vision tells me.
But what is your favorite book? Yes, you there!
And to what has it taught you to submit?

*

Anne Babson is the author of three full-length collections of poetry — The White Trash Pantheon, Polite Occasions, and Messiah. Her fourth collection, The Bunker Book, will be published in 2021 by Unsolicited Press. Her poems have appeared in literary journals on five continents. She lives and writes in New Orleans.