TIME OUT

by Marc Swan

Photo by Nadia Povalinska "who recently fled her home in Ukraine. It is from before the war, just a few weeks and a lifetime ago." —Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American, March 11, 2022.

In the photo, her back is to us.

She holds a scarlet red umbrella,

perhaps a harbinger of spring

or an unknowing portent 

of things to come,

that shields her head, 

catches snow 

falling from nearby trees

in a quiet park 

away from busy streets.

Late winter leaves 

glow cinnamon 

on snow-covered branches.

There are tracks, 

but she walks alone

in a small city in Ukraine.

The way life was before 

bombs and rockets fell,

hospitals, churches, clinics fell,

museums, homes, restaurants fell, 

and people—

defending their way of life

now buried in mass graves.

Today two US journalists— 

one dead, the other wounded

just outside Kyiv.

Marc Swan, a retired vocational rehabilitation counselor, lives in coastal Maine. His fifth collection, all it would take, was published in 2020 by tall-lighthouse (UK).

NUCLEAR WASTE

by Charles Rammelkamp

Ukraine has initiated a defensive strategy for the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, one of the most radioactive places on Earth, which lies on the shortest path between Russia and Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Photo: A Ukrainian border guard on a joint patrol with the Ukrainian police inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. —The New York Times, January 22, 2022

“It doesn’t matter if it’s contaminated,

or if nobody lives here,” Yuri declared,

responding to the unspoken skepticism 

in the sheen of the reporter’s dark eyes.

“It’s our territory, our country,

and we have to defend it.”

Shouldering his Kalashnikov, Yuri patrolled 

the snowy fields of the Chernobyl zone;

winter in northern Ukraine.

“I remember reading about the Soviets

parading the children on May Day 

through the swirl of radioactive dust

right after the accident 

to try to make us—and the world—believe 

nothing serious had happened.

Thank goodness I wasn’t alive then.

“Pripyat’s a ghost town now;

used to be the biggest city in the area.

You can still see the old Soviet propaganda –

a sign extolling the virtues of nuclear energy.

‘Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier.’”

Hunching his shoulders, as if to toss away his anger,

shifting the rifle, Yuri went on:

“Now we don’t know 

what will kill us first,

the virus, radiation, or Putin’s bombs.”

 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife Abby. He contributes a monthly book review to North of Oxford and is a frequent reviewer for The Lake, London Grip, Misfit Magazine, and The Compulsive Reader. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, was published in 2021 by Clare Songbirds Publishing and another, Sparring Partners, by Moonstone Press. A full-length collection, The Field of Happiness, will be published in 2022 by Kelsay Books.