“Devil I’ve crept with spiders / I’ve buzzed among the flies / I’ve rolled along these railroad /tracks conducting sinners’ lies” —Cindy King, “The Thank-God-I’m-an-Atheist Blues” Tinderbox Poetry

Or say, AI meets local news show.

“The tables / I served. The law firms I hustled / from one zipline to another, classroom / where I taught economics to the medicated / kids of bus drivers and stevedores” —Edgar Kunz, “Salvage” Mariner Books

“i do not trust/any poet that did not/slurp the purple velvet/milk of excess from/lucky charms while/watching voltron/but my father says/with clear conscience/the same thing about/tang and leave it/to beaver” —David Tomas Martinez, “Hexaptych on Ambition” Tin House Sarabande Books

“you who once said / to a woman who came up to the podium / to say she was moved by your poems, / ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, Ma’am, / I was after other things.’” —Stephen Dunn, “Out of Respect” Shenandoah

“There’s so much wrong with a country where a woman / dying of ovarian cancer has to work forty hours a week / at Dollar General” —Shaindel Beers, “HA!”

Part of what makes these metrics (cited by Indigo Olivier in the latest issue of TNR) so shocking is that they point to exactly the kind of corruption the US has accused foreign governments of fostering. In the aggregate, the scale of the graft in Washington eclipses them all.

In the U.S. the 'low' in June 2021 was 12,626 daily cases.

Today, our 'low' is 173,758 daily cases.

That's 13.7 times higher than our 2021 lows.

With each wave our 'lows' keep rising.

We've never returned to anything close to the lows in 2020/2021. It only goes up and up.

“she also appeared / perched amid / the luminous / Hollywood square / of afternoons / pretending not / to know facts / about outer space / or islands or headless / queens” —Matthew Zapruder, “The Empty Grave of Zsa Zsa Gabor” apublicspace

“She had some things she wanted to write down: / something about her father and his guns / and his alcohol and her trite love for him / that never got to pale in comparison” —Dorsey Craft, “Elegy for the Me That Died in Childbirth” Ploughshares

“When the poet wrote _I lost my mother’s watch,_ / we knew she meant more than a timepiece. // To watch over the soft-skulled expulsive being / that is _baby_ is a genre of love that must break // its own clock.” —Heather Treseler, “Purpura” SundressPublications sundressblog.com/2024/03/04/the…

“two Russians on an ice-dancing reality show/performing as Jews in Auschwitz. I was sickened,/even though I couldn’t follow the pantomimed action,/and I wondered if I was producing Holocaust kitsch myself” —Jason Schneiderman (Jason Schneiderman), “Dramaturgy” Virginia Quarterly Review vqronline.org/poetry/2021/09…

“On the brick wall opposite my window, light and leaf shadow. Graffiti reading Joey 79. Inside, light on the lap of the chair.” —Joanna Penn Cooper, “The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis” Brooklyn Arts Press

'In the first 4 months of 2024 there were TEN times more registered cases of whooping cough in Portugal than the whole of 2023. Portugal has one of the best vaccination rates in the world. It's not lower vaccination rates. It's covid immune damage.' Pedro is a Portuguese doctor

“instead I got chased from the dinner party / by some Puritan goody claiming I had designs // on her insipid mister, wrong idea, / but a clue to woman as domesticated pet // or wormy colonial acre.” —Erin Hoover, “Forms and materials” Black Lawrence Press

If I had a nickel for every time the only poem I like in a poetry book is the unpublished one…

“all the lights/in the apartment were on/and I said it’s just like Hopper,/but she didn’t understand./I said it was just a room with a person in it/whose feelings rose in his face for a moment.” —Laura Read, “The Lucky Penny” Moss UMass Press mosslit.com/laura-read-the…

“I loved knowing a woman’s hands secured the needle // into my vein, secreting glyphs of narcotics / before going home groggy and emptied” —Kendra DeColo, “I Listen to George Harrison’s ‘Apple Scruffs’ After My Miscarriage” The Ilanot Review ilanotreview.com/want/poems-ken…

“Once, Mark Leidner talked me into doing set design, / unpaid, in the Poconos / where I would be forever traumatized / by the overpopulation of deer” —Bianca Stone, “Set Designer” Tin House

“Jack’s father disappeared when he was ten. / ‘No big deal,’ Jack says, ‘he was a bastard anyway, / he used to flatten beer cans on the top of my head.’” —Mark Halliday Indiana Review UChicagoPress poetryfoundation.org/poems/55020/ba…