WHERE DO YOU GO TO DIE?

by Adele Evershed

Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran has said that she is "deeply worried" for her extended family in Gaza. Moran's mother is Palestinian and members of her family in Gaza are sheltering in a church after an Israeli missile struck their home. Speaking to the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire, she said: "No longer are people saying, where do we go to be safe? The question they are now asking is, where do we want to be when we die?" —BBC, October 29, 2023

to the sea
already so full of salt
so you become part of the ebb and flow
governed only by the mourning moon
and any tears shed lost in the tumult of waves
or crusted in the creases of a carcass 
left to rot on a far distant shore
 
to a rowan tree
already listing from the bombardment
so you can nourish the roots
that once nourished you
and the redness of your screams
can hang like a bloody reminder
of all the things you were too young to see
 
to the mountain top
with its beguiling back story 
so your shallow breath 
can dovetail with the off white clouds
and fall as gentle soaking rain
delivering an absolution
to those who have asked for none
 
or do you simply 
pick up a stone
and say…
I will not die today

Adele Evershed is a Welsh poet living in America. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Finishing Line Press published Adele’s first poetry chapbook Turbulence in Small Places in July. Her Novella-in-Flash Wannabe was published by Alien Buddha Press in May. Her second poetry collection The Brink of Silence is available from Bottlecap Press.

HERE, WHERE NOT EVEN THE LEAVES FLUTTER

by Devon Balwit

Bandaged and bloodied, a mum nurses the baby she saved from Russian shellfire by shielding the tot with her own body. Brave Olga—badly injured by shrapnel in Putin’s blitz on Kyiv—cradles her month-old child as a man thought to be her partner comforts them. Amazingly, the baby was believed to be unhurt thanks to the quick-thinking courage of its Ukrainian mother. The two were being cared for yesterday at Kyiv’s Ohmatdyt children’s hospital. Journalist Anastasiia Lapatina, who works on English-language newspaper the Kyiv Independent, said the baby was well. —The U.S. Sun, March 19, 2022. See also story at Infobae.

Ratatatat—no bullets—just a flicker

making a morning ruckus on a chimney cap.

History is happening elsewhere. There

people breathe its stink, tweeze its shrapnel

from their skin, like the bloodied mother nursing her baby

on a hospital gurney. Even the old poet

has refugees blanketing his living room and library.

Post-barrage, survivors salvage what

they can. Each moment presents its immediate problem

to be solved—more life always the answer.

Here, the flicker quiets in slanted columns

of rain so gentle that not even the leaves flutter.

As in a fairy tale, I fight ensorcellment,

straining towards that distant bombardment.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. Her most recent collections are Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press 2020] and Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang [Nixes Mate Books, 2021].

WE HAVE NO OPTION BUT TO DIE

by Tricia Knoll

Explosions in Gaza City on Tuesday. Last week, New York Times journalist Iyad Abuheweila saw their destructive power up close at his home in Gaza. He quotes his brother Assad as saying, during the bombardment, "We have no option but to die." Photo credit: Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images via The New York Times, May 21, 2021

This headline arrived in a tweet,

restating the obvious fate 

we forget in warm sun, 

when the lilacs bloom, as my dog

chases a bouncing green ball

into a clump of trees. 

 

Then his story. The bombs. The blasts.

Newlyweds who lost everything they had.

His mother pleading her sons to stay 

in the same room so they could die together.

Their nights allow no hope for sleep,

dreams cancelled, the nervous

edge of dawn slicing open new visions

of destruction. Rockets and airstrikes.

Airstrikes and drones. Someone whistles.

Another chants God is great.

 

Buddhists tell us we are of the nature to die. 

Is it hubris for me to believe I will not die

today? What gratitude do I owe for the bloom

of the peony, the trust with which I put 

the tomato plant in soil? Do I know

how far I am from Gaza? 

How close? 

Tricia Knoll is a poet living on the unceded land of the Abenaki people in Vermont, land divided into rectangles of ownership. Her poetry appears widely in journals and anthologies. Her new book Checkered Mates is now available.

BREATHMAKER

by Jeremy Bryant

"A five-day-long bombardment by Syrian government forces is reported to have killed more than 300 civilians in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta area." —BBC News, February 23, 2018

This image—girl child with blood as rouge, with liquid eyes—how?
What words? "These children are part of the human cost."
There is only this—brokenness, only an endless gloaming.
What sights in the blurry background?
A mother who was making bread when the roof fell,
a mother whose dust caked face is lined with vertical tear stripes,
a mother waiting for her child's last breath. There is only this.

Jeremy Bryant is a poet and a writer of creative nonfiction. He is a graduate of the low residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Bryant is a spiritual writer who often explores universal suffering. His work may be found in Pikeville Review, EAOGH, TheNewVerse.News, and Prism.