by Maia Justine Storm
as they waited for the UN to help,
my Burmese friends said
coop for coup
and vocalized both the b’s in bomb
i knew what they meant
i was too sad to correct them
five years later, caught
between
the cruelty of two dictators,
one here, one there,
they ask for legal guidance
yet once more, sadness gets
in the way
as Nurul Amin Shah Alam
dies, not in Arakan, but here,
not from genocide
but from cruelty of a lesser,
still homicidal, degree
Maia Justine Storm is a 78-year-old woman living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has been an immigration attorney for 25 years and has returned to her adolescent dream of being a poet. Most recently, she has been published in Poetry Superhighway where she was a Poet of the Week, haikuniverse, Antifa Lit Journal, The Mersey Review, and in forthcoming issues of Procrastinating Writers United and Thema.
