ENVIRONMENTALISTS
by Gary Every

If I chopped up all the environmentalists
and turned them into fertilizer
that would definitely make the earth a greener place.
I am so tired of people writing speeches
about the dangers of global warming,
writing in their air conditioned offices
before jet setting around the planet
to give speeches,
to raise money,
so they can spend more time jetting and giving
speeches to raise more money.
Tired of people hiding behind
“Save the Trees” signs
when it is really about covertly expanding
property lines.
How about the Nuclear Power protestors
who never car pool to their rallies.

I hope the Apocalypse comes soon
because I have taught my daughter
to shoot a bow and arrow
so she can hunt your children for food
because they look sort of slow and plump to me.
At least that would finally do something
about overpopulation.

18cc's of blue collar psychobabble
by roibeard Ui-neill

“U.S. forces give the nod / It’s a setback for your country.”
-Midnight Oil

1

What would Billy Pilgrim
have concluded about the 1st Gulf War?
There’s obviously no moral difference
between oil derricks & Dresden china.

Pentagon officials postured & preened.
944,000 rounds of depleted uranium were expended.
Traces of the 320 metric tons of syndrome
hopped transports back to the red, white & blue.

What if a failed state &
the median family income
switched countries?
The cost would remain the same...
...the unborn of sand & suburbia
subsidizing the hubris of empire.

Birth defects, lasses,
a leukemia chaser at the health clinic,

if it exists.

2
What would Walter Reed
have made of the 2nd Gulf War?
There’s obviously no legal difference
between oil derricks & Ubaidan artifacts.
Approximately 650,000 Iraqis bit the cluster bomb
while Afghani afterthoughts pushed up poppy fields.

Pentagon brass huffed & puffed,
swept G.I. Joe’s PTSD,
his traumatic brain injuries,
under the hospital beds in Germany,
the first stop
where the truth was deep-sixed
in the pockets of profiteers
quicker than limbs
were rejoined to torsos
in the nursing homes of the brave.

Mold & cockroaches, boyos,
purple hearts, neglect & depression.

All at the discretion of an emperor
who should have saved our nation
by falling upon his own sword..

DEAD BOY IN THE RIVER, PHILIPPINES
by John Christopher Weil

Below a crumbling stone bridge, old men fish in the old way,
from rowboats on a river as gray as the heavy mist.
The mist settles on their shoulders like woolen capes,
lean arms protrude as if fleshless bones.
Conversation turns to ash in the mist.

The talk among the fishermen becomes echoed murmurs,
of a dead boy found shoeless and bare chested.
The fishermen are stoic, they pull on the lines like words
strung between them.
These men are cruel and emotionless.

This morning the bloated body of a brown boy
had indeed surfaced.
He washed up next to women laundering clothes
along the shore.
They finished their chore before reporting the body.
Upstream little girls continued to urinate in the water.
They stared at the boy, but did not run.

Two policemen dragged the boy further up the embankment.
They laid him on black mud. His death stare had fixed
on passing clouds,
as if counting sheep in an agonizing sleep.
The policemen smoked, lost patience waiting for the coroner,
then left the boy alone.

The coroner’s crimson truck never came.
For days the glassy eyes of passing fishermen paid
the boy little heed.
But their tongues gave him words to hear,
words echoing under the bridge of heavy stone.
Died by drugs, they say, opium likely.
The driver of a Jeepney must have dumped him like a
sack of sand.

We have seen it all on the river, the fishermen tell an
American reporter.
These fishermen in their bones, all lean, skin tough like sandals,
talk as if nothing surprises them.
They are ghosts of the river mist who pass along the
weekly stories.

For several more afternoons a dozen rowboats float by the boy.
He is covered in flies so thick his face is black.
A nearby fishing line suddenly goes taut in the current.
So a fisherman pulls in the line only to unhook a pair of shoes.
Casually, he laces them together, and with barely a glance,
he tossed the shoes beside the barefoot boy.
To give him comfort in heaven, he said, his voice echoing
under the bridge.
Then he drifted on down the river without a glace back.