Open for submissions — A poem to redeem as best we can every tragic day of the Trump administration. Here is a link to pay the $3.00 submission fee. No need to confirm; I will immediately receive notice of the payment. I invite you to submit 1–3 poems in an email with a brief bio to michael@indolentbooks.com. Please use the subject line “Second Coming Submission.” Submission fees are waived for paid subscribers once per month.
Brad Vogel
Renegading, Inauguration Day, Washington Square
I peer through naked dawn redwood
realize, flags and chants, bare branches
snow there’s no heart-breaking
metaphor fit for this moment
no needled curtain keeping me
from epic sun, sublime arch stage
the irretrievably dark
capitol complicity that brought out
this all-too-inadequate frenzied human gore
flapping in killing winter breeze
this crowd of caring rabble
from the whole Gotham hill hardly any
ants railing at H bombs of extinction
of rights of species of decencies
so small these coffee-colored cones
strewn on concrete permafrost
taloned drones overhead
I reach down with my cold roots
listen as hoary oaks
whisper nutrient by nutrient
of potters field plots
and horrors prior
recall that
laughter and skin and piano and promenade
have always broken out
leafily, blissfully green
when it seems life could not possibly
give us a sign
I will be here when the end comes
—can we not each say the same—
the coffered arch fallen
bark thickened, fires circling
playing dead again in some
four hundred millionth january
watching without eyes
sniffing without nose
smirking without mouth
sap roiling below
renegading
fit to surge
Brad Vogel is the author of the poetry collections Find Me In the Feral Pockets (Euphrosine Publishing, 2024) and Broad Meadow Bird (Euphrosine Publishing, 2015). His poems have appeared in Evergreen Review, Smartish Pace, Freshwater Review, No Dear, The Eel Pit, Alla Prima, and other journals. Founder and coordinator of NYC Poets Afloat, Vogel lives and canoes in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
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Beautiful and harrowing; true andvubsparing! Brad Vogel
Bravo!