Liz Ahl
Fake Ghazal
The narcissistic man-child points and blusters “fake news!”
during his most recent spew and blather to make news.
Just when I think my despair has touched its limit,
the creature’s maw unhinges, finds more of me to take. News
to no one: his voice chews at the frayed ends of my hope.
To no one with an ounce of heart or sense is this ache news.
The relentless pixels of his thin-skinned cruelty might break me,
break you, break the world, even, finally, break “news.”
I know I’m meant to find some inch of ground where vigilance
and sanity can coexist. Or maybe I should forsake news.
Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds, forthcoming in 2017 from Hobblebush Books. She has written four chapbooks: Home Economics and Talking About the Weather, both from Seven Kitchens Press in 2012 (the latter as part of the “Summer Kitchen” series); Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010), which received the New Hampshire Literary Awards “Reader’s Choice” in Poetry Award in 2011; and A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration, Atlanta Review, Able Muse, Measure, Cutthroat, and Rappahannock Review.
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