ELECTION NIGHT 2022

by David Radavich

“Waiting for a Pear to Fall” by Jonas Daniliauskas

The sky is clear
and not a word
floats in the heavens
or on the earth.

 

It is the time of waiting.

 

What must be said
has already been said

 

and we 

like perfect fruit,

 

waiting to be peeled
and consumed.

 

What remains
in the eating

 

at the hands
of others?

 

A last hope
that our insides
will be tasty,

 

that our sacrifice
will bring life
and health

 

to a broken state.

David Radavich's poetry collections include two epics, America Bound and America Abroad, as well as Middle-East Mezze and The Countries We Live In. His latest book is Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun: German and English Poems (2022).  

EMPTY PLACES

Illusion painting by Daniel Siering and Mario Shu.

Frederick Charles Melancon lives in Mississippi with his wife and daughter.  He is vaccinated and wears a mask.

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

by Marsha Owens  

Credit Warren F. Johnson, Photographer

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."  1 Corinthians 13-12


The black eye
of the storm
is the safest place
we’re told.

I don’t know blackness
slumped in the abyss
of my white privilege

yet I see broken
everywhere,
a prism of shame
shattered
beyond words.


Marsha Owens lives and writes in Richmond, VA. Her writing has appeared in print publications, including The Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, The Sun, and online at TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rat’s Ass Review, and Rise Up Review. She is a co-editor of the poetry anthology, Lingering in the Margins.

POETS IN MOURNING

by Kate Carey

We scoured the world,
searching for bits that were not broken.
We find everyone is broken
and everyone is reaching for that bottle of glue.

The day after the election, my sister
called me at work and I found shelter
in a supply closet
so we could loudly openly weep,
mourning for our futures,
faces drowning in tears,
throats bubbling with absolute terror.
We were trying to make sense of a world that didn’t make sense.

I texted every black woman I loved,
every white woman I loved,
my half-Cuban, half-‘rican best friend, my sister, my husband.
I reached out, showing where the thornprick bled red
“I hurt.” They clasped back “Us too.”

If our hurt were electoral votes, that
mother fucker’d be obliterated.

A magazine article titled ‘Edible Philly.’
And how now our country looks like a
tasty morsel
on a gleaming plate
for this conglomerous king.

We’ve elected an angry hairpiece to lead us,
gave a tyrant access to our vulnerabilities.
Let us set fire to the idea that dissent is not an option.

Kate Carey is a 20-something who writes while she’s supposed to be doing other things. Her day job is not very interesting but her life is beginning to be. She has had one poem published in Dying Dahlia Review. She lives in Philly with her parents and resents she had to say that part at all. 

VICTORY

by Judith Terzi

after "Where Aleppo's Escapees Converge"

by Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times, 12/19/16

The shelter's in Jibreen. This is no home away from home.
Refugees stream into a factory. Both sides fled their home.

The fleeing & returning cross paths here. Who is who?
Some returning to Aleppo to find the ashes of a home.

Others just escaped Aleppo, a city thousands of years old.
Gunmen set fire to the buses carrying them from home.

Armies shelled a hospital, then a makeshift clinic appeared.
Fathers killed fathers. What to tell the children of home?

Chopped lettuce heaped on a table & vats of donated oil.
30,000 falafel sandwiches. Doesn't charity begin at home?

A teacher writes on a blackboard. Fewer children now.
Some only trace the letters, can't read the syllables of home.

Sweet tea soothes a family huddling to ward off the cold.
Truces broken, re-broken in the broken city called home.

Judith Terzi's poetry has appeared in journals such as Atlanta Review (International Publication Prize, 2015), Caesura, Columbia Journal, Raintown Review, Spillway, and in anthologies such as Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle), Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo), and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Pacific Coast Poetry Series). If You Spot Your Brother Floating By was released in 2015 by Kattywompus Press and a new chapbook Casbah is forthcoming in 2017. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Web.

THE PUPS

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Wildlife services in California are being pushed to their limits this year. Since January 2015, every month has set a record in sea lion "strandings," mostly sea lion pups, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There has been an unusually high number of sea lions stranded since January," said Justin Greenman, assistant stranding coordinator for NOAA on the West Coast. "Stranding does happen, but just to give you perspective, 1,800 [sea lion] pups have been responded to this year alone. We responded to 1,600 strandings total during the entire year in 2013," he said. Stranding is the official term to describe marine life that "swim or float into shore and become beached or stuck," according to NOAA. Greenman said California has had warmer weather than usual this year, and, while NOAA is still conducting studies on the Channel Islands to get a more proven explanation, warmer water drives the food source farther out or deeper into the ocean, where the colder water is. When food is farther away, the mothers are away from the pup too long in search of food, and return with little food or too few nutrients for a growing sea lion. —CNN, March 18, 2015

The pups
rise like shaking hands
out of the surf,

with their skin
held like bunched blankets
round their shoulders. They aren’t
yours.

Who should claim them?

From the road, they are the color of the sand –
easy to miss. Think

of them:
their wide steep eyes,
and their bones like broken sticks.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Word Riot, The Kentucky Review, Paper Nautilus, The Lake, and The Tule Review, among others.

PAPAL BAGGAGE

by David Feela





Getting ready to leave,
the Pope has suitcases
opened for airing,
vestments dry-cleaned
and prayer books stacked
on the bedside table
like a miniature Pisa.

He knows enough to take
just what he needs,
to fold his hands,
to visualize a better world.
If the moving men
do their job, then
nothing more needs to be said

about those other men
who took what didn’t belong
to them.  Aren’t we all
brothers and sisters? 
Don’t we live together
in a house belonging to God?
Let us give thanks

so many knickknacks
broken during the last move
have been swept away,
and that our closets
are so large, the daylight
will never illuminate
what gets left behind.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.