SUNFLOWER PEOPLE

by Robert Knox 

You hide in the subway tunnels

of life’s unending nightmares

You walk, or ride, or hire cabs for thousand-dollar journeys

     to a border crossing

that is no longer open

You struggle down roads, carrying your baggage,

your children,

who belong not only to you,

but to your country,

      and to us all

 

You shelter in rubbled cities,

holes blown in once-solid blocks

of home and hearth,

sacred refuges that once housed human bodies and souls

by the hundreds,

people no more, nor less breakable than any of us,

 

left abandoned and vulnerable,

now that death has come to a land

     where sunflowers bloomed

 

You, who flee

and carry one another’s burdens

along pitted roads to the hope of a tomorrow

somewhere safer than today,

that haven

we have all promised ourselves.

That earthly haven

in which we may celebrate another spring,

another birthday of the earth

 

You carry our lives in your journey

as well as your own,

and those of your loved ones, your ancestors,

and the memory of ours as well,

There is room enough, I know, in your souls,

     to carry all these

 

as there is world enough for you

in ours

Come, walk in our shoes as well:

there is world enough for all. 

Robert Knox is a poet, novelist, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of House Stories, a recently published collection of linked short stories. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. His essay on Putin's war on Ukraine is up on Medium.

THE FIGURE IN THE TOAST BURNT FOIL

by Alejandro Escudé





The shooter was hiding in the gleam
of a trashcan lid—he held the gun close
to his chest and sped from lid to lid
across international terminals.

They dropped their bags and ran
looking back for the coil of a black flag,
Arabic scroll, a figure in the toast burnt foil
as night broke among the neon columns.

The human mind is a spider slipping
off wet shower curtains, the heart,
a hundred hounds howling, the feet
like eighteen feet, the neck hacked
by Jihadi John in the military dawn.

No all clear on the horizon, more shots
heard from the coin-din of the airport
where the forest of propeller blades meet
the lost baggage mountains, a river rippling
where a tiger stalks the naked prisoner.

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.