GAZA, JUNE 8, 2024

by Elizabeth Poreba

The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Tusday that it was “profoundly shocked” by the impact on civilians of Israel’s raid to free four hostages, adding that actions by both Hamas and Israel may be war crimes. —The New York Times, June 11, 2024. Photo: A Palestinian medic carrying an injured child Saturday at a hospital during an Israeli military operation in the town of Nuseirat in central Gaza.

Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock

We know from ancient bones that a pigeon or dove could atone 
now these bodies strewn 
sufficient sacrifice when less than a lamb or goat would suffice 
bodies anonymous to us 
the same birds that crowd our streets
but these could devise no flight 
their blood set the sinner right  
damage—collateral,  blood—fungible 
a ram replaces a son, or if no ram, 
a score of these little ones.

Elizabeth Poreba is a retired New York City High School English teacher. She has published two collections of poems. Vexed and Self Help (Wipf and Stock), and two chapbooks, The Family Profile and New Lebanon (Finishing Line Press). Her work is also in This Full Green Hour, an anthology composed of work by six of the O’Clock Poets (Sonopo Press, 2008). Kelsay Press will soon publish her new collection Yamma.

KYUSHU RAIN

by Elizabeth Poreba




The Kuma River
churned in her bones
and rain became
a planetary
condition
gravity visible
as grey opacity,
swallowing
ceaselessly,
an event sealed
from any sense
of a time
outside its presence,
so that even
in the high room
above the storm
in her bones
anything safe,
any object —
carpet, dry sheets,
solid bed —became
a temporary
event.

A retired New York City high school English teacher and long-time resident of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Elizabeth Poreba’s poems have appeared in several journals, including Poetry East, Ducts, and Commonweal. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook The Family Calling. Wipf and Stock has published two collections of her work, Vexed and Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring.

ABOUT THEIR GUNS

by Elizabeth Poreba

Photo: Corey Morgan, 27, (left) has been identified as a person of interest in the shooting death of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee. Morgan was picked up on an unrelated gun charge with Dwright Boone-Doty, 21, last week in Evergreen Park. —Evergreen Park Patch, Nov. 24, 2015

Their guns make them persons of interest, but there is nothing to say about them
They have nothing to say, they need not speak, they have guns
Nothing was said as far as we know, but then for no reason the guns
They had the guns before, but nothing happened for a long time
as if the guns with their promise of nothing were enough,
but when that kind of nothing was not enough, they had guns.

Guns are like poetry because they make nothing happen
The guns mean that there is nothing to say
Nothing squats in the gun’s gleaming cylinder
Little abyss of nothing waits in the gun
Out of the gun, the bullet, bud of nothing
From the gun into the body so that nothing will happen there
Nothing anymore, nothing, not one thing more.


Elizabeth Poreba is a retired high school English teacher living in New York City. Her new vocation mostly consists of writing letters and attending rallies. She recently posed under the Statue of Liberty’s nose as she joined several hundred demonstrators brandishing red scarves in support of the Paris conference on climate change.