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Winter 2025-26
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Walking the Floor
It is the curse, the opportunity,
of those who are overpaid and
underemployed, the supervisors
who plod and plot and pace
the halls and factory floors,
with envy in their hearts
and time on their hands.
Doing their jobs, they move
like stalkers, keeping watch and
a cruel eye out for innocence,
for the colleague leaning against
the corridor wall, or the rising star
in the next-door office, the rate-busters,
the organizers, the ones endowed with
too many words and a surplus of wit.
It is open season on the ambitious,
the vocal, the worker who seems
too much for her own good,
who cares too much for others,
the one who needs time off
for his wife's chemo, or
her daughter's school play, or
his own slowly eroding sanity,
the worried guy who, while
pissing away his ten-minute break,
notices what might be a stain
of blood in his urine, so that
looking up at the peeling paint
on the bathroom wall, he has
started to feel like murder or despair
may be the final comfort after all.
Joel Savishkinsky
Artificial Intelligentsia
What will the Olympian initiates do
with those who have slaved on the line?
Toss them aside
when there is no more work to dangle?
The worn-out nuts and bolts lie supine
in a cardboard box
on the org chart. There they will reside
with the candle and the ox
until the AI gods calculate otherwise.
Deus ex Machina does not ask who --
does not look them in the eyes.
It knows only cipher of sine and cosine,
and other dispassionate bytes of chide.
There is no other angle.
Aeschylus says a pox
on these literate douloi and their guise.
Daril Bentley
A Wonderful Future for Some
Robots are being perfected
and we love them, say happy
billionaires. They can be
programmed for anything;
secretary, cleaner, lover,
cook, guard, nanny, any
kind of worker. No pay,
no benefits, pension.
All these people are like
obnoxious hungry little
birds with wide open mouths
protesting, demanding,
I hope we don't let them
buy food, health care, they
will die off and leave us
in peace with our bots.
.
Marge Piercy
The Other Shoe
With the current administration
in Washington, I enter each day
waiting for the other shoe to drop
and pretty much every day
the other shoe drops. It's a march,
a goose step, and when that shoe
drops, it's loud, very loud,
indeed, so no one can miss it.
If it reminds me of the goose step
performed in Nazi Germany,
well, it's clearly intended.
Surely a marching column of
German soldiers brought fear
to the citizenry. But here, as
as the other shoe drops, as the
goose step continues, voices
are raised, more and more voices
each day, This is the United States
of America, and while there are
certainly bootlickers who hang
on every footfall, there are more,
many more, who are prepared to
disrupt the parade, who hear others
marching -- not in goose step --
and listen very patiently
for the other shoe
to drop
Matthew J. Spireng
In Times Like These
In times like these you gotta choose not to worry
There's always something to worry about
You gotta decide not to shrink or lower your voice
Somebodies gotta use that voice that has shaken history
The voice that thundered without freedom for all
There ain't no freedom a'tall
Some folks have to stand and bear witness
Or make our case with their sign
By a busy streetside
This is a real struggle for our country and our home
trump, maga, stevie miller and DHS
Will not stop with brown immigrants
Nor with gay and trans people
The hatred infects everyone and everyone is suspect
Until the empire eats itself from the inside.
Stewart Acuff
Inquest
Our statesman, those politicians fat
with contempt for the People,
and holding a nuclear pistol pointed
at the world's hostage head --
why do they keep digging foxholes
on Wall Street?
Can't they see the angels descend
from their dusty heavens, helpless
to take the injured workman's place?
Can't they see the braiding together
of earth and sky on the rainy horizon?
Why do they keep trying to dam up the future
behind the dawn? And why
are they whispering
to one another in the language of blood?
Isn't it fantastic
they don't know the equation in the leaf
is not the end of the mystery?
Are their feet dead,
or are they just plain stupid
because they can't understand that the dance
of millions together
is the terror of the gods?
Don't they know
that more than winter
will blow between them and their names,
that they too shall go into a universal
Alzheimer's dark?
What lies can they preach
to our tired salute
that we have not already believed?
Robert Edwards
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