A CALENDAR BROKE

by Martha Landman

            for John

            and heaven is imagined as whole and unceasing

                        -- Christina Murphy

Dawn enlightens a Puter jungle

a classic world

ends

in different time zones

God grins

yesterday

my Mayan calendar broke —

guess it’s no use

claiming on the warranty.

The moon, the earth

the stars dance a wild galaxy

a small eternity

this earth

this planet

a last cigarette

suffocates a man’s son

Gerald Benedict broods in

silence

tomorrow has come.

Martha Landman is a South African-born Australian poet residing in tropical Queensland.  She has published on- and off-line and recently co-authored a book of poems and short stories with Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke, titled The Paradoxophies, which is available on www.lulu.com.

STEREOTYPE

by Joan Mazza

The unlikely faces of same-sex marriage. --PostPartisan, The Washington Post
Larry Duncan and Randy Shepherd (Meryl Schenker Photography)

Seated— two white haired, white guys
with long white beards down their chests,
their right hands raised to take an oath
or pledge. Each wears a flannel button-down

under a dark blue quilted jacket. Their USMC
camouflage baseball caps look new.
They could be lumberjacks or loggers buying
hunting or fishing licenses, might be taken

for brothers. A wooden cane leans against
one’s chest. Harley- Davidson logo peeks
from the other’s unbuttoned winter layers.

Good ‘ole boys who love their guns and brew.
In another era, each might have lived alone
in a remote cabin, called hermit, loner, scary.
Do they chop their own wood and have a still?

But this is the state of Washington at the end
of 2012. A black man has been re-elected
president, and these two men, ten years
together, finally get to marry.


Joan Mazza has worked as a psychotherapist, writing coach, certified sex therapist, and medical microbiologist, has appeared on radio and TV as a dream specialist. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Perigee/Putnam). Her work has appeared in Kestrel, Stone’s Throw, Rattle, Writer's Digest, Playgirl, and Writer's Journal. She now writes poetry and does fabric art in rural central Virginia.

ELECTION CANVASSING IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, 2012

by Mary Dingee Fillmore

Illustration by Christiane Engel

The woman who never votes
cracks the door.  Her grimy trailer stinks
of smoke and despair.  She says no,
the election’s nothing to do with her,
as she shoves her kids behind her, swats
at the dog.  I can’t persuade her.

Walking down her rotting steps, I go on
driving the streets, knocking on doors, not
for him, the President, likeable and whole
but for her, her young face already sagging.
I have to stop a white man burdened
with too many Cadillacs, whose every meal
is cooked by a woman, who hasn’t ironed
a shirt for decades. To stop him now
from clawing away the last of her few
rights, the right to whatever’s left
of her beautiful, human body
so like mine.


Mary Dingee Fillmore is a poet and novelist who writes about the Holocaust and Resistance in the Netherlands among other subjects.  Her work has been published here, the Atlanta Review, Slant, Upstreet, Pearl, Diner, Westview, Main Street Rag, Pinyon and Blueline.  In her spare time, she helps nonprofit organizations decide what to do and why, and has had her own business, Changing Work, since 1982.