Once you start stabbing people who deserve it,
where do you stop? So many worthy candidates.
Macbeth’s problem. At least he had a wife to blame.
There are always going to be witches,
cackling over cauldrons, to set you thinking,
woods to get lost in mid-life,
battles to come back from
with your mind on chores left undone
back at the castle, scores to settle,
slights to avenge. The moat needs draining,
the murder holes are low on oil,
and that distant relative chained
to the dungeon wall has a dentist’s appointment.
No need to question where these messages
come from, this clarity that allows you
to see through the steam rising off the cauldron,
see past the warts, the sneers
on the faces of the messengers.

She stood at six-foot-four,
a miracle, a freak.
Most any wooden floor
she walked upon would creak.
No window, porch, or door
was safe from her physique.

When she stomped into town,
petunias would wilt
and greenery would brown
and pails of milk be spilt,
and weaker walls fall down
and have to be rebuilt.

One by one, in her wake
new houses rose, improved
to withstand such a shake.
And some thought it behooved
them all to let her quake;
but most were still unmoved.

A Task Force was assigned
to meet her face to face
and ask her if she’d mind
staying at her own place,
but she was not inclined
to shoulder such disgrace.

YOU MEASLY LITTLE MEN!
YOU FEEBLE, PUISNY ANTS!
She yelled at them, and then
she kicked two in the pants.
THE DAY I’LL DO THAT’S WHEN
PRINCE CHARMING COMES TO DANCE.

Then suddenly they knew,
as one brave nursed his fan:
Like any untamed shrew,
her problem was — no man.
The Task Force thought things through
and came up with a plan:

They searched far, high and low,
for some brave knight to charm her.
One, six-foot-six or so
but trembling in his armor,
said resolutely NO!—
and then became a farmer.

Would she never be a wife
and know connubial bliss,
but have to live her life
forevermore a Miss
and keep on causing strife
for want of one true kiss?

As year piled onto year
and course trailed after course
at last it became clear
no knight on a white horse
was going to appear
to satisfy the Force.

For in this modern age
much new had come to pass:
and Time had turned the page
from chivalrous to crass.
No longer did youths wage
their fortunes on a lass

in hopes that a true male
could make a lady fair
as in a fairy tale
and former ways, forswear.
They sought no holy grail,
nor damsel in despair.

Up and down the coast
the Task Force searched and panned.
One morning they almost
decided to disband.
Then, in their home town’s Post,
they read that their homeland

had suffered the attack
of a great hurricane
and lay in ruin and wrack
and neighbors had been slain.
They had to hurry back;
priorities were plain.

The Force saw, far and near,
destruction was widespread.
The farmers’ fields were sere
and rivers had turned red.
They shed many a tear
for many others dead.

Where the next village should
have been lay nothing but
torn shards and scraps of wood
clogging up rill and rut:
nary a building stood,
nor office tower nor hut.

Their home town, however,
had been spared from the worst,
its buildings more secure,
recently reinforced.
And they owed it all to her,
whom they had scorned and cursed!

To other nearby lands
beset by far more grief
than joy, our town lent hands
to aid in the relief.
They formed Good Neighbor bands.
Our Termagant was chief.

She had them clear the rubble
that had been tempest-tossed
and go to extra trouble
(of course at half the cost)
to erect the new walls double
so as not to be lost

again. That misanthrope,
by working tirelessly,
reinforced folks with hope
(as much as hope could be,
considering the scope
of the catastrophe).

Our grateful village gave
the Termagant her pick
of men—now, willing—save
the married, old, and sick.
Alas, though, she would have
not one of them — not Dick

or Tom or Harry—none! —
but shouted, red and sore,
IS THAT THE SORT OF FUN
YOU THINK YOU’LL USE ME FOR?
She cursed them, every one,
and slammed her cottage door.

She was as she’d begun:
our Termagant once more.

One of the best ways to learn and grow as a society is by listening to those whose voices are often overlooked. This week’s contributors do just that.

“Eight Days in Prison” by Nicholas Chittick chronicles roughly a week of experiences in a medium-security Illinois prison.

“Own” by Brooks Lindberg is a poem from the point of view of a young person dealing with family strife.

“Dissolution” by Julie McNeely-Kirwan follows a man as he strives to get a lawyer to help him secure an unusual divorce.

What if it’s not a poet in me,
but a potato that lies mute, still
as a stone, stiff with all that starch, sweet
beyond all blessed belief? Yet doomed
for some inevitable and — yes! —
edible destiny.

And would all my words abandon me?
All my days above ground have not
prepared me for this single moment
of roundness being next to soundness,
of brownness being wholly skin deep
and just as easily bruised.

A fist, a hand in glove, a hardened
heart. Half-baked, I see more than I am
believing; I have the lumps to prove
it. So what about grief? Don’t ask me.
I only said what if. Much better
to ask a turnip instead.

This has not been an easy piece to write, for it deals with a very odious category of people, those who are so unpleasant that, upon sight of them, many flee and hide. Are you such a person? Ah, you automatically declare “NO!” I assert, though, that you must study my words of sterling wisdom before you can be positive. Now let’s move on to today’s probing topic: How to tell when it’s time to work on your attitude and general demeanor. I proffer to you six ways you can tell:

(1) Just after you run a stop sign, yell obscenities out the window, and flip someone off, a cop stops you. The “Jesus is my Lord” and “Y’all have a great day” bumper stickers aroused strong suspicions that you were driving a stolen car.

(2) You overhear the kids you babysit begging their parents to let them stay: (A) with the  neighbor who stays drunk all the time, wanders around in a fog mumbling to herself, and just got out of prison or (B) at the local daycare they once went to daily, where the bigger kids (the ones with brass knucks) fought a lot over the little kids’ food and the owner sometimes called the police to restore order.

(3) The sight of you approaching can disperse a large crowd from the sidewalk or empty out the most popular restaurant in town in ten seconds flat—during lunch hour.

(4) Your own mama says she can’t go shopping with you because—well, she has a prior engagement… a headache… peas to shell… a hangnail… a feverish desire to watch “Lawrence Welk”… a very contagious illness…

(5) Your pastor—one of the godliest, most compassionate, peace-loving people alive— has a sore place on his tongue, from biting it, after every attempt to converse with you. (No, you won’t see his tongue—just him running in the other direction.)

(6) Your ninety-eight-year-old great-grandfather says it’s not a good time to come by because—uh, he’s going ice skating—and then mountain climbing… he can’t stand to miss a minute of “Dancing to the Oldies with Richard Simmons” reruns… he has to go to the gym to help some young guys with their power lifting… he needs to spend the evening alone looking for pictures and other mementoes you know he hasn’t looked at in fifty years…  

If you haven’t gotten the point by now, you must be really dull-witted. OOPS! So sorry! It’s terribly out of character for me to say things like that. I have to go now. I need to put some more bumper stickers on my car. 

I decided to go on Thursday night to the Buddhist talk at my temple, the Congregation B’nai Tsimmes. I managed to get out of work early, always a Nirvana-inducing feat, then high-tailed it home, ran three, showered, nuked and ate a health-conscious chicken pot pie, and set forth on my Siddharthan quest. Minya stayed home with the quads.

On the ten-minute ride to the temple, I fretted about whether I was wearing the right clothes; the flyer had said to wear “comfortable clothes and footwear,” but I wasn’t about to wear sweats to a place of worship. I wondered if I would know anybody there, or if some unseen underground, some Yid Falun Gong, would be the only members of the congregation who would go to something like this. I wondered how Rabbi Tbilisi had been persuaded to allow such a presentation, such tref, under his roof.

There were ten or twelve cars in the parking lot. At least I wasn’t the only meshuggeh. It was a pleasant evening. Fall was certainly coming, but it wasn’t here yet. I was, I hoped, “comfortable” in my jeans and T-shirt.

As I walked towards the temple, a black Miata buzzed into the lot, a Miata which could belong only to my long-time acquaintance, a man with whom I’d grown up, some thirty years since, in the old part of town, Mr. Harold Simchas-Torah. He, of the hyphenated name, the first such hyphenation I’d ever encountered, the product no doubt of his forward-thinking mother back in the sixties, was a black silk shirt, gold chain, gold bracelet Jew, always tanned, now on his second wife, Tsuki, a Japanese import. There was much to dislike or chide or dismiss him for, but yet, our mothers had been friends before us and we had been through much, and gotten high much, in the old days, and still occasionally, in the new.

He was not a rich Jew; hence the Miata and not a Mercedes, but he was not a poor Jew as I had been, relatively speaking, in our little town in the old days, and he flaunted whatever riches he could. He was still a terrific source of high-quality marijuana.

In fact, he motioned me over to his car as he drove past, and when his window rolled down, that familiar sweet smell greeted my largish nose.

“Harold, you’re getting stoned for a Buddhist meditation session,” I said, tsk-tsking all the while.

“Yeah, you want some?” Smoke he was trying to hold in escaped through his teeth as he held up a still-smoking half joint.

“No, for God’s sake,” I replied. “Although, maybe afterwards…”

It was a nice night, after all. It wouldn’t be so bad to be high.

Harold shrugged and took another puff. I scanned the parking lot guiltily. Birds twittered and chirped. Crickets cricked.

“Are you coming?” I asked.

He nodded and snuffed out the joint. His window rolled up, and he got out of the car. He brushed ashes off himself, off his pants, which were a satiny black loose-fitting thing with a sash or a drawstring or something.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested in this sort of thing,” I said. “And I can’t believe you got high for it. Well, actually, I can believe that.”

We walked towards the doors, he just slightly unsteadily.

“It’s a way to get out of the house,” he said.

I held the door for him, and we stepped inside. The bird twitter was gone, replaced by an echoey silence, fluorescent-lit and vaguely sepulchral. There was a glass case full of Jewish doodads for sale, pins of Torahs and Chais, little mezzuzzi, little stone Ten Commandments, large plastic noses and whatnot. There was a cloakroom beneath a stairway leading up into the Hebrew school where I used to do battle. Near the door to the sanctuary was a sign for tonight’s talk with an arrow pointing down the hall. I showed Harold and pushed him in that direction.

Still bathed in gleaming Hebrew light, we made our way down a long hallway I’d never been down to a small conference room I’d never known was there. Jewish-themed drawings and paintings and gluey collages done by the Hebrew school students lined the hallway walls.

Harold paused before a very colorful picture of something or other.

“I like this one,” he said.

“Come on, putz,” I said. “We’re late.”

“Fuck you,” he said, probably audibly to the people in the conference room as we pushed open the double doors.

On the seventh day God rested, so Sunday dinner was up to Lucifer. While chewing enthusiastically and explaining to his angels that, for much of the beginning of human history, his most confusing creation would believe their planet was not only flat but the center of the universe (to hearty chuckles all around) God ate in contentment. But, towards the end of the meal, the creator abruptly began to brood. Seeing his lord staring off, his hairy jaws full but no longer moving, Gabriel asked what was wrong.

“Well,” God both swallowed and answered hesitantly. “It’s the food.”

“Oh, I did I burn it again?” Lucifer asked. More laughs around the picnic table stretching across the clouds.

“No, no, it’s just…” God ran his tongue over his teeth and cleared his throat. “Well, I’ve had an epiphany—it just struck me where these ribs come from.”

God dropped the bone, still sporting a bite or two of glistening meat and dribbling pink juices, to his plate. It clattered down the pile of a half-dozen others, all scratched white with teeth marks. He pushed the plate away.

“It’s not just meat,” God explained to his heavenly host—who suddenly looked very skeptical. “This is meat that rightfully belonged to a living thing. I… I think it’s wrong to eat it.”

“Well, it’s too late to make it up to Adam now,” Lucifer remarked, trying to laugh off the unexpectedly heavy mood and pointing to the blood-stained cooler by the grill.

God, however, would not be moved.

“No more meat,” he proclaimed, rising from the table and scrubbing his mouth. The angels stared at one another.

The creator’s new diet, however, was harder to maintain than he expected, and he often cheated. God was at times surprised, if not embarrassed, at his own taste for flesh. Scattered crumbs of minced Eve-and-forbidden-fruit pie littered the refrigerator early one morning. Half an Abel wrap was discovered in the crisper, hidden under an untouched bundle of kale. When confronted, God shrugged off his inconsistent culinary convictions as trivial. Later, alone and racked with guilt, the heavenly father would swear off meat for whole days at a time.

But these bouts of nearly-zealous vegan fervor only ended in gluttonous splurges. The discrepancy began to irritate the angles, especially Lucifer, who possessed not only a passion but a real knack for cooking. But what was safe to prepare? When a long meat-abstinence triggered a craving for stew in the creator, God would nearly drown the earth in order to sate his greedy hankering, and Lucifer scrambled to fill the largest pot he could find. Yet forty days later, just as the devil finished packing the freezer with god-only-knows how many meticulously labeled Ziploc bags, God insisted the entire store be disposed of, thrown out as unclean.

Another long gastronomic sabbatical ended with the roasting of two whole cities.

“At least watch your sodium,” an alarmed cherub begged, winching as the boss dashed a second and then third sprinkling of Lot’s wife over his plate.

Meat was proclaimed taboo once more, but the very next day God bought himself a jerky dehydrator. He claimed it was for preparing home-made raisins and banana chips, but instead of the smell of dried fruit, it was the tangy odor of Job, slowly curing, that soon hung in the air.

In frustration, Lucifer quit heaven to open a restaurant, which, to God’s chagrin, became appallingly popular. A diet of sinners, carefully portioned with whole-grain, fruit, vegetables and plenty of water in-between meals kept God’s formerly-favorite cook in fine shape—a condition Satan himself attributed equally to a lack of agitation.

“If you’re constantly stressed over what you eat, you wind up eating exactly what stresses you out,” the restaurateur told his customers with a wink. He also made no secret that he would love to treat his old employer to an evening of elegant, health-conscious dining, on the house, just to bury their past.

God (himself more and more noticeably overweight despite his repeated condemnation of meat products) ignored the invitation and tried to denigrate his ex-friend’s business whenever the topic came up. He picked at little things—claiming the building’s thermostat was kept too high, for example. Meanwhile, God began to spin downright wild rationalizations to sanctify his untamable appetite.

“If you really want to break yourself from meat,” the Lord chuckled to Gabriel as he studied the earth below and twisted the end of his beard between his fingers, “you have to visualize yourself as the poor creatures you would eat… if you were not able to keep your commitment up, that is. Yes, you have to put yourself on the same level with the poor things… you’re really one of them… they are you.”

God reached his might finger down and squeezed his limitless spirit into a tiny, squalling body swaddled in a feed trough. His gaze lingered on the human parents to his meaty, fostered child, feeling only good will towards man and no, not one ounce of hunger. But when three kings and a group of shepherds crowded into the stable, the Lord’s mouth began to water. God shivered and pulled his trembling hand back into the clouds—but opened his fist with a groan. He had, without quite meaning to, snatched up a generation of Hebrew first-born sons from Herod’s kingdom. Only the promise he made to himself that this was absolutely the last time he would consume babies (they had never set well in his belly anyway, those Egyptian newborns of Pharaoh’s nation, and later, the infants his conquering Israelites tossed from the fortress walls of the Samarians and Midianites, from the watchtowers of Amalek and Babylon) allowed God to eat without feeling too guilty.

Thirty years later, the devil came to Christ in the desert, to invite him to dinner. Satan could reserve a table for parties of twelve or larger any time, no waiting. And the Passover special: disciples eat free. God, in human form, turned stoically away.

Still, the offer hung in his mind. Reservation taken care of. No waiting. Now, that was service. Hoping no one would recognize him, God crept through the doors of Satan’s establishment, intending to order a simple dish, perhaps just a salad. But, after being seated and welcomed personally by the owner, God began to feel more and more humiliated. Did Lu’ have to grin so broadly and greet him so loudly? The occupants of the surrounding tables were staring. God considered standing up and walking out right then.

Instead, in a revelation of spitefulness, the Lord decided to order the most complex dish he could imagine: himself. Without a moment’s hesitation, not even a blink, the host dismissed himself to the kitchen to prepare the meal personally.

God sipped his ice water and smirked to himself. Let the arrogant upstart cook that! He would fail, of course, emerge from the kitchen, humbled, and beg to return to his old post. Yet, as he stabbed a lemon wedge underneath the ice chips in his glass with his knife, doubt crept into God’s mind. He heard his fellow diners whisper over their plates, but he could not make out the words. Had this challenge been a miscalculation? Had his hunger, once again suppressed to the point of reason-obliterating craving, clouded his better judgment? Of course he wouldn’t eat a thing—even if anything was placed before him, which was unlikely. But, just as a precaution, God deftly removed his fork and spoon, still wrapped in the immaculate cloth napkin, from the table and hid them along with his knife inside his billowing, white robe.

As if upon cue, his cook marched through the double swinging-doors of the kitchen in a cloud of savory steam, carrying a covered, silver tray. A heavy, sweet odor followed.

God, his dish before him but no cutlery at hand, found himself gripping the thin, soft cut of flesh with his large fingers. As if in a dream, he closed his eyes and took a bite.

A jab of pain broke this trance before it could even settle in. The delicate slice of meat had slipped through God’s hands and lay on the floor. He had knocked over his water. The horizontal parentheses made by the bite-mark on the side of his right index finger stared back at him.

Stumbling from his table while muttering an apology and waving away the dessert menu with a growl in nearly the same harried breathe, God charged out of the restaurant. On the way home, terrible thoughts assailed him: the repercussions, the echoes of this hunger reverberating through the earth, his act of cannibalism exalted, re-enacted, magnified… He could hear them now, his lost, hungry lambs, singing in the fields, on the altars. With this bread, with this cup…

Before returning to Paradise and locking the door behind him, God stopped to devour Stephen with such voracity as to nauseate even the hereto iron-stomached Saul. How thankful he was for the conscience-muting grogginess, even if it was accompanied by that all-too-familiar swollen feeling extending from his gut right up to the back of his throat.

Throughout the ages, poets and writers have examined the times in which they lived. As this week’s contributors demonstrate, our modern lifestyle offers opportunities for both humor and reflection.

“In Velvet” by Audrey El-Osta raises a sit-com scene to divine self-expression.

“Princess and the 21st Century Space-Age Mattress” by Mat Labotka provides a humorous update of a classic tale.

“Interior Monologue (Girl with Cell Phone)” by Frank De Canio turns to the sonnet form for a wry dissection of modern culture.

Though it’s no mace, but cell phone in my hand,
I’d like to favor you. But I’ve a slew
of messages whose import countermand
desires of my awestruck retinue
who pass me with petitions on the street.
Because of this, I claim the royal right
to read my e-mail following a tweet
to devotees while you keep me in sight.
Indeed, not only are my hands not free,
but texting makes it difficult to turn,
acknowledging those holding doors for me.
Thus, I can’t give the gratitude you yearn
for who suppose a royal highness grants
indulgence to her abject sycophants.