ZENO IN AMERICA

by Dale Wisely

A Black teenager was shot in the head by a white homeowner in Kansas City, Mo., after showing up at the wrong house to pick up his siblings, lawyers for his family said. Family members identified the victim online as Ralph Pual Yarl, a 16-year-old high school junior. You can contribute to a GoFundMe to help pay for the boy’s hospital bills.

 

Imagine a bullet approaching its target. It may help to think in slow motion. Let’s say it’s seven inches away from impact. No, let’s say eight because it is important for us to be able to divide readily. No pesky fractions. Haven’t we had enough fractions? Eight inches and... slow that bullet way down. Before it reaches skin, layers rich in capillaries, then skull... but if you’d rather think of, say, a sheet of drywall, that will do. So do. Do think of drywall.

 

Before the bullet makes contact it must pass the four-inch mark. Then the two-inch mark; then it’s just an inch away from, let’s say, plywood. Sheet metal. Or a STOP sign on a rural road. We can’t avoid fractions after all. When we keep dividing, we get fractions.

 

Then one-half inch. Then a quarter inch. Almost there. But next is the last one-eight inch. Stop there. Or halfway from there to the target. It doesn't matter where you stop. Just stop. Wherever you stop, think of that as a place where nothing is struck. Where the space left to travel is nothing and everything. Where nothing is pierced, shattered, ended. Where everything is as it was. This is a place where things go so fast and have so little space remaining and so little time left. Where a thing is about to happen but never does. I’m trying to say that this is a place where the skin remains intact and blood is retained in vessels, and bone unshattered. 

Dale Wisely runs Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, publisher of the journals Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unlost, Unbroken, duality, and first frost.

HERE LIE DEAD IN TEXAS

by Amy Worley

Nick Anderson

Here lie dead

a star gazer

a trailblazer

a bodhisattva

2 artists with tiny Mona Lisas

stamped on their still small spirts

not yet emerged.

 

Here lie dead

two seasoned, storied, spirit guides,

who were delicately, precisely, so, so lightly,

tending gossamer spirits.

 

Here lie dead

would-be mothers &

would-be fathers &

all the glorious would-be children &

all the would-be made inside them.

 

Here lie dead

among the bullets & bone fragments

unwritten books & unbuilt churches

un-prayed prayers in the

dark, wet cave of adolescence.

 

Here lie dead

the African-descended

the Mexican-descended

the whatever mix descended

double helixes no longer spiraling.

 

Among the dead

slivering over bloody bodies &

and rising up to stare us in our unseeing eyes

is the serpent of our failure.

 

Not an either/or failure but a slimy sludge

of yes/and foundering and non-doing,

with a forked tongue &

voluminous, sweet-smelling venom.

 

Here lie dead

in this community graveyard

a virologist

an ecologist

a drummer

a plumber

a shattered grandmother whose shards pierce like shrapnel.

 

Here lie dead

what we didn’t do to serve an unwell young man &

what we didn’t do to protect the hatching of the future.

 

Here lie dead

we all

knowing of good & evil

and choosing to hide behind the tall, dark tree

rather than stand naked in the dappled light of truth.

 

Amy Worley is a poet and nonfiction writer living in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, two boys, and her literary dog, Leroy. She is also an attorney and management consultant. She has a BA in English Literature and a Juris Doctorate. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in various online and hardcopy publications.

IN THE DENISOVA CAVE

by T R Poulson

Once upon a time, two early humans of different ancestry met at a cave in Russia. Some 50,000 years later, scientists have confirmed that they had a daughter together. DNA extracted from bone fragments found in the cave show the girl was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. The discovery, reported in Nature, gives a rare insight into the lives of our closest ancient human relatives.Neanderthals and Denisovans were humans like us, but belonged to different species. —BBC, August 22, 2018

This at last is bone of my bones

—Genesis 2:23

The wind blows, brittle as a bird bone needle
in this cave where skeletons dance in layers,
time folds in eons, and we seek the seed, dull
as the Beginning, a stone bracelet our prayer
to grandfathers unknown. It must have begun
with fire, the flames that made flesh tender,
laid bare the bones of beasts, broken, undone,
crying. The flames that twisted up like slender
ribbons, teasing, heating. Here, a strange man
enters, here a woman’s bones turn away a suitor
like her, here bone meets bone. Here, the clan—

Genes spiral, twist, through bones, as computers
tell of fire, of seed. We see an orphan long bone
splinter. We see ourselves, unmixed, alone.

T R Poulson, a University of Nevada, Reno alum, lives in San Carlos, California. Her work has appeared previously in TheNewVerse.News, as well as Rattle’s Poets Respond, Verdad, The Meadow, Trajectory, J Journal, and others.

GEORGE BUSH PAINTS

by Louise Robertson

Putin by Bush

This is what we artists and open mic 

worshipers have hoped for

all this time with our journals

and rants and sketches, to see

someone so Republican at the altar of

art. One sees the scratchings, 

like our own attempts at the cave wall.

Hands stained red. The trick

of dimension is like a whole extra grade

level. The trick of expression--

however easy to start--

so much harder to get exactly right.

I want to take him to workshop,

talk to him about getting the bones

of it down first. What could this man know of bone

and muscle and ligament

having ignored so much gore in his path:

the scraped and scalloped wartime bodies,

the skulls looking like so many bladders

emptied of their gray and red and black,

the rubble made out of parlors and

kitchens? If that introspection

can come from making art,

if that is one of life's most elusive gifts, if that

is the divine in the human coming out,

I have to say, George: finally.

Louise Robertson has earned degrees (BA Oberlin, MFA George Mason University), poetry publications (Pudding Magazine, New Verse News, Parting Gifts) and poetry awards (Mary Roberts Rinehart, Columbus Arts Festival Poetry Competition -- twice). She is active as a poet and organizer in her local Columbus, Ohio poetry.