What is the Question?
          by Li “Web Crease” Du

Debasement is the password; justice is the epitaph;
the networked sky is covered with the cloud of fad and fact.
The Ice Age leaves, yet manatees are drawn in Florida
to power plants, like Lot’s wife to the Dead Sea corridor.
I came into this Earth with hands and head, with feet and mouth.
But I do not believe that I will reach a thousand doubts.
The seas break all their dikes; the brackish waters wreck the heart.
Here is a new conjunction and a glimmering of starts.
These are the pictographs for future generation minds,
the watchful eyes of billions on their way to closing blinds.

 

Li “Web Crease” Du is a poet interested in the Internet and Modernist, Postmodernist, and New Millennialist China. His little unpublished chapbook Sonnets From the Chinese, on 59 Modernist Chinese writers born before 1920, has been excoriated by Lew Icarus Bede as a “work struggling, like the Chinese, to write sonnets, interspersed with abstruse tidbits of information…hardly worth the effort.”
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On Westminster Bridge, March 22, 2017
          by Basil Drew Eceu

At least four people have been killed and forty injured in
a terrorist attack in London in the afternoon.
Here near the cradle of great Parliamentry government,
a cruel terrorist went mad upon the hard cement.
He rammed, and slammed, his car into the people that he passed,
school children, women, men he hit; he stepped hard on the gas.
His purpose was to murder, and he did indeed do that;
and once he left the car he took his knife, and stabbed, and stabbed;
till he was stopped. Dear God, the very buildings seemed to shake,
as London’s mighty heart, thus wakened by such hate, did break.

 

Basil Drew Eceu is a poet fond of Britain.
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Token Changes
          by Leisure C. Wedab

Who darns their holey socks these days? Are thimbles even used?
Who irons clothes, or marks childhood with bronzed-up baby shoes?
How much depends upon old wheelbarrows in the rain?
Do roof-tops tell which way the wind blows with a weather vane?
Monopoly has made some token changes to its game;
a new T-Rex, a rubber ducky, and a penguin came.
Out with the old, in with the new; but this is not the first—
once, barrow and the dog replaced the lantern and the purse.
So now along with scotty dog, new cat, hat, car and ship,
three little pieces in a game will mark a culture’s
                                                                                                shift.

 

Leisure C. Wedab is a privy associate of Cu Ebide Aswerl, and whose father loved to play card games and board games. When Wedab was young, he would play Monopoly with older friends in the neighbourhood for hours on end.
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At Orly Airport, South of Paris, France, on Saturday
          by Cews Baudelier
          “I love Paris in the Springtime…”
          —Cole Porter, “I Love Paris”

Stopped by police in Garges-lès-Gonesse, on Saturday,
Ziyed Ben Belgacem discharged birdshot, then ran away.
He then drove to Vitry-sur-Seine; he fired, and left his phone,
fled in his car, carjacked another, and drove on alone,
to Orly, where he grabbed a woman, French gendarme, and said,
“…I’m here to die for Allah,” with air pistol to her head.
But at that instant, two police fired three bursts into him,
who’d just before tossed a container filled with gasoline;
He died with cigarettes, Quran, and lighter on the scene;
but luckily nobody else was murdered for his spleen.

 

Cews Baudelier is is a poet of the French streets and a lover of Parnassian verse. He recently noticed the lavender crocuses, like limp ghosts, struggling to rise up out of the winter dearth.