ON THE ELECTION SUCCESS OF DONALD J. TRUMP

David Steingass  November 2024  

While it is true he is neither my savior nor my retribution,

I have no trouble proclaiming him my once, 

future and forever personal 

floating island of garbage.

PAUL BUNYAN RETIRES 

His camp’s cook shack, bunk house, stock lean-to, and sharp shop­­––all built rough wood-ramshackle––sag now and moulder into pine tree duff. Paul still duck-tapes bacon slabs to his feet and skates to grease the big griddle to cook flapjacks for kids with appetites like those of his beloved saw-boys. He finds he needs to keep some of the old swamp critters close enough to touch. Hodags’ shiny backbone plates. Hoop snakes rolling through brush to freeze his breath as they stun his heart. And of course the mad dog-wolverines. 

Each night he cranks up the fireplace he rebuilt from the stone boat of rocks Babe dragged back to Rhinelander from the Olympic west. North Woods pipe smoke drifts through the pine canape stirring stars into new constellations the same way it churns his blood. Whiffletree, he mutters.Wanigan. Cackleberry. He chants back the excitement he remembers from old time ice-out log drives. Moose catsand grouse ladders fill sleep’s wild center until the minute Cookie’s kitchen iron clangs daybreak in the swamp.

WHERE SHOVEL HANDLES POINT

Some boys can’t find their ways out of mud

they stand up to their noses in the morning after 

high school graduation. Learn where shovels

 point! screed they grow fat yelling at sons 

they heard straight from god their fathers 

those days they spent slogging fields

by shovel.  How they hated clay’s smell, 

its clammy trails sliding down 

tender skin inside their elbows and 

armpits, and down along the shaky

sticks of their spines. And hated worms 

too short to knot and too slimy

to touch––acres of them too spooky 

to think about.  You want out? bully-

clay taunts as it taunted. 

Fight your way, or turn tail and run

the same scared way you’ve come at last 

to look.  Bile from old gods’ soggy 

graves churns the boys’ gooseflesh 

whenever their eyes close, where-

ever they hold still for what’s 

left of the rest of their lives. 

               David Steingass

               dhspoet@gmail.com    

David Steingass

1 Cathedral Gate

2 Paella 

Wood-smoked mussels gurgle through rice dunes  

3 Men and Women at the Town Well

4 Bees among Fallen Loquats

5 Heart-high Bullet Scars (Cathedral Gate Detail)

THREE ROLLS OF FILM IN ISTANBUL

1

Ardahl leads us into the Blue Mosque through stiff camel leather-door flaps. Shows the best light along Hagia Sofia’s walls. Tells how to respect cisterns as desert holy sites. Danger by the Bosphorus, he smiles.

2

Men with wooden knife scabbards drag sheep out of sight that reappear gleaming on Ramadan spits. Soldiers link elbows and stroll holding hands. Slung upside-down, their rifles tangle like costume jewelry.

3

Musicians’ open mouths reveal rifle butt-sized spaces. This surprising life, they sing, their gypsy castanets playing the rhythms of Dixieland jazz. Lizard-shaped sentry eyes sweep the crowd for shark fins. 

FIVE SHOTS OF FOLKLORE STRAIGHT UP 

He kissed me four times, she said, her voice like a night train’s whistle through mountains. Once for each cheek. 

IQ, she said. That’s your chainsaw’s teeth times half your truck’s cylinders? He’s just went out back to count up is all. 

The night before he left, the stillness felt more exciting than ambition.

A good party, Serbians say, you dance barefoot on broken glass until your feet bleed. The Irish see everybody dead who belongs to them.

Army defirment test question: Star is to firmament as step is to ladder. Yes or No. 

PRAIRIE LIGHT 

                       ––Art Sinsabaugh, 11 Midwest Photographs

Morning’s silver dollar-glisten flips bright as a boy’s naivete and sharp 

as a girl’s appetite for romance.

High noon steams bur oak canapes and melts the barn roofs’ smoldering 

tarpaper edges.

Twilight congeals into dust pudding thick enough to stall railroad cars

 caught on the horizon. 

l moon picks through fish skeletons flopping in water-

colored dust. 

Midnight’s ful