SPRING

by Katherine West

Natali Sevriukova reacts next to her house following a rocket attack on Kyiv on Friday, February 25, 2022. —CNN

In my dream

this is the last day of winter.

From here forward 

when the moisture comes it will not be white

when the wind blows it will not cut

toes will not numb

noses will not run

gloves will not disappear

cars will not skid 

heating bills will not rise 

neighbors will not scream 

flyers will not punch 

police will not shoot 

lawmakers will not obstruct 

soldiers will not shell 

soldiers will not shell.

The well-placed will not translate 

the world 

will not infinitely explain 

what we knew since we were two 

will not call us

"these people"

will not congratulate us 

on tying our shoes 

will not consider a different perspective 

"not listening"

will not use every adjective except "white"

when describing people

will not consider themselves BFFs with God

will not consider nature a bank account 

will not consider another country a stepping stone. 

In my dream

this is the last day of winter.

From here forward 

mini-iris will purple the planter boxes on main street 

buds will swell on fruit trees

grass will green from the inside out

neighbors will greet

children will play outside until dark

and fear will sleep

until it is needed.

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. She is also an artist. 

DOOMED

by Richard Meyer

a sandwich board pessimist proclaims the apocalypse

the blighted land, a globe on fire,                     

the sludgy oceans rising higher,

the sky an ashen winding sheet

no place to run, nowhere to hide,

a species bent on suicide,

extinction on a dead-end street

maybe a plague, or flood, or war

or greedy scoundrels gulping more

on a planet wrecked, made obsolete

or tumbling toward us through the void

a stone and iron asteroid

the size of old Minoan Crete

no matter what the fatal blow,            

from up above or down below

no refuge in our self-deceit

it’s doom and doom and doom from here

the die is cast, the end is near,

a final reckoning complete

Richard Meyer, recipient of the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize, lives in Mankato, MN. His book of poetry Orbital Paths was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

ELEGY FOR LVIV AND STANISLAWÓW

by Joel Savishinsky

As Russia’s vicious attack on Ukraine continues, the western “safe haven” town of Lviv (top photo) is bracing itself to join the theatre of war. “We expect there could be an attack,” says Olga Myrovych, 34, head of the Lviv Media Forum. “We are far from Putin’s border, but this will distract the efforts of the Ukrainian army.” Lviv is a central European jewel, an exceptionally elegant town with a long history of culture and tragedy. —Institute for War & Peace Reporting, February 27, 2022. In the lower two photos, Ivano-Frankivsk (formerly Stanislawów), a city located in Western Ukraine, had its airport, fuel, and lubricants depots destroyed by the Russian missile systems. The city, formerly Stanisławów, is almost 600km away from Kyiv. With the city airport bombed, the people of Ivano-Frankivsk are being evacuated to bomb shelters. —SAYS, February 26, 2022.

The heart can be broken

in so many ways: lost love,

position, regard and address.

Janus is a novice when staring at

the diamond faces of disappointment.

 

We fear that even poetry may not

matter, that we have no voice, that

we have one but cannot be heard.

Shall we carry our broken hearts

before us like a banner, shouting

rage into the wind, using our mouths

and pens to signal from, or to,

a distant land.

 

When arms have been withheld,

can the body of words suffice

where other parts have failed, or

is hope already the disembodied

ghost of those about to die.

 

Crushed by the alien arms and armies,

the four-chambered heart of

our grandmothers’ homelands

may soon be a million lost freedoms,

the ones our leaders and

the whores of Babylon have each

mis-filed in the archives of revelation.

 

 

 

Joel Savishinsky is the author of Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America (Cornell University Press, 2002), winner of the Gerontological Society of America’s book of the year prize. His parents and grandparents, and those of his wife, immigrated to the US from western Ukraine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, escaping pogroms, anti-Semitism, and the impending invasion of the Nazis. Their communities of origin are named in the poem’s title.

THE TURTLE GAME

by Susan Terris

Kira Rudyk

In Ukraine, Kira Rudyk—member of Parliament—told

Wolf Blitzer on CNN, she has just been trained to use

a Kalashnikov rifle to help defend her city of Kyiv.

Our women, she said, will protect the soil same as our men.

Then she mentioned her young daughter. Instead of

trying to explain if/when/how/why Russians invade,

she teaches her child to play the game. If you know 

an attack’s imminent, you lie on your belly in the safest 

place that’s near. Hands on your ears, mouth open, 

 

so then you’re a turtle. It’s a don’t move/lie next to me/

pretend thing. As I watched, listened, tears slid down

my cheeks, and I thought for a moment that Kira was

the mother of my grandchildren, protecting them

with a Russian rifle and a game learned on the internet.

Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and 2 plays.  Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers  have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal.

THE OTHER NEW YORK

by Susana H. Case

A view shows a petrol station, which bears the name of New York in Donetsk Region, Ukraine March 3, 2021. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich. See also Wikipedia.

There is a town called New York in Ukraine.

Stalin gave it a Soviet name that didn't stick.

Many of its houses are empty,

along with the streets and parks.

Young people dream of leaving.

At the store in the town center,

they are out of bread.

In a room with balloons, a child

holds a chocolate and cherry birthday cake,

while the sound of gunfire blasts out

a few miles away. How naive we are

about power, profits—like children holding sparklers.

The few adults at the birthday party fret an errant 

artillery round might hit the chemical plant.

Even in peacetime, it spits out fumes 

from phenol production into the air. 

The streets are worn and tired.

Oh, New York: where is your Donetsk Times Square

full of excited tourists, your skyscrapers

that cause neck aches from people looking up in awe?

Where are your people—like in that other 

New York, the American one—who complain 

how much they suffer because the air is chilly,

the bus ten minutes late?

Susana H. Case has authored eight books of poetry, most recently The Damage Done (Broadstone Books, 2022). Dead Shark on the N Train (Broadstone Books, 2020) won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite, and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk and Cake Press, 2022).

LOVE THAT CANNOT LIVE LONG ENOUGH

by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis

Fact Check by Reuters, February 25, 2022: Photos of explosions show Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not Ukraine. Social media users have mislabeled images of overnight explosions in urban areas, claiming they are from Ukraine amid the Russian invasion. However, the images show the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Gaza Strip and were taken in 2018 and 2021. One picture (above by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images) shows Israeli air strikes on Gaza in response to a barrage of rockets fired by the Islamist movement Hamas amid spiraling violence sparked by unrest at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

Not long ago,

I was Kosovo,

then became Baghdad

by the river Tigris.

Then I turned into Syria

and Ukraine,

crippled and bled to death.

Only to wake up again,

without any eyes or limbs,

without any heart or soul.

And today, I'm Gaza,

covered in ashes.

 

And Kyiv—

siphoning rockets and bullets.

You can call me hatred

or hope that cannot die.

Or love that cannot live

long enough.

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is a Pushcart Prize nominated, Indian-American poet, writer, filmmaker, and author of four poetry collections. Her poetry, essays, and translations have appeared World Literature Today, Columbia Journal, California Quarterly, Indian Literature, Silk Routes Project (IWP) at The University of Iowa, and Stanford University's Life in Quarantine. Poems from her award-winning book Bare Soul and poetry film River of Songs included in the "Nova Collection" and the "Polaris Collection" Lunar Codex time capsules are set to go on the moon with NASA's missions" in 2022 and 2023. Forthcoming is her poetry collection Trespassing My Ancestral Lands.

PERSPECTIVE

by Marc Swan

“This is a relatively civilized” city, he says, referring to Kyiv, after saying it’s not like Iraq or Afghanistan. https://t.co/q6UEtwvzyZ

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 26, 2022

Each morning after an espresso

from our six-cup stovetop

with granola, yogurt and blueberries

in our favorite ceramic bowls

we review the news in the online sources

disheartening is a mild term

enlightening

sometimes

watching the world dissolve before our eyes

is unnerving, overwhelming, disjointing

first European invasion since WW II

how quickly we have forgotten invasions

in Gaza, Egypt, Lebanon, the Balkans, Africa, 

and points beyond and in between

today eastern and western economies 

have our attention

fuel prices, trade options, empty store shelves

car prices, building supplies, and yes

the list has only begun

we are interlocked in this chaotic world

of language differences, money differences

but most of all ideology differences

that create distrust, uncertainty, and taint

the taste of Pavé Toulousain cheese

we used to get

from the French farm outside Toulouse

and the crisp white Txakolina 

imported from the Pyrenees—

that once seemed so important 

Marc Swan, a retired vocational rehabilitation counselor, lives in coastal Maine. Poems recently published in Gargoyle, Crannóg, Chiron Review, Queen’s Quarterly, among others. His fifth collection all it would take was published in 2020 by tall-lighthouse (UK).

THE DAY BOMBING OF UKRAINE BEGAN, 2/24/22

by Julie Bolt

The old Kiev Restaurant on 7th Street in Greenwich Village; Allen Ginsberg and Quentin Crisp dining there.

It was always a point of debate:

Veselka, Kiev, or Ukrainian National Home

Veselka was busy and bright, 

Kiev was for neighborhood regulars early or late at night, 

UNH was to time travel into a Ukrainian  private club from another age

I loved them all, but especially Kiev 

For the best comfort food in Greenwich Village

And largest portions and lowest prices

And latest hours, the most tolerant waiters

However it was hard to decide whether to order a combo blintz and pierogi platter 

or assorted pierogi platter 

or potato pancakes

Real first world dilemma 

Ideally friends would share what they had

And then there was the challah of clouds with butter

And oh how the boys had crushes on the Ukrainian waitresses

And the head waiter flirted with my mom, cheeks flushed like borsht

And I went so often they sometimes gave me a free cherry blintz!

I knew through my Bulgarian pen pal how oppressive the Soviet Union was

I don’t remember if I thought much about whether the Kiev staff escaped oppression

But I remember that December 26, 1991 was a great day

I had just moved to Philadelphia then

So I could not celebrate at Kiev

I probably just ate a vegetable hoagie

Gorbachev had the map of peace on his head unlike Putin’s face of war

After Philly, I moved to New Mexico, Arizona and California

In 2005, I returned to NYC, ready to feast on Kiev’s sauerkraut pierogis slathered in apple sauce and fried onions

New ownership resulted in Ukrainian-Asian fusion, and small portions, 

aspiring to expensive tastes 

Sadly, Veselka acquired long NYU lines, 

So I decamped to The Ukrainian National Home

It wasn’t long before Kiev shut its doors forever

I will always mourn the closing of Kiev

I hope the owners did not miss the entire bright window of Ukraine’s democracy 

Where are they now?

What are they thinking today

as people flee Kyiv 

as Ukraine is bombed 

as Putin says the dissolution of the Soviet Union that we all lived through is a myth 

Our friends are dying in the crossfires of lies

The blue sky grows dark 

The yellow flowers burn

Julie Bolt is an associate professor of literature and writing at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. Recently, she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Transformative Learning in the Humanities. Her poems have appeared in Thieves Jargon, Slow Trains, The Red River Review, Poetic Diversity, Syntax, Shot Glass Journal and Home Planet News, amongst others. Her book is Border Pedagogy for Democratic Practice.

AFTER BOMBS DROP

by Bunkong Tuon

 

A piercing cry haunts the metro,

In the apartment building, in the dark.

 

Fear is a new word that’s given form in

This cry of a child, in the terrible terror

 

A father must feel when he sees 

Tanks and soldiers on the streets of his childhood,

 

In the hug of a mother, maybe a grandmother

Who holds the child as tightly as she can.

 

What else is there to say?

Everything seems trivial, unwise.

 

I send money through the links on NPR.

I send letters to elected officials.

 

I write poems like this one.

I do what I can to lessen my helplessness,

 

To soften the child’s piercing cry that 

Haunts my days and nights.

 

I hold my kids as tightly as 

They allow me. 

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of Gruel and And So I Was Blessed (both published by NYQ Books), The Doctor Will Fix It (Shabda Press), and Dead Tongue (a chapbook with Joanna C. Valente, Yes Poetry). He teaches at Union College, in Schenectady, NY.

A MOTHER FLEES

by Jack Kristiansen

            after Marc Chagall’s Fire in the Snow (1942) 

"Fire in the Snow" (1942); Gouache on paper by Marc Chagall. Collection: Amy and Eric Huck, Lewisberry, Pennsylvania

 

It’s human  

to start fires 

and every so often 

people approve   

of villages going up 

in flame 

so tonight 

a mother flees. 

 

Like a statue 

that’s come alive 

just in time  

to jump down 

from her perch 

above the altar, 

a mother flees. 

 

Having awoke 

to the coughing 

of her child, 

their house flickering, 

a mother flees. 

 

No crown 

on her head 

to hold in place 

her flaring hair, 

a mother flees. 

 

The night’s gone green, 

the snow green, 

her clothes smoky green. 

Her calm dog 

waiting for her 

to catch up, 

a mother flees. 

             

No husband 

in sight, 

the angels gone 

in disbelief, 

left with a son 

to save, 

a mother flees. 

 

Her child 

too heavy  

to carry far, 

a mother flees. 

Jack Kristiansen exists in the notebooks and computer files of William Aarnes who hopes to move soon from South Carolina to Manhattan.  His new collection The Hum in Human is available from Main Street Rag.

FAMILY DEBATE OVER KIMCHI

by Helen Wilson

We sit in a Korean BBQ restaurant

snipping conversation with tongs,

searing meat with commentary

on the political affairs of the day.

 

“They took pinking shears to

the religious discrimination bill... 

divisive

unworthy

tattered then

abandoned by a wayward man-child.”

 

Tender beef cuts melt

in the mouth while

kimchi sours

like first world ethos

 

only sweeter. We agree,

“Lies leave a nasty taste.”

Bald-faced lies

poison any hope of error. While

 

errors are forgivable

contempt and chilli sauce are not,

staining white flags

indelibly without hope of redress.

 

“Pure heat, not head

nor heart.” I say of

rapid fire policy and 

unfiltered visceral campaigning.

 

“Democracy’s disintegrating,

honour’s unhanded and

self-interest trumps

public good.”

 

“Nothing’s changed,” say the young ones,

as their fingers 

skip across tiny screens

at the speed of light.

 

“Pollies have always snuffled

from the trough

of populism.” 

such is their experience.

 

Defeated,

we wield chopsticks

and pierce the offerings

that we can control.

 

Distracted by 

the crazy patchwork

of dishes and sticks

and tastes and flames as

 

tanks roll across the tundra

and the blanket of peace

under which we hide rolls back.

“So much for perestroika and glasnost.”

 

Who ever really knows?

Helen Wilson is an Australian poet and a professional communicator who has written for magazines, art shows and a pure love of the lyrical. Her passions include ekphrastic poetry, haiku, and dinner with her adult children. She dreams of a world where people will play nicely. 

90TH BIRTHDAY IN KYIV

by Corey Weinstein

In just four weeks in the summer of 1941 the German Wehrmacht wrought unprecedented destruction on four Soviet armies, conquering central Ukraine and killing or capturing three-quarters of a million men. This was the battle of Kyiv–one of the largest and most decisive battles of World War II and, for Hitler and Stalin, a battle of crucial importance. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were taken in the aftermath of the battle of Kiev, but very few would survive German captivity. —Arthur Grimm, “Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East,” Semantic Scholar

I live in a breadbasket,

That’s the whole problem,

Fields of wheat, of barley

for the soup the family loves,

Carrots, onions, meat scraps

or beets for borscht that stains,

Blood reluctantly on our hands.

None of them: the Whites, the Reds,

the Iron Crossed Pure Whites,

the new Green with wallets and promises,

None of them know our voices,

taste our beautiful farms,

Now still again the Reds attack,

and we are stained again

with what must be done,

I was nine standing at the pit’s edge,

Some cheered, not me, some retched,

The ground heaved and belched for a week,

Father cooked their lunches, never recovered,

A drunk in Kyiv gutter dirty to the end.

Again the shrieks of bombs and moms,

Blasts and dust and blood in the air,

These Reds of famine and orders and lies

roll over our wintered earth to plant

their seeds of our despair, now still again.

Corey Weinstein is a retired homeopathic physician whose poetry has been published in Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Forum, California State Poetry Society, and Jewish Currents. He currently attends writing classes at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in San Francisco and hosts their Poetry Circle. Weinstein has also been published in a number of medical/academic publications. He was an advocate for prisoner rights as the founder of California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he plays the clarinet in a local jazz band, his synagogue choir and woodwind ensembles.  

WINTER BREAK

by Katie Kemple

On my Instagram feed, one family

posts smiling photos from ski slopes,

snowy white backgrounds that match

perfect teeth. Another family travels

to a tropical paradise: bikinis, blue

waters and palm trees. And then, a

photo of a family packing their car

trunk in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Coats

on and loading plastic bags of their

belongings. What to leave? Baby teeth,

cleats, a wedding dress. The oven's

set to nothing for the winter. The clock

goose steps the seconds forward.

Each last look like a photo now,

the kind on film with limited takes. 

Katie Kemple's poems have appeared in recent issues of Atlanta Review, Ligeia Magazine, and The Shore. 

POEM FOR A RUSSIAN SOLDIER

by Jesse Dukes

Written on the Eve of the Invasion of Kyiv

A dead Russian soldier in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Credit: Tyler Hicks, The New York Times.

I believe you know right from wrong. Go back.

You polish your boots, oil your gun.

Watch dispatches from your blue-eyed master.

Brew tea with thyme in your uncle’s samovar.

Brought back from Afghanistan, in dead of winter.

Better drink it now, while it’s still warm.

 

It is cold in Donetsk. In your uncle’s house, it’s warm.

Do you think marching west will bring glory back?

Renew a once terrible empire, melt Russian winter?

Will you do something useful with that gun?

Nikita knew to stay close to the samovar

Who is more clever, master or Man?

 

You are a man who needs no master.

Your uncle’s house is already warm .

You have tea, lemon, an ancient samovar.

You have Tolstoy, Checkov, Lermontov. Back

Home, you have a madman.  On your mantle, he’s placed a gun.

He’s sent you to Ukraine in winter

But you are the French at Borodino, fighting the winter.

You are the Germans in Stalingrad, sent by their master.

Too far from home never firing their guns.

Dying forgetting the comfort of warmth.

Ukraine is no enemy. You can still go back

Find your uncle, fire the stove, fill his samovar.

 

You know the story, Vasily leaves the Samovar.

Plunges back into the very teeth of winter.

And when he realizes his danger, it’s too late to turn back.

And what kind of master would leave a man

Stranded in the cold, without a way to stay warm?

Do you mean to kill winter with a gun?

 

You still have a choice. The gun

May yet stay on the mantle. The samovar

May yet fill the house with steam and warmth.

You and your fellow soldiers cannot defeat winter.

But you can defeat your master, just a man.

You still have a choice. Go Back

 

Stay warm despite the winter.

Heat the samovar, heed no master

Take your gun and go back.

Author’s Note: I wrote this over dinner last night, thinking about Tolstoy's Master and Man, and "Checkov's Gun". I love Russian culture, Russian history, and the Russian people I've met, and I hope they'll find their way to the right path. 

Jesse Dukes is a Senior Producer of Podcasts at WBEZ, Chicago Public Media. Twitter: @CuriousDukes

WHEN GOVERNOR ABBOTT DECRIES GENDER-TRANSITIONING AS CHILD ABUSE

by Remi Recchia

 

I call my doctor and tell him, I don’t want to be a man 

today. Detransitioning? No. I mean I don’t want to be alive 

 

in a place that thinks my heart strings are puppeteered, that I am  

a marionette genetically modified for road rage, sex drive, alcoholic 

 

tendencies. That I don’t want the pharmacy tech to stare extra 

hard at my driver license on a routine prescription pickup. 

 

That I don’t want to blush when drunk friends ask: 

tampon or jockstrap? Because they’re not asking, are they? 

 

The dive-bar dust on their credit cards will remind them later 

that yes, it was rude, but they were drunk, and they have a right 

 

to know who their friends are, their dates are, what I 

will expect them to suck or fuck. 

 

Greg Abbott isn’t asking why the children want to change, 

he’s asking why they’d want to look like that. 

 

Like a man in a dress or a woman who’s been mutilated 

from the inside out, breasts carved off by a butcher’s 

 

knife or by a tree when she lurched in the wrong direction 

at the shout of “timber,” wearing, presumably, a flannel  

 

button-up under a leather jacket. Like a turtle without its shell 

or a ring-tailed lemur without its jewels. But if Greg Abbott 

 

asked me, I’d tell him, what kind of parents agree to HRT 

in the first place? What kind of parents say, yes, I trust you 

 

to grow a beard you won’t regret? Maybe our mothers  

are lovely and our fathers are brave, but I have always been alone 

 

and I have always made my own choices. I’d tell Greg Abbott 

that sometimes a law is just a word and abuse is a red 

 

herring for an onslaught of transphobic legislature, an actual 

school of fish with teeth and fish with fins, and who, now, 

 

can win against the slaughter.     

Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021); his forthcoming chapbook Sober will be published with Red Bird Chapbooks in 2022. 

THE END OF HOPE

by Joan Leotta

Somewhere in Ukraine, a child

measures her steps to school wondering

if her home will be standing

when the last bell rings,

if her parents will be safe if bombs fall,

if her school can shelter her

and her friends in the basement,

if she can find and reach her parents

should rubble, smoke fill her town.

Each time Putin spews out

his verbal assaults her hope erodes.

 

I know this because in October, 1961

when Castro fired verbal assaults

bragging on the power of his Soviet missles,

I lived in a likely-to-be targeted town.

As I climbed each of the 150 steps

From the bus stop to the top of the hill

To reach the gothic doors of the

1930s building that was my school,

I stopped on each step to pray

that we would all be safe,

and above all, that

my mother who

worked miles east from our home

and my father who worked

miles west from there

would find me and we would

face together

whatever terror Castro inflicted.

Each day my hope eroded, restored

when we escaped the physical horror

all those years ago.

 

But this morning, February 24, 2022

that Ukrainian child’s hope is gone

in a mudslide of fears made real,

playing out with troops and

air strikes and people rushing

about in fear. Her hope ended, I

hope for her that no matter what, her family

will remain together, sheltering

each other with their love.

 

Author's Note: This poem has been in my heart for several days. Yesterday’s New Yorker article "The Crushing Loss of Hope in Ukraine" put the words in my pen, and today’s news from all sources about the invasion gave the ending lines.

Author and story Performer Joan Leotta is the author of the poetry collection Languid Lusciousness with Lemon. And she is offering her chapbook Gifts of Nature for free at this link.

THE ARTIST

by Louise Wilford

Covered in red and blue graffiti, the toppled statue of British politician Edward Colston, who enslaved tens of thousands of people, stood in the city of Bristol, UK for more than 100 years before it was pulled down by angry protesters during a wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the country last summer—after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Demonstrators used rope to tug the statue from its stone plinth and their bare hands to roll it through the streets and into the murky waters of a nearby harbor as onlookers cheered. Others chanted “Black Lives Matter,” in solidarity with those across the Atlantic dealing with issues of police brutality, systemic racism and complex histories. —The Washington Post, June 4, 2121

She painted Love on a garage roof,

in throbbing streaks of purple-red, the convolutions of a colon.

Sprayed Birth inside a canal bridge arch–metallic mist of bronze and copper,

cream and jungle green—its colours glowing loud as we moved

closer. Joy on a fire-damaged caravan, in orange streaks, fading

at their edge to silver fairy-dust against a woodland midnight.

 

Paintings drifted off around the tow –first drafts, discarded

—or maybe gifts, or threats. A wisp of air, she moved

about the streets, unseen save for the spores that trailed behind,

hand-prints on lamp-posts, splashes on a fence, office windows

and abandoned cars. Tragedy in a bus shelter, thick brown strokes

with an uneven brush; Bliss rolled up a shutter’s sides in jolting yellow

stripes; the turquoise-blue of Hope rubbed on the bricks of an abandoned

warehouse—and Innocence, black as a crow’s wing, sprawling, smug, along

a dry-stone wall.   

 

On the beech-tree avenue in the park, she painted the stretch of Life,

from gold to god, each stage a different tree. Her colours startled

like a kestrel’s swoop, on bollards, awnings, road signs, multi-storey

concrete car-parks. On a crossing, she painted the white stripes shocking

pink. She filled the holes of letters with tiny dots like grains inside an hour-glass;

 

scrawled a Nightmare on an underpass, a Daydream on a council refuse bin;

Ambition on the tall side of a Tesco van, Destruction on the shovel of a JCB.

Peace, soft as sand, perched on picnic tables. She spread her peacock tail

so the hues that churned inside her could escape, Tenderness like a swirl

of oil on a puddle, blood-red Anger, bile-green Envy, the pewter-grey

of Misery, and the sharp vermilion ache of Fear, vinegar shiny as a magpie

feather. Shades and shadows, grit and silk and dust and grease, stirred

and shifted, blended and erased.

 

Until one day, she drenched with the fishbone-white of Death,

a statue of a man whose alchemy created gold from blood and bone.

This man of stone had swaggered in that square for a hundred and fifty years.

Her colours now were spent. She hiccuped out a final few beige coughs,

a gentle sneeze that left a cloud of baby-pink dancing in the sun—and then,

with a flap of her wings, she left.

 

Louise Wilford lives in Yorkshire, UK. Her work has been widely published, most recently in Bandit, English Review, Goats’ Milk, Jaden, Makarelle, POTB, The Fieldstone Review, and Parakeet. In 2020, she won the Arts Quarterly Short Story Prize, the Merefest Poetry Prize, and was awarded a Masters in Creative Writing (Distinction). She is working on a children’s fantasy novel.

WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON

by Gail White

Explosions in Kyiv heard live on air https://t.co/JGLvh4k8tX

— HectorM (@JaguarVer) February 24, 2022

All times are times of impending doom,

If one knows how to read the signs.

But old gods walk through the living room

And lay down nets and fishing lines.

Clutching the mesh, I begin to seek

Wonders and signs I’ve let slip by:

The fish impaled on the heron’s beak

Miraculous as the butterfly.

Between war and depression the end will come.

With plague and famine we take our chance.

But the cat moves her kittens one last time,

And the sandhill crane does a mating dance.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

LAST RIGHTS

by A.M. Juster

Nearly a quarter of Americans say it's sometimes OK to use violence against the government—and 1 in 10 Americans say violence is justified "right now." That's the finding of a new report by The COVID States Project, which asked 23,000 people across the country whether it is "ever justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government?" The report is one of several in recent months that find people more likely to contemplate violent protests than they had been in the past. Christian Davenport, a professor at the University of Michigan and a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, is… circumspect. While the numbers are "not especially surprising," Davenport said he's "not a fan of the use of polls exclusively" to determine a populace's potential for violence. "Individuals will say a great number of things on a poll," he said, "but never show up for anything." Photo: Trump supporters climb the west wall of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. —NPR, January 31, 2022

I hear them in their future seminars

propounding theories about our fall

that may well make them academic stars,

but make no sense at all,

and yet, if I were there instead of dead,

I could not mount a lively refutation

to what those unborn experts will have said, 

but would just vent frustration.

As when deflated praetors palmed off keys

to Rome on Goths they labelled "primitive,"

our leaders, cultures and democracies

became diminutive.

It never seemed it had to be this way,

and we were calm as strongmen made us weak.

There was still time. We knew what we should say.

Too many did not speak.

A.M. Juster’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Hudson Review. His eleventh book will be published by W.W. Norton next year.

WHEN FREEDOM'S SAKE IS MUCH THE SAME AS HEAVEN'S

by David L Williams 

after "Sonnet 19: On His Blindness,” by John Milton

“And that one Talent which is death to hide . . .”

Dave Granlund cartoon originally published March 7, 2014!

When I consider how our country’s spent

In darkness by near half its population,

I fear that our once enviable nation,

With lost regard for civil government,

Is now deprived of any common sense

And blindly on the road to self damnation

Unless we find a way to restore reason,

Ceasing to stoke these vain and would-be tyrants,

I have to ask myself if this was meant

By founders who insisted all are equal

And fought a war to prove that this is true,

Defeating enemies who stood against

The principle that all our sovereign people

Are equally entitled to self rule.

David L Williams is recently retired from 34 years teaching high school English in Lincoln, Nebraska, his primary residence since he went to college there in the 80s. His poetry has mostly been written since May of 2021, and he has only recently started trying to publish, with success already in several publications, including The New Verse News. 

2022 WINTER OLYMPICS

by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei

Read: "What Uyghur Americans Want You to Know about the Olympic Games" from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

As the wIntér oLympics cLOSE for 2022,

the Covid Bubble popped, and Xi Jinping’s Beijing fling’s through,

the teams returned, some to their lands where real snow oft occurs,

remembering the food and quarantines with heartfelt stirs.

Though typical concerns and controversies happened still,

false starts, missed calls, falls, dope disquals, and jumpsuits on the hills,

the WINter Games participants were “free” and far from strife,

Tibet, HongKong and Xinjiang. There was no loss of life.

Bing Dwen Dwen, frozen in his space clothes, with his constant smile,

embodying ice purity, has waved good-bye in style.

 

Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is poet of China, an anagrammatic heteronym of Bruce Dale Wise. “Reed ABCs” is his art name (hào).

EASTERN UKRAINE POEM

by Indran Amirthanayagam

                               for Ilya

The town is not amused. Bombs have been dropping

every ten minutes and thousands of women and children

have already fled, but Ilya's cousin on the Zoom call

keeps insisting on calm. What gives? I wish I could

shift the debate to my own little conflict, lobbing

poems into cyberspace and expecting the fallout

to give some clues about diction and meter, the finishing

couplet. Once again, my poem shifts to a discourse

about me and my proclivities.What about those family

members on the trains? What about the fellow trying

to pacify his cousin via Zoom? What about the soldier

on the border wrapped in an overcoat carrying a rifle?

Is he really able to fight in the modern theater against

the satellite-beamed remote killing device?

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube.

INTIMIDATION AND BLACKMAIL FOR THE PURPOSE OF TAKING OVER THE WORLD

by Terese Coe

Watch for the multiple rows of replacement teeth,

the not-unfair comparison to sharks,

the antipathies that betray the territorial,

the sonar for the nascent dictatorial.

 

Terese Coe’s poems, prose, and translations appear in The New Verse News, Agenda, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Classical Outlook, Cyphers, Hopkins Review, Metamorphoses, The Moth, New American Writing, New Scotland Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Stone Canoe, Threepenny Review, the TLS, and many other international publications. Her book Shot Silk was short-listed for the 2017 Poets Prize, and her poem “More” was heli-dropped across London in the 2012 Olympics Rain of Poems. Giorno Poetry Systems, West Chester Poetry Conference, Barnstone Translation Award, and others have awarded her prizes or honors and scholarships.

THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HOUSE LAVATORY

by Peter Nohrnberg

Now gather round, and ye shall hear

A tale of epic daring

About a King who tweeted lots  

But wasn’t into sharing.   

 

Forsooth it was a vile Act

That drove him into battle:

“Preserve all Records” Congress bade;

But records are known to tattle. 

 

At first he simply tore them up

But a Northern Plot took shape.

Foul thanes restored his mangled foes,

mended with Scotch tape. 

 

A vision came to aid the King

—O I fear my rhyme shall spoil it!—

To gather up his papers dear 

And take them to the toilet.

 

Now he himself sat on a throne

Of 24 karat gold,

But in the White House was installed

A porcelain commode. 

 

Notes, memos, logs, and Post-its too

In basin he did pitch.

A smirk upon his face, quoth he:

“Toilets never snitch!”

                                   

He flushed it once, he flushed it twice,

He cursed the gods above!

And with his little stubby hands

He gave a forceful shove.

 

Who knows what knowledge then was lost?

A proof of Fermat’s theorem?

Evidence of Electoral Fraud?

A Covid-19 serum? 

 

What was wiped out I cannot tell:

Mum’s the Orange Mandarin.

Destruction worse than what befell

The Library Alexandrian! 

 

The doughty deed now done he left

The toilet overflowing.

He soared above the effluvia,

POTUS the All-Knowing.

 

And yet he did not know when he

Flushed it all down the crapper,

That squatting in the stall next door

Was CNN’s Jake Tapper! 

 

Out burst the newsman, overwhelmed

By fast approaching flood,

He saw the thickening of the tide

And sensed it was not mud!

 

“Who brought on this catastrophe,

Who took this massive dump?” 

The scales then fell from Jacob’s eyes:

It only could be T***p.

 

For clinging to the leather sole

Of the shoe of Squire Tapper:

A doodle of two giant boobs

On a McDonalds wrapper.

 

It was the flush heard round the world,

Except in Mar-a-Lago.

About his deed he’ll tell no tales

Just like good old Iago.    

 

‘Tis true, ‘tis true the Don is dumb,

But everyone else is dumber;

He even one-upped Tricky Dick

By being his own Plumber!

A scholar of literary modernism, cultural critic, and poet, Peter Nohrnberg’s poems and essays have appeared in Southwest Review, Notre Dame Review, The Wisconsin Review, Oxford Poetry, and Public Seminar. His poem “Pantoum After a School Shooting” was awarded second place in the 2020 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. His essay “Joyce, Irish Photography, and the Making and Publicizing of National, Familial, and Authorial Images" is forthcoming in Joyce Studies Annual 2021.

SOUL

by Frank John Edwards

It must be that something is broke,

When the sermons that Jesus once spoke,

Would land him in trouble

In some Christians’ bubble

For being excessively woke.

Frank John Edwards is a former military helicopter pilot, now a writer and physician living in rural New York. He has had poems published in various journals including the Virginia Quarterly Review.

A SOLITARY MAN

by Mary K O'Melveny

For the past 27 years, Dennis Wayne Hope (above) has been in a Texas prison cell that is somewhere between the size of an elevator and a compact parking space. For one hour, seven days per week, or two hours, five days per week, he is let out to exercise—alone—in another small enclosure. The only people he comes into contact with are the guards who strip search and handcuff him. The last personal phone call he had was in 2013 when his mother died. More than a quarter-century in isolation has led him to hallucinations, chronic pain and thoughts of suicide. Solitary confinement is a sanitized term for torture. Mr. Hope, 53, whose plight was described by the New York Times, has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case on the grounds that his prolonged isolation is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s bar against cruel and unusual punishment. Lower courts denied Mr. Hope’s petition and court observers are skeptical the Supreme Court will take up his case. So sure are Texas officials that the court, with its conservative majority, won’t agree to hear the case that they waived their right to respond to Mr. Hope’s petition for a writ of certiorari. —The Washington Post, February 16, 2022

For twenty-seven years,

I have not seen a bird’s shadow.

Nor felt a droplet of rain.

No one has touched me

save the guards who strip-search

me to take me to an indoor

cubicle for solitary weekly

exercise. They do hold my hands,

to fix them to steel handcuffs

required for our walks down

cement block hallways of a

Texas prison. In 2013, I received

my only telephone call.

My mother was dead.

 

Last month, my lawyers asked

the Supreme Court to weigh

the parameters of punishment,

to tell me if unusualness or

cruelty come to their minds

in circumstances such as mine.

Some say prison focuses one’s

viewpoint. If it tends toward

the myopic, there is good reason.

I would ask them to focus

their eyes on distant objects –

a task I can no longer perform

because my narrowed world

affords no view of light or distance.

A compact car would be too large

to park in my 6x9 foot cell.

 

Next, I would ask them to consider

how vocal cords can atrophy,

as muscle, ligament, mucosal

tissue diminish from lack of use.

I did not take a vow of silence

when I entered this place

but my voice has hollowed

as its volume faded and its pitch

turned to a thin reed-like whisper.

At first, I talked to myself. Even

sang. But soon enough, I was

not enough. Words failed me.

Now, my head aches constantly.

My heart pounds, my pulse races

as if I was running up a mountainside.

But all I do is sit on my metal slab

or stand and watch walls wave, shift

as though a fan was moving them

like air. Sometimes, demon spirits peek

through wearing pinpricks of light.

 

Some say if you do the crime,

you can’t complain about the time.

But duration and despair should not be one.

I do not sleep. I have no sense of space

or stage. My brain must work overtime

to construct reality from scant available

signals. I read about a 1950’s experiment

on rhesus macaque monkeys. After thirty

days of isolation, they turned away from

social interaction, became disconsolate.

Each day I remember less.    Less.

I hope the Justices will answer me

while I still know my name. While I can

still name most things I have lost.  

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

ON THE EVE OF THE RUSSIAN INVASION

by David Radavich

They amass at the border

as giant snakes and roaches,

men and their killing

machines, poised

to overrun the resistant

creatures of democracy.

 

Every weapon developed

by man is turned toward

usurpation and control,

as if that could solve

anyone’s need,

historic or personal.

 

Imagine the soldiers

in their invented cause

testing the firing pins,

adjusting the angles, feeding

the first ammunition.

 

Imagine the potential 

victims, defiant, sure 

of their innocence, 

not wanting to be yoked

like pliant oxen

at the master's gate

 

Imagine when the war

happens, its final destruction,

random death, a quagmire

of duty and egos in mud

doing battle like scorpions.

 

We wait with mental

swords drawn to cut what?—

air with our hopes

and expectations that cross

before us against the sun.

Among David Radavich's poetry collections are two epics, America Bound and America Abroad, as well as Middle-East Mezze and The Countries We Live In.  His latest book is Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun: German and English Poems from Deutscher Lyrik Verlag (2022).