EthicalDative

The Gentleman From Kentucky Rises to Eruct

Posted on February 23, 2026 by JMN

El Caballero de Kentucky se levanta *to make Obama a one-term president* y con propósito de eructar.

“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!

Posted in Anthology | Tagged English-Spanish, language, Spanish-English | Leave a comment

Elephants Are Eminently Sentient

Posted on February 21, 2026 by JMN

A Renaissance-era fresco attributed to Jacopo Ripanda depicting Hannibal on the back of an elephant during the Second Punic War, in the third century B.C. Credit… Adam Eastland/Alamy. [New York Times caption and illustration]

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.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged doggerel, language | Leave a comment

Degrees, Accolades, Publications, Affiliations (DAPA)

Posted on February 17, 2026 by JMN

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.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, poetry | 2 Comments

Upon this Slab Build Ye a Breakaway Church

Posted on February 13, 2026 by JMN

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?

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, rhetoric, spirituality | 2 Comments

Translation of ‘October With Wings’ by Azurea20

Posted on February 7, 2026 by JMN

“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.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, poetry, Spanish-English, translation | 2 Comments

Annals of Journalism

Posted on February 4, 2026 by JMN

The gentleman from Kentucky rises to… say something.

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!]

Posted in Quotations | Tagged journalism, language | 4 Comments

Fire in the Casus Belly

Posted on February 1, 2026 by JMN

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!

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged doggerel, language | 3 Comments

Three Rules With Tolerances

Posted on January 26, 2026 by JMN

**ḍaḥik-nā ḍiḥkaẗ(an) ka-l-ẖamr(i)** “We laughed a laughter like the wine.” The phrase is from a poem by Haidar Al Abdullah titled **Tarajjal yā ḥiṣān**. I like to translate the title as “Make Like a Man, O Horse,” and the phrase more freely as “We spilt laughter like wine.” Their respective published translations by Yaseen Noorani are *Go Dismounted Like a Man, Horse* and *We let out a vinous peal of laughter*. (From *Tracing the Ether: Contemporary Poetry from Saudi Arabia*, ed. Moneera Al-Ghadeer, Syracuse University Press, 2026.)

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.)

Posted in Anthology, Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, miscellaneous, poetry, rhetoric | 2 Comments

Europa to Americus: ‘Yassuh, Massah!’

Posted on January 23, 2026 by JMN

The Greek derivatives in English spurt from a font of abstruse vocables that gives us, say, “dithyramb” — “a passionate or inflated speech, poem or other writing.” It’s a short hop to coinage such as “pithyramb” — “a passionate or inflated instance of pith” — proffered by… wait for it… a “pithyrambo.”

Take Hemingway, whom many of us cite unread. One of his characters says something like “bankruptcy comes on gradually, then all of a sudden.” A certain Ms. Clausing quoted in The Times pithyrambed it shamelessly:

… Ms. Clausing, the U.C.L.A. economist, warned against assuming that just because Mr. Trump’s policies haven’t harmed the economy yet, they never will. “The long run takes a long time to arrive, and when it comes it comes with astonishing swiftness,” she said.

As we await the long run’s arrival let’s kill some time tinkering with Woody’s ditty:

THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
(Call and Response)

This land is our land
(That land is our land)
From th’ shores of Green Land
(To th’ Cuban Eye Land)

From fair New Found Land
(Where’er we lay hand)
To th’ Hemisphere’s End
(Or where our troops land)

Your land is our land
(There is our Home Land)
(ICE Land is MY Land)
(Mar-a-La-GO-Land)

All real estate grand
(A place to grandstand)
Snooty Switzer-land
(Little Saint James Land)

All mine to COM-mand
(Kiss thy behind land)
The former Rhine Land
(All thine to DE-mand)

Posted in Anthology | Tagged doggerel, language, rhetoric | 6 Comments

Keep What Holds the Light Unbroken

Posted on January 16, 2026 by JMN

The Gleb on a Gnat’s Vesicle
— After Donne.

How do we rue you, cunning tongue?
Grant us, sir, spit out a lung.
Perdition’s grease fire. Odium’s pimp.
Perversity’s pal. Plague’s piece of tail.
Malice engorged. Enormity in a suit.
Torrent of keening. Badmouth bard.
Punch down, PUNCH HARD!

Swervy weaver. Voyeur warrior.
Randy prancer. Double downer.
Pope of payback. FULMINATOR!
Pulling woolster. Sharp practitioner.
Dirty trickster. Spurning truther.
Crimson wattle. Rights reneger.
Dodge disaster. CASTIGATOR!

Hustle’s apostle. Carnage’s barker.
Deferment’s dandy. Decency’s bruise.
Putter’s potentate. Pageant’s peepster.
Casino’s crap shot. Crypto’s mule.
Columbia’s thorn. Liberty’s blindfold.
Spurred heel. Sultan of feel.
Man of steal. HELL OF A DEAL!

Posted in Anthology | Tagged doggerel, rhetoric | 2 Comments