LESSONS OVER 80 YEARS

by Royal Rhodes

Physicians for Social Reponsibility

     "...then uncontrollably I began to weep..."
           —Derek Walcott, Another Life


The original child bomb
at an early hour
in the Far East
burst in the August air.

It made the atmosphere
truly luminous
like god-particles
in transfiguration of light.

Pedestrians on a bridge
were silhouettes
racing to paradise
as Buddha's smile froze.

And now after decades
the terror birthed
there, a monster
birth, is wombed again.

Treaties are twisted into
origami devil dragons
and peace bells again
are blessed but silenced

new technology multiplies
death for millions while
protesters are sent to jail,
making death much safer.

We have disremembered
the faces moistened
with molten jellies
from upturned, burst eyes.

Royal Rhodes is a poet whose poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including several times in The New Verse News.

SMILE

by William Marr

Smile coach Keiko Kawano teaches students at a smile training course at Sokei Art School in Tokyo, Japan, May 30, 2023. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

trapped in masks for three long years

many people

can't remember how to smile anymore

 

should eyes be opened or closed 

how about the mouth 

and should the eyebrows and mouth corners 

be lifted up

or pulled down

 

there’s really no need to spend money 

to find a smile consultant

just go outdoors

and look at the flowers

blooming with innocent smiles

from the ground that was once covered 

with heavy snow and ice

William Marr, a Chinese American scientist/poet/artist, has published over 30 collections of poetry and several translations. His poetry has been translated into more than ten languages and is included in high school and college textbooks in Taiwan, China Mainland, England, and Germany. A former president of the Illinois State Poetry Society, he now lives in Chicago.

BY ANY OTHER NAME: SPRING TRAINING ANGST

by Earl J. Wilcox

If some kids played it on the Pittsburgh

streets with only a Wiffle ball, a crooked

stick, and one lad to keep it from the gutters.

 

If they played it on a loamy garden patch

in an Arkansas village with a ball made

from old socks around a ball of twine.

 

If kids of any age and many sizes

played the game on a sandlot

in Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic.

 

Even if the Japanese kids decided to

practice ten hours a day just to make

the team for the family’s pride.

 

If the boys of summer began practice

in winter, in a game that no longer

uses bat boys, has no fans in the stands... 

 

And if this game has no hot dogs or

peanuts and Crackerjacks and many

players wear kerchiefs and masks

 

And if they can no longer blow bubble

gum or eat pumpkin seeds or swat each

other on the butt after a terrific play.

 

And if the balls and strikes are called

by a robot squatting behind the screen

in the stands or hovering in a drone.

 

We will still call this game BASEBALL.

 

Earl Wilcox dedicates this poem to the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose "Baseball Canto" remains the iconic tribute to our national pastime.

THE PANDEMONIUM AT FREEDOMLAND

by Rick Mullin

Please Scream Inside Your Heart,’ Japanese

Amusement Park Tells Thrill-Seekers                          

—National Public Radio, July 9, 2020

We’d ask you, please, to scream inside your heart.
Consider others and the outcomes of your actions.
Secure yourself. The ride’s about to start.

The mechanism of this rocket cart
will get thrown off by any loud distractions.
We’d ask you, please, to scream inside your heart.

In Freedomland, survival is the art
of navigating obstacles and factions.
Secure yourself. The ride’s about to start.

The dark comes fast. It’s difficult to chart
the course of cannon shots and counteractions.
We’d ask you, please, to scream inside your heart.

It’s quiet now. I feel we’ve grown apart
composing our corrections and retractions.
Secure yourself. The ride’s about to start.

Democracy, the Slide of Bonaparte…
forget those rusty Freedomland attractions.
We’d ask you, please, to scream inside your heart.
Secure yourself. The ride’s about to start.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.

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.

LATE NIGHT IN A SMOKY BAR AN OLD SWASTIKA DRINKS WHISKEY WITH THE GODDESS ISIS

by Kit Loney

You say a terrorist stole your name? I hear you, sister. Back in the day I was easy in my skin, passed among the creatures of the earth like a fine breeze. I was whirling dervish. Pelican diving. Windmill. Showed travelers the way to Buddhist temples. Would appear on kimono sleeves in sky-blue silk brocade to gather good fortune. Faced left in Sanskrit to juggle dots and dance on pointed toes. Man, those were the days. The Navajo would invite me to kneel on woven carpets for sacred healing chants. I was earth, air, fire, and water. north, west, south, and east. Then one day I’m grabbed from behind, knocked out cold. In fog of fever dreams I’m something small and lethal, like a pistol, dread burning up red from the tail of my spine. Wake up decades later. Splitting headache. Hands covered in blood. These days the Japanese kids call me Mangi, some hashtag to hip as if that Hitler nightmare never happened. But sister, I‘m still covered in scars, still shaking. Oh God! What have I done? And this new tide of angry men with their hands clenching my every arm. No ocean on earth is deep enough. Sister, help me, please!

Kit Loney comes to poetry from a career in visual arts. Her poems have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Fall Lines, Emrys Journal, Kakalak, Yemassee, Qarrtsiluni, Waccamaw, One, and Poetry East. In 2012 she received the Carrie McCray Nickens Poetry Fellowship from the SC Academy of Authors.

BASHŌ WOULD CRY, THEN . . .

A Tanka Anticipating Summer in Honor of Matsuo Bashō
On the Occasion of Japan’s Three Mega-Banks Receiving All Fs on the 2017 Fossil Fuel Finance Report Card

by John Brooks 

"There's no question that funding climate change is a deadly investment strategy," stated Jenny Marienau, 350.org's U.S. campaigns director. "Yet banks around the world are funneling billions of dollars into the fossil fuel projects leading us closer to catastrophic warming every day." —Common Dreams, June 21, 2017. Image source: Rainforest Action Network/Report Cover Detail

dream cicadas thrum
as banks bake-rape the planet
fossil fueling greed
annihilating Earth wa
Bashō would cry … then protest

Author’s Notes: The poem utilizes the traditional Japanese poetic form of the tanka—with its five-line pattern of 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 syllables—which was one of the forms employed by Japan’s most famous poet Matsuo Bashō many of whose works exude his deep love and respect for nature.

     “wa” is a term for a traditional Japanese cultural concept related to holistic harmony.

     As for “Anticipating Summer” in the poem’s subtitle (though this poem was completed on June 24th), “summer” in Japan isn’t considered to have actually begun until semi (Japanese for cicadas) start their yearly rhythmic buzzing following the end of Japan’s rainy season sometime in July.

John Brooks, a longtime resident of Japan, is a writer, child sexual abuse survivor-activist, climate change activist, and animal rights activist (among other things, of course) deeply concerned with anthropogenic global warming and its massively dystopian consequences if humanity’s thoroughly inadequate—though in some locations and respects noticeably improving—response continues. His self-published novella Preludes depicting the horror of child sexual abuse from a child’s perspective, has received favorable reviews by readers and is available for free download on various ebook sites.

VISIT TO HIROSHIMA

by Alejandro Escudé

A boy looks at a huge photograph showing Hiroshima city after the 1945 atomic bombing. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Japan August 6, 2007. Reuters/Toru Hanai via International Business Times.

Oh children of Japan,

the dot that inflated
to the size of a neutron star.

Oh children of Japan,

you watched your own feet
evaporate.

Oh children of Japan,

you clung to a rope
thick as an Egyptian obelisk.

Oh children of Japan,

an apology flying like
a bomber evading a blast.

Oh children of Japan,

your bodies, a pile
of blackened marbles.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

THE GHOSTS OF ISHINOMAKI

by Luisa A. Igloria

In early summer 2011, a taxi driver working in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, which had been devastated by the tsunami a few months earlier, had a mysterious encounter. A woman who was wearing a coat climbed in his cab near Ishinomaki Station. The woman directed him, “Please go to the Minamihama (district).” The driver, in his 50s, asked her, “The area is almost empty. Is it OK?” Then, the woman said in a shivering voice, “Have I died?” Surprised at the question, the driver looked back at the rear seat. No one was there. A Tohoku Gakuin University senior majoring in sociology included the encounter in her graduation thesis, in which seven taxi drivers reported carrying "ghost passengers" following the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. —The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 21, 2016. Photo by Getty Images via International Business Times.

There was something
I was trying to finish—
A lunchbox
for my little one:
balls of pearled rice,
the pale white body
of a radish undressed
on the chopping board.

*

Take me
to Hiroriyama,
I say to the driver.
After we crest
the hill he stops.
The road disappears.
There is nothing there.
Every time, I die again.

*

I am a shimmer
in the twisted grass,
a shadow on rusted
copper. My hands,
two pale fish lost
in a river of red
at the ends
of my sleeves.


Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015.

SENKAKU SPEAKS

by Marilyn Peretti

China has said Japan is endangering peace in the region after it passed controversial laws expanding the role of its military abroad. Japan should learn "profound lessons from history", China's defence ministry said after Japan's parliamentary vote. The vote allows Japanese troops to fight overseas for the first time since the end of World War Two 70 years ago. Tensions between China and Japan have escalated in recent months over a group of islands to which both lay claim. The security laws were voted through Japan's upper house late on Friday, with 148 lawmakers voting in support and 90 against. It followed nearly 200 hours of political wrangling, with scuffles breaking out at various points between the bills' supporters and opposition members attempting to delay the vote. —BBC News, September 19, 2015

I am Senkaku,
tiny islands embattled
by China & Japan.

     Please remember
     the crack of air
     & shrieks of life

at the fulmination
of an A Bomb
burning Hiroshima.

     Please remember
     Mr. Abe, as you order
     more drones & destroyers,

fighters & amphibians,
in blind opposition to your
beloved model of pacifism.


Marilyn Peretti lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She has been published on The New Verse News, Christian Science Monitor, Journal of Modern Poetry, Talking River, Kyoto Journal and others. She has published several books on blurb.com. She takes interest in international politics, the conflict, the violence, losses, threats and sadness, still hoping leaders will make the right choices.

CENTENARIAN OVERLOAD

by Marilyn Peretti

“Japan considers cheaper congratulatory cups for soaring number of centenarians. Ministry cannot afford to keep handing out saucer-like sakazuki, a 100th birthday gift from the government since 1963.” The Guardian, August 20, 2015. Photo: Misao Okawa was born in Tenma, Osaka, on March 5, 1898. GETTY IMAGES via Stuff.co.nz.

We are very well
eating simple rice
fish and seaweed
stretching in the park
we are now 100 years
poised to accept
sterling silver gifts

so well we number
twenty-nine thousand
thus no silver anymore
maybe crisp paper
letters signed
by Shinzo Abe
Congratulations


Marilyn Peretti lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She has been published on The New Verse News, Christian Science Monitor, Journal of Modern Poetry, Talking River, Kyoto Journal and others. She has poetry books on blurb.com. She takes interest in international news: politics, conflict, losses and sadness, as well as the humorous twists in life.

FOR YUNA. FOR HER FATHER.

by Paula Schulz

(CBS News) — Norio Kimura knows he may never find his daughter’s body amid the radioactive rubble of Okuma, Japan, his deserted hometown near the Fukushima power plant. Still, he returns as often as authorities will allow, looking for Yuna, his dead daughter. It’s what keeps him sane. The survivors of Okuma, about 11,000, left the town after the earthquake on March 11, 2011, most never to return. Yuna was one of 111 – including Kimura’s wife and father — who perished in the earthquake; her body is the only one not recovered there. Kimura has so far found just one of her shoes.

                    Fukishima five years later: only one unaccounted for


For Yuna: a small deity to keep her company forever.
For her father: one pink tennis shoe.

He can visit only ten times a year, stay only five hours.
So he does, come hell or high water or blizzard, though

there’s not even a cold hope of finding her now.
But their connection not grey waves

nor cesium 137’s silver melt can sunder.
The blind hunt for anything of Yuna’s:

to keep sanity and soul together
from rising sun to rising sun, year after year--

this is the heart’s grind and gnaw,
this is the stone permanence of love.


Paula Schulz has taught for nearly twenty years.  She lives in Slinger, Wisconsin with her husband, Greg.

HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN WITH LICORICE UNLUCKIES

by Tricia Knoll

NAMIE, Japan — His may be one of the world’s more quixotic protests.

Angered by what he considers the Japanese government’s attempts to sweep away the inconvenient truths of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Masami Yoshizawa has moved back to his ranch in the radioactive no-man’s land surrounding the devastated plant. He has no neighbors, but plenty of company: hundreds of abandoned cows he has vowed to protect from the government’s kill order. --NY Times, January 11, 2014

I grew up on the myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, that careless bovine
kicking a lamp that burned down Chicago. Hot time in the old town
tonight we sang. When Mrs. O’Leary was officially cleared of wrong-doing,
it was too late for kids that learned that song in grade school.
That kerosene lamp, and she didn’t do it. The cow was innocent.

I like cows. I’m lactose in love. Ice cream. Cheese. At the Oregon coast,
we have a herd of Oreo cows --black at the butt, black at the head, a middle stripe
of creamy white around the belly. People tell stories about those Oreo cows.
Tourists go out of their way to take pictures of them, officially --
Belted Galloways.

Today’s hot time cows...well, they surprised me. Those radioactive cows,
the Fukushima cows, all one color cows -- I guess you’d call them licorice
unlucky cows. Cows of Hope. Officially Japanese blacks. Radioactive cows
feeding on contaminated grass and Mr. Yoshizawa who says the fault
is not the cows’, they are more than walking accident debris. So he lives
along side-by-side them to stop the genocide of licorice unlucky cows,
a shooting and a push into the big pit. He too will learn just how hot
time is in the old town.

Yup, those cows. Waiting at the dwindling manger to join the ranks
            Achelos
                 Mrs. O’Leary’s cow
             moon jumpers
             Elsie
             the Oreo cows
                 Y Fuwch Frech
             Babe
           
and the Licorice Unluckies in the hot town.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet. Finishing Line Press is publishing her chapbook Urban Wild in May 2014. She once rode a pregnant cow on a ranch which was a filmshoot site for a documentary highlighting the danger of the widespread use of DDT.