OH, TO BELONG

by Alan Walowitz

Russia has expanded its list of sanctioned Americans in a tit-for-tat retaliation for the latest curbs imposed by the United States. But what is particularly striking is how much President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is adopting perceived enemies of former President Donald J. Trump as his own. —The New York Times, May 21, 2023

I want to get on that Russia-list.

To be among those who can’t go to Moscow—

would be so Chekhovian, bittersweet

not to see the Cyrillic sights, or trade in  

Gazprom futures, or pass gas in Red Square.

Here in the Times is a list of my peeps, my peers—

the Jews, the odd, the Kleptocrat wannabes, 

the comedians, the gays, the left-wingers, a few right

who despise George Santos, his lies which

make them queasy, though wonder at how easy. 

Some who grew up in Brighton, or 108th in Queens—

and here a Huckabee from Arkansas, 

notorious for lying herself. 

And others, much kinder, smarter—

actors, heiresses, entrepreneurs, free-thinkers

who submit clever Shouts to The New Yorker,

most never to be heard

except for an occasional squint 

through that imperious monocle.

All of us who would have been

red diaper-babes once upon a time

whose mothers never lived to see the day

our names had made the Russia-list 

in The New York Times.

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.

IN MOSCOW

by Phyllis Wax

Natalia Samsonova says she imagines the muffled screams of those trapped under the rubble, the fire and smell of smoke, the grief of the mother who lost her husband and infant child beneath the ruins of the building in Dnipro bombed by Russia. She imagines being unable to breathe. That is why she is here, at a statue to the Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka, a largely unknown monument tucked away among Moscow’s brutalist apartment blocks that has hosted a furtive anti-war memorial at a time when few in Russia dare protest against the conflict. PHOTO: A woman holds a placard reading ‘Ukraine is not our enemy, they are our brothers’ in front of a monument to Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka in Moscow. Photograph: Reuters —The Guardian, January 28, 2023

On this poor, indigent ground

I shall sow flowers of flowing colors;

I shall sow flowers even amidst the frost,

And water them with my bitter tears.

—Lesya Ukrainka

Silently                    

they lay their flowers

before the poet’s statue.              

Alone

or in twos

they stand mute.

Thunderous      

in the silence

is their sorrow

their horror

and shame

at what Russia is doing.

Phyllis Wax watches the world from Milwaukee. Much of her poetry comes from her observations. She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, in print and online.

ANTHROPOPHOBIA

by Daniel Lurie

More than a week after four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in a house near campus, the police chief leading the investigation said on Sunday that the police had not been able to answer many of the crime’s most pressing questions, such as how the victims’ roommates were not awakened during the overnight killings or where the killer might be now. The few details that have been uncovered have only deepened the mystery of a crime that has unnerved students and residents in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, and left victims’ families trying to help piece together what happened. Photo: Friends and community members celebrated the victims’ lives during a candlelight vigil in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on Wednesday. Rajah Bose for The New York Times, November 21, 2022

Credi

You never trusted easy/when you first got here/every night you’d push a couch/ 
in front of the door/a dark cloud hangs/over an emptying/Moscow like quarantine/
you haven’t slept in 3 days/the faces of the 4 victims/a constant rolodex/
a handful of years younger than you/same age as your students/you hope/
they get home/after you canceled classes/you have nowhere else/to go/
over a phone call/your mother tells you to buy wood/for the ground floor windows/
all the stores are sold out/your friend Beck was struck/while on her bike/months ago/
drivers still floored it through town/this moment is a cardinal/ 
in a field of snow/you haven’t been there/but you know there’s a bouquet/
resting against a stone slab/an unrested abode/wrapped in yellow/
police tape/no one deserves to lose/their lives/the suspect still/
at large/fills every corner/every room/the eyes you won’t meet/
on the street/the shadow outside/your loved ones/homes/

Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer from Roundup, Montana. He attended Montana State University Billings, where he received his bachelor’s degree in Organizational Communications. He is currently in his second year at the University of Idaho, pursuing an MFA in poetry. Daniel is passionate about the environment, human rights, rural life, and conceptualizing grief. He is the Poetry Editor for Fugue. His work has appeared in The Palouse Review, FeverDream, The Rook, Sidewalk Poetry, and most recently in Moscow’s Third Street Gallery. 

HANDS

by Ruth Lehrer

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny makes a heart gesture with his hands while in a cage in the Moscow City Court on Tuesday. His suspended sentence from his 2014 criminal conviction was ultimately converted to a prison term. (Press Service of Simonovsky District Court/Handout/Reuters via CBC)

He’s in a glass box right now they call it the aquarium we can’t hear him 

    can he hear us

the judge pretends to read judgment the news already knows already 

    prints her words

before they exit her mouth leave her tongue like a corrupt mind meld 

    two years eight

months in a prison colony with his silent hands he flashes a heart to his wife 

    who takes

off her mask and waves.

Ruth Lehrer is a writer and sign language interpreter living in western Massachusetts. She is the author of the novel Being Fishkill and the poetry chapbook Tiger Laughs When You Push.

SUBURBAN SMOKE

by Alejandro Escudé

Sometimes I visit the suburb of LA
I grew up in. There was a park
a block away from the house we rented.
I played little league baseball there.
It was a park, like a park with swings
and a pool. Now it’s a homeless encampment
and the little leagues are gone.
Maybe baseball is gone too—I can’t tell.
I mean I watch it. I root for the Mets
because that’s the team I was on
when I was a scrawny lefty outfielder
because there was no way
the coach was playing me on first base
or shortstop. I was lucky if I got to bat.
The coach was a winner; if you’re American,
you know what I mean by that.
I was lucky if I got to bat.
I remember hearing the LA riots looming
in the east; a hornets nest of helicopters,
the smell of smoke, a cacophony of sirens.
My father talked of Reginald Denny
he said: “I just crossed that intersection.”
His face pale. “I had so many tools
in my truck too.” Maybe that’s what
a suburb is, a place where one just
barely avoids the tragedy of America.
Oh there were lawns, basketball hoops
above garage doors. On Sundays,
it was very quiet, and I don’t remember
talking about the President.
He wasn’t a big fat face in the sky.
There weren’t goose-stepping posters
lining every citizen’s mind, a fear-bomb
exploding each half hour. In every suburb,
there’s a Beirut, a Moscow, a Jerusalem,
a Kenosha, a T***p bent over in his driveway,
cutting up a freshly caught rattlesnake.


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.

RED DOMINION, THE TRANSITION: RATED R

by Alejandro Escudé

Illustrated | Mark Wilson/Getty Images, Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy Stock Photo via The Week

T***p stands at the top of the White House steps
holding an assault rifle: “Say hello to my little friend!”
he screams as the army rushes to arrest him, explosions
everywhere; in the Oval Office desk, dozens of encrypted
Russian messages, a diagram of an experimental aircraft
inside his seven iron, and the button, beneath the bust
of Taft, he pushed to open a passage to a bullet tram
leading directly to Moscow, on the way blasting by
Satan himself, his wild angel wings, demons wearing
MAGA caps raise their claws as he speeds through,
the tram, shaped like the cockpit of a 747, painted black
with T***P in red on its side; the final station is made
of gold, supporters and strippers greet him in Moscow;
police whisk him up a marble staircase to a glass elevator
and into a luxury hotel room near Red Square where
he’s met by a few KGB officials awaiting his last report
which T***p recites in precise Russian as he removes
the prosthetic face he has worn for decades, unveiling
a remarkable resemblance to Lenin; he runs a hand
over his bald head, the window open, sound of traffic
outside. Trump holds up a rumpled wig and smiles.


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.

UP CLOSE AND NUCLEAR

by Llyn Clague

Cagle Cartoons via The Tennessean

1

My heart leaps up and clangs
against a ceramic roof curved like the sky
and chunks fall down with loud bangs
when I read about the anti-’s willing to use any factoid or lie
as artillery, to shoot down
Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

I too was, and still am, at heart an anti- –
a gunner aiming at high-flying authority
since early childhood, when images of ack-ack against the bombers
flaking in the night sky
burned on my memory.  I became
an outright oppo, sometimes even frantic
over power, ever suspicious of the Bargain
made over my head, by Them, with muscularity.

But one thing my anti- was, and is – is
implacably (if belligerently) anti-war – is
never against reaching across the divide
to try, however hard, to make peace with the Enemy –
Communist or Cong, Chinese or Cheney –
who was, and is, also, always, inside.

In my heart as well (if paradoxically) I yearned,
and still yearn, to find
that, in the Other, beyond No –
a possible basis
for a collaborative Yes.

2

Tricky Dick to Beijing, Sunny Ronnie with Moscow,
but it’s Nervous Neville to Prague
that gives the anti’s their analogue.
The Iranians just might lie and cheat
like Hitler.

With their history    
of subterfuge about centrifuges,
of hiding and deceit,
I must admit
the obvious: not all pacts work out.

Adamantly I am anti- those anti-’s –
from the know-nothing yahoo
to mad Netanyahu
to the more reasoned (if political) oppo’s and sidewalk vigilantes –
who bluster, better no deal than this;
who insist, to compromise with Them is to appease;
who, if war we must – well, better sooner!

But there is, beyond rumor,
a chance they are right.

3

My heart leaps up and plinks
against a flat plaster ceiling
and flakes drift down, falling
silently as snow in sand bins.

The specter of my anti-
weakening … of losing certainty
haunts me.

Up close,
Obama’s nuclear maneuver
is not personal, like loss
of face, or fighting the self-crippling demons
you or I try to suppress, even (if dishonestly) deny.

But his, and Khamenei’s, willingness
to reach across ocean and mountain,
past each other’s “Great Satan,”
above their own intense, entrenched resistance,
to make a pact
over the defining radical of our epoch,
speaks to a personal belief, in each,
of, in the other, a humanity
that proclaims an affirming Yes.


Llyn Clague’s poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly, and other magazines.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.

IN EACH OF US

by J. D. Mackenzie

Moscow ralliers protesting the murder of Boris Nemtsov carry a banner reading "Heroes never die — these bullets are in each of us" | SERGEI GAPON/AFP/Getty March 1, 2015

The sting of each new murder
and the recoil of every new clue
points us back to the same source

We carry the burden of knowing how
these gruesome deaths inter-connect

We suffer the agony of wondering
when it all must end

Ballistic tests mean as much
as dust in ancient churches

We’ll march because we can
burn candles when the wind permits
and hope, because we can’t give in

The bullets are in each of us
sunk into those who remember better times
who cherish the power of free voices
and wistfully recall our rightful place
in the world


J. D. Mackenzie tried careers as a steelworker, sommelier and psychiatric aide before his current role as a college administrator.  A 2011 Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in The New Verse News, The Ekphrasis Project, Four and Twenty, and Poets for Living Waters. He lives with his family in the foothills of Oregon’s Coast Range.

PUTIN AS JABBERWOCK

by Kathleen Capps

Shots fired as Russian troops force their way into Ukrainian base in Crimea --Financial Times, March 22, 2014

Long ago with eyes aflame,
Keen his claws, monster came.
We have only fists to sing
We have only stones to sling.

No one calls to freedom bring
We have only fists to sing.
In the Square we’re beaten down
A Savior no where to be found
Monster monster burning bright
With all the diamonds in the night
Sitting on your jeweled throne
Dark and evil is your crown.

Whiffle your wings through tulgy wood
Manxsome Moscow foe, no good
To Crimea or Ukraine in breaking laws.
Only blood drips from those claws.


Kathleen Capps received a PhD from the University of Oregon in English; studied French, Spanish, German, Czech, Polish, and American Sign Language; presented conference papers at international semiotic studies and comparative literature studies conferences; raised Icelandic sheep for thirteen years; sometimes blogs about the farm.