WHEN FOOD SCRAPS FLOOD AIR LIKE HOODED CROWS

by Mary K O’Melveny

Blackened parachutes resembling mammoth falcon wings

tumble down from sleek cargo planes beneath cloudless skies.

Together, they add up to less than all the food supplies 

which might fill up one land-bound rescue truck. Things

we thought we understood, now take us by surprise –

broken hearts turn genocidal with all that terms implies.

Blame can fall to innocents as if they pulled all the strings,

as if they still held the power to defend their land, prized

for generations, Ottoman deeds spelling out their ties

to rugged hills, olive trees, sand dunes and desert springs.

No one knows how many will survive hunger’s debased stings,

though some families are erased forever. Those who’ve died

are always undercounted when world leaders shout, spout lies

while survivors watch flour, fuel, fava beans with famished eyes.

Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.

WHAT FEEDS US

by Amy Strauss Friedman

Each morning I reach into a bag of broken hearts
to feed my dog. Chicken biscuits in fragments
from freighting. He devours them whole
as if his survival hinges on love, on ancestry,
an ancient civilization that still remembers him.

He chews them rabidly as news of Las Vegas
bleeds through the television screen, another omen
of our dying planet. Our stars have left the scene
for the night, and in their wake the smoky scars
of the newly dead. We feast on broken hearts.
It’s all we have to feed us.


Amy Strauss Friedman is the author of the poetry collection The Eggshell Skull Rule forthcoming from Kelsay Books, and the chapbook Gathered Bones are Known to Wander (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). A two-time Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Escape Into Life, decomP, and elsewhere. Amy lives in Denver, Colorado where she teaches English at Columbia College.