Tara Menon
Eve of the Presidential Inauguration

Dusk is setting
on the eve of the presidential inauguration.
There hasn’t been such a transition
from evil to good
in this century.
The earth heaves,
expelling some of the clogged evil
trapped under the ozone.
The man who was born
to defeat Trump will ascend.
Millions hold their breaths,
praying he will be safe.

—Submitted on 01/19/2021

Tara Menon‘s poems have appeared in Emrys Online Journal, Rigorous, Infection House, The Inquisitive Eater, The Tiger Moth Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Art in the Time of Covid-19 (San Fedele Press, 2020). She has also published fiction, book reviews, and essays in numerous journals including Many Mountains Moving, The Kenyon Review, Parabola, and India New England. Menon, an Indian-American, lives in Lexington, Mass. 

This is the last poem in the Traditions: Poems in the Afterglow series. SUBMIT to our new online series, A River Sings, via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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Marjorie Moorhead
Another Chickadee Poem

All pandemic long, I’ve been watching
chickadees.

Observing their swooping flight
to the feeder from scraggly branches.

Always taking turns;
no collisions, no fights.

Swoop in, take a seed,
swoop out.

I could watch them all day,
like flame of a campfire

or a baby in a crib, looking up
with sparkling eyes, existing

in some joyful world where knowledge
of hateful things hasn’t entered.

That shining pool
of innocence.

The irises like doors
to infinity

inviting you
back in.

—Submitted on 01/11/2021

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, Verse-Virtual, Rising Phoenix Review, Amethyst Review, Tiny Seed, Consilience, and other journals, as well as in nine anthologies, including Covid Spring (Hobblebush Books, 2020). A new collection is forthcoming from Indolent Books in 2021. Moorhead lives on the NH/VT border.

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Ellen S. Jaffe
They Came to the Capitol

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—W.B. Yeats

We saw the rough beast slouch, slither, and stomp
its way to the Capitol,
heeding its misanthropic master,
past-master of lies, deceit, arrogance,
and mocking cruelty. They bought
into marching orders that never should have been ordered,

broke windows and laws,
bones and the sense of decency and patriotism,
even as they paraded sham-patriotic signs
and slogans. Did you see the Confederate flags
and the Auschwitz sweatshirt,
among the red-white-and-blue placards
waved by these ghost-white, sheet-white rebels,
storming unmasked in the middle of a pandemic?

Their violence was also naked, unmasked,
urged on by their hero, encouraged
by other legislators (even those who now cry foul).
The leader who incited them to “glory”
now reads teleprompter words in a flat, lifeless voice,
urging calm, denouncing the “heinous” act, promising peaceful transition—
after weeks of swearing how badly he’d been robbed.
But he ends his talk with animation:
our incredible journey is only beginning.

No, his journey is ending—finished, past, kaput,
over and done with.
And so, I hope, is his followers’—
may they see their folly before too late.
And may what slouches birthward in this city, this nation,
be human, not monster,
liberty and justice for all
a reality for all of us, each one of us
in our own skin and heart,
not another lie masquerading as the truth.

—Submitted on 01/09/2021

Ellen S. Jaffe is the author of Water Children (Mini Mocho Press, 2002), Skinny-Dipping With the Muse (Guernica Editions, 2014), and The Day I Saw Willie May (Pinking Shears Publications, 2019), as well as a young-adult novel, Feast of Lights (Sumach Press, 2006), and a book on writing, Writing Your Way (Sumach Press, 2001). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century (Lummox Press, 2018). Jaffe grew up in New York City, and lives in Toronto. 

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Ronda Piszk Broatch
Two Poems

Where There is No Hope, One Must Invent Hope

When my bleary eyes pull heart blade
from hearth side, I think of Job – let my cry
have no resting place. I believe the rain

has read this news. As has the onion,
the president’s voice, the lash of black-
berry vine, bitterest lemon, the gravesite

carnation still whole weeks after. Suffering
has a keen scent, an over-extended autonomic
nervous breakdown. I imagine

Elie Wiesel at the Wailing Wall.
I think the rain cares nothing for the news.
The news reaches its inky fingers into my heart

searching for something sharp. Wearing safety glasses
when cutting an onion leads to dreams
of dissection, a fear of infinity. I think if this

country gets any kinder or gentler,
it’s literally going to cease to exist. The fathomless
black hole of chaos weeps at the news

it may soon be usurped. Blackberry vines
protect even the bitterest of blackened hearts.
Suffering locks the knife drawer.

Self, I see you reading between the lines—
the ouroboros cannot wail with its tail in its mouth.
Lacking a head, it’s just a tail. Camus tells us,

Là où il n’y a pas d’espoir,
il faut inventer l’espoir. In a black hole,
every blade returns to its sharpest beginnings,

holds hands with suffering. I wander
the news of a morning, all my sorrows curled
in a puddle at my feet.

When You Don Your Macro-Self-Glorification Fedora, I Grind My Clay Pigeons, Shredded My Thistle-Pained Pages

I’m sorry for this sad-ass country, sawed-off 3 am Twitter tweeter eclipsing all the good news yet to be had. I regret I didn’t clip my toenails before the hike, scrambling boulders to reach Heart Lake in the rain, that I lied when my old boyfriend asked me if I voted for Reagan. My favorite pundit never had a nebula, but I’m sure he blew a pinwheel, pinned a yata to the ISS before it traversed the heavens in hopes of finding some sort of intelligence seemingly void on our own planet. When I disposed of the narcissus bulbs, the narcissist blowing up Twitter because he didn’t win re-election, didn’t lead in the polls, but instead led an insurrection, I crashed the party where the muscles of my back revolted and squeezed the last nerve I have left. The June moon and Smokey the Bear couldn’t advise me how to punctuate this shit show—the one where a guy dressed as a moose, and hundreds of others dressed as themselves stormed the halls of Congress, putting their dirty boots on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and stole a plinth while smiling at someone’s iPhone camera. My menorah is one candle short of Hanukkah, and my tragic flaw is your velvet manta ray, your mantra to the universe where every beanie baby is released from the dark cavity of your mother’s dresser drawers. I dreamt the whole ball of wax, cats multiplying before my eyes, the chalk-lined and the side-lined, how you opened for Ted Nugent, and took up the bow and arrow. In my next life I will learn to fly again, and this time I’ll get it right. My chi is stuck between my clavichord and my clavicle, and my sternocleidomastoid is equal to X most of the time. I will never understand the quantum levels of Planck lengths you will go to keep your position as narcissist in chief but am happy to visualize you in orange brighter than your painted on tan. I’m not sorry to imagine a world without you, Mr. Never-was-my-Prez. I think the ISS has a trick hatch, and the hinges are working just fine.

—Submitted on 01/08/2021

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press, 2015), Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and Some Other Eden (Finishing Line Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Diagram, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and other journals. She lives in Washington State. 

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Kathy Nativo
Two Poems

Live in the Moment

Encourage yourself, Humanity, to live as young as you are.
You are in primary school and most survive it.
There is no need to invent holidays.
Every day is one.
Live in the moment.
Your fate is not set.
Draw pictures.
Use your words.
Learn to express.
Keep yourself open like a pantry door.
The truth of the matter, Humanity, is that you haven’t yet discovered
even the first line of your story.
Your first steps are tottering ones.
You are a species among many.
Life abounds around you.
You are nurtured by nature.
You can fall on its hardest surface and it will cushion you.
You stand a chance, standing ankle deep in the stream of time.
All of your windows are raised for you to look out of and still feel secure.
Oh Humanity, life is a game.
You don’t have to play it well.
Just enjoy the play, as all children do.

Eco Iko Iko

The climate of the world has changed.
All the little fires have become a conflagration.
The world is Rome and it’s burning.
The arctic has seen its day.
The iceberg that the Titanic struck no longer exists.
It melted leaving hope with the survivors
for bias, bigotry and prejudice to melt too.
In this small world of inhabitants to many—too many,
Nero and Molly Brown have become compatriots.

Gardeners, grow all the flowers, grass and vegetables you want.
Then cast what it took to grow them into the stream that runs through your town.
Home dwellers, burn Roman Candles on your lawn just for fun.
Entertain your neighbors but don’t save them.
Florists, put your thoughts in flower boxes.
Hang them on brackets outside your window.
Their colors and type will speak for you, even yell.
One can do worse than yelling outside your window.
Crow like a well feathered and well fed crow.

The boundaries of Earth are nature made.
We are causing them to change by setting them ablaze.
We soil the soil with our waste.
We taint the tides of the oceans with our detritus.
We enclose our spaciousness with fences and walls.
In being bound our grief will know no bounds.
We advance to shoot off the Earth on those Roman rockets
to bring the debris of our ethos into the cosmos.

In the natural world we must relearn to take our place.
In eco-green we should place our trust
by not just planting the seeds of reparation
but planting them with appreciation, purpose and thankfulness.

—Submitted on 01/08/2021

Kathy Nativo‘s poems have appeared in Beat of the Street and Poetry On The Streets. She is a musician and retired music instructor in in Wethersfield, Conn. 

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Crystal Valerie Rea
January 6th, 2021

I said I am hungry
not Hunger Games.

$800 fine for gatherings more than 10.

Quebec institutes curfew;
this Saturday, 8pm.

Another curfew
at six, this day.
Not very Presidential news
Democracy gives way

PCR test required
72 hours before flight.

What is denied cannot be denied.

Outed,
in plain sight;
the visibility switched
lives ago.

I wonder, being White
and knowing

if the skin of the failed coup had been other
they’d have been beaten
gassed
shot

I wonder, our right as Canadians to comment on place that is not-
Home
and yet we neighbour.

What is the role of neighbour?

How do we do the work
local
and Global?

There is a reckoning to come beyond acknowledgement.

A pandemic to quell
lovers to meld bones with.

There is a reckoning to come beyond acknowledgement.

A reckoning upon whose breath
we’ll speak the names
of the heaven sent.

—Submitted on 01/08/2021

Crystal Valerie Rea is dedicated to democracy and art, and the places they intersect. Transitioning from Canadian Actors’ Equity Association stage manager to workshop facilitator while the stages of our world are dark, she holds a BFA in theatre (technical production) from Ryerson University in Toronto, and a focus in art direction from Vancouver Film School. This is her first poetry publication.

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Pam Sinicrope
My Teratoma

The doctor tells me
my teratoma looks like a pocket
of bones and cartilage, bulging
with hair, bright yellow, fat-rich.

This random mutation gone rogue
will not cease fabricating.
I name him Donald and he talks
to my lady parts while I sleep:

Pocahontas…bimbo…
I treat ‘em like shit…
by the pussy…you can
do anything if you’re rich…
blood coming out of her wherever…

and though the odds of cancer
are small, he continues
to amplify and twist
my ovary.
Donald must leave.

The surgeon dissects and strips it
layer-by-layer, the chambers of teeth,
tailbone and hair, scrapes it into a tiny bag,
suctions the remaining seepage, the process
is long and labored, but necessary
to prevent infection and sepsis.

I trace across
the ridge of scar, remember
how his half-formed phrases punctured
into ears and eyelids.

Later, he becomes nothing
but a case report, haploid parts
floating in formaldehyde,
confetti in a sea of apoplexy.

The doctor tells me he is
gone, was not malignant.
The doctor also tells me
he could grow back.

—Submitted on 01/08/2021

Pam Sinicrope‘s poems have appeared in 3 Elements Review, Appalachian Journal, Literary Mama, and other journals. among others. She is a student in the low residency MFA program at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, and lives in Rochester, Minnesota.

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