YOUR COUNTRIES ARE GOING TO HELL

by Diane Elayne Dees

Our country, on the other hand,

is a big slice of heaven, where 
 
a bag with different things in it
costs so much, we can’t afford

to buy clothes and medicine.
But things are bound to get better

because hundreds of penguins
have been hit with tariffs.

It will take time for us to see
the benefit of this, so our children

must have two dolls instead of 
thirty dolls, but no worries—

they won’t have to get 
vaccinated against anything,

and anyway, we’re all going to die.
Our children won’t be autistic

because their mothers, burning
with fever, won’t take Tylenol.

And—since they absorb everyting—
our children will rule the world 

once they are all saturated

in steak sauce. Having been spared 

the evil of windmills, they’ll be smart 

enough to bring down the plot to make

them all transgender. The bad news
is that there's no controlling 

the rampant spread of transgender mice
because the immigrants ate all the cats.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books), The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press), The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press), and I Can't Recall Exactly When I Died (Kelsay Books). Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

by Steven Kent

So listen, sheep: The earth is flat
(There's video to prove just that).
Each contrail you can see today
Was put there by the CIA,
While climate change is just a ruse,
A trick the Bilderbergers use
To dupe us now and gain control.

What's more, they mean to steal your soul
Through wicked work like plant-based meat,
Electric ovens for your heat,
Those 15-minute city plans,
And semi-auto rifle bans.
In fact, the Feds will take all guns,
Emasculate our manly sons,
Then bind us up with UN clamps
And ship us off to FEMA camps.

Bill Gates, we know, has killed a lot
Of people with his Covid shot,
Elections rigged--so neatly planned—
With checks George Soros wrote by hand.
We're red-pilled now, nobody's fools:
We watch and watch 2000 Mules,
Convinced that Biden cheated when
He won before, and will again!

A Swiftly conjured magic spell
May now control the NFL
Since Taylor is a psy-op drone
The Deep State here controls alone,
Her latest romance clearly meant
To reelect the president.
I'd still be in the dark, I'll bet
Had I not found the internet.
With Qanon right by my side,
My eyes at last are open wide:
Each truth another truth begat
Since I put on this tinfoil hat.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer, musician, and Oxford comma enthusiast Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Journal of Formal Poetry, Light, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and Snakeskin. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.

THE DEATH OF A POET

by Roxanne Doty

These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza. —Literary Hub, December 21, 2023

Before they were bombed from the sky 

warheads raining on their crucified city

littered with the bones of winter

and blood of children

they were a poet and a teacher

a mother and father who understood 

the hope of words, the way they slipped 

through walls and checkpoints

couldn’t be stopped by soldiers 

or guns, how they empowered

defied the laws of physics

and occupation and oppression

 

To the secretaries of war who murdered the poet

words were sterile instruments, tools

like wrenches and screwdrivers, hammers

from the hardware store, like bunker buster bombs 

and hellfire missiles from a rich country

with democracy and security on its lips

and complicity on its hands, to these priests

of destruction, the poet was a calculation

the result of collateral damage equations

estimates of death rankings of acceptable levels 

of slaughter

 

The poet was killed in their home 

and in a school and a hospital and a UN shelter

and a refugee camp and on a war-torn street

and waving a white flag

before they died the poet had asked

When shall this pass?

 

The poet understood that words are fragile

even with their power could crumble and die

they need an audience to listen

to absorb to act and the poet knew 

that all the children of Gaza 

are poets too

Roxanne Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her debut novel Out Stealing Water was published by Regal House Press, August 30. 2022.  Her first poetry collection will be published by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2024. Her short story “Turbulence” (Ocotillo Review) was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart prize for short fiction. Other stories and poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Quibble Lit, Superstition Review, Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, The New Verse News, Saranac Review,Gateway Review and Reunion-The Dallas Review.

THINKING ABOUT THE NEWS, I PICK WILD RASPBERRIES

by Bonnie Naradzay

Israeli forces have concluded their largest-scale military operation in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin in decades, killing at least 12 Palestinians and leaving widespread destruction across the city’s refugee camp. —CNN, July 5, 2023. The Israeli military says all of the at least 12 Palestinians killed in its near 48-hour operation were combatants, and that its operation aimed to break the mindset that Jenin is a “safe haven” for militants. But the Palestinian fighters parading through the streets in broad daylight, with weapons strapped to their chests, showed that they remain unbroken and defiant. The Jenin Brigade, a faction affiliated with the wider Islamic Jihad group, said eight of the dead, ranging in age from 16- to 21-years-old, came from among their ranks. Meanwhile, United Nations experts have stated that five children were among the dead. Muhammad Darwish Photo: The back wall of Hanaa al-Shalaby's daughters' room was blown out, leaving chunks of rubble on a small bed. —CNN, July 7, 2023

Walking along the road to the metro,

I have read that of 12 killed so far, 

5 were children. The IDF claimed

they were all terrorists. The clusters

of raspberries are red and I eat them.

Over 1,000 soldiers supported 

by missile-carrying drones

invaded dense neighborhoods.

IDF means Israel Defense Force;

it withdrew with its armored cars 

from the Jenin refugee camp only 

after depriving families of electricity, 

water; after smashing roads to rubble;

after blocking ambulances trying to reach

the wounded, after invading hospitals

and detonating canisters of tear gas there.

The raspberries are still safe to eat.

The news says Israel is buying 25 

more F-35 stealth fighter jets from 

the U.S. for free; the deal is financed 

through U.S. military aid: nearly 

$4 billion given outright to Israel 

every year no matter what; 

not as loans to be paid back.

I turn back to the raspberries, 

remembering that time I ate ripe

mulberries from a tree in the park. 

The UN observer on tv said Jenin, 

in the Occupied West Bank,

is in Area A, which is supposedly 

under the sole control of Palestine.  

Meanwhile Israel launched airstrikes 

attacking Gaza again. I pay my fare 

at the metro, go downtown 

to the homeless shelter, and share 

poems by Tu Fu and Langston Hughes.

Bonnie Naradzay’s recent poems are in AGNI, New Letters, Kenyon Review, Tampa Review,  Birmingham Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, and many other sites. She was awarded the New Orleans MFA’s poetry prize:  a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle (in the Dolomites) of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary. For many years, she has led regular poetry sessions at shelters for the homeless and at a retirement center, all in Washington, DC. 

LET PEACE BE THE MOTHER OF EVERYTHING

by Steven Croft

Polemos pater panton (War is the father of all things.)

—Heraclitus

From the internet I read about the bombardment of Barcelona

by Italians, Germans, in 1938, watch the Movietone footage

of children running, the torn arm of a father's tweed jacket dark

with blood even in the film's black and white.  Omen, prelude

of what would come.  Today Germans, Italians, the rest of us,

condemn the bombs' carnage in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol.

The UN was founded in 1945 to prevent world war and make

the world better.  A gradualism powered by hope, a world

where the center will hold, held by our civilized will, forged

from what we all want and what we know we did wrong.  But...

those bomb-melted multistorey wrecks of buildings in the gritty,

jumpy newsreel are grimly colored in today in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol.

War could never be a mother.  Not that she couldn't cradle a rifle

as easily as a baby, plant a garden of mines—but motherhood

is too likely to want the peace to nurture children, is too ready

to negotiate, to drop the aim of a final strike on the wounded,

seeing her own sons and daughters in them, their mothers' pain.

Even if it, she, starts small like an opening bud in spring, compassion

could start at a steel plant in Mariupol where bloody-bandaged men

are being stretchered out to buses today on CNN.  Negotiation

could spread to Kharkiv, Kyiv, Kherson, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, peace

could become a warm-bedded garden, now the mother of everything.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

WHY BLUE

by Catherine Gonick

“Animated Water” by Dragonlord-Daegen at DeviantArt

of all the light sent by the sun, blue scatters the most in all directions

to be seen by everyone 

 

it fills our sky and waters, most of our planet when seen from space,

yet in the rest of nature blue is rare,  

hard to find in minerals and plants, or food, except in blueberries 

and cheese, and difficult to make, ask any chemist

 

O blue of lapis lazuli, sleep and twilight, moon and Monday, ribbon

and blood, of medieval cathedral windows, glaciers, and forget-me-nots

 

O blue warm and cool, in hues of indigo, ultramarine and aquamarine,

turquoise and teal

 

blue that lowers our pulse rate, warns of poisons, protects against

the evil eye when used in pendants, painted on doors and houses

 

there is a blue of stability and distance, of peace and sadness, 

eyes of people who survived ice

 

a blue of harmony, seen in the flag of the United Nations,

a blue of storms, in uniforms for soldiers and police

 

but for the most part blue is everywhere we’re not—and invites

us to join it

 

of all the light that reaches Earth, blue is the sun’s favorite 

Catherine Gonick's poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Sukoon, and in anthologies including in plein air and Grabbed. She works in a company that mitigates the effects of climate change.

AMERICA FIRST

by Gil Hoy

The colorful Mosaic ceiling of the Chapel at the Normandy American Cemetery & Memorial symbolizes the United States which blesses its sons fighting for the freedom and a grateful France, which lays a laurel wreath among the fallen Americans who gave their lives for the liberation of the oppressed Europe. “On D-Day anniversary, ‘America First’ doesn’t sit well on the beaches of Normandy” —The Washington Post, June 6, 2019

Are we a family of nations
or are we not   How did                                                    
this nations thing happen
in the first place anyway
where just about every man
woman and child belongs
to one like a fraternity
or club   Was it a language
barrier or is that chicken
before egg banter   No slant
eyes here   No black eyes there

Americanized Lily White
Monet Europeans will inherit
the earth   Not the chosen people
Not the Nazis nor Jap equivalents

Build that wall   Rousseau wrote:
The man who enclosed the first
piece of ground was . . .
How many crimeswarsmurders
saved mankind by pulling up
stakes  Like the League
of Nations   Like Clinton
(the philanderer one)
at the second Obama DC:
“We’re all in this together
is better than you’re
on your own”

Not the selfish spoiled brat
hoarding all the kids’ toys
to be sent to his room
for a timeout   My adult
son was a little boy once
fighting sisters for front car
seats   And he was so sad when
his friend’s mother-made brownies
were eaten    Eaten by the class bully
who tried very hard to eat even
the last one   And many many many
more before that, before my starving
son had had even a teeny tiny bite

And our President wants
to bomb Iran (Liar!) and ban
transgenders and Muslims from living                                
in this world   His National Security Advisor
believes if you remove the top ten floors
of the UN building nothing happens
And his AG thinks Congress will
stay asleep at the switch   And London
protesters are disguised lovers who cannot
help but love our President and his terrific
economy, made in his own image
where tax breaks get richer and borders
get poorer

And when will the meek inherit
the earth   And where’s that last brownie
for my heavenly son and his starving
father to eat.

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and semi-retired trial lawyer studying poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared most recently in Chiron Review, TheNewVerse.News, Ariel Chart, Social Justice Poetry, The Potomac, The Penmen Review and elsewhere.

THERE IS GRANDEUR IN THIS VIEW OF LIFE

by Pepper Trail

A tangled bank, near Sandwalk, Charles Darwin’s walking path near his home at Downe House. —Image by GrrlScientist via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

“Around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.” —The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, May 6, 2019

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank,
clothed with many plants of many kinds,
with birds singing in the bushes,
with various insects flitting about,
and with worms crawling through the damp earth,                                                      
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms
have all been produced by laws acting around us,
and that from so simple a beginning endless forms,
most beautiful and most wonderful,
have been, and are being evolved.
          —Charles Darwin, the final paragraph of The Origin of Species, 1859
                                                                 

It is interesting to contempl te  t ngled b nk,                              
clothed with m ny pl nts of m ny kinds,                                      
w th b rds s ng ng  n the bushes,                                                  
w th v r us  nscts fl tt ng bout,                                                                              
nd w th w rms cr wl ng thr ugh the d mp e rth,                        
nd t  reflect th t these elb rtely c nstructed fr ms,                                
h ve  ll been pr d ced by l ws  cting  r nd  s,                                            
nd th t fr m s  s mplbeg nn ng endless f rms                          
m st  b   t fl  nd m st w nd rf l                                                      
h v   b   n,nd   r   bng   v lv d.          


Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

DEAR LEADER I WORRIED HIM

by S.O.Fasrus

Image source: zazzle.com

There was Kim Jong-il
Kim Jong-un
turn up the telly
not much fun

Car on the road
masses of space
art on the wall
Kim Jong's face

Go to the shop
can't find one
There was Kim Jong-il
There was Kim Jong-un

Dear Leader Un
taking in the view
firing off a missile
fuse just blew

There was Kim Jong-il
Kim Jong-un
turn up the telly
but you can't turn it off


S.O.Fasrus has verses at LUPO and is currently writing a YA novel.

A NEWEST COUNTRY'S ABUSES

by Valerie Sonnenthal

Photograph: Simon Maina/AFP/Getty . Rights investigators from the UN mission in the Republic of South Sudan (Unmiss) warned of “widespread human rights abuses”, including gang-rape and torture in a report based on 115 victims and eyewitnesses from the northern state of Unity, scene of some of the heaviest recent fighting in the 18-month-long civil war. —The Guardian, June 30, 2015

where do spirits go
when they have left
reddened earth
violated bodies
Sudanese girls
mothers
women burned alive
their tukuls leave no trace
in ashes of violence
Tabit two-day spree
every man bent
metal beaten
wood hammered
every girl fouled

Nuba Mountains reverberate
bombs obliterate
schools   mosques
health clinics   crumble
water  polluted
nothing  for no one
no one  the one
they were
yesterday

who counts atrocities
who counts
one war
one way
no where to flee
life simply
eviscerated
, but
where do the spirits go
are they free
must they bare witness
praying for the ancestors
please intervene


Valerie Sonnenthal joined the Cleaveland House Poets when she moved to Martha's Vineyard in 2006. She writes the Chilmark Town Column plus arts and lifestyle stories for the MV Times, Arts & Ideas magazine, and  publishes Errata Editions' Books on Books series. 

ALEPPO DIARY: THE NEW NORMAL

by Mary Jo Balistreri

What follows is a found poem based on “Aleppo Diary: The Carnage From Syrian Barrel Bombs" by Dr. Samer Attar in The Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2015

A nine-year old boy a barrel bomb obliterated hand

cylinders packed with explosives/shrapnel dropped by helicopters
Can you sew it back on

Bombs can’t be aimed hospitals pancaked blood smeared floors
slaughter of innocents 12 million in need half of them children
I couldn’t promise

Hundreds dying one weekend alone pulverized bodies crushed skulls
aid alone can’t offset systemic sustained slaughter
Stop barrel bombs the doctors say

Stop barrel bombs the doctors say
a nine-year-old asks Can you sew it back on
the U.N. asks, What more can we do

Steps you can take the doctors say
enforce no fly zones buffer zones too medical neutrality would be a help
more access to camps of refugees but mostly stop the barrel bombs

A nine-year old boy hand blown off you’ll be all right the doctor says
but deep inside the doctor knows the helicopters keep dropping
barrel bombs keep exploding

Mary Jo Balistreri has two full books of poetry, Joy in the Morning and gathering the harvest published by Bellowing Ark Press, and a chapbook, Best Brothers, published by Tiger's Eye Press. She has recent work in Parabola, The Hurricane Press, Plainsongs, The Avocet: Journal of Nature Poetry, Crab Creek Review, Quill and Parchment, Ruminate, The Homestead Review, The Heron's Nest, Acorn, and A Hundred Gourds. She has six Pushcart nominations, and two Best of the Net. She is associate editor of Tiger’s Eye Press. Mary Jo is also one of the founders of Grace River Poets, an outreach for women's shelters, churches, and schools. 

GAZAPPED

by Charles Frederickson




Unemployed Gaza youth unruly majority
Disheartened break out Manifesto declared
Challenging miserable conditions faced everyday
Mental incarceration suffering post-traumatic stress

Fuck Hamas fuck Israel fuck
Fatah fuck UN fuck USA
Dissatisfaction desperation frustration aggression depression
Mission Impossible leading normal lives

Sick of imposed shitty existence
Being jailed for inexcusable offenses
Mentally emotionally tortured by Hamas
Totally ignored by indifferent cowards

We want to scream breaking
Shameful wall of unjust apathy
Shedding sleepless nightmares outraged tears
Overhead F16’s breaking sound barriers

We cannot say what we
Want do what needs doing
Nowhere to run hide escape
Move No shunned hope options

We don’t want to hate
Fear being heavy-hearted victims anymore
We desperately want freedom is
Peace too much to ask

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 

HELL IS CALLED GAZA

by Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis

A Palestinian man carries a wounded girl at the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya after receiving treatment for her wounds caused by an Israeli strike at a U.N. school in Jebaliya refugee camp on Wednesday, July 30, 2014. (Photo: AP/Khalil Hamra via Common Dreams)

The Senate passed a resolution Tuesday that states the Senate’s support of Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas rocket attacks and condemns a “bias” United Nation’s report. S.Res. 526 was passed through a unanimous consent agreement. The resolution also condemns a United Nation’s Human Right Council report that stated Israel had committed human rights violations against the Palestinian people. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that U.N. report was “disgusting” and failed to recognize that Israel is defending itself from attacks started by Hamas, a terrorist organization. “I’ve always been a supporter of the U.N. but what I saw last week disgusted me,” Reid said of the report. “It was so one-sided.” --The Hill, July 29, 2014

If you had been the astronaut descending hell
the territory of unknown claims and bargains
Unimagined grievances and verdicts
going back to the ages
so long ago no one knows when it all began

Had you been there with me
Next to children, eyes closed, bodies floating in dreams,
harkening to ballads of far away muses in sea blue skies
embraced by rapturous blankets
kissed by the waking lips of wide-eyed mothers

in a UN fortified school
(what could be more secure for levitation)

Had you heard the long whistle
Then cracking thunder
Seen the black clouds hover high and higher
Like a tsunami tumbling in skies

And when down below, inside the classroom
the black mist cleared
had you seen the sharded glass, bloodied blankets
feathers for pillows, shoes
And limbs of children and mothers scattering all directions
East and West

Had you heard the wails of scarlet faces
Had you tasted the shadow of death

Would you have passed US resolution S. Res 526?
Would you have supplied the grenades and mortars?
Would you have said Yes to the War Reserves Stock Allies programme?
Would you have exclaimed in high voice, teetering to heavens,
“We stand with Israel and its right to defend itself?”

Have you forgotten?
The children slept before exploding into atoms in the ether.


Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis lives in Olympia, WA with her husband and daughter.  She is now revising a series of poems and other creative works to be completed 2015-2016.

UNJUST KIDDING

by Charles Frederickson

Image source: CKNW

Gaza offspring 3 wars old
Shrapnel unexploded debris littering strand
4 youngsters quicksand sucks victims
Senseless whimsical merciless bullyrag assault

Civilians shouldn’t die 1,780 homes
Mosques hospitals apartment blocs leveled
Leaving distraught families fearing drones
Aimed at tightening stranglehold noose

Power cuts outrage everyday occurrence
Farming limited by security zones
Movement restricted fishermen territorially confined
Raw sewage pumped into sea

UN found that about 25,000
Gaza minors suffer from post-traumatic
Stress disorder infants asking mothers
“Why is Israel bombing us?”

Invader fights simply because it
Can unstoppable grim forecast game-plan
21% deep poverty 40.8% unemployment
Teenager jobless rate skyrocketing 50%

No childhood to speak of
Disappearing dreams replaced with nightmares
Basic human rights freedoms trampled
Unable to live with dignity


No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson  proudly presents YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .

THE DESTRUCTION OF ANYWHERE

by David Feela

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
And released lethal doses of chemical gold;
And the corpses in white shrouds could not testify
When Assad shook his fist: all the dissidents lie.

So Death spread its wings without making a sound,
no staccato of gunfire, no bombs shook the ground.
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill
And their bodies convulsed before growing quite still.

No gashes or wounds, no bloody revolution;
They died to save bullets, a thrifty solution.
And the UN, they came, took the samples away
To be tested in labs before bodies decay.

And the streets of Damascus are quiet tonight,
And the militants home while they wait for first light;
And how sad the last volley of lies to be hurled
Has melted like snow in the glance of the world.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

A SNOWDEN SIGHTING

by Rick Gray

I don't know who I'm betraying, my TV doesn't work, 
but I must confess I saw Ed Snowden yesterday
on Chicken Street in Kabul.

It was only a glimpse
from the cracked, glaring window of a coughing taxi
near a dangling, pine-scented Quranic quote

but I'm certain it was him.
He was clutching a naked chicken over a laptop
and had the hunted look of a refugee

sort of like everyone in town
sort of like me
maybe that's why I couldn't help waving

and maybe that's why he nodded back
in the secretive, American way of those
gone to ground

and searching for a cheap hotel room
to spend the rest of your life
not going crazy in.

You've been a bad boy, Ed.
Me too, though in a less Boozy way.
So when all this toxic dust settles

which you will soon learn the UN calls "fecal matter"
let's get together at an undisclosed location and
shoot the shit.

I encourage you to let the postmodern goatee grow primitive,
and ditch those glasses. They are as deadly here as a square Humvee.
I'll teach you everything like a big brother

though you probably don't like Big Brother
call me whatever you want
I'm just another one who fell

between the new, prismatic cracks
and am searching for the old rainbow of
friendship untapped.


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.

KABUL, 5:30 AM, MAY 25, 2013

by Rick Gray

“Taliban Attack U.N. Affiliate’s Compound in Kabul, Testing Afghan Security Forces” By ROD NORDLAND and SHARIFULLAH SAHAK, The New York Times, May 24, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan — In what appeared to be a concerted effort to test the capabilities of Afghan security forces in the capital, Taliban insurgents sought to penetrate the heavily fortified heart of Kabul on Friday, blasting their way into a residential compound of the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations-affiliated agency.

The Afghan forces managed to hold the attackers at bay, and hundreds of international agency employees in nearby compounds escaped harm. But at least two people were killed and 13 wounded, including an Italian woman, and it took more than six hours for hundreds of Afghan police officers to subdue no more than six attackers with suicide vests, guns and grenade launchers. Explosions continued through the night. The authorities said they were from booby traps the attackers had planted in the compound.

It was the first example of what the military calls a “complex attack,” involving both gunmen and suicide bombers, in the capital since insurgents attacked the headquarters of the unarmed traffic police force in January. It took Afghan forces nine hours to bring that to an end.

Photo: A wounded Afghan police officer was rescued from a checkpoint. Omar Sobhani/Reuters

The morning after the attack
I'm woken by the rough voices of
men banging together metal scaffolding
and joking in a language
I'm too sleepy to learn.

I rise with them
to bang together a
rough draft of whatever
my aching brain can translate
from this wrecked mess.

Reaching open my thick, black curtain
I'm blinded with golden windows
exploding with a raging peace.
"Get out here, professor!" a Brooklyn voice leaps
impossible from an unfinished roof

and comes crashing into my space
riding a wild Afghan light, burning me
like a dead brother returning.
"We need your body!" he keeps singing
into my sunken chest, pounding. 


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.