Second Coming No. 306 — November 21, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by Donald Trump and his fascist regime
Lanette Sweeney
Please Show Us the Truth
The chastened House finally voted yes,
said they stood ready to release the files.
What changed, exactly, during the recess?
Then the Senators unloaded this mess;
no vote needed to dump those dirty piles.
now that the House finally voted yes.
Though many knew Epstein, none will confess
to having played on his kiddie-sex isle.
What changed, exactly, during the recess?
The biggest men hide their sins, more or less,
in fancy suits, striding down power aisles,
but the House finally deigned to vote yes.
May all the rapists now under duress
be haunted by those teen girls’ brave, braced smiles.
What did they edit during the recess?
Most gross is Fox trying to reassess
if a girl’s 15, are men pedophiles?
The chastened House finally voted yes.
What changed, exactly, during the recess?
Lanette Sweeney is the author of the poetry collection What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing a Child to Addiction (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Please See Me, Amethyst Review, Whistling Shade, Shawangunk Review, HuffPost Personal, and other journals, as well s in the college textbook Women: Images and Reality (McGraw-Hill Education, 2011). Sweeney lives with her wife and their pets in South Hadley, MA.
Second Coming is a project of Indolent Books, a haven for poets over 50 without a first book and a welcoming space for women, people of color, queer and trans writers, and others who do not fit molds or conform to expectations.
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 | A guest post by
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One gets so tired of hearing men debate “what’s a girl,” is that the first time an adult male in the family pulls her down on his lap and she realizes he has a hard on? Or later when a teenage boy feels entitled to pin her against a locker and finger her, or another who thinks he loves her and the boyfriend tries to farm her out to his friends for money at 11 years old?
These are the debates of misogyny and sexism. No woman, no mother, no girl who is honest about living in a patriarchy will deny the experience which is why this poem rings so true.