MY FATHER'S TREES

by Rikki Santer

The Yatir Forest in Israel ends at the border with Palestine. The largest human-created forest in Israel, 12-square-mile Yatir was created in the 1960s on semi-arid land with four million trees, 90 percent of them Aleppo pine. —National Geographic, March 24, 2023

after Hamas, after Gaza

A ring of trees in Israel

encircle his legacy, a memorial

from his bowling buddies

three decades ago. The certificate

declared from Leviticus:

When you come to the land

you shall plant trees.

My father never visited that land

and neither have I but I trust

his trees are there still in the Negev Desert

perhaps an arboreal Heinz 57 of carob,

redbud, olive, almond, pear, cypress,

cedar, and oak. 

Bologna sauce is what my father

cooed he’d squeeze out of me

when his hugs were hymns

in gratitude for finally finding

the good life with wife, daughter, son.

His ideas of assimilated Jewish

migrated to my secular shaping. 

Synagogue just on high holidays, 

Sabbath just another Friday night

for cheeseburgers and Hogan’s Heroes. 

And Zionist? He was more B’nai Brith 

bowling league and temple dues.

These days I imagine his Israeli trees

forsaken by milk and honey. Their roots

sponging up bloodshed. Their skins

trembling with gunfire and bomb.

Their bent architecture davening

a shameful Kaddish.

Their barren fractals of branches

reaching and reaching 

for nothing but air.

Rikki Santer’s poetry has been published widely and has received many honors including several Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2023 she was named Ohio Poet of the Year.  She is currently serving as vice-president of the Ohio Poetry Association and is a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council.  Her twelfth poetry collection Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.

SABBATH

by Chris Reed

The deepening fall stalls my step,
invites a seasonal sabbath,
a slowing of time, luring me
to witness the dying world,
the retreat of light, warmth, color,
a trail of endings,
this yearly dress rehearsal.

Here is the world. 
Leaves, red-rimmed, rustle silently
like yesterday’s still photos from Gaza,
Israel, Ukraine, blood-tinged. 
The deck is wet from recent rain,
as water runs out in war-torn lands,
runs out for all, as rivers 
and aquifers shrink, while torrents
wash cities into the sea.

A rest. A time away from politics,
like leaving the red-faced relatives,
arguing in the sunroom, laced
with whisky fumes, surrounded
by blue-blossomed African violets.
I’d sneak into the kitchen 
filled with the smells and warmth 
of my grandmother’s baking bread
as she hugged me and nodded,
a knowing smile on her face.

Was it in Coetzee, I read that politics
is just a form we use for the hate
and frustration already there?
Was it in Miller, I read that when
as children, love is denied, politics
and how we treat our own children,
are where we fine-tune our cruelty?

The leaves turn paler, start to yellow,
the sky, a cleaner blue after the rains.
Sabbath is about sitting with gratitude,
sitting with possibilities,
sitting with some kind of god, 
some kind of love.
I wait.


Author’s Note: The seed for this poem was this week's New York Times story about the Amazon River.


Chris Reed is a retired Unitarian minister. Her poems have recently been published in River Heron Review, The NewVerse News, and US1 Worksheets, among other journals.

WITNESS

 by Amy Shimshon-Santo

I am the person formerly known as _____ _____ - _____.

Now she is the bird left behind from the flock.

She is the figure weeping in the sand.

A witness, witnessed only by the sea.

I am not a war correspondent or a social media expert. 

I am not a documentarian of suffering.

Don’t worry. I have nothing to teach you and nothing to say. 

I’m just skipping words like stones along the water, 

knowing they will bounce and then sink down.

The birds laugh at us.

Birds side eye sonic jets and helicopters. 

Maybe they will tell the trees what’s going on — what they see and feel.

Last week I was a writer.

Today I am a barnacle on the belly of a whale. 

I am moaning like an underwater animal.

When did time stop? When will it start back up? 

Will it? Is this the new time, 

the timeless time, lost in unknowing?

I am not a flag.

I am no longer really a woman, I just gave birth to life.

I am not a faith, just faithful.

Oh broken bones and heavy stones

How far will you tumble?

How far down will you fall?

Six days ago was the sabbath. We gathered 

with 29 members of my family across four generations. Cousins with cousins. 

Sisters with sisters. Brothers and children and grandparents.

Six days ago was a Friday.

Today is six days past a moment of miracles, six days past the bomb.

24 hours x 6 ago there was a night where we could all lay down and hope to sleep.

If I am going to sit with the page I have to say that I don’t want to say

I want this to not be true.

Before I speak, I want you to know that I am wrong. 

Not because I know nothing but because everything is wrong. 

Not every thing but the big world of powers that evaporate worlds. 

I don’t want to remind my mind and relive what has become a beginning.

I don’t want to state the facts because the facts are a mush of kindnesses and disasters.

I am the person formerly known as a self.

I melted into the Mediterranean, sonic booms above our heads. 

My tears salt the water and make everything sting.

I want to tell you about the weeping. 

The mother collapsing onto her belly like a conch shell whose life has departed. 

She is the throw away, the detritus of those left behind.

Author’s note: I have been in three cities in Israel during this past week. I am from Los Angeles. My mother was born here in 1932 as a Jewish person under the British Mandate Palestine. I am a mother, a teacher, and a culture maker. I am deeply opposed to murder, torture, war, and intergenerational harm. War is the loss of lives and infrastructure and dreams and time. Torture and war are the worst uses of human energy and potential.

SEEKING ORDER

by Jim Gustafson

the dead are closer sometimes than others.
Now very near all around. Pushing
the thoughts away is not possible now.

It seems we need to keep score,
for reasons I do not understand
Yesterday, I worked my ass off

moving paving stones, lining them up
trying to get them straight and level.
I wanted them to look like I knew

something I do not really know.
I wanted to bring order
to the chaos all around me.

Today, too, will be the same.
I will seek order, make lists,
check things off, as if, it makes

a difference.  I know better, yet pretend.
The alternatives are limited. They float
in the air. I am ducking their swats.

I cover my face to hide my nose
from its odor, which is invisible too.
These days will go on

These days will become nameless
The sabbath shall melt away
my prayers now only words of fear.

Jim Gustafson is the author of three books of poetry: Friar Fred’s Diary (Big Table 2018), Unassisted Living (Big Table 2017), Driving Home (Aldrich Press 2013). His poems have appeared in Rattle, Poetry Quarterly, Tishman Review, The New Guard, Prick of the Spindle, and other journals. Jim and his wife Connie live in Fort Myers, Florida where he reads, writes, pulls weeds, and lines up paving stones.

SOCIAL DISTANCING

by John W. Steele

Not knowing who is shedding Novel Corona,
it’s not so bad to huddle in our caves

plugged into our phones and laptops, Zoom.
As for lining up in bare-shelved stores

who needs toilet paper, food and drink,
soap and sanitizer anyway?

Meanwhile the crocs have stopped their bellowing,
called a truce. They’ve reached across the swamp

and offered one another bite-sized hunks.
The old-bird alpha-male has softened his tweets

and started to squawk about how he is going to kill
the virus. November looms large. The other crocs,

afraid he’ll chase them from the swamp, are cowering,
hoping he won’t snap and spill their blood.

John W. Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher, assistant editor of Think: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction and Essays, and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University, where he studied with Julie Kane, Ernest Hilbert and David Rothman. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Boulder Weekly, Blue Unicorn, Copperfield Review, Heron Clan Anthology, IthacaLit, The Lyric, Mountains Talking, The Orchards, Society of Classical Poets, Urthona Journal of Buddhism and the Arts, and Verse-Virtual. He was nominated for a Pushcart prize, won The Lyric’s 2017 Fall Quarterly Award, won an award in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and was awarded Special Recognition in the 2019 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. His book reviews have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Raintown Review.

THERE IS THIS GUY

by Howard Winn

Image source: DonkeyHotey

who believes the Earth we live on
is six thousand years old and
says the geological evidence
is all malarkey as is the physical
data that verifies much of
Mr. Darwin’s theory about the
creation of homo sapiens which
this particular gentlemen says
he can refute in a few slick minutes
if questioned about the source
of what he believes without question
while at the same time insisting
his god made the world of Adam
and Eve in six days ending with
the Sabbath which our current
calendar created by the Greeks
and Romans a few years back
places as Saturday while our
Sunday is the first day of the
week and all those days in-between
named from classic mythology
are when this God parceled out
his chores of creation since he
apparently did not want to be
overwhelmed by trying to do too
much in the twenty-four hours
someone controlling the sun had
placed in each day so named
which leads one to ask just who
was the original engineer in charge
who put limits on this God The Papa?


Howard Winn’s fiction and poetry, has been published recently by such journals as Dalhousie Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), The Long Story,  Cold Mountain Review, Antigonish Review, New Verse News, Chaffin Review, Thin Air Literary Journal, and Whirlwind. His B. A. is from Vassar College. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at N. Y. U. He has been a social worker in California and currently is a faculty member of SUNY as Professor of English.