Category Archives: Second Coming

Second Coming No. 64 — March 24, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Cecille Marcato
What Did You Do Last Week?

An unelected but powerful official in the New Government asked us to name five things we did last week. Good question. I had to think. One: I sat at my window & watched two cardinals, a house sparrow, a house finch, a yellow-rumped warbler & a pair of mock parakeets share food from the feeders. (The cardinals are a couple & often appear in the yard together or one right after the other, all without interacting, which they do only in private while accomplishing their shared goals.) Two: I went to a class. We read from three journals, three poems each. We discussed editorial choices vis-à-vis our own work. Is that two things? Three? Three: I surfaced from the deep depression I have been in (everyone is in) to make a meal but found I had the bends. Four: Remembered something I’d read (Gibbon? Someone else?) years ago. That during the decline of Rome, previously provided services fell by the wayside. Garbage littered the streets & no workers were paid (or made) to pick it up. Mail went uncollected, un-distributed. (Here, I could be projecting, as I’m not sure that Romans had a post office. Benjamin Franklin had not been born. Just last week when I was doing my five things, a birthday greeting I’d mailed with a little vintage railroad trading card from the New Haven line tucked inside did not reach its intended recipient to cheer him up & my car registration with payment of $78.23 along with proof of insurance disappeared. Plus, for the final time, proof of inspection, since the Local Government will no longer be requiring them in the hopes that poor people with unsafe vehicles will simply drive off the roads in what, one hopes, would be one-car collisions. During the first regime of the now-nascent New Government, I’d had seventy-five handmade holiday cards disappear because the Post Office had needed eviscerating since voters were using it to vote.) These days, the new kind of “garbage” in the streets is human—people down on their luck or ill who, whether they could work again or not, need looking after for a time because that is what a benevolent society does for its less-fortunate citizens, many of whom might have been soldiers in the army of the very Government that now eschews them. What human is not in some way burdensome? (A question that surfaced while watching the birds, not that they are in any way a drain. The opposite, actually—when away, I think of them with joy. In school I learned that thinking is working.) Five: Wondered Is this it? Is this what it’s come to? The cartoon man in rags holding a placard in the street that reads The End Is Near? Or is it the mid-section of the beginning of an extension of a very long end? I thought of my mother, speaking from a hyperbaric chamber after eleven months in a hospital bed before Affordable Care. I guess this is it, she said; I guess I might not ever get well. Mother et al., maybe we need to rethink the meaning of well. Maybe that’s more than five things.

Cecille Marcato‘s poems have appeared in Leon Literary Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Husk, Naugatuck River Review, Slipstream, and Solstice, among other journals. She holds degrees in literature and design and graduated from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A cartoonist as well as a writer, Marcato lives in Austin, Texas.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

Second Coming No. 63 — March 23, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Paula Rudnick
Changed

A Delta jet landed on its roof last week,
hanging passengers upside down like bats
surveying crumbs from their last snack,
their condition changed from light to leaded,
winged to grounded, safe to dangling
at the moment they thought they had arrived.
I did 45 sit-ups this morning—
not bad for a person my age.
My body didn’t ache too much
when I got out of my organic-fiber bed.
The coffee exceptionally good today,
just the right amount of strong,
mellowed by a splash of half-and-half
sipped slowly from an antique floral mug.
The lemon-ginger scone I quick-defrosted
tasted almost like fresh-baked
and the lilies that I bought on sale
yesterday perfumed the air.
No one shot at me when I picked up the newspaper,
dropped at my front door before dawn’s light,
my life unchanged from how it was
a month ago, except nothing’s the same.
Inside my chest a heaviness I can’t cocktail-hour away,
inside my throat a rant ready to spill.
The small blue leatherette passport
I used to flash invincibly makes me lower eyelids
when border guards request my documents now
like in some vintage black and white movie
where things get bad and then there’s no escape
and I am bolted to my seat prepared for impact,
weighing who to call to pledge my love.

Paula Rudnick is the author of the poetry collection Now is Not a Good Time (self-published, 2022). Her poems have appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, LA Jewish Journal and Kosmos Quarterly as well as in the anthologies What We Talk About When We Talk About It Vol. II (Darkhouse Books, 2020), Verdant Truth Serum Vol. 5 (Truth Serum Press, 2019), and The Place Where Everyone’s Name is Fear (Anxiety/Outcast Press, 2022). A former television producer and a mother of two daughters, Rudnick lives in Los Angeles.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

Second Coming No. 62 — March 22, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Erin Murphy
What Did You Do Last Week?

1.  I lay in bed and thought of the AA mantra
     one day at a time and the Dolly Parton lyric
     I’ve had to think up a way to survive
     and the Becket line I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

2.  I scattered a few bucks like birdseed
     to causes I care about.

3.  I sat in meetings where there were calls
     to order and motions on motions,
     oceans of motions. Someone in the shadows
     was always taking minutes. Taking minutes.

4.  I went for a walk in a wetland preserve
     nestled between an asphalt company
     and the county courthouse. A northern flicker
     pecked for ground beetles. On its head:
     a red brushstroke like an artist’s
     afterthought. Or a warning. I wondered
     if birds have blood. I wondered if the people
     in power have feelings. I wondered
     if we’ll go on. I told myself we can’t
     not go on.

5.  I wrote this poem.

Erin Murphy is the author most recently of the poetry collections Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024) and Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). Her poems have appeared in diode, ONE ART, Eastern Iowa Review, Brick Road Poetry Press, Ilanot Review. and other journals. She is a professor of English at Penn State Altoona and poetry editor of The Summerset Review.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

Second Coming No. 61 — March 21, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Birch Wiley
DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
an erasure of an executive order

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 7301 of title 5, United States Code, it is hereby ordered: Section 1. Purpose. Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts. Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept. Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.= Sec. 2. Policy and Definitions. It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality, and the following definitions shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy: (a) “Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.” (b) “Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.(c) “Men” or “man” and “boys” or “boy” shall mean adult and juvenile human males, respectively.(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell. (f) “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body. (g) “Gender identity” reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex. Sec. 3. Recognizing Women Are Biologically Distinct From Men. (a) Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall provide to the U.S. Government, external partners, and the public clear guidance expanding on the sex-based definitions set forth in this order. (b) Each agency and all Federal employees shall enforce laws governing sex-based rights, protections, opportunities, and accommodations to protect men and women as biologically distinct sexes. Each agency should therefore give the terms. “sex”, “male”, “female”, “men”, “women”, “boys” and “girls” the meanings set forth in section 2 of this order when interpreting or applying statutes, regulations, or guidance and in all other official agency business, documents, and communications. (c) When administering or enforcing sex-based distinctions, every agency and all Federal employees acting in an official capacity on behalf of their agency shall use the term “sex” and not “gender” in all applicable Federal policies and documents. (d) The Secretaries of State and Homeland Security, and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, shall implement changes to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder’s sex, as defined under section 2 of this order; and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management shall ensure that applicable personnel records accurately report Federal employees’ sex, as defined by section 2 of this order. (e) Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology. (f) The prior Administration argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which addressed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, requires gender identity-based access to single-sex spaces under, for example, Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act. This position is legally untenable and has harmed women. The Attorney General shall therefore immediately issue guidance to agencies to correct the misapplication of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) to sex-based distinctions in agency activities. In addition, the Attorney General shall issue guidance and assist agencies in protecting sex-based distinctions, which are explicitly permitted under Constitutional and statutory precedent. (g) Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology. Each agency shall assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology. Sec. 4. Privacy in Intimate Spaces. (a) The Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security shall ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers, including through amendment, as necessary, of Part 115.41 of title 28, Code of Federal Regulations and interpretation guidance regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act. (b) The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall prepare and submit for notice and comment rulemaking a policy to rescind the final rule entitled “Equal Access in Accordance with an Individual’s Gender Identity in Community Planning and Development Programs” of September 21, 2016, 81 FR 64763, and shall submit for public comment a policy protecting women seeking single-sex rape shelters. (c) The Attorney General shall ensure that the Bureau of Prisons revises its policies concerning medical care to be consistent with this order, and shall ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex. (d) Agencies shall effectuate this policy by taking appropriate action to ensure that intimate spaces designated for women, girls, or females (or for men, boys, or males) are designated by sex and not identity. Sec. 5. Protecting Rights. The Attorney General shall issue guidance to ensure the freedom to express the binary nature of sex and the right to single-sex spaces in workplaces and federally funded entities covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In accordance with that guidance, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Labor, the General Counsel and Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and each other agency head with enforcement responsibilities under the Civil Rights Act shall prioritize investigations and litigation to enforce the rights and freedoms identified. Sec. 6. Bill Text. Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs shall present to the President proposed bill text to codify the definitions in this order. Sec. 7. Agency Implementation and Reporting. (a) Within 120 days of the date of this order, each agency head shall submit an update on implementation of this order to the President, through the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. That update shall address: (i) changes to agency documents, including regulations, guidance, forms, and communications, made to comply with this order; and (ii) agency-imposed requirements on federally funded entities, including contractors, to achieve the policy of this order. (b) The requirements of this order supersede conflicting provisions in any previous Executive Orders or Presidential Memoranda, including but not limited to Executive Orders 13988 of January 20, 2021, 14004 of January 25, 2021, 14020 and 14021 of March 8, 2021, and 14075 of June 15, 2022. These Executive Orders are hereby rescinded, and the White House Gender Policy Council established by Executive Order 14020 is dissolved. (c) Each agency head shall promptly rescind all guidance documents inconsistent with the requirements of this order or the Attorney General’s guidance issued pursuant to this order, or rescind such parts of such documents that are inconsistent in such manner. Such documents include, but are not limited to: (i) “The White House Toolkit on Transgender Equality”; (ii) the Department of Education’s guidance documents including: (A) “2024 Title IX Regulations: Pointers for Implementation” (July 2024); (B) “U.S. Department of Education Toolkit: Creating Inclusive and Nondiscriminatory School Environments for LGBTQI+ Students”; (C) “U.S. Department of Education Supporting LGBTQI+ Youth and Families in School” (June 21, 2023); (D) “Departamento de Educación de EE.UU. Apoyar a los jóvenes y familias LGBTQI+ en la escuela” (June 21, 2023); (E) “Supporting Intersex Students: A Resource for Students, Families, and Educators” (October 2021); (F) “Supporting Transgender Youth in School” (June 2021); (G) “Letter to Educators on Title IX’s 49th Anniversary” (June 23, 2021); (H) “Confronting Anti-LGBTQI+ Harassment in Schools: A Resource for Students and Families” (June 2021); (I) “Enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 With Respect to Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Light of Bostock v. Clayton County” (June 22, 2021); (J) “Education in a Pandemic: The Disparate Impacts of COVID-19 on America’s Students” (June 9, 2021); and (K) “Back-to-School Message for Transgender Students from the U.S. Depts of Justice, Education, and HHS” (Aug. 17, 2021); (iii) the Attorney General’s Memorandum of March 26, 2021 entitled “Application of Bostock v. Clayton County to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972″; and (iv) the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace” (April 29, 2024). Sec. 8. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect: (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or (ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals. (b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations. (c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person. (d) If any provision of this order, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this order and the application of its provisions to any other persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.

Birch Wiley is a poet and librarian living in New York. Their work is forthcoming in Pleiades and Union Spring Literary Review, among others. Their first book, Mythweaver, will be published by new words {press} this summer.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

Second Coming No. 60 — March 20, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Susanna Rich
Morning After the Election I Make My Bed

Sound bites and tallies
scrambled my comforter,
unfit the fitting.
This is my morning.
To grunt, tug, wrestle
the mattress cover
to knuckle under edges,
fist the corners.
I unfurl the top sheet
to complain like a mainsail
in heavy wind. The flap.
The collapse into wrinkles.
Mocking my hope of joy.
Tuck. Tuck. Everything
tucked. Folded onto itself.
Pillows, like blanked eyes.
The shams. The sham.
The blanket stretched hard
for the quarter to bounce
Washington’s profile,
check my skill, my worth.
I make my bed
to take back yesterday,
last week, summer,
wrestle the whole cloth,
hospital corners, quilted
down, the too many threads,
fluff the pillows, crawl
back in, pull the sheet
over my face.

Susanna Rich is the author of five poetry collections, most recently SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage (Blast Press, 2020) and Beware the House (Poet’s Press, 2019). Recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Collegium Budapest, she is a distinguished professor emerita of English at Kean University in Union, NJ. Rich presents one-woman, audience-interactive poetry experiences through her company Wild Nights Productions.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

Second Coming No. 59 — March 19, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Margot Wizansky
In Florida, “Don’t Say Gay” Is the Law

The governor has a plan to keep children
from being infected with gay. A gay suppressant,
making the word gay illegal. We will all be silent,
eat cupcakes, tie orange bandanas around our necks,
suck the word gay from the English language.
We’ll blow the word out of classrooms, kiss it
good-bye, put it in the closet or send it off to camp,
swish the rooms clean of it. In art class we’ll
resume painting the still life of pansies and fruit,
pass by the window and look down low where
a bear has plugged the dike, go out the back door
and even now, the garden is full of zucchini ripening,
look up to see a rainbow and a chicken hawk flies by,
its prey an otter in the river or that puppy in the grass.

Margot Wizansky is the author of the poetry collection The Yellow Sweater (Kelsay Books, 2023) and the chapbook Wild for Life (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022). Her poems have appeared in journals including The American Journal of Poetry, The Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Ruminate, River Styx, and Cimarron, among others. Wizansky edited the anthologies Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains. With Wendy Drexler she co-edited What the Poem Knows, a tribute to beloved poet and workshop leader Barbara Helfgott Hyett. Now retired from a career developing housing for adults with disabilities, Wizansky lives in Massachusetts.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

Second Coming No. 58 — March 18, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Annie Bien
Undaunted

Downpours roil cliffside,
mudslides of thought excrement
burst as waterfalls.

A match sparks in flame,
stench of saliva spat sweat,
skin pores reeking sweat.

Mute wheezy voice, flesh
pores enlarged, inside each hole:
Spoiled old man ego.

See this illusion
created on boundless lies.
Keep your mind open.

This ocean of suffering
can be sailed, watch the star paths.
Moonglows are phases:

In full moon we see
The forks and roads to travel,
In new moon we move.

Annie Bien is the author of the poetry collections Under Shadows of Stars (Kelsay Books, 2017) and Plateau Migration (Alabaster Leaves Press, 2012). Her story Earthen Sky won the London Independent Story Prize for flash fiction (2020). Bien’s translations of Tibetan Buddhist texts appear in the digital repository 8400. Her poetry and flash fiction have appeared in The Wild Word, The Banyan Review, MockingHeart Review, WordCityLit, Autumn Sky Poetry, and other journals. She lives in Brooklyn where she teaches meditation and qigong.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

Second Coming No. 57 — March 17, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Laurel Brett
Rendezvous

If I should meet you
at the summit of a snowy mountain

let us not burden each other
with our stories of how the world

has wronged us—our genes,
our histories, our disappointments.

Instead, let us each pull up a chair
and say our names.

Let one of us point
to a peregrine falcon,

wings extended in an ecstasy
of flight, without remarking

on its predatory nature. Let
the other admire

the way the white around us
dazzles without remembering

the melting on Mt. Fuji.
It’s true—at the foot of this peak

the very fabric of the earth unravels.
We each know this. No need

to speak. For this moment—
a mountain, snow, a falcon and us.

Laurel Brett is the author of the novel The Schrödinger Girl (Kaylie Jones Books, 2020) and the literary critical study Disquiet on the Western Front: World War II and Postmodern Fiction (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Born in New York City, she lives in Port Jefferson, NY, and teaches in the English department at Nassau Community College in Garden City.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

Second Coming No. 56 — March 16, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

John Cross
Back to the Beginning

a child with a crayon spinning through the air
of a mostly invisible universe draws trees
& mountains lifting & falling with the breeze
draws one tiny man with wispy cockroach-leg hair
waiting for the firing squad he’s ordered
that’s meandered into the suburbs selling
sovereigntist anthems door to door
paper targets where their hearts should be
& the child imagines heat in a salt mine
near the hidden deep of the earth
that keeps pushing up red orange swirls
as any child might do & she scrawls
some forgotten word for how she feels right now

John Cross is the author of the poetry collection What Bleak Angels Carried Your Bed, forthcoming from Omnidawn Press, and the chapbook staring at the animal (Tupelo Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in journals including Volt, Lana Turner, and Yalobusha Review, among others. He teaches English at Westridge School for Girls in Pasadena and lives in Monrovia, Calif., with artist Christine Kiphart and a dog named Gordon.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.

Second Coming No. 55 — March 15, 2025

Posted on by

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Linda McCauley Freeman
To Our Great and Anonymous Dead

You who suffered
baton blows,
cuffs and Klans, chains
and chances. You who held
the tantalizing tastes of freedom
on your tongue. You who stepped
up and stepped forward and stepped
out. You who saw a vision of this land
as one for all people. You who knew
our pronoun should always be we.
Not them. Not Other.
But sister and brother.
To our great anonymous dead,
lead us now against temptation
to block the news, to close
our eyes, to shrug, to sleep,
to lie down
and let it all die.

Linda McCauley Freeman is the author of The Marriage Manual: Poems (Backroom Window Press, 2024) and The Family Plot: Poems (Backroom Window Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in journals including New World Writing Quarterly, Delta Poetry Review, Lightwood, Chronogram, and Fourth & Sycamore, among others. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she is a swing dance teacher and a yoga instructor.

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 occupant of the White House. 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.

If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.

You can use the form below to donate as little as $1.00 (not visible in the email version of this post) or use this link to visit our donation page where you can donate as little as $1.00 or choose titles from the Indolent Books catalogue as thank-you gifts for donations starting at $25.00—The more you give, the more thank-you gift books you get, up to six books for a donation of $100 or more.