LIBRARIAN/HAPPY EASTER/X

by Annie Cowell

“Twenty-two years after a pair of notebooks filled with Charles Darwin’s early musings went missing from the Cambridge University Library, they were anonymously returned in good condition last month along with a note to the elated librarian: ‘Happy Easter.’” —The New York Times, April 5, 2022. Photo: One of the returned notebooks included Charles Darwin’s famous “tree of life” drawing, which maps out how related species could diverge from a common ancestor. Credit: Cambridge University Library via The New York Times

It wasn’t just the fatty bloom of ancient leather

(although my fingers itched to touch it),

but more the lignin laden bibliosmia

which wafts from the wrinkled patina.

Vanilla essence of Darwin.

What lay inside mattered less to me

than the shadow of the procreator,

of the man whose mind gave Life to the Tree.

An aura which goes beyond the scientific,

of ink-stained fingers lacing 

his beard with brown and grey before 

penning those spindly branches. 

Two decades, I have been their guardian.

Whilst they were presumed missing

mislaid, misfiled, misplaced,

I have inhaled Darwin; stared at the covers

through half-closed eyes,

felt his ghostly hands on mine. 

It is only when he whispers

the books are overdue,

that I know I must return them.

The librarian looks a jolly sort so 

I choose a pink gift bag

and leave them with a note,

happy to have played a part 

in the mystery

of the Origins of Life.

Author’s Note: This poem was inspired by the return of Darwin’s notebooks to Cambridge University. I wanted to imagine what had motivated both the taking and the returning of them.

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

SONGS OF SURVIVAL

by Cristina M. R. Norcross

Pregnant women and children were caught in the bombing of the hospital in Mariupol. —The Mirror (UK), March 10, 2022

“Congress of Peoples for Peace" by Frida Kahlo (1952)

Debris, like ticker tape confetti,

still floats in the air, 

as the camera lens captures

a young mother’s silhouette,

protective hand holding her half-moon curve.

I spot the side of her cheek and eyebrow

dotted with streaks of blood,

where shards of glass or wood must have 

swept past her, mercifully missing 

her vulnerable nest within.

 

A Frida Kahlo painting appears on my screen,

while breaking news continues to drone.

Both moon and sun spheres glow on the canvas.

A tree of life, bursting with oranges,

grows before my eyes.

A mother hen sits impossibly on top,

as if keeping eggs warm on the highest branch.

 

The little girl’s song in the shelter 

lingers from last night, 

stays with me, as I walk through the house.

I hear her honeyed, hopeful voice 

even as I fall asleep. 

Her letting go of sound, word, voice, outcome

is the bravest note I have ever heard.

 

We sing ourselves into a new day,

an insistent melody

where sound itself holds the promise

of survival,

proof that beyond the bombs and tanks overhead,

rooted in the cellar of Ukraine’s earth,

is a chorus of people who believe. 

 

Cristina M. R. Norcross lives in Wisconsin and is the editor of Blue Heron Review. Author of 9 poetry collections, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, and an Eric Hoffer Book Award nominee, her most recent collection is The Sound of a Collective Pulse (Kelsay Books, 2021). Cristina’s work appears in: Visual Verse, Your Daily Poem, Poetry Hall, Verse-Virtual, The Ekphrastic Review, and Pirene’s Fountain, among others. Her work also appears in numerous print anthologies. Cristina has helped organize community art/poetry projects, has led writing workshops, and has hosted many open mic readings.  She is the co-founder of Random Acts of Poetry & Art Day.

FUCK YOUR GUN!

by Scott C. Kaestner






Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a 6 year old child’s right to enjoy a festival with the family.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a family’s right to go grocery shopping on a Saturday morning.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede an adult’s right to enjoy a night out with friends.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a student’s right to get an education without having to attend classmates' funerals.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a believer’s right to worship the God they choose.

Fuck your gun, fuck the NRA, fuck your thoughts and prayers, fuck the cowardly thieves who represent us.

Fuck your gun!

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, dad, husband, and guy who never gets tired of sunshine or tacos. Google ‘scott kaestner poetry’ to peruse his musings and doings.

REQUIEM FOR THE TREE OF LIFE

by Roberto Christiano

Magnified and Sanctified be your name.

When I was a young man, full of youth
and ardor and ideals, I took modern dance
at Dance Place in Dance Alley,
Adams Morgan, the Hispanic Section of D.C.

I never was a dancer but I was an actor
and I needed a pliable body to express
my characters.

At the end of every class, Carla Perlo,
our teacher, would say, “May your names
be written in The Book of Life.”

Somehow I suspected my name would not
be on that list, not because I was a gentile,
but because I was unworthy.

But that was when America
was the America of the beautiful
Hippie spillover and such blessings,
while not ordinary, were not extraordinary.

My body is older now,
and will not tolerate modern dance
or even bend to jazzercise,
despite the willingness of spirit,
or the voice of blessing.

I think about The Tree of Souls in the movie Avatar,
a great enormous weeping willow—instead of leaves,
crystal glowing stalactites which turn a most delicate
violet pink in the night. If The Tree of Souls is destroyed,
as it almost is, it will be the end of civilization.

And now I know as I go into Saturday mass,
a week after the Pittsburgh news,
at Our Lady Queen of Peace,
that two miles down the road
at Beth El,  Shabbat is there,
and I hear again the prayer.

And so I pray in the only way I know,
to the crucified rabbi,
with death only a heartbeat away,
and eleven candles lit,
and I sing,
all are worthy. all are worthy here.

May your names be written
in The Book of Life,
May your names be carved
in the bark of The Tree of Life,
May your souls dwell in
The Tree of Souls.

Shabbat Shalom.
Shabbat Shalom.

Editor's note: This Saturday, November 24, marks the one-month anniversary of The Tree of Life shooting. 

Since then, two people were killed and two others shot in El Dorado Arkansas on October 28; two people were killed and three others shot in Vallejo, California on October 30; a woman was killed on November 1 by the same man who killed two men the day before; two people were killed and four wounded in a Tallahassee, Florida yoga studio on November 2; a gunman killed twelve people including a sheriff's deputy and wounded many more at a college bar in Thousand Oaks, California on November 7; three people were killed and another shot at a bar in Globe, Arizona on November 11; three people were killed and one wounded in a shooting at a home in Dunn, North Carolina on November 12; four people were shot and killed in Tsayatoh, New Mexico on November 13; three people died after a quadruple shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on November 14; and four people died on November 17 in 2 separate shootings in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Yesterday, two women and two men were found in a home in Philadelphia with gunshot wounds to the head; a police officer and two other people were killed in an attack at a South Side Chicago hospital; and one person was killed and four others injured in a shooting  in downtown Denver.

Roberto Christiano won the 2010 Fiction Prize from The Northern Virginia Review for "The Care of Roses." He was also a Pushcart Nominee for poetry published in Prairie Schooner. His chapbook, Port of Leaving is published by Finishing Line Press. His poetry is anthologized in the Gavea-Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry published by Brown University.

TO THE POLITICIAN WITH A MICROPHONE DRIBBLING THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS

by Tricia Knoll





I have my hand up in your face, you crazy motherfucker!
I do not want your prayers and thoughts.
Yes, my son was inside that school. Drawing peonies.

What did you say? I said it was my son dancing
in that bar. I’m sick of your platitudes and droopy eyelids.
He was line dancing and you tap dance about amendments.

He was in the yoga studio doing sun salutes.
That’s what I said and yes, I’m yelling at you.
He was stretching for breath to live in peace.

Yes, he was at Shabbat. Next to his grandmother.
And at the Baptist church. And the nursing home.
And the trucking office. And the Waffle Company.

And you’re out here with your microphone
crooning what a terrible shame
that so many people suffer mental illness

and that your people, the ones in their desks
piled with law books, are going for the death penalty
as if that says something other than you don’t know

nothing. This shooter shot himself.
And I don’t want the other ones
dead, I want them loved by someone

and I want YOU to stop making it sooooo easy
for them to buy the guns that make every
single room in this country dangerous to be alive.

We are all in this together. I was there too.
So was my neighbor and his daughter.
And his neighbor in the wheelchair.

Where were you? Playing golf?


Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet living in a quiet woods.

HALLOWEEN FOR A NEW GENERATION

by Lois Leveen

Photo by Sarah Gould.

It's odd to dress up
as a Jew when you
are already a Jew
but I do. Costume
myself in calf
length skirt, bright blue
blouse, covered head. The nose
I have with me always.
At my throat, sixteen
carat  מָגֵן דָּוִד shield of David
dangling from rope
chain. I clutch prayer
book instead of purse.
Apply make up to make
a bullet hole between my eyes, another
at my heart.

When I arrive at the party
vampires and zombies
snub me. Skeletons turn
their scapulared backs.
A werewolf at the punchbowl
mutters asshole.
Undaunted by the undead
I search the crowded room for a black
kid killed in the park by a cop,
queers of color gunned down
on the dance floor, teacher
and students schooled
to death by a lone shooter, any one
of fifty-eight massacred country
music festival attendees. But not even
the Sikh slain for being
Muslim has come. You're a fright
to behold! screams
the glow-in-the-dark tshirt of the ghoul
who tells me to leave. A fright not
to be held in this house
of horrors, I step into the dark
and stormy night of America. America opens
its arms to ones like me.

Lois Leveen is old enough to remember when adults didn’t go to Halloween parties and children to go through active shooter drills in school. She is the author of the novels Juliet's Nurse (Simon and Schuster) and The Secrets of Mary Bowser (HarperCollins). Her poetry and short prose have appeared on/in Ars Medica, The Atlantic, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, The Chicago Tribune, cloudbank, Culminate, Hawai'i Pacific Review, The Intima, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, Monkey Puzzle, The New York Times, NPR, and The Southhampton Review; one of her poems is inscribed on a hospital wall.

TREE OF LIFE GRANDPARENTS

by Matt Witt

The poet's now-deceased grandparents Edna and Irv.

Our olive tree when I was growing up:
an icon in our Jewish neighborhood,
easily a hundred years old,
with rough-barked branches shading the entire yard.

Women in modest dress
stopped to harvest the olives,­
not so much to save money
as to remind them of home.

Under this tree of life
passed my Jewish grandparents
when each came to visit.

Ida was old country,
her parents from Poland,
her old smells and
old Yiddish expressions
foreign to my growing interest in
The Twist,
Mr. Tambourine Man,
a­nd protests against The War.

Edna and Irv had left their heritage behind,
hosting us on Christmas,
not Hanukkah,
and wearing hippie beads to
a “happening” in the park.

One morning I walked the family dog
past a neighbor’s lawn.
A cross had been burned
into the grass the night before.
It stared at me every day
until new seeds grew in the spaces.

Soon after, I sat under our olive tree
filling out a college application
that asked my religion.

“Should I mark ‘none’?”
I asked my mother.

“You have to put ‘Jewish’,”
she said.

“Put Jewish, or else
people will think you are
trying to hide it.”

Matt Witt is a writer and photographer who lives in Talent, Oregon. He was recently selected a Writer in Residence at Mesa Refuge in California and has been selected an Artist in Residence at Crater Lake National Park, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, and PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon. His writing has been published in the The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the literary journal Cirque, and many other publications.

CARRYING FORWARD

by Tricia Knoll 

I have too many funerals to plan.
That’s what the rabbi said when asked

how he handles the mourning
and mornings that come after

the worst has happened. I need a break
the physician begs, no more stinking news.

I have to practice healing all over again.
The poet chews up the words she knows

for hate and they rub raw like hand-me-down
rags, unbought, stamped like prison garb.

The child asks after the star. What night
holds the star on that building?

The parents try to say all nights, all stars,
we are all one under all of them.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who grew up in a community similar to Squirrel Hill. She regularly attends a church in a denomination whose buildings have come under violent attack for its religious liberalism and strong social justice stands.

THIS COUNTRY

by Judy Kronenfeld





        Anti-Semitism was something that happened in history,
        that happened in other places.
        —Sophia Levin, 15, Tree of Life congregant              


My immigrant father, born in Germany,
was “a little roughed up” after Hitler,
after the first anti-Jewish decrees,
was scared “once or twice” by a knock
on the door before he left for America
with his younger brother in 1934,
following his parents the year before.
Only his settled older sister and her
family made the mistake of staying
until they couldn’t escape.

Maybe in order to live
in this new country, to have
 a wife and child of his own,
my father chose to keep his sister’s story
mostly close within, his private
memorial flame. Maybe his heart
was so heavy it broke, but he wouldn’t let
it scar and harden against love, or let
a furrowed brow cloud every hour,
unlike a few whom evil terrorized
beyond hope.

All I know:  as a young child growing up,
here, in this country, I wasn’t compelled
or even invited to dwell, to imagine
the last years of those relatives
I could never meet:  the broken glass
on the streets, the stars shining
on their coats, the black engines
steaming in the station, the swallowing
fear in their stomachs, then the soup
of potato skins, the lice,
then their starved flesh and protruding bones
becoming smoke just about when I was born
on a golden, free street.

But eleven people exterminated in a synagogue,
on Shabbas morning, here, in this country,
in Pittsburgh—native ground
of Gerald Stern, Michael Chabon,
Gertrude Stein—by someone who says
All these Jews need to die, and as I rage and mourn,
a sliver of imagination lacerates
my heart with fear and makes my stomach quail,
and I can hear the heavy boots on the stairs,
the rap of knuckles on the door at 2 A.M.,
and I can see my aunt, my uncle,
my cousins whom I’ve never seen,
who were wrapped away from me
by my father’s love, who were herded
at gun point to their deaths—
arising out of the safely past and gone.

Judy Kronenfeld’s last three books of poetry are Bird Flying through the Banquet(FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Ghost Town,  Rattle, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other journals, and in two dozen anthologies. She also writes creative nonfiction, which has appeared frequently in Under the Sun, in Hippocampus, and in other places. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing, UC Riverside, and an Associate Editor of Poemeleon. 

AGAIN

by George Held

Oct. 27, 2018 Squirrel Hill is home to a large Jewish population. Above, Tree of Life synagogue. Pam Panchak/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/AP via The Washington Post

Jews are being slaughtered again, ho hum –
In serene leafy Squirrel Hill this time

After days of pipe-bomb deliveries
To Dem bigwigs, enemies of the T***p state,

As reported by those enemies of the state,
The media; now the Jews again, those

Enemies out of central casting always
On call for the demented demons

Of domination as they once again
Focus their hatred and execute scapegoats

In the name of some Judenfrei utopia
That can never exist, because once

Judenrein, those left will turn on the weak
And most despised among them

And the executions will begin again…
So don’t look for barbarians at the gate

They already are right here inside –
Inside our borders, inside our hearts


George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, writes from New York. His twentieth collection is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle, 2017). Under the Escalator, his dark fantasy for children, came was released last month.