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I don’t care if it’s fake. Today I abandon all that is pure In my highly-secured space And race up to the sunlight blazing On my Kabul roof to praise Aesha's new nose.
May it reach forever like the stem of this artificial flower
I raise above the frozen mountaintops Where cold, clipping blades are rusting in the melting fragrance of a true, blooming rose.
Rick Gray served in the Peace Corps in Kenya
and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in
Kabul. He was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie, and has an essay that will be appearing in the forthcoming book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock.
From his base after Jack enlisted he changed his mind to be war resistant trying to forget the sand in his breath and a thousand images in a state of death, What am I here for he would ask feeling out of breath as Jack was handed his appalling gas mask, pulling his own weight now hidden with his friend Jackie in a trench watching for an enemy to what fateful end, yet they became grateful here on this park bench when T.V. interviewed even when AWOL they called for peace, their mind was renewed and the world made sense when all wars could cease and they would make a difference.
B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer
and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines
throughout the world, including Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Review, Le Guepard (France), Kadmos (France), Prism International, Jejune (Czech Republic), Leopold Bloom (Budapest), Antioch Review, and Prairie Schooner. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Margaret Thatcher has died. There will be parties Up and down the seams of coal At the Trades Club, the Workers’ Associations, tubs Of ale will be up-ended, dominoes Will click across the boards, foaming mugs fail To capture what the people will try to carol That she didn’t quite stamp the soul Out of every seam of the remaining factory trail, Out of every cup in a palm held out for some help. But will they be rejoicing Equally in the halls Where those who ruled this country fully Before Margaret now rule it all And for a while they were haunted By this girl who knew every call Of the metallurgist’s numbered table, She knew what was silver, what was gold And the basest element – the fire That burns in people’s soul That she knew how to ignite with a lyre And it is burning again, now that she no longer cares Burning and turning, turning like a ribbon in the wind, A flag, like something from the Wat Tyler rebellion Before he was cut down by the King’s men.
Atar Hadari was born in Israel, raised in England, and studied poetry in the US. His Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik (Syracuse University Press) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award, his collection Rembrandt’s Bible will be published by Indigo Dreams on July 8.
An FBI internet surveillance unit will collaborate with the coming NSA data center in Utah to decipher and monitor email between private citizens. Homeland Security recently began to monitor social media using version 2.1.3 key words & search terms.*
Some are obvious. Do not use assassination,
Taliban, bomb, bomb squad, bomb threat.
Al Qaeda (all spellings). But electric? Blackout.
Metro. Power. Smart? Is it worth the risk to say
failure? Dock. Airport. Airplane and its derivatives.
Cancelled. Delays. Flood. Snow. Blizzard.
Why, these are some of your necessary words--
everyone’s necessary words. If you suffer blizzards
you need to talk about them and if you don’t, you
need to gloat. Wildfire. Ice. Stranded. Stuck.
Temblor. All suspect. Use sleet at your own risk
along with plague. Plume. Enriched. Collapse.
They have marked the best words as hazardous.
Including hazardous. Breach. Mudslide. Grid. San Diego!
Say goodbye to relief and closure. And cyber terror.
Cyber terror is not to be used. Warning
is on the list.
*Sources:
"The Department of Homeland Security Is Searching Your Facebook and Twitter for These Words" by Joel Johnson, Animal New York, February 27, 2012.
"The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" by James Bamford Wired, March 15, 2012.
"Avoid these words to prevent Homeland Security from spying on your social networks" --Technology News Blog by Tecca, Today in Tech, Yahoo! News, May 29, 2012.
"U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens" by Julia Angwin, The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2012.
Originally from Washington D.C., Deborah Gang moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan to attend graduate school and remained there, both for her work as a psychotherapist and the proximity to Lake Michigan. Her research has been published in Education and Treatment of Children and her prose and poems in Literary Mama, Encore, The Michigan Poet and J Journal (CUNY).
It’s messy when they die
in winter, he says. The dirt
is too cold to work with then.
I tell him I will consider this
when I die. Just give me two-weeks’
notice, he says, quoting a joke,
and it occurs to me humor
must be an unwritten
prerequisite for a grave digger.
I ask him what he thinks
about the recent uproar in Boston,
no one wanting the bomber
buried in their own backyard.
Well, he says, I’ve always thought
we should have a special section
for the politicians. We could put
him here with them—in a place where
we let the dogs run.
In the space before I laugh,
I remember the story
the undertaker told about how
in the middle ages they considered
suicide the ultimate crime.
But since you can’t punish a dead man,
they took out their ire on his corpse
and buried it at a crossroads
to be trod on forever. He said,
“If we do not take care of dead humans,
we become less human ourselves.”
The man next to me says,
“You know, I give every person I bury
the gravedigger’s promise.”
We are almost to the cemetery gate.
“I say, I’m the last person who’s ever gonna
let you down, and the last one
who’ll ever throw dirt on you.”
He laughs a laugh so real
I can smell the earth thawing in it.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poetry has appeared in O Magazine, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion and in her children’s lunch boxes. She is a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. Favorite one-word mantra: Adjust.
Shirley J. Brewer ( Baltimore , MD ) is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. Publication credits: TheCortland Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Pearl, Comstock Review, Loch Raven Review, Passager, and otherjournals. Her poetry books include A Little Breast Music, 2008, Passager Books and After Words, 2013, Apprentice House/Loyola University. M.A. Creative Writing/Publishing Arts, University of Baltimore.
She never imagined the sheet she lit would curl him in its hot tongue, never believed he wouldn’t wake in those flames, throw back the covers, and wash his feet like she’d been asking him every night before bed.
The air buzzed with a lightning storm. The chickens refused to lay and no matter how long or hard she kneaded the dough, all morning, the loaves cooked up dense and hard as baseball bats. At least, no child again this month.
A photo of them as newlyweds, so young they look like children playing dress up, hangs in the hallway. Too stubborn to quit a decade later and now look where it’s got them.
Black petals fall. Bits of sheet, newly caught rise like cardinals. A door opens, the wind roars, timbers spit and splinter until she finds herself outside in the grass watching
lightning split a sycamore. She looks from the tree to the body they’re pulling too late from the burning house. She believes it when she tells them she has no idea who he is.
The crossword puzzle clue for 2 down required a word for women’s rites leader. I couldn’t parse any cross-current lines. I combed through suffragettes and freedom fighters. Sojourner, Amelia, Victoria, Abigail, Elizabeth and tried to cram their names in. Margaret Sanger? Shacklers to the White House gates? Rosa? Jane Roe?
Then I read it right -- rites. The woman priest, absolver of wrongs? Desolver of woes? Healer of hurts? End-of-days angel? Candlemaker? Coiler of the womb cord? Doula? She-who-washes-the-dead?
Nothing fit. Peacemaker Apple plucker Palm reader Stonemason Bread baker Bee tender Bed maker Caretaker Crone Godmother Goddess Sorceress Star eater
The answer in the next day’s paper: mother.
Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet and a proud mother.
Today, all the old houses
have hidden harrowed humans,
and the midden of their captors,
their own enduring bodies--
or so it seems when the flask
from the inside jacket pocket offers
us our ruin: society on the news.
Even the laureate of Fresno
turns a stick-up into stature,
lines of brutal fighting in his corner
market. As usual the armed forces
are a locked room in a foreclosed
house with a girl pounding
on a dirty window. We wonder
who she is, but not ourselves,
frowning on the doorstep.
Amy Holman is the author of Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window, published in 2010 with Somondoco Press. The news is one of her favorite sources for topics, and poems have previously appeared in New Verse News. Recent poetry and prose is in The Same, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, and Zocolo Public Square. She teaches poetry at The Hudson Valley Writers Center, and is a literary consultant in Brooklyn, NY.
Frankly, I am intimidated by the size, the sounds of big black bees. though experts say these loud, raucous insects are not dangerous, seldom sting, even if cornered in a hole or near my seat on the pergola where these Genus Xylocopa systematically burrow deeper and deeper into the cross pilings of my shady nook. Yet when I glance up from my book, see the pilfering pistons drilling a shaft to lay their dark and sinister eggs, I am dazzled, and damned at the same time. No Yin and Yang moral for me this May, or in any month when these bees egg on my impulse to swat them down as though they are a swarm of clever- tongued bellicose Republicans bedazzling the universe about Benghazi.
Earl J. Wilcox writes about
aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His
work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular
contributor to TheNew Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland (Reuters) May 7, 2013 – Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Tuesday decried Buddhist monks’ attacks on Muslims in Myanmar, saying killing in the name of religion was “unthinkable”.
East and West,
different in temperament
and religious thought
yet closer than imagined,
Enlightened One.
We bear the stink
of murdered saviors in
our advanced Western tribes;
our savagery worshiped
as an act of commemoration
that leaps from holy texts
to pretexts for slaughter
in the name of an abandoned God.
Good and Evil
wrap their tendrils
at each other’s throat and fist
so say your Wrathful Budhisattvas
and now your children bring fire,
bring wrath to every infidel
as a liberation for their soul.
It is, Enlightened One, eminently thinkable
when night obscures starlight
and flames quench the darkness.
One must consider the unspoken precept:
human nature trumps a tranquil soul.
Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.
We sit in plastic chairs in a hotel
conference room, overflow
for the flood of contracts ruptured
while Wall Street and Washington
bought “get out of jail free.”
The judge grills a mechanic: his assets,
tools, tow truck, garage, lift
will liquidate to satisfy the banker’s need.
We are all next.
The judge calls
a name. Consuela walks to the front
and sits at the table, skirted for brunch.
We hear her debts read aloud—
the public shaming the Constitution allows,
having banned debtor’s prison.
The officer of the court rattles off names
like a hostess calling parties for seating.
I tell my wife to remove her rings.
We take our turn at the stocks,
and then slip out the side door,
without looking back at the rest,
debtors, whose communion we’ve joined.
Matthew Hummer is a teacher, father, and husband. He is also an M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing at Sewanee, The University of the South.
BALANCE
Same-same yet somehow different
Seen through refocused laser gaze
Cherish our commonalities honor discrepancies
Superiority complexes falling through cracks
ENDURANCE
Religions teach empathy not enmity
Universal red blood donor brotherhood
Imperfect beings inhabiting peaceful planet
Sacred principles uncovered deep within
FORBEARANCE
Education learning life-altering lessons
One’s enemy the best teacher
Common sense accepting forgiveness as
Rare as quality of mercy
Seventeen years they’ve been burrowing deep in tree roots,
waiting for their time to wriggle out of their exoskeletons
and take wing, males singing to attract females. The woods
in the afternoons transformed into a noisy singles bar.
The last time the red-eyed brood emerged, I was visiting
in Virginia, guest from Florida, not a resident.
I slept with windows wide, welcomed that chorus
louder than frogs, natural and shrill, an improvement
over motorcycles, sirens of ambulances and fire engines,
Fort Lauderdale’s ceaseless traffic spewing exhaust.
A bonanza of a buffet for wildlife, they dropped
from trees onto our lunch tables. Delighting in delicate
segmented wings, I photographed portraits. Listening now,
I anticipate the din, thunderous as a jackhammer,
with earplugs and an extra feather pillow for over my head,
ready to welcome the natural world I moved here to love.
Joan Mazza
has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, sex therapist,
writing coach, and seminar leader. She is the author of six books,
including Dreaming Your Real Self (Perigee/Penguin/Putnam), and her work has appeared in Cider
Press Review, Rattle, Off the Coast, Kestrel, Permafrost, Slipstream,
Timber Creek Review, The MacGuffin, Writer’s Digest, The Fourth River,
the minnesota review, Personal Journaling, New Verse News, Playgirl and
many other publications. She ran away from the hurricanes of South
Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural
central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.
In this dishonest script, my brother, We must pretend no one is listening in, and we are not men, but children Put to sleep with lullabies so sweet You’ll want to scream When the next bombing hits and our connection breaks into a quagmire of static.
Rick Gray served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. He was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie, and has an essay that will be appearing in the forthcoming book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock.
after the Boston Marathon, and after seeing the documentary, “Syria behind the Lines”
Crystalline cool days—bougainvillea
spills from our walls like rivulets
outdoing one another, like lavish
manes of brilliant, curly scarlet
tossed flirtatiously by the wind—
and in our yard, exploding galaxies
of snow-in-summer; popped up orange liqueur
poppy cups; torches of white iris…
Exploding fire, and the red ochre of blood
spattered over Boylston Street, as if a dark perversion
of Holi came frenzied through—no playful
faces splashed marigold, indigo,
saffron praising spring—leaving behind shreds
of clothes, glass, flesh…
And in Syria, somewhere, again
and again, convulsed young faces
buried in the chests of older men,
whose hands pull the faces in to blot out
what they’re seeing and their screaming,
so the fighting can go on.
Still in Syria somewhere—opulence
of nets of oranges and grapefruits
hanging above the fruit-juice stands piled
with lemons, carrots, melons? Is there hope
for cool sweetness in the throat—intensities
of blended watermelon, strawberry,
banana, milk, honey, mint—families strolling
in the cooling midnight streets, old men
playing chess on 2 A.M. sidewalks…?
On a talk show two broadcasters
argue almost raucously over
whether a newspaper was right
to cut off at the knees a photo
of a man’s legs blasted off below
the knees, in Boston…
And, somewhere, in Syria, again,
and again, a dreamy, peaceful
sweetness sweeps over the bearded face
of a very young man, many times wounded,
many times returned to the rebel lines—
who has already or will join al-Nusra—as he speaks
of his hope to become a martyr.
Here, at home, in California,
where the bougainvillea bursts
in a frenzy of bloom, two friends—a relative,
a poet—dead in the ordinary old way,
of early cancer, of old age.
Judy Kronenfeld’s most recent collections of poetry are Shimmer (WordTech Editions, 2012) and the second edition of Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of The Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize for 2007 (Antrim House, 2012). Recent anthology appearances include Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse Press, 2012) and Love over 60: An Anthology of Women's Poems (Mayapple Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in many print and online journals such as Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Fox Chase Review, Foundling Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Hiram Poetry Review, Natural Bridge, New Verse News, The Pedestal, Poetry International, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stirring, and The Women’s Review of Books.
I waved a dollar out the window. We brushed hands as he took it.
Thank you, he said. I said nothing,
just rolled my window up and waited
with renewed impatience for the light to change.
You know how it is,
I couldn’t help but doubt, at least a little,
the crudely lettered sign he held.
Then I remembered that cavemen depicted running animals by giving them eight legs.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on
a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the
Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.
A terrible, terribly damaged boy nearly bleeds to death in a boat, under a tarp, in somebody’s back yard. Yes, he has blood on his hands and worse. How have we let this happen to one of our boys? But no one will say they are broken hearted. They will only say they are strong. “You picked the wrong city this time,” they say. I just want to cry for a while and hold each other.
My granddaughter is fussing in her car seat. I corkscrew my arm back and grope around for her blinky. I help her get it to her mouth. My beautiful daughter smiles at her beautiful daughter in the rearview mirror. The baby grabs my index finger in her damp, four month old fist and goes back to sleep. Something to suck on, the purr of the motor, someone within reach who loves her, is all she needs for contentment.
Way up in the mountains of Honduras there are plans to build a dam that no one needs or wants. It will make rich Hondurans richer. They will siphon off their share. It will make rich Americans richer. They will sell unsustainable technology to the rich Honduras. Some how the Chinese are involved. Some rich Chinese will get richer, too. The thatched roof houses of the poor people who live along the river will be thirty feet under water.
There is a young man who trusts me to give him advice. His mother is suddenly in the intensive care unit at the hospital. He is ashamed that he doesn’t understand her condition and doesn’t know how to make things better for her. I take the young man to the hospital and help him talk to the social worker. I joke with his mother in my bad Spanish and make her laugh. He feels a little better. I would be proud to be this young man’s father.
Automatic weapon fire blows apart a whole school full of tiny, fragile bodies. Even with the knowledge that they will never hold their own children again, the parents go to Washington and say please don’t let this happen to some one else. But the Republicans have so blatantly sold their souls, you got to wonder why God doesn’t strike them down. Hey God, where is the fire? Where is the brimstone? Where are the frogs and boils?
I am three floors above sea level in an old, old building. Looking out through wavy glass I can see the beach curve away to the north. A poet is reading about her memories of living in Alaska. I know many people in the room. Some of them I’ve known for forty years. In that moment, The New York Times and National Public Radio are far away. I don’t think so much about the little things. The big things are more important.
John Kotula is a writer and artist who lives in Peace Dale, Rhode Island.
The other name safeguards your identity life's green card matches the form of a poem and works to shelter our absence from betrayal with an urgent wish to be not an exile but an open door poet scenting no caution to live among others in sisterhood as a brother lip syncs his soul music with a solace of speech here in an open air labor festival I am asked to urban read my fierce verse for all soaring singers peace partisans, consumers of the sun survivors of fascism and freedom rides, lovers of natural species, animal shelter providers and to recollect those who stood here before us.
B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer
and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines
throughout the world, including Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Review, Le Guepard (France), Kadmos (France), Prism International, Jejune (Czech Republic), Leopold Bloom (Budapest), Antioch Review, and Prairie Schooner. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
In order to save the National Security Agency The trouble and expense I am planning to spy on myself – After all who is in a better position To do so? I will record and report My every move But even more than that I will reveal my inner life To the authorities The shapes and colors and contents Of my thoughts musings longings moods Memories dreams reflections In this way providing crucial data For psychological profiling That could lead to my arrest And indefinite detention Lest single-handedly On some Tuesday afternoon I overthrow the government. I would proudly and humbly Accept a medal from Congress And the thanks of a grateful nation For helping to avert anarchy in the streets But whether or not I receive a hero’s acclaim For my innovative and brilliant spooking I will pass my days In maximum security solitary confinement Comforted by the knowledge That I have rendered invaluable service in the struggle To keep America free
Buff Whitman-Bradley is the author of four books of poetry, b. eagle, poet; The Honey Philosophies; Realpolitik; and When Compasses Grow Old; and the chapbook, Everything Wakes Up!
His poetry has appeared in many print and online journals. He is also
co-editor, with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley and Sarah Lazare, of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He has co-produced/directed two documentary films, the award-winning Outside In (with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley) and Por Que Venimos (with the MIRC Film Collective). He lives in northern California.
