WHAT HAST THOU DONE?

by Kyle Gervais

To be or not to be, the president 

asked all the world today, and chose the first.

And if he reached for the obvious, I don’t

begrudge a player of many parts his thrift.

 

But I in my distant unpolitical ease

have time to mine a deeper buried gem,

a coward king’s belated penitence:

It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,

a brother’s murder.   

 

                    They weren’t the same, of course,

Abel and Cain, and Vladimir is not,

can never be, Volodymyr might say,

his brother’s keeper. 

 

                    But the men who crossed the line

on the map from west to east met men (and more

than men) with names like theirs, with songs and food

like theirs, with roots that reach, tangled, chafing,

downward deep in a fertile common soil.

 

And when the guns are stilled and angels’ mouths

have sung so many brave souls to their rest

above the earth that cries out with their blood,

one man will turn, and hide his face from God.

Kyle Gervais teaches Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he lives with his husband and two cats. He has poems, published and forthcoming, in Arion, Canadian Literature, Defenestration, Eunoia Review, Literary Imagination, PRISM international, and Triggerfish Critical Review.

TRUE HOPE IS SWIFT AND FLIES WITH SWALLOW'S WINGS

by Annie Cowell 

Mural with swallows, Kyiv.

At dawn there is a chattering outside;

the swallows have returned—

A clattering percussion after winter’s silence

And I wonder as I watch them 

hurtling like arrows across the sky—

are there swallows shrieking over Kyiv?

Whilst missiles blast the light from Kyiv’s skies

will children spy the swallows darting past;

olive twigs hanging from their beaks?

Will those birds find their nests are broken

and sit instead on the prow of Charon’s boat

to guide the dead to the underworld?

Or rather, as sirens wail in breathless darkness

will the swallows glitter amongst the stars—

souls of the dead heralding the sun?

They say that true hope is swift 

and flies with swallow's wings

‘and light will win over darkness’

Annie Cowell is a former teacher living in Cyprus. She has poems forthcoming in a number of publications. @AnnieCowell3

MEMO TO JEFF SESSIONS FROM WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

by Wilda Morris

I warned you in my famous play
what happens when you grasp the coattails
of a sociopath drunk on the possibilities of power,
one who hides evil intent behind the scriptures
he quotes, sows seeds of division,
spreads false gossip, multiplies lies
while boasting his achievements, faith
and truthfulness. Had you read Richard III
and heeded Buckingham, you would have realized
that one brief pause before fulfilling all demands,
one little bit of conscience, and you’d be doomed.
You were destined, like him, for the axe
by your recusal.


Wilda Morris lives and writes in the Chicago area. Her blog provides a contest for poets each month.

DESCANT ON OUR DEFORMITY

by Rachel Voss

Richard III's skeleton as found in the grave beneath a parking lot. The remains of the King who died in the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485 were reburied in a tomb in Leicester's Anglican cathedral on March 26, 2015.

What’s more naked
than bones?  The whitewashing
of history, a ghostly rose

to honor the dead.  Which
dead?  “It doesn’t look like
the face of a tyrant,” a woman

said.  Hasn’t she heard
of Shakespeare (who couldn’t
have written a better ending),

or known any real sons of bitches?
It costs a lot of money
to look this immortal.

The onlookers point their thousand several phones,
and every phone takes several similar pictures,
and every picture condemns us all for vanity.

Now is the spring of our
reinterment.  Despite
the line of worshippers

and the royal craze, I, for one,
am determined to hate
the idle pleasures of these days.


Rachel Voss is a high school English teacher and lives in Queens, New York. She graduated with a degree in creative writing and literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her work has previously appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, Borderline, WORK, Blast Furnace, and The Prompt Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in Newtown Literary and the Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology.

THE SINGED FLAG AT THE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

by Tricia Knoll

"Two of the hallmarks of a Southern Oregon summer are heated theatrical performances in Ashland and wildfires in the surrounding forests. This week those two are at odds, as the smoke from numerous area fires has led to the cancellation of performances on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s open-air Elizabethan Stage." --Oregon Live, August 1, 2013
Images: Pisanio and Imogen painted by J. Hoppner (1801); Incident Management Team fire photo.

Wild fire tears forward on the Rogue
River, tickling Zane Grey’s one-room
cabin of hand-hewed logs,
in the purple sage.

Smoke jumpers, helicopters lifting
the weight of water, scorch, death
of fire fighters, children in face masks --
the West burns and those at risk
do not breathe. Homeowners pack
again, photos, pets, and wills.

Today’s dragons breathe names
of Big Windy northwest of Merlin,
a Whiskey complex, Brimstone.
Name the culprit lightning,
name the culprit record-breaking
hot summer days without rain.
Name a culprit human hand.

The actors shut the outdoor Shakespeare
plays in Ashland. No white flag
calls out merry troupes to juggle.
Cymbeline’s Imogen pockets her dark letter
asking for a horse with wings,
not tonight when the sky
is blight and ash.

The newspaper asks for more
than the National Guard, for more
from the government, and we,
the comfortable elsewhere, ride home
in guzzle cars to sit in Adirondack
chairs, content to do less
to clear the air of residue
that got us here.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet. She has endured fires near Sisters, Oregon on two occasions.

FOR WALT AND ALLEN

by Rick Gray

                                                                 

My name is announced before takeoff.
It’s JFK again, but this is a new terminal.
I haul my carry-on past rich kids pouting
In First-Class, already juiced,
 and step back onto the homeland.

Outside waits a man in a blue uniform and a silver badge.
“Are you a writer?” he asks.  There are tribal scars
On his fat cheeks.  I don’t ask.
“Follow me,” he tells me, and we walk together back
Down the tube to America. Our footsteps echo out of rhythm.

At the American Airlines check-out desk ten men are hovering over
my lost notebook of poems. I relapsed in the wine bar and my God punishes.
A man no older than thirty introduces himself as Tim from the Terrorism Task Force.
I told him I was not impressed, and that I believe in respect for elders.
I’m very traditional that way, Tim. Maybe it was my years in Africa when I lived in a hut.
Tim’s training did not include humor and, confused, he steps away.                                                          

The Boss moves in, a man with the pink alcoholic shade my ancestors taught me.
His face looks frozen in 1974. Very pre 9/11, with a suit that looks
lifted from the costume room of The French Connection.
“You’re a poet?” he starts. “You said it,” I swing back at him, “not me.”
“ A woman found your notebook and was very alarmed,” he frowns.
I try to break his Popeye scowl with a grin. He goes grim.

“Your poem called Bomb Threat is of concern,” he continues,
Lifting a torn page out of my notebook. Everything is written in green.
“And your comments about Homeland Security we all find curious.”
“That shit is weird,” the black guy with the scars exclaims. Everyone nods before
French Connection waves them still.

“I’m missing my plane,” I say, and a cop tells me to forget about flight.
“What was your destination?” another one asks.
I am going to Afghanistan to teach Shakespeare, I calmly explain.
I finally get my first laugh. But when I tell them to go fuck themselves, fascist pigs,
They’re back to business with my notebooks.     

But not I.
No, I now have a growing audience of passengers for the Paris flight
And I was raised not to waste. Children are starving in Africa.
THIS IS NOT AMERICA! I shout to them.                                                                                  
I AM BEING HELD FOR POETRY! I cry, and don’t know why I raise my fist.
This must be the oral thrill of the spoken word I’ve read about    
And I can feel Whitman and Ginsberg grinning below the New York dirt of JFK.
“Front page!” I bluff to the boss, flushed with my little fame, “New York Times!”
and pull out another notebook and start writing, staring into his badge.

Walkie-talkies come out and soon an alternative ticket is being printed.
They give an Irish cop the job of returning my notebooks; no one else will touch them.
“Hold onto these,” he gives me a wink I might, in a better mood, call Whitmanesque.
“It’s a shitty job,“ he apologizes as I take back my poems and head to another gate.
“Any good publications?” I hear him call out to me.
“Nope,” I shout back, “my job sucks too.”

Oh America, I don’t want to leave you!
I want to stay and write poems that make men huddle in airports!
I want to be pulled off your American Airlines and asked by scarred men if I’m a writer!
I want to make speeches about liberty to passengers to Paris!
I want to alarm everyone in the country!
But instead I’m off to another stupid war
To pay for my daughter’s ballet.
No one in America responds to my resume,
only these lost notebooks that don’t pay.
So before I step away from my homeland
I get one last jab at the Irish cop trailing me.
“I’m coming back soon!” I shout back at him from the tube.
“And we’ll be waiting!” he calls back to me, waving a little blue book.


Rick Gray served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. He was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie, and has an essay that will be appearing in the forthcoming book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. When not in Kabul, he lives with his wife Ghizlane and twin daughters Rania and Maria in Florida.

FINDING RICHARD

by Dave Goldenberg

Richard III, Infamous English King, Found Under Parking Lot --US News headline, February 4, 2013.
Image source: University of Leicester

"March on, join bravely, let us to't pell-mell

If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell."
--Shakespeare's Richard III



To none would this cold grave as heav'n appear,

And so it seems, clod-cloister'd in cold clay,

That I did damn'd in hell these centuries lay

'Neath Vauxhalls and Renaults in second gear



Yet 'tis in heav'n I have come to stay.

The Bard hath penned perhaps no greater role--

And lions have inhabited my soul,

Such as Pacino and Olivier.


Dave Goldenberg is a New York ad guy who moved his office about 30 miles uptown. Although he's won awards as a writer and creative director, he's equally at home in his left brain. Over 20 years he's served every kind of client, from AOL and American Express and Schick to MTV and America Online. But that's just his day job. He's also a folksinger on the local circuit, a passionate skier and an unapologetic Yankees fan.