WHAT COLOR WAS THE SKY THAT DAY?

by Susan Cossette

Impossibly clear, painfully blue.

 

So much sun, the perfect morning,

then all changed irrevocably.

 

Humanity raining from the sky,

down to the bedrock,

down to the Hudson’s slurry wall.

 

Your lives now confetti.

 

22 years later I regard the bloody eye

of tangled and twisted steel,

the fraught echoes of last calls home.

 

There is no light 70 feet below ground,

in this place,

where we will always remember you.

 

Bagpipe music pumped in,

Amazing Grace, how sweet the contrariety.

 

I take my sandals off.

root into the bedrock,

my small white hand pressed to your tomb.

 

2,977 lives.

 

No day will erase you from the memory of time.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

TWENTY YEARS IN & OUT

by Art Goodtimes

For the first ten years after 9/11

a band of us peaceniks marched our

San Miguel County Seat’s main street

in protest & remembrance

Once a month. Every eleventh

Doves preaching to the peacocks

 

No permits. Just commish & citizen kin

remembering those who held hands

falling from the Towers like shot duck

 

Remembering those eagles in uniforms

racing up stairwells intent on rescue

as the crushing hate of true believers

came crashing down on their heads

 

Remembering America’s lashing out

without true purpose. Invading Iraq

Afghanistan. Predator strikes. Collateral

damage. A nation bent on inflicting

endless terror on endless terrorists

 

After decades of foreign wars

we peace-marchers kind of lost heart

Chickadees with PTSD. Crows

becoming accustomed to carrion

So industrial Telluride’s unreal

estate bubbles on undisturbed

 

Now, explains

Capt. Barefoot

lives of peace

our only protest

 

Parade-master & poet-in-residence at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival, Art Goodtimes served fives terms as Colorado’s only Green county commissioner. He is currently represented in Congress by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Rifle).

FIRES THIS TIME

Clackamas, Oregon, September 12, 2020


by Carolyn Martin

Dozens still missing in Oregon. Burnt roses are seen outside a destroyed home as destructive wildfires devastate the region on Friday, Sept. 11, 2020, in Talent, Ore. (AP Photo/Paula Bronstein via OregonLive)

While I check out evacuation routes
and pray our packed cars are precaution,
not necessity, thousands have lost
all there is to lose except each other
and maybe a treasure or two:
a dog, a cat, livestock raced
to fairgrounds, a child’s diary.

They don’t see what we—
the hunkered-down-in-place—see:
miles of ash heaps, contorted
cars and trucks, war-weary firefighters
who breathe the unbreathable.

Meanwhile, my mother lies in a NJ nursing home.
She can’t remember if she ate her lunch
or how to answer her phone. I watch her mind
slip into the smoke that wipes out
our Douglas firs and seeps into our home.
Today she doesn’t know her air is clean
or that nineteen years ago, she breathed
the ash of 3000 souls drifting
through another blackened sky.


Carolyn Martin is happily retired in Clackamas, OR where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. She is the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation.

THE GREAT FIRE

by Rick Mullin

Trinity Church steeple in silhouette on 9-11-2001.

Trinity Church Cemetery, Manhattan

At lunch, they ask me where to find the grave
of Alexander Hamilton. “The other
side,” I tell them, pointing to the nave
and tower-shadowed trees. “I hate to bother
you...." Don’t tell me... Hamilton. The same.
Tomorrow I should think to bring a sign:
The Other Side of Trinity [an arrow
pointing right], and sit back from the line
of tourists searching wide-eyed on the narrow
paths between the headstones for a name
that Broadway brought to light outside the oldest
steeple on a precipice and port
of no return, September at its coldest
in a New York City of another sort,
more human-scale and redolent of flame.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Transom.

HERE, HOLDING ON

by Carolyn Martin

Photo by Rob Sheridan: Ground Zero, New York City. October, 2001.

                                             
                        for New York City


October 1, 2001

Twenty days of barricades
and twos and threes pause
on Chambers Street—
business suits, backpacks, hoodies,
uniforms in every shape.
No one pontificates
over vacant desks and pews,
tear-wet beds, fire stations gone,
bone fragments searching for home.

Here, they’re awed.
Tower shadows fled.
The first time in thirty years
Village streets and living rooms,
store fronts with their sidewalk signs,
responders struggling with ash
bathe in sun. They bathe in the sun.

Here, light takes hold
and I, a stranger from 3,000 miles west,
grab a subway strap,
head to an uptown hotel
to write this down.

August 7, 2017

Here, breaking news:
DNA defines one more loss.
(Male. Unnamed. Per family request.)

Who’s left?

Eleven-hundred twelve gathered
in dusty dark, sharing thoughts
they thought as shadows dissolved.
Comparing notes on deals signed,
dinners served, dreams deferred
for the practicalities of work,
little words unsaid.

Here, holding on—each to each—until
they’re freed from this room
where they’ve agreed on the coarsest truth:
closure is a human myth.        

From English teacher to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin has journeyed from New Jersey to Oregon to discover Douglas firs, months of rain, and dry summers. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in publications throughout North America and the UK, and her third poetry collection Thin Places was released by Kelsay Books in Summer 2017.

MONTHS AFTER

by Alan Catlin

Months after
the towers came down
he sat an Upstate
New York bar
drinking lunch,

in town for business,
his friends teasing him,
“So were you one
of those guys we saw
on TV running away
as the second twin
came down?”

“Bet your ass
I was.”
He said.
Not smiling.
Not even vaguely
amused, as if he was
thinking, ”I could
have been one of those
human specks falling
down the side of
a building from
just-above-impact-
floor.”

“What would you
have done?  Hung out
to watch or stayed in
the lobby to see what
happened next?
I don’t think so.”

I didn’t either.

Alan Catlin is poetry editor of online journal misfitmagazine.net. His latest book of poetry is American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press.

EAST THIRTEENTH STREET

by Terese Coe

Eventually he touched upon what she meant to him, not in so many words. In New York on 9-11 she walked the two miles crosstown to his apartment. They needed each other now. No other friends in walking distance. No transportation. Everything had stopped. The city was silent. He had tv news on. They sat on the couch the entire day, transfixed. Soon she could no longer speak. He didn’t see why. Asked her soberly,        

            Are you in shock?
            No, I’m not in shock.
            Why aren’t you talking?
            There’s nothing to say.

He looked at her as if he didn’t understand. He’d been talking to Bob on the phone. She said it more intently, so he’d know.
         
            There’s nothing anyone can say.

His silence may have been a form of agreement. It did not persist.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection is Shot Silk.

AT CENTURY 21

by Rick Mullin

Image source: drjudywood.com


It happened. And the man in front of me

exploded straight up off the street, a mile

high. Many things seemed similarly

amplified. A woman cried as all

the contents of her briefcase scattered

over Dey Street. I assume she worked

in Tower One and would have made it in

by 9. And then the transit cruiser parked

on Broadway hit its lights and faded in-

to smoke and mirrors and a sense that mattered 

more than any rational surmise.

A shadow stream. Outrageous hip hop sneakers

rocketing. I saw the clearest skies

rain paper as a fire at the farthest reaches

closed a ring on everything that shattered.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.