BOOMER'S LAMENT ON THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY OF JFK'S ASSASSINATION

by George Salamon
November 22, 2018

"Did a president of the United States, while in command of total nuclear war, detach himself enough from its power to give his life for peace?" — James W. Douglass,  JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

We imagined everything differently
Before our generation's leader was killed.

We read Albert Camus, our bible,
And vowed to be neither executioner nor victim.

We wanted to be rebels, in our fashion,
But ended up consumers in their niches.

We witnessed the Empire's revenge
When bullets took down our peers at Kent State.

We stumbled into our adult lives in the Seventies
While the spirit of Nixon settled over America.

We protested when his agents devastated Vietnam,
Now we howl as Agent Orange deconstructs the presidency.

We tried to make a difference
As the Armies of the Night

We buried our hopes with our heroes
As the colors faded after 1968.

Editor's note: Although he did not film the home movie streaming above, the 13-year-old who now edits this journal will never forget being in the crowd at that place on that day to cheer the future President.

George Salamon has the opposite view of the 1960s from those expressed by the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers.  He lives and writes in St. Louis, MO.

POSTPARTUM, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

by Penelope Scambly Schott

                                                                                                               
Do I need to say I was twenty-one, my boy just four months,
my breasts still tight with milk,

my bare feet unwrinkled, and even the part in my hair
was sad?

The apartment got smaller, the kitchen table uglier,
the window gray with fog,

and all I could breathe was diaper pail deodorant
and my husband’s indifferent tobacco.

My one comfort was the warm gust from the floor vent
ballooning my white flannel nightgown.

I had thought carefully about this whole situation
and because I did want to be a good mother,

I had decided I couldn’t proceed to poison myself
without suffocating my baby first.

Then the phone rang and somebody I barely knew
said, The President has been shot.

My tiny kitchen filled up with ambulances, black limos,
the book depository, the grassy knoll,

until the moment when Kennedy was pronounced dead,
and I stood there shocked and frozen,

and then, suddenly, it came to me that maybe,
just maybe, I didn’t need to kill us,

and as I stood there holding my jolly baby,
I breathed out from healthy young lungs

the waxy gardenias of the dead.


Penelope Scambly Schott’s newest books are Lovesong for Dufur and Lillie Was a Goddess, Lillie Was a Whore.   She lives in Portland and Dufur, Oregon.

FIRST GLASSES

by Laurie Lamon

Fifty years ago I waited

in a room lined with

chairs where everyone

was old behind the dark

glasses that unfolded

and rippled, pressed

to eyes and temples,

and tremulous as my voice

when I read every street

sign and billboard each mile

home, 1963, the world 

for the first time hard

and fast and unmistakable.

Laurie Lamon's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Ploughshares, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Plume, and other magazines and journals, including 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days, edited by Billy Collins, and thePoetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. In 2007 Lamon received a Witter Bynner award, selected by Poet Laureate Donald Hall. Lamon has also received a Pushcart Prize. Laurie Lamon has two collections of poetry are The Fork Without Hunger and Without Wings, CavanKerry Press (NJ), 2005 and 2009. Lamon is a professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington and the poetry editor for Rock & Sling.