HOPE

by Julian Matthews

to honor the families of passengers and crew of MH370 on the 8th anniversary of the airplane's disappearance on March 8, 2014

Click here for MH370: An Interactive Presentation by The Straits Times (Singapore), March 8, 2022

Hope is the cold metal hanger in my heart 

where I hang the coat of all my warm memories of you

which I put on to feel your hug, 

your firm arms around me

Hope is the candle I light and re-light in my mind

remembering all the ways you glowed

All the ways we melted into each other

I keep the flame lit so I can still feel

the burning longing for you to come home

to see grace in these shadows

Hope is the light I leave on all night, every night 

awaiting your return

Hope is a kite on the high wind

I hold on to this unfurling string, 

unwilling to let go

even as you get smaller and smaller in the distance

in the blue, blue sky

I shade my eyes as you merge in the lap of the light

Hope is stubbornly willing this line between us

to never, ever snap

Hope is the ship you last boarded waving your goodbyes

from the handrails

Hope is me waving right back at you from the port

my arm hurting as it gets heavier and heavier

and you, further and further

with the passage of time

Hope is your silhouette on the horizon

bobbing on this sea of heartache

Hope is the salty tears I cry on nights like these

that could fill the ocean between us

Hope is this piece of the broken plane

I found on the beach

that you may have brushed against lightly

as you walked down the aisle

This drifted debris I hold in my trembling hands

Hope is placing my ear against it, cheek against shard

to listen to your last message within--

I dreamt again of you last night

like the thousand dreams before

You grinned cheekily, your eyes smiling

as you stepped through the front door

I asked you, nay, demanded:

“Where have you been?!”

And you reached out, pressed your palm

against my chest, my honeycombed heart,

and replied calmly, sweetly:

“Here, always here, my love...”

Hope is knowing that is true

Hope is awakening to that truth

Hope is the only home I know

Julian Matthews is a former journalist expressing himself in the pandemic through poetry, short stories and essays. He is published in The American Journal of Poetry, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The New Verse News, among others. He is based in Malaysia.

IN THE TIME OF PLAGUE

by Alejandro Escudé

When the so-called Black Death swept through northern Lincolnshire during the middle of the 14th century, sick and desperate people turned to the nearby Thornton Abbey's hospital for care. So many people died there that the members of the abbey's clergy were unable to prepare individual burials and instead had to bury the bodies in a so-called plague pit … But even though dozens of people were consigned together to a shallow mass grave over a period of just a few days, the remains were nonetheless treated with respect and received individual attention, according to a new study. Photo: A close-up shows part of the mass grave at Thornton, where the deceased were carefully positioned and placed in an organized manner without any overlapping. (Image: © University of Sheffield/Antiquity Publications Ltd.) —Live Science, February 18, 2019

Forty eight humanoid figures
on the archaeological diagram
of the Black Death burial site;
Thornton Abbey monks, patient,
pious, wrapped each individual,
performed last rites, conscious
of the space between negligence
and love, light separating all us
pilgrims making the trek out
to the country to die with hope
of afterlife. Why does the cross
resemble a key? Why is the answer
always more patience, a power
more like prayer than habit?
I won’t forgive some around me
despite our woes widespread.
Rat-psyche world, words heady
as a virus, our bodies buried
side by side so they don’t overlap
even in life. What is love but hope?
When one looses hope does
one loose the ability to love?
These monks didn’t. Wouldn’t.
I see their bony, medieval hands
sorting it all out in the dirt,
disease, blood, vomit, their
screams suppressed by prayer
and see the same monks in
the people wearing hazmat suits
today, leading those sick with
a new disease down the stairs
of an airplane, the disease itself
the shape of the airplane,
a cruise liner, an old couple
quarantined in their cabin,
taking it all in stride, they say,
unabated fear in their hands,
their jittery faces, those carried
away in China, yelling like
hostages, stowed away in clear,
plastic houses. Abbeys whose
hymns we’d rather not hear.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

FLIGHT CHECK

by Lee Nash

A British Airways pilot has reportedly been left with significant damage to his eyesight after a “military-strength” laser was shone into the cockpit of his plane landing at Heathrow, in what appears to be the most serious laser attack to date in the UK. The pilot suffered a burned retina in his right eye and has not worked since, according to the head of the British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa). The incident has escalated concerns over the problem of laser attacks. Balpa claims that one in two pilots has been in a plane targeted with lasers in the last 12 months. . . . In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration said the number of incidents had grown steadily since it started collating information on laser attacks in 2005. More than 3,700 incidents have been reported in the US this year. —The Guardian, Nov. 23, 2015. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA via The Guardian: A plane lands at Heathrow. 

You may think that the most important
piece of equipment on this passenger jet
is the undercarriage,
or the recently serviced turbofan engine,
or the locking mechanism on the cockpit door.
Or the enhanced GPWS,
or the pitot-static system.
You may be afraid that the flight director
will freeze,
that the rear pressure bulkhead is not airtight.
You may be concerned that human error will occur
over at control tower,
or you may be anxious
that the security check you just passed
to ensure no incendiary device is on board,
in some innocuous soda can, for instance,
has failed.
If there’s enough fuel.
If autopilot somehow flipped to descent.
When you’ve run through the list in your mind,
don’t forget to fret
about one more thing,
the two things that are actually flying
this crate,
two precise, acutely sensitive optical instruments,
and the left one just got fried
when someone in the rundown high-rise opposite
(bypassing every operational sensor
and every moral censor)
shone a military-strength laser
(through the cockpit, into the orbit of the eye,
though pupil, lens and vitreous body)
onto the pilot’s retina.


Lee Nash lives in France and freelances as an editorial designer for a UK publisher. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the UK, the US and France including The French Literary Review, The Dawntreader, The Lake, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Orbis, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, The Interpreter's House, The Journal (UK), Brittle Star, The World Haiku Review, Black Poppy Review and Silver Birch Press.

ABRAHAM'S PLAN, SEPTEMBER 2014

by Jed Myers

Detail of “Abraham” (1502) by Filippino Lippi at the Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

I might beseech Ishmael, by my old body’s language,
to take the cushioned seat by the window, the one
where I think he’d be the most comfortable. But the sun
in his eyes at that angle? I don’t know. And the carnage
in midday glare—how could that view leave him sanguine
to talk with Isaac at all? I could draw the shade,
or suggest the carpeted floor, like where they once played
under both mothers’ gaze. Oh, how could they hang on
to those days like I do? Isaac will call for a chair
too far from his brother, not in the same light. So I’ll offer
dark tea, sage water, or something stronger,
to soften the crystalline disdain in the air.
This could be the day they discover, neither is tougher
and neither can have his way. Or must we go longer?


Jed Myers is a Philadelphian living in Seattle. Two of his poetry collections, The Nameless (Finishing Line Press) and Watching the Perseids (winner of the 2013 Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), are being released in 2014. He won the 2012 Mary C. Mohr Editors’ Award offered by Southern Indiana Review, and received the 2013 Literal Latte Poetry Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Fugue, Atlanta Review, Crab Creek Review, Sanskrit, South 85, The Tusculum Review. 

THE STOWAWAY

by Anne Graue





Scaling the fence in San Jose
he smiled at himself,
proud to have not taken
that first drag in the seventh
grade when his friend Gavin
held out the pack of Marlboros.
His breathing was easy now,
and he felt his sneakers
hit the tarmac with some give.
He smiled again
circling the phrase "Homeland Security."
His comb in his back pocket,

he jumped inside the well
of the landing gear, finding
a place to roll his adolescence
into a position that might
outlast the flight, his unconsciousness,
his conscious act of defiance--his parents'
frantic search for their son gone
missing, who was a good kid, didn't smoke
or do drugs, who was smart enough,
who knew that hitching a ride inside
the outside of a 767 was a possibility.
His body folded up easily above the wheels--

he woke in paradise, combed his hair,
remembered how the noise was so great
and the cold was so numbing.


Anne Graue writes poetry and teaches online from her home in New York's Hudson Valley. Her poems have appeared in Paradigm, Compass Rose, Sixfold Journal, and The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly, and she was a finalist in the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award competition for 2013. She has written reviews of literary magazines for NewPages.com.