Second Coming No. 121 — May 20, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House and his regime
Anne Graue
Inalienable rights disappear like
a whimpering dodo, the last one falling
into fire in a Disney movie—this has become
the nightmare we waited for. If a bluebird
crawls into one of the holes of the dead half
tree trunk left standing behind the rhododendron,
then the crickets will stop chirping and the
neighbor’s dog will run loose. Time is melting
into rising tides and a rare Elmer Fudd Pez
dispenser is floating on top of a murky Hudson.
The dodo falls into a crevice in the earth,
burns to ash. The sun shines on as if it doesn’t
mind where its rays land, how strong they hit—
releasing millions of neutrinos
that just want out.
Anne Graue is the author of the poetry collections Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press, 2020) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Poet Lore, SWWIM Every Day, Spoon River Poetry Review, Gargoyle, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including Coffee Poems: Reflections on Life With Coffee (World Enough Writers, 2018), ed. Lorraine Healy, and Blood and Roses: A Devotional for Aphrodite and Venus (Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2017), ed. Rebecca Buchanan. Graue’s book reviews have appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The Rumpus. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.
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.
If you like Second Coming and you want to support it, consider making a donation to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.
Second Coming is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:
1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settingsand click on the publication you want to make changes to.
2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.
I really love the images in this poem!
Enjoyed this a lot, the garden, the pez dispenser, the dilapidated sun. Thank you, needed this tonight.