MOVING THE QUEEN

by Tricia Knoll

All she wanted when she fled up
north was to keep her child and man --
she hummed her song all along.   
All she wanted from mother’s day
was for her son and another
mother’s boy let each other live.

All she wanted from her locked chain
on the White House fence was to vote 
for a man for President.
All she wanted from a wheelchair
rolling her body to the voter’s booth
was a death with dignity.

All she wants running for office
is to oust the jerks who tell her
to do more with less and love it.   
All she wants from her website
is for Muslim and Jewish women
to read each other’s poetry.

All she wants from a pink t-shirt
is to walk with womenfolk
who celebrate survival.
All she wants from bumper stickers
is for neighbors to know
she yearns to marry Isabelle.

All she wants to find online
is work that lets her feed her twins
more than macaroni and cheese.
All I want from holding the queen
is to slide her fleet-foot fury
to checkmate the cross-head king. 


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet. She never burned a bra but she walked in a Yale graduation in 1970 without one.

POPE FRANCIS' SILENT PRAYER

by Priscilla Lignori

Crowd under the rain
eager for the announcement--
centuries' old rite

Smoke pours from chimney 
loud basilica bells ring--
They have a new pope!

Announced in Latin
the huge crowd responds with cheers,
waving rain-soaked flags

New Pope Francis waves
so quiet before the crowd--
A silent prayer?

Is he asking for
the rain to wash away all
that has come before?


Priscilla Lignori is a psychotherapist in private practice and the winner of international awards for haiku poetry. The founder and teacher of Hudson Valley Haiku-kai, a community dedicated to studying and living the Way of Haiku, her poems have been published in the World Haiku Review, The Asahi Hakuist Network, Ko magazine, The Mainichi Daily News.

THE POPE PICKERS

by David Feela

“Vatican Smoke” by Mike Luckovich, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via The Cagle Post.

“What color was the smoke this time?”
“I couldn’t see, but it smelled like bacon.”
“How long will they be in there?”
“It’s impossible to say.”
“What do they do between ballots?”
“Stare at the ceiling.”
“The one Michelangelo painted?”
“That’s the one.”
“Are there enough toilets?”
“Only because they’re all men.”
“Why is that?”
“Because God is a man.”
“I don’t think anyone knows that for sure.”
“The Cardinals do.”
“And who told them?”
“The Pope.”
“The Pope is just an elevated Cardinal, isn’t he?”
“We must not question the wisdom of nepotism.”
“I think they call it Catholicism.”
“Same thing.”
“When they finally decide, how will we know?”
“White smoke will rise from the chimney.”
“What if we can't see it.”
“It will smell like the toilet needs cleaning.”


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

THE ELECT

by Sondra Zeidenstein

Image source: Wicked Mike

I woke from a dream
in which I had curly hair,
a bushel of it, unkempt,
uncombable, beyond
messing with
and I was smiling,
I who have always had
scanty hair, flat
to my narrow Rumanian
Jewish skull. I didn’t care
that it wasn’t beautiful,
just that there was
so much of it.

So I’m slow this morning
letting myself down
into reality, the disrepair
our ship of state displays
two days after we won
by one percent, the victory,
a gift from Blacks and Hispanics,
our traditional country
gone, said a pundit.

But my traditional country
has always been
diverse and I remember
how proud I was to be
standing in line in the gym
at school next to the one
black girl in my grade
and when we were told
to hold hands to our left
and our right, my brain
hesitated a second, imagining
the other to whom I’d never
spoken and then
without looking at her,
since we faced forward
so stiffly, I reached sideways
took her hand, and she
took mine. She was thin, my height,
I can’t recall her name,

but that her hand was
slighter than I expected,
her fingers without grasp
to reach for what she knew
by now at twelve
did not belong to her,
her palm flat and dry,

and I felt secretly proud
that I was called on
to extend my privilege
and well being, to someone
less sure of what if anything
belonged to her and I lived
for a moment joined, saying
to my proud, ignorant self,
what I have she must have too.
Here. Take it.

So Obama won again.
He walked on stage at two
in the morning when I could
barely stay awake and his women
wore taffeta, the girls’ legs
exposed above the knees,
their hair flattened and shining
under the lights, their parents
never leaving them for an instant
under the roars of thousands
joined as I had been
seventy years ago
at Morningside School.
This family had it all
for a moment in our country,
something I always believed in.
I was part of it or
I was nothing.


Sondra Zeidenstein is a poet and publisher of Chicory Blue Press. She has published three books of poems, including A Detail in that Story and Contraries and edited several anthologies, including A Wider Giving: Women Writing after a Long Silence.

ON THE EDGE

by Laura Rodley

Abenaki Indian Pictures. Abenaki Children. Image source: Indians Pictures.

In the back edge of the forest

are stones piled up one on top the other

in a horseshoe shape facing

the quartz vein outcropping

perhaps built by Abenaki Indians

before colonial men sent their servants

to take stones from Indian burial mounds

to build their stone fences,

unknowingly disturbing the peace,

and here my husband and another

man named Jim lift beds of moss

off the stone structure, reveal it

to be as tall as a horse, facing the sky,

the midnight sky when the Big Dipper

hangs low and this is what my eyes

feasted on before the election,

how it is time for the Indian spirits

to walk our land, to look

to the Big Dipper and the old spirits

caught in her cup

for our answers, for forgiveness.

Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” has won a Pushcart Prize and appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

THE FRAGONARDS PLAY A HOME GAME

by M. A. Schaffner

Image source: Pébéo

Through all my life I’ve grown up just enough
to step back through the looking glass and sing
nonsense songs while shaving.  You know the tunes.
Context has everything to do with death,
and that changes constantly, so today
I’ll settle for a six pack and a game
of football or Scrabble.  Let small dogs watch
as we wrestle with ambition and win
one more time, because we know its weak points.
Last night there was a moon.  There will be again
long after we uncork our last bottle.
We solved the world’s problems.  It will have more,
but I don’t need to work them any more
than will finches nesting over the grill,
or their neighbors, the squirrels, or the cats
hunting stupidly, garden to garden.


M. A. Schaffner has work recently published or forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, Magma, Tulane Review, Gargoyle, and Skirmish Magazine.  Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys.  Schaffner used to work as a civil servant, but now serves civil pugs.

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. 

TEMPORARY BLINDNESS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

I went to the ophthalmologist. She shone the light in my right eye and said, "Do you have a pet? I see an animal hair. And some lint." She lowered the light and looked at me sternly. “I’m going to wash your eyes.”  She found cigarette butts, bristles from street sweepers, an old bike chain, and child’s flip flop. The left eye closest to the yards had dandelion fluff, a flea, and the tip of a Jart. She washed my eyes,  and when I opened them, a pile of scraps was between us. I blinked and said, “There’s still an irritant.”  She followed the light back in and pulled out Mitt Romney. Ah! I could see again. I mean, I could stand to look.

Her opthamalogist has cleared Elizabeth Kerlikowske to drive her car to teach.

AFTER THE ELECTION

by Joan Mazza

Watercolor by Suzanne Mays-Wentzell

The sun should be out, beaming cheer
in celebration of a win for equal rights
and a president who tells the truth,
but today is gray and dreary, forecast
for wind and rain, maybe snow.

I didn’t stay up all night like some, tired
of the angry words, too angry, too,
at those who vote against their interests
for a man who lied and lied. I went to bed,
resigned to cope with heat or cold,

no matter how the winds of voting blew.
I rose to learn the winners, and asked
again what shelters we might find
when I still worry about the safety
of our vegetables and drinks, the air

we breathe. Taught to pray for happy
outcomes, for wisdom in our leaders,
recovery from illness, grief, addiction,
I know no one’s listening to wishes
no matter how cold and dark life seems.

Through weak morning light, the ground
is littered with this year’s leaves. Signal
to go inward, grateful for this home, space
where darkness means silence, warmth,
and no one shouting what god wants from me.


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.

A SIGH OF RELIEF

by Barbara A Taylor


a sigh of relief
big bird takes off
back to the same


Barbara A Taylor’s Japanese short form poems appear in international journals and anthologies on line and in print, including Haigaonline, Eucalypt, Atlas Poetica, The Heron's Nest, Frogpond, Kokako, Simply Haiku. She lives in the Rainbow Region, Northern NSW, Australia.

Image source: Chris Piascik based on a tweet by Dan Cedarholm

FIRST LINE OF A LIMERICK FOLLOWED BY FOUR LINES OF SILENCE

by J.R. Solonche

There once was a Willard Mitt Romney
(silence)
(silence)
(silence)
(silence).

J.R. Solonche is co-author (with wife Joan Siegel) of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). His poems have appeared in many magazines, journals, and anthologies since the 1970s. He teaches at SUNY Orange in Middletown, New York.

THE MAN WHO WANTED IT TOO MUCH

by David Spicer 

        From the age of five the man’s ambition was to be President of the most powerful nation on earth. This desire burned so intensely he acquired a swarthy, handsome demeanor that attracted beautiful women. He chose the loveliest and they worked together to fulfill his dream. He graduated from the top business school and felt that since government was the biggest business, he was uniquely qualified. His successes mounted and his family of five sons thrived. He craved leadership like a man desperate in a desert. He sweated desire and ambition. When he mounted his campaign for President after serving as savior of the Olympics and governor of a small state, the people did not trust him. They called him a liar and a fraud. His party renounced him and then slowly accepted him without passion. His opponent grinned and charmed people, his eloquent intellect a coin that dazzled. One pundit branded the man whose lifelong ambition dangled within reach a clumsy buffoon who wanted it too much. Voters agreed. On election day they chose the stunning intellectual by the slimmest margin, and the handsome businessman flew into the desert and disappeared.

Author of one collection, Everybody Has a Story, four chapbooks, and six unpublished poetry manuscripts, David Spicer has previously published in The New Verse News and also has work in Alcatraz, Nitty Gritty, Aura, Brown God, Hinchas de Poesia, Crack the Spine, Dirtflask, Spudgun, Mad Rush, Used Furniture Review, Fur-Lined Ghettos, Spudgun, Bop Dead City, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Resurgo, and elsewhere.

THE CANDIDATE TAKES A DAY OFF AFTER WRESTLING THE ARCHANGEL OF TRUTH

by Michael Brockley

The candidate is plucking the creases of his stone-washed jeans after his wife has crossed the hall to iron a pair of Neiman-Marcus socks when the archangel of truth trumpets his battle cry behind him. He turns to this challenge against his honesty to find feathers fluttering above the floor around a vanity table. The grim creature is naked as a G. I. Joe doll. Fragrant as brown sugar. It crouches in a sumo stance while the nominee rolls the sleeves of his white oxford and snugs an Ayn Rand cravat against his Adam’s apple. He circles the archangel, calculating angles until the vanity is behind him and he can grope for the bayonet in the miscellany drawer. A fusion of fog and fury attacks the candidate who stabs at the bald dimple of its crotch. The beautiful mouth. The monstrous, hallelujah eyes. A chandelier crashes around them as the politician flails at wisps of feathers. A whirlwind ransacks the room, shattering windows and mirrors. The daemon materializes behind the standard bearer to slam him to the floor in a half-Nelson. Vipers breed in the contender’s brain. In triumph, the archangel seeds a halt in the candidate’s hip, vanishing at the click of the wife opening the door to investigate the commotion. She helps her husband with his socks. Asks how he stubbed his toe. When she knots the laces of his Italian shoes, he retrieves a paper from his pocket with the day’s lies erased.

Michael Brockley is a 63-year old school psychologist who has worked in special education in rural northeast Indiana for 25 years. He has poetry publications in Wind, The Windless Orchard, Spitball, The Indiana Review, The Indiannual, The Spoon River Quarterly, The River City Review and The Ball State Literary Forum. Tom Koontz’ Barnwood Press published his chapbook Second Chance in 1990, and Brockley has lately placed work in Indiana publications such as Maize, Country Feedback, Flying Island, The Tipton Poetry Journal and Facing Poverty. A video of Brockley reading his “Hollywood’s Poem” which was published in Facing Poverty can be found on YouTube. His poem “When the Woman in the White Sweater Asked at the Cancelled Charles Simic Reading Asked If I Was David Shumate” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Barry Harris of the Tipton Poetry Journal.

THE BEGINNING (WITH NO END)

by David Feela

Image Source: Freeology

In the beginning some man said
“Let there be rape”
and he saw that if it wasn’t divinely intended
it might not be legitimate,
so he made certain enough men
held positions of power
to keep an eye on the women
who claimed it had happened to them.
And there was whimpering
on the 1st day in November.

Then another man said,
“Let there be pregnancy”
and the men charged with
upholding God’s mind
knew it wouldn’t happen to them,
so there was much relief
on the 2nd of November.

And the Constitution said,
“Let there be elections”
so the men who had wives
pushed them in front of the cameras
to claim no matter what their husbands said
they were good men.
Infants were cuddled and kissed
all during the 3rd and 4th days.

Then the doctors said,
“Let there be amniocentesis”
and a window into life opened,
(though many pulled their shades)
which accounts on the 5th of November 
for the heat in Roe v. Wade.

By November’s election day a woman said,
“Let me make up my own mind”
but so many things had been said
the chance to lay the issue to rest
on the 7th day was pretty much dead.

David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

WILLARD MITT ROMNEY

by Mark Zimmermann

                           
I’m an ordinary millionaire.
I don’t need a media elite
to remind me I made money.
Morality demanded I earn it
and I did. I made a dream my own.

In my world, one will earn a dollar
or one will want an entitlement.
Indeed, I’d tell any needy, amoral
idler: Don’t lean on a millionaire. Learn
to toil—or win ten million in a lottery!

We need a new national order—now—
or we’ll all drown in a money drain!
A Ryan-Rand leader, I didn’t let
any tweedy elite meddler order me
to reward an addled, idle dream

in Detroit. No—I rallied any and all:
don’t wait on an entitlement! I rallied
any and all: earn a real and moral dollar!
I did it and I’m an ordinary man.
I married my dear, dear Ann. We earned
one dream and made it into two.


Author’s Note: The poem above is a lipogram that uses only letters appearing in Romney’s full name: a-e-i-o  d-l-m-n-r-t-w-y.

Mark Zimmermann lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he teaches humanities and writing classes at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Recently, work of his has appeared in Verse Wisconsin, the 2013 Wisconsin Poets Calendar, and a variety of other venues.

BEFORE OBAMA CAME

by Brandon Mullis

Once this land was beautiful
With shining silver springs
The dew-kissed fields'
old harvest yields
Fit both for man or king

But then the sky grew darker
The fields were kissed by flame
O how grand
was once our land
Before Obama came

The forests played a melody
Its fauna harmonized
The sparrow's tweet
so nectar-sweet
A robin would reprise

Now it's all so raucous
The wind sings not my name
Those dulcet tones
soothe not my bones
Not since Obama came

The sun was so much brighter
Water just seemed wetter
A woman's touch
healed twice as much
My pants fit so much better

There was no Justin Bieber
No "Glee" or "Jersey Shore"
On demon's wings
came all these things
With number 44

The world is now so flimsy
So malleable and frayed
The hidden cost
of things we've lost
Might never be repaid

We still had Michael Jackson
Steve Jobs and Neil Armstrong
These men and more
stood strong before
Obama came along

The future's bleak and ominous
Like many futures past
As in them all
we'll surely fall
If we don't do something fast

I may not have the answer
But I do know who to blame
So let's raise cheers
to those great years
Before Obama came


Brandon Mullis pretends to be a writer. While doing this, a number of short stories and poems do accidentally get written. His work has so far only been published in that mythic forest we hear so much about -- the one where no one's around to hear them, so nothing makes a sound. Rejection notices, however... let's just say if they ever become a form of currency, Brandon Mullis will be the 1%.

INFESTATION

by Jean L. Kreiling


Our town’s been stricken by an infestation
more visible than gypsy moths or bees.
These pests won’t sting or cause deforestation;
in fact, they look a little bit like trees,

but short, malformed, and ugly. They sprout words
instead of leaves—red, white, and blue, all caps;
no green-clad limbs support alighting birds
or shelter chipmunks for their morning naps.

Instead, the stunted, manufactured trunks
support annoying pleas for our support
of earnest men and women—and some skunks
and swindlers—who pursue an autumn sport.

Theirs is, in fact, a most important game;
the outcome could affect our lives and work.
But while the roadside vermin swarm, each name
propped on a pole looks like that of a jerk.

This plague will end; we must try to remember
that time always exterminates these lines
of lurid boldface blight.  By late November,
we’ll cheer the landslide loss of campaign signs.

Image source: Duane Burnett.com

Jean L. Kreiling's work appears widely in print and online journals and in anthologies.  She was the winner of the 2011 Able Muse Write Prize for Poetry, and she has been a finalist for the Dogwood Poetry Prize, the Frost Farm Prize, and the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award.

OBAMA’S FIRST STAND

by Gershon Hepner



Though his blah-blah made him a blockbuster;
as debater he seemed most lackluster,
by Romney so flustered,
he turned into custard,
while making his stand against Custer.


Gershon Hepner was born in Leipzig in 1938, came to England one day before the Second World War, became a doctor in 1963, emigrated to the US in 1968, and has been living in Los Angeles since 1976. He has four children and nine grandchildren, and a wife who is a talented poetess. He has been writing an average of five poems a day since 1992.

OBAMA: I WAS TOO POLITE

by J.R. Solonche

Okay, my bad, oh well.
I gave him heck instead of hell.

J.R. Solonche is co-author (with wife Joan Siegel) of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). His poems have appeared in many magazines, journals, and anthologies since the 1970s. He teaches at SUNY Orange in Middletown, New York.

Tuesday Election Day

And if you are turning in your ballot in the U-District, the ballot box has moved from the door of the community center up a little further north right by the corner of 50th and the Ave, the entrance to University Heights where the Farmers Market is held on Saturdays.