Trauma Wagon
The city council is voting on funding
To renovate the park off Visitation Pl. soon
A father will teach his son the crossover step back
Whether or not that cash comes in
A mother will walk with her daughter on the grass path
And remark on the beauty of a tree that’s been there
Since Before Joey Gallo was born
Regardless as well.
The equipment at the newly built batting cages
Will need to be intermittently fixed by a mechanic
Many, many times to ensure
That the sluggers of tomorrow get their swings in.
The mayor won’t have a say in that.
People will move in and out of rent stabilized apartments
No matter what is decided at that table.
An ever increasing number won’t need to bother
With how “rent stabilized” is defined;
Others livelihoods will depend on a few words in a statute.
The local community board will propose improvements, amendments
Respond to noise complaints
And attempt to litigate just about anything else you can imagine
For a long, long time to come.
But here today a rusty scratched cornea on 4 wheels
The deformed, inbred cousin of the prison wagon
Pulls up curbside in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Out steps a skinny-fat white guy in a stained shirt
He stumbles off the top step
Lights a cigarette and nods at his partner
Who is about to cast another net into a broken home
The familiar Kafkaesque deed that pays his bills, he justifies inwardly.
“Lets do lunch at the Lobster Pound,”
He suggests to the other.
“I should have been a fisherman,”
The other replies.
The innocent are strapped in with an iron padlock
Which forms an incredulous X across their chests
Crossing them out of normality
Crossing them out of whatever stability they had left
Crossing them off the daily list of deliverables for
Of these two roadside bureaucrats
The trauma wagon only goes one of two places:
Group home or foster home.
Many benefactors in the latter category have entered the arena
For the tax write off
And they’re looking for their prize catch.
Sure there are some decent folk out there too but
Would you want your future coming down to
Such a subhuman, crass roll of the dice?
This was all necessary because a yuppie invader,
Organizing with her friends
On numerous occasions picked up a smartphone
Thinking she was doing the right thing —
Because their parents liked to do cocaine and frankly
Had gotten tired of doing it in the bathroom out of sight.
But really because they were noisy
And brought around unseemly characters.
A yuppie who could not tell you the first thing
About rent-stabilization laws.
There are no winners here
Except the yuppies, of course,
Who are now off to brunch to bemoan trivialities
In the company of nobodies.
“I’m proud of myself,” she boasts
As she sips from her third mimosa at 11:00 on a Sunday morning
Imagining those kids frolicking around a lily field at a picnic
And taking pictures with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Jason Youngclaus graduated from College of the Holy Cross in 2005 with degrees in English and Philosophy. In 2006, he moved to Washington Heights, Manhattan to work as a political operative. He has stayed in NYC ever since, continuing work in this field — and forming the Brooklyn based indie rock outfit, Cuba in 2008. Follow him on Instagram @Jyc_music.
Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC is excited to announce the release of 
Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC is excited to announce the release of Thalassophile: a chapbook of poetry by Abigayle Goldstein.
Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC is excited to announce the release of Trauma Carnival by SaraEve Fermin.
Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC is excited to announce the release of Provocateur by Jessica Helen Lopez.
“La Diáspora de un Aztlán norteño” details the unique ‘MiChicanidad’ experience of life on the border in Michigan. This is another definition of Aztlán, as seen on a Northern Border, this time between Canada and Southwest Detroit’s predominantly Mexican American neighborhood. Growth of this Spanish speaking barrio began in the earlier part of the 20th Century due to the rise of migrant labor and employment at factories. Later, the area prospered as those immigrants began to choose to stay. Their addition to the interpretation of life on the border, as well as the community’s vibrant nature, is unparalleled especially as it is defined through creativity.
“…this collection carries both the beauty of human resilience and the searing pain of postatomic burning carnage. The poetry, like hope, is an obstinate and sturdy survivor, for ‘what could i do but write songs.’ These verses often push the envelope, asking questions that make more sense than our grammar. ‘are you out there in the stealth night on the edge of blue? listening/ are you loving me for sending you this fix of heartbreak/ slid down metal, taut and wound. electric. are you?’…haunting, resonant odes and the rhythmic power of promises and truth, poems spread across Hiroshima and Barcelona, Laos and Albuquerque. These poems bring the world into a familial embrace, but spit out the naked power of truth, both personal and political, as if it were a well-chewed chicken bone, gnawed raw. Through it all, this mother-daughter poetic duo reminds us that, in the beauty of human hope, ‘nothing sacred can be lost.’”
“Mercedez Holtry’s poetry speaks to the origin stories of her Chican@ and Mestiz@ people. It is a mixed bag of mixed blood and the celebratory songs of family, culture and the history of the la tierra that she has blossomed from. Her poems are resistance and resilience. She is a fierce page poet warrior who also casts her spells from the stage, as a true bruja does. Oppressors beware. Holtry mixes up curses, prayers and incantations with her poetic brew. This is a poet who uses her mas palabras for healing and retribution. Her collection de poesia es muy firme, a true reckoning of what is to come from a generation of woke poets who have much to say and aren’t afraid to say it. ”
Originally written in french by Werner Lambersy, this short book serves as an homage to Pina Bausch, an extraordinary modern dancer. This English translation, by Jack Hirschman, serves as a continued remembrance to not only an amazing modern dancer but the poet whom she inspired.
“Bassam writes poems that feel like slow motion car crashes where, at every turn, you’re also reassured that it’s ok to feel like this, like even if nothing is going to be ok, there is strength to hold like a parking brake, like the axis of a planet. Bassam’s words are a gut punch, a pull to beating heart chest, a hand that holds yours in the bleak. One senses that the act of poetry for Bassam is truly one of survival. What a strength it takes to show our deepest insecurities, to not ask for forgiveness. To not be the hero of your own story. Bassam is a bright non binary voice. One that asks not for acceptance, but simply is, and tells the stories of body and mind that is so intimate and accessible to those of us who endlessly battle with our shapes, our selves. What a gift to give.”
Within these pages, entitled “Bekimi I Nënës, A Mother’s Blessing,” Jack Hirschman and Idlir Azizaj present a translation of Jusef Gërvalla’s poetry. This is the first time this collection, originally published by the Naim Frashëri Publishing House, in Tirana, Albania in 1983, is translated in the English Language. In 1983, a year after the original publication in his native Kosovo Albanian, Jusuf Gërvalla, his brother Bardhosh, and comrade Kadri Zeka were allegedly murdered by the Serbian secret service in their exile in Germany. Gërvalla was known as a journalist and a musician as well as a poet, novelist, and founder of the Marxist-Leninist group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Kosovo. For the first time, Jusuf Gërvalla’s poetry, including selections from his three books: They Fly and Fall, Green Stork, and Sacred Marks, can be shared by the english speaking population.
“Unease at Rest” is an ‘ugly butterfly’, anatomized. It is the death’s-head moth pinning itself under glass. Every poem is another marking on the insect’s back, resembling a human skull. Each one steadfastly reminds its author that it isn’t, in fact, a skull. But each feels about that heavy. In this grossly gorgeous collection, Gibson doesn’t wrestle or toss away the bones on his back. He quietly, humbly carries them. Wil doesn’t fly straight into the lantern’s yawning flame. He stares it down, he names it, and he reaches for it. He does so for us, sparing us the discomfort. And he does it with a steady and trained hand: imperfect palms stretched perfectly. The textual body of his poems, too, flex and fold this way. Every page a ‘soft, awkward, and most authentic’ wing. Wil reaches for the fire with such an ugly human grace, that it explains the ugly human light that swallows us too, by which we are lit from inside, to which we all are bound.”
This collection of poems alternately pierces the reader with astute and heartbreaking observations (Good Drums is a particularly devastating musing on white, male American-ness) while at the same time using evocative language to spar with and challenge the ideas of belonging and connection and love. These poems invite the reader to contemplate what it means to come from somewhere, and how it feels to long for a place that isn’t home, but could be. They invite us to see the mundane as essential, and to see and celebrate the things that connect us to our identity. The title of this collection is apt; like a nail gun, these poems violently pierce, but do so in service to building something sturdy and sheltering, and every one is a love letter to the dance that makes us who we are.
Out of Denver, Colorado, Paulie comes “from below” and rises to join our parade of writers. A two time National Poetry Slam finalist, Paulie Lipman is a loud Jewish Queer poet, performer, and writer. His work has appeared in the anthology ‘We Will Be Shelter’ (Write Bloody Publishing) as well as The Emerson Review, Drunk In A Midnight Choir, Voicemail Poems, pressure gauge, and Prisma (Zeitblatt Fur Text & Sprache).
“These poems are a way of telling you what I saw, at least the remnants of those things. My poems have codes in them. They have forms that have long since lost favor. They have rhyme schemes and syllabic structures of old and new places. They have formlessness that abides by current trends, but embraces none of them wholesale. They are, as Milton once wrote, poems that attempt to champion the unnamable and the indeterminable. Mine are the equations of empty sets and irrational numbers as much as they are of ritual and nostalgia. I have decided not to appease all critique. I am at rest, because the people I trust most have said that there is something in them, something of where I am from, what became of my home, and what is becoming in the world. And for the first time in a long time I’m not ashamed of my part in this story. With all that I am, let these poems be a part of my apology to the world and to my beloveds, an apology for each moment as it passes to the next…”
Starting next Sunday, January 6 2019, follow this site for a new featured work of writing every week.
Due to a successful fundraising event during the month of December, we are able to pass on our good fortune to our amazing readers.
We have an excited 2019 planned for Swimming with Elephants Publications, including the creation of the Weekly Write, new releases from our Parade of Poets (including Jessica Helen Lopez and SaraEve Fermin), and the continuation of our yearly anthology, Parade. We will once again run an Open Call for Chapbook is the fall of 2019, as well as be looking for future features for our Weekly Write and artwork submission. Keep an eye on the website for upcoming Submission Calls.
We are proud to announce that two of our publications are finalist in the 2018 
Swimming with Elephants Publications 