ANOTHER FALSE NARRATIVE

by Catherine Gonick

Wojciech Kossak "Cossack on Horseback", 1918, watercolour on paper, 24 x 14.5 cm

My Cossacks just left, taking with them

everything they could carry.

As usual, my books, notebooks,

my rubber crutch. I can’t even climb

the walls. But deep in my closet,

a locust swarm gathers. I ride it

back to the desert, scan for signs,

a dung-beetle track, ripple of sand,

to find an oasis of laughing doves.

 

Scribbling again has meaning, yet certain

as ink on paper, as bullies’ lies

on social media, these scimitared

thugs will return. In a garden

of sunflowers outside Odessa, my aunt

fell in love with one of the Cossacks

on horseback passing her house.

 

She was only a child, but her story

reminds me not to be fooled

if now and then, they are handsome.

A pogrom against words is still a pogrom.

 

Catherine Gonick’s poetry has appeared in publications including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Forge, and Sukoon, and in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, and Dead of Winter 2021.  She is part of a company that fights  global warming through climate repair and restoration projects around the world. Pogroms early in the last century drove her grandparents and their first two children from Odessa to California, where her aunt painted sunflowers and worked in the San Francisco Public Library, and her uncle was a leader in the Longshoremen's Strike of 1933 and a lifelong activist. 

TWO DEGREES

by Ralph James Savarese

Murder hornet photo tweeted by @Elvis_Trump

                                                                                           
Let us now praise the Japanese honey bee, Apis cerana,
which alone cannot defeat the much larger

and more vicious “murder hornet,” Vespa mandarinia.
Just one or two of the latter can destroy an entire hive,

moving in like winged, up-armored Cossacks.
After decapitating the honey-makers, they stuff

their yellowish-orange mouths with larvae and pupa.
Yet a miracle, not so much on ice as in the oven,

sometimes occurs. The honey-makers practice a technique
called “bee-balling,” which involves swarming

their attacker and collectively cooking it alive.
The bees move their flight muscles to generate heat;

they can withstand temperatures two degrees higher
than the hornet…. How about we try this with that predator

in the White House? Surround him with human warmth;
kindle him, you might say, with kindness? Of course,

the American honey bee hasn’t yet developed such a defense,
perhaps because it’s insufficiently eusocial and maybe

even indifferent to the fate of the hive. (“I’m not gonna
wear a mask, and there’s nothing you can do to make me!”)

As the seas rise and infection marauds the planet,
can you not hear the soft buzzing of wings, the earth balling

to save itself?

Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books of prose, Reasonable People and See It Feelingly, and one collection of poetry, Republican Fathers, due out in October.

BAN ON MILITARY GEAR . . .

by Marjorie Maddox

except here? Last call
for chain-gangs-
in-training at this chain
bar and grill where each chain-
clad cult sparks shootouts
in a city of brotherly bonds
($1 million and counting),
as bloody as that 90’s Waco,
or trying, nine dead but riding
too fast toward that other road
block, those blasted
and blasting seventy-six bodies
in the siege that inspired
McVeigh, another chain-
reaction of cult-carnage.

History is heavy
on our backs
as are tire tread on a biker’s foot,
muscle-imposed taxes,
rival-enforced respect;
knives, ammo;
as are Bandidos and Cossacks lighting up
the ticking bombs of their lives,
revving up revenge in this parking lot
of smashed-in faces,
bashed-up corpses;
this past of bloody sorrow
and linked pain, ongoing narrative
of chains, chains, chains.


Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox’s book, Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013), focuses on living in an unsafe world. In addition, she has a new ebook, Perpendicular As I (Kindle version, Nook version).