EMANUEL

by Ed Gold

We asked the red bottle-brushes blooming off the back porch,
we asked the woman who was singing and writing parking tickets,
we asked the colossal white blossoms of the magnolia tree,
we asked the cashier named Wilnetta at the Harris Teeter,
we asked the cedar waxwings swarming the holly berries,
we asked the new baby, Helena Wren Silverman,
we asked the hailstones striking west of the Ashley,
we asked the oil truck that overturned and blocked I-26,
we asked the helicopter circling the neighborhood,

we asked the couple holding hands under a maroon umbrella,
we asked the two mourning doves sitting close on the wire,
we asked the cardinal who placed a millet seed in his mate’s mouth,
we asked the aviator sunglasses forgotten on the porch table,
we asked the smudgy smoke of the citronella candle,
we asked the blue flowers on the Kleenex box,
we asked the juice glass with a decal from a moose hall,
we asked the first brown clutch of leaves in the green of the pin oak,
we asked the empty hammock on the porch next door,

we asked the crow we thought was an eagle until he cawed,
we asked the green anole who hopped on a branch and turned brown,
we asked the hawks whose chick refused to leave the nest,
we asked the loquat tree that didn’t blossom and fruit this year,
we asked the mutant sunflowers sprouting under the bird feeders,
we asked our neighbor whose throat is healing from radiation,
we asked the house finch on the sconce with his eye crusted over,
we asked the little boy who played dead under the pew,
we asked the mockingbird who sang for five minutes before starting over.


Author’s note: This is a poem I wrote after the massacre at the Emanuel AME church. We live three blocks away.

Ed Gold has a chapbook Owl and poems in the New York Quarterly, Kakalak, Cyclamens and Swords, Poet Lore, Gargoyle, and many others. He is a grateful member of the Long Table Poets in Charleston, South Carolina. Ed Gold lives in Charleston with his wife Amy Robinson.

A CLASP

by George Held





So as I left the hygienist’s chair, white-clad Reesha
Said she’d taken a cruise to Turks and Bermuda
And, despite sunscreen, her tawny skin had turned
Black as the Nigerian queen Amina’s,

And I said, “Look at my sad white skin,”
Reddened and pebbled by actinic keratoses
(and smeared with cream to spare it from cancer)
And then I said what was on my mind about

Charleston, the city of Charles (whose name isn’t even
In the Bible), where white-racist hatred had burst
From a gun barrel and killed Pastor Pinckney
And his prayer-meeting sisters and brethren,

And I thought of all the black forbearance, the black
Sympathy, the black nobility that has steadied
A course that might have burst into whirlwind, war
And more deaths of worthy men and women,

And we two, Reesha and I, standing face to face
In the cramped space between high-tech dentistry
And the human race, the only race, clasped hands
And said to each other that in our own history

We at least are friends as I hoped that I was not
Just a superannuated white man
Deluded that he was without the taint
Of racial prejudice.


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

THE SNAKES

by Carolyn Gregory

The Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a day after Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine congregants following a Bible study. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RAEDLE/GETTY via The New Yorker.

The snakes are slithering
from under the rocks
where worms and old bodies
lie buried.

The bones are not stopping them
from venomous thoughts
of squeezing innocents to death
or sinking their fangs in.

For they have been hungry
in their hiding holes,
thinking of the red meat
of their prey running quickly
across the prairie

to their own small caves
between mountains and cactus,
fearful for their families
and children.

Nothing will paralyze the snakes
save the hatchets good men wield
in the dead of night
to save our people's freedom.


Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Seattle Review, Cutthroat, Borderlands: Texas, Main Street Rag and Wilderness House Literary Review. She previously won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has published two full length volumes of poetry through Windmill Editions in Florida: Open Letters (2009) and Facing the Music (2015).