Frances Mac
Women’s Empowerment Panel

An adaptation of Donald Trump’s remarks made on March 29, 2017

thank you
		(this is resented)

thank you
		(really she shouldn’t say this  but	
what rough roof
		she has to give
				in full
		to be edible	
		to seem a secret
		to tell a torn
thank you
thank you
		secret of pert
		secret of labor
		secret of 	
would have been
		she’s celebrating the art
			of speak and stay)

thank you very much
thank you
		(such history 
beginning each generation		
		the Adams who urge her – 	
				blessed roe –
		to live 		first round
			then as a maker untamed
		lain to the sky
			grit on the shoulders	
		a titan only by will)

thank you
thank you
thank you
		(will her daughter believe
			in herself or in nothing
		the leashed power of her	
			homeless
		she the owner of chances
		
she means to dare
			a bright truth
		for each and every one
			daughters	granddaughters
		to stop
		thanking you)

Poems by Frances Mac have appeared in Epigraph Magazine, Burnt Pine Magazine, The MacGuffin, and Santa Clara Review. She hails from the Texas Hill Country and currently lives in Washington, DC.

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Laura Iodice
Ode to a Dream Defiled

I’m all for Jay Gatsby, that delusional dreamer who cherished gold
While praying for white.
I’m for his lyrical laugh, his pastel-laden laundry,
His defiant optimism,
His guilt-free guile.

I’m not much for his choice of friends, though.
That ever-pretentious Nick, feigning tolerance
Yet judging all the while
As he measures Gatsby’s glitter
Against Tom and Daisy’s pedigreed smiles.

Not much for white wedding motifs on mile-high ceilings,
Nor master horsemen who flaunt their bruising whips,
Nor green lights that can’t be reached. Such liars, those lights.
“Go, Go, Go,” they whisper from across the wide bay,
Knowing all the while that swimming is an exclusive sport.

And so Jay sinks, as does the Dream.
And Spring yields to Winter all too soon;
And all that’s left is an empty pool, its concrete bottom,
Once watery womb, now tomb,
An unremarkable resting place.

And the roaring times too, are gone.
Returned to the Egg that spawned them.
Not dead, but dormant, prepared to hatch
When time permits and memories lapse
And empty promises erase the past.

Then the clock slips from the mantel’s ledge
And tilts its hands toward the beckoning bay where
Boats await their passengers to rock against the tides
And reach once more for that green breast
Long gone.

Poetry by Laura Iodice has appeared in Social Justice Poetry. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in High Shelf Press, Conclave Magazine, The Write Launch, Litro, Metafore Magazine, Crack the Spine and Vending Machine Press. She is a veteran secondary and post-secondary educator and scholarly writer. A Bronx native, she lives with her husband in Syracuse, NY.

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CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue
You Have to Be Wealthy in Order to Be Great

I like to tell people it’s hard to get rich,
but it’s even harder to fill your body cavity
with golf balls and sell them to foreign
heads of state at exorbitant prices. It all
depends on the alignment of dimples, learning
to hold clubs in your mouth without
chewing. You don’t get wealthy by accident.
It’s takes a lot of grit to flatter someone
on Monday, and then on Tuesday, feed them
to the cylindrical grinding machine you keep
in your luxury penthouse suite. That’s how you
achieve greatness. First, you’re rich. Second,
you’re entirely coated in plutonium. Third,
you’ve accumulated quite a collection of slightly
used penny loafers which you sell for very
reasonable prices at the Penny Loafers
Emporium. Come on down! Off I-34 by
the Shoney’s. Your brother owns that Shoney’s.
He says kids under 5 eat free. Every Christmas
at Mother’s you try to tell him: no one eats free.

CL Bledsoe is the author of the poetry collection Trashcans in Love (Ghoti Fish Press, 2017) and the novel The Funny Thing About… (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2018). He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter, and blogs, with Michael Gushue, at @howtoeven.

Michael Gushue is the author of Pachinko Mouth (Plan B Press, 2013), Conrad (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2010), Gathering Down Women (Pudding House Press, 2007), and (in collaboration with CL Bledsoe) I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey (Editorial Pretzelcoatl, 2017). A resident of Washington, DC, Gushue is co-founder of Poetry Mutual Press, and co-curator of the reading series Poetry at the Watergate.

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Frances Mac
TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline Announcement

An adaptation of Donald Trump’s remarks made on March 24, 2017

please the man
frankly
words don’t pay
a damn thing here

america for sport

miles to refine
demons to make
things to take

first america
first us
first me

back to our words
the side of know
and plenty
expressed finite

did we not tell it
did we not ask why

Poems by Frances Mac have appeared in Epigraph Magazine, Burnt Pine Magazine, The MacGuffin, and Santa Clara Review. She hails from the Texas Hill Country and currently lives in Washington, DC.

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Alana Hayes
Beyond Approach

So, how much do you get to decide
I give now?
Who’s paying for this satisfaction?
Who’s making the profit?
I know it’s not me.
Where is this woman’s benefit?
Let’s get one thing straight
I will not make any adjustments
just to make a sale
I will not sit over the counter,
on a shelf
waiting for you to grab me.
I think I’m going to require a prescription,
so visit your doctor.
I’m going to make sure you have a lot of paperwork.
You better sign all the dotted lines,
go through all the red tape,
and swipe that credit card of yours until it’s dead
if you want to get to me.
In all fairness
if making the sale is all about
a welcoming smile,
I’d rather be beyond approach.

Alana Hayes is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she received a BA in English Literature and another in Women and Gender Studies. Her poetry revolves around themes of Judaism, feminism, and social justice issues. Follow her on Instagram @womanasriot.

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Ann Chadwell Humphries
No Sanctuary

You earned exile
slaughtered nine innocents
confessed not to a priest in a curtained booth
but to police on a security camera.
Your voice stained like grease.

You dressed in stoicism like steel armor
proffered no regret
when family screamed at you, Feel it!
Spoke rebellion with no eye contact.
When jurors wept, you hardened like cement.

When a daughter sobbed I forgive you
you withdrew to your bunker of obsidian.

I have no jurisdiction to forgive you.
Only a saint can leap that chasm.
My faith declares you a child of God,
so must I.

You are where you need to be
locked behind concrete and steel
a twisted moral compass for company.

Poems by Ann Chadwell Humphries have appeared in Jasper Magazine and on The Comet, the bus system of the Central Midlands Regional Transit Authority in Richland and Lexington counties in the Columbia metropolitan area of South Carolina (an initiative of Columbia’s inaugural poet laureate, Ed Madden). Winner of a 2017 Into the Fire scholarship from The Sun magazine and recipient of a Jasper Magazine Emerging Voice award, she lives and writes in Columbia, SC.

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Judson Evans
Rent-A-Wreck

Let me tell you about my grandchildren they
are dead, or
I am spending their inheritance on drugs
or oil. I am packing the great multi-compartmental American Tourister™.
Its price is right
below the wastepaper blonde in drag
as Simone Weil. With its four wheels and motor, it’s so much
more than luggage,
so much more than a commodity, a perpetual state of
expansion.

Imagine the universe a balloon buttered with
residue of kittens laced with cyanide. You are its
surface, the stakes of the obese dirigible of your
freedom pop like a string of firecrackers

As long as the evangelists keep shimmying hellfire
pamphlets under your wiper blades, you may continue to imagine
you are inside an intestine with a map of the itinerary, waiting
for the tally of three world historical phases  duodenum, jejunum, ileum, bath tub rings of the coral reefs.

Of course we are afraid, but can’t the perimeters be booby-trapped with pesticide or asbestos?

Can’t the mercury shares be stapled to the edges of the envelope?

Can’t the illegal immigrants be drafted into the shopping cart wars of the future?

Luckily, the homeless are backward-compatible with the newly emerging food groups. Blue light has a smaller wavelength so more of our private data may be packed inside poisoned figs. Donkey carts full of the them pass the street where I live, the street where I live…

Poems by Judson Evans have appeared in Pedestal Magazine, Contemporary Haibun Online, Cleaver Magazine, Interim, and Salt Hill Journal, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies New Smoke: An Anthology of Poetry Inspired by Neo Rauch (Off the Park Press, 2009), Viva La Difference: Poems in Response to Peter Saul (Off the Park Press, 2010), and The Triumph of Poverty: Poems Inspired by Nicole Eisenman (Off the Park Press, 2012), all edited by John Yau. After a tenure as director of liberal arts for Boston Conservatory from 1988 to 2015, Judson Evans is now a full-time professor in the Liberal Arts Department at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

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Jane Yolen
If One Child Is Saved

If one child is saved,
we call it a miracle.
If many children die,
a Holocaust..
We have no word
for the in-between,
only for those moments of peace
with a small p.
Perhaps if we did,
We would have
a record crop
of ploughshares.
We could spend our days
listening to small hands
playing clapping games,
not hiding in closets
or cellars, or holes.
If one child and one child
are saved.
And one more
and one more.
If we could find
the capital P
hidden away in the duck’s egg,
along with Kostchai’s heart
perhaps.
It is an old story.
The oldest.
It is a good dream.
The best.

Jane Yolen is a poet, novelist, children’s book writer, essayist, short story writer, and lyricist. To date, she has published 376 books, 10 of them poetry collections for adult readers. She has won many awards for her work, including two Nebulas, two Golden Kite Awards, a Caldecott Medal, two Christopher Medals, a New England Public Radio Arts & Humanities award, and three World Fantasy awards. Six colleges and universities have granted her honorary doctorates. Yolen writes, “But awards can be dangerous. One set my good coat on fire.”

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Todd Heldt
Prayer on the Bob Jones University Campus

Stumbling drunk between the buildings
With bisexual girlfriend and gay best friend,
we are three shades of Sodom. Our show
runs late, and we need coffee and sugar
and time to sober up for the all-day drive
to Atlanta. The Krispy Kreme Donuts
is not open yet. When I thought of hell
when I was young, it was for very bad people
and me. Stuck in Bible Country for at least
a few hours, I catch myself starting to pray
for the first time in years, my prayer that
no one will notice I’m here. I don’t know
whose side I’m on anymore, but if there’s a hell,
it’s probably a lot like this, and if there’s a God
it obviously can’t keep us straight either.

Todd Heldt is the author of Card Tricks for the Starving (Ghost Road Press, 2009). His work has appeared in 2AM Muse, Blast Furnace, Chiron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fear of Monkeys, Gyroscope Review, Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many other journals. Heldt is a librarian in Chicago.

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J.P. White
Somewhere in Laredo

Never enough toilets.
I remember this one toilet somewhere in Laredo
No one would dare because a rooster
Was leashed to a drainpipe by one leg
And he was not happy with the tilt of his world.
Even if you could slip by him without getting
Your hand or leg pecked, the overflowing toilet
Did not have a seat and no paper to wipe with.
Some people argue the world always sits
At the table of the invisible and food is coming.
Some claim liberty for the captive
Has not advanced one verse since Corinthians.
Most of us know by now the earth is fed up
With shit in her nest. Better or worse?
Either way, slow this pilgrim, so slow
And it’s getting hard to stay in the hunt
For a toilet said to be right here, but it’s not.

J.P. White is the author of the poetry collections The Sleeper at the Party (Defined Providence Press, 2001), The Salt Hour (The University of Illinois Press, 2001), The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator’s Garden (Holy Cow Press, 1988), and In Pursuit of Wings (Panache Books, 1978). His essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies. He holds a BA from New College (1973), an MA from Colorado State University (1977), and an MFA from Vermont College (1990). He lives on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis.

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