CANNIBAL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

On 9/11/2001 guns were turned 

on us as aeroplanes Noam Chomsky 

explained before a crowd 

at the University of Madras. 

Now, twenty-four years later 

guns are again pointing at us, 

dropping down from 

the Blackhawk hanging in the sky 

over a building full of citizens 

and migrants, brown-skinned, 

shivering in the night air, ziptied, 

naked, in bedclothes, stolen from 

sleep and asked to produce birth 

certificates, passports, doors 

to their apartments bashed in 

by three hundred masked

and camouflaged men showing

no search warrant, wearing 

Infrared shades, an operation 

to neutralize a migrant, deliverer 

of food, driver, store clerk,  

runner for the exchange of milk 

and eggs, not the gang member 

the Department of War Propaganda

deems reasonable cause for 

the night raid on the South Side 

against bona fide Americans

in these United States.

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. His publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

MENDING NEWS

by Gilbert Allen

                          with apologies to Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a war—

European or wherever—on the tube

that, for a decade, hasn’t had a tube.

We need less breaking and more mending news.

Picture old Movietones run in reverse

where buildings reassemble magically,

crushed bodies levitating from debris,

the bullet a blunt needle stitching flesh,

a mushroom cloud intact Hiroshima

at dawn. And no, I’m not an advocate

for Happy News—feel-good finales that

follow the last commercial with a Fido

wagging his tail from Kharkiv to Lviv

after his westbound owners couldn’t find him

or the insouciant Persian seraphim

purring beneath Mariupol's rubble.

No, what I want is just a world made whole

after each so-called surgical attack. 

That would be good both going and coming back

for all us sorry old stone savages.

Gilbert Allen lives and writes in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. His most recent collection of poems is Believing in Two Bodies.

BUILDING MATERIALS

by John Kaufmann

The enemies of American democracy? Big lie, big anger and big money. Saving American democracy will require stopping these three powerful forces already on the way to destroying it. —Robert Reich, The Guardian, December 19, 2021

A pallet of salt,

a bucket of chlorine, cement blocks,

two-by-six, one-by-two, shims, PVC, Pex.

I measure you by dollar figures, volume,

weight, time (although that’s the same

as money). Weigh

 

me, you say. Feel me.

 

Skirting panels, J-channels, trusses,

purlins, OSB.  A rust-bucket

excavator and a skid steer.  That was big.

 

I buy you because the lid

tends to blow off. Pipes burst, roofs collapse, septics clog.

Things fall apart. That’s 9,999,999 years

of kidney stones and payment plans,

and another 666,666 of holes you can’t stop digging.

And it gets worse;

it’s the fine print that will kill you,

but it’s the finer print that will grind you down. 

 

Pipe cutter, jig saw, ozone machine, tamper—

I buy you to shape the world, 

but the world shapes me.

Still, I use you to bang against it.

 

A caudillo with hair the color of a lion, a gaze

blank and pitiless as I-don’t-know-what and stubby hands

is moving his greasy thighs among the indignant desert birds—

but it’s not in Egypt this time. It’s here,

in the cracked septic tanks, the water mains made of electrical conduit and duct tape,

the shoddy foundations, the rotting window frames and leaky roofs.

It’s in the kung flu, the water boiling

slowly as the frogs hump, the Vulpine

chants to lock her up—or him—someone, please—

We have traced the call, ma’am, and it’s coming from inside the house.

 

Nuts, bolts, washers, screws (“I love you”, they say),

Wingnuts, eye bolts, U-bolts, hanger bolts, sex bolts.

Common nails, box nails, roofing nails, brads. I love you, too.

Not because you’ll bind us together. We are fated to spin out

like a bunch of Balkan states, a rogue galaxy or a pyrotechnic display.

I love you for the way you ding! when I drive you home, the way

you marry your two halves when I tighten you, how

you cleave a roof panel to a truss and how you bite into cement.

I love you because you don’t budge—because you

stay put while we are thrown against the fan, emerge

and float off into blue heaven, scattered.

John Kaufmann is a former lawyer, current mobile home park owner who lives in southern New York State.  His writing has been published in The High Plains Register, Off Assignment, Litro, The Journal of the Taxation of Financial Products, The Journal of Taxation of Investments, and Tax Notes. 

DISPLACEMENT

by Erik Schwab

Graphic source: The Daily Plant.

It’s not that they’re screaming. It isn’t pain exactly,

in the market garden, these kohlrabis and cabbages,

these garlic scapes: it’s that they’re in shock. Harvest

is our word, theirs must be apocalypse. But another

word is anthropomorphize and someone told me

once I shouldn’t do it and I believed them and found

the stump of my root dunked in a washbasin and divested

of holy dirt. Now near the end of time

I wish medications were poems, I wish I were floating

over lakewater, skipping silver marbles instead of

saying the new things I say every reluctant day: I’m

on the mend, thanks, thanks, I’m grateful for the

prayer, for the sea urchin, for the red beetle, for

the cabinet of curiosities you sent and for the gig driver

who lost three family members while my heart was 

locked behind a thick pandemic door.

The right kind of time traveler would go twenty years back

and plant that tree, but we service-patched cyborgs

haul our untested upgrades in one direction only, toward

the gracious refusal, toward the retirement of connections, until

the building falls in the middle of the night, the slumbering tenants

dreaming of skydiving and waking to astonishment.

Erik Schwab lives in Seattle, WA. Last year he started writing poems for the first time since college, with the invaluable help of a weekly workshop at Community Building Art Works.