Issue #6, April 2026
Scott Beal
“I think we can agree popping out of a hole screaming / Is the vibe of existence right now.” That’s how Ellen Welcker begins her entry in issue #6 of Public School Poetry – and yes, I think we can agree. As if our late capitalist hellscape of dehumanization, enshittification, and environmental catastrophe wasn’t bad enough, we’ve added AI as an accelerant to the project of burning everything down in the name of short-term profit. Not to mention, of course, the astonishingly rapid flourishing of coldhearted authoritarianism being enthusiastically cheered by wide swaths of our neighbors. “An age of bureaucratic cruelty,” Cal Freeman names it, which if anything feels like understatement.
I took the photo that serves as this month’s cover image while passing through Dansville, Michigan a couple of springs ago. As a metaphor for capitalist dystopia, I doubt I need to unpack the image of a bright yellow Dollar General sign presiding over a sprawling, sunlit field of the dead. In ways both subtle and direct, the poems in this issue speak to corporate capitalism’s existential horrors – a big-box store panic attack, a customer service call haunted by grief, cryptocurrency corruption. Their speakers negotiate microplastic poisoning, hardship payment plans, casual racism on micro and macro scales.
Troubled as they are by all the mean uncertainty that makes screaming from a hole the vibe, these poets still embody faith in language and art as a tool to clarify, to commiserate, to build. We have to sort the affiants from the decedents. We have to practice our R’s to “rant and rhapsody” and to put a fine point on our hunger. As Stephen Leggett reminds us in “At the Gates,” when you’re a luminescent creature yanked into a nightmare world, what else is there to do with all your muscled brilliance but sing?
- Scott Beal, Vice-Principal
Notary of the Republic
A Cottage
A Phonebooth in North Corktown
Five-Paragraph Essay by Claire Denson
Fable of Love
Ikea Panic Attack
Pontifex Maximus Debbie
Five-Paragraph Essay by Jay Griffith
"Wimpy, wimpy, wimpy"
Glamour Marmots
Friendship Banquet Bouquet (BFF FBB)
Five-Paragraph Essay by Shannon K. Winston
dial tone
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Five-Paragraph Essay by Sarah Carson
Mary Oliver's Wild Geese Hymn A Hallelujah
All That I Know Of Tree Sex And Panties Was Unearthed At Another Poet's Reading
The Moon Shines On My Feral Face
Five-Paragraph Essay by Ellen Welcker
a simple misunderstanding
an open letter to the white woman offended by my use of "The N-Word"
J.B. sings a new song
Five-Paragraph Essay by Kristie Williams
The Branches, the Green Winds
Hella
1975
Five-Paragraph Essay by Matthew E. Henry
Private School Math
While on the Phone with the Bank Trying to Enroll in a Hardship Payment Plan, I Hear Another Woman on the Phone with the Bank Trying to Enroll in a Hardship Payment Plan
What My Mother Means When She Says a Daughter Needs a Mother
Five-Paragraph Essay by Stephen Leggett
Leonardo da Vinci Brings Me Flowers
A
R
Five-Paragraph Essay by Cal Freeman
Reading Trakl by Candlelight
An Advent Poem
Arriving at the Gates
Five-Paragraph Essay by Sally Rosen Kindred