Tag: politics

Three Poems by Abby E. Murray

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Political Love Poem

for my political love: I wanted to get you
       something apolitical, but all I could find
were roses and the socialist movement.
       All I could find was chocolate and colonialism.
I wanted to give you something untouched
       by human mistake and cruelty—no diamonds,
no flights to countries safer than this.
       A friend suggested I offer you mathematics,
the objective truth of numbers. Did you know
       Pythagoras was murdered? Did you know
Einstein discovered refuge in New Jersey?
       Is there even such thing as harmless small talk?
If there was, I’d buy a coat made of its fur for you,
       each hair some creamy comment about the weather:
here is a blue sky, warmed by manmade drought.
       Here is a mountain you can climb to see
just some of what’s been stolen. My love,
       I’d give you nothing if it wasn’t also ruined,
if it wasn’t its own long history of lack. I’d put my hand
       in yours, if only its bones and tendons
weren’t brought to you by so much more than devotion:
       theft and injury, centuries of trespass,
the wallop of our humanity on a breakable earth.

*

To the Man Who Could Shoot Me and Get Away With It

When I first realized I was a pacifist—I was a teenager—
a great mentor I didn’t have at the time told me,

you should learn how to be hated by the ones you love most.
It wasn’t terrible advice. I might’ve held it in my mind

awkwardly, the way I hold my husband’s Kevlar now
when he hands it to me between deployments,

sorting through our basement, saying, here, hold this,
and because my instinct is to reach for what needs holding,

I do. Maybe getting away with what we do in this life
is the worst that could happen. Maybe to be furious is to love.

A friend recently asked me why I thought men
had so much power. I offered the only truth I had:

because they’ll kill their children for it. I grew up to become a poet
with pronouns in my bio. Pacifism is more labor-intensive than war.

A mentor I really did have once told me, a poem isn’t a poem
unless it’s hurting someone. I thought about how the sun

can’t love anything constantly without killing it, unless
what it loves can figure out how to shield itself,

how to be loved from the safety of millions of miles away.
The sun is probably just as interested in survival as the earth.

A now-dead man-poet once told his now-dead woman-student
to make every poem her last poem, like she hadn’t already,

like we aren’t all being shot at by systems constructed
just for him. I would like every worm I’ve ever stepped over

to go back underground and tell that dead man-poet
I am no longer writing my last poems. I can only write

beginnings. See, I’m ending this one with a seed
no bigger than the sound of your name being called

from another room. You stop to listen. Who was it, calling?
Is there something you can do? If you hear it again, you’ll answer.

*

Hearing Test

I sit in a booth with the single-button clicker
in my hand and think about whether my husband
       would or would not get a kick out of this:
me, ears muffed, listening to an artificial man’s voice
tell me what to say, and I actually say it. Say cowboy.
       Cowboy. Say airplane. Airplane. At no point
does the man ask me to name what I hear
around his voice: the sound of birds flying far away
       from where I am, the sound of two eyes rolling,
the sound of the ocean if the ocean quit its storms
and married itself to carrying a man’s voice
       across it on a precious shell. Say shift. Shift. Say take.
Take. Here’s an example: the men behind AI
want to answer my emails using my voice.
       When I am asked to teach a workshop,
the men behind AI suggest I call myself definitely interested.
The only thing I am definitely interested in
       is the location of my voice: my throat, my skull,
my hands. It cannot survive elsewhere.
The audiologist discovers a small rock garden
       growing in each of my ear canals, which she describes
as petite, in a not-good way. My laugh is either
a gunshot or a car backfiring. Say hot dog. Hot dog.
       Say mousetrap. Mousetrap. The fluid that should be
where my rock gardens are can, in some people,
become so salty it crystalizes, which explains why
       solid ground feels like the surface of the ocean to me.
When I explain this to my mother, she brightens
and says, does this mean you are—what is it? a salty bitch?
       Everything my mother knows about profanity
she has heard from me. I gaze at her and shine,
a star and its moon, a river learning to swim in the sea.
       And even though I’m more of a dick
than a salty bitch, I hug her, tell her I’m proud of her,
and we listen to the sound of knowing
       the noises our voices make have been heard.

*

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 first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest and teach writing to military officers.

Broken Sonnet by Susan Rich

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Broken Sonnet

How do you begin a poem when you know
How the story ends? Even with a dog,
Joule! who traveled everywhere with him,
Even with his student whom he taught to listen
To each human heartbeat, to open a central line;
Even caretaking U.S. Veterans and with just one
Small camera curled in his right palm like a charm, he—
A kind man (in each account) an activist, Minneapolis—
Light-skinned, bicycle fanatic, in a resonant voice he keeps asking
Are you okay? helping the woman being pepper-sprayed
up from the cold street, making sure she can breathe.
Even then.

                                            for Alex Pretti, 1988-2026

*

Susan Rich is the author of six collections of poetry and co-editor/editor of three anthologies. Her recent books include Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds,  Blue Atlas,  and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems. Susan co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems with Kelli Russell Agodon and co-edited, The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders with Ilya Kaminsky and Brian Turner. Her other poetry books include Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue–Poems of the World, winner of the PEN USA Award. A winner of the Crab Creek Review Prize, Times Literary Supplement Award (London), and a Fulbright Fellowship. Rich’s poems appear in the Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. 

Outpouring by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Outpouring

A bucket of water tossed on the frozen streets of Minneapolis
for the ICE agent to slip on while running at the crowd of protesters;

a river of souls streaming through the avenues
chanting Renee Good’s name, waving posters of her sunflower face;

a tsunami of people all over the world sending money and encouraging notes
to the ones buying groceries for the ones who are hiding,

afraid to go to work, or school, or the store;
everyone marching together in zero degree weather, scared

and defiant, weathered activists arm-in-arm with new-to-this Gen Z kids–
those with nothing to lose, those with everything,

blowing their whistles, following the black SUVs,
banging pots and pans outside the Hilton where the agents are trying to sleep,

saying No, not in my neighborhood, saying MacBeth
shall sleep no more, crying Murder most foul, sleep no more;

What is this outpouring? Where’s the source? Will it be enough?
Today, we’re all Minnesotans, from California to Maine: we’re tired,

hoarse, footsore, at the ragged edge of endurance from getting up before dawn
to protect our schools, our neighbors; still, there’s no stopping this

outpouring of people, in all the states and every weather while the sky itself
pours snow and sleet all over the blasted heath they are trying to make

of our country. Outpouring of disgust at the mad king and his masked army,
a united swell, an upsurge, a tsunami of courage and outrage

flooding the streets and highways and byways
with humanity declaring itself human in the face of the faceless,

singing Hold On in four-part harmony, testimony rising up
and pouring forth in faith; a cascade, a deluge, a torrent of love.

*

Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen and Omega Institutes and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.

Jimmy Carter Brought to the Capitol to Lie In State by Christine Potter

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment
Jimmy Carter Brought to the Capitol to Lie In State
Wind yesterday, wind again today, strong enough to rock
the thick, shaggy trunks of cedars. Dead leaves and bits of
paper rise in what sounds like surf—but no water. Sky’s a
mean blue beyond the jangled, empty maples. Too bright
and cold. Cold wind. Shuffle-click of military shoes, body-
bearers strapping the President’s casket covered with our
flag to a black caisson. The horses’ black necks curled like
question marks in the white sun. Someone gravel-voiced
huffing orders. More wind. Hoof-clatter, columns, stone
steps, a distant siren, an almost recognizable word caught
in the air, held aloft until it’s gone. One horse, riderless,
waving its head. The first President I had been old enough
to vote for. His voice on the old-even-then black and white
TV I’d repaired by replacing tubes. His serious Oval Office
camera-gaze, our sweet old world: blurry, glimmering. We
paid for things with coins. We didn’t want war but hadn’t
won one recently. My father was out of work. Me, too. Dad
and I drove to Unemployment together. Dad still liked him;
a President is a seat at the dinner table. How could we know
the future and how distant it never was? The year I was born,
Jimmy Carter entered a melting-down nuclear reactor and
repaired it, absorbing an entire year’s worth of radiation in
ninety seconds. He lived a century. Everything you’d never
imagine happened. I never thought I’d cry for two whole days.
*
Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Rattle Poets Respond, Eclectica, ONE ART, Tar River Poetry, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The McNeese Review, Grain, and Consequence. Her full-length poetry collection, Unforgetting, is published by Kelsay Books and her time traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are on Evernight Teen. She lives in a very old house in the Hudson Valley with her husband and a chonky cat named Bella.

Two Poems by Shannon Frost Greenstein

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

I’m Not a F*cking Superhero Just for Raising My Autistic Son

I just don’t know how you do it, she says, marveling,
her eyes wide like prey to express
just how awe-struck she truly feels.
You’re a Superhero.

My son, stimming, cavorting happily around the room;
neurodiverse, a bright ray of sun, simply delightful,
and brilliant like a savant;
she sees his meltdowns
his struggle to use the bathroom
declares me to be the Ubermensch
and I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

There is consolation in her voice;
like she is sending up a holy prayer
of thanks
her own children do not have special needs.

It is really condescension, though,
because I am someone to be pitied; because I am someone
with something broken.

But hold up for a second there, Miss Becky Home-ecky.

My son is perfect precisely as he is; he is a joy to nurture and get to know.
There’s no need for heroism,
because loving him
requires nothing superhuman at all.

After all, it doesn’t take an Avenger
to be an Autism mom;
it just takes
a mom.

So save your pity
when you meet my child on the Autism spectrum
because we are both doing just fine.

And I am not a f*cking Superhero
just for raising my autistic son.
I raise my autistic son
because I am his f*cking mother,
and that is just
what mothers do.

*

I Blame George Balanchine

I blame George Balanchine
for decades upon decades
of the most vicious kinds of eating disorders;
for veneration of the waif
at the expense of growing old;
for the toxicity and abuse
that defines professional ballet
and the pervasive legacy of exclusion
that still persists to this day.

I blame Saint Augustine
for the devaluation of women
and the marriage of church and state;
for back-alley abortions
and unresearched stem cells;
for the stigma of sex
just for the sake of sex
and the pervasive legacy of judgement
that still persists to this day.

I blame Nancy Reagan
for propagating systemic racism
as the face of the War on Drugs;
for equating addiction
with weakness of character;
for commanding us all to Just Say No
as crack ravaged the Black community
and the pervasive legacy of an epidemic
that still persists to this day.

I blame Donald Trump
for his epidemiological illiteracy
and killing one million Americans;
for misogyny and bigotry and prejudice and hate
because he is just the worst kind of person;
for humiliating our nation
on a geopolitical scale
and the pervasive legacy of intolerance
that still persists to this day.

I blame them all for the damage they’ve caused
and for reinforcing the otherhood of people like me
and if you agree with anything they have to say
then, you prick, I fucking blame you, too.

*

Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/her) resides in Philadelphia with her children and soulmate. She is the author of “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things”, a full-length book of poetry available from Really Serious Literature, and “Pray for Us Sinners,” a short story collection with Alien Buddha Press. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Litro Mag, Bending Genres, Parentheses Journal, and elsewhere. Follow Shannon at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre.

Five Poems by Ron Riekki

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Kid Who Drank Himself to Death During the War

lived in the barracks right across from mine.
His face was all brilliant with light, like
the sun hitting the ocean. And they hit us
in boot camp, the revelation of that, how
the recruiters don’t mention this little fact,

or they did—unsure if they still do it now,
but my suspicion is yes, the fists all bone
and temple, the church of war. I remember
my mind before the explosions, how it used
to think properly, or maybe it didn’t, the river

near my home owned by the mines now,
oranged. I walked to it yesterday, stared
down into the deranged red, so close to
the color of blood. I pulled up my hood
and walked home. I can walk though.

*

I Worked in Prison

My jobs have all been fist fights for cash.
When I was a boxer, I started getting tremors,
the doctor telling me to stop or they’d become
permanent. I stopped. They stayed. I thought
about how I’d been a boxer my whole life,
even before I was boxing, how the military
takes your skull and kills it. Sure, you can
still live, but it’s a bit like your body is
a house that’s been built, but abandoned,
foreclosed, possessed, a sort of Satanism
to corporation, a sort of corpse-creation,
that reminds me so much of prison, how
there were all these sons in there, no sun,
the paleness of their skin, everyone, no
matter your race, how it looked like they
were all fading, their psyches, their souls,
the violence where if they ever got out
I knew they’d be changed, how violence
stays in your veins, how a bloody life
stays in your blood, how we really,
honestly, could do anything else other
than what we’re doing and it’d be
better, but we’re promised to this cash.

*

(lucky) I Work in Medical

Which means medical works
me, because medical doesn’t
work, because of this equation:
politics + medicine = politics,
and the nursing homes aren’t
homes and there isn’t nursing
there, because the CNAs and
the med techs and the EMTs
are all making minimum wage,
which means my partner fell
asleep driving the ambulance,
turning it upside-down, just
like his life, trying to make

the torment of rent, how it
tore into us, you, me, every-
one when even the EMTs
don’t have health insurance,
and we know that the word
minus ends with US, because
it’s all about erasers, melting
pots where the kids come in
overdosing on marijuana and
one of them says, But you can’t
overdose on pot and I tell him
Well, you are right now and
it’s beautiful—hyperemesis,

how it is, this existence where
the overdoses are normalized,
where my uncle, his heroin
addiction in a hick town, how
I call him and he answers,
voice in slow motion, the ice
outside his window so loud
that I can hear it, the blizzards
of poverty (the anti-poetry),
A Cell of One’s Own and
we’re owned and I’m ranting
about the renting because I
am worried as hell about home-

lessness because the word virus
ends with US and this won’t
get published unless the editor
has been to the pub and is OK
with saying f- censorship—too
afraid to write the word, too
afraid to talk about how when
they play the sexual harassment
training videos at work, everyone
does a play-by-play commentary
like Misery Science Theater 2021,
how we’re all Orwelled and all it
takes is one hospital bill to end a life.

*

In This Poem, I Am Happy and Blessed

but it’s a short poem. It’s a poem where God
gives me a bird, walking, at my feet, how I
almost didn’t see it, the thing rainbowed as
all hell. Who makes something that beautiful?

I snuff out my clove, hurry inside to my cubicle.

*

I Can’t Stop Winking

It’s a defective muscle. My trauma-head
all butchered. But people misread it, think
I’m flirty. Or that I’m sharing some sort
of secret with them. They look directly
in my eyes with a look like yes, I under-
stand too or yes, I saw it as well. Saw
what? The occasional frown, sometimes
a wink back, sexy. But I’m twice
their age. I want to apologize, say
that my eye is owned by history, but
they just move on, their bodies so
perfect, able to control everything.
How do they do that? How?

*

Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). Riekki co-edited Undocumented (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited The Many Lives of It (McFarland), And Here (MSU Press), Here (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book).