Two Poems Accepted by Mollyhouse

Gage Skidmore, President of the United States Donald Trump speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. 23 Feb. 2018. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

I was very happy to be greeted, first thing in the morning and so close to a holiday, by an acceptance of two poems to Mollyhouse. Many thanks to Editor Raymond Luczak. I am even more thankful than usual because these poems are avant-garde responses to the authoritarianism of the toxic yam’s regime, and so not welcome at just any journal.

Luckily, Mollyhouse is not just any journal, as I suspected from its name. As I learned doing research for my dissertation on Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, and Tom Stoppard, a mollyhouse was a meeting place for gay men. (Actually, I seem to remember my sources alluding explicitly to gay brothels.) In accord with its name, Mollyhouse does not accept submissions “by white hearing able-bodied heterosexual cisgender men.”

Taking a hint from this, I included the two poems that have found favor in my submission: “Koans from the Late Anthropocene” is about the insoluble conundrums posed by authoritarian fostering of personal disempowerment, cowardice and bullying, environmental degradation, and abusive violence; and “100% Pure” is a can poem about white supremacy and the persecution of immigrants and asylum seekers at our Southern border. (That persecution was, of course, not unique to the yam’s administration, but he did greatly worsen it, most notoriously through increased separation of children and even infants from their parents.)

I’m so glad these will now have a voice in the world.