GAZPACHO POLICE Not only do we have the DC jail which is the DC gulag, but now we have Nancy Pelosi's gazpacho police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, and spying on American citizens. – Marjorie Taylor Greene, 2/9/2022 Police are key ingredients in this puree. Like red, ripe tomatoes, they blend in, indistinct. Add cucumbers, red onions, green peppers, cumin, garlic: flavor enforcers. Quality-control squads. But recipes do not send scofflaws to jail. Juries are made up of citizens doing their duty. Maybe average citizens are the bread-base, a mix of day old and fresh, adding texture, thickening the broth, infusing a medley of ethnic spices. The angry lady rages about spies: police that spy on lawmakers. She decries Pelosi’s private army-- simmering, on call, ready to chill and serve: gazpacho police. How does a Congresswoman recruit an army? Wouldn’t the CIA notice? And why spy on legislators? Isn’t the Congressional Record public? Are Congressmen really sneaking around doing sneaky things until busted by gazpacho police? Perhaps someone is adding water instead of olive oil? Skimping on oregano? Nipping at the red wine vinegar? If you don’t have the right blend of tomato, veggies, bread, and spice-- informed citizens as well as the gullible, public servants vs. self-servers-- then all the mincing and mixing yields only a hiccup of gourmet broth. So, what’s the point? Why whip up a goulash of grievances? Gripers dine on a diet of dudgeon: outrage at the DC “gulag,” outrage at alleged spies, outrage at the scapegoat party leader. One righteous finger-pointer reads a speech on the floor of Congress claiming gazpacho police run rampant in the Capitol. She pushes big-time bad-guy buttons: Soviet prison camps and Nazi Secret Police-- though the Nazi zinger sinks in its own sauce, thickening as it chills… Somewhere in this name-calling soup, there lurks a rotten tomato. Copyright 2/2020 Patricia Doyne
Poetry from James Whitehead
Zombie film sonnet
We need more cinema about killing.
I mean movies about killing zombies.
Cinema seems the wrong word for zombie
films, or movies about killing zombies,
although cinema could work for killing
as a theme or action. I mean movies
can be arty, even about killing,
but probably not films about zombies,
or films about killing zombies. Zombie
movies then are not cinema. Zombie
movies are films. We could use serial
films. On television. A serial
series about a serial killer
of zombies. Man that would be a killer.
*
Indulgences
My therapist told me the book that I needed
was Out of the Shadows, by Carnes.
Healing the Sexual Addict, it warns.
I’ll buy a copy tomorrow, I lied.
I hated that therapist, anyway,
his post-modern priesthood,
hated his fees, hated to pay
for what ought to come free.
Instead, I read The Story of an Eye,
then Miller, then Nin, then Lawrence,
then Wilde . . .
To drift with every passion ‘til my soul
was a stringed lute on which all winds could play
2 weeks later I was lost, in the pull
of a blonde & feminine gravity,
no less than I was when in therapy.
*
Talk
All this “God Talk” in all this poetry,
it’s weird. I do it myself. I’m guilty.
There’s Eliot, of course.
Is he Christian?
One can’t know.
One can know Christ was Jewish.
I guess that makes Eliot Christianish . . .
given his disdain for the Jewish man.
There’s Hopkins & his symphony of sound,
his sound of God,
his sound of consonants,
his sound of vowels
& his search for constants.
But he knew God as well as he knew sound.
& there’s the masses –
asking God for shit,
a new house,
a new lover, a new me,
& victory over their enemy.
Now. . . if only I can just ignore it.
*
Sick
– after reading Aime Cesaire
Decadence like war now has veterans,
to die of an age, era, or epoch, hung over,
the “watery suns of rums” gone down,
to the other side of the World,
not forgotten, in their place,
the herald of morning signaled,
by horns blown with curled toes,
a rousing cock’s crows,
& the unfurled sheets of a nameless whore,
me,
the sun,
in place of the watery suns of rums,
coming up,
& on the other side of the World,
dreams aborted by a mere alarm clock.
To die from an age, era, or epoch
is not the desired aim.
She shows gums, yellow teeth, smiles.
Speaks tenderly . . . please. . . come. . .
*
Topiary
It is a strange art.
And a strange reminder.
People cannot just leave plant life alone
anymore than
leaving people alone.
Whoever did this is no gardener.
He shaped you,
(and editors cut my work),
shaped you into some cartoon character
for tourists to this amusement park.
Some donor has taken over nature by proxy.
You can’t follow the money when it comes
to a mutilated plant.
Gardeners grow.
This hack job is different.
But I can follow your roots.
I can see your patience hidden in you.
You will still return to Earth despite this.
We both will.
*
Giving it up
– After John Berryman
When my un-warranted wants get planted
deep into the plots of my seedy head
I think thoughts of deflowering, of bed.
It’s not just hell that leaves me imprisoned.
For all the tricks of its light, I see red.
Red is fire, stop, passion, blood, her hair.
“I couldn’t rest from hell just anywhere.”
(I should be resting from heaven instead.
Whenever I think of her, I’m not there,
but she is . . . she is an aporia).
Images of her dance about like smoke
about my face while I think, pace, drink, choke.
My lungs turn black, my cigarettes burn red.
Alack, alas, a lack, et cetera.
*
(may be cut as needed)
About the Poet
J.T. Whitehead has Bachelors’ degrees from Wabash College in English & Philosophy. He received a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Purdue, where he studied Existentialism, social and political philosophy, and Eastern Philosophy. He earned a law degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. He spent time between, during, and after schools on a grounds crew, as a pub cook, a delivery man, a book shop clerk, and a liquor store clerk, inspiring four years as a labor lawyer on the workers’ side. Whitehead now practices law by day and poetry by night and lives in Indianapolis with his two sons, Daniel and Joseph.
Whitehead was Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, briefly, for just five issues: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6. He is a one-time Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author (2011), a seven-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet (2015, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020), and was the winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize (2015). Whitehead has published over 300 poems and prose works in over 110 literary journals and small press publications, including The Lilliput Review, Outsider, Slipstream, Left Curve, The Broadkill Review, The Iconoclast, and Gargoyle. His first full-length collection of poetry, The Table of the Elements, was nominated for the National Book Award in 2015.
Poetry from Alan Catlin
Listening to The Moonlight Sonata During a Mohs Procedure Thinking the last time I saw this piece performed was at Saratoga with Andre Watts backed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, an outdoor performance one humid August night sitting on the hard packed hill, all the grass scuffed away during rock show crowds of twenty thousand plus, all of them amped or strung out after scoring big on drug alley, the place we think of as the promenade, outside of the Hall of the Springs; the moon low in the sky, the pianist caressing the keys, the surgeon not even born yet. All those Virgin Island nights I couldn’t sleep listening to mother play Chinese Checkers with her selves in the dark Six voices arguing false moves phantom jumps quantum leaps over clogged northwest passages to nowhere Her cat’s eyed marbles polished until they gleamed in the darkness as they played The unnaturally colored ones pale blue greens like death or red irises burning in a nightmare that stays with you when awake I was stuck in a single take tracking shot like a Russian Ark movie but instead of The Hermitage I was on a set designed by interior decorators of the Red Room on Twin Peaks, then twenty-five years later where all the carpet mazes interlock and transport the unsuspecting to an Inland Empire then the ballroom of an Overlook Hotel and I’m following Danny, the hot wheel kid, on the impossible mobius strip carpets that lead so far into the past even the dead people dancing haven’t been born yet and I’m stuck dumb, made immobile by whatever Laura Palmer is whispering into my severed ear, all her words dissembling into tinnitus white noise static like nine inch nails in between stations chanting, “She’s Gone, She’s Gone…” and I’m back at the Road House drinking skunk beer ignoring Mr. Booth exhorting me, “Heineken, fuck that shit. Pabst Blue Ribbon!” and the scene shifts to the back seat of Frank’s speeding car and I’m squeezed between Frank’s under-dressed droogies from a clockworkorangebluevelvet in a noir nightmare neither Roy Orbison nor Ludwig con can save me with a chorus of crack whore angels singing and dancing to Little Eva and Alle Menschen are waving their hymnal and speaking in a language that hasn’t been invented yet like space age revenants from a futurama fourth reich I can’t be rescued from until Billy Pilgrim makes the scene in a Slaughterhouse Five of the mind in a Twin Peaks diner where nothing is as it seems. Not even the coffee. Not even the pie. Work Anxiety Dream with Lydia Davis in it. I’m back in the tavern again and its wall-to-wall humans though it could be worse as previous night terrors have shown. Everyone is smoking clove cigarettes to cover the smell of hashish hookahs emanating from the blind corner to the left of the bar that I can’t see in my back bar mirrors. We’re all in the midnight witching hour, stuck in jukebox hell, listening to The Best of Patsy Cline, ” Worry, why do I let myself worry? Wondering what in the world did I do?” Then the new general manager is behind the bar introducing herself as Lydia Davis and I’m thinking what the hell is she doing here? She doesn’t even look like the 70’s version of Lydia despite not knowing her then, I’ve seen photos of what she looked like. And she assures me she is the same Lydia Davis so I just go with it and try to find out when she changed jobs and why but she’s not interested in anything I have to say. “Read this.” She says and turns to walk away and I say, “Watch your step.” But she still isn’t listening so I’m not surprised when she steps in the place where the wooden slats we walk on are broken, turns her ankle and would have fallen flat on her face if I didn’t catch her. “I knew you were trouble from word one.” She says, pretending she can walk on a broken ankle. “You’ll pay for this.” Lydia says. And I say, “You can’t fire me. No one else can run this place.” ” Watch me.” She says. And Patsy is crooning, “Dreams I know can’t come true Why can’t I forget the past” And I wait for Patsy’s plane to crash. Planes have crashed here before as I saw first-hand outside the tavern. Patsy may be gone and I may be fired but I’ll be back. That’s why they call it jukebox hell. Her cousin saw mother in the City a week before she died. “You’d never know She was that close to passing on. Of course, she was thin but then she always was. Seemed happy and talked like there was no tomorrow. How did she die?” I told him that when they opened her up, after finding the stomach cancer they didn’t look any further. Was enough cancer there to kill two people. “Stomach cancer. That’s supposed to be painful, isn’t it? She showed absolutely no signs of pain. We went McDonalds’ and she ate like a horse.” “I expect her dissociative personality gave the pain to someone else What did you do when she started talking crazy? I mean how did you handle it?” “I just laughed and laughed and eventually the subject changed.” He was the kind of guy who made the best of things. He just dealt with stuff. He identified the body for me too. He was a better man than I am.
Poetry from Ivan S. Fiske
Happiness is the Only Mask I'm Wearing despite all the pain that lay beneath my skin i've pushed happiness into my body like a baby mother wearing proud joy in the labor room, post-birth, in agony. love has given me so many reasons to be broken it has sailed my heart in the wilderness of anguish & had clayed the surface of my heart into a valley of wound like a solved puzzle. when i say, i'm happy it means: my body has befriended freedom like my forefathers of Liberia my heart wears the joy they wore when they were freed from the jaws of slavery. every morning, depression wraps its breath around me & sit at the edges of lips hoping it'd be the first thing i taste, but, when i drag my body into reality, happiness flips through the pages of my skin & mind & brush away anything saddened or depressing truth be told, when i was birthed, my grandmother named me "Muna" which means: happiness because that's what i am.
Poetry from Amos Momo Ngumbu
Slavery Was Not Glory Growing up as a child in the midst of America And Europe, My legs led me to an unknown site, Where chains were the bedspreads for the Negroes. As their lips befriended silence. I painfully knelt down, to see if our eyes were of the same kind. All l could see was the sorrow of words digging down to the center of their hearts. Their minds were the home of loneliness, As beating sucked away their beauties. Their feet were like a fula bread, striving for a brush to be smoothed. Slippers were their greatest enemies. And their Shirts were exchanged for chains. As hunger and setbacks were their national Anthem. Sorrow then escorted me to granddad. In questioning him of what l saw, "Granddad, why were human creatures, Treated in the 70s, like a moving object? He answered and said, "They were our vehicles and machines for work". Oh! I then wondered, if slavery was the fruit for the negroes. Color is just a design, not a fault to be fought. Silent then kissed his face, for he said "We shall talk, another day." Author Bio: Amos Momo Ngumbu Jr. writes from somewhere in Monrovia, Liberia. Born March 21, 2002 unto the successful union of Mr. and Mrs. Ngumbu. His works are forthcoming in Poetry Soup and We Write Liberia website, Agape Review and somewhere to else. He is also the author of the chapbook called ‘Africa Weep No More”. When this lad is not writing a poem, he finds comfort in graphic designing with his laptop as well as reading books.
Poetry from E.J. Evans
Following the Shadow When I walk I could easily forget my body in motion, and watch my shadow as it glides across the ground, over everything, without obstacle. Each time I walk I could choose and appoint my shadow as my alter self, my soul walking free. I could go out on a bright day and wander everywhere and follow with admiration the sometimes surprising grace of its movements. I like to imagine it would know the way better than I do. And so I find myself leaning further into the shadow, as if to transfer to it my own volition and momentum, gradually letting go of this awkward body with its long life of wearying missteps. And when obscuring clouds come over, I know that the shadow does not disappear, but instead spreads out across all that I can see of earth. Perhaps then it encompasses the world. The Expanse In another life that must have been my youth I walked beaches of a distant ocean. And then years later other beaches of a different ocean, and then yet another. Always drawn to wander the boundary of the known and unknown worlds, looking for anything that had been brought to me from the other side--shells, driftwood, seaweed. In this way the whole expanse and depth of the sea spoke to me of itself. Even now, finding myself in another life, here among green hills and dark woods, I'm keen and alight for any things that might be brought forth from all that is unseen. This life of appearances is rich with signs. Each day presents a new reading of whatever comes. I watch and listen. The sun comes up and it goes down. The birds come and go. Once I found antlers shed by a deer just outside my back door. Seer I have settled into this quiet place where little happens-- watchful for changes and portents, any tiny openings into the future. A future to be sifted out from a hazy spectrum of dangers-- fire and ice, the slow dissolution of the familiar, hardships as yet unnamed. Though every day I strain to see I can see little but bits of love passed on, from this point, beginning with me, from one to others and from them to yet others, stretching far forward in time, fragile bridges into the nothing. The Lake It has stood by us all these years, steadfast and silent ally. Not asking, not telling. Seen here from our house just a thin bright sliver of blue with tiny white houses stacked around its shores, a dock and some bright dots of sailboats, scattered, as if to make invisible forces visible. Closer in the shallows children swim laughing in bright water. We can't see the depths but they are not so far and as we get older we imagine them. Timeless currents revolving in the dark, somewhere underneath our life. We can see so little of what is happening. We love the lake but sometimes we love even more whatever made the lake, and whatever made that... The Secret History of Summer Finding myself left, becalmed in an aftermath, I wandered down the trail through woods from the house to the creek, as if something in me sought the water's level. And stood for a while, as I had before, in that place where no one ever went. Where the passage of time was slowed to the flow of the barely rippling water. I loved that when I swam in the creek I could see no houses or roads or telephone poles. Could not see where I'd come from or how I'd come to be there. Only clouds and water, trees and wildflowers. Happy at last to have nothing left over and to feel the simple fullness of my life flow on through me, unimpeded.
E. J. Evans is the author of Ghost Houses (Clare Songbirds), Conversations With the Horizon (Box Turtle Press), and the chapbook First Snow Coming (Kattywompus Press).
Poetry from Aloysius S. Harmon
My Body is a Testimony of Grief as a boy growing up, i tossed my body against the cold floor screaming for things i couldn't get. i poke my fingers in the fire & thought scars are not real. i have held scars without fire, too many times, this is how a boy germinates into a man. i remembered the one that sailed me to this unknown place it turned me into a wrecked boat that lost its route. this poem holds a testimony of a boy who survived depression of how i sobbed in dark. Written By: Aloysius S. Harmon Aloysius S. Harmon is an emerging writer and poet who writes from his room and quiet places like the beachside, under the large mango tree, etc. He is also one of the disciples of Dr. Patricia Wessely.