WE'RE SITTING AROUND A TABLE NOT FAR FROM THE RUSSIAN BORDER

by Ron Riekki

A Chinese artist, a Russian musician, and American poet,

and we talk about surveillance, sharing how dangerous it is

to be an artist, after speaking with a local who told us about

the tensions with Russia, how they're like a choking fog,

and the musician from Russia says it's all propaganda there,

says she doesn't care, that her voice will never be voiceless,

tells us about being taken in by the Russian police and how

she brutalized them with truth, was let go, and then let go

of her country, emigrating, immigrating, Euro-ricocheting around,

and hanging out with Pussy Riot, doing anti-war campaigns,

and we speak of the ten percent of the Russian population

being tortured, and she speaks of physical torture and

emotional torture and the torture of propaganda, and

the Chinese artist talks about holding up signs in Hong

Kong that were all white, not allowed to have signs with

actual words, so this haunting image, this effective image

of hundreds of artists and writers and protestors and students

holding up these white signs, ghost signs meant to haunt

politicians, and the American poet talks about being hunted

by the Trump administration for a pro-Islamic, pro-immigrant

tweet, how the administration administered paperwork to his

home, pages and pages and pages of warning, how watched

we are everywhere, he says, he thinks, he feels, and we are

near the Russian border, except it's shut down, too dangerous,

and here we are, doing art that is too dangerous, and having

this conversation that is too dangerous, so dangerous that

we turn off our phones to make sure we are not being listened

to, because we want to create the form of our words, rush

home and turn our conversations into lyrics and artwork

and this poem you are reading now, written near a border

that is rotting with worry, a border that lacks moonlight tonight.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

NATIVITY

by Lynn White

A woman dries a baby in a towel after giving the infant a bath inside a tent at a camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Jan. 18. AFP via Getty Images via NPR, January 31, 2024

There are no Magi to adore them now,

the women giving birth 

in ramshackle sheds

or freezing tents

or in the rubble

and cold

and dirt

of what’s left.

There are no Magi to bring gifts,

no shepherds to bring succour

to the women giving birth 

in ramshackle sheds

or freezing tents

or in the rubble

and cold

and dirt

of what’s left.

Maybe artists will paint the scene

but I doubt it.

None are needed

when we can already see,

when we already know

and then we don’t see

anymore.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

HURRICANE WATCH, NEW ORLEANS

by Gail White

Mon., Aug. 30: Children watch reporters at a building collapse scene in New Orleans. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Someday only the divers

will visit New Orleans.

The church bells will ring under water.

Kelp will encircle the rusting wrought iron

like Mardi Gras beads.

The round-eyed fish will roam free

with no one to cook them with almonds.

Drinks are not on the house now, but under the sea.

Politics cause no fights. Who wins doesn’t matter.

The artists are gone. The rich and the homeless are gone.

The old jazz musicians have shut up their instrument cases

I will be one of the few to remember the days

of white-powdered beignets and coffee at Jackson Square,

and Jackson himself on a rearing horse tipping his hat.

And the bells of St. Louis Cathedral

will ring for mass under the sea.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

MY PORTLAND

by Tricia Knoll

Photos by Morley Knoll

Portland people march. That’s what we do when called from our desks, our beds, classrooms, jobs. We know our history. The KKK. Davenport Flood. Japanese internment. Redlining. Gentrification.

We thread the blocks downtown like needles seeking to bind up frayed fabric. From four directions we come for Pride, Black Lives, climate change, our left-coast city. To the county whose votes determine how the state goes.

We mantra our weirdness, embrace the smallest park in the world and the largest city park. We drink micro-brews and unfiltered water. Bicycle repair shops feature espresso drinks.

We dress for the seasons’ rain, umbrellas good against gas. Leaf-blowers to blowback aerosols sifting down on our masks, homemade or for gas. Hockey and lacrosse sticks to return the cannisters to behind the fence.

Maybe we come naked, exposed, worried and afraid or angry and loud. A city's tradition of riding a bike naked from the top of the hills to the river.

Smell the Riot Ribs in the parks between City Hall, Portlandia, the Fed Building, Courthouses. The hostas were once lush there. A bronze statue of a white pioneer points the way as if native people never lived here in large numbers on the riverbank where salmon spawned upstream and century-old trade routes converged.  

We are moms, the displaced, overlooked, veterans, church-goers, atheists, the beaten on and the upbeat who walk and cry for a better day. For justice.

Board up Tiffany’s. Board up the banks.The Pioneer Place shopping mall. The artists come to paint. Show howbacks are stabbed. They give us the dead and butterflies that hope, list the names so we can say them again and again. We know this history. It was nothing to cheer about.

We also know that the untrained federal storm troopers, the mercenaries paid under contract, must go. Must go. Must go

Tricia Knoll moved recently from Portland, Oregon to Vermont to be near family. She lived in Portland for 45 years, worked in the Portland Building, lunched in all the parks adjacent to the courthouse, City Hall, and the Federal Building. She has marched and marched over many years on Portland's streets.

TO MUSCLE MEMORY

by Lynnie Gobeille

"Automat" (1927) by Edward Hopper

He says he plays by muscle memory
Stares off into space while on the stage
In some sort of out-of- body zone.
He asks if writers ever feel that way.
Do we experience the Zen
Of lost time and space?

I think of countless meals burned,
Eggs exploding on the range,
Long past “boiled”—moving on
To become lethal weapons;
As I sat patiently
Waiting for the arrival of the Muse.

I tell him—
Maybe that is what love will be
In this time of Covid19 and
Social distancing is really
All muscle memory with no touch.
I tell him not to worry—after all—
Hell—this is nothing new to us.

Artists are used to creative isolation.
And all this fear over Solitude?
—Just another name
For how we live our lives.
He picks up his guitar and plays—
I turn back to my computer.

Our words hanging there
Along with our silent fears
To be digested later.


Lynnie Gobeille: Co-founder and retired Co-Editor of the Origami Poems Project. Champion of all things Poetry & Magic.

PANTOUM FOR THE ARTISTS

by Alejandro Escudé

A person with the Oakland Fire Department takes a photo of the artwork on the front of the "Ghost Ship" warehouse in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016. The Fruitvale district warehouse caught fire on Friday, Dec. 2, killing 36 people. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group via East Bay Times)

The artist dies in a house of fire, the exits unknown.
A wreck bastardized, a crow suspended from spokes.
Why was nothing done? Where has the fire begun?
Separated by the smoke, the artist gags and chokes.

A wreck bastardized, a crow suspended from spokes,
The city rumbling past, a bridge full of nothing-souls
Separated by the smoke, as the artist gags and chokes.
Coffee here, coffee there, cold nights like unlit coals.

The city huffing past, a bridge full of speeding souls,
But the artist seeks more, a hive of unpredictable acts
Sipping coffee here and there, on cold coal-less nights,
Squatting in the cheap happenstance haphazard tracts.

The artists seeks more, the unpredictable hive acts
In such a way that cannot serve the absconding rest
Squatting in the priciest prime premeditated tracts.
Every fire begins in disarray or in an empty chest.

And so, the artist will not serve the absconding rest
And there is nothing to be done. The fire has begun
In the city’s forsaken disarray, in the penurious chest.
Artists live in a house on fire, all the exits unknown.

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.