CHICAGO STOCK (YARDS) 1954

WHISPERS OF THE NOW

by Corey Weinstein

We were born on a sigh of relief

trembling lips after Nazi butchers’ blade,

pasty grins of “don’t mention it please”

elders hiding this truth from their brood.

 

Trembling from Babi Yar family’s ruin

our adults invoked a solace of silence.

Just let us strive, be free range kids. 

We, fizzy bubbles of sorrows’ cauldron.

 

     (now this genocide in Palestine)

     (children, press, doctors targets)

 

High grades and high jinks were our sweet lot

summer’s play, bikes and balls all day.

Bubbles can only break, learn the horror

noxious smells waft up from stockyards.

 

     (rubble trapped death stench)

     (homes and hope lie in waste)

 

Hot days joy mixed with sirloin slaughter

what could our folks have had on their mind?

Pens of cattle, hogs not dear Kyiv cousins,

grins not groans for Rogers Park preteens.

 

     (miasma of cruelty’s purpose)

     (to break a peoples’ spirit)

   

When we unearthed the bloodbath’s facts

sighs of relief became embarrassed stutters.

Children left to fathom a world’s dread, 

parents’ silence a kindly confusing legacy.

 

     (what are parents thinking now?)

     (telling kids about Gaza now?)

Corey Weinstein’s poetry has been published in Haight Asbury Literary Journal, Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Our California 2024, The Ekphrastic Review, Forum (City College of San Francisco), California State Poetry Society, Visitant, Abandoned Mine, Speak Poetry of San Mateo County, California State Poetry Society and Jewish Currents, and he wrote and performed a singspiel called Erased: Babi Yar, the SS and Me. In his free time, he hosts San Francisco OLLI’s Poetry Workshop Circle and plays the clarinet in his local jazz band, Tandem, his synagogue choir and woodwind ensembles.

TABOO

by L. Roger Owens

In the evening of the day that negotiations

over the Strait of Hormuz threaten again to collapse

and Russian missiles kill seventeen souls

in Kyiv—we saw seven bodies still lying there, one

reporter says—the same day a progressive democrat

declares victory in a senate primary in Michigan,

the family of my daughter’s boyfriend joins us

for a game night. We’ve made brownies. They bring cookies,

peanut butter ones. Ice cream chills in the freezer.

The whole gang comes: mother, father, sister and her boyfriend

(who went to high school with my boys), younger cousin,

and the boyfriend himself, it goes without saying.

We sit in a circle in the family room like a shape poem,

our names prosodic when spoken,

the consonance of the v’s and m’s, hard g’s beat--

boxing; two r’s waltz together sweetly.

The game is one in which you prompt your teammates

to guess a word, but there are several you can’t say.

My word is banana, and five more are forbidden me:

fruit, peel, yellow, split, and bread. I make

banana bread whenever a family member returns home,

from college, say, or from a trip away

(something dead citizens of Kyiv will never do again).

“Welcome Home Banana Bread,” we’ve named it

in the family cookbook, and three bananas

are browning in the kitchen now, waiting to be smashed

into pancake batter. My teammates know none of this.

I yearn to say peel yellow fruit, and time runs out.

I alone decline crumbed cookie between my brownie

and ice cream, and while we spoon dessert

into our mouths, no one dares to speak

of the widening fiasco in the Middle East or allude

to human remains strewn among the streets of that great city,

its Golden Gate immortalized by Mussorgsky.

No one says, Thank God the centrist lost.

But you don’t mention these things, of course you don’t,

not when your families are gaming together for the first time—

you don’t. More ice cream, anyone?

 

L. Roger Owens teaches spirituality, ministry, and creative writing at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He is an MFA student at Ashland University.

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.