Present Fashions of Dress All dress must transact its weighty work, changing old modes and boldly innovating thought and intellect to render it progress. Our present fashions of feminine attire are in harmony with the swiftness and force of a...
Poetry
Three Poems By Ashley M. Jones
Mary, Don’t You Weep, or, Mary Turner Resurrected When Mary Turner threatened to press charges for the wrongful lynching of her husband in Brooks County, GA on May 19, 1918, she was strung upside down, her clothes were burned off, and her unborn...
CHOOSING ALTERNATE FACTS, FEBRUARY
An iris dares to bloom. Six wasps chastise a window from inside, ignore an open door nearby. For hours. They walk the window. One by one, four mount The rod I level to the pane, Lift out the door. Two more resist. Afraid, enraged? They lift their...
fall awake
fall awake we are walking to find the sunset children of the West need to watch the colors change to know we exist we braid the flags of our mothers into our locks we tie ourselves to our histories to keep from dissolving we sing the blues and print...
Two Poems by Peycho Kanev
__________ Creating in Reverse This world is created by language and everlasting light of nouns and gerunds coexisting within the shell of silence. Even the tiniest miracles can happen under a snowflake— If anyone asks if you lost your faith tell...
Waiting for Them To March on Us
As we link arms (mine far from steady) she tells me, before sunrise every morning her grandfather would gather twigs, and slowly he would begin to spin and as he spun, his arms would rise, head lifting, back arching, all spiraling up while he began...
Poems By Reginald Dwayne Betts
Secrets At two a.m., without enough spirits Spilling into my liver to know enough To call my tongue to silence, Miles learned Of the years I spent inside a box: a spell, A kind of incantation I was under; not whisky, But History: I robbed a man...
Two Poems By Tony Hoagland
DINNER GUEST The dinner guest goes upstairs to use the ladies room, and after she has washed her hands, just out of curiosity takes a peek in the medicine cabinet- where among the Nyquil and Ativan and dental floss she sees a bottle labeled Male...
Two Poems by Martha Zweig
Beauty Sleep Kwitcher bitchin, dad snorted. Shut yer yap up. I hated the salt stinging my cheeks, it curdled my sass. Little blue gas flames itched in the kitchen. A pudding seethed, the better to set. Pulpy crushed gripes folded in. Bard: the...
Gwine Dig a Hole (A Blues Opera): Scene I
GWINE DIG A HOLE is dedicated to the life, memory, family, and friends of Philando Castile. I have no eloquent, clever statement to make in the dedication. The libretto says what I think. -Ozzie Jones __________ Characters Old Man Old Woman...
Thoughts & Prayers
This poem is composed of the public language around mourning over school shootings, all of it verbatim from political leaders or shopping and news sites. Hashtag PrayFor Thoughts and No child, teacher; there’s just no other...
A Safe Trip to Your Final Destination
We have stowed our carrion items, as instructed, in the overhead compartments. The roadkill squirrels stacked nicely, not so the feral goat, souvenir of a mountain holiday. In the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure, we will activate our own...
Portfolio: Poems by Fady Joudah
Declaration of Independence I am the one I think you are. Could it be that when the body ended, history started and when the body persevered it was rediscovered? I am the one you think I am. In a show of hands the captain asks for a Cave of Hands...
Six Questions for Fady Joudah
Interview by Christine Mallon Scoundrel Time: Can you talk about how or why poetry has stayed with you throughout your time as a physician? Is the practice of each tied to the other? Could you also talk about being an Arab-American poet in America...
How It Ends: The Donald’s Going
The Donald’s Going (With apologies to W.B. Yeats) Rooting and rooting in the White House drain The plumber cannot hear the moving men; Things go in boxes; the hairspray takes up four; Marine One has lifted from the lawn, The orange-tinged...
How It Ends: The Everything Bagel Seder
The morning after we cast our votes, informing them by simple majority, in the Electoral College, and in truth that our liberty has had enough of being diminished, grabbed, fondled, ridden roughly, and otherwise abused to great delight of the tax...
How It Ends: I Remember (Life before 2017)
After Joe Brainard I remember, as a very small girl, seeing Gerald Ford lose the White House, on TV. I remember thinking I saw him cry. I remember then, when I believed politicians had feelings. I remember later, when George H. W. Bush...
Winner, Editors’ Choice Award in Poetry: Plasticity
In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s first anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our first annual Editors’ Choice Awards. Elly Bookman’s “Plasticity” is the award-winner in Poetry. Here is what...
Poems by Paul Otremba
The Representatives When they showed up at my ready door, it was their taste for flesh that misled me, and it was a picture produced later that confirmed what provisional and corrupt intelligence we’ll go on, and successfully. They were not...
The Beauty of the Ship
When, staunchly entering port,
After long ventures, hauling up, worn and old,
Battered by sea and wind, torn by many a fight,
With the original sails all gone, replaced, or mended,
I only saw, at last, the beauty of the Ship.
__________
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My Appointments
My appointments: Maple Syrup. Pertussin. Recusals. Refuseniks. Dutch aunts. Dachshunds. Irish setters. Nodules. Old oatmeal. Truffles. Bone density. Sebaceous cyst. Pain in the crown. The Neck. Rattle of the Time Machine. No Back Ups for Ninety Days...
A Daybook for Late Summer, 2017
Antifascists say the time for waiting is over, or rather that fascism will only grow stronger if we wait for it to grow stronger. I’m scared. ¨ Tonight’s sky was a foreboding beauty, the kind that makes the heart fold in like the...
Two Poems By Virginia Beards
Song for the Camo Girls and Boys “You know in Africa no woman ever misses her lion and no white man ever bolts.” -The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Ernest Hemingway They grin from ear to ear In camo artfully splotched For grinning...
Poems By Erin Hoover
PR Opportunity at the Food Bank It’s Thanksgiving and I’m at a dinner service with a journalist, trying to wedge my fable about urban generosity into the newsroom’s mollusk heart. I stand next to mothers, their kids shouting Christmas carols, also...
The Peace Grant
No singing of any kind. All year the rooms dark. Then a week of lights. The owners have returned, their daughters haunt the balconies. One of them looks at me and doesn’t look away. A thousand years pass. Whatever happened in that moment, what...
Not Seeing the Friend of God
To get to the Old City of Hebron, al-Kahlil, medieval Ottoman city of white and lustered limestone and to the souk where chickens roasted on rotisseries, lambs and rabbits hung on meat hooks, wasps buzzed near bins of nuts and candies, and I bought...
Portfolio: Six Poems by Jill McDonough
Spelling “Prostitutes” I volunteer at a juvie, call it kid jail. We play a homemade Boggle, make all the words we can, make Mad-Lib things with them like this: lip split from slipping in shit, I sit and sip spilt spit. We write Fast Poems...
My 6th Grade Teacher
Mr. Barren chose two boys each week to swim with him at the downtown Y back when it was male-only–to swim nude in the cool chlorinated waters amid schools of old men, their buoyant testicles and laps without end. One girl got to sit on his lap...
Toothpaste
Translated by David Keplinger I danced with virtuosity, swingingly, elegantly, with two gorgeous short-haired women, as if I were Gene Kelly dancing with a young Méret Oppenheim and her twin. But it was a trick, a grift, a con. The women were...
The John Doe Poems
John Doe at the Funeral Not a mourner just a bass player backing up the family on Will the Circle Be Unbroken nodding my head in prayer like I mean it like I believe it and almost I do when I watch Chummy get up and Big Steve and A.J. all these old...
In the Dark Times
In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times. —Bertolt Brecht There will be prayer, too, but to a different god, and dread will lurk in the songs we sing. Doom in the timpani no matter what the tune...
Letter To My Grandchildren’s Grandchildren
We went forth in pairs, born of women. We believed in a god, or didn’t. We worshipped numbers, their primal power to confer our place on the planet, the size of our intellect, the degree of coolness or warmth in the air. Air was everywhere...
Poems by Liu Xia, With An Introduction From Her Translator
Where is Liu Xia? This is how you try to erase a person after he’s died: you delete all mentions of him. You ban the phrase R.I.P. on blogs. You arrest those who mourn him. You spread his ashes out in the ocean where no memorial can be built. You...
Four Poems By Amanda Newell
For Adam, my student, in Walter Reed “Take One!” says the sticky by the AFG decals, but I don’t, though I want to, because—really— I have no claim to sacrifice, no stump swinging like a wind-wild bell, no appled fist, no marbled skin. Quite possibly...
The History of Wrongs
will take a while, doodle all you want. Dot a pupil on each pearl stacked to distraction on the margin. Argus froth out a hundred eyes of which by turn did sleep always a couple and the rest… Scribble the obvious. Life, friends, is… I cross-hatch...
Casino in Coharie Nation
Around a hairpin turn, not quite hidden inside a forest that has been trampled for tourism, strip malls disguised as native villages, façades of man-made wood, green confetti like grass littering the parking lot, wind catchers and arrows, tiny...
Eve Speaks
“ . ..and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.” –Genesis 4:8 Not the exile, nor the ceaseless toil, nor the pain of childbirth or the shame of nakedness; not the withering of blossoms, or the slow...
If You See Something, Say Something (a trademark of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security)
Across the nation, we’re all part of communities. In cities, on farms, and in the suburbs. We share everyday moments— the face that sneers even when it’s saying ‘fantastic,’ the crowds whose joy sounds exactly like rage with our...
Comey: Cut-up
And then the nature of the person To lift the cloud Criminal in nature Turning Grandfather clock A whole lot of personal pain Lifting the cloud Being somebody who loves this country These were lies The nature of its work As a cloud Grandfather clock...
Please State the Nature of Your Emergency: Scoundrel Time Portfolio Interview with Aaron Anstett
Here are some poem titles from Aaron Anstett’s fourth book, Insofar as Heretofore: “Self-Portrait as Jackass on Dash Cam,” “Please List All Previous Addresses,” “If the TV Will Not Be Used at All During the Entire Diary Survey, Indicate Reason Below...
The Beginnings of Sorrows
In my country, number one for billionaires, prisoners, franchises offer menu consistency. What lies dormant today in the collective unconscious? Akin to tintype, sun prints itself on structures and skin. As we age our vocabularies expand with names...
James Franco Private Event
It is snowing outside in the woods of New Hampshire, each flake unique and crafted by James Franco. The radish in my wax paper bag of carrots and celery—it is the face of James Franco shaking up my lunch. James Franco has designed a line of...
Next Election
Maybe inject chlorophyll beneath skin to grow own food as we go. Maybe clutch in each palm handfuls of fat as hedge against vanishing animals. Maybe class up cursing with smattering of Latin. Maybe drive to supermarket stunned by afternoon sun faint...
Against All Evidence
Because we cannot believe in God the Monster entirely but believe in God the Monster a little, we’ll never be elected. We own these souls. Won’t someone fix them, uncover and preserve forever patches of sidewalk sun to sit in? In this game we walk...
Things We Say
After latest tragedy, let’s drift asleep listing words for what fish oblivious in waters do: plunge, glide, dive, sway. Our daily allowance of banalities includes again that strange phrase, “realistic fiction.” Among many nevers: Billionaire or...
Final Animal
Translucent amphibian or molecular invertebrate, scavenging rodent or stubborn ungulate, whatever it is endures all manner of onslaught for that imaginable unimaginable forthcoming moment it’s the last thing blinking and breathing in landscape...
How to Build a Monument
Carving out the walls of Zion A desert river called The Virgin Urged us to sit that night. You know. The night my head caught fire And the stars kept falling And the splash of moon on the water made it certain That earth and sky go on and on and on...
It Will Rain
At the salty rim we long for raindrops, umbrella-shaped dancing on a picnic plate, settling down the dust in their hurry to spill old water into rusty tanks, surprising clover from ceded ground. The same precious well will mount on the same well...
Wing Banger
I have heard a cicada crawled out of the dark silences of the mountain after years eating its heart out, to join its luck its wet green wings clicking to the mountain choir dewdrop blackbird twig-snap stone-throw and the wind playing on things...
Pox Americana: A Roll Call: 5/4/17
(@ the 217 Congressional Representatives who voted to “repeal & replace” the ACA, each one up for reelection in 18 months) You will someday sicken and someday, sure as taxes, vote no more. You will someday sicken and someday, sure as taxes, vote...
Words Fail Me
And it’s not one of these old-age lapses caused by blinking brain synapses. And it’s not a matter of speechless awe at something I just saw on YouTube—a toilet-flushing cat, or commensurately gifted brat. Sometimes, it’s true, I lose a noun or two...
Porcelain and Glass
Summer halfway trundled up, the July rain rasps down our nighttime roof and window glass, the road out front rivering to ruts of pebbled sand, where soil bleeds veins between clumps of grass. At dawn the cat stands stunned at doorway’s edge, tail...
Incident at the Western Border
She vanished before they could shoot her: left only an atmosphere of mist, brume of body which blew inland in a myriad of droplets, a haze of nard and cinnamon touched softly with myrrh and cassia, floating like pamphlets scribbled in a foreign...
the last time
I did it alone. Not in bed where I’d willed myself dead for so many years I became apparition not in the bathroom where I fed my body to a hungry blade & cut down my hair with a match. It was not in the arms of the man I tried over & over to...
fusillade for my mother’s brain
You spoiled mound complicated by static you skull-born satellite launched from a splintered mirror you doom-hatched agony steady as piss you childless guilt scorched in fog you blazing delirium un-teaching my name you sideshow daydreamer...
dead radio apostle
Heels in stirrups, knees pitched above my hips, I am blinded by every measured breath required before each push— a cold, unnatural discipline. I was taught to focus on something in the room, to distract from the hell-rigged pain knifing me from the...
Six Questions for Rachel McKibbens
Six Questions editor Christine Mallon caught up with Rachel McKibbens recently to ask her about her poems in Scoundrel Time, all of which will appear this fall in blud. What follows is a sneak-peak into that volume. Scoundrel Time: In “the...
Dura Mater
I carried death inside me for several days, waiting That man had no ticket to the concert; he pressed his ear to the wall, but no song found him Bees were swarming; they made sleeves and a hood around me when I stood still All winter a deep booming...
Vanishing Point
For as far as we can see, they trudge across swirling sand toward us At the gate, one child’s blinks, such a uniform degree of metronomic motion with inky lashes—they seem to make an audible click, the second hand of memory, calligraphic Tropics of...
“Appropriate and Just”
Diplomacy? A bother and a bore.
In fact, who needs a diplomatic corps?
Who needs cables and epistles?
When you launch a bunch of missiles,
you can lift your polling numbers from the floor.
Flamboyan (Royal Poinciana)
I always wanted to be that woman That brazen hussy clothed in red The color of a torch singer’s lips or a rooster’s wattle Fecund, inflamed, unashamed My trembling limbs spread wide In rampant, ecstatic bloom Defying you and your mortal fears...
This Is Us (Oxycodone Song)
What was it Mavis said about the marble, re: Da Vinci, or was it Michelangelo, you know, that the job is, some- how, the careful removal of what isn’t needed—of what’s getting in the way? Something like that? Google it, I said. She’d been the...
The Mothers on the Wall
Stant pavidae in muris matres oculisque sequuntur Pulveream nubem et fulgentes aere catervas. -AENEID VIII 590-1 The fearful mothers standing on the wall, the cloud of dust they follow with their eyes: millennia pass, and nothing’s changed at all of...
American Patriot: A Portfolio
Poems by Jim Daniels, Photographs by Charlee Brodsky Size Matters Imagine singing “Oh, say, can you see” to a flag you can’t see. That’s what graduate students at the University of Texas at Dallas had in mind when they...
Isolated Splendor
I was aping Mussolini in a pizzeria when the American I fell for called me an asshole, not an overreaction in Roma, the city responsible for romantics like Caligula and Berlusconi. Later that night, soccer hooligans attacked the riot cops, the...
Scoundrel Time Interview–Six Questions for Poet Jim Daniels and Photographer Charlee Brodsky
Featured Portfolio: “American Patriot” as a Dialogue between Poetry and Photography about the Nature of Patriotism, an Interview Pittsburgh-based photographer Charlee Brodsky spent this last election year taking photographs of American flags in...
Still Life w/ Gay Lil’ Patriots
yu so fun so danger so smoke so ready 2 deady [next stop: F I R E W O R K S spend $ & get &z off] we bubble buy blame bead up the sky w blood [the libertree thirsty & i wonder what this b 2 me] as yr local majikal hapahaole mite say a...
Murillo’s Saint Catherine, c. 1650
–Hospital de los Venerables, Sevilla She stares with a bearing – experience having brought her soul this far – and lifts a frond, one kind of sword, in one hand, effortless. In the other, clutched to her, the silver plated sword of her own...
Congrats! The Revolution Is Now
buff buffe / buffer buff/reibu / buffrebufffring / & fervently awaitin ya pass code o, word ? we wonder how we will in2 existence: amazonial primal access & 1070p rejection o’ taxes science will save ya ass / a seat...
Sonnet on Hearing the Name of the Proposed EPA Head
The entire planet is his. Put here: a statistic about how long we have. The (partially) fake news: the Garden, created for man, is now available for pillage. Man’s ingenuity to fix it, ha. Why don’t they talk about man’s stupidity...
Slow Bus Detroit Chicago (for Thomas Sayers Ellis)
Don’t get off the bus Take it nice & take it slow No one getting on the bus & nowhere else to go Sometimes the bus stops moving Sometimes it moves ahead Little on by little off There’s little to be said The bus itself’s the...
The Nearest Woof Is 50 Miles Away When You’re in Murray, Kentucky
For $5.00 Mama Nancy chauffeurs you through tractor stores & auto washes. Students lift life-size cardboard cutouts of the Pope. An Aztec wish doll who is white interrogates me & smells of carp. I salivate for the unrequited egg over...
Report a Problem With This Poem
—as noted on the Poetry Foundation website This poem isn’t meant for you or for anyone, really— hairpin scratches in wet clay, hardly cuneiform, whatever came to mind then left as quickly. Resistant, like a child whose fist clamps around a...
My Sister and I Are Having the Same Dream
Long after nights of arm-tickling across the chasm between our twin beds, after all the shared illnesses of childhood—spiking fevers doused in crystalline alcohol, such pungent, icy baptisms, after the honeyed scabs of measles and of falls, years of...
Life Is So Good Here
Barbecue smell drifts over from the river. Too much lighter fluid splashed in the pouring. Flares of sudden fire. Parkland. Given: a family, Dad home on leave. The kids lead him by the hand, showing him off, he’s theirs. And Mom fully reclined on...
A Word From Our Sponsor
“The bay is blowing gray beneath the sky. The trash fish are fingered From the net and go missing with a flick of the blade. Pity the newborn’s cry into the cold of the clinic. Fear the man whistling along the road beneath a dying sky. Know the last...
Suggested Improvements
The red flyer was posted by the elevator On the ground floor by the mailboxes. Management Has enlisted the utility company To come install new more efficient shower heads, Low-flow kitchen faucet aerators and other Improvements that will save money...
Two Cheers for the Middle Class (Mojave Song)
“Reality,” said my friend Fortunato, a neuroscientist, “is a controlled hallucination.” Just so, the unnamable swims into focus, all teeth and sharp corners. A guy at my daughter’s fancy school complains about belt-tightening...
Sleeplessness: Eulene-Style
“Knowing I couldn’t sleep made it harder to try.” –Marvin Bell Eulene tries anyway, even though insomnia gallops like...
Introductions: Telemachus Dreaming of Telemachus Dreaming
of Telemachus dreaming, not of Odysseus, of a man whose name is not Odysseus: this man’s one name’s not not Odysseus, either, nor man whose name is not Odysseus. Odysseus is not the dreamed-up man whose name...
After the Election, in a Semi-Barbaric Land
After the election, I stare at a door. What’s behind it? Scylla? Charybdis? Maybe a tiger. Or else, a tiger. After the election, witch hazel, stubborn, electric, bursts yellow over Wolf Creek. I’m too sad to get drunk. Gold needles tumble all day...