Fall 2024



The Blue Collar Review is a quarterly journal of poetry and prose published by Partisan Press. Our mission is to expand and promote
a progressive working class vision of culture that inspires us and that moves us forward as a class. The work presented is
only a sampling from the magazine. Subscriptions are $20.00 yearly, or $7.00 for a single issue.
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Poetry Samples from the Latest Issue

The Application

At the base of the form
there is a blank for free-form exposition.

The attached question posed,
the one that cannot be answered with check marks,
is: why would you be exemplary at this job?
The reality is that I do not need
to be good at this job,
I simply have to appear to be a more desirable
potential employee than all the other
street-urchins, losers, and malcontents
that have wandered in to join this lottery.

I write: my skill set
matches your undocumented need.
And every day
I learn more, grow and transform.
Maybe it is my penmanship this exercise judges.

       Ken Poyner


The Day

has come when I can't go on
telling myself I like this job,

that I like serving industrial food
to people who won't or can't

feed themselves real food -- fresh
groceries, but must have frozen omelets,

heat and serve, refrigerator-fresh gyros
(Is tzatziki sauce included in the

package?). And bags of chips,
potato chips, sun chips, fake-healthy

chips, giant bags and bags of chips,
breakfast, lunch and dinner chips.

Weight goes up as life quality goes
down, 1850 mg of sodium, 90 seconds

in the microwave produces a cheeseburger-
in-heaven. Who wouldn't love it? These

processed foods cater to us overworked,
underpaid masses so Bezos and billionaire

buddies can touch the stars using employee's
minimum-wage backs as launching pads.

The day has come when I must acknowledge
if I stay I'm a facilitator of this travesty.

      Kathryn Showalter


Precariat Numismatics

The love of money, the lack of money.
Two bloody uncompromising tyrants,
& how many of us are mired in Chapter 13
of this never-ending story?

Career politicians, their meat hooks extended,
so few accused of being generous to a fault,
they may "fund" themselves running elsewhere.

45 years working a lot of dead-end jobs.
i opted for early retirement, now find myself
living from one niggardly deposit to the next --
freedom compromised, independence collared.
i'll take the crumbs, regardless.

Poetry doesn't pay the bills, ditto the narrative rant.
i've joined my fellow 99%ers & play the Hoosier lottery,
not because we're dreamers, because we're desperate,
daring Luck to smite us with Afluenza,
gild our rusty piss-pots.

Nothing on my birth certificate
says i was born to suffer fools,
but i'm the big, bigger, biggest fool of all
when it comes to the subject at hand.
i hear a chortle as it evaporates etherward.
i've discovered the precarious side of disposable income.
The hypertension & manic depression remain untreated.
i despise the enforced rationing of my tipple & tobacco,
those beloved monkeys without whom i'm quite hateful.
i've canceled any notion of better home & garden,
poverty won't find charity in an empty cupboard.
Speaking of which, greedflation loves our local grocers.
A dietary restriction knots my stomach, tightens my belt,
another night of beanie-weenies & tap water du jour.
A fossil fuel stalks my piggy bank -- goddam it,
I'll park the car on cinderblocks,
start riding my thumb again . . . to the revolution . . .
. . . needs must when the devil drives, hmm?

Wish I had a dollar to my name, flip a coin.
Potter's field or my corpse littering a golf course.
What's left of me won't burden the tax base --
my skeleton has morphed into a wrinkled sack
hoarding a pound of flesh & 206 lazy bones.
We practice a militant yoga to stay in shape,
pinch Abe, squeeze George until he hollers,
due malice sharpening a stick
reserved for the squinty eye
atop the pyramid.

       roibéard


What Is It We Will All Do?

What will the future hold
when money is our only god
smiling down upon the well-to-do
Some are chosen while most just need

Driverless cars and artificial intelligence
will hardly be the end of us
What, praytell, will the rest of us do?
Everyone is already writing poems,
screenplays, keeping journals
for practice and prosperity,
sending resumes out to fan flames
of cancer in lieu of the new cyber
related dead-in jobs
They are all dead-end jobs
Attending workshops, chasing certificates
The writing has long been on the wall
in letters two feet tall, what will we all
be doing after everything is automated?
Those skills once passed down
acquired through manufacturing
A tailor per se, a butcher or chef? What
happens when the work we were told
we didn't want, has all gone robotic
outsourced to distant lands, orphans,
street urchins, barely paid slaves in thrall,
lackeys at large suffer confusion their necktie
turned noose, under pressure, awaiting dismissal
-- You are redundant,
we don't need you, don't want you
layoffs herein in effect
The type of news that always makes the stock market soar
What will we do? or become? waving
our little liberal arts degrees, in hock up to our eyebrows
with children, we may or may not want,
children that'll resent us either way, who we couldn't
instruct or inform -- what will they do?
Can we save them? Will they save us? Transcend
this societal swing, this technological trend,
this hypnotic regressive pendulum,
our monetary means to an end
Imaginations minced relentless trampled
in an avalanche of zeroes and ones
parsed by fiscal sadists with an unfailing eye
on quarterly reports, hedge fund derivatives
fractious percentages, leveraging's and
squeezing out that last bit of sustenance from
where ever necessity's mother left it

Charged for water, for air, penalized by machine
for what a human requires to maintain themselves
What will we do as our situation worsens,
Where will we live, streaming entertainment,
as newspapers die or are consolidated

As the environment erodes, turns surly, seeks revenge
populations explode, ancient pandemics rekindle,
resurface, and no one can afford a doctor, medicine
or whatever price the cure is set

When the food produced and our diet makes us sick
and the rules have been updated in small print
the question continues to taint the air

What will we do
what will any of us do
once the future has had
its way with us

      Larry Crist


The Rule of the Corpses
" . . . this is the new antifascist war . . .
we must fight against the rule of the corpses" -- Amiri Baraka

today, the mother of scorpions devours her own
grasshopper mice eat their cousins
migrating cranes are laying plutonium eggs all over the
Baltic sea.

& another pubescent freedom fighter accidentally kills a sage
& another behemoth flood water swallows the gulf coast
& another goliath chemical consortium swallows the sea
& another matouke mushroom is gulped down as a delicacy.

today, the smog charges over the sky
the smog wears the face of Genghis Khan
& every continuing generation practices its on poly-
technical forms of kamikaze

tired generals wage war with tired generals
another tongue loses its language
another Chicano lad is thrown into the tar pits
a gamma ray bursts a tumbleweed shrivels
weapons drive men psychotic
& nothing is always the same as nothing.

in the common wind, common ephemera cohere
in the common atom, rigormortis speaks with futuristic eyes
it is Hitler & Assad fornicating a rose
it is an apiary of lost worlds
a mausoleum afterlife of lunatic brains
a carnival sky filled with crematorium ash

& dying trees are weeping
& long-gone leaves are falling
old ships in the harbor with dead grecian nymphs
with new skies heavy with the karma of hara-kiri missiles
& street strangers approach with beggar bowls
& life jerks itself off on its own cosmic sheets.

today, epiphanies stalk time with rusted hatchets while
god sits alone before his audience of 100 billion solar systems
writing his scripture of black holes quarks & solar wind
& because god watches over epiphany & apocalypse equally - - -

today, history will not be heeded
today, a nation of blind robots will follow the rant & piffle
of a mad man over the cliff & into oblivion
today, the mother of scorpions devours her own.

      normal


Jeff Bezos has a Rocketship Called: New Shepard

The ruling, well-fed, educated, rested white men
benefiting from capitalism claim
Socialism will not work for America.

Sad to report, they're right --
it won't work in their America --
stolen, enslaved, imprisoned and exploited America.

We've given it an unequitable try
playing by their written rules --
and ones made up on the fly.

When will we
wake up, wise up, rise up --
REALIZE we've got the numbers?

Let all voices be heard
the way --
We the People oughta work.

Have a say in the way
things go
in a land prospering off our labor.

Let's say this in a way they may understand,
an expression of their own:
Lead, follow or get out of the way.

It's time for a new day!

      Roy N. Mason


The End of Empire?

Is the election the end of the American empire?
Now that the great beast of greed and cruelty has turned
To rip open its own stomach and expose its own entrails
For all to examine and finally face
America's dream was a delusion of goodness
Masking the terrible truth of American history
And much hyped mighty individual mythology
Our great wealth a result of stealing land and stealing people from other lands
Cheating the enslaved, the indigenous and all workers
From the survival of the first whites wiping out entire tribes and native nations
To the depravity, cruelty, dehumanization of slavery
To the burning of women called witches for trying to be free
Time to begin to build real democracy and freedom
From the ground up

The institutions have failed us, fallen before the insatiable demand for everything of value
But our ancestors
Blood of our blood
Spirits living amongst us of freedom fighters
They fought and won abolition of slavery
They won the vote for women
Workers endured through generations
Of the bloodiest worker oppression
We will continue America's struggle
Making the road forward by walking together
Through every thicket, bramble patch and barrier
Building a way of life that can recover
A country that values humanity
Over oligarchy and greed.

      Stewart Acuff


MAGA Redux 2024

A howling darkness descends –
Half-assed corporate liberals
      spout nonsense
missing their complicity
"misreading" truths and warnings
        they cursed – as they did us
hypocrisies still echoing
between tears of hopeless defeat

The best of us must come together
        united
in a common defiance forged
of solidarity and militant love

Our backlash
has already begun.

       Al Markowitz


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