Jane McPhetres-Johnson
THE OTHER POEM: 2016
The Brexit, The Donald, & The Dreamers
Today they say our world
markets are in free-fall and
the union has broken apart
because the leavers voted
to leave and the remainders
united in loss. Leaving is
catching on, uncoupling is
all the rage, while the winners
actually believe they can
put everything back again
between the faded lines and
just as it was when the reds
were red, the whites white
and the bluebloods undiluted
by those who muddy the pure
and muddle the words, work
for nothing at jobs we don’t
want until they’re the ones on
top. The remainders. The voters
to leave. The other others out.
Jane McPhetres Johnson was born, raised, and educated on the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies, migrated north to the Wyoming Big Horns, and recently landed on the eastern side of the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. She completed the Goddard MFA under the care of Stephen Dobyns and Thomas Lux the same week her younger son was born, named him Ben Jo(h)nson, then dreamed up programming for public libraries until she finally got arrested at the George W. Bush White House and quit her library work to look for a more effective, affective voice. Always she has practiced the 3 Rs––Reading, wRiting, and Revision–– but seldom has taken the next alphabetical leap to Submission. Recently, however, her poems are venturing out to become verbal expressions of the Munch-kin “Scream” in the face of militarism, exploitation, and the sad insanity of corporate lemmingism. Her poem “Growing up beside the Continental Divide” was first published on Indolent Book’s series What Rough Beast, March 4, 2017, and then went to Washington in the “Not My Prez” anthology.
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