24 December 2011

Chiaka Obasi

David S. Pointer

I. B. Rad

Angie Thompson

Stephen Jarrell Williams

Chiaka Obasi

.
.
The Impostor

You stood on that elevated podium,
Your eyes averting our eyes.
And eyeing the ceiling of the auditorium,
Your lips told good lies,
Which no excellent impostor could tell,
And only skilled salesmen could sell.
We have known you for what you are.

Your mouth has spoken.
Our hearts won’t hearken.
We want sincere men to give our votes,
And not he who won’t steer our boat,
For when the real you is unveiled,
We will look like our votes were for sale.
We have always known you for what you are.

All through your first tenure,
You were averse to our plight.
Though you claim to be our saviour,
Our district could not see the light.
Now, you want to return to that seat?
Over our dead bodies, you can’t have it.
We have known you for what you are.


Bio:
Chiaka Obasi resides in Enugu, Nigeria, where he has worked as a copywriter, taught in a private school and now works with Global Human Rights Abuse Intervention Center, Enugu, Nigeria. He has a B.A. in Theatre Arts, a PGD in Journalism and has completed his course work for the award of M.A. in Theatre Arts at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria. His poems have appeared in Crossroads, an anthology of poems in honour of late Christopher Okigbo, Water Testament, an anthology of Nigerian poems on water and water-related issues, edited by Greg Mbajiorgu.

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David S. Pointer

.
.
Definitions

If I define
terrorism
under criminal
law I’ve got
a crime,
If I define
terrorism
under
international
law I’ve got
an act of war,
and If I
define terrorism
as a particular
response
to unjust economic
policies while
receiving media
attention—I’ve
got irate corporate
executives calling
their PR people


Bio:
David S. Pointer has published political poems for 21 years. He was the son of a piano playing bank robber who died when David was 3 years old. David later served in the Marine military police.


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I. B. Rad

.
.
Nuclear Proliferation

Once, I held nuclear proliferation
an unmitigated disaster
but now I've begun to appreciate
growing nuclear parity's just
confirmation of our humanity,
for what better antidote to "global warming"
than "nuclear winter."


Bio:
Ms Rad, I.B. and Wonderdog live in the "Big Apple." Though the poetry is actually written by Wonderdog, she allows I.B to affix his name to it for an occassional biscuit.


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Angie Thompson

.
.
Here We Stand Glorious, Emerged From The Den

you thought we were numb.

You thought we had drawn the curtain on political standpoints and foreign wars

"oh another one" we said,
and you thought we believed it.

You thought that we had gone to sleep,
put to bed like naughty children after a long day of fighting in the house
leaving you to carry on your better, more important things in peace.

I'll be honest that we were tired.
I'll be honest that we started to roll our eyes, and ignore the red flags, and give up on anything ever happening again.
But After all,
it had been a long decade
..and we'd seen more civil rights and Arab blood lost
than we ever thought possible.

Shock and awe, shock and awe,
..and then...
normal.


You know it is said,
after a trauma, an animal will isolate itself,
finding a quiet place to heal, before it joins the rest of its pack again;

Perhaps we have had to do that too.

Here we are, the long sleep of knitting bones and scars lifting,
awakening again to
what it's like to be together:
to do things as one.

Flexing muscles, pulling claws in and out
stretching and roaring like a lion with picket signs
we feel our feet on the ground again,
a pride of lioness, ready for hunt.

Beware.

Between the clouds of tear gas and grenade smoke,
our eyes glow fierce and golden with life.

We will not be told any more lies and believe them.
We will not accept any more rules, and follow them
We will not turn an eye against the factories and drug sales and slavery
those corporations endorse.

It is time we find our moral compass, and start singing our own songs again.

Have you heard?

We are lifting up our voices;
finding strength.


Bio:
Just the facts ma'am?


25, female, tall.
Relentless writer of all things, detail junkie, voracious consumer of children's literature.
Is generally woken up at night by thoughts of what it feels like to be a galaxy, or what
she's going to say next to whom. Just the RIGHT way this time.
Dedicated practitioner of Ninjutsu,
aspiring poet-warrior,
nomad.
Literature, Fine Arts, Africana Studies.
Dancer.
Activist.
Mess.



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Stephen Jarrell Williams

.
.
Ego

None of us
saw
what the world was coming to

we had ideas and even visions
but
nothing like the slap and roar of the end

children no longer born
women no longer loved
sea and sky no longer blue

earth, wood, and stone
falling
on every man so full of himself.


Bio:
Stephen Jarrell Williams loves to stay up all night and write with lightning bolts until they fizzle down behind the dark horizon.

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03 December 2011

Peleg Held

Eve Lyons

Peleg Held

.
.
Set The Hook Deep

This we remember.

Stretched out on the half-ruined,
in unlit clearings, we sing
of extinguished constellations.

Heads back, we sing into night.

A satellite falters on the wire,
and goes black in the belly of Cetus
as the orchard slips slowly into
the uncontrollable substance of forest.

Handfasted together,
in sight of no one,
stitching respite against
the sadness.

We coalesce,
The dark between stars.


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Eve Lyons

.
.
The Giving Tree Makes Me Want to Give Up On This World

In my world,
we bless our food
before every bite.
In my world,
we say thank you
after we are sated.
In my world,
we pay attention
to the impact of our words,
destructiveness of our footsteps,
we try not to add
to the darkness.
In Shel Silverstein's world
a boy takes and take and takes
a tree gives and gives and gives
until the tree is no more
and that is considered love.
In my world,
that's violence.


Bio:
I am a 30 something year old married queer woman living in Boston, MA.
I have been previously published in Fireweed, Concho River Review,
Labyrinth, Women’s Words, Woven, Sapphic Ink, Texas Observer, Word
Riot, Houston Literary Review, and two different anthologies. I have
performed in the now defunct Amazon Poetry Slam for many years and
recently had a ten minute play in the production Ten Tiny Shows in
Cambridge, MA.

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18 November 2011

From the editor

Cassandra Dallett

Pamela Gemme

Howie Good

Kristin LaTour

David Michael Joseph

Jack Peachum

JP Reese

Martin Willits, Jr

Bänoo Zan

From the editor

.
.
We don't make a habit of editorialising, here at protestpoems. It is warranted on this one occasion, though, I feel.

The world's very foundations are shaking in this time, and all of us are busy preserving what we have left of our lives, always conscious that we are here but for the grace of whatever gods or faiths we follow.

I wanted to apologise for protestpoems becoming, to all intents and purposes, an irregular publication. That's because I also am exercising self-preservation in view of the state of the nations.

Thanks to all of you who keep reading protestpoems, and thanks to all our contributors. Please don't ever give up on us.

Richard Pierce-Saunderson



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Cassandra Dallett

.
.
Fleet Week

A destroyer by our side
lined with jets
war is so distant from here
we can comfortably clap and scream
our applause at fighter jets
A helicopter plane hovers over the bay
spraying water
making us part of some Hollywood version
of the destruction
we visit on foreign lands
ingraining death so deeply in them
they weave rugs
of tanks and automatic weapons
gone are the plants and animals you might expect
in the weaving of hand died threads.
Gone is everything
but dust
it seems to us
the entire middle east some bombed out
orange powder
blowing in the wind
the cradle of the world
just sand?
we are green and blue burning the petro
in smart little Hondas
waving flags
like fascists but not coming off like fanatics
they are the flag burners
the lighters of effigies
we are the sane
in cubicles of recycled paper
moving numbers across computer screens
calling them debts and investments
green zeros disappear off those screens
like a hand held calculator when you hit the Big C
it’s just gone
and they try to explain tax brackets, dividends,
bonuses and Nasdeq
we nod our head so as not to appear ignorant
clap after the flying toys
with exhausts of red white and blue
we nod and clap
and make excuses for filling up our tanks
throwing plastic in the ocean
torturing taxi drivers accused of terrorism
we tell our kids these big missiles
are cool
even after crying through Vietnam films
“We just do it”
another generation eaten limbless
and witless
with the craziness of fighting
for their country.


Bio:
Cassandra Dallett lives in Oakland, CA. Cassandra is in need of a job and a vacation, but writes poetry and has published at Hip Mama, The Chiron Review, Bleed Me A River, Ascent Aspirations, Criminal Class Review, Nibble, and The Milvia Street Journal among others. Look for more links on cassandradallett.com


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Pamela Gemme

.
.
Disaster in the Gulf

Yellow slickers glint like lit
matches on the water.
Salt rises frozen on the cruel rust bleed.
The working walk the inkwell girders.
The answer to everything is to dig
up the blow-out- preventer.
On their pedestal, they gather the belted
bodies labeled BP.
Menhaden belly up in buttered foam.
On this blue/green fallacy, the tide
affirms the consequences,
the question is begged:
Why blame God for any of this?
The earth insurmountable turns the wake.


Bio:
Pamela Gemme lives in Leicester, Massachusetts. She has several online and print publications.

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Howie Good

.
.
Occupy Poetry

If nobody
tells anybody,
how would
anybody
ever know?
My words
long to be
as bees
making honey
in a lion’s
head.


Bio:
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love Dagger from Right Hand Pointing, To Shadowy Blue from Gold Wake Press, and Love in a Time of Paranoia from Diamond Point Press.


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Kristin LaTour

.
.
A Letter to a Daughter

I do not know where you went
after the man with the gentle face
and large brown eyes took your
hand. Your father was given
money, and I was given tears
and later, a branch on my back
for not stopping them.

Soon you will be ten, be taller
than when I last saw you.
The grass grows as high as my shoulder
but you were already beyond that
seeing far into the distance.
What do you see
in the land where you are?

I eat but nothing has taste.
I wish for sweetness where you are
and good meat. Soon you’ll be 16
and be wanting to know what I have
to tell you about children and marriage
the things I did not think of when you were
eight and in my arms.

I send my message on monsoon clouds
to blow through your hair
and on the beaks of small birds
to tweet into your windows.
There is more to life than what is given to us.
There is more in what is taken away.


Bio:
I'm still teaching at a community college outside Chicago where my stated job is to teach writing, and my real job is to get people to think about the world around them. I have a poem about immigration issues in the US forthcoming in Dirtcakes. My website is www.kristinlatour.com.

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David Michael Joseph

.
.
Standing Still in Palos Verdes

I followed the leader
But he was following someone else.
I asked the wise man for answers.
He said he had to think about it.
I asked the strong man to give me to give me a hand.
He said he had to ask the stronger man for help.
I asked the captain to take me across the channel.
He said he had to ask the first mate to take the wheel.
I tried to read the dictionary backward.
I tried to run a mile but found I was running in place.
I prayed to God for help.
He was in Palos Verdes playing golf.
With Donald Trump and John Elway.


Bio:
I'm a Filmmaker, Poetry/Short story author and Screenwriter from New Jersey living in Los Angeles. I have a passion and love for poetry. I always include poetic prose in my filmmaking. I have created four short films. Shadows of Sepulveda and C.A.k.E, the most recent.

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Jack Peachum

.
.
The Conservative Candidate

Behold– the candidate speaks–
feet firmly anchored in the past!
See– what a miracle– it stands upright–
almost like a creature with a spine!
Flashes of human intellect, small wit, small empathy-
brews here a stew of human viciousness–
darkness where a heart should beat–
and a conscience the size of a mustard seed.


Bio:
Jack Peachum is a poet/ author who has published widely on the internet & in print journals in the last few years. He is shy & somewhat reclusive & resides in a small town in southern Virginia with a bulldog named Eleanor. He's the author of one chapbook, Polyamory, and a novel, Tempest.

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JP Reese

.
.
Leviathan

The act did not begin here in this room. No. It did not
start with this rendition, this hooded man stumbling over cement.
It began instead in an airport in Boston, in a lawyer's precision,
in a president's fear that history would not be with him.
Bones lifted by a shirtfront, the man rises, then lies tilted, neck
arched, his world narrowed to a damp cloth that smells of dead men.
His musk lets go, dripping shamefully beneath the board
to mix with water that erases air. His breath, no breath.
His terror, all terror. Callused hands hold the ropes as he strains,
his heels kick at heaven, tendons snake along each trussed arm.
Outside, twilight falls, a desert darkens, and every belief chokes
on swirls of blood and doctrine in a place beyond a law,
without a name.


Bio:
JP Reese has creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction published or forthcoming in many online and print journals. She teaches English at a small college in Texas and is a poetry editor for THIS Literary Magazine, thiszine.org, and Connotation Press: An Online Artifact., connotationpress.com. Her work can be read at Entropy: A Measure of Uncertainty jpreese.tumblr.com.

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Martin Willitts, Jr

.
.
What About This Is Not Clear
Based on Occupy Wall Street

We do not need a handout; we need a hand up.
We do not want to destroy the financial system;
we just do not want the financial system to destroy us.

We do not special favors;
we realize that special favors belong only to
the big corporations and banks
that send away our jobs,
waste our money, and demand a bail-out,
then use the bailout money to give bonus
for poor manager performances
and to executives, who created the financial mess,
and furthermore used taxpayer money
to lobby against the taxpayers
in order to get more preferential treatment.

What part of this is wrong? What part of this is not clear?

Many of us want to work, at a decent job,
and be treated decently.
We are not ‘hippies’. That ended in the 1960’s.
We are not radicals, communists,
or any other negative term given to us.
We ARE the PEOPLE.
We are an 87 year old grandmother
worried about her grandchildren’s future;
we are the hard hat who cannot find construction work;
we are the teacher, the nurse, the shop keeper;
we are the recent graduate
with over $50,000 of loans
and no clue who will hire them;
we are the union member who was laid off
as a connivance to limited budgets;
we are the Maine Sergeant that faced off thirty police,
telling them that we do have First Amendment Rights
and this is not a police state yet;
we are the Vietnam Veteran
who was shot in the head with a rubber bullet;
we are the former bank manager,
one of 30,000 laid off after Wall Street downsizing;
in other words,
we ARE the People; not the enemy.

We are the ones who elect politicians
who are supposed to speak for us; not against us,
not to work against us, not to make things work against us.

What part of this is wrong? What part of this is not clear?

The Republicans praised the Tea Party
although their stand against TARPS
is the same as the Wall Street Protesters.
They praised Arab Spring
whose complaints are the same as the Wall Street Protesters.
The situation is too close to home,
too uncomfortable for their real support’s tastes,
so they accuse the protesters as being lazy,
ungrateful, and greedy. Yet they welcome the Tea Party
because it supported them into office.
If one was not true, then the other would not be true.

What part of this is wrong? What part of this is not clear?

Vote the real terrorists out of office.
Change the rules.
Do not let corporations spend endless amounts of money
supporting certain politicians
and paying for lobbyist to promote certain dangerous bills,
when they could be hiring people.

What part of this is wrong? What part of this is not clear?

If certain politicians had to take pay cuts,
lose their benefits,
not be able to include their pay towards retirement,
and have to get their own insurance
while having pre-existing conditions,
then they might consider more carefully
how it effects the voters, instead of their enablers.

What part of this is wrong?
What part of this is not clear?

Pass it on.


Bio:
Martin Willitts Jr was nominated for two Best of The Net awards and his 5th Pushcart award. . He has had seven poetry chapbooks accepted this year including “True Simplicity” (Poets Wear Prada Press, 2011), “My Heart Is Seven Wild Swans Lifting” (Slow Trains, 2011), “Why Women Are A Ribbon Around A Bomb” (Last Automat, 2011), “Art Is Always an Impression of What an Artist Sees” (Muse Café, 2011), “Protest, Petition, Write, Speak: Matilda Joslyn Gage Poems” (Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, 2011), How To Find Peace” (Kattywumpus Press, 2011), and “Secrets No One Wants To Talk About” (Dos Madres Press, 2011). He is a Quaker and they are used to protesting things they feel are just plain wrong.

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Bänoo Zan

.
.
Iran (1)

I am forced—

stripped down
to a handful of dust

The waves of my hair
shorn

hands and feet
tied down
to procrustean
borders of subjection

my vagina bleeding
in explosions of testosterone

I am the witness
to my archetypal nightmare

My sons lusting after me
in incestuous copulations of power

My daughters offering me
to rapists
as their scapegoat

I am alluring to invaders
who demand
a fake orgasmic pleasure
in denial of pain—

a prostitute smile
I cannot afford

thirsting after my dark juices
to keep their industrious
phalluses going

No-one hears me
in the middle of
the gang-rape

And when mock-trials
are staged
I am called to testify
against myself:

I am a terrorist—
to colonialists—
I terrify ugliness
by my independent beauty

Accused of profanity—
I dance lifeless
hanging from sacred gallows

Like Tahmina.................................... (2)
I have bedded “heroes”
who have slain the young

Like Jocasta
I have bedded “heroes”
who have slain the old

And this is not
my first time:

I am the woman
with a history

You
who stand in line
waiting for your turn:

You
cannot maintain
that erection
forever


Notes
(1) Iran, is not only the name of the country, but also a feminine first name in Iran.
(2) In the Persian epic, The Shahnameh, Tahmina is the wife to Rostam, the epic hero who leaves her not knowing she is pregnant. Their son, Sohrab, gets killed by his renowned father while he is on a quest to find him.


Bio:
Bänoo Zan landed in Canada in 2010. In her country of origin (Iran) she taught English literature at universities. She has been writing poetry since the age of ten, and has published poetry, criticism, biography, translations and a book , The Song of Phoenix: Life and Works of Sylvia Plath, reprinted in 2010. She writes in Persian and English.


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16 October 2011

Peter Baxter

Julie Beckham

Paul Hellweg

Howie Good

Irène Mathieu

Abrafo Shanti

Scott Owens

Peter Baxter

.
.
The Merchants of Menace

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It drops as the gentle rain from heaven
upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesses him that gives and him that takes.
The mightiest within the mightiest; it becomes
the banker better than his yacht, houses and credit cards.

Or his interceptor that shows the force of his financial power,
the attribute to awe and respect,
wherein doth sit the want and fears of presidents.
But mercy is above, all the interest paid;
it is enthroned in the hearts of rulers;
it is an attribute of God himself;
and earthly power doth then show like God's
when mercy seasons payments made

Today the Bankers got their pound of flesh,
Taken without a drop of their debtors blood
By trickery and stealth they sold a bond anew
Conditioning that only the bankers on forfeit would be paid
Today their massive bonuses just keep on rolling in
Thanks to discarding rules that friendly politicians gave

The few over the many have once again prevailed
Taking the food from mouths of babes never leaving just a scrap
So the world does bleed and people to riot make
Named and shamed by the media clapping all in glee
Whilst the bankers continue in golden silent anonymity
Their selfish genes now do in confidence grow
Sneering at the masses all suffering down below
But altruistic genes will in their children grow.


Bio:
Peter Baxter lives in Brighton.

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Julie Beckham

.
.
Unmaking Adam

Adam did it well,
there are names
all over this planet,
names inscribed,
embossed,
signed into books,
onto baseballs and checks
and paintings, names that
move and shape and hide
what is really there;
these names, they are
(in all cases) stage names--
Hitler, Ghandi,Madonna--
they are brands,
they are made so you
can be found and held,
so that you will
remain
a size that is catchable;
do not let a word be
all you mean;
do not let it
make you (it has already!);
it is one costume only,
one purple sheet and
feather hat,
one leader, believer, dancer;
Christ was not Christ,
nor do you live on a line,
or through another's body,
in a mouth or mind;
be as large and bright as you are
in every direction,
(not just left to right
or right to left)
be that which precedes names,
that which blinded Adam
through the trees
and made him mute


Bio:
Julie Beckham's fiction has been published in Ottawa Arts Review, Grimm Magazine, and Boston Literary Magazine. She has also been short listed for the 2009 Fish Short Story Prize and has received an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train 2009 Very Short Fiction Competition. She has an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia is currently based in London.


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Paul Hellweg

.
.
Prey for War

To endure war
is only
meaningful
if you come out
alive
and
not too badly
damaged
at the other
end,
but to endure
simply in order to
endure
until
there is
nothing
left
to lose,
that has been
and still is
the unfortunate
plight
of countless millions,
and there will never be peace
as long as
those martyred souls
fail to haunt
all our dreams.

Acknowledgment: Modeled after Bukowski’s “her only son”


On a Battlefield the Flies Don’t Care Who Wins

On a battlefield the flies don’t care who wins,
nor do worms and maggots,
nor does the ground
eagerly waiting to receive
blood and tissue and fat and bone,
assuming, of course, that your side has lost.
Victors get to carry away their dead,
and their flies are left
to fend for themselves,
c'est la vie.

Acknowledgment: Title from William Stafford


Bio:
Paul Hellweg is a member of both Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He has had over one hundred poems published since his debut in 2009. He won the 2009 Coatlism Press full-length poetry book contest, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For more, please see: www.paulhellweg.com


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Howie Good

.
.
Word Problem

If 1,800 of our soldiers
went into battle,
and only 400 survived,
how many clawed the grass
before they died?

(Please show all your work.)


Bio:
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011).

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Irène Mathieu

.
.
the tenth eleventh

it’s twelve in the morning
of the tenth eleventh
since it happened.
september, that is.

the breaking, I’m speaking.
I mean the mountains,
when they dissolved into
dusty shadows at our feet,
powdered into lungs like
the fog of bone sand in
the air in a place the world
would have otherwise
forgotten. it used to be quiet
in our valley, masha’Allah,
just the granddaughters growing
their small curls, and the
grandfathers growing old with
the smoke of pipes and stories.

I mean the windows,
when they hemorrhaged,
bodies like blood cells
flowing onto the sidewalk,
the city in screams,
the big apple cored. it used to
be proud in our city, God bless,
but fear has crept among us,
lies on its flat belly beneath
the subways and hisses,
sends its spawn streaming
to all counties in our country.
we used to talk about the
melting pot, but now we never
mention the cauldron in
which we are slowly boiling.

I mean the fig trees,
the fire trucks, the orphans,
the droughts, the body bags,
the bomb-scarred walls,
the ashes, the incantations,
the wails, the vows,
the grit, the shrapnel,
the questions, the infernos,
the boots, the burkas,
the machine guns, the blankets,
the goats, the flags,
the mothers, the winds,
the granddaughters,
the grandfathers,
the smoke,
the stories.

it’s the tenth eleventh at twelve.
the memory in death
asks us to live
better.
God willing,
insha’Allah,
the eleventh eleventh
will be a less broken
september.


sarajevo

there is freedom even in
oppressive cigarette smoke.
in this part of Europe they toss
ashes like laughs;
powder keg suspended in
an Adriatic embrace.
the time is taut;
their faces drawn.
the call to prayer
echoes from minarets
and it sets her wings alight;
but those lips behind their clouds
of smoke draw in, feverish,
hear the bombs again.
allahu akbar cry the mosques,
and she agrees, but her
price for this magic was an
airline ticket; they paid in
Srebrenica bombs.


border control

his deepest fear was stagnation,
un-movimiento that can capture only

a Haitian born a mountain range away
from Port-au-Prince, Dominican

dulce pooling everywhere but in
the barracks of bateyes.

so for fear he exchanged lunches
for bus trips to Santo Domingo,

where he could certify belonging
with a passport, a ticket to motion

and permission to stay in the
only place he’d ever been.


what do you offer at checkpoints,
outstretch with trembling hands like

one of five daily prayers to
machines guns that make a steel fence?

some passports are etched in
Gazan gazes, refusals to blink,

or the cuneiform on weathered palms
like Rosetta stones of veins and skin.


where I live border control means
brown control: keep the dark-eyed out,

the babies bred into cartels and the
Aztecs’ ancestors who still live under

the Cortes curse confined to Ciudad Juarez,
where women are becoming an

endangered species. if the brown make it
past marble-eyed khakis and are caught

driving, shopping, loving, or learning,
ask them for a passport. if they don’t

speak English, handcuff them –
that’s border control.


Bio:
Irène Mathieu is a writer and aspiring physician/human rights advocate/global health policy-maker/community organizer from Virginia. She currently attends Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Previous publications include writings in The Lindenwood Review, The Caribbean Writer, Muzzle Magazine, Damselfly Press, Magnapoets, 34th Parallel, and Haven Magazine. She was a finalist in the Jane’s Press Stories Foundation’s 2010 poetry contest, and her photography and a painting have also appeared in print, in 34th Parallel, The Meadowland Review, and Hinchas de Poesía.

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Abrafo Shanti

.
.
Orc Occupies Wall St.

In the foaming,
fermenting, and simmering pot of the diamond-stud district
Orc enters New York
Walks up, walks down
Wall St.
Waves of sentience crossing bridges, stopping traffic

Orc has entered New York

And echoing from the curling red lips of Brother West,
(the same color of all blood-laden lips)

"Don't be afraid to say 'revolution.'"


America is fainting
fading
the citizens of New York
close their books and lock their diamond chests
as the human jewels in the crowd
protest

"America, change the transistor in your heart and breast!"

America, America
is fainting,
fading
like a blade of grass
from green to yellow to brown
in winter dusk and ivory surround
and the descent of the sun

masters of ecstasy call us forward and back
from
the Arab Spring to a Continental fall

"Don't be afraid to say 'revolution'!"

The world must stand still
for the eyes of the world to see its body

Traffic must stop

You are the eye that scans the glittering globe
a witness of body and mind
to wails and pains in the shattered earlobe
and thus
you are the lips to proclaim
the wrongs and writhes of conscience
the deafening screams of thunderous wails
the rhythms of earthen sights gone unseen
beneath the glare of capital's sheen
and
all life is holy,
life ought to delight in life

How do we bring back the sun?


Bio:
I teach Philosophy at a university in America. The impetus for this poem emerged in me as a response to what I see happening right now as interpreted through the writings of William Blake.


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Scott Owens

.
.
Nightmare Haiku

without a cold war
those who feed on fear learn which
buttons they can push

giving in to fear
we all become weapons
of mass destruction

economics--
what hasn't been justified
by necessity

policy insures
an unfettered flow of dead
dismembered, displaced

instead of dollars
and cents when the gas pump rolls
faces of the dead

come to liberate
mission accomplished we leave
many thousand gone

ten years past
still such dependence
on vengeance

dangerous to say
America is just
America


Bio:
Recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Scott Owens is the author of 8 collections of poetry and over 900 published poems in journals including Georgia Review, North American Review, Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Poetry East among others. He is the founder of Poetry Hickory, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and 234, and vice president of the Poetry Council of NC. He teaches at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, NC .


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30 July 2011

Raud Kennedy

Scott Owens

I. B. Rad

Martin Willitts Jr

Raud Kennedy

.
.
Afghanistan

In bed, prolonging the moments
before pushing back the covers.
The voice on NPR, a reporter in Afghanistan,
refers to the spring fighting season
as if he’s announcing the opening
of ski season at Mt. Hood Meadows.
I brush my teeth, minty fresh, extra whitener.
Death tolls from suicide bombings.
Toweling off after showering, it’s total US casualties,
a number that could be the population figure
of a small city. A city of dead young men and women.
The refreshing lather lifts my beard
as my triple bladed razor shaves my face kissable smooth.
Tell me again why we are there while I am here.


Bio:
Raud Kennedy is a writer and dog trainer in Portland, Oregon. To learn about his most recent work, Portland, a collection of short stories. www.raudkennedy.com




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Scott Owens

.
.
Losing Light

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity - Yeats

Days count down towards the end,
each one with less light
than the one before it.
The vision of hope’s flame
illuminating night and day
seems a distant memory,
perhaps never more than dream,
belief displayed on imagination’s screen
transformed by necessity of compromise,
disillusionment of dreamers,
idealists, hopeless romantics
too quick to feel betrayed.
The question is how to survive
in a world that drains light away.


Bio:
Recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Scott Owens is the author of 8 collections of poetry and over 900 published poems in journals including Georgia Review, North American Review, Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Poetry East among others. He is the founder of Poetry Hickory, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and 234, and vice president of the Poetry Council of NC. He teaches at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, NC. www.scottowenspoet.com




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I. B. Rad

.
.
The New Man

In a bygone Soviet era
Marxist commentators constantly extolled
the advent of a "new man;"
that is, the evolution of its citizens
(both men and women)
into consummate comrades
fit to forge a workers paradise.
Analogously, crony capitalism demands
its own species of new man,
a pliable hermaphrodite,
so in America's rising utopia
corporate/ government/ Wall Street stewards
are no longer requisite
since our ultimate citizens
will go fuck themselves.


Bio:
Ms Rad, I.B., and wonderdog work and play in New York City.

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Martin Willitts Jr

.
.
What Has The World Come To?

What has the world come to?
We take advantage of others for our own purposes.

Some terrorists captured a nine year old girl
as she was going to school
which was forbidden to girls.
She had a small space of her face exposed,
which was definitely against religion.
We may think that this is harsh,
but that is their belief. This does not mean
her kidnapping was necessary.

They strapped a bomb on her
and sent her to a public market to blow herself up.
When she did not comply, was she defying religion?
The men who sent her
thought their mission was righteous.

What is conviction but failure to see a better way?
How can we rest the disquieted spirit after this?


Bio:
Martin Willitts Jr recent poems appeared in Naugatuck River Review, MiPOesias, Flutter, Atticusbooks.net, Muse Café, and Caper Journal. He was recently nominated for two Best of The Net awards and his 5th Pushcart award. He has new chapbooks: “The Girl Who Sang Forth Horses” (Pudding House Publications, 2010), “Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for Cezanne” (Finishing Line Press, 2010), “True Simplicity” (Poets Wear Prada Press, 2011), “My Heart Is Seven Wild Swans Lifting” (Slow Trains, 2011), “Why Women Are A Ribbon Around A Bomb” (Last Automat, 2011), and “Art Is Always an Impression of What an Artist Sees” (Muse Café, 2011).



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18 June 2011

Diana Woodcock

Michael Gregory

Diana Woodcock

.
.
Year of Lhasa

Around the yaks’ necks, golden flecks of
sunlight fall on timbrel bells. Leavening
the city with prayer, pilgrims arrive each
day in droves. Dust clouds rise like incense
off unpaved roads. Monks chant prayers,
making ritual stairs to heaven from palace,
marketplace and monastery. Rancid yak
butter tea stinks in musty shops and cafes.

Wind whimpers through cracks in the wall.
Bits of sod roof fall onto our bed. All day the
dread of sunset and the cold of night. Dagger-
like icicles cling to laundry hung drying on
the balcony. Two Chinese men play elephant chess
while keeping one eye on us, the range
of the Himalayas wrapped round us all—stark
and gray save for their snow caps, each peak sharp
as the angel shark’s backward curving teeth.

All day pilgrims wind their way around the Jokhang
Temple, chanting and spinning hand-held prayer
wheels. Nowhere to go—this city always their
destination— they move in slow motion, some so
old or sick they’ve come to die in this sacred place.

Before nightfall, they settle by the river,
light their fires with yakpats, play homemade lutes
and reed pipes, drink butter tea while their yaks
graze and the haze of their fires rises like incense
over the river, drifting with their prayers and the
flashing shorebirds on the shifting wind across
the Himalayas and the closed border to the exiled
Dalai Lama.

Around the necks of the young girls, ivory
pearls of moonlight fall on stringed shells.
Every night every one of them dreaming
of that thousand-mile flight.



Bio:
Diana Woodcock is the author of Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, which won the 2010 Vernice Quebodeaux International Poetry Prize for Women and is forthcoming from Little Red Tree Publishing. Her three chapbooks include In the Shade of the Sidra Tree,), a nominee for the Library of Virginia poetry award (Finishing Line Press), Mandala (Foothills Publishing), and Travels of a Gwai Lo—the title poem of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Toadlily Press. Currently teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, she has lived and worked in Tibet, Macau and Thailand.

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Michael Gregory

.
.
Remembering

Speaking truth to power
Fighting fire with fire
Keeping alive to fight again
the battle if not the war

There are many ways to resist

witnessing
testifying
putting money where your mouth is
body on the line
a monkey wrench in the works

Many ways to prepare

remembering
the body bags
the mustard gas
the Kamikazes
Ghost Dancers
suicide bombers

remembering
Buchenwald
Hiroshima
Rwanda

remembering who paid
for surgical strikes
smart bombs
strategic rapes
tactical bombers
death squads
mass graves

There are many ways to resist

lying down on the job
lying in
lying in wait
instead of just lying

remembering
Pearl Harbor
the Gulf of Tonkin
the Bay of Pigs
the Pueblo, the Maine
Abu Ghraib
Guantánamo

the broomstick in Brooklyn
Rodney King in L.A.

the ace of clubs the king of diamonds
the pentagon the tower
connecting the dots
the poppy fields to the oil fields
the cotton fields to the coke plantations

boardrooms to party platforms
bank accounts to body counts

world banks
world trade organization
world trade center
world market
stock market
slave market
new world order

self-interest to vested interest
interest rates to tax breaks

sweat shops to laundered money
to keeping up with the Joneses

civil rights to human rights
birth rights to last rites

remembering
what wasn’t on TV
what isn’t on the history channel

Operation Chaos
Project Phoenix
Operation Mindbend

debt debit deficit doubt

Project Artichoke
Project Naomi
Project Monarch

the High Arctic Auroral Research Project
the harp angels don’t play

remembering who you are
remembering who you aren’t


Bio:
An internationally-recognized toxics activist for many years, Michael Gregory's poems have appeared widely online and in print journals. He is the author of several books and chapbooks, including most recently, re: Play (Pudding House 2009). Mr America Drives his Car: Poems 1978-2010 is forthcoming from Education in Reverse Press.




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21 May 2011

Darrell Petska

Alan Garvey

Darrell Petska

.
.
Reckonings: Choeung Ek

This poet's life at 26
assumed the luxuries of love
expansive hope
happiness unchecked--
And you?

That year at Choeung Ek
the killings began:
Vietnamese and Thais,
Chinese, Buddhists and Muslims,
thinkers, poets, all.

That orchard turned killing field
consumed the blood of thousands:
men, women, their sweet children all
clubbed, stabbed, poisoned,
tossed en masse into lowly pits.

Visit today and see
their many skulls, their bones
that surface with heavy rains,
their bits of clothing, their teeth,
their gaping graves

the grass does its best to cover,
the trees sighing overhead:
thus we blame Pol Pot
as we blamed Hitler
as we blamed Rwanda's Hutu.

Is this poet's life at 63
a wiser year?
Did the Dark Ages end?
Choeung Ek was yesterday.
Some were 26. And you?

Today we do our work,
love our families, write poetry,
seek the good in life.
But explain abiding love,
great poetry, such graves we dig

and toss each other in.
These killing fields pursue us
asking where we were
what we did and
have the guilty stepped forward.


Bio:
I am a retired editor-adult education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. We have much to answer for over our history. By exploring questions of responsibility and culpability, sometimes we find answers that help us to make sense of our actions, or to act so that we can move on.

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Alan Garvey

.
.
Justice

In the beginning was the Word
then came the uttered word
the written word
the printed word
the lying word
word of agreement
word of betrayal
word begging for mercy
word pointing fingers at friends
word howling innocence and corruption
word typed and numbered
word as evidence of duplicity
entered and logged in court records
as received truth which all know
in their hearts is a lie, lie, lie
word repudiating acts of good faith
word sweating under strain
in front of many cameras
word that made no difference
because it remained silent
word that might have been and offered solace
word we have seen and will never forget
word inciting to strike
refusing to be complicit
word illegal when uttered
or written and copied on paper
word of rejection rejecting all
but where the word comes from


Bio:
Alan Garvey’s third collection of poetry, ‘Terror Háza’, was published by Lapwing (Belfast) in 2009. His work is represented in various magazines and anthologies. He graduated with a MA in Creative Writing; and has read in Toronto and Newfoundland, and worked in Budapest, courtesy of the Irish Arts Council. He has worked as an arts administrator, part-time lecturer and creative writing tutor, and is a contributing editor to ‘The Gloom Cupboard’.


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30 April 2011

Gerardo Mena

Gerardo Mena

.
.
Good Pilgrim, I Beseech You

Buckets of flame, handfuls
of tongue, a pocket full of spit
and dagger words.

Good pilgrim, I beseech you.
Do not sleep upon
..your throne of
teeth.
Be feral.
Climb the
towers of jet and cinder.
Dance at their
coming.

Good pilgrim. Oh Pilgrim.
Lay your head upon
the roadside. Drink
..to the levees. Shed your
sinew and let it wash to the spillway.
Rejoice at the coming ash.


Bio:
I am a decorated Iraqi Freedom Veteran. I spent six years in Special Operations with the Reconnaissance Marines and was awarded a Navy Achievement Medal with a V for Valor for multiple acts of heroism while under enemy fire.


I won the "2010 War Poetry" contest sponsored by Winningwriters and I have poems published or forthcoming in Diagram, The New Mexico Poetry Review, the Nashville Review, the Barely South Review, and War, Literature & the Arts.



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16 April 2011

Elvira Basevich

Frances Drabick

Eve Lyons

Martin Willitts, Jr

Elvira Basevich

.
.
The Fire of History

My grandmother clasped the feathers
that were loosened from her pillow
until they fused into a damp tuft;
her words find me as the radio blares.
A clock cannot help the sound of its ticking
and the robins, their diurnal chirping.

‘What good was
.............this life
that even in its final, weak
........flicker
...........wounds me?’

.......‘Where is your father?
..............................together we can remember
the garden of the wooden, plain-faced town
............we fled from, where I passed my girlhood.
................How those blossoms, knots of
..orange and green bulbs, emanated
a dim, confused radiance!

I want to remember that garden
before it was
consumed
by the fire
..........that
...............fell
....................from German airplanes.’

‘He’s not here, Babushka.’
‘O.’

‘my girl, I love you.'
................I know.'
'O.'

'Then there was that woman with your name, Elvira, the daughter of a Kazahki neighbor
with three babes as thin as boards who gave herself to soldiers in exchange for bread and
..................dark sugar she measured out in quarters of a gram.
.................................She died
..................in a field of cauliflower-colored airplane parts
..................clutching
her infant son,
.................................and even now I can feel her
.....................................dying
...............beneath the endless sky, and that foliage,
beneath that foliage that lazily
......hung
........where the oak tree bloomed igneous metal.
............She was a
..................good woman but life doesn’t deliberate virtue
..............and it
......too is hard
for good women like us.’

Virginal and cold, as if blown in from the Volga,
an augury of fire ignites all the channels
on the radio dial. ‘Are they really preparing
for another war?’ she asks. The robins
suddenly fly off the lindens crowding the windows,
as if to avoid her visage as I begin to answer.


Bio:
I am a philosophy student finishing her BA in June at CUNY Hunter College and will enter a doctoral philosophy program in the fall at the CUNY Graduate Center. I principally research German Idealism, Marx and the Frankfurt School. I have worked as an Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies and the Journal of Social Philosophy. Although I pursue philosophy professionally, I have been writing poetry since I was fourteen, drawing considerably from history and my family members’ experiences in the former Soviet Union and as immigrants in the United States. I have never published.

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Frances Drabick

.
.
Can I Buy An O?


Obama, OPEC, Oprah, Omar,
Osama, Oz, Orman, O’Reilly.
They shoot for the moon, moolah, mogul-hood,
blind-bombing, false freedoms, body benefits,
busts to boons, and pointless positions
of antagonisms; for power points over: your thoughts,
your votes, your decisions & delusions,
your oil, your rights, your spiritual and health paths.
Some are poltroons, orators, confessors, popular,
oppressors, and nearly all, are self-ordained oracles:
an ‘oligon of the millionaires who want to sell you
an idea as they run the boob-tube like a school room
where we sit and stare, as typhoons of debt blow overhead,
and floods knock our homes off their footings;
where poorness pools at our feet, and too many nations of
citizens and soldiers ooze their marrow on dry sands
for a question no one knows and no one answers.
I’d like to buy an E and A, for Enough Already.


Bio:
I am a grassroots, emerging poet. Pushcart nomination in '09. Poems in Off the Coast from '09-'11.


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Eve Lyons

.
.
Our Doughboys Aren’t Rising Today


The last surviving
World War One vet
died in West Virginia today.
Corporal Frank Buckles was
one hundred and ten years old.
Born in 1901, he lived long enough
to see two centuries,
two world wars,
two police actions,
two more undeclared
illegal wars.
Have we learned our lesson yet?
What was the lesson we were learning?

The last surviving
World War One vet
died in West Virginia today.
Today, we have no draft.
Today, our wars are fought by paid militia,
the battle scars are kept
off our television screen,
out of newspapers.
Yet still soldiers keep on fighting,
poor people still sign up to battle,
since it’s the one way they can get
health insurance and go to college.

We’ve learned war is good for business,
bad for public relations.

Frank Buckles was born by lantern light in Missouri,
Dropped out of school at sixteen,
Lied and snuck his way into the army
Only to outlive all the other doughboys.

The doughboys fought when war meant something
even if what it meant made no sense.
War is just another business venture
lining the pockets of corporations,
making citizens into indentured servants.

This isn’t what anybody dies for.

Bio:
I am a 30 something year old married queer woman living in Boston, MA.
I have been previously published in Fireweed, Concho River Review,
Labyrinth, Women’s Words, Woven, Sapphic Ink, Texas Observer, Word
Riot, Houston Literary Review, and two different anthologies. I have
performed in the now defunct Amazon Poetry Slam for many years and
recently had a ten minute play in the production Ten Tiny Shows in
Cambridge, MA.

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Martin Willitts, Jr

.
.
How Can I Be Silent?


There are so many things that are wrong,
it is impossible to wring my hands of all of them.
They need to duck tape my mouth.
They are probably reading this.
Nothing is secret anymore.
It hasn’t been secret for a long time;
we just chose to ignore it.
They do not want us to remember the past.
They tell us to brighten our teeth and keep to the right.
But what is right?
They tell me what is right, in my sleep,
when I eat cornflakes, when I tie my shoes.
There are many things to believe
but only if you believe in the right things.
I will dental floss my car.
Some of the messages I tend to get confused.
Greenhouse gas is good for you.
Unions are causing the collapse of millionaires.
We should accept third world wages
and perhaps secretly dream we all become slaves.
This is right-thinking.
If this is right-thinking, then I want none of it.
When a nuclear power plant releases gas in Japan
hovering over the world like a glowing dragon, the press
pretends it is not serious. When genocide continues,
it is considered good business practices. When we drill
for natural gas with carcinogenetic chemicals
which makes water fizz out of the tap, the companies
say it is safe to drink but will not drink it themselves.
We all allow this to happen.
It is simple to ignore the news, be glazed
in front of the television, drink tepid tea and vote
whatever we are told is right.
We believe whatever we are told.
If you are reading this then you are being subversive.
You will be investigated and you will enjoy it.
You are being followed. Don’t look.
Act like everything is normal.
Drink wholesome milk.
Guess the right price along with the Price Is Right.
Buy a vowel from Vanna.
Drive the biggest gas guzzler and be proud.
Stand in the unemployment line and hope you're acceptable.
Worry about the poor misfortunate billionaires.
They have it tougher than the rest of us.
Pity the poor billionaire.
Right makes Right.
Left makes everything dangerous.
Get it right; or get out.
If you are reading this, you are “undesirable”.
If you stopped reading this a long time ago, you are lying.
Corrupt greed is good for you.
Just remember that and you will be OK.
Silence sounds like this…….


Bio:
Martin Willitts Jr recent poems appeared in Naugatuck River Review, MiPOesias, Flutter, Atticusbooks.net, Muse Café, and Caper Journal. He was recently nominated for two Best of The Net awards and his 5th Pushcart award. He has four new chapbooks: “The Girl Who Sang Forth Horses” (Pudding House Publications, 2010), “Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for Cezanne” (Finishing Line Press, 2010), “True Simplicity” (Poets Wear Prada Press, 2011), and “My Heart Is Seven Wild Swans Lifting” (Slow Trains, 2011).

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02 April 2011

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Janice D. Soderling

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

.
.
the angle of history


What symbols shall we use now to describe the end of time?
The old ones are dessicated and impotent;
the eagle plummets from its gyre;
the hollow man totters in his wasteland.

Time reaches its apogee and the world shudders imperceptibly
as its momentum shifts to adjust for the angle of descent.
We are not in the time of the fall but instead are merely mundanely
sliding down the slope of an unimagined history.

We plunge down this history without coordinates,
benjamin’s angel tumbling behind us
along this history without end;
this history without significance.

We confess that the future is a construct to comfort ourselves,
clinging to it as a child clutches her blanket.
Now speechless and stunned in the presence of death,
we reinvent immortality, we become cyborg and virtual.

Long-ago, poiesis sufficed but now we makers defy death
by becoming that which we make, impatient to rise again,
resurrecting the old myths of rebirth and regeneration,
disdaining to ask what manner of monster arises from our ashes.

We design ways to penetrate time and space.
We elevate our tools as icons, their use as sacrament.
Machines appear to us in our dreams
and we put them on as once a bride donned her gown and veil.

We lay down upon the altar of technology,
offering ourselves as sacrifice to an unknown god.


Bio:
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Oklahoma. Her most recent collection of poetry is the award-winning Work Is Love Made Visible (West End Press, 2009) She is the Editor of Mongrel Empire Press and a member of the faculty of the Red Earth Creative Writing MFA.


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Janice D. Soderling

.
.
Easter 1983

(i.m. Marianella Garcia-Villas, de la Comisión de Derechos Humanos)

A gaping gunshot wound in the side of morning.
Broken limbs sprawled
like abandoned nestlings.

O sister!

A defoliated tree nailed tight
to a brown sky.
Lips braver than instruments of torture
have stopped moving.
The grass burns blood-red.
The heavy steps of the earthquake
come ever closer.


Author's noteMarianella (sometimes spelled Marianela) García Villas, was cofounder and president of the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador, a non-governmental watchdog organization that covered the violence committed by government forces and right-wing death squads. In March 1983 she was captured in a conflict area where she had gone to document the use of chemical weapons by the army and was murdered after being tortured. I think of her every Easter.

Bio:
Janice D. Soderling is a previous contributor to Protestpoems. Her poems with political themes have appeared in Montréal Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Apple Valley Review, New Verse News, nth position, and the sadly now defunct journals Green Fuse and Babel Fruit. Recent work at Studio, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Literary Bohemian, Lighten Up Online, The Flea, Orbis. She received the Harold Witt Memorial Award for 2010 Best of Volume from Blue Unicorn.


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19 March 2011

F. I. Goldhaber

F. I. Goldhaber

.
.
March 10, 2011

Epigraph: "Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist." -- Pastor Martin Niemöller

Last night the end started.
The only question: end of what?

For decades, the rich abused
the middle class, trying to take
us back to times of serfs,
peasants, and slaves. Union blood

bought us forty-hour work
weeks, two days off, pensions, health care
benefits. The middle
class expanded to include more

than merchants, small business
owners. The rich rebelled, taking
their jobs and paychecks to
China, India. The

U.S. prospers, but all
the money goes into only
a few pockets. They trashed
our economy, destroyed the

value of our homes, the
only asset most of us own,
and stole the taxes that
should have repaired roads, taught children,

protected our safety,
delivered quality health care
to us all. They monger
fear, set religious believers

against each other. Last
night they dropped all pretense of a
budget crisis, broke the
law, came for the trade unionists.

Last night the end started.
The only question: end of what?

Will the American
people finally wake up to
the outrageous, horrid,
parasitic travesties the
GOP perpetuated

on us all? Will they stop
allowing the GOP to
ignore/remove/destroy
our Constitutional rights? Or

did we hear the death knoll
of the Democratic party,
last night? Cash from corporate
America and the 400

who own more than millions
inundates the GOP with
ample funds to buy votes
in Congress for more tax breaks and

opportunities to
abuse what's left of the middle
class. Only the unions
have enough money to
fight back. Only the unions stand

between us and return
to a world run by dictators
and robber barons. The
ultra right-wing resorted to

lies and fabrications
against organizations that
register and recruit
minority, poor, and liberal

voters. Only unions
can compete against them. So the
big-money backers of
the Republican governor

have manufactured a
crises to take out the unions
in Wisconsin, using
public policy to destroy

their only rival. Should
their union busting succeed in
Wisconsin, Ohio,
Indiana, Pennsylvania,

they will come for the rest.
All the big political cash
to decide who wins and
loses elections will support

right-wing candidates. Bake
sales versus billionaires, what the
future of elections
will look like if we don't speak up.

Last night the end started.
The only question: end of what?


Bio:
F.I. Goldhaber's second poetry collection, Pairs of Poems, a collection of poems about nature, love, history, and politics, was ranked number three in the Preditors & Editors readers poll. She has written professionally for more than a quarter century and has had short stories, novelettes, poems, news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews published in magazines, e-zines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies. http://www.goldhaber.net/poetry.htm

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19 February 2011

Chris G. Vaillancourt

Stephen Jarrell Williams

Chris G. Vaillancourt

.
.
We Are Master

We are garbage mouthed corporate fucks
sitting around a table. Spread before us

are charts and graphs that we are
jacking off each other over. So excited

in our plans to build another building.
Fuck the poor. Fuck the struggling. Let

them be moved to welfare districts. They
are not people, they are fleas to be contained.

Distressful rabbits needing to be skinned.
Unsavoury bastards needing to be dismissed.

We don't care about those we pretend not
to notice. We do not love unwashed bodies

when we sit like fucking morons in some
concrete and steel mentality. Waving our

bank accounts as if this justified our
stinking souls. If the poor become too

much of an issue, start a war and send
them there to die. Sit on toilets of gold

social standing taking a collective shit
into the cesspool of the world. Be advised

we have the law on our sides. We not only
can take away your home, we can erase

your will to be a man. We can slip plastic
bags over your heads and watch you

struggle to survive. We don't care. We are
too busy sucking the cocks of the men

above us so that we may advance in
social standing. We are content to slip

away our sense of moral outrage as we
swallow the semen of surrender. Let us

all forget the cuts and scratches we
receive each and every day of our

useless living. Let us not bring to
mind the striving of the celestial soul

as we bend over and get dry fucked
in our asses by the right-wing thinking

dickheads we have decided to worship.
We spend their tax dollars on building up

our personas. We use their money to
create a world class Armed Forces. Fuck

the people if they want universal social
recognition. Fuck them if they want to

live with dignity and pride. We are the
corporate bastards that make the decisions

on what they will buy. We are the braindead
perpetuators of their funeral like cries.

We are what we are. We are what we are.
We don't give a flying fuck how many

parasites we exterminate. Don't get in
our way as we erect a government that

promotes our elitist values. If you want to
be free of us, just fucking die already.


Bio:
Over 200 of my poems have appeared in more than one hundred journals in the U.S. and Canada, in Japan and Australia, and the U.K, including: Real Angry Poets, Quills, Unfeigned Coffee Fiend, Detour Memphis, Why Vandalism?!, Plum Ruby Review, Vox Poetica, Outcry, The Hudson Review, Whisper, Poetry Space, Dangling Verbs, Writers Forum, Poesie, Cafe Del Soul, South Jersey Underground-Issue 6, Protest Poems, Poetry Stop, P&W, elffin&elffa;, and many others. I have had a series of chapbooks published in the 1980's by 4 Winds Press, such titles as "Doors and Windows", "Dancing in the Eighties" and "Slow Burn". I have had four poetry books published, "Teardrop of Coloured Soul" "I Walk Naked into a Cloud", "the Rushing Stream of Desires", and "A Yellow Sunshine Night".



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Stephen Jarrell Williams

.
.
Throne Sitters

Humanity
is
awakening

pushing
back

the downward
press

of the elite's fat asses.


Bio:
Stephen Jarrell Williams loves to stay up all night and write with lightning bolts until they fizzle down behind the dark horizon.

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05 February 2011

Scott Owens

Peter Tetro

Scott Owens

.
.
Using My Name In Vain

Murder, slaughter, genocide, rape,
bomb, gun, bullet, hate,
acceptable loss, collateral damage,
casualty, deterrent, torture.


Don’t worry about shit, piss,
fuck, cock, cunt, balls,
cocksucker, motherfucker, goddamn it all
to hell
when the hammer hits the thumb.

All the words are my name.
Forget Yahweh, Jehovah, Christ,
Elohim, Adonai, Allah
. None of them
come close. None of them possibly could.

But bitch I can do without.
Nigger, chink, raghead, heretic,
faggot, blasphemer, slut, whore
--
all in vain
........ all to no end
............ but destruction.


Bio:
Author of 6 collections of poetry and over 800 poems published in journals and anthologies, Scott Owens is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and recipient of awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College. He grew up on farms and in mill villages around Greenwood, SC.

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Peter Tetro

.
.
Zimbabwe

I also do nothing
......just watch/listen
whatever meager news
smuggled or sanctioned
as a once proud regime
.......... strangles
all detractors
to poverty & destitution
long departed colonials
blamed for this their fate.

Mugabe plays on that
addressing the world
with flair to drub it in
while riding the bribed adulations
from that minority favored
allowed (by law)
to pursue
....victimize
...... torture
........ kill any dissent.

The once freedom fighter
who mocks the world
...... gets verbal discouragements
no sharper than an unintended tut-tut
........ slap on the wrist
from fellow African politicos.

A country dying from neglect
inviting devastations
of Biblical proportion…
just another slum-hood
of the global village
begging more than prayers
while passing by
eye averted, nose pinched.

I’m ashamed!


Bio:
I have retired to Kingston, Ontario, where I volunteer and continue to write and participate in local reading series. I’m published or forthcoming in Vista (Canada), Down in the Dirt, Westward Quarterly, Thick with Conviction, strangeroad.com., The Pink Chameleon, The Green Silk Journal, Pulsar Poetry Magazine (U.K.) and The Cynic Online Magazine. I believe that all humans have been created equal. I grieve today's devaluation of the individual whether that is in some developing area of the globe or right here in our own backyard as we become mere units of production measured on the quarterly bottom line.

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22 January 2011

.
.
Kevin Heaton

JP Reese

Emily Severance

Kevin Heaton

.
.
Wind Chimes

a baby’s breath
cannot purify
winds of compromise,
nor indemnify
wantonness,
but applied to chimes
in innocence;
may pierce the pall
of sorrow, and bestow
welcome solace
upon the sound
of tears.


Bio:
Kevin Heaton writes in South Carolina. His work has appeared in: Foliate Oak, Pirene's Fountain, Nibble, Elimae, The Recusant, and many others.
He is listed as a notable Kansas Poet at KansasPoets.com.
http://kevinheatonpoetry.webstarts.com/publications.html



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JP Reese

.
.
For The Women

Once more, rocks wait in stadiums of dust.
Hands press to wounded heads or claw the dust.

The people silence singing, shutter shops.
Razors all stilled, beards draw the Afghan dust;

Red poppies are destroyed and laughter ends.
The fields lie fallow, raw, returned to dust.

Bearded Pashtuns eye every shadowed street,
Salvage the holy law from boot-stomped dust.

Young soldiers marched away, taking their bombs.
The female teachers' graves merge straw with dust.

Dark rivers freeze below the Khyber Pass.
Come summer, flesh will thaw to mix with dust

Near Peshawar, a sister has transgressed.
Her purple thumb, whipsawn, collects the dust.

An unveiled face once more courts suicide.
And girls, forbidden books, withdraw to dust.

The women all retreat behind burkas.
Each temptress hidden from flawed men of dust.

A man exits a cave above the plains.
His followers, in awe, kneel in the dust.


Bio:
JP Reese has work published or forthcoming in Connotation Press, The Smoking Poet, Silkworms Ink, The Pinch, Forces, Eclectic Flash, Used Furniture Review, Blue Fifth Review, and Gloom Cupboard. Two of Reese's poems are in the current issue of Corium Magazine. Reese is a poetry editor for this -- a literary webzine, and she also teaches English at a small college in Texas.



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Emily Severance

.
.
Body Bags

Do body bags come in different sizes?
Do the petite get to show off
Their fine figures during the return
Flight? Are they plastic or canvas or burlap or
Silk? Are there patches for the outside
Announcing how many bullets, shrapnel,
Or body pieces within? Does their coloration vary
Or is it always the dead green of worn dollar bills?

What sort of quality control is insured before a body bag
Is sent from the factory? Who trains
The body bag makers and the body bag inspectors?
Who creates the pattern? A dedicated seamstress
The likes of Betsy Ross? Sew onward fair patriot.

How do they keep account of which body’s in which bag?
Are dog tags stapled on? Names written in indelible ink?
Do they use numbers corresponding to names on sheets
a corporal pages through as he greets the hero’s family?
Are the bags reusable? Are they tucked in the bottom of caskets,
Burned with autumn leaves, stored next to wedding gowns?

How many body bags does it take
To screw in a light bulb?
How many to maintain
A standard of life?


Bio:
Emily Severance teaches elementary special education in New Mexico.
She has a BA from The University of Michigan (where she won the
freshman poetry prize and a Hopwood prize for poetry) and an MFA in
studio art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.


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