It's Still The Weekend
Breaking poetry by Penny Peyser, Brad Nolen, Kurt Cole Eidsveg, Joseph M. Gerace, Jerry Bradley
Dear Reader,
It isn't easy to take a stand. It isn't easy to learn your hardest memories have gone viral. It isn't easy to watch things happening that you can't stop. It isn't easy to learn that the lowest violences are protected and systemic acts. It isn't easy to be with all that's happening right now.
The poet Brad Nolen motions toward this in our week's poetry: "Here the poem's supposed / to show a changeable world, / but I'm afraid / the noise of screens / destroys my convictions."
So this week, I ask you to join me in reading work that has what it fears isn't there: power. It takes power - enormous, gorgeous, towering, culture-shifting, loving, sheltering, cry-yourself-free, burning, cannot-and-will-not-lose power - to find your convictions in the enclosing walls of this world. Read with me.
Elle Aviv Newton,
Editor-In-Chief
Poets Reading the News
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1,000 Victims... So Far
By Penny Peyser
The shock and awe of more dark revelation
From those in vestments black and collars white,
Should have no statute or no limitation
On retribution righting victims’ plight.
Apologies are meaningless to those
Who suffered while their innocence was robbed
And signed away their will to dare expose
While evil so incarnate weaved and bobbed.
No truthful mea culpas from the altar
Of predatory priests or those on high,
Archbishops’ flimsy morals only falter
Despite their “come to Jesus” drawing nigh.
Too late the warning to avoid this mania
For Catholic children raised in Pennsylvania.
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"Customer Success is Our Mission"
By Brad Nolen
When the poem begins “Here
is the video of schoolchildren
just moments before being
massacred by U.S.-
backed Saudi bombing”
will anyone keep reading?
When is “Just Massacred”
a backed will, a collective message
finger-written in a film
of dust on the bombed-
out body
of a bus?
Hear the children
being us, in a sense,
laughing as the roll is called,
on their way
to a martyr’s museum and their
own martyrs’ graves.
Bombing it (the bus,
the poem, the video,
the moments before
the field trip’s end)
becomes a bloody matter of
fact, just more news, and nothing new.
“Kids just being
kids” in a war(for oil)zone
get blown apart, their little limbs
scattered in the wreckage, and all
to ensure an energy
security that is only ever measured at the pump.
Now, Yemeni men dig the forty
tiny graves needed
to hold the mutilated bodies
of little boys, who died
in the event, which our
Saudi friends called a success.
Here the poem’s supposed
to show a changeable world,
but I’m afraid
the noise of screens
destroys my convictions. These
horrible horrible things
just happen
on a screen in a screen as a screen
and like the movies
someone screams
but in all of it, verisimilitude is
a feature of production.
I have to imagine
their parents to weep,
have to hold their losses as mine,
but even then I can only ever imagine
one loss at a time. So what
does one do then with
forty
little bodies, besides watch them
pass by in the news?
I want there to be a change-
able world, but in truth
I think I just do so as a custom-
er. I click and click away
between screens among screens within screens
where the news and the olds, and all of my shows, my work and my light communications
just happen together
as a virtual noise that I shop, and that
I can turn off in a minute.
So, I do weep when I see that
American bombs destroy children and weddings and funerals.
But only for a moment in private, clicking away most of
a day unaffected by the warfare
waged to secure this virtual world I consume
freed from the lasting effects of conscience.
Nothing ever changes but the pronouns
in the news. What happens there is too far away
to choose. So, the chaos of the third world be-
lies the order in the first, where screened horrors
are just more links accruing views, just an other
shit show, for which the best world has a thirst.
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28 Different Spoons
By Kurt Cole Eidsvig
Every zombie and vampire movie got more serious,
or was reinvented, after South Boston discovered opioids,
then heroin.
Whitey Bulger ran away and we leftovers staggered
and moaned for Andrew Square and Methadone
Mile for doses. It’s alive. It’s over. It’s overdoses.
Outside my front door on D Street, two blocks
from the projects, people stapled warnings
on telephone poles about OxyContin, about Fentanyl,
about missing cats.
We found the needles. We found the veins.
We found out way too late the differences between
suicide and homicide.
We found discarded destroyed remains
of spoons on the ground everywhere we looked.
I said to Johnny Blockbuster, “Company’s on its way.”
Editor's note: Above is an excerpt. Read the full poem right here.
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Knight of Swords
By Joseph M. Gerace
for the survivors of those abused by priests
the tarot dies not suffering
a too-long halo burn
with a sigh and groan is crucified
upside-down
post-modern catholic church
refuses the card—inverted—suspends itself
by death it manipulates corporal punishment
not suffering
that tau cross of silver extermination
no interpreter needed throw him into the sea
great work of punishment at the head of man
the horse god of post-modern catholicism
looks to the tarot and swallows the first pill
the priest offers not suffering
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From the Archives: Hurricane Harvey
Alive in Captivity After the Flood
By Jerry Bradley
There are lots of ways to be blind,
but you can smell water
even when you can’t read a map:
volcanic beachheads, a wild trench,
ambiguous lines of terrain,
each divided by the transitive property of water.
Admire the math of a cornfield maze,
the farmer who dusts his hands
in fulfillment while the silo leans forward
as if it has something to say.
Beyond it, tamed and peaceful,
a disused church stands, its eyes
broken like the last panes of heaven.
You’ve seen this, and through birthday binoculars
you’ve seen other scapes: ructions at the waterhole
in a world so flat that everything seems in view –
hyenas, vultures, herds of elegant ungulates.
Home it’s all possumhaw and crawdad palace.
I like the land, animals, birds, this place;
still I wonder what it wants me to know.
So I listen when the water speaks;
I look when it tells me to,
but mostly I go when it says go.