Second Coming No. 59 — March 19, 2025

A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House

Margot Wizansky
In Florida, “Don’t Say Gay” Is the Law

The governor has a plan to keep children
from being infected with gay. A gay suppressant,
making the word gay illegal. We will all be silent,
eat cupcakes, tie orange bandanas around our necks,
suck the word gay from the English language.
We’ll blow the word out of classrooms, kiss it
good-bye, put it in the closet or send it off to camp,
swish the rooms clean of it. In art class we’ll
resume painting the still life of pansies and fruit,
pass by the window and look down low where
a bear has plugged the dike, go out the back door
and even now, the garden is full of zucchini ripening,
look up to see a rainbow and a chicken hawk flies by,
its prey an otter in the river or that puppy in the grass.

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Margot Wizansky is the author of the poetry collection The Yellow Sweater (Kelsay Books, 2023) and the chapbook Wild for Life (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022). Her poems have appeared in journals including The American Journal of Poetry, The Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Ruminate, River Styx, and Cimarron, among others. Wizansky edited the anthologies Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains. With Wendy Drexler she co-edited What the Poem Knows, a tribute to beloved poet and workshop leader Barbara Helfgott Hyett. Now retired from a career developing housing for adults with disabilities, Wizansky lives in Massachusetts.

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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.

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Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.

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