fascism

Your eloquence offers a modicum of comfort, dearest Daniel, in the face of disaster on both sides of the pond…

“But then, what is the point of speaking out when protest isn’t ubiquitous, when outrage is confined to pockets of passive resistance, too tempered by the precariousness that is being middle class, with our terror of being poor, destitute. The precarity of subsistence urges us to genuflect at the foot of capital.”

I’m heartened to hear you speak, nonetheless…

Daniel Paul Marshall

England has exited, mic drop & all that drama. Smirky Boris looked very pleased with himself in his speech, saying nothing of any value other than…well, fucking hot air & a wagging paw, like a weak handshake. Big Ben got a cheap digital ring, a gesture, cheaper at least. We had it holographically printed on Downing Street, yip jump. O dear.

The clientele I serve beers, in the magnanimous taproom down by the quay in Exeter, despondently purchased shots of whiskey or rum to down on the stroke of 11 & who can blame them. A few tables were really drinking heavily to compensate their disgruntlement, from the time they got off work, to last orders. The taproom had no quarreling which side are you on, in our taproom, we have a safe haven from Brexiteers, boasting their triumphs against the ill pairing of their jingoistic effluvia with the economic…

View original post 633 more words

What a Patriot Dreams

I saw the flags come down—
in a scene that scrolled in slo-mo,
& from multiple vantages—
their masts falling like the trees
flattened by shockwaves
in those clips of old footage
from military nuclear bomb tests,
spliced into documentaries
for high school history classes;

except, my dream version’s vivid images
weren’t the projected celluloid etchings
that teenagers confined to plastic chairs
could summarily cancel from sight
with one hand motioning No
in the universal vernacular.

From a sweeping arc of floodlights
that rendered the indigo skyline
of an early-summer dusk starless,
the flags all vanished at once—
their wingless, red-white-blue heaps
crushing in on themselves, darkening,
& dropping like torn parachutes.

Sleep’s last claim on my consciousness
was that horizon of empty haloes
the mass plummet had left behind,
before my eyes fluttered open
to this morning’s first, grainy insinuations
that breached the blinds’ periphery,
& accreted into a single, silent force
creeping along my bedroom walls,
as if it could somehow thwart illumination
of my most preposterous, waking truth:

that in this country of my own
birth & citizenship, I’ve, in turn,
given birth to two, precious children—

my riven heart’s two halves now trussed
in a spectacular fiasco of feathers & wax.

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

I wrote this poem a little over a week ago upon waking—or, rather, not having the luxury of waking—from the nightmare of our country succumbing before our eyes to a fascist coup. I don’t generally post such new, raw work, but there seemed to be little sense in waiting with this one.