The Politics of Love & Other Invisible Structures

January 2019 | poetry

To a ghost that never dies.

I had my first drink at 15, the same year my grandmother took her last, washing down two bottles of codeine with gin. I watched them wheel her out of her apartment on a gurney, zipped up, tight. I thought my soul died. Some talk of funerals, she read the obituary every morning with her coffee. Her death came fast and silent like a traitor. I wept until earth became clay & clay became chalk, then I erased everything.

40 years later, our bodies like urns, cupping our animal hearts. Mom buries her hope inside an old sycamore. I tear at the roots with my hands. Tired of the fury, that loud, ugly, spit in your face anger. The fuck you kind of rage women aren’t allowed to show. I want to make my darkness visible so I sell plasma on the corner for $60 a pop.

by Sheree La Puma

Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry appeared in such publications as Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Crack The Spine, Mad Swirl, and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She will be featured in the forthcoming Best of 2018 issue of Burningword as well. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and attended workshops with poet Louise Mathias and writer Lidia Yuknavitch. She has taught poetry to former gang members and theater to teen runaways. Born in Los Angeles, she now resides in Valencia, CA with her rescues, Bello cat and Jack, the dog.

Steve Karamitros

January 2019 | poetry

For Comrade Malcolm

the false prophet will screw with your head daily
an image of desperate unknowns:
the anonymous taxpayer
who would like to take offense
on behalf of those offended,
the popular victims of the day.
his face is caked with muted flesh
and grinning ivory teeth

he nods with sympathy to the jobless
            but can offer no work
he turns cold on the youth,
            “innovate and get a job
            and get a life too”
and all the while, he repeats the mantra,
            “Look How Far We’ve Come!”


but the Grind goes on, despite him.
the secretary will type
the factory worker will strike
            but neither can taste any Free
            in free trade.
the bus driver will bus
the newsmen will make news for every seated person
            as the students bargain with the bankers
            to negotiate their debt
            and cancel their dreams.
the doctors will doctor
the teachers will teach
the businessmen will do business
            while the dark-skinned are executed publicly on video
            and the poor have to rage to remove the lead
                        from water that eats through metal
                                    as it flows through aging pipes
                                                in apartheid cities.

but the Grind goes on, despite him.
and Change comes, the Fruit from all those broken bodies
and as people say, “Now, surely, is the time. We’ve had it!”
the false prophet says, “No,
we should move slowly and wait for a more convenient time.”

The Gag Order

Did the sculptor who made Justice
a blindfolded woman
have a joke at our expense?


the elevated scales of unbiased balance,
the sword at her side:
            more the two dimensional things 
            from the worn pages of fairytales 
            than the metaphors of a sculptor


are the gown and the trinkets meant  
             to be the future,
             the hopes of a civilized people?:
that she will swing the
sharpened edge of justice
in the right direction?
the steel as true to its target 
            as the archer Apollo
            his golden chariot traversing the heavens
and the Light
            warming every face
            as it falls towards
            sunset?


but can you doubt today
that Power takes its pleasure   
from the womb of Justice?
for, dropping all pretension and
feigned virtue,
the scales and the sword disappear

             though the blindfold works well for the kink:
             her clothes torn away, he places
             a sweaty palm over mouth and nose
             and then takes what he wants


with a notion
that the tears
are simply her misunderstanding

by Steve Karamitros

Steve is an urban planner living in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains. His poems and short stories focus on the bizarre and irrational forces that animate society and what we call ‘nature.’ His published work has appeared in Poetry Quarterly (Fall 2016).