by Mae Scanlan

Chuck and Nancy and Don
Shared a White House dinner last night
To mull what is going on,
And endeavor to set things right.

Chuck and Donald and Nance
Said the meeting was quite instructive,
A true bipartisan chance
That wound up being productive.

Don and Nancy and Chuck
Spoke of DACA, The Wall, and tax;
The Dems said a deal was struck;
The Donald said “Not the facts.”

Nancy and Chuck and Don,
This trio is not fake news.
It called for Dom Perignon,
But the Donald does not drink booze.

by Orel Protopopescu

There’s no mountain of sheer profit
Shkreli’s not ashamed to scale.
If he’d pay five grand to own it
at the risk of going to jail,
maybe tabloids publish secrets
from the DNA of hair.

Or perhaps he longed to grab some
just because he knows it’s there.

by Chris O’Carroll

He railed that Irma was a hoax.
His fans are anti-science folks,
Who smoke the same great crack Rush smokes.
Do you suppose a few more tokes
Will help them see on whom the joke’s?

by David Hedges

“Had America not absorbed the sheer skeeviness of that decade, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”—Op-Ed, The New York Times, September 2017

It seems that skeeviness is now
A word that everyone should know;
The New York Times would not allow
A word to interrupt the flow

Its readers are accustomed to
When tapping into current news.
Did skeevy pass a peer review?
Was it intended to amuse?

If skeeviness means what I think,
It started in the reign of Ronald
When everything began to stink,
And culminated in The Donald.

by Estes Smith

POTUS pouts,
When not a Twitter-happy cockalorum.

FLOTUS flouts,
In runway footwear, flood relief decorum.

by David Hedges

My older friends, I must confess,
Are scared down to their sneakers.
They’ve heard about, with great distress,
Trump’s vow to smoke out leakers.

by Orel Protopopescu

In a town in Michigan,
on Walmart’s barest shelf,
sat a notebook, virginal
but tempting, by itself.

Several women went for it.
A blond, near twenty-one,
held off two assailants till
her mother pulled a gun.

Pistol-packing Mama yelled,
Don’t pull my daughter’s hair!
(What a priceless lesson for
the school-age children there.)

Blondie, book and hair intact,
redeeming Mama’s toils,
ran to pay, mid-getaway,
for hard-won victory’s spoils.

Those who wrote our right-to-arm,
could they have visualized
a land where guns serve learning,
where writing is so prized?

The moral of this story?
Don’t step into Walmart
without your vest and helmet
and an armored shopping cart.

by James Hamby

Irma followed in a hurry
Close on Harvey’s heel.
I’m sure that I would start to worry
If global warming were real.

by Orel Protopopescu

Hello Houston, can you hear me?
I’m in Corpus. Catch my hat?
Don’t be fooled by imitations.
Mine’s made here. Just think of that!

Forty greenbacks on my website,
if you’re wondering. What a crowd!
We won’t say congratulations,
though I did, just now, out loud.

Texas storms bring epic turnouts.
I love Texas. I’m your guy!
Cut the flood zone “safety standards.”
That’ll leave you high and dry.

Didn’t want to call your mayor.
He’s a Dem, so we don’t kiss.
Gotta go and push for tax cuts.
Can we put a lid on this?

by Jerome Betts

I’m Larry the Downing Street cat—
Hacks and snappers are glad about that.
When the people inside No. 10,
Like Theresa or two former men,
Fail to come up with gaffes to make news
I’m the feline-as-filler they use.

MPs enter and leave; some are bats
And some are vile back-stabbing rats.
Some have brains, some have not much aloft,
Some like Brexit, hard, medium, soft.
Politicians! They’re really not nice,
Yet I’ll stick to my post and catch mice.

A mere human can manage my tweets
While I wander the Westminster streets.
Never on an electoral list,
I’m neutral, a pure hedonist,
Though if Trump appeared, courting applause,
Then this pussy would vote—with its paws.

A contribution to Public Discourse in the Year of our Trump 2017

by John Ridland

I
Along twenty sandy beaches
The only leering thing
Was the eye of the donaldbird.

II
He is of three minds
Like a country
In which only one of the three favors the donaldbird.

III
The donaldbird whirled with the campaign winds.
He was the main cause of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Were one.
A man and a woman and a donaldbird
Were not..

V
I do not know which to deplore
More, the duty of listening,
Or the duty of voting,
The donaldbird twittering
Or just after.

VI
The electorate peered through the window
Of fogged-up glass.
The twitters of the donaldbird
Crossed to and fro.
The moods
Traced in the twitters
An absence of sense.

VII
O fat man of Manhattan,
Why do you gild all your buildings?
Do you not see how the donaldbird
Snuffles around the pussy-cats
Of the women about you?

VIII
We knew noble precedents
And pellucid, capable language;
But we know, now,
That it has devolved
To the donaldbird’s tweets.

IX
When the donaldbird ran out of cash,
He stiffed the contractors
On one of many constructions.

X
At the sound of the donaldbird
Lying that red lights are green,
Even the lords of bamboozlement
Would cry out, Sharpster!

XI
He rode over Florida
In a glass limo.
At once a fear pierced us
In that we mistook
The shadows of his equivocations
For donaldbirds.

XII
The river is melting.
The donaldbird must be leaving.

XIII
It is evening all over America.
He is snowing us
And he is going to snow us.
The donaldbird sits
On a palm-frond.

by Mae Scanlan

When the POTUS and the FLOTUS
Left for Texas (per appeals),
We just couldn’t help but notice
That the FLOTUS wore high heels,

Black stilettos, raising eyebrows
As she sauntered to the plane;
Both the lowbrows and the highbrows
Had to think this was insane.

She wore sneakers when she landed
(There’s a flood. The lady’s hip.)
But one question (let’s be candid):
Fashion footwear for the trip?

by Catherine Chandler

A 100-year-old fruitcake believed to be from the Scott expedition has been found in a nearly “edible” state in the Antarctic. — The Telegraph, August 2017

Captain Robert Falcon Scott,
in A.D. nineteen hundred ten,
sailed from Wales, so go the tales,
with sixty-four courageous men.

Among provisions on the ship
were petrol, ponies, dogs, and skis,
a frying pan for the pemmican,
and tonnes of relish, jams, and cheese.

Moreover, Mrs. Scott had packed
(lest Robert tire of penguin steaks,
biscuits and beans and canned sardines)
the Rodney Dangerfield of cakes.

But in his haste to reach the Pole,
(though Amundsen had beaten him to it)
Scott left the chunk inside his trunk
where none would ever find or chew it.

And there it languished till today
in a lonely hut on Cape Adare,
still wrapped up in its rusty tin,
moist and none the worse for wear.

Though Captain Robert Falcon Scott
did not return to the land of the living,
in snow and ice, full of dates and spice,
lies the gift that keeps on giving.

by James Hamby

Perhaps the reason for Trump’s noncompliance
Is that he doesn’t believe in science.

by Bob McKenty

Home whites/road grays in days of yore
Were what all Major Leaguers wore,
But nowadays it’s camo gear
And retro styles from yesteryear,
Breast-cancer pinks and prostate blues
(Of course including matching shoes),
Pinstripes, perhaps, black tops besides,
And 42s for April’s ides.
Star-studded caps will be their way
Of marking Independence Day,
Late August they now take their whacks
With jaunty nicknames on their backs.
And next they must accessorize:
Designer shades to shield their eyes;
Those velcroed gloves that batters use;
Compression sleeves in gaudy hues;
And body armor to abate
The dangers lurking at home plate.
Our fabled boys of summer who
Once graced SI now crave GQ.