A Totally Real Memo (Wink!) from the Department of Defe...War

A. From the Office of the Secretary of WAR, MOTHERFUCKERS!:

In accordance with Secretary of WAR, MOTHERFUCKERS! Pete "Peter" Hegseth's memo from this summer where the Secretary [note: Can we get that changed? Makes me sound like a chick- PH] informed our brave men (and women, for now) in uniform that no one is allowed to "be a pussy," and on wise, medically-sound guidance from Secretary of "Health" and "Human" Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is one of the good Moslems, we will begin testing all male service members at age 30 and over to ensure that the service member's level of the hormone testosterone (T) is acceptable. 

Testing procedures:
1. Groups of male service members will sleep in designated barracks the night before testing.

2. In the morning, Secretary Hegseth will go around to each bunk prior to service members waking and check to see if each member has an erection. If a service member does not have a full erection, Secretary Hegseth will engage with the service member's penis to bring it to full erection while an assistant times the length of time it takes to achieve full tumescence. Note: Secretary Hegseth requests that, if you wake up during this part of the test, you should continue to pretend you are asleep. AT NO TIME MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH SECRETARY HEGSETH. 

3. In groups of three or four, male service members will be brought into a room and asked to masturbate to ejaculation into a provided cup. Secretary Hegseth will be seated in a chair to watch each service member masturbate to ensure proper ejaculation occurs. The Secretary requests that service members only wear a white t-shirt and athletic socks as they enter the room. The Secretary will ask questions about the libidos and sexual activity of service members while they masturbate. Masturbation duration will be timed, with notes made if it take too long or too little time. As with the previous part of the test, DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH SECRETARY HEGSETH. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. 

4. Secretary Hegseth will personally test each semen sample by tasting it. He will be able to tell if the semen contains the correct minimum amount of testosterone by comparing it to the taste of his own semen, which he will provide for himself. Service members must stand at attention right after they have completed ejaculation while the Secretary tastes their semen and comments on various attributes he perceives. Even if Secretary Hegseth asks a direct question, DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH HIM. THE SECRETARY PERCEIVES ALL EYE CONTACT AS A THREAT AND MAY ACT ACCORDINGLY. 

5. Service members whose T is low will be forced to take regular injections of it in order to improve the service member's masculinity. If a service member refuses to receive the injections, they will be deemed "transgender" and forced to leave military service. 

6. Service members whose T is normal will be put back into regular duties.

7. Service members whose T level is above that of Secretary Hegseth's will be assigned to strip nude and oil wrestle the Secretary so he can prove that "You're not so tough." During these nude oil wrestling matches, DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH SECRETARY HEGSETH. HE CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR THE VIOLENCE THAT WILL FOLLOW. THE SECRETARY MAY BE INTOXICATED AND HAS NO IMPULSE CONTROL EVEN ON GOOD DAYS.

8. If a service member defeats Secretary Hegseth at oil wrestling, that service member and his family will be deported. Probably to Liberia. 

9/11 Is Tired of This Dance

Staring in the mirror, 9/11 sighs. Even though it's generally only once a year now that anyone cares that she exists, she knows that 25 years means something magical to people, as if numbers that end in 5 or 0 carry a mystical force when, really, it's just the nature of humans to find arbitrary significance in things that are inevitable. 25 years was going to happen, she was going to be there for it, and she knows people will want her to look her best. She works on her eyelashes.

What 9/11 hates most about these kinds of anniversaries is the willful amnesia, where names like "Bush" and "Cheney" are intoned with reverence, as if they weren't the same monsters who regularly burst into her apartment and jacked off on her and made her march around with their cum on her face, calling anyone who came to her aid a "traitor" and sent out the squamous, smirking Karl Rove to destroy them. Now, on these occasions, she gets to hear perhaps how Bush tried to unite us or maybe some kind of insulting assertion that they weren't as bad as Donald Trump. They were, she knows, she knows, and she wants to scream. They were just as bad. They used her as an excuse to try to break down the nation and the world and rebuild it in their gnarled, corrosive image, with everyone an enemy until proven otherwise. And they would make her appear regularly and dance for their pleasure. 9/11 remembers all those nights in the Oval Office, with Rumsfeld and Rice pawing each other frantically, supremely aroused by her swaying and shaking, laughing as Colin Powell tried to avoid staring at her when they stripped her and dragged her into a threesome that left her empty and lost. Cheney and Bush sucked on their cigars and laughed. They put so much heroin into her veins those days so she couldn't protest. God, it was so many foul years before they finally let her be.

She puts on her lipstick. Yes, those filthy times may be at an end for her, with many of the worst of her rapists gratifyingly, finally dead, but 9/11 knows that what they did to her and in her name was the template for what came after, for the worthless wars and the whores in conservative media, whether radio, TV, podcast, online, everywhere, making bank on tearing the citizens of the country apart, and the politicians who ride that hatred hard, like it's the fastest horse at the Derby. Without her, so much might have been different. Or maybe they would have at least found someone else to drag around and exploit.  

Jesus, she thinks, at least Giuliani has become such a disgrace that no one dares to try to redefine him as some kind of benevolent, elderly statesman whose dignity is missed in false comparison to the indecent mongrels leading the nation now. And it almost makes her giggle to think of Giuliani contemplating that it is, in fact, a Muslim mayor who will lead New York City through this day, a Muslim man who is genuinely beloved and admired and who, it seems, has no interest in watching 9/11 dance.

But dance she must, even if it's only every fifth year. 9/11 has aged in the last quarter century, "but who hasn't?" she thinks. She knows her responsibilities. It moves her deeply that she is the first world event that impacted the lives of many who were children when she was forced into her current existence in fire and blood. 9/11 wishes, oh, she wishes that it wasn't the case, that she was just another day. 

She checks herself out, her dark but not black dress still fitting, the slit not quite as high up on her thigh, but open enough to let her move. She can't stare too long or she'll burst into tears. She thinks about bin Laden, how he knew that they would torture and parade her and use her as an excuse for every destructive impulse they ever had. She think that it's laughably tragic that he understood the United States better than most Americans.  

She's ready. Reluctant but ready. 9/11 is tired of the ritual of dancing so everyone can behold her and honor her and condemn her and mourn for her and mock her and more. She'll do it because she has no choice. For her, for 9/11, for the country where she lives, for the endless manufactured crises that may not be in her name directly but have their origin in her, it will never stop being 9/11. 

A Poem for the Laborers

"From 'Be Recorder'"

by Carmen Gimenez

they work their fingers 

to the soul their bones 

to their marrow 

they toil in blankness 

inside the dead yellow 

rectangle of warehouse 

windows work fingers 

to knots of fires  

the young the ancients

the boneless the broken

the warehouse does too 

to the bone of the good 

bones of the building

every splinter spoken for

she works to the centrifuge 

of time the calendar a thorn 

into the sole dollar of working 

without pause work their mortal 

coils into frayed threads until 

just tatter they worked their bones 

to the soul until there was no 

soul left to send worked until 

they were dead gone

to heaven or back home 

for the dream to have USA 

without USA to export

USA to the parts under 

the leather sole of the boss 

they work in dreams of working 

under less than ideal conditions 

instead of just not ideal 

conditions work for the 

shrinking pension and never 

dental for the illusion 

of the doctor medicating them 

for work-related disease 

until they die leaving no empire

only more dreams that their babies

should work less who instead

work more for less 

so they continue to work 

for them and their kin 

they workballoon payment 

in the form of a heart attack 

if only that’ll be me someday

the hopeless worker said on 

the thirteenth of never 

hollering into the canyon 

of perpetual time 

four bankruptcies later

three-fifths into a life 

that she had planned 

on expecting happiness 

in any form it took 

excluding the knock-off

cubed life she lived in debt

working to the millionth

of the cent her body cost

the machine’s owner

Yolanda Berta Zoila 

Chavela Lucia Esperanza

Naya Carmela Celia Rocio

once worked here

their work disappearing

into dream-emptied pockets

into the landfill of work

the work to make their bodies

into love for our own