The New York Times reports on a poll finding that 15% of Americans believe in QAnon conspiracy theories.

Those are the findings of a poll released todayby the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which found that 15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters. The same share said it was true that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” to depose the pedophiles and restore the country’s rightful order…

And fully 20 percent of respondents said that they thought a biblical-scale storm would soon sweep away these evil elites and “restore the rightful leaders…”

Mr. Jones said he was struck by the prevalence of QAnon’s adherents. Overlaying the share of poll respondents who expressed belief in its core principles over the country’s total population, “that’s more…

“Yarrowstalks was an underground newspaper (and later a magazine), primarily based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that published 12 issues from 1967 to 1975. It is notable for being the first publication to publish the comix of underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. Unlike many underground papers of its era, Yarrowstalks was not explicitly political. Like the San Francisco Oracle, Yarrowstalks combined poetry, spirituality, and multicultural interests with psychedelic design, reflecting and shaping the countercultural community as it developed in Philadelphia. Yarrowstalks was noted for its innovative use of color, graphic design, and cold typeoffset printing. (The name of the publication is derived from Achillea millefolium [‘yarrow’]; the stalks are dried and used as a randomizing agent in I Ching divination.) In addition to Crumb, other notable contributors to Yarrowstalks included Timothy Leary and the editor/publisher Zahn. Yarrowstalks was the brainchild of Brian Zahn. The first…

PAINTING:Pine Barrens Treefrog by Andy Warhol (1983).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Like everyone, the current crisis had seeped into pretty much everything I do, but fortunately the benign spirits of my recent ancestors are there to offer advice. With their faith, practicality and superstitions, they have all the tools to put the apocalypse back in its place.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Oz Hardwick is a UK-based poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and his most recent publication is the prose poetry sequence Wolf Planet (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2020). A keen collaborator with other artists, his joint collection with Amina Alyal, Close as Second Skins (Indigo Dreams, 2015), was shortlisted for that year’s Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award, and he…

I Am Passenger; He Is Driver
by Shannon Milliman

I am passenger. He is driver. He is scheduled to test for his driver’s license.
He has asked if he could drive the two-hour route, mostly freeway
And with light waning into hours of darkness.
I told him yes, he could drive but every cell in my being wanted to say no.
I am still waiting for the moment when the gift of agency
Feels triumphant.

Do you know what it is like to give up control in the seat of the driver?
To have uncertainty that the flesh and blood in your male mirror image has the practice and mental agility to drive in City conditions at night getting his sister and mother and self to safety?
In my mind I whisper that he wants to preserve himself, too.

There is no reason he would want to fail in this…

My daughter bought me an orchid plant
by Julie Standig

for Mother’s Day
four years ago,
two days after
my mother died.

As a rule,
I kill orchids,
which my mother
had often said I did
to her.

I was not one
to be generous
with water,
somehow,
despite me,
this orchid survived.

It thrived,
grew more leaves
even rose again,
pale pink flowers
on twin stems,
as if it had a will
to stay alive.

This winter
has been long
and stagnant.
The orchid
has endured,
has grown
two sturdy sprouts.
I am still waiting.

Like a resurrection
of sorts,
this Mother’s Day
plant. Or is it
my mother’s hand,
somehow rising
from a grave,
to promise,
this one will live.

PHOTO:The Orchid Is Blooming (Polaroid) by Nancy L. Stockdale.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: At the conclusion of a long winter, and some input on my daughter’s poetry…

Sisyphus, the symbol of the absurdity of existence, painting by Franz Stuck (1920)

“In philosophy, ‘the Absurd’ refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find these with any certainty. The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd; rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously. The absurdist philosopher Albert Camus stated that individuals should embrace the absurd condition of human existence. Absurdism shares some concepts, and a common theoretical template, with existentialism and nihilism. It has its origins in the work of the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who chose to confront the crisis that humans face with the Absurd by developing his own existentialist philosophy. Absurdism as a belief system was born of the European existentialist movement that…

The Shakes
by Joe Johnston

I am still waiting for the shakes to stop.
I am still waiting for the magic of Big Sur
to envelop me in calm
comfort, to
let
me
breathe.

I did the work; I rejected the
mythos and I rejected the
ritual and I decamped to the
valley. And I waited.

I
wait
ed.

I waited as the shakes continued
and I waited as the Fall rolled in and
the tide rolled out.

boom

BOOM

The beats go on as the
Beats went on, and
I don’t have the right map so I’m
lost, off the road, a city light
my only beacon, waiting for
the. shakes. to. stop.

PAINTING:Big Sur Coastline by Eyvind Earle.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: A popular book many young people read to broaden their boundaries is Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road. But I don’t feel that…

“The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In the general sense, the spectacle refers to ‘the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign.’ It also exists in its limited sense, where spectacle means the mass media, which are ‘its most glaring superficial manifestation.’ Debord said that the society of the spectacle came to existence in the late 1920s. The critique of the spectacle is a development and application of Karl Marx’s concept of fetishism of commodities, reification and alienation, and the way it was reprised by György Lukács in 1923. In the society of the spectacle, the commodities rule the workers and the consumers, instead of being ruled by them, are passive…