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a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society

Denise Duhamel


Eric Cartman Runs for President, Again

Respect my authority, he shrieks

at rallies, the same phrase

on his promotional hat.

As rotund as the Capitol’s Rotunda,

he says Kenny is a loser for being poor.

Kyle is a loser too, for being a Jew.

The rally-goers chant We respect

your authority! as Cartman

does a dead-on impersonation

of Hitler. He loves to destroy synagogues

for fun. He brags that when he dressed

as der Führer on Halloween,

and Principal Victoria tried to change him

into a ghost, Cartman became

a Klansman instead. Cute! Cute!

shout the rally-goes. But don’t call him

a racist—one of his best friends is Chef

and he brags that he backed him

when the school cook wanted

a new, less bigoted town flag.

Only Cartman knows how to beat

the system—posing as a disabled kid

to enter the Special Olympics.

He reminisces that he tried

to earn millions once by donating

a kidney to someone who really needed it.

The rally-goers laugh, then chant

We respect your authority! Then Cartman yells,

What about my beautiful girlfriend Heidi?

even though she’s not there. What he

doesn’t say is that Heidi’s just left,

“If you always make yourself the victim,

you can justify being awful… I’m breaking

up with you.” Cartman doesn’t take no

for an answer. He knows how

to destroy the Burning Man Festival

and San Francisco. And he loves revenge—

he will get a pony to bite the penises off

of anyone who’s bullied him.

Cartman can get the local “redneck”

to kill on his behalf. All this is true.

You can look it up. By the way, in episode 14,

he re-starts the Civil War.


Dissident

I went so many years undetected in my commie-pink tee, my outrageous poems where I thought I could say anything. No one arrested me despite my jokes. No one shot me when I raged on about a certain political party at parties. Here comes the volta where you think I’ll give into my fear. Instead I praise the conch shell, the wise dead who visit my dreams, the lizards and buzzards, the palm trees and palm readers, the clouds and paintings of clouds. The code-switching and codes. Damn that Supreme Taco Bell Party Pack, that orange trumpet flower.

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Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of which was CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.


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