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

Sean Sutherland
After the Election

I keep thinking of a time in the countryside at a
friend’s cottage. Exotic flowers waited for us
each morning. We warbled along to songs from
the 30s on an old record player. There was even
a room where you first had to make a bird call
if you found yourself there, when the eight of us
made the inventions of the others more lavish.
What I left to be in that house felt eclipsed
by a word from a lost culture defined as people
up late who speak from the summits of their hearts.
So that one night my friend and I formed
a vague notion we are part alien, with a
nostalgia for some other more serene world.
In a slender child’s bed like mine, in a husky
conspiratorial voice, he whispered after 1am
that the major American river we both know well
as a majestic animal of burden, in its nocturnal
luster of barge light, has another river just as wide
and many miles long which runs deep below its
every curve, but fast in the opposite direction.
In wonder, larger spaces grew between our words
as sleep came on the deep river surfaced.
I could hear the roar of that river as possibility,
and if in the morning pancakes, coffee and laughter
walked up those stairs to wake us, we could
forget that river as if it were a dream, or let it
sweep us along into anything we imagined.

Sean Sutherland‘s poems have appeared in journals including Atlanta Review, The Florida Review, Sandhills Literary Magazine, Hypertext, and Lime Hawk, among others, as well as in anthologies including Poetry for the Actor: A Guide to Deeper Truth (Smith & Kraus, 2020) edited by Deborah Hedwall. His plays have been produced at alternative theatre spaces in New York including Ensemble Studio Theatre, HERE Arts Center, and Altered Stages. A MacDowell Colony Fellow, Sutherland studies and teaches at The Writers Studio in New York.

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.

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

Emanuel Xavier
Here We Will Stay

We were never meant to belong,
pero aquí estamos—
brown hands, queer hearts,
ghosts of ancestors whispering from las esquinas
where our names have been erased.

Another wall, another ban,
another law written in white ink
with the blood of those
who were never meant to matter.

Our grandparents’ tongues
stumble on the lips of children,
but still, they dream,
despite the cages, despite the bullets,
despite gods who never listen.

And when they scream, Go back!
dime, ¿back a dónde?
Al Bronx, a El Paso, a San Juan,
to a map that never claimed us
but never let us go.

They hold la biblia
like a blade,
like a border, like a brand.
God, but only theirs,
To justify el odio.

Still, we remain,
glitter on our faces,
con uñas pintadas,
con tattoos y resistencia.

They cannot silence us,
because we have learned
to carve poetry from el silencio,
to turn our broken Spanglish
into a weapon
más fuerte que su miedo.

We are still here.
Y aquí nos quedaremos.

Emanuel Xavier is the author of seven poetry collections. His most recent, Love(ly) Child (Rebel Satori Press, 2023) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for gay poetry and was awarded the Silver Medal in the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award category at the International Latino Book Awards. Xavier’s cult novel Christ Like (originally published by Painted Leaf Press in 1999 and reissued by Rebel Satori Press on its Queer Mojo imprint in 2009) was groundbreaking in its portrayal of a young gay Latino’s immersion in the downtown club scene of the 1990s. He has edited several poetry anthologies, including Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (Floricanto Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, as well as in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, Edited by Rigoberto González. Xavier serves on the Board of The Publishing Triangle and is currently working on a memoir and a screenplay based on Christ Like. His honors include the Marsha A. Gomez Cultural Heritage Award, a New York City Council Citation, and a Gay City News Impact Award.

[The poet provided a considerably more concise and modest bio; I expanded it. —Ed.]

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 the work of Indolent Books, 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.

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

Patricia Q. Bidar
Red

These are days when every action carries a shadow idea: how much can anything matter with the breath of the minute hand nudging permanent midnight?

I learn that Pentecost is sometimes known as the birthday of the church. Pentecost Sunday marks the presence of the Holy Spirit with the earliest Christians as they gathered after Jesus’ death. Fifty days after Easter. (“He is risen!”)

My knowledge of these things is spotty. But I love Jesus as a friend. The Jesus Christ Superstar Jesus. Jesus of the gospels, bountiful hang time with misfits. That flowing Dan Fogelberg hair. That Jesus is just all right with me.

“Cleanliness is Next to Godliness” was curlicued on a little placard in my grandparents’ bathroom. Trying to make sense of it, I decided my grandmother had misspelled both “Kleenex” and “Garbage.”

OTOH, “I believe in the golden rule. Whoever has the gold makes the rules” was stenciled on a sign in our grandfather’s home bar. There was also an oil painting of a sexy woman toreador in only stiletto heels, brandishing a pair of red panties at a huffing bull. He told us our grandmother was the model. Another time, he said he himself was the model for the profile on the head of the American dime.

Behind the bar as our parents and grandparents played poker in the next room, my sister and I would loll, eating maraschino cherries and ruining bright paper drink parasols to inspect the tiny strips of Chinese newspaper inside.

So, no religious upbringing. And I learned today “we” mark Pentecost Sunday with the color red. See, on that first Pentecost Sunday, people were on fire with the Spirit, loving and praising God.

Red is the color of exposed skin, strange words issuing forth, the believers gleefully rowing, posing on precipices, or dancing badly under the trees. I see snakes dangling down, hissing out sales pitches to sunburnt ears.

And yet the signs of nature are here for us to see, and smell. Hear. The sunny wash of Matilija poppies. Trill of birdsong. Clouds drifting across powdery skies. The jacaranda’s canopy, nearly bare in the weeks before its heavenly blooms.

Patricia Q. Bidar is the author of the novelette Wild Plums (ELJ Editions, 2024) and the short story collection Pardon Me For Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press, forthcoming). Her short works have appeared in Waxwing, Wigleaf, Smokelong Quarterly, The Pinch, and Atticus Review, among other journals, as well as in several anthologies. A Los Angeles native, Bidar lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, CA.

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 the work of Indolent Books, 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.

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

Linda Hillman Chayes
Election Lament

          after Larry Levis

Soon, without exception, everyone
will be carved from stone.
The fountains in the courtyards and airports will run
                               dry & bone & airless,

Elephants in the room & lion-tamers in cages.
O composer for clown horns,
Laureate of the run-on verse, you
might suppose this is written about you…

If not, who? Women who wait in doorless waiting rooms?
Burning men who fight with foam under the Thunderdome?

Goodbye, little country.
Goodbye, neighborhoods of tolerance, bicyclists pedaling
from one end of town to the other
skirting mildew, shadow,
the bleak of sirens.

You can see that I am spinning
signals in spent bursts,
                               much like, as I peck my way
forward, the birdsong of someone
too tired to sleep as the bicycle horns bleep and bleep.

I beg your pardon, but did we not shout through a bullhorn
as if our lives depended on it?

And this cotton-candy truth on which we string our belief
less and less, at the hands of a jester.

For no reason and because
I can find no other compelling question, does everything we hold dear
even as a flag of spun sugar,
dissolve?
Devoured. By mouth

Linda Hillman Chayes is the author of the poetry chapbooks Not My First Walk on the Moon (2024) and The Lapse (2014), both from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in journals including Kestrel, American Poetry Journal, Bracken, Quartet, Westchester Review, 2 Horatio, and others. With Therese Rosenblatt, she co-edited The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity (Routledge, 2017). She holds a PhD in clinical psychology from City College of the City University of New York and is a practicing psychologist and psychoanalyst.

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 the work of Indolent Books, 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.

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

Barbara Reynolds
Message to the World

The voice persists
like stridulating crickets,
raising eyebrows,
eliciting groans.
Bullish, its tongue
tramples bare-headed facts,
and dodges carpets
of moss-capped moans.
Like eager talons
snatching herring
from the sea,
its fictions expunge
and loot.
Beware the strut
usurping the truth—
its comb sports a blade
and its claw a boot.

Barbara Reynolds‘s poems have appeared in Pangyrus, Avocet, What Rough Beast, Muddy River Poetry Review, and The Somerville Times, as well as in several anthologies. She is a retired math professor living in Somerville, 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 the work of Indolent Books, 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.

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

Oz Hardwick
The Results Are In

Oz Hardwick is the author most recently of the poetry collection Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). His poems have appeared in The Mackinaw, Anthropocene, One Hand Clapping, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Wordgathering, and other journals. In 2024 he received both the Charles Simic Poetry Prize and the Dolors Alberola International Poetry Prize.

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 the work of Indolent Books, 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.

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

Suzanne Osborne
Lullaby in a Time of Sorrow

          Nov. 6, 2024

The sun came up anyway
in a sky blue as 9/11.
I took a walk anyway
scuffing through leaves dead
as all my hopes.

There, there, now, now.
Don’t mope. Tomorrow
you’ll find a way to live
in this alien world
but for now feed the cat
meowing round your feet.

Musk, Hegseth, Kennedy.

There, there, now, now.
Just keep busy. Do
the crossword, do Wordle
and Spelling Bee—see?
you’re a genius, now isn’t that nice?

Greenland, Panama.

There, there, now, now.
They won’t hand over the canal.
A fairy-tale ogre’s threats, just set
them to music and sing yourself
to sleep. Tomorrow the sun will rise
as it always has, you’ll feed the cat
as you always do, take a walk as you always
do, watch the world change as it always
does, the sun will set again as it always
has and will till time runs down and all
our little hopes and fears are done.

There, there. Now, now.

Suzanne Osborne‘s poems have appeared in journals including What Rough Beast, A River Sings, Jonah Magazine, Neologism Poetry Journal, and New Plains Review, among others. After an early career in theater, a stint in academia, and too many years as a legal secretary, she now lives in Forest Hills, NY, and writes poetry.

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 the work of Indolent Books, 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.

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

Anna Van Lenten
Inauguration Over, the Smiths, the Beatles, and Shakespeare Gather in the Gowanus Whole Foods Parking Lot

The Gowanus Whole Foods parking lot, nth family shop.
It’s February, 2025, and there’s everything to love
and to lose. (Try to remember, the genome’s predictive power
is very low—five or ten percent.)

You clasp close the safety belt, gather a chestful of air
for home. A tsunami of heat and light spills into the body of the car
and yours with it.
The windshield glass, with its loving fingers, rakes the fur of your fatigue.
Once again, you fall asleep in the Whole Foods—
              —PAUSE—
              for 11 minutes, doze as a lioness who once upon a time
              prowled the bars at a zoo, her ferocity forgiven but not forgotten.

Somewhere your spirit animal stretches, opens an auspicious eye.
Meat is Murder on the radio. Your planet’s smithy,
befouled, needs a power wash.
What did you get?
               Honey Bear $3.00
               Brown Cow $4.13
               Blue Herring $4.94
               Blood Orange $1.26
So many animals in money—blood even. Rejuvenating.
The negotiations you make to ingest one…be one.
But you were extracted from inside one
              a swaddle for a parachute.
So, it took half a lifetime to learn how to crash,
only to find all along
it was a test, dummy test.
Take five, this time with feeling.

This term’s going to be rough, kids, fasten your seat belts.
Still, even Obama killed thousands—did his dead feel less?
              Ah but he did it remote—so elegant, so fine—Michelle knows:
              Sleep pretty darling, do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby…

Above all do no harm / To live is to harm:
No math will square that circle;
descend, aliens—show us the way (telepathically of course).
Because words…sigh.
What to dream of?
Diamond-star specials in the asphalt,
the air gusts with snow-sparkle puffs…
Always, your need for out-of-body experiences;
this world puts price tags on everything
—always the need for more courage, for right words right order.
Read less.
Read more.

Exiting the lot (fault lines everywhere, and you ready to fight)
you learn BBC reporter Fergan Keane
has discovered the secret to a happy life.
Fresh memory—at the Gowanus Canal drawbridge with your daughter
              February, 2017 (that election):
              she closed her eyes for two seconds / you clicked.
              (The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, As daylight doth a lamp.)
And the Canal cruised past, oblivious—
emptying itself then re-filling,
week in, week out, like we must do now.

Anna Van Lenten is the communications coordinator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She curated a highly regarded series of photography exhibits at the Half King bar and restaurant in New York from 2010 to 2019. In 2016 Van Lenten founded LightField, an arts organization in the Hudson Valley, producing multimedia exhibits in New York and Dubai. Her essay about Gerda Taro and Lee Miller appeared in Musee Magazine. She holds an MFA in fiction from The New School.

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 the work of Indolent Books, 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.

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

Guillermo Filice Castro
I Am Not Alone: Equilibrium

I am looking for balance. Steady ship
on a serene, sparrow-crossed ocean. Balance.
Avoid phone notifications though something
may slip through. My love for the world,
if I can call it that, this life, breaks my heart.
Hope the cat won’t soil the floor again, disturbed by
a different litter or who knows what. How sublime
to watch her high wire act along the edge of the sofa,
not a single misstep, while last week a runaway
dump truck smashed clean into our local store.
My little suburban world on a hill, shaken.
We had an earthquake, too. Another ICE raid.
Small & cave-bound, the best among us
would sketch hunt scenes on walls. Tomorrow
the noise of light & revision might kill off
this poem losing its footing. The glass Father
left unwashed in the sink. No matter
what I did, they, my parents, always fought,
even if I prayed or didn’t touch myself for a week,
Mother still tried to jump out of his moving car.
My favorite book as a teen was The Omen II,
turned on by what felt like sexual tension
between the young antichrist & his cousin.
I am in love with the son of the devil, something
I could say now to upset Christian nationalists.
Balance. After choir practice: a quiet room.
Then flames tore through the clutter in my school.
What can love do. Rebuild, try again.

Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of the chapbooks Mixtape for a War(Seven Kitchens Press, 2018) and Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His work has appeared in journals including Allium, Barrow Street, Brooklyn Rail, Fugue, Mulberry Literary Review, New Verse News, Pine Hills Review,and others, and is included in Best American Poetry 2023, edited by Elaine Equi. Born and raised in Argentina, Castro lives in New Jersey with his husband.

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 the work of Indolent Books, 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.