ANGELS OF DEATH

a previously unpublished poem written in 1982

by Mitchel Cohen

Veterans warn of echoes from 1982 Lebanon war as new conflict looms on Israel’s northern borders —The Observer, July 14, 2024

Israel, baby, you're doing it again!
How many times have I told you
You can't use me as your trench coat
Flashing your Mezuzah in the subways?!
Look, there are three things in this life
that carry us through in one piece
and one of them is Love!
This isn't love, it's murder.

Israel, sweetheart, listen to me.
Take your planes and go home.
Take your tanks and turn the guns around.
You point them at the wrong people.
Your enemies are at home.
They are in bed, living fat
Off their profits, traif pigs
in plush corporate boardrooms

Israel, the desert
is rising up around you. Refugees
are thrashing the sands with thatched straws
peeled from the rubble of huts
and phosphorous bombs. It rises up
from the desert floor of Galilee, from the West Bank,
and over Beirut, little separate clouds of sand,
Smoky clouds, bloody clouds
Of Palestine's Indians.

Israel, even in America,
in the apartments of Jews
along Ocean Parkway, in Co-op City,
In Miami, and Cleveland,
and St. Louis, a panic
jangles in the teeth, a shudder
shivers through the shawls
worn on Shabboth, an unspoken nightmare
kicks open the jaws, a tear
a scream. No, Israel, no!
We will not be your gestapo!
We cannot shield you from the genocide you commit.
  Israel, O Israel,
  Get the hell out of Lebanon now!

Mitchel Cohen was a founder of the infamous Red Balloon Poetry Conspiracy and Red Balloon Collective at SUNY Stony Brook (1969 and on). He co-founded the No Spray Coalition against pesticides, chaired the WBAI radio Local Board (2008-12), co-edited G, the newspaper of the NY State Greens/Green Party as well as the national Green Politix, and hosted a weekly internet radio show, Steal This Radio. He has published two books of poems—The Permanent Carnival and One-Eyed Cat Takes Flight—with a third in the works. He has also authored radical pamphlets and books including The Fight Against Mosanto's Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides (Skyhorse). Mitchel's currently mourning the death of Willie Mays—the greatest baseball player of all time—and his dear friend and poet Connie Norgren. Mitchel lives in “The People's Republic of Brooklyn.”

AMERICAN CREOLE

by Indran Amirthanayagam

An old man chats in creole

on a bench by Prospect Park.

Along Empire Boulevard

a group of teens high-five

kouman ou ye, sak pase;

a writer, deep in a book,

puts it aside and stares

into space, mouths

a silent cry, Ayiti,

in and about the

park on an early May

afternoon, the air 

warm, every language 

out for a stroll but all 

in a handmaiden's role 

to the tongue sung 

loudest in exile. 

in 2023, that country 

in the Caribbean Sea

boiling and burning 

and sending its children 

and women, men 

and old men and 

old women, all

who can find a way

out via the new deals

of sponsorship

or the old murderous

tricks of climbing

aboard rickety boats

to live or die

in the sea

beyond the Keys.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. 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 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 and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

HINT OF AN ELEGAIC SUMMER VOICE

by Earl J. Wilcox

for Vin Scully (1927-2022)

Some say his dulcet tones

Soothed the raucous hard ballers.

 

Some say his mellifluous vocals

Quelled the rabid Dodgers horde.

 

Others say his soothing cache

Of insightful swag saved the day.

 

The wonderful horde of baseball

Lore and treasure allured us forever

 

the day he arrived in Brooklyn &

the era he shined in his city of angels. 

 

We shall not hear again his storied

Trove of love for our nation’s game—

Our man with a voice for all seasons.

Earl Wilcox writes from his retirement balcony in upstate South Carolina. A collection of his poems—It Goes On, Life Poems—will be published in 2023.

POSTHUMOUS EXISTENCE

by John Hodgen

Were we not paying attention, attention-deficited even then,
even before the term was wheeled in on some gurney
with a wobbly wheel? Brooklyn Hospital, so overrun,
where Fauci was born, where Whitman volunteered,
his beard as face mask, tending Union soldiers,
bringing peaches, poems, writing letters for them,
urging them to believe that a woman back home
would still marry them when they came home,
marching Johnnies through the rye,
missing a leg or an arm or an eye?

And Keats, quarantined in the harbor in Naples,
not nearly the quaranta giorni, the full forty days,
on the Maria Crowther, six weeks out from Gravesend,
typhus all around, bobbing like rhythm, like synaesthesia
in the bay. Keats, mortality weighing “heavily” on him,
“like unwilling sleep,” Keats half alive,
“half in love with easeful Death.”

Did we not see it, fully take it in,
poets and plagues interwoven, the world caving in,
the burst of tubercular blood in Keats’s handkerchief,
Whitman’s soldiers (“warriors,” T***p says) who survived,
stood, hobbled and grim, and married just as he told them
they would, writing back years later to tell Old Walt,
fierce believer in grasses, sheaves and hymns,
that they had named their children after him.

Or is it simply that we have lived too long
to have seen it again?

And who moves quickly now, masked, from bed to bed,
giving succor, solace, taking selfies with the nearly dead
to share with the families prevented from being there,
with Poe’s masquers, red death, double ventilated with dread?
What nurses, doctors, poets glide among us again,
like shepherds, pastorals, like trashbagged antibodies,
nearly invisible, shining with novel, singular grace?

John Hodgen is the Writer-in-Residence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. Hodgen won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His fourth book of poetry Heaven & Earth Holding Company is out from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and his first book In My Father's House has been reprinted from Lynx House/University of Washington Press. Hodgen’s fifth book The Lord of Everywhere is just out, also from Lynx House/University of Washington Press.

THE SHORES OF BROOKLYN

Saturday July 1, 2017, 3 p.m.

by Tsaurah Litzky

Pier 5 Brooklyn Bridge Park, photo by Etienne Frossard

Seen from my kitchen window, the line in front of Luke’s Lobster
across Water Street (lobster rolls $20 each) is longer than the B25 Bus
weaving its way through the crowd.
Families with strollers, dogs walking their owners, young lovers, old lovers,
people alone eating ice cream cones, legs, legs everywhere legs,
women of all sizes, shapes, ages showing off their knees, at least.
Shorts are in this year. T***p beware! Screw your tweets, your T***p care!
You won’t stop us from strutting our stuff on the shores of Brooklyn,
a big woman in pink short shorts, her thighs jiggling like Jell-O is
escorted by a guy who looks like a young Brando,
I want to cut in, steal her shorts, steal her date,
while behind them four young dudes joke and pass a basketball,
followed by three sweet teen angels in hijabs.
The waterfront is still a free country! Such happiness!
Suddenly! Claps of thunder! Lightening cracks across the river
the heavens open, rain comes pouring down, the crowd scatters,
to huddle under the trees in the park or push into the ShakeShack,
the happiness so quickly shattered!
I already know there are no guarantees of permanence anywhere,
especially in a country that could elect T***p for President,
yet something pulls me to the window, I open it, stick my head out,
in less time than you can say “the land of the free,”
my head is soaking wet but when I breathe in, I smell the sea.

Tsaurah Litzky is a widely published poet who also writes fiction, memoir and commentary. Her poetry collections are Baby On The Water (Long Shot Press) and Cleaning The Duck (Bowery Books). Her most recent poetry chapbooks, Full Lotus: Poems about Yoga and Jerry in the Bardo, were published by NightBallet Press.

CHRISTMAS PAST WITH THE TRUMPS

by Alan Walowitz

Image source: Pinterest

The Q17 would take me past Jamaica Estates—
though I didn’t know then of Trump,
whose pop already was a big deal in Brooklyn,
but I knew this was where the rich folks lived.
And I’m sure young Donald, though a bully even then,
wasn’t the one who pushed me aside
and shook me down for a couple of dimes
in the arcade at the Jamaica Terminal
just to get at the shooting range,
with a rifle that shot light at the little metal ducks that
would shut with a snap like a flock of cheap valises.
A guy like him didn’t take the bus, I learned,
and would have pocketsful of dimes to fill his own machines
that lined his basement finished in teak and kingwood—
and had real guns to shoot at summer camps
with riflery and riding, Western and English,
and cloth napkins that came with service
and they didn’t dare call it mess.

My father would drive us through Trump’s part of the world
this time of year to see the Christmas lights of the rich,
and we probably went by his house a couple of times,
though the really well-to-do never put up lights,
while the newly rich installed just one color—a melancholy blue—
on their mansion’s outer edge so passersby like us might be awed by its size,
in the winter dark, while the family that might have lived inside
was off on a cruise, though they likely left the curtains open,
and the white lights shaped like candles on the huge tree
would illuminate those ten foot ceilings, in those cavernous front rooms
that otherwise were never permitted to reveal
even a shadow.

Alan Walowitz has been published various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in Queens, NY. Alan's chapbook Exactly Like Love is available from Osedax Press.

WHAT'S BEING HATCHED

by Linda Lerner

Pamela Langford, who took this photo, wrote to The City Birder blog on the subject of Brooklyn Botanic Garden hawks on April 22, 2014: “The BBG red-tailed hawk pair appears to be nesting in the Japanese  garden. Today my friend Jan Kraus and I spotted a hawk flying into a pine tree near the entrance to the Japanese garden (by the cherry esplanade).  It's not easy to see, but after watching a while we saw a hawk in the nest, and later there was a swap when a second hawk arrived and the hawk on the nest flew away. No way to know how far along things are, but the pair appears to be attending either eggs or youngsters. . . . In any case, I am hoping for another delightful summer with fledglings in the botanic garden.”

BROOKLYN - Some Brooklyn residents are concerned to go outdoors after a red-tailed hawk attacked a woman. Tahjah Coleman says she was on her Bedford-Stuyvesant terrace when the bird grabbed her head from behind. News12Brooklyn, May 26, 2014

the muggers were hawk faced and back in

the same hood others were chased out from

with those who couldn’t afford to live here

a few began to occupy abandoned buildings

rent illegal sublets  share small apartments

and now someone’s balcony

the area changed  people felt safer so

she didn’t know what hit her when

something grabbed her from behind  felt claws

scratching the back of her head felt

blood on her hand  blood running down her neck

around the same time another woman was attacked

while sitting on her fire escape … people

feared going outside again …

however news travels outside language they got it:

the coolest city … words on a Brooklyn window sign…

If you’ve been in love, you know how the slightest movement

a fleeting shadow crossing a smile … know when someone has

moved on or in … I have both times …

so they picked it up in the air  in the silent sound waves

the way a couple of others who’d had enough of trees chose

an apartment building across from central park

squawk cries flew thru friend Donna’s words, Why can’t it go the other way

smaller houses with gardens instead of all the luxury hi rises

mingling with my mother’s  be careful what you wish for

squawk cries with the foul smell of another time

Linda Lerner's Takes Guts and Years Sometimes (New & Selected Poems) is published by New York Quarterly Press.