A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House and his regime
Linda Lancione
Habeas Corpus
Oikos, a monkey, dead at the bottom of the ocean September 15, 1947.
In the shower, thoughts of the Shoah, heaps of shoes.
Bent-over men with shaved heads encaged in Salvadoran prisons.
A man I know, the son of a friend, has written poems about mushrooms, a suite of thirty with intimate black and white photos of their frills and coils and cavities.
At the dentist, deep pockets. If you’re not careful, your teeth will fall out. How can that not sound like the scoldings your mother gave you.
After that, I lose my car near the Sawtooth Building, ask a stranger, then do what she says—two blocks left, two blocks right.
Language appears and disappears, like my car, like light and darkness, with a will of its own.
The late-night comic says the Secretary of War has tattoos that are ashamed of him.
Stand up, stand up, a voice says. I can’t help it. I am ashamed.
Something’s dead in the basement of the Pentagon, pungent and sweet.
Linda Lancione is the author of the chapbooks The Taste of Blood (Finishing Line Press, 2016), 2% Organic: Poems from a West Marin Dairy Barn (Wordrunner Press, 2008), This Short Season (Small Poetry Press, 2001), and Wanting the Moon (Wildflower Press, 1981). Her poems and essays have appeared in Verdad, Softblow, The Sun, Kelsay Books Blog, Cimarron Review, and other journals. With Burl Willes, she co-authored the travel guides Undiscovered Islands of the Mediterranean (John Muir Publications, 1990) and Undiscovered Islands of the U.S. and Canadian West Coast (Avalon Travel Pub, 1991). A longtime Berkeley resident, Lancione is a former ESL teacher and an avid traveler.
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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