Hydra
Kip Knott’s work has recently appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Light Space & Time, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and Wild Roof Journal, among other places. His full-length book of poetry—Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on—is forthcoming later this year from Kelsay Books. Currently, he is a teacher and an art dealer who lives in Delaware, Ohio. More of his work can be accessed at www.kipknott.com.
“If you are born poor it’s not your mistake, but if you die poor it’s your mistake.”- Bill Gates
We admire the philanthropist for “giving back”
and ignore what they first had to take away.
It is a sin to need help and a blessing to offer it;
there is profit in not asking too many questions:
“How does one with no boots
pull himself up by his bootstraps?”
“Why teach someone to fish
then deny them access to the lake?”
We are only 4.25% of global population, and yet
we own 28% of Covid-19 fatalities. But don’t worry,
our billionaires, dying to restart their factories,
donate to food banks so the underpaid don’t starve.
But we do not weep for the hungry—this is America!
We are each one sixty-hour workweek away
from striking it rich. We refuse to quarantine our dreams;
If 200,000 perish, that’s the price of freedom.
Someday we’ll erect an immaculate monument
to those who died for the good of the economy.
His Momma died 18 months ago. For Mother’s Day,
he bought one of those shiny Mylar helium balloons
and some Carnations. It wasn’t easy to do, between shifts
at work and wearing a mask to the store—it’s dangerous
for a Black man to protect himself against a virus—
but he wanted to honor the woman who,
in spite of the odds, had kept him alive.
He tied the balloon to a vase on the kitchen table
where they used to listen to music and cook dinner.
When the store clerk was filling it, he
stifled a laugh-turned-cry, remembering that birthday
when she got him 20 balloons and one-by-one
they inhaled the noble gas,
nearly dying of laughter at their squeaky voices.
Leaving for the final time, he caught his reflection
in the Mylar. Hours later, dying beneath a cop’s knee,
he called out for Momma.
The last thing he saw was the joy in her eyes.
Back home the flowers have wilted and the balloon,
twisting slowly in the now-stale air,
sinks lower and lower to the ground.
in memory of George Floyd
Too musically disinclined to rap or sing the blues,
too bound up in striving to retire
to the vase of my bed like an ersatz flower
(not even 300mg of Seroquel
can reduce me to mere ornamentation),
I instead write this poem,
which few will read.
You may wonder if it matters
that you read this, but
I’m not one to lavish much on myself:
For whom else would I obsess
over this comma, that
enjambment?
To survive this world’s lush, radiant, burlesque
suffering,
It’s best that you understand
why I will never self-immolate, never
give what’s broken in me or the world
the satisfaction of my surrender.
Peel back my eyes
and touch the still-healing wound
oozing cerebral fluid from the Big Bang.
It’s in this blind space of raw pain
I often dwell. Here everything is reduced
to elements, genes, math, poetry. Here
my life to date plays on an endless loop like
propaganda. And here originate the florid
manifestations of myself: the video gamer
and the coder, the lucid dreamer
and the psychoanalyst.
If you could join me here,
you would understand how I’ve endured.
You would find immortality in anguish.
“Power is not what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – Saul Alinsky
Elections have consequences.
So say the victors to justify
their ends and means.
Perhaps the American Dream
is to live without consequence:
no mistakes, only cheapness
we are free to later discard.
Why deliberate honestly?
Abundance is our temptation,
prosperity the lie we tell to
expiate our original sin.
Elections have consequences.
Had Lincoln lost, how many
would we still count as slaves?
Who voted for mass incarceration,
child detention, soaring inequality?
In America anything is possible.
A Black president. Rags-to-riches.
Our poets, scientists, entrepreneurs
have proven their greatness—
the full flower of individualism—
Yet something blights the soil.
We are good people but not a
Good People. We welcome the Iraqi
refugee, ignore the crime that made him one.
Who voted for the War on Terror?
Who paid for the lies that launched it?
How much is too much to spend on
defense? On political ads?
Alinsky argued that what matters
is a particular means for a particular
end. Democracy not in the abstract
but in the flesh, the messy world
of action and reaction. I’m ready to commit
murder at the ballot box. I hope it’s not
too late to stop the carnage. America
forgives itself so easily, as though
we weren’t forgiving but forgetting.
If we knew the difference between
poll numbers and corpses, budgets
and starvation, we might have avoided
this moment. A pandemic. A fraud.
I cast my vote uncertain it will count.
That is, be counted. That is, matter.
When my blood is on the ballot,
there is only one outcome I can accept.
Elections have consequences.
Andy Posner grew up in Los Angeles and earned an MA in Environmental Studies at Brown. While there, he founded Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit that provides financial services to low-income families. When not working, he enjoys reading, writing, watching documentaries, and ranting about the state of the world. He has had his poetry published in several journals, including Burningword Literary Journal (which nominated his poem ‘The Machinery of the State’ for the Pushcart Poetry Prize), Noble/Gas Quarterly, and The Esthetic Apostle.
The car idled in the middle of the street. With the glint of white sky reflecting on the windshield, I could not see a driver. Detour or continue? How suspicious I’d become. Murder, drugs, kidnapping. So much mayhem in my town at the edge of the Alaskan wilderness. I was headed to the woods to forget all that, and more.
I edged to the side of the road and kept going. Closer, level with the driver’s side, I peered into the window. A young man sat at the wheel, a boy really. Dark hair, a hockey emblem on his jacket, maybe on his way home from the local high school. He faced away from me, studying something on the opposite side of the street. I followed his gaze to a weathered wooden fence a few paces away. There, atop a post, a dark shape, foreign yet familiar. My brain struggled to explain what my eyes beheld.
The boy opened his window and leaned toward me. His skin was smooth and clear.
“Hasn’t moved,” he whispered. “At first I thought it was a juvenile bald, but maybe it’s a golden.”
A boy who stops to parse eagles.
Up close, the size and power of the bird stunned and unsettled me. Standing on the ground, it would surely reach my waist. Its beak curved sharply into a deadly tip that could rip my flesh just as easily as a hare’s. It seemed indifferent to us, focused on whatever lie inside the bounds of the fence. Cat? Chickens? Small dog?
A slight breeze rippled the rich brown feathers along its back, revealing the paler juvenile tones beneath. Surely a bald eagle, since we were far from the mountainous haunts of the golden. Last summer while driving to town I spied the unmistakable white head of an adult bald eagle perched on a power pole above the marsh. Maybe this was an offspring, here in late November when it should have moved south. With winters turned so mild these past few years, if food was plentiful in a neighborhood with easy prey, why leave?
“I’ve never been this close,” he said, eyes wide.
No one passed. For minutes we shared the street. The boy, the bird, the jaded woman.
At last, the eagle raised its head and glanced back at us as if to say, “What are you doing here?” Silently, it spread its magnificent wings and lifted off.
The boy and I stretched our necks to watch it soar over the neighborhood.
“Wow,” he said.
He put the car in gear and inched forward.
Yes. Wow.
“Have a great day.” he said finally.
As he pulled away I waved and followed the eagle into the forest.
Susan Pope’s work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, The Southeast Review Online, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Under the Gum Tree, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, and Writers’ Workshop Review, among others. Her writing reflects intimate connections to home and family in Alaska as well as a restless exploration of faraway places. Her essay entitled, “Canyon,” which appeared in Bluestem, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.
It had happened before.
The first time, she was ten. It was an accident, riding her bike. She didn’t remember the hurt of it, not
even in dreams. Only the sticky cream
of blood on her chest. The limbo aftermath of being road-killed. The sound of a child, hospital bound,
crying in an endless, sputtering, roar.
God, it was
strange. The second time, at twenty, she meant to do it. It was easy enough with a handful of pills and a
locked bathroom door.
The chemicals diffused in her arteries like incense. A ceremony. At peace.
Until consequence shattered it all.
She awoke to the whispering. The stares. No one trusted her unguarded, alone. But couldn’t they see
the danger was over? She’d come back, like a cat with nine lives. Self-vaccinated, for another
decade. Brick by brick, word by word
by dinner and diaper and bridal concern,
she’d built herself back. But this self she had built–she wanted a new one. Not this wilted age, white
flower turned brown at the edge.
Her birthday was in June. This third time was due soon.
And she looked forward to it.
Samantha Pilecki’s work has appeared in Five 2 One, Kansas City Voices, New Lit Salon Press, Timberline Review (forthcoming), Yemassee, and other publications. She’s the winner of the Haunted Waters Press short story competition, the Writing District’s monthly contest, and was a finalist in both the New Millennium Writings Contest and the Writer’s Digest short story contest.
After he closes the doors and tells the driver “Okay,” the man asks Curtis, “What brings us out here this time?” He’s flipping through papers on a clipboard. “Has anything changed with your wife since…?” He’s tracing his finger down a list. Curtis’ face is already buried in the sports page. He lowers the paper and looks at the man and then back at the sports page.
I tell the man it’s the lump between my shoulder blades.
I’d show him, but I can’t even turn over in here. Not the way they have me strapped down. Not with all this equipment and Curtis and the man crammed back here, too.
I say I can’t describe the lump other than it’s a lump because I can’t see it. I could never turn the right way in the mirror in the bathroom because I can hardly turn around in there. Curtis has looked and probed but always says it’s nothing. “No thing,” he says.
I can see the silhouette of his head nodding behind the sports page.
I tell the man Curtis says it’s nothing, but I know it’s there. I have dreams about it. It has a pulse. It’s growing. Why wouldn’t it? It gets watered a few times a week. If I lie on my back at night I can feel it against the mattress. Hot. Itchy. If I go to sleep like that I dream about the lump. I hate calling it that. Lump. A generic term for something that could be festering a sac of pus that could burst subdermally and poison my system. I’ve told Curtis this. How many times? Ask him. He doesn’t deal with it. But my dreams. Almost always the lump has grown out of control overnight except I know in my mind in my dream that it hasn’t. It has been growing all along but I had hidden it under an Ace bandage or a bulky sweater or sweatshirt. “Don’t touch me, Curtis,” I’d said for days in my memory in my dreams. Which I’d never say to Curtis because I love him going on eighteen years.
Curtis rustles his paper, but he doesn’t respond.
I say in my dream I’m denying to myself and the world that the mass is a thing that has to be dealt with because it’s like I’m barely a thing if I am even a thing to be dealt with and then I’m growing something off me that requires a greater degree of dealing with, like here’s a sequel to me and everybody shows more interest in it than they do in me.
The man lights up a cigarette. He pats down his shiny pompadour and adjusts the rings on his fingers. He leans in to me. I feel his hand between my shoulder blades. He says, “Yeah. We need to cut that bad boy outta there.” His cigarette bounces up and down between his lips with each word. “You got insurance?”
I tell him no.
“It’s gonna cost you. And that bad boy is huge. Or keep it. Hell, maybe it’ll shrink.”
Curtis looks at the man over his paper and says, “Don’t. For chrissake, what’s wrong with you people?”
I tell Curtis this is what you get when you don’t have insurance. I keep telling you. This is what you get when you don’t deal with things.
Curtis asks the man for a cigarette. Now they’re both smoking. I’m going to choke to death back here. Curtis asks, “Can’t you give her the orange pills?”
The man says, “We can’t do shit until she’s admitted.”
I shoot Curtis my dirtiest look. He shrinks down behind his paper. I’m not really mad because at least we’re back to dealing with things for right now.
Jeff Burd spends a lot of time writing and thinking about writing, and worrying about not writing and thinking about writing. He graduated the Northwestern University writing program and works as a Reading Specialist at Zion-Benton Township High School in Zion, IL.
