A VIEW OF ISIS’S EVOLUTION IN NEW DETAILS OF PARIS ATTACKS

by Mary Leonard

A VIEW OF ISIS’S EVOLUTION IN NEW DETAILS OF PARIS ATTACKS. A wounded man was evacuated at the Bataclan concert hall during the Paris attacks in November. Investigators hope the arrest of Salah Abdeslam will shed new light on the assaults. Photo credit: Yoan Valat/European Pressphoto Agency via NY Times, March 19, 2016

                         While reading the Sunday Times on my daughter's birthday

"He turned and looked at the people,  and with a
 smirk, apologized and blew himself up."

It matters that you notice the bulky layers,
the anorak with fur collar on a warm night.

It matters that you go through security, open
your backpack, the trunk of your car, be

Frisked, attention, TATP, bombs, answer personal questions.
I'll tell you this: notice him, her, everyone

Alone. Do you understand? That one.
Attention must be paid. This one.

"TATP bombs require real training,
a skilled bomb maker," A Start Up

Bomb Factory? something for your
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?

It matters that you notice, the absence
No phone, the blank stare, nothing

"Forget small scale attacks," a senior
ISIS said, "hit everyone and everything."

You must pay attention. Your life matters.
Your child matters. Her school matters.

Be wary of men in tracksuits with logos
of nearby teams. Be wary what their

Hats say.  Notice if they look so calm
they'd accept ball bearings inside their flesh

Listen to me, this is your mother
speaking. The world is not

safe. The world is not
an oyster here for the taking.

Forget the sound of waves,
the smell of salt, all the sweet flowers

Where? Long time asking . . . 
And I will ask, Where have they gone.

Mary Leonard has published chapbooks at 2River, Pudding House, Antrim House Press, and RedOchreLit. Her poetry has appeared in The Naugatuck Review, Hubbub, Cloudbank, The Chronogram, Blotterature and most recently in Red River, Ilya's Honey, and A Rat's Ass. She lives in an old school house overlooking the Rondout Creek in Kingston, NY.  Away from her own personal blackboard, she teaches writing workshops for all ages through the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College

I AM FROM A TURBULENT WORLD

by Elizabeth S. Wolf




I am from Paris.
I am drinking café,
watching football, screaming
along with the band.
I am from Beirut, being
bombed for what I am not.
I am from Jerusalem, being
stabbed for who I am
and who I love.
I am from Abu Ghraib
and some callow American youth
has me down on all fours, wearing
a leash for a dog.
I am back from Iraq
home in Colorado Springs
gunned down at
Planned Parenthood.
I am from Bangladesh, being
hacked by an axe for blogging a story.
I am a young man from New Hampshire
beheaded for trying to understand
the story to tell.
I am from San Bernadino and I go to
a special school where today
we were having a party when
the bad men burst in.
I am from Sandy Hook Elementary School.
I am from kindergarten, learning
the belly of a ‘b’ goes this way
and the belly of a ‘d’ goes that way
and bullets go everywhere.
I am from Syria but I am
running for my life and if I
do not die along the way,
I don’t know where I will arrive.
I am the truth, fractured into
thousands of brilliant faceted carats.
I am the glare so bright that one
sliver of truth is blind to
all of the others.

I am from Paris. I am
the unnamed young man towing
a piano, by bicycle, so that I can play
John Lennon’s “Imagine”
in front of the Bataclan Theater.
I am the hope that someday you will join us
and the world will live as one.


Elizabeth S. Wolf has previously published poems in local anthologies (Merrimac Mic: Gleanings from the First Year; 30 Poems in November 2014; Amherst Storybook Project). She lives in MA and maintains a day job as a Technical Metadata Librarian.

EXTREMIS

by Carol Alexander

Your voice in Saint-Germain-de-Prés is pastis
in a glass of fog, held by an invisible hand.
How phrase this in a nomenclature vivid
as a lipstick smeared at the bar?

In the hotel lobby, Arab girls and boys
praise a wine never to be served
and potted palms are sleeping, curled and dry.

That great beast, the wind, noses pavements
soaked in blood that dries before the world's eyes.
Raised on every bridge are unwavering lights
where once smoked oil lamps strung on narrow streets.

My camera pinches off lanterns and loaves,
a pink dress hung in the galleries
while your meeting, not to be postponed,
is soup and cigarettes under martial law.

Dogs off-leash bare teeth and wheel
at the unfamiliar smells of men.
Muted leaves that missed their moment
when September made an oven of the streets
mostly now have fallen into loam.

I've a little forgotten disaster in these months;
it could be the sound of wind through husks
or a tremulous breath breaking in mid-song.


Carol Alexander's poems have appeared in such journals as Bluestem, Caesura, Canary, The Common, Chiron Review, Illya's Honey, Mad Hatter's Review, Mobius, TheNewVerse.News, Poetry Quarterly, Poetrybay, Red River Review, The San Pedro River Review, Sugar Mule, THEMA and Zymbol, as well as in various anthologies including Through a Distant Lens (WriteWing Publishing) for which she received the award for best poem, and Proud to Be, for which she was a poetry finalist. Alexander's chapbook, Bridal Veil Falls, was published by Flutter Press (2013).  Recent work appears in Split Rock Review and Clementine Poetry Journal.

DOWN IN THE GRIT OF MUSIC NOTES

by Anna Hawthorne

Down in the grit of music notes, a drop of blood lay drying
though soon another concert would flow, becoming more than a tide
why did they shoot the messenger here
when all we wanted was to dance
a pitterpatter firecracker they thought, while glancing at their cell phones for news
of an impending storm . . . low pressure was sensed yet not obeyed
and they ran for the nearest door with a ringing sound delayed, a resonating hover over the empty stage


Anna Hawthorne is a conservationist, birder, and a painter working on a book about the extinction of birds.

SCOURING

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

COLORADO SPRINGS — A gun battle erupted inside a Planned Parenthood center here on Friday when a man armed with an assault-style rifle opened fire and began shooting at officers as they rushed to the scene. The authorities reported that three people were killed, a police officer and two civilians, and nine were wounded before the suspect finally surrendered more than five hours after the first shots were fired. —NY Times, Nov. 27, 2015. Photo by ISAIAH J. DOWNING/REUTERS via NY Times

I cannot leave while the wind sings in its cold November voice, exercising spruce limbs above the roof, full of spirits and souls perfecting their escapes: my husband’s colleague, the Paris dead,
unmourned strangers caught up, baffled.

Wind is not what they imagined. Always alive, it blows songbirds from the sills. Smashes streetlights and scatters the shards like leaves.

Below in the ugly solid house, cats sleep on quilts, still, while limbs thrash, cross themselves. Wind is the terrorist with no intention: unequal heating of the earth’s surface, dared by anemometers to blow harder.

Spider webs inside the window and the window tremble. Ghosts of people I once loved make room for the freshly dead. The sound of a train with the force of a bomb lifts our jackets then our bodies and snatches flesh from our faces.

Unsaid fury and unspoken endearments, wind is the thunder of my body breaking up like river ice and letting go. Lost souls from anywhere on the globe pluck at the sleeves of  the living. I am what you will be.  This whirlwind tears boats from their slips, clothes from the line, hope from the future.

Today’s gale prefaces snow with no regard for our journeys; it smoothes our problems into a dull continuous roar and cleanses them of impurities. They return to us, still problems but smoother, speaking a language we don’t understand.


Elizabeth Kerlikowske reports here from time to time on the news here and there.

THE MOURNING AFTER 11/13/15

by Don Hogle

Image source: The Hip Paris Blog by Carin Olsson

On the bus to Lambertville this morning,
and the sadness and anger at 129 dead in Paris
hang over a stunning fall day
like the last note of the piano
concerto I heard last night,
Trifonov's delicate finger
barely grazing the key,
the lightest vibration, and then
the lingering silence…

What does it sound like
when a life dissolves?

Boucler Votre Ceinture
Abroche Su Cinturón de Seguridad
Fasten Your Seatbelt
the seat in front of me advises.

Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo
Atocha Station
Tower One Tower Two

No strap of nylon web will protect
us against the Promise of Paradise
and a Kalishnikov, the explosive
strapped to the heart, the Pilot
of the Terrible Belief.

What to do
is not a question
but a dilemma
set down in an open field
not for contemplation
nor consideration
nor inspection
but for interrogation.

For now,
three pieces of construction paper
one blue one white one red
taped to the window
of my living room
facing out onto our world,
and a black rectangle
posted on Facebook
pour la France,
for all of us,
but only
for three days.

Most of the trees are already stripped
here, but the green grass of central Jersey
rolls on, as the bus proceeds
toward Frenchtown.


Don Hogle is a poet, blogger and brand and communications strategist living in Manhattan.  Poems have appeared recently in Mud Season Review, Minetta Review, Blast Furnace, Shooter, Bethlehem Writers Roundtable and TheNewVerse.News among others.  He was a finalist in the Northern Colorado Writers’ 2015 Poetry Contest. 

PARIS/BEIRUT

by Leslie Prosterman

A relative of Samer Huhu, who was killed in a twin bombing attack that rocked a busy shopping street in the area of Burj al-Barajneh, waves his portrait as she mourns during his funeral in the southern suburb of the capital Beirut on November 13, 2015. Lebanon mourned 44 people killed in south Beirut in a twin bombing claimed by the Islamic State group, the bloodiest such attack in years, the Red Cross also said at least 239 people were also wounded, several in critical condition. —JOSEPH EID/GETTY IMAGES via TheWorldPost, Nov. 16, 2015

all afternoon I defined massacre shambles abbatoir
then resorted to the binary
the   they did we did       the done to will do
the right the wrong    the dark the light    the lash the gun the bomb
contracted to one straight line:  
fear to rage to hate to kill to make a them that isn't me.

but by the night I was reminded
of the spaciousness
of the unclosed curve
of the infinite horizon

May we live with uncovered hearts
May that which binds our hearts be dissolved

into the widest possible compass of us


Author’s note: Thanks to John Travis for the lovingkindness meditation.


Leslie Prosterman, author of the book Snapshots and Dances (Garden District Press, 2011) and other poems in various journals and collections, recently collaborated with composer Charley Gerard to set her poem FluteBone Song to music, now out on CD (Songs of Love and Passion).  A former academic, she is also a sometime student of trapeze.

WATCHING CABLE NEWS

by Alan Catlin

Watching Cable News,
Bomb victims wrapped
in trauma bags, triage
in process.

Recurring file footage,
am man still wrapped,
lately among the missing,
the injured, talking on
a cell phone, gesturing.

How odd to see a
continual man, dressed
this way, no longer part
of the medical scene

We, as watchers, are
caught in the video replay
world, must recalibrate
our thinking: this is not
some Hannibal Lechter
rewind movie but Paris,
France, today, in the midst
of a terror attack.


Alan Catlin has published numerous chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and prose, the latest of which, from March Street Press, is Alien Nation.

I WANT TO WRITE A POEM FOR PARIS

by Bayleigh Fraser

A memorial at La Belle Equipe restaurant, one of the sites of the attacks in Paris on Friday night. Credit Lionel Bonaventure/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via NY Times, November 14, 2015

But I don’t want to hear its ragged shots
of reason, the uncertain billowing of its curtain.

No explaining an ocean rippling cracked glass,
where faces have vanished under a sun

only desiring to burn, or reflect itself
in each thing it touches. There is no poem

rising from the soundless terror of hashtags:
asking for God’s ear, an illuminated tower

searches for satellites. Prayers. Paused players.
Foot approaching the bass pedal. Gunmetal.

I want to open sounds so I can understand them.
The words only thought in my head as I read them.

Like fireworks, someone says, and he was gone
and so was she, falling into their own echoes.

And what can I say, showing up in the distance,
with only tremors in my hands, still warm with breath?


Bayleigh Fraser is an American poet currently residing and writing in Canada. She attended Stetson University in Deland, Florida and plans to continue her education in Canada. Her poems have appeared in A Bad Penny Review, Artemis Journal, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Hart House Review, The Lake, One, Rattle and other publications.

OBLIVIOUS

by Sarah Edwards

The relatives of one of the victims of the twin suicide attacks in Beirut mourned during a funeral procession in the city's Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood. Credit Wael Hamzeh/European Pressphoto Agency via “Beirut, Also the Site of Deadly Attacks, Feels Forgotten” by ANNE BARNARD, NY Times, Nov. 13, 2015.

oblivious

to the smoke
of a thousand towers
babel to trade

oblivious

to blood-stained
family legacies
adam to al qaeda

oblivious

to tears
mothers searching
golgotha to nicaragua

oblivious

to sacrifice
of martyrs
joan to martin

we play our games
repeat the poem
change the names

oblivion


Sarah Edwards is a retired clergyperson with poetry replacing the pulpit.  She has a newly released chapbook,  Pandora, Let's Talk, published by Finishing Line Press, and other poems have appeared in Conclave, Minerva Rising, Slim, and TheNewVerse.News.  

NIGHT RATS

by Carolyn Gregory

At night, they run toward each other,
biting off each other's tails.

They flagellate themselves
over an unknown God
who answers none of their prayers
for work, land or hope.

Hiding during the day,
they are aroused by the need
for meat at night,

their prayers not inspired by love
but by the drill to capture,
biting off the heads of the enemy
and spitting out their hearts.


Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Main Street Rag, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ygdrasil, Seattle Review. Her first and second books were published by Windmill Editions in Florida.