GAS Featured Poet: David Wolf

 

David Wolf is the author of seven collections of poetry, Open Season, The Moment Forever, Sablier I, Sablier II, Visions (with artist David Richmond), Weir (a micro-chapbook from Origami Poems Project), and Seven. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and journals, including BlazeVOX, Cleaver Magazine, dadakuku, decomp, E·ratio, Exacting Clam, Indefinite Space, Lotus-eater Magazine, New York Quarterly, Otoliths, River Styx Magazine, Transom, and Utriculi. He is a professor emeritus of English at Simpson College and serves as the poetry editor for Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts.

 

What’s in this?

Sit with me awhile.
Nigh is night, and just when you feel
it’s time to stave off another tip of the hat,
you hear the scythes whirring in.
Why, it’s another sunrise,
illuminating the russet trees, pink chimney-smoke,
just a single plume.
Heck if there’s not
something about that new little pizza joint next door
that makes you hope they succeed,
a felt reaction to all the pulpy pizazz going round,
and yet by now this happenstance 
should be sufficiently muddied.
Clarity squared. 
Drifting in through failure’s open window:
serenity sinking back into the hazy whine— 
a rustling
of stiff brims fraying.

Youthful Love Poem Revised for My Collected Works

September Song

The sultry wind scattering

 a few more leaves from the trees

into the pale September grass…

Beginning to doze

from a little too much afternoon wine…

The summer going, going…

Then a surge of remembrance:

The worried look you fixed me with that day

as if to confirm

the lost mind I was claiming

though it was you I was losing

not my mind

and you knew that as you closed the car door for me

and I started the engine

the last time I would ever see you in this life

the only one for love

Sumped Ember Song

The cutworm breeze gathers

myriad seeds from the clouds

flings them into the wild autumn desert . . .

 

Awakening

from a loss of dawn’s dreamless naphtha—

 

you brush away winter seeping in, in

 

a draining balm:

 

The smile you saddled yourself with that afternoon

as if to reject

the found secretions loosed upon the magical hellscape

though it was my own shimmer I was collecting

not the scraps 

and you claimed nothing as you opened the elevator door for me (no car, only the shaft)

and I dropped and 

rolled free of

the first instance I would forget you in this life
this life 
the only one for

all that

 

 

GAS Featured Poet: Jan Steckel

 

Jan Steckel is a Jewish, disabled, bisexual poet and writer and a retired pediatrician. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards for LGBT writing. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks(Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative prose and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus and elsewhere. She has four Pushcart nominations. She lives in Oakland, California.

Nephthys

 

The coast is toasty today.

Ginny’s in a cool linen caftan,

me in a starry minidress.

We sip iced tea on a brick patio,

eating salmon salads and pastries

while the moneyed WASPS of Santa Barbara

chatter Sunday greetings around us.

 

At the swimming pool, my parents’ neighbor

plans to go to church, then the dog show,

warns me that vaccinations will cause

dementia and infertility. She hasn’t had one

in years, she says, doing bicep curls,

as I try to back away imperceptibly.

 

Getting out of my parents’ apartment

is like escaping a tar pit, everyone asking

me to act like one of the paid caregivers. 

I remind myself that I’m not here

to get my mother into the shower, 

drive my father to the market,

put ointment under my mother’s breasts,

but to unsnarl their taxes, make sure 

Dad doesn’t buy a whole new computer 

just because he can’t remember his password. 

 

Entropy accelerates in their condominium. 

Mom keeps a gradually crumbling statuette

of an Egyptian goddess. First her head

fell off, then an arm. All the plaster bits

lie about her feet, turning to powder,

emblematic of my parents’ minds. 

Kitten Season

The Belgian Malinois slammed her rock-hard skull
into the back fence in pursuit of the Best Ball in the World.
Fractured a board, revealed behind it the open mouth
of a bucket fixed horizontally in a pyramid of debris.
The little tabby we’d seen cat-walking the fence-top
hissed inside and stood her ground against the dog.
Next day she went hunting and we found why:
three wobbly kittens the white-bibbed image of our own tabby
who died last week. The fourth kitten, nearly all white,
a bastard Siamese. Their eyes just beginning to lose their blue.
I don't want another cat, but my brain is neon flashing
BUCKET O’ KITTENS
BUCKET O’ KITTENS
BUCKET O’ KITTENS

Making America Sad Again: Trump and the Sycophants by g emil reutter

g emil reutter:

It has been quite an experience these last few months in the promotion of our rights as citizens of the United States to speak out against tyranny without fear. The goal was to reach folks who could not attend rallies due to work commitments, many working two jobs.  I decided in October to begin distribution of Distance to Infinity on street corners/bus stops and parks to promote this right that we hold dear. Making America Sad Again – Trump and the Sycophants followed with the same distribution pattern. The books were handed out, (campaign style), at 19 different locations between October 7, 2025 and March 14, 2026. A total of 475 books were gifted to citizens traveling our streets, byways and transit systems.

 

In brief discussions with many, it was evident fear has been generated from Washington to our citizens about speaking out. In some small way I am hopeful to have encouraged those encountered to speak out. The reaction I received was generally 80% positive with a few negative encounters but civil conversation.

 

I view the books as seeds spread out over the Philadelphia area that hopefully will take root and encourage others to speak out. I am grateful to all those I have encountered as well as all those who have purchased Distance to Infinity and Making America Sad Again – Trump and the Sycophants in support of Alien Buddha Press. I am especially thankful for Red at Alien Buddha Press for his constant encouragement and bravery.

 

Review: Making America Sad Again: Trump and the Sycophants by g emil reutter

g emil reutter writes with the urgency of a man who cannot afford to wait for history's verdict. This collection, published by Alien Buddha Press in 2026, is political poetry in the oldest and most necessary sense — not poetry about politics, but poetry as witness, testimony delivered in real time while the courthouse is still burning.

The work's greatest strength is its refusal of elegance as evasion. Reutter doesn't reach for metaphor when bluntness will do. "Everyone is getting screwed by Trump" lands with the flat exhaustion of a man who has watched the con unfold in slow motion. The poem "Marionettist" is perhaps the collection's most formally controlled piece — Miller as puppeteer is an image that earns its bitterness, the strings spreading "across spectrum" with a cold, mechanical efficiency that the fragmented syntax mirrors well.

The collection is deliberately uneven, and that's partly the point. These poems were written "in real time as events unfold," as reutter states in his introduction, and they read like dispatches — some sharper than others, some ragged with anger. "Hey Mr. Putin!" has a chant-like repetition that builds genuine menace. "The Light Shines Brightly in the Darkness," centering María Corina Machado as a counterweight to Washington's chaos, is one of the few moments of genuine tenderness, and it lands harder for being surrounded by so much corrosive fury.

The Light Shines Brightly in the Darkness

As fascists dim the lights of freedom

And shadows are cast across the political

Spectrum and with the exception of a few

Many have lost their spines. America with

All its faults was once the beacon of light

Now struggles to overcome the darkness

Generated from the White House.

Yet in another land, another place where

Autocrats rule and diminish freedoms of

The people, stands a woman strong in

Conviction against all odds to bring

Democracy back to Venezuela …

In spite of threats

In spite of jailings

In spite of the bullies

She is a defender of freedom

Who has risen and has resisted

Inspired and led in the cause of freedom.

In Washington a White House full of

Whining, again the loser in charge failed

To con the Nobel Committee as he

Attacks peace and freedom at home

"Standard Police Procedure" and "No Praying Permitted" are the collection's most devastating poems — concrete, specific, and built around a repeated phrase that accumulates moral weight with each pass. These show what reutter is fully capable of.

Making America Sad Again is not a comfortable book, nor does it try to be. It is a record of a man paying attention when many looked away, written with blue-collar directness and genuine moral outrage. Whether it endures will depend on whether the moments it documents become history or — as reutter clearly fears — a new normal. Either way, someone had to write it down.

                                                                                                    Belinda Subraman

GAS Featured Poet: Barbara Marie Minney

Barbara Marie Minney is a transgender woman, award winning poet and writer, speaker, teaching artist, guest reader/editor, and quiet activist.  She is the author of four poetry collections: If There’s No Heaven,  winner of the 2020 Poetry Is Life Book Award and an Akron Beacon Journal Best Northeast Ohio Book in 2020; the Poetic Memoir Chapbook Challenge (2021); Dance Naked With God (2023); and A Woman in Progress, winner of the 2024 American Fiction Award for Poetry Chapbook,  finalist for the Eric Hoffer de Vinci Eye Award, and a San Francisco Book Festival Runner Up.  Follow Barbara at https://www.barbaramarieminneypoetry.com.

Birdwatcher Too

(Containing words from the federal government banned words list)

                                                            ~after the Gospel of John

 

 

quoth the raven      “nevermore”

     so why is this shit      still happening

 

            in the beginning     there were words

            the word thinks he’s king       the word was 

            not king      with him     nothing was made

            darkness shines     in the light

            the light has not overcome it

            we are all witnesses     to the darkness

 

            true light     has not     come into the world

            he was in the world

            but not of the world

            and should not be received

 

            the word      made his dwelling

            among us

            we have seen his glory

            full of inelegance and falsity

            

assigned male      at birth

     self-generated      hate speech

 

directed at      my identity

     my own     self-expression

 

suicide a slow     climate-change death

     no science-based vaccine     in sight

 

cursed with     both a head and a heart

     face buried     in the tits of my soul

     

 i had      a gender abortion

     a fetus energy transition

 

of gender identity

     emissions of      lesbianism and bisexuality

    

 a queer     non-conforming activist

     quoth the raven      “nevermore”

Spravato

 

Esketamine surges     through my nose     rushes to my brain

pushes me     on a space-headed trip     to dissociative psychedelia

 

three feet

 

                two heads

 

floating          

 

           floating

 

                       floating 

 

through a spaceless sky     of bodymind

 

a kaleidoscope       of geometric waveforms 

promenade in the air 

 

to battle depressive dissonance 

 

afterimages of      demons and angels    devils and saints

thought parasites     shrivel and die

 

nightmares dissolve        into nothingness 

stars not so dark

 

moon shadows not so deep

emptiness erupts          into volcanic metacognition

 

          even nights         are better