by Alice Campbell Romano
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| Photo of @AdamParkhomenko’s family trapped in Ukraine. |
Face what you have to face. Chop onions. Let your
eyes sting for the kitchen screen where a city is rubble,
nothing stands, all the ground is chunks of bricks
and stones, a wreckage more extreme even than the
leavings of a tornado the TV showed you last hour.
What does it profit an autocrat, an absolutist,
unless that his obliteration is more terrible than a work
of nature. I am that I am, God the destroyer. Onions
sauté now with sliced red peppers in a little olive oil.
You feel so feeble. But you don’t flip the remote to
California’s Gold. You add the chicken tenders, while a
newscaster tells you what you know. Children starve.
Alice Campbell Romano is a New Yorker who spent more than a decade in Italy, adapting Italian movie scripts into English. Her work has been published in print journals and online, most recently by Willows Wept Review and Ekphrastic Review's Starry Starry Night Anthology; this week in Prometheus Dreaming and forthcoming in Beyond Words.