THE NEIGHBOR

by Corley Norman

It is near twilight and the man next door is mowing his yard.
I am fighting my impulse to go over there, pull him away and shout
What are you doing? No one mows at night!
It defies all common sense! Stop right now!
 
I would catch him off-guard, unnerve him with my unneighborly outburst.
I wouldn’t be mad enough to shoot him or anything. I don't own a gun.
But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't shoot him even if I did own a gun.
I suddenly realize he might own a gun and enjoy shooting.
 
What is on my mind is that today many mothers were crying
As they held signs and yearned to be heard by men whose deafness did not know sign language.
Mothers wailing with the cries of their crooked-toothed, messy-haired children:
Hear us! Help us! Like me, they did not want to be shot.
 
Maybe their sounds just ricocheted like bullets off the fine marble walls of the Capitol.
Maybe it felt wise and just to the quasi-lawmakers to tune out the inconvenient citizenry.
Maybe they were thinking of things they had to do. Urgent things.
Like: I think I’ll mow the yard this weekend. 

Corley Norman is a writer living in Nashville , Tennessee. She has spent most of her life in the field of dramatic literature where she picked the wildflowers of Shakespeare to inspire her.She has an MFA from the Univ. of Tennessee.

YOU BAN BOOKS, YOU BAN DRAG, KIDS ARE STILL IN BODY BAGS!

by Patricia Phillips-Batoma

“Neighbor is not a geographical term,

it is a moral concept.”

—Rabbi Yoachim Prinz

On Tuesday, my neighbor’s white magnolia scintillates against a beach blue sky. I wear shades to trek past farm fields and pines to vote in spring’s local elections. 

 

I hope to stem the tide of “back to basics” policies, fig leaves for fears—tax dollars spent on gender neutral bathrooms, light shed on our egregious system of chattel slavery, 

 

calls to address our cancer of white supremacy. These questions that refuse to fold themselves back inside the bottle are not our enemies. The universe calls us to travel along 

 

their twisting turning highways and open to the sacred space of meaning. I pass a small corner beauty shop where a flag flaps today at half mast, like every flag across America 

 

until the three nine-year-old children and three adults slaughtered at Nashville’s Covenant School are properly buried. I have another neighbor who hides inside his garage a truck bearing

 

a bumper sticker from the local gun shop. It is bright yellow with red letters that drip as loudly as the thirteen stripes on our flag. This guy has planted that flag in his yard 

 

alongside a sunflower flag, flags of pastoral scenes bought at the local garden shop, sometimes a MAGA flag. The American psyche is the backyard of men like this, 

 

staked with false flags and strewn with dollar-store lawn trinkets that look like they were dumped there by last week-end’s severe storm. Only all this stuff—

 

fiberglass giraffes and mushrooms, bunnies and Celtic crosses—is intentionally placed. Tell me again what Jesus said about loving our neighbors, even those who cry wolf

 

when some neighbors speaking truth into bullhorns don’t look like the Bull Connor neighbors who have burdened us with day after day of our children’s humanity stunted 

 

by the ever-hardening space of schools with metal detectors and SROs in combat gear. Last week, in an adjacent town, an eighth grader shot dead a 10th grader. 

 

Also, my neighbors.

Patricia Phillips-Batoma is a writer and teacher who lives in Illinois. She has published poems in The New Verse News, OffCourse, Plants & Poetry, Parentheses, Tuck Magazine, and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis.