NVN Tuesday: METAMORPHOSIS and A FABLE
“Metamorphosis” by Imogen Arate and “A Fable” by Kevin Carey
METAMORPHOSIS
by Imogen Arate
The White House is campaigning to spin Biden’s support for Israel’s war while actively facilitating the slaughter. —The Intercept, January 17, 2024
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Bid farewell in the rearview the world you invented A paper house unfurls oil-slicked plumes as flags of surrender The chartreuse shutters you proudly claimed the victory of your refinement curl to the lap of an inferno nursed on sated falsehoods And the Astroturf spits its faux blades onto the white pickets still defending your illusions What aftertaste regurgitates now of the celebratory bubblies imbibed What terroir offers the graves of those you condemned Limp now into a future that your past has trampled Let your nostrils collect the iron of dried blood drained to solidify the quicksand swallowing your flailing proclamations of pristine intentions
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Imogen Arate is an Asian-American poet in search of hope: that humanity will overcome our self-destructive tendencies to work together against the onslaught of the climate crisis. She's also the Executive Director of Poets and Muses, an award-winning multimedia platform that has featured diverse contemporary poetic voices from around the globe. She believes that we will only be able to value lives equally when we lend our ears and hearts to the life stories of those we don't readily recognize as our kin.
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A FABLE
by Kevin Carey
Shutterstock A-I generated image
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A long, long time ago a very bad wolf, probably the worst wolf ever, did some very bad things to some lambs, some of the worst things ever done to lambs anywhere. As a matter of fact, this very bad wolf had wanted to eliminate all the lambs. The lambs who were saved from elimination made a pact with some very big bears (who helped save them from the wolf) and together they decided to push some rabbits from their nests so the lambs could have a land to call their own. It’s worth noting that these rabbits had nothing to do with the very bad deeds of the very bad wolf. . So the lambs took a mile, but then they wanted two, then three and so on and so on. The rabbits who were being pushed from their nests fought back and were called very bad rabbits. The lambs who wanted even more land made even more big bear friends and this gave them even more power, which they used to keep pushing more rabbits from their nests. The rabbits had no bear friends so they fought back again, and they were called very very bad rabbits. And so the story goes. But this story has no end. The lambs are still pushing the rabbits from their nests and soon they will have eliminated all the rabbits and when that happens the lambs will have done what the very bad wolf had wanted to do to them. The moral of the story: a rabbit with no big bear friends is easy to push from a nest.
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Kevin Carey is Coordinator of Creative Writing at Salem State University. Books include: The Beach People, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, Jesus Was a Homeboy, Set in Stone, Murder in the Marsh, and a new novel Junior Miles and the Junkman (September 2023 from Regal House / Fitzroy Books) and a new co-written poetry collection Olympus Heights (October 2023 – Lily Poetry Review). He is the co-founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag.
Brilliant the fable, to keep with Animal Farm on the shelf of timeless and lasting literature