Second Coming No. 488 — May 22, 2026
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by Donald Trump and his fascist regime
what we call peace is our silence dispersed / by the elephant trumpet, dull
summoning to a pale chaos / full—we insist—of potential
our peace is a silence dispersed
blanket of fleece stretched
to the corners comfort is not
the villain the issue is regulation
—excess & dearth
how to recalibrate the acts
of giving and receiving to
civic imperative our life
force the body an organism
of in & out—food, breath, period
ic blood
the pachyderm is much maligned
clarion elephant trumpet
muddled & dulled with rhetoric
what’s the connection, anyway?
grey-skinned mammals in possession
of tenacious memory
a fondness for striped tents and peanuts?
i cannot imagine real
elephants choosing this circus
over an actual mudbath
or serving as instrument
to summon us to our pale chaos
to those who would see we the people
to our extinction not by desire
so much as through atrophy a wasting
of the muscular stuff that keeps
a body fit for purpose ripe
for work for love & indolence
which is to say: rest give it a
rest the elephants might say
the body is not a babel
but clarion
emissary from a country
that manages to hold its myriad
subjects in equal regard
no matter what lies the intellect
tells itself all the brainsplaining
in the world cannot suppress
the uterine howl
nor the palpitations of a heart
beat prior to arrest
& bent on life
Irene Cooper is the author of the poetry collections even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety (Airlie Press, 2024) and spare change (Finishing Line Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook octets, (Downstate Legacies and PRESS 254, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, Witness, Bear Review, and other journals. Cooper lives in Oregon.
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