David P. Miller
Against Being Stupefied

The morning glories’ quick life—
force sparked their tendrils
in a new direction, this late summer’s
overripening days. Risen from
the second-floor porch pot—twisted
through the wind-spinner’s stalled blades—
self-hoisted into the low branches
of our Evodia tree. Now, the Evodia’s
ornamented two ways at once: twined
purple blossoms, clusters of maroon fruit.

A small red-headed girl—three years?—
adventures around the block
with her mother, one hand holding
a stuffed white rabbit, shopping bag
across her other wrist. New ones to me,
these two, this second of September.
At the corner, daughter hesitates,
mother points their next way.
My story for them: It’s their first new—
neighborhood walk-around, the girl
learning to propel herself on the sidewalk.

Indoors, behind the curdled pixels,
contenders ridicule human worth as always,
as arenas-full of hands stretch to heaven.
On repeat: others’ depth of skin tone—
the turns and curves of vowels and consonants—
the topographies of their faces, versus a sea
of flagstaffs, high-relief triceps, and the star
speaker’s index finger poised to fire.

Next corner up-street, the morning’s black cat
paces to the No Parking Sign, pauses to lie
on the pavement, gets up and paces
as the expected man arrives to unlock
and raise the grate of the turquoise bodega
with sea-green steps. A lone end-season
cottonwood seed floats past a mourning dove
on a wire. The grate gaps just enough for the cat,
bounding straight upstairs to Las Villas Market
beneath the metal’s corrugated rattle.

David P. Miller is the author of Bend in the Stair (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021) and  Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Lily Poetry Review, Reed Magazine, What Rough Beast, About Place Journal, Solstice, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, SurVision, Vincent Brothers Review, and Nixes Mate Review, among other journals.

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 current 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.

Subscribe to get each day’s poem by email.

Henry Israeli
The Ceremony of Innocence

We walked home through a field where
an oil rig and a family of deer compete
for resources. From the winds of attrition
fell the first flakes of a nuclear winter
in a child’s memory of the 1970s.
Lying in the grass, staring at the sky,
watching clouds tell fantastic lies—
that was heaven in a child’s eyes.
In those days, we could still feel the earth
rotating and spinning beneath us.
Now the deer wander empty streets
and we hole up inside our homes
with shades closed, our children watching
the great summer fires on black screens.
Sleep well, children, don’t worry if
the barbed wire meant to protect you
also snags the most beautiful songbirds.

Henry Israeli is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Our Age of Anxiety (White Pine Poetry Prize, 2019), and god’s breath hovering across the waters, (Four Way Books, 2016), and as editor, Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books (Saturnalia, 2022). He is also the translator of three critically acclaimed books by Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Plume, and The Harvard Review, as well as several anthologies including Best American Poetry. Henry Israeli is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books, and teaches in the English & Philosophy Department of Drexel University .

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 current 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.

Subscribe to get each day’s poem by email.

Kathryn D. Temple
Rising

I am waiting for high tide
the dock under water, one bird against a blue sky

a mission, take the straight line home
to put the trash on the curb, it’s an ordinary Sunday
without benediction

a crow peers in the window, turns to talk to another,
a black feather floats, sails on a rising current,

I hear the cricket in the basement, chirrup,
and the water is rising

Kathryn D. Temple is an English professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Streetlight, Metaworker, The Examined Life, Delmarva Review, and 3Elements, among others. She is the author of two academic books on law and emotions and many academic journal articles.

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 current 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.

Irene Cooper
but who now will deliver the weather report

david lynch said it’s a great time to be
alive if you love the theatre of the absurd
for seven straight years at two thirty pm
he ordered a cup a coffee
and a chocolate shake at bob’s big boy
whose three dimensional logo sported
a similar bouffant to lynch’s own
in an interview on a pbs talk show
with a disgraced host lynch talked
about routine, how a regular dinner
of broccoli and chicken gave his imagination
a foundation to create
i read a story in which lynch met a kid
on his girlfriend’s front lawn
whose father was a professional artist
and that was that, once he understood
that one could choose, he never looked back
today I imagined that i could live
a life without undue attention to capitalism
i’d just collect my check, pay my taxes
and that would be that
i’d live an unironic life, loving the bluebird
and the pie, a cup of coffee and a cigarette
this being a free country
this being a free country

Irene Cooper wrote the feminist noir novel Found; Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy about family; spare change:poems, finalist for the 2022 Stafford/Hall award; and even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety: poems. Writings appear in Beloit Poetry, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, Witness, Bear Review, and elsewhere. Irene works and lives with her people and Roxy in the middle of Oregon.

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 current 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.

Dion O’Reilly
Thinning of the Veil

5 November 2024, Bellingham WA

I love how quiet
the town, how mute
from low-pressed clouds,
the seep of rain.

I want an animal
coat to keep me
warm, to skirt shadow
by the waterfront, slow

barges creeping like
slugs on stainless water.

I want coverlet clouds
to lift for a second,
the slow sun hurting
my worm-white skin.

Now is the time
for the line between
dead and suffering
to shimmer and deplete,

for a million imperatives
to speak in the stripped-down trees:

Listen. Look. Drink. Take.

Some hate the darkness
when it o’ersways,
when it enters
our kingdom like liquor

from forgotten bottles,
the singing and stinging,
rush, at dusk—
a cauldron

of flying things
stirred and thrown
into the darkening sky.

Dion O’Reilly is the author of three poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator, a finalist for the Steel Toe Book Prize and the Ex Ophidia Prize; Ghost Dogs, winner of The Independent Press Award for Poetry, Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Poetry Award, and runner-up for the Catamaran Poetry Prize. Her third book, Limerence, was a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sun, and Rattle. She is a podcaster, leads poetry workshops, and is starting a new poetry journal about alterity. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.

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 current 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.

Timothy Liu
About Last Night

It’s true. Half of America
got what they wanted

but is it true we all got

what we deserved?
Who pays two dollars

a can for cat food when

you can pay twice more
if you’re willing to wait

long enough? I too

liked your fetus better
when you wore it on

the inside of your sleeve

like a shiny bauble
not ready to be shown

to the world—its secret

gestation waiting to go
all out. Now that we’re here,

what’s next? Whenever

I see two crows lodged
in the swaying crown

of a pine, I look around

for a third in the way
I was taught in school—

how they’re better able

to look out for each other
that way. Remember

the day you woke up

only to find God hitting
your doorstep with a thud

like a newspaper you knew

you weren’t going to read
anymore? Today feels

like that kind of day

only now I have all the time
in the world to circle

back in my dark cloak

of feathers in the sun,
even let out a wicked caw

or croak depending on

my mood! I bet you wish
you could be like me

all high and mighty

without a care in the world
how things will turn out

the next thousand years—

Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of twelve books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Say Goodnight, a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; and Vox Angelica, which won the 1992 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. Liu’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review, among other journals and anthologies His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. He teaches at SUNY New Paltz and Vassar College.

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.

Jesse Bradley-Amore
To the voters who treat voting like deepthroating a shotgun that they hope is empty

You don’t care
as long you can celebrate
the wreckage of your choices,
pick your teeth with the splinters, 
get tipsy on tears that aren’t yours. 
 
What you forget is
nothing will get better
until you have enough money
to get the right people to listen. 
But even then, you’ll pull

Up the ladder. Even then,
you’ll tell people: I did this
all by myself. But you’re wrong. 
It takes a village
to burn itself down

Jesse Bradley-Amore is a writer, cartoonist, and (occasional) improviser based out of Winter Park, FL. His stories have been featured on RISK! and The Volume Knob. His comics have been published in Oyez Review and Action, Spectacle. Under his J. Bradley pen name, he’s the author of Teenage Wasteland: An American Love Story and has fiction in Short Edition dispensers. His solo show, How I Learned (NOT) To Drive, is set to debut this year at various festivals throughout the country.

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.

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.