POETS IN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ISSUE Ed Zahniser   FROM DUNG BEETLES TO BINGO For all we know dung beetles may study Humans and their ways and call it humanology. —Frederick Buechner Or pincate beetles hike up onto their forelegs, blast out their anti-predator irritant juice, and call that law enforcement, all the while inspiring Beano and the ten thousand household aerosols from Procter & Gamble. Or prairie dogs— not dogs but rodents like the squirrels called “the meat that grows on trees”—burrow between two entrance/exit holes and call that the Lincoln Tunnel, only to see it taken over by burrowing owls who call it squatters’ rights but then find themselves chased out by snakes who call it the advent of Freudian psychology. Or bears that hibernate with a pine-pitch plug in their anal pore to cut down moisture loss but don’t know what to call this because they’re asleep for half the year, so we’ll call it “top management” who are half asleep all year but call it “optimum performance to the metrics” which we grunt workers call a buzzword then take a gridded sheet of buzzwords du jour to endless staff meetings where we check off each buzzword as top management buzzes and buzzes until we get a full line checked off all the way across or up and down our sheet then jump up and scream “BULLSHIT BINGO!”       Ed Zahniser is a 34-year federal employee with the National Park Service Publications Group in Harpers Ferry, WV. His poems have appeared in over 100 literary magazines in the U.S. and U.K.; three books, most recently Mall-hopping with the Great I AM (Somondoco Press, 2006); and three chapbooks, most recently Slow Down and Live, a collaboration with artist and designer Heather Watson of Pernot&Tatlin (2011). He was a founding editor of Some Of Us Press in Washington, DC, where he was born, and formerly poetry editor of Wilderness magazine and an associate poetry editor of Antietam Review. He lives in Shepherdstown, WV, where he is the co-founder and poetry editor of the all-volunteer community quarterly The Good News Paper.     Published in Volume 13, Number 3, Summer 2012.