Second Coming No. 118 — May 17, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House and his regime
Linda Laderman
On the Gulf, 2025
In Florida, a Welcome to The Gulf of America 2025 tee shirt.
A man standing on the sidewalk says, I just can’t get used to it.
Tango dancers and a guitar player busk on the Gulf of Mexico Drive.
More than a thousand immigrants detained over five days in Florida.
Citizens, green card holders, visas. I burrow my toes into the sand.
I ask my group at the Holocaust Center if they are bystanders, enablers, resisters.
Do antidepressants hinder my writing?
Would Plath have been as brilliant if she didn’t suffer?
The dogwoods bloom, dependable, here last year, now.
I’m running and running, unable to catch my breath, to dream.
Words elude me. I Google a poetry prompt generator.
Storm, grieve, absented, uprooted, hodge, spread-eagled, fractures, emigrants, wordless.
Include more than one type of tree. Write about a famous battle or war.
I grieve those who are absented, gone like the Banyans and Palms uprooted by the storm.
Linda Laderman is the author of the microchap What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, winner of the 2023 Jewish Women’s Poetry Prize from Harbor Review. Her poems have appeared in Gyroscope Review, SWWIM Every Day, ONE ART, Thimble Literary Magazine, Scapegoat Review, and other journals. Laderman attended Ohio University, where she earned a BS in journalism and an MA in liberal studies with a concentration in feminist theory. She holds a law degree from The University of Toledo. Laderman lives in Michigan, and served for a number of years as a docent at The Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.
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