REMEMBERING CATASTROPHE

by Anita Lerek

“The Lost Library Forest,” a painting by Luis Peres

Mother, how much time is left

for us in the forest library, 

where master spines 

clasp woody pages

pollinated by wind?

How much time before 

the boxing up, the clearing out

of minds meshed in ancient tree lives: 

now inventory, cubic footage,

caged, trucked away—

to bonfires staged by haters. 

1933, Berlin: Cigarettes, 

chocolate, sausages for sale!

To music and spotlights

some 50,000 books burn.

Burn the texts, said Artaud. 

Did he yearn for another heaven

to leave scripts of cruelty 

far behind?

I cry for you, Mother, 

stroke keys for you. 

Something must be saved here 

of your wounded spines… words. 

How memory’s flesh burns.     

Wind, carry my voice without a voice—

tell the trees that she, I—

Author’s Note: Homage to the thought of Edmond Jabes (The Book of Questions), and to the poem by Don Pagis, "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car."

Anita Lerek has spent her adult life juggling business with the enchantment of poetry. The visual arts, jazz, and social justice are life-long influences. Born abroad (Poland), she retains a sense of otherness, and a resulting affinity for the divergent. Her poems have appeared recently in Poetry Super Highway, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and River Heron. She is co-founder of Change Artists, a start-up online poetry community relating to political engagement. She is the author of a chapbook, History and Being (2019). She lives with her archivist husband in Toronto, Canada.

SMASHING THE WORLD RECORD

by Devon Balwit




Even for the home stretch of Kipchoge’s marathon
I wouldn’t be able to keep pace. All high-altitude sinew,
he would pull away toward the Brandenburg Gate
while I panted soft behind, years of chips and booze
dragging like a sea anchor. His pacers tired early,
just fifteen minutes in, leaving him alone
with his thoughts. What were they for that 2:01:39?
The years of training at dawn, outpacing Hicham El Guerrouj,
his next marathon? Breaking the tape, Kipchoge
hugged his trainer, held up by giddiness before falling.
He rested but a moment on his knees then rose
for the cameras, the adulation of the crowd.


Devon Balwit has six chapbooks and three collections out in the world. Her individual poems can be found here or are forthcoming in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, Cultural Weekly, Triggerfish, Fifth Wednesday, The Free State Review, Rattle, Poets Reading the News, etc.

BERLIN, DECEMBER 19, 2016

by J.D. Smith





Much reading renders dust the myth
Of some past golden age,
As rust and tarnish, canker, rot
Have flyspecked every page.

Outlines emerge, though, that describe
The wax and wane of powers
And which times had the wit to build—
Or only tear down—towers.

As on a crowded street one sorts
The harmless from the threat,
Some stories stand out from the day
And mark a turn, so that

If we can’t quite assay this age
Or what it is replacing,
We still can feel the flames and smell.
The swart smoke of debasing.

J.D. Smith’s third collection of poems Labor Day at Venice Beach was published in 2012; his first humor collection Notes of a Tourist on Planet Earth the following year.. His poems have appeared in journals and sites including 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Texas Review, and Dark Mountain 3.

THE BLANK BOWIE

by John Paul Davis




Don't say glam. Everyone always says that.
Neither say alien nor say stardust.
Invent a brand new vocabulary.
Say moonage. Say sula vie milejo.
Before heavy metal, before eyeliner
for rock gods, before electronica,
there was Bowie, self-named after the knife,
himself the blade, separating spirit
& the body, feminine from female,
mask from masculine. Androgyny and.
All of us & simultaneously
none of us. He went to hard rock's bombast
& distortion to find soul. To Berlin
to find the blues in a synthesizer
orchestra. Called himself the Thin White Duke,
thus freeing himself to write R&B.
He knew what everyone craves most of all
is a mystery. It's why our gods ask
us to carry what we can never hold
up some sacred, burning mountain, why love
comes laced with heartache, why such queer lyrics
keep us awake in the night, wondering.
He understood that to write a hymnal
for the spiritually dispossessed
he must himself become a borderland.
What is the sound a soul makes as it leaks
from its seams? Bowie. How keens the heartcry
of a person born out of place in time?
Bowie. How echoes joy on your second
wedding day, after you'd all but given
up on love? Bowie. Say the hot demon
of the drink or drugs still bucks in your veins,
say you think you can't leave the one who hurts
you, say you're harrowed by an old music
you heard once on an aging stereo
as a child. Say Bowie & he'll appear,
screwed up eyes & screwed down hairdo, well hung
& snow white tan. Saint Satellite, my dim
dreams need your code-switching & baritone,
my hetero tongue, needs your gender
bending & the high holy spark & howl
of your guitar, my weekday commute needs
your compact rebellion & scattershot
crimes of fashion. Let me borrow your mouth
& be beautiful, if not for a life
time then for just today, just one more day.


John Paul Davis's poetry has appeared in Muzzle, Rattle, Four Way Review, The Journal and many others. He lives in New York.

SOPHOCLES LONG AGO HEARD IT ON THE AEGEAN

by Mark Sargent

Seventeen Syrian refugees, including five children, drowned Sept. 27 when their boat sank in Turkish waters on its way to Greece. The Turkish coastguard recovered the bodies from a wooden boat that had set off from the Turkish holiday resort town of Bodrum for the Greek island of Leros, Doğan News Agency reported. The refugees drowned when they failed to get out of the boat’s cabin, the news agency said. Another 20 migrants, who were on the boat’s deck, survived and swam back to the Turkish coast, it added. All were wearing life jackets. —Hurriyet Daily News (Turkey), September 27, 2015

A leaf detaches from the oak and
drifts flipping down against
the pale blue late afternoon sea below,
a lone cicada takes up a rattling solo,
the white rubble of Mavrovouni
flashes across the bay.  What
mountain?  And still the day
holds the black at bay.

Come, says the sea, enter me.
Sun stunned, lazy with heat,
we obey, para-dicing the flow
into glittering fragments that coalesce,
a phosphorescent shadow
fading in our wake.

The nation reels, nothing’s being done,
all values called into question,
the capitol seethes with plot and betrayal;
driven by hunger and war and need
thousands scramble ashore each day,
possessions and children on their backs
swelling the roads towards the next
checkpoint and north, always north,
it’s a long way from South Sudan
to Berlin, Damascus to Dijon.
Nobody wants to stop here.

Night comes with nostalgia, an ache for
a moment of clarity such as the shore lights’
glimmering fingers splayed
across the black and blacker waters,
poised to sound a Monkish chord and
every creature and the sea linger
together exhaling, tidal, stretched open
to return on the breath
to that darkling pain,
and the night whispers,
take the silence with you.


U.S. poet Mark Sargent has lived in Greece since 1990.  Two books published in 2015: The Li Ho Reflux Tour 2003; Crisis: Letters from Greece 2013-2015.

PRAVDA

by Kelly Jadon

Nicholas Roerich, "Guests from Overseas"

Awaking in spring, gaunt from nursing cubs
in darkness, alone, in her den
So is Mother Russia with Ukraine, Georgia
buffers which she keeps within reach

Her snowy fur hiding blackened skin
for warmth against ancient frigid tundra
Crossed by Vikings, Rus', a brutal heritage
ancestral blood violented by Mongols

Hunting hares across drifts
she returns with raw prey
offerings of peace to cubs
Feeding rebellious spirits within her states

Drawing her babes outward,
she nudges them to follow
in her footsteps they plod,
Unbalanced, weak, young
not fully independent democracies

To the sea’s ice
she dives fishing
gazing into air holes of whiskered seals
her territory
As is Kiev, taken by Grand Prince of Rus'
Oleg

Swimming miles across open waters
she leads growing cubs
in her wake
Old Soviet thinking controlling masses
hammer and sickle
Berlin wall, Afghanistan, Georgia—
all unforgotten

Two years cubs follow the mother
learning her hunting and survival skills
As Viking thoughts prepare for Mongol behaviors
the Rus'
bear witness
truth of who they truly are


Kelly Jadon is a graduate of Spring Arbor University and holds a degree in English with a focus on poetry.  She is a teacher, poet, and writer.  Her poem "To Taste The Oil" was recently published by The Voices Project and was featured at the University of Colorado "Eye Contact" event as an audible poem.  Her poem "the snow pile" was published at Everyday Poets (1/2014).  "Destination Hamamatsu" to be published in Pavilion Magazine (Fall 2014).

A ROUTINE BOMB

by Michael Ratcliffe



“Hardly a week goes by in Germany without an unexploded bomb from World War II being found at a construction site or in another location.  [This past Wednesday, 3 April 2013, one such bomb was found in Berlin.] Authorities detonated a bomb in Munich on Tuesday night, August 28, 2012, after efforts to defuse it were unsuccessful. It wasn’t the only bomb scare in Europe that week.” --Der Spiegel On-line, August 28 and 29, 2012


A bomb, five hundred-fifty pounds
of rusted steel, corroded wires, decayed explosives,
found beneath Munich’s center
where it lay hidden since World War Two,
buried in the rubble left by other bombs,
covered as the city rebuilt and tried to forget war;
uncovered by workers sixty-seven years later.

In beer halls and cafés, homes and offices,
curiosity and questions:
When was the last bomb found?
How will it be disposed?
Should we be worried?
This relic of the past,
this failed deliverer of death,
becomes part of the city’s chatter,
along with the economy,
the Greek debt crisis,
and the unseasonably hot weather.

The experts, unable to defuse the bomb,
decide to detonate,
and make plans for a controlled explosion.

At the dinner table, a family talks
about other bombs, routinely disposed—
one defused just the week before in Nuremburg.
They pass the meat and then the bread
and talk about the planned explosion.
The children ask if they will see the blast,
but they are in the evacuation zone
and must leave in the morning—
father suggests a day in the Alps.

A mother leaves her downtown office
and makes her way home, her usual route closed.
It was her country that dropped the bomb.
This is all so strange and foreign—
just part of the European experience, she tells herself.
She assures her children there is no need to worry,
old bombs are found all the time.
Her young daughter listens, but has heard that bombs kill.
She tugs on her mother, and asks if they will be okay.

An old woman remembers bombs falling,
and all the friends and relatives lost to those that did not fail.
She knows bombs kill.
She draws the curtains across the windows,
goes to the basement and huddles in a corner,
where she thinks about her mother
and how they would hold each other tight
whenever the bombs fell,
and pray they would be alive the next day.

August 28, 2012:
A Sufi cleric killed in Dagestan;
four dead in a truck in Kandahar;
one dead, seven wounded in Fallujah;
twenty-seven killed in Damascus;
bank windows shattered in Athens;
a memorial service for Israelis killed in Sofia.
In Aleppo, men, women, and children huddle in fear
as their government continues to bomb the city,
sometimes striking as they stand in line for bread.
In Munich, experts covered the bomb with sand and straw.
The controlled explosion shattered windows,
sparked a few fires, which were quickly doused.
The next day, the city returns to its routine.
In the beer halls and cafés, homes and offices,
talk turns to the economy,
the end of August holidays,
and the much-needed rain
that turns the bomb’s crater
into just another muddy hole.


Michael Ratcliffe lives and writes in the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington area.  His poems have appeared in Symmetry Pebbles, Loch Raven Review, Do Not Look at the Sun, Poetry Quarterly, The Copperfield Review, The Little Patuxent Review, and You Are Here: the Journal of Creative Geography.