(The ruler protests the land that he rules.)
Don’t tar my riff, piggy, snarls the boar.
Blast the damned Beatitudes with gas!
(The ruler protests the land that he tools.)
Blare the Ten Commandments in the schools!
Your cities are the Sodoms of Gomorre!
(The ruler protests the land that he fools.)
Don’t tar my riff, piggy, snarls the boar.
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
“Eruct” is a cultismo in English but common currency in Spanish as “eructar.” It means “to belch.”
Let’s conjugate! ¡Conjuguemos!
Present Indicative
I belch — eructo (eructas, eructa, eructamos, eructáis, eructan)
Preterite Indicative
I belched — eructé (eructaste, eructó, eructamos, eructasteis, eructaron)
Imperfect Indicative
I used to belch or was belching or belched habitually — eructaba (eructabas, eructaba, eructábamos, eructabais, eructaban)
Future Indicative
I will belch — eructaré
Periphrastic Future Indicative
I’m going to belch — Voy a eructar
Conditional Indicative
I would belch — eructaría
Future Perfect Indicative
I will have belched — habré eructado
Present Progressive
I’m belching — estoy eructando
2nd-Person Singular Imperative
Belch! — ¡Eructa! (familiar) or ¡Eructe! (formal)
2nd-Person Plural Imperative
Belch! — ¡Eructad! (Spain) or ¡Eructen! (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Perú, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panamá, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, República Dominicana, Cuba, México, USA)
3rd-Person Singular Imperative
Let the gentleman belch! — ¡Que eructe el caballero!
1st-Person Plural Imperative
Let’s belch! — ¡Eructemos! or ¡Vamos a eructar!
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
ELEPHANTS ARE EMINENTLY SENTIENT
Of course they are, you ninny. So is an
Amoeba in its way. But these big beasts
In magnitude are titans of sweetness;
Matriarchal, family prone, pacific,
Communicative browsing herbivores.
Pressed upon a time into the misery
Of cock-besotted, bipedal mammalians,
Elephants were frogmarched to a bitch
Of a wreck by a puny Punic horde,
Martyred on the cross of a mountain.
Well rest you, tusk-shorn Surus, last to fall!
Where justice reigned, God were a Pachyderm
Enthroned up yonder, trumpeting on high,
Mounted on a hellion known as Hannibal,
Riding eternally the bastard in the sky.
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
DAPA and something about gender orientation and ethnicity are common data points in Poetry’s thumbnail profiles of contributors to the magazine. They’re like snapshots of bodybuilders flexed for pose-off. Musculature duly noted, but here’s what’s truly interesting:
How do you get around? Car? Bus? On foot?
Content of your fridge and spice rack at this moment?
Where do you write? If by a window, what’s the view?
Favored travel destination?
How do you decide verses need to go public?
Do you say “glow worm” or “lightning bug”? “Seesaw” or “teeter totter”? Does “route” rhyme with “rout,” “root” or neither? What about “hoof” and “hooves”? Pray for “peace” or for “victory”?
Distilling such info into an essence is challenging, but that’s the point. You’re a poet! Say something revelatory and evocative about yourself in two or three sentences.
This is me:
I avoid shelf-stable soy milk in favor of the “fresh” stuff. I’d choose “peace.” My recipe for a getaway is a bicycle equipped with pannier and the Upper Peninsula in the Fall. Lightening bug, seesaw, rout.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
If I named God, I would name him more like a boat
than a dog, but more like a dog than a dead relative.
(Leslie Sainz, from “When I imitate myself, I am a number of certain people,” Poetry, January-February 2026)
The God I grew up with promises the wicked they’ll experience undying agony after they die. There’s a better post-death outlook for the non-wicked. By rights the godfearing fear God.
Is it possible to shop Gods? There’s a jealous God and an indulgent God. One personal and familiar, One high-and-mighty, stern but loving, vice versa. An almighty more-than-One, with many shapes or None, an ever-All-ness and back-of-Beyond-ness. There’s faith in a Her, in a Them, in the “primitive” God of the “savage,” and in ritual devoid of the divine altogether.
Capitalize what you will, it’s able to be rendered cult. Religion walks on water and rules the sky.
What about richness of possibility, plausibility, ineffability, of god -head and -hood and -lessness that’s conceivable or inconceivable, actual and latent, plural or unitary, unbelievable and doxological, above all supremely stateless? Does worship need sharp elbows?
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
“Translating a piece of verse can be the sincerest way of reading it.”
Huda J. Fakhreddine
No sé. I don’t know. They’re important words in any language. I know that I feel, if not what I feel, when a poem goads me into articulating what skirts the edges of speech. That sentence cloaks confusion in some kind of dress. It may be to say that I don’t know what the poem says other than it speaks to me — and this is irony — wordlessly. What’s conveyed floats over, under, around and through the friction it generates on the page. Azurea’s Spanish has a pellucid, propulsive quality that crests like a swell summoning me to body-surf it in English. That’s the unruliest simile I can fabricate for the sweet consternation induced by intruding upon someone else’s fugitive lyric.
OCTOBER WITH WINGS
by Azurea20 translated from Spanish by JMN
Before her
the greatest certitude lacks
importance
and the voice which names her
ceases to be mine.
How to abandon the me.
How to abandon the me,
to create from nothing.
To be a god, or goddess.
To dig down deep
where pronouns don’t exist,
digging to where the verb is,
where the act is conjugated,
where the tatters of life
are mute, at rest,
ceasing to air their rifts.
What’s conjured steers between
a school of synchronized fish,
a forest of silent beeches,
an unfathomed ocean,
a mountain sheltering misfortune.
I don’t know.
Maybe the embrace
of river with sea…
and Certitude.
Certitude, I say.
Like an October with wings.
OCTUBRE CON ALAS
Azurea20
Frente a ella,
la mayor certeza carece
de importancia
y la voz que la nombra
deja de ser mía.
Cómo abandonar el yo.
Cómo abandonar el yo,
crear de la nada.
Ser un dios, una diosa.
Cavar hondo donde
no existen los pronombres;
cavar donde existe el verbo,
donde el acto se conjuga,
donde los harapos de la vida
enmudezcan, reposen,
dejen de airear sus desgarros.
Camina el conjuro entre
un bancal de peces sincronizados,
un bosque de hayas silenciosas,
un océano incomprendido,
un monte que acoja la desdicha.
No sé.
Tal vez el abrazo
del río con el mar…
y la Certeza.
Digo: la Certeza.
Como un octubre con alas.
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
Some burger joint names are hard to pin down. The following excerpt is from MySA (“My San Antonio”).
Whataburger rival ramps up expansion with new $1M Texas outpost. This is the third Shack Shack coming to the Austin area in 2026.
By Cristela Jones,
Austin Trending Reporter
Jan 9, 2026
A fast-growing New York City-based burger joint appears to be ramping up expansion plans in Central Texas. Shake Shake has just set moves for another Austin-area location within the next two years.
Last spring, Shake Shake filed a TDLR for its first $980,000 location in Georgetown, a suburb about 34 miles north of Austin. Now, the chain will be moving into another Williamson County city down the road.
[Elsewhere the article nails it: Shake Shack!]
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
The Secretary of War and the Commander of War mustered the Brass at the Department of War.
First the SOW
Then the COW
Settled the hash
Good and proper
Of the Brass
At the DOW.
B-B-B-BOOM!
K-K-K-POW!
NOBEL FOR PEACE!
N-N-N-NOW!
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
RULE OF GOLD
Treat others like you want to be treated.
RULE OF IRON
Believe in Me or else.
RULE OF THUMB
Steer into the skid.
TOLERANCES
“Every trade works to different tolerances. Steel workers aim to be accurate within half an inch; carpenters a quarter of an inch; sheetrockers an eighth of an inch; and stone workers a sixteenth.”
(Burkhard Bilger, “The Art of Building the Impossible,” The New Yorker.)
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Glimpses and Manias (I’m So All About This Painting)
Lee Krasner’s grid-like “Composition” (1949), featuring hieroglyphic-like forms, will be featured in the exhibition “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” opening Oct. 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With its visual complexity it opened new avenues for explorations in abstraction. Credit… Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [New York Times caption and illustration]
This thumping doodle by Lee Krasner — whatever it is, I like it, not least because it looks like some kind of writing devised by a sensibility going for broke. For that matter it could be the shower tile of a Venusian. The “Jewish girl from Brooklyn’s” early influences are pegged as “Hebrew calligraphy, cubism, Mondrian and especially Matisse.”
Krasner’s artefact conveys well nigh infinite possibility as to what a painting can be or what could be a painting. Nothing adjacent to “pretty” or “ugly,” just intricacy tantamount to a perfervid tramontane hallucination. It makes her partner’s drips look lazy.
The tale of Krasner’s 1950s collages is one of those creation stories that love to tell themselves and be told. They acquire the status of deep lore surrounding deceased practitioners whose leavings accrete value trousered by museums and galleries.
At a dead end after struggling with some recalcitrant drawings, she ripped them in half and threw them on the floor. “Having finished this bout of destruction, I slammed the door and walked away,” she said. Days later, she saw the possibilities. She tore more, she pasted those scraps to paper — and later Masonite — and interlaced them with tangled, cursive, or thrusting marks.
Who hasn’t struggled with a “recalcitrant” drawing? The upshot in this case has the heat of annunciation: “Lo,” spake the angel, a connoisseur. “My jaw dropped. She was a really great painter.”
(Amei Wallach, “For Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Equal Footing at the Met,” New York Times, 2-25-26)
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved