GOODBYE, KYIV

by Donald Sellitti

Goodbye, Kyiv and thank you
for the chance to stand in solidarity
with you at safe remove to
write of you with passion and with
anger in my slanted rhymes.

I cared a lot, I really did, and bared
my heart in lines I broke in
unexpected places, taking 
risks you wouldn’t 
understand.

You’re not a poet.
I was just as brave as you.

The moving zeitgeist though
has moved and left you 
far behind as winds of war
have blown again and lauded us with
new and fresher outrage for the
dead and dying. My anger needs
new tinder, not the charcoal
of your cities, for its burning.

I’m back inside my garden now
where themes of death and
inhumanity present themselves
in quaint and small tableaux.

A newly fallen tree; a spider that
I’d stepped on carelessly
with one leg tapping. Death is 
all around me as it is with you.

I might write of you again, Kyiv,
if something fresh emerges from
the blandness of unending war, 
a bomb as blinding as the sun 
perhaps, awash in metaphor.

But for now, goodbye Kyiv. 
Best wishes for the future,
really. 


Donald Sellitti honed his writing skills as a scientist/educator at a Federal medical school in Bethesda, MD before turning to poetry following his retirement. Numerous publications in journals with titles such as Cancer Research and Oncology Letters have been followed by publications in journals with titles like The Alchemy Spoon, Better than Starbucks, and Rat’s Ass Review, which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize in 2022.

BRUSH WITH BRAVERY FROM 4,500 MILES

by Becky DeVito

“Walk Through Claude’s Gardens” by Tatyana Pchelnikova.
Tatyana Pchelnikova’s website of original art.
Tatyana Pchelnikova at Made for Bravery.
Tatyana Pchelnikova on Instagram.

I’m on my second of four cups of gunpowder 

green tea and here’s a tweet from Zelenskyy: 

now there’s Made With Bravery, an online shop 

where anyone with a Visa card 

can make a miniscule contribution to the war. 

I don’t like to brag but if online shopping 

were a competitive sport I could medal 

in the cool stuff at a good price event, so let’s get to it: 

vyshyvanka shirts—I could wear one of those. 

Such a flattering cut, but the stitching sprouts all over. 

Look at this men’s vyshyvanka. Simplicity 

is elegance, right? No one to buy it for 

but why should that stop me? The sleeves 

would be too long and perhaps they’d snicker 

at my cross-dressing. I don’t think I’d care 

much about that but then there are folks 

who would think culturally illiterate

and so many already think that goes with American

so I can’t buy one of those. T-shirts are okay but 

I can’t wear yellow near my face and hey—

there’s an art category and that’s perfect. 

I won’t have to worry about the size, but the shipping! 

And international—better not think about it 

or I’ll never get to the finish line. 

 

That abstract painting with every shade 

of pink and green and all those textures…

which I can always return to later. Scroll down to a riot 

of flowers. I mean, a peaceful demonstration. 

That word is used inappropriately so often. Crowded, 

standing together. Reds and yellows and purples shout 

over each other, but they have something substantial to say.

About joy, or the need to let all your color catapult 

you into the next dimension and whatever shape that takes, 

I could use reminding. Click and it’s Walk 

Through Claude’s Gardens, and I believe it. 

Those petals curl right off the canvas the oil is so thick 

and wait, this is an oil painting, not a print? 

I’ve never owned an oil painting. Maybe I can afford it—

yes, $247 is something I can do, especially for an original.

How big is 50*50 cm, anyway? Another tab to convert 

centimeters to inches, 20x20, that’s a nice size 

and I definitely love it. Have to have it. 

 

Put in my address: why can’t Chrome translate 

the countries in the dropdown list? I’ve seen США 

so many times in the tweets but it would be a shame 

if it got sent to the wrong country. 

Google Translate says I was right 

and I’d better be, after 6 ½ months 

of keeping up with this war 

that was supposedly never again, 

and why won’t they let me specify my state? 

I guess it could arrive with only the zip. I want it. 

I put in my Visa number and the next screen 

isn’t in dollars anymore but UAH. 

 

Whoa, that’s a lot of digits 

so another tab for a currency converter 

and yes it’s right so I press Pay and it says 

I still need to make the payment for my order. 

At least they’re recognizing I have an order. 

I call the number on the back of the card 

and plug my other ear to hear the voice from India 

say nothing was declined, nothing was purchased 

today and they would know even if it was a minute ago 

so I have to solve it through the site. I email 

and ask if someone could have bought it 

during the cup of tea between when I started 

putting in my address and when I pressed Pay 

and so could I commission a similar one 

and I’d better get this taken care of soon 

because if she sells her entire stock on the first day 

it won’t be long before they’re four times the price. 

Good for her, but I’ll be shut out 

and there are so few occasions to join 

this awful war from 4,500 miles away 

and it’s not in my cart so I really hope 

it’s being saved in cyberspace  

while the customer service people wade 

through the backlog including three emails 

from me and that painting would 

fill the beige void I get sucked into 

for every virtual meeting 

much better than this starting-to-get-long 

black-and-white poem. 

 

By now they’re all struggling to sleep 

through air raid sirens because the Russian army 

thinks they’re making gains when they lob 

their missiles at apartment buildings, but those HIMARS 

we sent have been really good at shooting 

rockets out of the sky so maybe none will land near her 

tonight and Kyiv is 7 hours ahead of Connecticut 

so I hope when I wake 

there will be more than the automatic reply from Bravery 

waiting for me here in my inbox. Hold on—

how did this fraud alert slip in? 

Yes, I recognize that purchase. 

Why did it take eight hours 

when the lady from the credit card company 

said it would have shown up instantly? 

 

Thank God I left the tab open 

after I kept telling it to Pay 

because I can’t find the painting on the site 

anymore but they’re still trying to fingerprint my browser

from hours before so I reload and press Pay 

and it doesn’t work the first time but 

reload that sucker again and 

Wahoo! I’m the new owner of actual art 

and look I got it done before midnight 

and wow she must have been just as frazzled 

because it’s only 6:46 am there 

and here’s the shipping label, all ready to go. 

Tatyana Pchelnikova, you’re amazing. 

I subscribed for updates because I have another 

empty wall and you’ll be my go-to artist 

even after the invaders 

have had enough of their genocidal nonsense. 

 

Becky DeVito is pleased to report subsequent purchases at Made With Bravery have gone much more smoothly, including the names of countries appearing in English in the dropdown list. Becky DeVito has used poetry as a means of working her way through trauma. Her experiences writing poetry led her to investigate the ways in which poets come to new insights through the process of drafting and revising their poems for her doctoral dissertation. She is a professor of psychology at the Capital campus of CT State Community College in Hartford, Connecticut. Her poems have been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Frogpond, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Naugatuck River Review, Ribbons: Tanka Society of America Journal, and others. Join her on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. 

LET PEACE BE THE MOTHER OF EVERYTHING

by Steven Croft

Polemos pater panton (War is the father of all things.)

—Heraclitus

From the internet I read about the bombardment of Barcelona

by Italians, Germans, in 1938, watch the Movietone footage

of children running, the torn arm of a father's tweed jacket dark

with blood even in the film's black and white.  Omen, prelude

of what would come.  Today Germans, Italians, the rest of us,

condemn the bombs' carnage in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol.

The UN was founded in 1945 to prevent world war and make

the world better.  A gradualism powered by hope, a world

where the center will hold, held by our civilized will, forged

from what we all want and what we know we did wrong.  But...

those bomb-melted multistorey wrecks of buildings in the gritty,

jumpy newsreel are grimly colored in today in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol.

War could never be a mother.  Not that she couldn't cradle a rifle

as easily as a baby, plant a garden of mines—but motherhood

is too likely to want the peace to nurture children, is too ready

to negotiate, to drop the aim of a final strike on the wounded,

seeing her own sons and daughters in them, their mothers' pain.

Even if it, she, starts small like an opening bud in spring, compassion

could start at a steel plant in Mariupol where bloody-bandaged men

are being stretchered out to buses today on CNN.  Negotiation

could spread to Kharkiv, Kyiv, Kherson, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, peace

could become a warm-bedded garden, now the mother of everything.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

COLOSSAL LOSSES

by Timothy Kercher

The Soviet monument symbolising historic ties between ex-Soviet Ukraine and Russia being dismantled in Kyiv on April 26, 2022.

Today I read that Russian

casualties are colossal, Latin

for larger than life,

the Romans using the word

to describe the statue of Helios

in the harbor at Rhodes,

a term now used to describe

abounding death, the day before

a colossal eight meter-tall Soviet

-era statue of two men

representing Russia and Ukraine

holding a banner of friendship

was taken down, the heads

rolling right off in the middle 

of Kyiv, where, in the surrounding

towns, colossal losses

were suffered, larger than life

numbers of dead civilians

strewn in the streets, add 

to this the soldiers on

both sides, the mass 

casualties on the eastern 

front in the cities, apartments, 

theaters, schools, hospitals eclipsed 

by heavy artillery, the war's

collective losses larger

than a toppled statue depicting

friendship, larger still

than a statue of the sun god.

Timothy Kercher lives in southwestern Colorado with his family and teaches on the Navajo Nation. He has lived much of his adult life overseas, including time in Ukraine, Republic of Georgia, Bosnia, Mongolia and Mexico. His essays, poetry, and translations have appeared in many literary journals including Crazyhorse, Plume, Ruminate, Guernica, and Quiddity.

REAL NEWS, EASTER

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Zoom, you are finished. The Sun is out

strolling on Easter Sunday, spring

roaring into summer making peace

in the heart and loins. Yes, imagine

that word rescued from time, recreated,

reborn 'though bombs are falling on people

and buildings in Ukraine. Refugees are

returning with brave hearts, friends;

and Zoom, you are dead like a cliché,

a doornail. In the suburbs of Kyiv

a woman is looking for keys

she buried under a nearby tree. War

continues but she does not give a damn.

She lives and dies where her home lies.

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube.

VIRA

by Jaime Banks

A mother who scrawled contact details on her two-year-old daughter's back while fleeing Ukraine has described to the BBC her desperation in that moment. Sasha Makoviy said she wrote little Vira's name, age and some phone numbers on her, in case the family were separated or killed while fleeing Kyiv. "In case of our death, she could be found and would know who she is," Ms Makoviy explained. The family are now in France where they feel "surrounded with love and care". —BBC, April 12, 2022

Her Kyiv apartment shakes

from the bombing. A woman

draws her two-year old close,

with permanent pen

scrawls the name Vira 

her birth date

parent’s names

grandparents’ names

telephone numbers

on the child’s slender back,

her hand shaking. 

If something happens,

she slants to think,

may this child be delivered

into familiar arms.

Numbers inked on skin

once a sign of barbarity,

now a mother’s only prayer.

Jaime Banks writes about family, home, and spirituality in everyday experience. She was recently awarded first place prize in the Bethesda Local Writer’s Showcase Poetry Contest, and her work is featured in the anthology Leading from Within: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead. A communications specialist and freelance writer, she resides in the DC area.

THE SPECTRUM

by Peter Neil Carroll

“Spectrum I” painting by Ellsworth Kelly (1953) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and promised gift of Helen and Charles Schwab

War began as predicted, a vision of fire.

I pulled the blanket over my head, safe,

thousands of miles from personal tragedy.

 

Maybe I should send my blanket to the Red

Cross, they could forward it to a child in

Ukraine. Surely that’s the least I could do.

 

Not enough, though. Maybe tomorrow I will

purchase a box of soft diapers for a children’s

hospital in Kyiv or a can of condensed milk.

 

I saw a photo of a woman weeping in the street,

her arms bare, blood on her naked legs, shoeless.

Clothing. That’s what she needs, a little warmth.

 

Yes, I realize, the wounded need bandages, anti-

biotics, plain aspirin in an emergency. It’s okay

to send medical aid. They call it humanitarian.

 

I know there are many Doctors without Borders

already there, and volunteer cooks boiling soups,

and stews to nourish folks who have lost kitchens.

 

Those helpers are so brave, sincere, real menschen.

I should support them, too, but will money arrive

in time to save a country? Can I buy an ambulance?

 

Can I drive an ambulance? That’s a peaceful way

to help strangers trapped in a war. It would be good

for my conscience. But can one person matter?

 

What the soldiers who are fighting really want are

more weapons and ammunition or, better still, tanks

and rockets. They could use airplanes and bombs.

 

But stop there. They must be only old-fashioned bombs

built on TNT. Not atom bombs or hydrogen bombs

because that could kill too many people plus animals.

 

Where does it end? What is it the right thing to send,

to help someone in trouble? Or a whole country? As if

I could draw a red line on a spectrum or cross over it.

 

Peter Neil Carroll is currently Poetry Moderator of Portside.org. His latest collection of poetry is  Talking to Strangers (Turning Point Press). Forthcoming is This Land, These People: 50 States of the Nation, winner of the Prize Americana. Earlier titles include Something is Bound to Break and Fracking Dakota.  He is also the author of the memoir Keeping Time (Georgia). 

TO BEAR OR NOT BEAR ARMS /FUGITIVE SECURITY

Two Poems by Alex Nodopaka

📸VISUALS📸

❗️Video from inside the apartment during a missile attack in Kyiv.#Kyiv #Russia #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/SRgk0WXU5F

— Aarian  (@Worldnews195) February 26, 2022

NOTE: This video is NOT from Alex Nodopaka's niece's apartment but from Twitter.

1. To bear or not bear arms

 

As my niece in Kyiv

is being shelled

I write poems

based on her words*

and what I see

on our TV.

 

I hold my Siamese

the way I imagine

her holding hers.

It seems odd to me

with the repressed

memories I held

 

for over 80 years

but that's all I can do

except bear arms

and join her.

I never in my life

thought I'd say

 

Damn Russia.

 

2. Fugitive security*

A poem based on the words of Alex Nodopaka’s niece in Kyiv.

 

The daily shaking of the 5th

floor of the building

where I live frightens me.

 

Nightly I put down

a few blankets on the floor

of my bathroom.

 

The only place that offers

a false sense of security.

Wedging my head

 

between the toilet

and the wall for protection

I try to sleep

 

despite the rumbling

keeping me awake.

 

Alex Nodopaka originated immaculately in Ukraine in 1940. Speaks San Franciscan, Parisian, Kievan & Muscovite. Mumbles in English & un poquo de Madridista. He sings in tongues after Vodka, has studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Casablanca, Morocco. Presently full time author and visual artist in USA.

MY BIASED DREAMS

by Cindy Hill

People who have arrived from Ukraine wait to board a bus outside the main railway station in Przemysl, Poland, on March 12. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images via The Washington Post, March 13, 2022.

A boat carrying around two dozen migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya on Saturday, with at least 19 people missing and presumed dead, authorities said. Libya’s coast guard said that a group of 23 migrants—both Egyptians and Syrians—set off from the eastern city of Tobruk earlier in the day. Three migrants were rescued and taken to hospital. Only one body was retrieved and search efforts were ongoing, the agency said. The shipwreck is the latest tragedy at sea involving migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean from the North African nation in a desperate attempt to reach European shores. Libya has emerged as the dominant transit point for migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, hoping for a better life in Europe. —The Washington Post, March 13, 2022. Photo: Migrants in Tripoli, Libya on 19 October 2021. Credit: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Middle East Memo, March 14, 2022.

I dreamt about a girl, thirteen years old,

walking from Kyiv wearing a dark teal down

puffer coat, a white knit hat with pompom,

and her cousin’s moon boots, which kept the cold

away, though they’d seen better days. She rolled

her eyes and tugged her earbuds out, then frowned

and waited for her brother. She sat down

on tumbled piles of broken concrete, scrolled

through her phone, then arms-length, took a selfie.

 

I never dreamt a girl in Syria

was walking to the border of Turkey,

or of a girl escaping Libya

by boat, destined to sink in storms of dread,

though each had been alive, and now was dead.

 

My deep-sleeping brain may have remembered

how my great-grandmother’s remaining kin—

slaughtered by Ceausescu on a mountain

pass—were not so far away, as black birds

fly; and those wheat fields that I’ve seen pictured

on the news called to mind her deep-scarred shins,

sliced by brother’s scythe as they dropped grain in

sheaves then stacked in golden stooks. English words

could not console her for what had happened.

 

I dreamt about a girl whose looks I knew,

whose patterns were the same as those I’ve drawn

in cross-stitch on a pillowcase in blue

and gold or black and red, in sheaves of wheat

I’ve etched with cotton thread. I never dreamt

of girls whose stories I have never read,

though they had been alive, and now are dead.

Cindy Ellen Hill is an attorney, writer, musician and obsessed gardener living in Middlebury VT. She is that author of Wild Earth, a collection of sonnets from Antrim Press, and Elegy for the Trees, a book of sonnets upcoming from Kelsay Books. Her poetry has been published in Vermont Magazine, the Minison Project, PanGaia, Sagewoman, WildEarth, Vermont Life, Measure, the Classical Poets Society online, Ancient Paths online, The Lyric, and the National Public Radio Themes and Variations program. She is presently an MFA student at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

TIME OUT

by Marc Swan

Photo by Nadia Povalinska "who recently fled her home in Ukraine. It is from before the war, just a few weeks and a lifetime ago." —Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American, March 11, 2022.

In the photo, her back is to us.

She holds a scarlet red umbrella,

perhaps a harbinger of spring

or an unknowing portent 

of things to come,

that shields her head, 

catches snow 

falling from nearby trees

in a quiet park 

away from busy streets.

Late winter leaves 

glow cinnamon 

on snow-covered branches.

There are tracks, 

but she walks alone

in a small city in Ukraine.

The way life was before 

bombs and rockets fell,

hospitals, churches, clinics fell,

museums, homes, restaurants fell, 

and people—

defending their way of life

now buried in mass graves.

Today two US journalists— 

one dead, the other wounded

just outside Kyiv.

Marc Swan, a retired vocational rehabilitation counselor, lives in coastal Maine. His fifth collection, all it would take, was published in 2020 by tall-lighthouse (UK).

ANTI-WAR RALLY

A Correspondence

by Phyllis Klein, Kathy Les, and Renée Schell

KYIV, Ukraine — Makeshift roadblocks have been installed throughout this capital to impede the movements of Russian troops snaking toward the city in a convoy about 15 miles away. On some strategic thruways, Ukrainians have parked trams and buses to restrict driving access. Checkpoints to inspect IDs have also been established to root out would-be saboteurs. “We have a lot of presents” for the Russians, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in an interview. “It’s not sweet. It’s very painful.” The extended 40-mile parade of Russian armored vehicles, tanks and towed artillery headed from the north on a path toward Kyiv has both alarmed and befuddled watchers of this expanding war. It’s not just its sheer size. It’s also because for days, it has not appreciably been moving. U.S. officials attribute the apparent stall in part to logistical failures on the Russian side, including food and fuel shortages, that have slowed Moscow’s advance through various parts of the country. They have also credited Ukrainian efforts to attack selected parts of the convoy with contributing to its slowdown. Still, officials warn that the Russians could regroup at any moment and continue to press forward. —The Washington Post, March 7, 2022

Dear Friends,

I send my love this spring as every

day a new trauma comes

to bury us just as we climb out 

of yesterday’s avalanche. Even here in 

the flatlands, sidewalks seem to turn

into wet clay, our feet leaving prints

that suck my shoes into glue-like cement.

My heart muscles out its love 

to your hearts as I struggle 

to take a walk, no way to avoid those

cruel neighborhoods of bad news. 

How bad news molders in the streets of tar

and disappointment. Flat tires

and tire irons so easy to weaponize.

Trees blighted, only crows left.

Love watches a plague of human heartlessness

trying to destroy it. Love begs 

for combat boots, stands on the fire escape

outside its tenement of low income love-fires.

I say, Let them burn. To kindle what is lovely 

I send you them, the embers.

—Phyllis

***

Whose Spring?

Lately I wonder 

for whose sake 

the flowers bud, 

the trees open. 

I watch the oak tree 

two houses away, 

how it plumes wider 

a little more each day, 

its pent-up exhilaration 

to burst forth, readiness 

for another year 

of leafy dress. 

Two continents away, 

a 40-mile convoy 

of armored trucks 

stalled in unison, greedy 

to penetrate a capital city 

that not two weeks ago 

populated itself with people 

awaiting their next spring, 

a chance to shed 

the heavy cold,

wet nights. 

 

Now those nights 

are filled with embers, 

blasts big enough,

red enough to douse 

whatever hope 

was had for a new year. 

Whose war is this anyway. 

Whose spring? 

—Kathy

***

Sister Cities

U.S. Sister Cities Sever Relationships to Counterparts in RussiaUkraine—Bloomberg, March 4, 2022

Whose spring? 

Whose war?

Here we planted a new 

word for spring:

Weaponize

A word I don’t want 

to taste in my mouth.

When did that appear?

Daily, hourly

wherever you look

fear is weaponized

water is weaponized

tire irons weaponized

words always.

Here, our spring

promise of ranunculus

sky of water vapor

sky of plumes

sky of smoke

A 40-mile convoy stalled, 

headlights and taillights

a rifle barrel’s width apart

a push, a threat, a smack.

There, even the roads 

are weaponized 

not our hearts

never let it be our hearts

There, hearts are strewn 

on the road 

like spent bullets.

When do we learn that there 

contains here?

—Renée 

Phyllis Klein, Kathy Les, and Renée Schell are widely published poets connected through a poetry crafting group meeting on Zoom. They live in Palo Alto, San Jose, and Sacramento, CA respectively.  This conversation poem is one of many collaborations they hope to have.

RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE

by Anastasia Vassos

People with children from Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv board an evacuation train to Lviv. Reuters photo via The Independent, March 8, 2022

The sun shines through the Venetian blinds

that guard the window, drops splendor

onto the dining room table where I write.

 

The linen closet upstairs needs organizing.

My husband turns on the radio

and instead of listening to news of the war

 

he puts on music to paint by—the scene of the Maine sunset

he took a photo of last summer. My phone lights up,

it’s Kristin in Kalamazoo, texting me

 

that her daughter-in-law’s parents

have fled Kyiv to Zanzibar, that the children’s hospital

where Natasha saved other lives has been bombed.

 

She’s trying to find a flight for them to the US.

This small world verging on world war

when we thought world wars no longer possible.

 

I pick up the phone to call Kristin, she tells me

her daughter-in-law wept last night for her parents.

For their safety. Almost sadder than death.

 

I want to believe there is life after death,

that the good guys will win. The sun has shifted and detonates through

the south-facing window, this last day of February ending.

 

The blasts in that faraway country do not discriminate.

It could be us, it might be us: civilians under siege sleeping in subway stations,

children going hungry. Here, the sun keeps bombing.

 

Here’s what I want you to know: the sun, as I sit

directly facing the window, explodes into my eyes as it sets.

If I move my head I won’t be blinded.

Anastasia Vassos is the author of Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate, 2021).  Her chapbook The Lesser-Known Riddle of the Sphinx was a finalist in Two Sylvias 2021 Chapbook Contest. Her poems appear in Thrush, RHINO, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is a reader for Lily Poetry Review, speaks three languages, and rides her bicycle to raise money for stem cell research.

SHE SAYS IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE

by Margaret Rozga

She was once her daughter’s age and that inscrutable. I was

once her age but already a widow. In Kyiv mothers

are brought near to tears, but who can cry, who can

anticipate having a daughter the age she now is?

Who has any room in her thoughts for anything more

than the backpack, the train station, the fear

of being separated, the maybe at the other side

of the border?

So fear takes a hiding place deep

in the chest but not as deep as the dream of a calm

and secure old age. Or deeper.

 

Here the three-year-old cries for a biscuit, begs

her to play. She sends the older brother to play

with the younger. Her daughter, my granddaughter

stays in the kitchen to listen

for the sound of dreams rising above worries

about prices. There is no war here,

no fear of bombs hitting this neighborhood. The war is

not that close to us. Not yet. The war weighs

on her mind even as she serves us fried fish and denies

biscuits. She worries about money in her non-war.

She cannot imagine. She can imagine.

This is how ghosts are born.

 

The succulent fish warms our bellies, relaxes

our conversation, shrinks the ghosts, makes room

for imagining a future for her family, my family,

hope for the Kyiv mother. Mothers.

Hope is what I, you, she

cling to when good is being bombed.

 

 

Margaret Rozga’s fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021). As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, she co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). Twitter: WIPoet @RozgaMargaret

TO GUINEA, WITH LOVE

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Amid Ukraine Exodus, Reports Emerge of Bias Against Africans —VOA, March 2, 2022

The tradesman from Guinea has lived in Odessa for fourteen years. He is

afraid. In one day all of Ukraine's airports shut down. In one night heavy

bombs fell just ouside of town. They are falling now. Russian soldiers

landed on the beach and are marching towards Kyiv. The horror. The sadness.

It is happening. Shock and awe. Awful. Wrath. Madness. Chernobyl, symbol

of nuclear death has been captured. No reports yet on the state of the concrete.

Where are we going? I listen to the trembling voice of my friend from Guinea.

He says he will watch and wait for another day or two, huddle at home

by his television in the apartment block. If fighting comes to his neighborhood

then he will call Guinea. Ask to be flown out. How many diplomats has

Guinea posted in Ukraine? How many cars and planes? Airports are shut.

But the sea flows by Odessa. He has lived in Odessa for fourteen years.

He knows people with boats. He has sold them housewares. He will

ask them to take him away. Past the battleships. To Guinea.

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube.