ZAPORIZHZHIA OBLAST

by James Gage

MOSCOW, Dec 29 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin on Monday told his army to press on with a campaign to take full control of the Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine after a Russian commander said Moscow's forces were 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) from its biggest city.

Goodbye 

to the merely discarded 

wrenched from their clutches 

and penchants 

and bright pearl-knit bags.

 

Goodbye

to the voices of 

the ironclad poor 

and the hapless yank,

the misanthrope’s trope 

adrift in the mainstream 

at the salon or the square

where Vicky’s mint cookies

and yesterday’s masts read

The Waters Run Red 

From Putin’s Unprovoked War.

 

These unprovoked lies 

rise up like smoke 

over the grim granite markers

in Kiev or Donetsk,  

over the lit cherry blossoms 

and redneck ears

of the keeper 

in pursuit of the truth

because there is only one truth

that will huddle the masses.

 

So live and let live, the gravekeeper pled

and watched from a distance as the leftovers fled.

James Gage is an anti-war poet and songwriter whose work has been published in dozens of periodicals and literary journals including Main Street Rag, Inkwell, Wordrunner, Sand Hills, New Verse News, Mountain Gazette, Oyster River Pages, and others. His first two books of poems True If Destroyed (2016) and True If Not Destroyed (2025) are available from Finishing Line Press.

A CHURCH ON UKRAINE’S EASTERN FRONT

by Suzanne Morris

Fighters from Ukraine’s Karpatska Sich Battalion in a church on Dec. 25 that was destroyed by shelling and reportedly looted by Russian forces during their occupation, in the Lyman district in the Donetsk region. Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The Church is torn from

limb to limb

daylight flooding through

gaping holes in hallowed walls

Russian spies posing as

monks and priests and nuns 

and at least one Ukrainian abbot 

convicted of espionage.

So I wonder about

the soldier in combat gear

entering through

an arched door

wrested from its hinges,

glass blown out

his heavy boots crunching

on the pulverized pieces

littering a floor

thickly layered with shell dust

below a magisterial portrait of

Jesus praying in the

Garden of Gethsemane,

looking heavenward

as if to beseech God for

an explanation for this

violent schism between two branches

that grew from the same root,

for the shell holes that

pock the background of the

star-speckled sky

above his haloed head

and the rock he kneels against

to pray.

Jewel-toned paraments

embroidered in gold

are strewn about the floor

and flung against

the high upholstered back of a

filigreed chair

while the Virgin Mary

enfolded in deep blue and rose

ponders in her heart

from high above:

For this, my son died on the cross?

Nearby, the wooden altar

with elaborate detail

is deeply scarred, panels missing

its top piece knocked awry

and all around, sections of

towering, frescoed walls blown out,

the portraits adorning them ripped,

iconography broken and dangling.

The soldier’s head is bowed

as though he has escaped

for a few moments of prayer

within this tattered sanctuary.

Or, perhaps he has come to

search for evidence of treason:

lists of people to be killed,

wads of illicit cash,

pamphlets of Russian propaganda

to be traced

so that justice

can be served.

And all the while the

raging war

hurtles into its second year... 

Suzanne Morris is a novelist and a poet. Her poems have appeared in online poetry journals including The New Verse News, The Texas Poetry Assignment, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Pinecone Review, and Emblazoned Soul Review.

THE OTHER NEW YORK

by Susana H. Case

A view shows a petrol station, which bears the name of New York in Donetsk Region, Ukraine March 3, 2021. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich. See also Wikipedia.

There is a town called New York in Ukraine.

Stalin gave it a Soviet name that didn't stick.

Many of its houses are empty,

along with the streets and parks.

Young people dream of leaving.

At the store in the town center,

they are out of bread.

In a room with balloons, a child

holds a chocolate and cherry birthday cake,

while the sound of gunfire blasts out

a few miles away. How naive we are

about power, profits—like children holding sparklers.

The few adults at the birthday party fret an errant 

artillery round might hit the chemical plant.

Even in peacetime, it spits out fumes 

from phenol production into the air. 

The streets are worn and tired.

Oh, New York: where is your Donetsk Times Square

full of excited tourists, your skyscrapers

that cause neck aches from people looking up in awe?

Where are your people—like in that other 

New York, the American one—who complain 

how much they suffer because the air is chilly,

the bus ten minutes late?

Susana H. Case has authored eight books of poetry, most recently The Damage Done (Broadstone Books, 2022). Dead Shark on the N Train (Broadstone Books, 2020) won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite, and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk and Cake Press, 2022).

THE BEAR NO LONGER DREAMS

by Aileen Bassis


Pushing aside a bottle on the table
and tearing off a piece of bread,
there’s a whisper, “Maybe
the bear wakes again,” and a rank smell

comes in the cracks between the boards.
The bear swings
a heavy leg over a door sill,
floorboards gasp.

The bear fills the room, hunger turning
his glassy blue eye a colder shade,
“I bring stability.”
His breath burns like ice,

the bear’s gravelly voice,
crackles like a radio broadcast
heard late at night
in a Lada careening

down the highway to Donetsk,
“Cousins,”
he pauses to lift a thick nailed paw,

“always, we were one.”


Aileen Bassis is a visual artist in Jersey City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. Her poems have found homes in many publications including Gravel Magazine, Milo Journal, Specs Journal, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal and Amoskeag.

DONETSK IN EASTERN UKRAINE

by Phyllis Wax

Ukraine's rebel movement was plunged into crisis on Thursday, when pro-Russian fighters backed by armoured personnel carriers seized the movement's headquarters in Donetsk and destroyed the barricades protecting it. The surprise move by a group called the Vostok Battalion, a heavily armed rebel unit that has been involved in fighting against the Ukrainian army, sparked speculation about an internal coup within the fractious rebel movement. There was also speculation that the move could have been an attempt by the leadership to purge undesirable elements with the Donetsk Peoples' Republic. Key rebel leaders, who were not in the building when the fighters arrived, insisted they were still in control and that they had even ordered the operation. "This is a police action directed against looters," a rebel source close to Alexander Borodai, the prime minister of the self-declared republic, said on Thursday afternoon. "There is no coup. Everything is under control." --Roland Oliphant in Donetsk, The Telegraph, May 29 2014

Not a tractor on this farm field
but a turreted tank,
a lumpy blue blanket and
close by a khaki tarp
sprouting a clenched hand
at one end.  All around
a new spring crop
is pushing through.


Phyllis Wax muses on the news and politics from a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI.  She's been widely published, recently in The Widows' Handbook:  Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival from Kent State University Press.  When she's not writing you might find her escorting at a local women's clinic.