Bee Politics in Samoa

A medley of Bee Gee songs rings rhapsodiously through this tender grove of coconut trees. Suddenly I remember I am not here only due to the lack of primates. It is more, more than the heartless cribbage games played by God, more than the slimy toenail paint on which He nibbles. There are vicissitudes of cheese and fiddle-playing mosquitoes, but I have found them all and they are insipid. I must locate the outrigger canoe and die.

– Mike Norris

Renewal of a Holocaust

Vast fields of whiteness
No bones remain
No pictures of the dying.

Vast fields of nothingness
Where the complex architecture of a
hundred generations stood.
Amazing technologies of human communication

Result of iron walls of unwilling cooperation
No escaping peasants
No hiding from invading solciers.

Result of angry leaders
Blotting out the sun
Renewal of a holocaust.

Vast fields of whiteness

– Michael Abrams

The Last One Chosen

I too was always the last one chosen in
Pick-up baseball games and what bugs
Me now in retrospect is not that I was a
Poor athlete but rather that some
Set of social values had me stand there
Until I was the last one chosen for some
Inconsequential ball game when I could have
Spent that time learning a Beethoven Sonata
Discovering laws of thermodynamics or
Reboring and automotive engine block.

– Walt Gebhart

Flying Saucer

mb3-6 Flying Saucer accentGramps hollered
he’d be damned but
he was going to ride
that new sled

down
that ski slope

and nobody could stop him
as he churned up
the beginner’s run
away from the trees

plopped onto the chartreuse saucer
and pushed off

crouched forward
he hung tight
in a cross-legged hump

slicing
a fluorescent stripe
down the hill

hit a rut

bounced high
did a double flip

and landed
saucer down

snow cloud puff
burning cigarette glowing

in place
streaking on

– Sheryl L. Nelms