POEM OF THE DAY BY EDIP CANSEVER

Table

(Masa da Masaymis Ha)

A man filled with the gladness of living
Put his keys on the table,
Put flowers in a copper bowl there.
He put his eggs and milk on the table.
He put there the light that came in through the window,
Sound of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.
The softness of bread and weather he put there.
On the table the man put
Things that happened in his mind.
What he wanted to do in life,
He put that there.
Those he loved, those he didn't love,
The man put them on the table too.
Three times three make nine:
The man put nine on the table.
He was next to the window next to the sky;
He reached out and placed on the table endlessness.
So many days he had wanted to drink a beer!
He put on the table the pouring of that beer.
He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness;
His hunger and his fullness he put there.

Now that's what I call a table!
It didn't complain at all about the load.
It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.
The man kept piling things on.

-Edip Cansever
(translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast & Richard Tillinghast)

Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism

By Dr. Lawrence Britt
Source Free Inquiry.co
5-28-3

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each: 1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. 2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. 3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc. 4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. 5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution. 6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. 7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. 8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions. 9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. 10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed. 11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked. 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations. 13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders. 14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

POEM OF THE DAY BY ELEANOR WILNER

Encounter in the Local Pub

Unlike Francis Bacon, we no longer believe in the little patterns we make of the chaos of history.
—Overheard remark

As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,

into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,

he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,

or was done. As if, after a life of enchantment, he

had awakened, like Bottom, wearing the ears of an ass,

and the only light was a lanthorn, an ersatz moon.

It was not that the calendar hadn’t numbered the days

with an orbital accuracy, its calculations

exact, but like a man who wants to hang a hammock

in his yard, to let its bright net cradle him, but only

has one tree, so he—wild and aware of it—knew

he had lost the order he required, and with it, rest—

his thoughts only a sagging bundle of loose ends,

and the heart, a naked animal in search of a pelt,

that once fell for every Large Meaning it could

wrap itself in, as organs are packed in ice for transit

from one ending to the next, an afterlife of parts—and

the whole? Exorbitant claim—not less than all,

and oddly spelled; its ear rhyme is its opposite,

the great hole in the heart of things. The goat,

he noticed, had a rank smell, feral. Unnerved,

he looks away, watches the last of his ice

as it melts, the way some godlike eye might see

the mighty glaciers in a slow dissolve back into sea.

He notes how incommensurate the simile, a last

attempt to dignify his shaking gaze, and reaches

for the bill; he’s damned if the goat will pay.


-Eleanor Wilner

POEM OF THE DAY BY PIMONE TRIPLETT

Last Wave

No warning, the fissure, the wave, the wreck, reckoning.

No warning, mantle's woe unto trench maw, bespeaking mega thrust.

And ocean receding, fish flapping in sand, silver.

Till water curved its back, crashed, spurting stones, dogs, shards, children.

Sky, sea, two spools unwinding in wet.

Though tourists were in love, the building-sized blue arc above them.

No warning, TNT force of thirty-two billion tons.

And the father's back slapping hard, water's uppercut coming on full.

And the arms shooting open, the child let go.

And the bellow-fat beast stamping its feet unchained.

Spattering the lime-striated caves, dry a second before.

Though a woman leaps from one rooftop to another, lives.

Though in village legend, long drought follows the flood.

And the tectonic subducts drop-kick one plate against another.

Though a taxi driver pauses over his noodles at the start of thunder.

Though money's made to dance on tables, entertaining locals.

No warning, this fist, signature.

Though seafloor systems exist, pricey items.

Though boys and men run the beach, yelling get back.

And some bodies drag along the coral for miles.

Though one fly rubs its hands.

No warning like a voice turned inward.

Though for two hundred thousand their last taste is salt.

No warning and the voice is as if.

Sky, sea, the two spools unraveling.

The voice breaking, birthing, up-wrathed, out-wrung—

Pimone Triplett

A TINY DROP OF TRUTH

Sometimes The Night's hot whisper
is nothing more than a black snake's hiss of a word
we cannot always quite discern-

a momentary corridor
of connectivity between us
and the haunted darkness
between the stars-

a smooth shiny pebble of a word
barely graspable in its hard
slippery-slopishness

nearly as ethereal on its surface
as the thought
at its dark heart,

a thought with a tiny drop of truth
in its blood, like a poison,
secretly insinuated into
the winding stream of things
in an attempt to stimulate
some sort of healing
between it and the world,

a truth that by fevering up the blood a bit
and dis-quieting deep dreams
and there-by prying open the inner onion-eye
that sleeps, deeply, at the center of the mind
forces itself

to at least be

disbelieved.


-Jason Ryberg, 2010

POEM OF THE DAY BY BRUCE BOND

Hunger

Take this phone face down in its cradle,
the woman there awakened by the bell
that never rings, that sleeps on the table
without the man who broke things off, who calls

back her marriages like abandoned farms
or something cold her mother said. Take
that. Take all the little teeth she frames
in photos, the carpet she pulls in mistaken

hope to bare the beaten slab below.
Or the punished mirror in her trash bin.
Take the stars of every glass she throws
to fate. And so the hour she cannot burn

her hoard of letters but thinks instead of how,
yes, she will buy a dog, something to find
her here this side of the living, for now
there will be another mouth to feed.

And feed it she does: her bones, her hands,
the chest of every pounding door. With each bite,
each morsel of meat she dangles overhead,
there is always a leaping heart to snap it.

And while the dog bears the name of her ex,
she admits nothing, and in weeks to come
he doubles his size, his appetite, the flexing
of her bed, his cry for more blood, more crumbs,

more hide to chew, more squirrels to scatter
with his jaw. For what she does is never
enough to settle the matter, whatever matter
that is, never the thing to douse the fever,

though she cannot give him up, any more
than sacrifice the world they eat. She knows
that now, knows there are nights so mired
in stars and hunger she takes to heart, who’s

to tell him no, no. And the whole yard stirs
to see her bent beneath the day’s fatigue,
a broken gate beside them, her whispering
tenderly into his eyes: bad dog, bad dog.


-Bruce Bond

POEM OF THE DAY BY WALLACE STEVENS

The Snow Man


One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


-Wallace Stevens