THE ULTIMATE DOT

by Julia Bair

Ukrainian word for bread: хліб [khlib]

friends say: 

you will write about completely other things now  

the war blanks flowers and butterflies 

it blanks the old books and new plays 

blanks the birds 

blanks men

it blanks hunger   

hungry people share their last crumbs with birds 

becoming the birds themselves 

disgusted to share their bread and life with occupiers 

and fall into the ground as crumbs 

instead of the grain 

to sprout over the “i” in every staff of life 

as the ultimate dot

Author’s note: Russians have no letter “i” in their alphabet.

Julia Bair is a Ukrainian poet, essayist and cultural critic writing on various topics, especially literature, fine art, cinema, and theater. Born and bred in a small town close to the Subcarpathian foothills and educated in the big city of Lviv at Ivan Franko National University, Julia travelled across Europe and lived in the USA for some years.

SHAME

by Wendy Hoffman

About 800 people, including children, are hiding beneath a chemical factory in the key eastern Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk, now 80% held by Russian troops, as more western allies promise additional missile systems and arms to Kyiv. Photograph: Families sheltering beneath the Azot chemical plant in Sievierodonetsk earlier in the war. Credit: Marko Đurica/Reuters via The Guardian, June 2, 2022.

Amid mounting fears over the war’s impact on world food supplies, Putin is due to meet the head of the African Union, Senegal’s president, Macky Sall, on Friday to discuss “freeing up stocks of cereals and fertilisers,” Sall’s office said. The meeting, in the south-western Russian city of Sochi, was organised at the Kremlin’s invitation, Dakar said. Ukraine and Russia are major suppliers of wheat and other cereals to Africa, while Russia is a key producer of fertiliser. —The Guardian, June 2, 2022

An operation to bring grain out from Ukraine through Lithuania, with considerable political hurdles, is just one option being considered amid warnings of mass starvation around the world. —The New York Times, June 1, 2022

I buy bread from a Ukrainian shop.

He bakes, his wife takes orders.

Fridays, they sell Miche,

Wednesdays, Levain.

Today her face is blanched wheat,

a baked skull.

She stops wearing make-up,

her hair shows grey.

She never talks much.

She has no words.

Their families remain there—

probably old Nazis—

as Russia conscripts its minorities,

its refugees and now its citizens

of all ages to destroy and die.

The world sacrifices

the earth that feeds us,

that once seeded land now skeleton.

Her hunched over husband sweats,

pounds moist dough.

I hand her thirteen US dollars,

she closes the window.

Wendy Hoffman has published three memoirs, The Enslaved Queen, White Witch in a Black Robe, and in 2020 A Brain of My Own.  The Enslaved Queen has been translated into German. Her book of poetry Forceps was also published along with a book of essays, From the Trenches, written with Alison Miller. Her most recent memoir After Amnesia is published on the SmartNews and Survivorship websites. It has been translated into German. What gives her life meaning is helping other surviving victims.

A TANKA FOR THE TWO PEOPLE KILLED IN KHARKIV BY A RUSSIAN MORTAR SHELL

"A loaf of bread on a park bench, collecting snow. A puddle of blood nearby. Those were the traces of two lives lost this past week, two people killed as they sat sharing a late lunch or an early dinner, or maybe just feeding pigeons. No one seemed to know their names. They died at around 5:30 in the afternoon on Sunday in the southeastern Slobidskyi district of Kharkiv from a mortar strike, residents said, describing the victims as an older woman and a middle-aged man." —Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak, The New York Times, April 6, 2022. Original photo by Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Jimmy Pappas is the Zoom moderator for the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.

BREAD AND CIRCUSES 2014

by George Salamon

Charities are being run by for-profit financial firms. And take our most prestigious universities. It's become an oft-repeated argument that they have become hedge funds with tax-exempt colleges attached. --Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica, Dec. 10, 2014

Nothing is sacred, all is corrupted
From giving to learning
Wall Street money and
Corporate voices
Confer commands.
A people once free and proud
Has been bought and sold,
Hired and fired, outsourced,
Downsized and rightsized,
Sliced up like a salami.
His knife, he attacks with
"Sharklike intensity."
His smile is dazzling.
He's got our bread
And we are his circuses.


George Salamon taught at several East Coast  colleges, worked as a business journalist and editor, and now contributes regularly to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News from St. Louis, MO.

FRANCIS' LAMENT

by Ed Bennett 

Photograph: Getty Images

How does one deal with this,
the stubborn, stolid expressions
on sleek faces well acquainted
with the banquet table?
The words of Christ rejected
as I bless the poor, call for
their protection, elevate them.

If I am a Communist
than what was Christ?
He reviled power, condemned
the exploitation of his own.
Now the money has turned some,
twisted the divine words to elevate
their “donors”, castigate the rest.

Lord we cannot wait
for an afterlife when bread
is unaffordable and our toil
is a yoke borne by the many.
Forgive us but give us this day
the ability to hear your words above
the clink of gold in diocesan coffers.



Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment, and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine and the author of A Transit of Venus.