ONCE UPON

a triptych for Ukraine, March 2022

by Lana Hechtman Ayers

Detail of the poster for the 2016 film.

I. Shush! Don’t Wake Her

 

See her now,

home from

the cancer ward,

in her own bed

in her own room,

curled around the fuzzy

brown teddy bear nearly

as big as she is at four,

fur of its right ear matted

down from sucking,

emerald neck ribbon frayed,

glossy hazel eyes shining

in the toadstool nightlight’s

amber glow. She sleeps atop the sky

blue coverlet hand embroidered

with sunflowers by her grandmother,

The white nightgown with flourishes

of willow leaves tangles around

her too-thin legs, and one chubby

thumb presses against her lips

that are as rosy as imported

cherries from her last birthday

celebration she dreams of

tasting again. From elsewhere

a clang wakes her and she

reaches for the waning

crescent moon that hangs

in the bedroom window

like one of her mother’s

dangly gold earrings

just as the bombs

begin to fall.

 

 

II. Once Upon a Time

 

Swallow the clatters of war tanks, bullet ratatat's, crashes of broken glass.

Hear to the red smoke as it shrieks down chimneys,

 

around drafty windows into the house, down the hall to the bedrooms.

Inhale the atonal black fire as it incinerates the fairy kingdoms of childhood to ash.

 

This is not the bedtime story any parent hopes to tell their children.

Look out your window.

 

If the night is clear and calm, or

if all that rains down from the sky is water,

 

ask yourself, how can I help parents in far off lands

find a happily ever after for their children

 

this one night

to the next?

 

 

III. Elegy for War

 

After the last bombs exploded,

silence deafened

the world for several decades.

People took to speaking

in gestures,

holding arms out in front

of themselves, wide open,

which led to stepping forward

into more hugs,

led to extravagant foraging

for wild berries.

Vehicles of insurgence

morphed into homes for bats

and rats and only grouchy bears

ever ventured near.

NATO transformed into

a travel agency,

with free week-night stays

across Greenwich Mean.

Everyone everywhere

shared recipes for soup.

Lana Hechtman Ayers has shepherded over eighty poetry collections into the world in her role as managing editor at three small presses. Her poems have appeared online at Rattle, Escape Into Life, Verse Daily, and The Poet’s Café, as well as in print journals and her nine published collections.

FUTURE ORIENTATION

by Imogen Arate

Tweet by The Kyiv Independent.

There is talk of war

in the shushing peacetime

desires for cracking 

delineations to self-heal 

without tending

There is talk of utopia 

in the blunt wielding

of firebombs Why not

destroy to rebuild (make

room for better)

On the bodies of whose

children friends parents

and lovers A question 

suppressed or answered

by the jutting of chins

toward the detested

"Other" 

though history’s fingers

point to mutual others

who have become as

anonymous as the sides 

they took

whose bodies grew

sunflower fields though

their bones still beg 

for time to reunite

with the consolation

of a soothing soil

There is paradise

in the overtaking 

of punctured tanks

by tendrils grown

from the dust of war

in the dawning

that we are multitudes

of singular imperfections

who seek out others 

to share our wounds

perchance to heal

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of Poets and Muses, a weekly poetry podcast that won second place at National Federation of Press Women's 2020 Communications Contest. She has written in four languages and published in two. Her poems, “A Declaration of Loyalty” and “Sanctuary” placed Second and Third, respectively, in the 2020 National Federation of Press Women at-Large Communications Contest. Her poetry has appeared in 18 publications on four continents, most recently in I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Dwell Time, Nude Studio, and dyst.  You can find her @PoetsandMuses on Twitter and Instagram.

MUSE IN ALFALFA FIELDS

by David Spicer

I roar through Utopia in my steroid
Chevy, cram a baguette in this gorge
of a mouth, a poster boy for broccoli
haters, climbing Hesitation Hill
to the cliff. I’ve declared myself
a winner, the empire below,
the valley with the ultimate prizes—
ruler of this huge county, thousands
following me, migrating to Utopia
to work for me, and women who
think I’m a sweetheart, holding
daisies’ secrets—and I’ve decided this
is the time: I can’t be their gatekeeper
because the face in the cracked mirror
no longer listens to reason, I’m tired
of spewing poison spit from my
darkened haze. No longer a cinch
to win, tired of foes who ruffle
my ego, I’m leaving the keys
in the ignition and detaching the bicycle
from the Chevy’s roof to hop on a nut
cruncher of a seat, riding to the beach
in the rain. Maybe one day I’ll hop back
on the train, but until then, take a tip
from me: when work stops being a gas,
it’s time to muse in alfalfa fields
and disappear to another county.
Not in this dream, you gullible lemmings.

David Spicer has had poems in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,  Gargoyle, Mad Swirl, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, TheNewVerse.News, The Laughing Dog, In Between Hangovers,  Easy Street, Ploughshares, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press, 1978), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Pushcart and a Best of the Net, is the author of one full-length collection of poems, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press, 1987), and four chapbooks. He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.