BASHAR’S BOUDOIR

by Salma Amrou

Physicists are born when bombs fall 

on heads like apples. According to the law of inertia,

once a dictator falls he never stops falling

flat on his face in Homs and Aleppo and Damascus

and Deraa, on graffitied walls invoking broken Hippocratic oaths

and stripped bare down to his underwear in a leaked

boudoir shoot and photos by the pool, 

skin draped taut across collar bones like tent poles,

albums showing all the skin where the sun never shone:

girls raped and children raised in prison cells

and corpses crushed between metal, dead rose

pressed between the pages of a ledger, each pose

for the camera a little sassier than the other. In the second law

of motion, the greater the suffering, the greater

the force needed to suppress it. Sednaya’s red wing walls 

varnished in the most sensual shade of blood

a shrine where the mouths of praying prisoners

are forced to swallow his name in place of God’s. Starving 

for some form of salvation, a country cannibalizes itself,

a dietary regimen to sate the appetite of the regime: detainees

swallowed and digested in the guts beneath ground.

In the third law of motion, revolt is regurgitation, 

bowels of bloodlust rising in an upchuck reflex, 

streaked across his tongue like the sweet nothings 

and the blush in his wedding pictures, too shy to look his bride 

or his people in the eye, fleeing from the gravity of his vows,

from the fact that he’s been falling 

and falling–

One of the photos of Bashar Assad discovered by rebels and posted on social media.

Editor's note: You can help the White Helmets rebuild lives and hope in Syria.

Salma Amrou is a former Youth Poet Laureate of Southeastern Virginia and an undergraduate student at the College of William & Mary. An Egyptian-American poet and aspiring novelist, her work explores themes of identity, belonging, and the experiences of the Arab and Muslim diaspora. Her work will be featured in the forthcoming issue of Zhagaram Literary.

RED BLOOD OF HUMANS

by George Salamon

Icarius (Diomedes Wounding Aphrodite When She Tries To Recover The Body Of Aeneas) by Arthur Heinrich Wilhelm Fitger via wikigallery.

"Israeli-Hamas war death toll nears 1,500..." CBS News, October 9, 2023

Red hot blood of old men,

red hot blood of toddlers,

red hot blood of grandmas,

red hot blood of soldiers,

red hot blood of musicians,

we spill you in Israel and we

spill you in Gaza, we spill you

in Ukraine and Russia while

they're counting the corpses

and wait until they reach the

numbers when the world's

institutions urge  an end

to bloodshed  and demand

return to the old status quo.

There's no elixir for bloodlust,

there's no drug to cure madness,

there's no vaccine to calm the

fever of death and destruction.

We never conquered humanity's

cruel face, its heart's hungry

gorge, the human form of its

terror.

We heard answers, but watched

as the messengers died on the

cross, by fire or by bullet, we are

left alone by and to ourselves.

Nothing is more terrifying in a

soul-less and bleeding world.

George Salamon was born in Vienna in 1934, as Communists and Fascists were shooting at each other in low-income housing areas. The Holocaust was a decade later, the Israeli-Arab wars of "annihilation" followed, then the bloody wars in Asia and Africa for wealth and economic "supremacy," and the endless Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed and terror for ownership of the "Holy Land." The carousel is still spinning.

GLADIATORS REIMAGINED

by Katie Chicquette Adams

Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers suffered a broken collarbone on Sunday and may miss the rest of the season. Credit Bruce Kluckhohn AP via The Charlotte Observer, October 17, 2017.

Though the Roman Empire is long
behind us, cultural remnants survive:
we still gorge on gladiators, groomed
for maybe not death, but a definite
kind of destruction
for our distraction.
We are still the Romans
paying the gross
ticket price, shaking our heads
in something like sadness
or shock when men trained to be tough
fail to be gentle enough.



We slaver with feigned concern, 

fans susceptible to the schadenfreude
of modern athletics, anxiously
awaiting the next agile, brawny feats
performed by men of a singular will
who know that in this world,
competing is what they can do well.
They push on, pawns of passion, paid
in glory and more,
hoping for less possessive,
more benevolent owners
who will mete out compassion
over control, respect over derision
for fighters choosing feet,
knees, or absenteeism as the
musical ode to past bloody battles
unnecessarily peals, and viewers believe
theirs to be the worthiest appeals--
because who are these gladiators
to dare to think, to speak, to feel?

These 21st century warriors
we parade and glorify,
degrade and deconstruct. 

We are fiercely invested
in players whose pockets we line,
personally disappointed (though
generally unaffected)
by their platform management
by their life-changing injuries,
disrupting our coveted consumption
of physical prowess
we neither possess nor deserve,
hollering, grumbling, reminding them
it is our needs, our bloodlust
these battered and battering
contenders serve.

Katie Chicquette Adams is an educator and writer in Appleton, WI.  She is a live storyteller with Storycatchers, Inc.; she has appeared or is forthcoming in River + Bay, Mothers Always Write, Heavy Feather Review, the regional radio segment “Soul of the Cities,” and on the regional blog, Storycatchers. She works as an English teacher for at-risk young adults at a public alternative high school, with hopes they will remake their own stories. She can be reached at k.chicquette.adams[at]gmail.com