by Thomas DeFreitas

Call me a snowflake, libtard, pinko,
But I won’t miss Cuarenta y Stinko.

by Julia Griffin

“100 Million Ballots, But Experts Say ‘Heaven And Earth’ Being Moved For Election Mail”
—NPR

The clerks are working overtime; the drivers strive all night,
The postmen’s sacks half break their backs; no part of this is light.
They need strong will, strategic skill, and also lots of luck:
For revving Heaven’s easy but this Earth seems truly stuck.

by Bruce Bennett

Loons are screaming on the lake,
a scary sound, for Heaven’s sake,
but far less scary than the sound
of screaming loons from all around.

by Nora Jay

“Michigan court sides with gun advocates to reverse firearm ban at polls …
‘I feel like I need to have my gun at all times,’ said Jim Makowski, an attorney
representing plaintiffs in the suit against the secretary of state. …
Makowski said Michiganders are already protected by state law …
With such protections in place, he said there’s “no reason or justification
for [Benson’s] legal order,’ which he labeled ‘political’.
—The Guardian

“I feel,” said Jim Makowski,
I need my gun. It’s critical
At all times, like a housekey;
And banning it’s political.”

Assessing this with candor,
I see debate’s no use.
Behold the Michigander:
A macho Michigoose.

by Dan Campion

“Hundreds of Trump supporters stuck on freezing cold Omaha airfield after rally, 7 taken to hospitals”
—NBC News

Don leaves supporters in the cold;
They shouldn’t be surprised.
The sick, the poor, the meek, the old—
They’re plainly his despised:

If you don’t own a limousine
Or fly on Air Force One,
You’re just a blip across his screen,
Then frozen out, my son,

And, hypothermic daughter, you
Are also on his Z-list.
So, welcome to the canned-heat crew.
Is that frostbite thou feelest?

by Iris Herriot

“Man arrested after showering commuters with money from 30th-floor window”
—The Guardian

Was anybody bruised or stunned or shocked into a seizure
Or, blind with falling paper, crushed by cars to paraplegia?
Well, maybe; but for all we know his record as offender
Is limited to harmless rains of wholly legal tender;
So if conclusions must be drawn, I offer only these:
Humanity’s perverse and quite impossible to please.

by Paul Lander

Scarlett and Colin have tied the knot.
Upset? Come on, you had no shot.

by Jerome Betts

“Universities must act to eradicate discrimination
against working-class students, including the
mockery of regional accents, equality
campaigners have said.”
—The Guardian

Those whose forbears cried “Yoicks!”
Look down on the oiks
Who pronounce “bikes” as “boikes”?

They deem even a don
As more goose than swan
If a “one” comes out “wan”?

Although not Dick Van Dyke
Let us speak as we like
Scouse, Brummie or Tyke.

To let student life be
Language barrier free
Shed the yoke of RP

And from Bucks, Hants and Wilts
To the land of the kilts,
Welcome burrs, brogues and lilts!

by Ruth S. Baker

“Five distinct types of dog existed by end of last ice age, study finds”
—The Guardian

At the end of the Ice Age there were
Five clearly distinct kinds of cur:
The noisy, the bouncy,
The smelly, the pouncy,
And those who shed forests of fur.

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

We know the pratie’s what the Irish eat.
Of eighteen forty-seven they despond:
No praties meant a famine so complete,
They needed help from way across the Pond.
Good-hearted Choctaw in a distant land
Eked out their cash to help the Irish feed.
Today their gift is valued at five grand …
Both Navajo and Hopi now have need.
“You won’t get by alone,” the Irish said.
“And we recall we’re in your people’s debt:
Long years ago you sent us cash for bread.
One million’s the thanks, today, you get.
And though a gift is not a loan, all told,
Now we’ve repaid our debt two-hundredfold!”

by Ruth S. Baker

“Ecotricity founder to grow diamonds ‘made entirely from the sky'”
—The Guardian

They’re mining the sky now in Stroud
Which should make the ecologists proud:
Stuff mined from the earth
Cannot equal in worth
These squeezings of carbon and cloud.

by Eddie Aderne

“The word Eigengrau means own grey, or intrinsic grey, or brain grey.
It is what you see when you close your eyes.”
—Patricia Lockwood, reviewing a collection of essays on Nabokov
in the London Review of Books

O Eigengrau, O Eigengrau:
You are the word I need for now!
I look upon the news, and ouch!
I feel the need to sigh and grouch;
But close my eyelids all the way,
I see instead intrinsic grey,
My own, my brain’s, true status quo:
O Eigengrau, how grau you grow!

by Nicole Caruso Garcia

Jiggery-Pokery
Judge Coney Barrett
Scooted to SCOTUS on
GOP praise.

P-grabber tapped her as
Six-to-three-scale-tipper,
Poised to flip Roe: back to
Coat hanger days.

by Julia Griffin

“Do all dogs go to heaven? Pet owners increasingly think so, says study”
—The Guardian

I’m hoping, in my afterlife, for miles of breezy heath,
Deer-droppings, ponds, and garbage bins, with mammoth bones beneath;
Endorsing as I do the late Will Rogers’ testament:
If dogs don’t go to Heaven, then I want to go where they went.

by Nora Jay

As I was coming through the gloaming,
I met a voter from Wyoming.
“My vote,” he said, and winked one cornea,
“Counts more than three from California.”