TEAR GAS AND WOAD

by Peleg Held

A nude protester—dubbed later “Naked Athena"—faces off against law enforcement officers during a protest against racial inequality in Portland, Ore., on July 18. Credit Nathan Howard/Reuters via The New York Times.

Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem. —Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars


She fingers the blue on slowly, feralled in its wake;
she counts the steps from inside out the fenced-in fields of grace.

A vitrumned likeness wavers, a cats-lick from the rim,
in the tea cup in the circle of the saucer's closing ring.

Let the tongue tip shape the watchword in the shallows of its bow;
let sentry sleep and serpent sing beneath the shuddered vow.

Here is where their end is born; there is nothing at the gate
but ink and skin, the sylph herself: the cunt-directed state.

Caesar may misread you in the peripherals of his glass
or more likely overlook you, a needle in the grass

but as you plunge into his heel he will see the face
of what gives womb its dark and what gives blood its taste.


Peleg Held lives in Hiram, Maine with his partner and 21 chickens led by the world's tiniest rooster, Gavroche-That-Lives.

CUSTOMS AND CONCENTRATION

by Peleg Held

Child migrants sleeping on the ground at the McAllen, Texas Border Patrol station. —NowThis, May 19 2019

A scapegoat tkhine, the sound of the note
thinned into air, red string at the throat—
its knot sung to sleep in a clavicled swale—
marking her, keeping her, outside the Pale,
the deep-drumming pigment that lodged in the heart
the night that she drank down the well of their art,
the dregs of the umbra that darkened the mat
Tenemos preguntas, the click of the latch,
the last strand of horse-hair plucked from a bow
sung out through rosin, then cinder, then snow,
salt dropped like breadcrumbs while good people slept
in the town with a desk where papers are checked
and cages of souls who once dreamed across fire
covered on stone as the cold law requires.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

AMERICAN SOLSTICE

by Peleg Held

Wednesday's surprise announcement that the U.S. will quickly withdraw all its troops from Syria is the stuff of nightmares for many of the Kurds living under the protection of U.S forces and the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). “Everyone is upset, sad and afraid,” one SDF member from the Kurdish-dominant Syrian city of Kobane told Fox News. “It’s a historic mistake. We wanted to be part of America. We are surrounded by enemies, and ISIS isn’t even finished yet.” “Everyone is confused and scared. This will mean that Turkey will likely attack us. We are in shock because we thought the U.S. would help us achieve peace after ISIS. We didn’t think that they would help us defeat the terrorists and then leave us alone to face the horror of Turkish forces and its extreme factions,” lamented Mazloum Kurdy, a 33-year-old father and teacher from Kobane. “Now people are thinking to displace themselves from their homes here again, but nobody knows where a safe place to go is.” In his words, it is an ultimate betrayal by the United States. —Fox News, December 20, 2018. 

 . . . only when the mountains are no more, only when Ocalan’s solitary resistance no longer lights our way is the day we should say “Kurds are no more” . . .    —Hawzhin Azeez


You waver, thinning wisp of a republic,
as the smoke of betrayal is drawn into our chests.
Drift into infamy. You say you are freedom itself
and now no longer owe any promise to liberty.
In Kobane they will grip their fate in their own hands,
in Rojava they will look to the mountains as their only friends.
A great people will once again be backed to the wall
while cowards rub their heels and take
the bows for the sacrifices of others. The watchers
on the walls tonight see you turn your back. Resigned
but not surprised. The only Empire that does not betray
is the one that, clutching the stone of its own delusions
finally sinks under. When your time comes,
as it will, for the last sparks to go cold into the black
earth, no one will come to sing over your ash.
Under a red flag the last architects of Armenia
march to mark your enduring work of this day.
Waver, thinning wisp of a republic
as the smoke of betrayal is drawn into our chests.

Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

LINE OF POSITION

by Peleg Held

Bones discovered on a Pacific island in 1940 are "likely" to be those of famed pilot Amelia Earhart, according to a US peer reviewed science journal. —BBC, March 9, 2018

We are running on a line between
celestial navigation and dead reckoning
tempting the keepers of the crossings:
To live now into the skies.

Gas running low, unable to reach you yet
Electra's song still sings above the static,
the scraping tide where shells are emptied, torn
and wings churn back to ore--
identification in the debris field is a matter of scale.

We must be on you but we cannot see you.
As the sun-line sweeps towards our flight path
we grope for an island. A large ring
of white sand around a bright lagoon.

This is Emil Harte.

We lay out the bones of frigate birds, a testament
on sand. In our dreams Electra remains on the reef
we lean into the transmitter, spit into sunspot
and whisper our coordinates into the harmonic.
Give us a bearing—what is our position now?

I am an island where lost flyers make landfall,
where mercurial fingertips sign the freckled glass
buried in the strand. Here post-loss transmissions
still crackle the air, even as the rest
is carried over in the pincers of crabs.

We are listening.



Author’s Notes: Italicized bits are from the final transmissions of Amelia Earhart. Earhart submitted her poems to Poetry Magazine under the pseudyonym Emil Harte.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

DAKOTA CLEARING

by Peleg Held

On February 1st, several water protectors established the "Last Child Camp" in exercise of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties. In response the Morton County Sheriff, National Guard, and armed mercenaries raided the camp arresting over 70+. —Winona LaDuke Honor the Earth, February 3, 2017

A man in holster and badge parts the fabric
of a Tipi. He is looking but doesn't see
the enemy or the polls as they converge
over his head. Behind him, his people come
as they have always come, with the license
of force and numbers to clear the land.
Warriors wait, laughing, chanting, bound
together by song and the smoke of their fire.
Under the earth, cold iron rings the emptiness
as a black snake dreams of the last child
on the land and how good it will be to be full.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

ALEPPO

by Peleg Held


Source: Twitter, 5:59 AM, December 13, 2016

There is a city.
It is not our city.
Its broken buildings are full of bodies.
They are not our bodies.
In that city syllables are run through and strung
together into long cords of rough names
that, if they were washed clean and laid
end to end, would reach right to our doorstep.
But our names are not rough names like these.

Someone, somewhere behind the wall, is banging on a pipe.
Or are they screaming for help?
We cannot say for sure.
If indeed, there are still words coming
from any body in those broken buildings
they are strange words, not our words
yet.

Source: Twitter, 7:11 AM, December 13, 2016

Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

METHANE CLATHRATE

by Peleg Held

“The news last week that summer ice covering the Arctic Ocean was tied for the second-lowest extent on record is a sobering reminder that the planet is swiftly heading toward a largely ice-free Arctic in the warmer months, possibly as early as 2020.” —Peter Wadhams, environment360, September 26, 2016. Photo: Arctic Ocean sea ice melt as seen from the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Cutter Healy via environment360.

Gather last words
basket them drowned
under freighted skies
on a dead sea.

Bring them to pestle and powder
the shell of the old into the blood
of the new. Shout gloryhole
when you crawl in
and when you crawl out.
Say nightshade when
you blow the wick black,
on our lips
is no home.

We whistled the fire up
and up it came, like Jacob
on a lattice, burning
to leave no angel alive.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

ANTHROPOCENE STOMP

by Peleg Held

Hail the ant mill's circling spinners
we cry from our chests at the screenlight fire.
March to the end in pomp and shivers.
Round round rosey sings the choir
as the bell-penny promise of the mule-skinner
piles the pocket posies higher.

"Hail the ant mill's circling spinners!
Aquifers! Drink 'em drier!
Well to whistle!" chant the buyers.
We dance in thrall as the air goes thinner,
our lashlines labeled stress and sliver,
a tightening backwards down the gyre
to the holding center—paid entire—

all the ant mill's circling spinners
marching to the end in pomp and shivers.

Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

APOSTATE ONLY AM I TRUE

by Peleg Held

“We are shocked and deeply saddened by reports that Mohammad Bashir al-Ajani and his son Elyas were murdered by the militant group Islamic State which had accused them of ‘apostasy’. The deliberate murder of civilians during an armed conflict is a war crime and both those who commit them and those who order them must be brought to justice. We call on all actors involved or with interests in this conflict to use all diplomatic means possible to ensure that no more civilians – including writers – are killed.” —Salil Tripathi, Chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee.

For Mohammed Bashir al-Aani executed with his son

outside Dier Ezzor in March 2016.

They tear at the strings
and a dew falls into the bright
of the lower skies.
I hear a singing under the blue:
cisterned voices,
thickening amber, welling new
in the combs behind dropped eyes.
There is a weaver this night—
working steady, working through,
weaving strands of the silenced,
binding many to the few.


Author's note: The title is taken from a line of Paul Celan's "Praise of Distance".

Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

SEPTEMBER 11

by Peleg Held

On September 11, 1973—Chile's socialist president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a coup. He committed suicide under mysterious circumstances as troops surrounded his palace, ushering in more than 15 years of military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. Since that time, the CIA has acknowledged knowledge of—but not involvement in—the plot. The agency "was aware of coup-plotting by the military, had ongoing intelligence collection relationships with some plotters, and—because CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970—probably appeared to condone it," the CIA writes in a history of its operations in the South American country. (Declassified documents reveal how the Nixon administration instructed the agency to undermine Allende's government and "make the economy scream.") —Uri Friedman, The Atlantic, September 11, 2014

The infamous rarely die
in caves. Instead they nobly precede
grey-scaled acknowledgements
by a few years, passing quietly
in rich linen and laurel.

In an office filled with smoke,
escorted by explosion and a crackling
fire spreading like arsenic
in an old poet's blood,

his final words were sent ahead
onto the airwaves:


Superarán otros hombres este momento
gris y amargo en el que la traición 

pretende imponerse.

In Chile, they speak of the foreign
pilots, of the murder of thousands,
of September 11, 1973, in Spanish.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. He writes poetry, does woodworking and lately, dreams of the summer. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

FORMALITY

by Peleg Held

Upon a bench one long sought June
a court has crawled from its cocoon
in a winged deliberation

if water should despise the dam,
if wool should curl out from the lamb,
if wood should burn against the cold,
if youth should pulse beneath the old,
if push should starving come to shove
if those that simply do may love.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. He writes poetry, does woodworking and lately, dreams of the summer. pelegheld(at)gmail.com

KITES OF TEHRAN

by Peleg Held

"Give me to the wind to take away." 

                                 Reyhaneh Jabbari

Black form, blue thread
at half the weight of man
you're lifted up unwed
from earth and still
they deemed you born
by crane to bear the weight
of laws now hung in taught lines
tethered to the clinging center
where before the dawn
can sing men in from sin
they're led to run and run
with kites in tow, following
upon their heels the faithful's fear
of height and hair, of wing and word
the sweeping trembling defiance
of every wind-ruled thing.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. He writes poetry, does woodworking and lately, dreams of the summer. pelegheld(at)gmail.com

DAMASCUS GLASS

by Peleg Held

Photo: Twitter/@MajdArar

On Thursday Majd Arar, a Syrian Engineer, tweeted this photo taken by a group of activists in the neighborhood of Jobar in Damascus. Jobar, a strategically significant area that leads into the very center of the capital, is a rebel stronghold of sorts and one of the first places hit by chemical weapons on August 21. Heavy shelling and fighting followed. As you can see, Jobar is in the dark while regime-held neighborhoods closer to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's seat of power are lit up. --Michael Kelley, Business Insider, Oct. 10, 2013

An October sea,
curled lip and foam,
teeth born and bared
to the watering gaze
of the afternoon.

The tide slurs its words
and sands grow cold
in the valley of so many footprints.

Something feeds
bodied, dark, too far away
to distinguish.
We gather our own
and taste the coming
winter in the back of our throats.

Through dregs of sky
where haze clots
to horizon, arm or eye
afloat upon lashed bulk
glints a mirror
but we look down, enthralled
by shadow's greatness
stretching across the emptying shore.

Tomorrow, we will wake,
East in expectation.
What there will shine?


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. He writes poetry, does woodworking and lately, dreams of the summer.

PUSSY RIOT

by Peleg Held






Run your needles through, Maria.

Open the holes in the uniform of State Security.

Blessed be the easel of your frame, the canvas 

of your skin exposed to pigments of vulgarity.

The taste of power changes slowly in its madness.

Stalin still shows little care for poetry 

that bares its teeth to dominance.

Clean shaven, five blades deep,

his finger grubs grow thin and learn dexterity

from an acquiescent smile upturned in ritual purity.

Nadezdha, in the place of Joseph,

do you dream of hope and fury

while the catcalls waller on?

Hooligans. You shame them all


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. He writes poetry, does woodworking and lately, dreams of the summer.