By Cheryl Caesar

(Editors note: The following is a book review by Cheryl Caesar of the book, “Pull Up a Chair by Tari Muñiz” published by Tari Muñiz and distributed by Goldenrod Publications)

 Tari Muñiz is a fierce and gentle spirit.

 I met her in 2018, at my first open mic at the Lansing Poetry Room. She sat next to me, a small, white-haired woman with big glasses. Then she got up and read “Fucking Pig Fuckers,” beginning “No offense to actual pigs / Fucking   Pigs   who are   Fuckers” and ending, “”Too fucking stupid to know / We are taking them down.”

I came to know her as a fellow board member of the Lansing Poetry Club, welcoming new faces at LPC’s monthly readings as she had done for me. I heard her stand up and read “Choice”:

By Craig Kirchner

Natural disaster, disease, bankruptcy

can reduce people to nothing, homeless,

hungry, no two stories are alike.

Man evolved as a specie realizing that

banding together was necessary,

sharing food, talents, and strengths to survive.

Remote tribes and outcast homeless Americans

live to survive – in jungles and on our city streets,

abandoned by family, friends, neighbors, us.

The wealthy could ease some of this problem,

see to a roof overhead, a meal, a hope that

tomorrow will be more than avoiding death.

By Lynn White

Soon we’ll be there

back

to those days

when Faubus was fab

when Klansmen were cool

and swastikas were chic not shite.

By Mary Ellen Talley

Nine Girl Scouts sit around a table

intently placing 

red, white, and blue seed beads

on small eight gold safety pins.

Some beads roll across the floor.

They’re so tiny,

echo the laughing ten-year-olds. 

We co-leader moms 

drop our share of beads, too.

Soon everyone has created  

American flag pins 

By Yuan Changming

ching chong, chinee

chink, chinky, chonky

so was i called a dragon of barbarity

a born rogue holding the laws of truth in deformity

because i ate rats, dogs, slugs and snakes

i began with anything but genes of true humanity

By Michael Roque

The phantom of Warsaw

is a history of self—

There, but unseen

unless sought out.

Buried in Okopowa—

skeletal remains

the world collectively moved from.

Old friends,

Unfulfilled desires… dreams,

the Pehrspace Indie scene—

The entire LA cityscape

decomposed in a mass grave.

By Becca Lavin

WE TESTIFIED

WE TESTIFIED

WE SIT in the bleachers and...

WAIT, NOT,

FORCED APOLOGIES

Through clenched teeth FROM...

OBFUSCATIONS’ OFFSPRING

WE WILL TESTIFY AGAIN

WAIT AGAIN and...

AGAIN

FOR...

JUSTICE & WHAT?

WE BELIEVED

WAS

‘THE AMERICAN WAY’

By J.I. Kleinberg

Click “read more” to see her visual poems.

By Miriam Bassuk

We are living a hair’s breath away 

from a daily brush with lunacy.

Humdrum plays her ordinary flute

as if gongs of war were not wreaking havoc. 

Plumes of black smoke riddle the air. 

Earth heaves cement ruin 

in a country, far from our shore. 

By Kerry Cox

two-tone teeth, never sleep
in mouths that always dream of meat
Chewing hard
spitting out bones
Ballooning the moon
Till it fits in gods arms

Those famous limbs
That built Rome in a day
Pulled out a rib
and gave Adam
A new name to say

By Lynn White

They waited patiently

standing in line

hunger made them quiet

un-childlike

too quiet for children

standing in line.

By Ali Ashhar

The holiest month witness

the unyielding era of human sanctity;

somewhere, down the alley

insatiable hunger confronts

the invincible faith

the razed hospitals give birth to

the spirits of eternity

By Shontay Luna

Heaven could’ve been here,

if he only acted right.

But common sense got gone,

and took itself out of sight.

He told me that I ‘destroyed’ us,

that June night when I left.

Bypassing his infidelity,

as if it wasn’t dire theft.

By Michael Roque

A year of in-betweens

in a vibrant life

now resembling an ER waiting room—

people-packed in varying states of anguish.

Those wheelchair-bound, abandoned in halls,

those bedridden, speaking in groans

and the many— 

sitting, standing seemingly unfazed,

but to an extent all commonly feeling pain,

a need for a doctor we don’t see,

a need for the aches to be eased,

but malnourished on stretchers—

Our only medics.

By Yuan Changming

During ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! aired on 29 October 2013, a 6-year-old boy proposed to ‘kill everyone in China’; in reply to the wide protest against such verbal violence, the White House later declared: “the principle of protected free speech is an important part of who we are as a nation."

Apparently, it is not the tiny guy

But his big parents

Who would very much like

To kill everyone in China

No, it is not even his parents

But his teachers, the picture

Books he reads, the movies he watches

The computer games he plays, and

The media bombs he hears constantly

That encourages him to do so

By Catherine Harnett

(written as a tribute to Epstein's survivors.)

You were a flower once, Lilac, Rose,

Honeysuckle; your petals were beautiful,

your intoxicating scents. You were meant

to bloom, hanging heavy on a bush, arranged

in a bouquet or vase, young flowers that

fade with dignity as flowers are meant to;

purple, peach, pink; enticing, turning a

fragile papery brown.

By Richard Wells

(After reading Robert Haas)

I know these poems

won’t stop disasters

brewing or about to burst

It’s easy to write a litany

names of dying beasts

rail against plastics

and forever chemicals

By Shontay Luna

Racism pulses through America’s blood.

In quick, tense rivers that flow through

inner city alleys dipped with police batons.

America is an oblivious skank; not caring

about being a shinning beacon of hypocrisy.

While not wanting anyone to say how she

really is. Scoffing at the plaque on the

Statue of Liberty; pleading to shelter the

masses. She can ask for them all, but

By Michael Roque   

My soul is Cairo

in 2011—

It’s revolution!

At the Tahrir Square of my very being,

voices have risen

demanding change from the corruption

running rampant

through my many facets of self.

By Lewton Thomas Jones

And the trees blossomed anyway

Despite the hairy men firing missiles without mercy

Despite Dow Jones hob nob binky slurp panacea-jihad

All the trees blossomed and bloomed anyway

Spring time snowy apparition did not wait for permission

A fantasy thrown back at the blood- soaked holy lands

Despite business as usual

Despite hospitals leveled

Despite theocratic maelstroms w/ their typhoon vendettas

The trees blossomed anyway in the shadows of Golgotha