Tag: political poetry

My Theory of Everything About the ‘Houthi PC small group’ by Marc Alan Di Martino

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments
My Theory of Everything About the ‘Houthi PC small group’
My personal TOE is that this was an SOS,
a holler for help so dire it could only come
from inside the house, from someone
so paralyzed that their only hope of escape
was to cc the editor of The Atlantic
in a group chat on an unsecured app
and…let the tape roll. Maybe in this way
the outside world could intervene, call
their bluff, do something. My TOE is sound
and has been vetted. It has been confirmed
by the Senate. It has survived multiple
hearings and a couple of jittery visits
to the Supreme Court, where it won
in a 5-4 decision. My TOE is foolproof,
bulletproof, hundred proof grain alcohol,
Occam’s Razor-sharp, capable of shaving
the false beard off the baby face of Truth
revealing a lean, mean fact-checking machine.
These days it seems the Truth is under attack
from all sides—not unlike the Houthi pirates—
and many have come to the sad conclusion
that “truth” is merely a personnel [sic] opinion,
and that to lord one’s truth over another’s
is tantamount to flying your war plans [sic]
into the World Trade Center, which of course
was already destroyed by illegal immigrants
flooding our borders, and even J.D. Vance
giving a thumbs-up emoji is really just his way
of saying
I’m trapped
in a deep well please
somebody help—
*
Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024—longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Stand by Tina Em

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An erasure poem of Trump's deferred resignation letter he sent to federal employees. Poet Tina Em has created an erasure poem that speaks truth to power. Link to the letter: https://www.opm.gov/fork

Tina Em (she/her), born in poverty, raised in a bi-racial family, serves others through her professional life as an engineer and innovator in federal public health workforce, and in her personal life as a volunteer, tutor, and writer.  Her first published poem, A Time to Rest, commemorated the bicentennial of Harriet Tubman in The Ekphrastic Review in 2022. Her recent work will appear in the 2023 Maryland Bards Poetry Anthology. Tina was awarded Honorable Mention for flash nonfiction essay in the Bethesda Local Artist Showcase in 2023. Tina co-led the Bethesda Poetry Group sponsored by The Writer’s Center, where she has been an active member since 2019. Tina is currently writing a poetry manuscript and a novel. She lives with her family in Rockville, MD.

Today, I Am Not Kind Because I Love Love, by Abby E. Murray

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Today, I Am Not Kind Because I Love Love,

I am kind because I hate hate.
If viciousness drives a luxury car,
I am scratching my initials into its paint
using only the ragged edge
of my tenderness. This may be
the age of distance and shame
but I am kissing the hands of my friends
while I can. I am making it weird.
I am confessing my commitment
to the bumblebee who spent her last calorie
mistaking the palm of my hand
for a buttercup, curling up inside it,
and dying. Sometimes you’ve got to piss
in apathy’s coffee, antagonize the hell
out of indifference. You become
furiously nonviolent, wild with love,
hurling small mercies into your life
like you’re pitching stones
at the closed glass windows of cruelty.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.

Watching Cabaret by Jacqueline Jules

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Watching Cabaret

Forty some years ago,
I saw Cabaret in a college theater.

The female lead was barely five feet. Her lover
hardly a head taller. Both beautiful with big voices,
just toy-sized against the backdrop of 1930s Berlin
and the Nazi rise to power.

Brilliant casting, I thought, getting up
from my seat, though I’ll never know
if the student director chose lopsided
stature to make a political statement
or if our small private school didn’t have
a bigger pool of actors to choose from.

But these days as I worry my country
is dancing away from democracy to march
in goose step, it feels as if I’m a petite actor
surrounded by taller figures
noisily crowding the stage.

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com