Day Merrill
Inaugural Forecast: Irony With a Chance of Fascism

January in DC is a crap-shoot.
Of course, the inauguration wasn’t always on January 20th
and it wasn’t always Washington.

Washington (the Pres, not the city) took his first oath on April 30th on the steps of Federal Hall
in lower Manhattan, destined to become the financial center of the world.
Start off as you mean to go on, America.

By his second term, Congress had moved the venue to Philly
and set March 4th (march forth!) as the date. Unless it fell on a Sunday,
because like remembering the Sabbath and everything.

Presidents need time between election and inauguration to
organize their cabinet (toss names into a junk drawer)
and make plans for their so-called government.

By 1932, it was clear that March 4th was too darn much time,
hindering the incoming guy from addressing urgent national problems
like the Great Depression then or where to put Musk now.

So January 20th it is. Unless it falls on a Sunday (still the Sabbath thing?)
with a private swearing in then and the hoopla pushed to Monday.
It’s happened a few times.

Obama holds the record for taking the oath of office.
Head Supreme John Roberts flubbed his first Sunday swearing in
and asked for a do-over “out of an abundance of caution.”

The next day, the public show, with two Bibles (an abundance of caution?),
one Lincoln used when travelling and the other from the King family. Must have worked—
four years later, another private Sunday, then again on Monday, Martin Luther King Day.

Sometimes the inaugural weather gets as much attention as the ceremony.

Two-faced Ronald Reagan was sworn in on both the warmest and coldest Jan. 20s,
Tough guy William Henry Harrison refused to wear a hat and coat while delivering his
nearly two-hour inaugural address. No wonder he got pneumonia, dying a month later.

“The worst weather on the face of the Earth,”
said a congressman about the blowing snow and freezing temperatures
that pummeled the inauguration of William Howard Taft in 1909.

This year, messy snow predicted for Sunday, 23 degrees with brutal wind chills Monday
as the indefatigable DJT takes office on MLK Day.
He might have preferred April 20th, but here we are.

Snow, wind, bitter cold, hail to the chief.

Day Merrill’s poems have appeared in The Binnacle, Halcyon Magazine, HIV Here & Now, Poems in the Aftermath, What Rough Beast, The Journal of Contemporary Rural Social Work, Tin Roof Press and Quick Brown Fox, among others, as well as in the Collingwood Public Library Writers Group anthology Musings. After a career as an English teacher and a university administrator, she became a career coach. Raised in New England and a former long-time resident of New York City, Merrill now splits her time between Ontario and Costa Rica.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series in creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the incoming presidential administration. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.

Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.

Kristy Snedden
Birds of America

Never so ferocious
were the silver bullet outcomes
after the 2024 election.
Silver-tipped words, silver-tipped birds.
Fellow vultures and cranes,
with silver-sheened wings, I’m sorry.
I forgot, I let you down, I meant to,
I meant to be a Northern Goshawk
but I slipped into an inky field of stars.
The woods are full of deer
and a bear next to the pond
where warblers hang on branches,
yellow heads and silver wings
statues in the water’s reflection.
If you came calling with your guns tonight,
I would hold you from afar
hold you in wing-shimmer.
Even Christ would pause here
but you are speeding on the highway
headed somewhere I don’t live.

Kristy Snedden is a trauma psychotherapist. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Contemporary Verse 2 and storySouth. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Kristy runs Brainspotting Through the Poet’s Eye groups to deepen healing with poetry and Brainspotting. Her debut full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Indolent Books. She loves hiking in the Appalachian Mountains near her home in Georgia and listening to her husband and their dogs tell tall tales.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the second Trump administration. The series is currently counting down the last five days before Inauguration Day and will enter a new phase tomorrow with a poem for Day 1. The current plan is to continue for all 1461 days of the 47th presidential administration of the United States of America.

Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.

Cornelius Eady
Withstand

What can you withstand, now?
What can you withstand?
All the fights they taught were right
Is shifting through your hands

All the birds exiled in the sky
Got no place to land.
What can you withstand, now?
What can you withstand?

The weathers trying to change
Your clothes,
A stale wind covers the land
Thunder rolls like an exit poll
Like some mad judge’s hand.

The ground beneath your feet
Is turning into sand
And it ain’t who’s gonna win
Or lose,
It’s what you can stand.

What can you withstand, now,
What can you withstand?
All the fights they taught were right
Are shifting through your hands

All the birds exiled in the sky
Got no place to land
What can you withstand, now
What can you withstand?

The weathers trying to change
Your mind,
Seems you made a mistake;
You thought you’d been
A citizen,
But now they claim you’re
A fake.

The ground beneath your feet
Is shifting into sand
And it ain’t who’s gonna
Rescue you,
It’s what you can stand.

What can you withstand, now,
What can you withstand?
All the fights you thought were right
Are shifting through your hands

All the birds exiled in the sky
Got no place to land.
What can you withstand, now,
What can you withstand?

CE: Words, music, and vocals
Charlie Rauh: Acoustic guitar
Lisa Liu: Piano
Tracks recored by Eady, Rauh & Liu
Arranged and mixed by Rauh & Liu
Mastered by Charlie Rauh

Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English, and John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tenn. Knoxville. In addition to his teaching duties at UT, from 2021-2022 he served as interim director at Poets House, a poetry library and cultural center located in New York City. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre in 1999, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize in 2001. Eady’s pandemic folk song project Don’t Get Dead, recorded with his Trio, was released in 2021 by June Appal Recording. His work and songs has been featured on NPR, BBC Radio 4 and the PBS Newshour. His awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lifetime Achievement Awards in Poetry from The Poetry Foundation, The National Book Foundation, Brooklyn Poets, Poets and Writers Foundation, Furious Flower Foundation and the Lannan Foundation.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series to help us process the renewed autocratic attack on our democracy. The series is currently counting down the last five days before Inauguration Day, then the count will resume with poem #1 and keep going as long as our democratic republic remains at risk, or until we end up in a gulag, whichever comes first.

Michael Broder
Freedom Is a Choice

I am with you with him with her
neither do I judge nor condone all deeds
I am with myself and for myself
nor am I sufficient or commensurate to my need
I am with food against hunger but hunger is desire
which engine drives us toward pleasure and the good
I am with a tunic against the burning sun
albeit the sun is heat and light and betimes the eye of God
I am with boots against the rocky path but rock’s the earth
beneath our feet and no way home without a path
I am with blanket against cold but the cold refreshes and quickens me
I am with shelter against rain and light against dark
tho rain is life and I am with the dark when I choose darkness
I am with breath but your choking grip thrills me
I am with truth against lies but tell me you will love me always
I am with beauty but let me grow ugly and old
with so much the greater pleasure to recall my comely youth
I am with wealth as the riches of the earth
for the benefit of livingkind for art for science
I am with power to do well good and right withal
I am with pleasure as a current electric
through mind body and spirit incandescing
I am with gratitude for all kindness bestowed
by god creature land sea or air
I am with air

This poem originally appeared in the Black Earth Institute’s 30 Days Hath September 2016 (Day 20). selected by Patricia Spears Jones. 

Michael Broder is the author of the poetry collections Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared most recently in Cimarron Review, 2 Horatio, Word for Word, Right Hand Pointing, and One Sentence Poem. Michael is the founding publisher of Indolent Books, a boutique indie press that focuses on innovative, provocative, and risky work by writers over 50 without a first book, women, people of color, and queer writers. He lives in Brooklyn with Justin, the last of his outside feral feline Mohicans.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series to help us process the emerging neofascist autocracy. The series is currently counting down the last five days before Inauguration Day, then the count will resume with poem #1 and keep going until the republic is restored. Or until Greenland conquers us. Whichever comes first. Back soon with info on how to submit.

Day Merrill
Pajama Day—September 27, 2018

On the occasion of the Senate confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh as nominee for Supreme Court Justice

Pajamas are the refuge of girls and women.
We stay in them to ride out a snow day or cramps,
we curl up in them to read alone and wear them to sleepovers.
They are our safety blanket.
They remind us of childhood and innocence,
what we put on after a hot bath,
basketball practice,
a debate team victory.

Pajamas are the great leveler.
Whatever we wear during the day—
the business suit with killer heels,
the school uniform with the skirt rolled up,
the scrubs under the white coat that bestows legitimacy—
when we come home and get into our PJs,
we are all that teenage girl happy to just be,
without the need to create any impression.

I spent the entire day in my pajamas yesterday,
glued to CNN as the confirmation hearing
raised my hopes, then confirmed my fears.

Advice to all women:
Never forget (or underestimate) how much they hate us.
Our very existence is an insult to the privileged patriarchy
that blusters and blubbers like a thwarted preppie
when we have the audacity to call out their actions and lies
while trying to remain “collegial”
wishing we could be more “helpful”
barely maintaining our shaken composure.

Yesterday was our Kent State—proof we are finally on our own.
Sworn testimony from three women dismissed as untrue or irrelevant
by alpha males who trumpet their support for a sexual predator
like bull elephants protecting a watering hole.
After the hearings ended, I stripped off my pajamas and got dressed,
readying myself for leaving the house to
walk the dog, visit a friend, meet a client,
vote.

Day Merrill’s poems have appeared in The Binnacle, Halcyon Magazine, HIV Here & Now, Poems in the Aftermath, What Rough Beast, The Journal of Contemporary Rural Social Work, Tin Roof Press and Quick Brown Fox, among others, as well as in the Collingwood Public Library Writers Group anthology Musings. After a career as an English teacher and a university administrator, she became a career coach. Raised in New England and a former long-time resident of New York City, Merrill now splits her time between Ontario and Costa Rica.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series to help us process the emerging neofascist autocracy. Initially planned to start on Inauguration Day, things got so…interesting (?) that I could not hold out any longer, and so now we are counting down the days to the inauguration in poems. Back soon with info on how to submit.

Ed Madden
Allegiance

On the occasion of the Hegseth Senate confirmation hearings

Experience and expertise matter less
than loyalty to the would-be autocrat.
Opinions matter more to him than facts.
Forget diplomas, study, steady service,
or years of know-how. Those don’t count
as much as conspiracists, yes-men, or that
kowtowing badge of allegiance, that kakistocratic hat.

Ed Madden is a professor of English and former director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. He served as the inaugural poet laureate of Columbia, South Carolina, 2015–2022. He is the author of six books of poetry, most recently A pooka in Arkansas (Word Works, 2023), selected for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection. He is the recipient of an artist’s residency from the Instituto Sacatar in Brazil, a Breakthrough Leadership in Research Award from the University of South Carolina, and a South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts.

Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series to help us process the emerging neofascist autocracy. Initially planned to start on Inauguration Day, but contributor Ed Madden wrote a very timely poem about the Senate confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, the nominee for secretary of defense, and I just could not hold out any longer. Back soon with info on how to submit.