By Becca Lavin

and if nothing more
she would feel some connection
to whatever myth she could conjure
in the moment

somehow she would gather strength
weathered, worn and beautiful
like autumns’ leaves
to her basket-bosom

By Craig Kirchner

We left the trash sit too long, chicken paper,

they call it, the scraps and packaging

from what was a delicious Marsala,

made the kitchen unbearable.

The smell gags, the mind knows

immediately, the deterioration of flesh.

By Cheryl Caesar

Nothing has ever been

seen before, nothing like.

Mind without memory.

Life without history.

Actor and audience,

each day he plays anew

on the exhausted screens

of our unwilling eyes.

By Richard Wells

without light
there is no vision

without vision
the people perish.

 our leaders are
hollow men

 as far from the border
of redemption

 as any who have lived

 soul sick men
who inflict suffering 

as if they had
invented it

By  Craig Kirchner

I wrote about it, we argued, not nasty,

but disagreed about whether to leave.

We stayed, I made risotto. We planned

to sleep in the master bedroom closet,

Swedish death cleaned, stocked with

bottled water, a small mattress.

Its closest to the middle of the building,

furthest from the windows, very stable,

if this condo complex blows away or ends up

under water, so will the rest of Florida.

By  Craig Kirchner

There is a routine, it starts with getting out of bed
and squirting the sleep from my eyes with Refresh.
I won’t bore you with the bore of the rest,
you have your own to remember.

There have been interruptions to it over the years
that usually involve an infirmity or natural disaster.
I used to play golf twice a month, practice during the week,
now arthritis in my knees makes it too hard to turn.
We had the strongest storm to ever form in the Gulf
relocate sleeping to the closet, away from the windows. 

But never in 75 years has the government altered my life,
it always held up its part of the bargain. I paid taxes
and voted. It kept the roads open and the food safe,
never interfered with my daily regimen.

By  Lyn Coffin

please hear our

pleas

lord

heavy laden

we are here

hear

your flock

flocking here

By  Miriam Bassuk

No way to encapsulate this period.

No rhyme or reason can iron out

our daily terror squashed deep

in the gutter of our bellies. What

makes it hard, there are no safe-

guards against a regime that lays

waste to all we hold dear, a regime

By  Peter Asco

Burdens will be cut down to size

Workload will become much lighter

Regrets will make you laugh

Impossibilities will look within reach

By  Robert Kokan

Beneath the tower of the fourteenth street bridge

it's dark and it's the last tired night.

All men now with sorrow filled eyes

and sad contentments of heart 

have given over to the dreams of new birth

(when your time comes, it comes

there is nothing a hand or a blood-borne

can do to prevent it).

By  Millie Renfrow

Fellow Citizens of the United States of America,

we meet at the axis of a revolution –

both political and social –

sweeping through our national life

such as we have never experienced

in most of our lives to date.

We enter a new war.

What poem will emerge

to fill this void?

There’s the key…

to alter the relationships

between this poet and others…

By  Margaret Roncone

We listen to the voice

that says 'grass and stars'

the voice that knows perfectly how to describe

luminescence.

we wait patiently on

the foothold

of March to see early daffodils

and crocus pushing through earth’s cold skin.

By  Mary Ellen Talley

(a found collaborative poem created from snippets of a phone chat with houseboundMillie Renfrow, age 84, on 11-16-2020)

Somebody sent me a sketch book

They started some doodles

I kept scribbling

It’s all black ink.

You can go from very light

to very very dark.

By  Craig Kirchner

I wanted to leave, you said no.

I wanted you to come with me.

Malta became a reference point,

a not so funny inside joke.

I was no longer betting on America,

a personality disorder was President.

He appointed a sexual assaulter

to be his Secretary of Defense.

By Leszek Chudzinski

“Then they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out—because I was not an immigrant.”

***

ICE has been given a quota

to catch each day and deport

1,200 to 1,500 illegales

schools

churches

hospitals

houses

raided

people rounded up

in the streets

at work

at home

By J.I. Kleinberg

— THE PROMISE

— hubris

— his bloodcurdling

By Craig R. Kirchner

I’m told constantly not to talk about it.

Half your friends and family will be offended.

You don’t want to express your disgust,

and you can’t quote their guy.

Quoting his remarks is damning,

there’s always a disconnect.

If you take one of his threats,

or rants on his hatred out of context,

you’re accused of misrepresentation.

If you put them back into their context

they become worse, unhinged, long winded.

I don’t want to talk about it, it makes me ill.

By Carsten Cheung 

You’d think it’d be
super cool,
but actually
there are many downsides
to being a modern day ninja.
First of all,
it’s not even by choice.
Like ancient Asian prophecy
foretold by American
fortune cookie,
your destiny is decided
at birth.
Black hair?
Dark almond-slanted
shaped eyes?
Male? (especially eldest child)
You are Ninja.
(Exotic-Lotus Ninja if born female).

By Martha Ellen

Oma
She had found a bit of woven, checkered cloth and fashioned it into a diaper for her newborn son. She scrounged some lengths of cloth and thread from wherever she could and embroidered a cap for him. She stitched a cotton gown with flowers. With tenderness she dressed him before she swaddled him in a worn woolen blanket to keep away the chill of the cool morning air. She held him close, kissed his cheek one last time and carefully laid him down on Brabant Street, in Ghent, in the early morning of May 26, 1815.

Cecile and Rosalie were returning to the common house near the port after a long night’s work, as they did every morning, holding hands as European women do when they are friends and as kindred spirits do when seeking the comfort of others who often endured a night of brutality some men were inclined to heap upon those they thought unworthy of any tenderness or care, only to be used and discarded. Cecile lifted the swaddled baby from the street and held him close, her maternal feelings intact, inaccessible to any cruelty that visited her in her harsh life.  

They all knew this scene. It was not new. Each knew the role they were compelled to perform in a world that did not value the likes of them as though they were incapable of giving love and unworthy of receiving it.

They took the baby to the police station. He was reared by other loving women in the convent orphanage. 

     I call her Oma.

By William Doreski 

Scolding the world in public

eases the dark congealing

in your shapely, old-fashioned skull.

The coffee shop hums. Urns deplete

as snow whirls in the doorway.

Baked goods hunker on display.

By Craig R. Kirchner 

We are being told daily of our incredible freedom

here in the Sunshine state,

where the sun is experiencing the freedom to be hotter

than it has ever been in recorded times.

We are free, as James Madison obviously envisioned,

to openly carry our beloved firearms,

in case we experience a need to defend ourselves during a road rage,

or in case our children are being groomed by lesser than ourselves.

We can carry our assault rifles in the trunk,

in case a particularly bad case of frustration crawls upon us

and we are near the elementary school that scorned us,

as the second amendment suggests. 

By Cheryl Caesar

(This poem was originally published in Across the Margin)

On the first day our Facebook pages went black.

We drove to work through a film of tears

and hugged each other in the hallways, unashamed,

and in the women’s room. We talked about renewing passports,

and families in Canada. We avoided referring

to the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale. We went

on to meet our classes, or conference with students

who complained, “I didn’t know

this assignment would be so evidence-based.”

We kept our blurry eyes front, and flowed

through the day on a current of work and love.

By Bud Sturguess

This morning, I woke to find my manor was burning.

I’d heard rumors about the neighbors being on fire,

or some such story,

but I’d long ago painted my windows black.

When I was stirred awake by

a constant crinkling and popping,

when I saw my Beatlemania collection melting

in psychedelic apocalyptic colors,

I decided it was finally true.

By Neil Vincent Scott - November 10, 2024 

turn the news off

turn the music up

let us once again

     tend to the garden of goodness and light

rejecting

     rebuilding

         renewing

as darkness descends

on the trampled flowers of promise

By Russell E. Willis

Tempted to despair, 

a better angel

sighs into our souls

some gentle signs of

peace and joy and some

other’s love for us