Current Edition

Wind In The Timothy Press

Current Edition

Spring 2010

Brainwashed

serving on the front lines

in academia

I’d receive memos

instructing me how to

think

there was a humane

slant to it all

yet I was being

used

as a sergeant in a war

against the kinds of minds

who now send to Iraq

the same class of people

I was teaching

but the heart of the problem was

my superiors didn’t care

whether my students

passed or failed: in fact

I had solid reasons

to believe they preferred

students to fail

as this forestalled

graduation & thus kept

up enrollment

which made for more

government funding

which tended to go

into the pockets of my

superiors themselves

but my students

tended not to believe this

most siding with

the administration’s upper ranks

in the battle just before

I went AWOL

Mark Wisniewski

Mark Wisniewski has a chapbook ONE OF US ONE NIGHT published by Platonic 3Way Press. He lives in New York where he has a cherry tree by a brook.





BROWN SWISS

     It was daytime school gig

     up in a in a north country.

     farming community

     Kids doing the Virginia Reel

     and you could tell who lived on a farm,

     the great odor of cow and silage.

     One farm boy was blind,

     his sister was helping him

     through the reel.



     We got invited to their house for supper.

     Got there late afternoon,

     the boy was parading a Brown Swiss heifer

     around the barnyard.



     “Hey Dudley ” he shouted.

    He probably could tell who I was

    because I smelled like a fiddle.



    I said, “What are you doing with a Brown Swiss?

    I thought you folks had Jerseys .”



    “We do.” he replied. “But Dad went to an auction

    to get me a heifer for 4-H, and he made a mistake.”


             Dudley Laufman

 