BEAUTY AND THE WOOLY BEAST

by Lisa Seidenberg

Left: Archaeologist Kathleen Martinez believes a marble statue discovered at a temple site portrays the face of Cleopatra. (Image courtesy Egypt Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities via Hyperallergic. Right: Researchers inspect the remains of a baby mammoth found in the Siberian permafrost in Russia's Batagaika crater. (Image by Roman Kutukov / Reuters via NBC News.)

A female wooly mammoth was found
In the frozen reaches of the “mouth of hell”
Nestled in a crater underground

50,000 years since she made a sound
Did she leave with a tale to tell
Nestled in her crater underground?

She was named Yana, a gentle sound
We don’t know if she let out a yell
Stumbled down by chance or forced underground

Cleopatra’s stone head was found uncrowned
Along with coins and other bagatelles
Scattered near her tomb recovered underground

Burial sites are a scientist’s playground
Clues in bones, a grown-up show and tell
Treasures from an ancient lost and found

Might the wooly beast and the Egyptian Queen 
prefer their secrets to remain unseen?
Safe-keeping their private lives 
Locked away from prying eyes

Lisa Seidenberg is a writer and filmmaker who resides in coastal Connecticut. She is a nominee for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. Her recent work has been published in Asymptote Journal, The New Verse News, OneArt: A Journal of Poetry, and Gyroscope Review. She is peer poetry reviewer for Whale Road Review.

DEAR JOHN

by James Schwartz 

Gleefully proclaiming the joys of rock ‘n’ roll, drugs and sex in the streets, John Sinclair reigned as a nationally celebrated troubadour of youth rebellion during the psychedelic era, playing a lead role in making Detroit and Ann Arbor counterculture hot spots with the MC5 band, the White Panther Party, cutting-edge concerts and flamboyant rhetoric. Sinclair, who lived in Detroit, died Tuesday after years of declining health. —Detroit Free Press, April 2, 2024. Photo: James Schwartz and John Sinclair

A few years ago at a reading,

John Sinclair is discussing where he will be buried—

Flint or Detroit,

I chime in,

Rome by Keats,

That makes John smile,

He made me smile as well,

When he told me:

You're lucky to have escaped the Amish! 

Rest in power poet. 

James Schwartz is a Detroit-based poet and author of various poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America (2011), Punatic (2019), Motor City Mix (2022) and most recently two novellas Sunset in Rome (2022) and Long Lost Friend (2023) from Alien Buddha Press. @queeraspoetry

THE CREMATION CRISIS

by Betsy Mars

A flyer for a campaign to dissuade Jews from cremation. Courtesy of Rabbi Elchonon Zohn accompanying “More and more Jews are choosing cremation. These rabbis aren’t happy about it,” Forward, January 5, 2023

An ash is an ash of course, of course,

unless it's derived from a Jewish corpse.

Then under law and tradition (Tradition!)

said corpse must be interred, of course.

 

We don't want to reminisce about history 

when we're enmeshed in a different kind 

of misery, and the associations 

with Nazi Germany might lead to regret 

and painful discourse. 

 

But in the end the worms have their way 

(first course) no matter our religion, 

and ashes to ashes, dust to dust, 

so why not hasten the process 

rather than wasting space for bones and stones 

(though most rabbis and scholars do 

not endorse this course, of course)?

 

The Bible does not tell us so, of a prohibition, 

so off we go, and we're all letting go 

of our divisions— or

at least the pundits tell us so—

and at least in this final decision, keeping up 

with the goyim, assimilation above 

the ground, not under ground, a shanda.

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, publisher, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her writing has appeared widely online and in numerous print anthologies. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee.  Her photos have been published in Rattle (as the Ekphrastic Challenge prompt), Redheaded Stepchild, and as a cover image for Spank the Carp. She works as a substitute teacher, and as a cat wrangler in her spare time. Her chapbooks and small press publications (Kingly Street Press) are available on Amazon. In addition to her chapbook collaboration with Alan Walowitz, she recently worked with artist Judith Christensen on an installation in San Diego which is part of an ongoing exploration of memory, identity, home, and family. 

MIKE PARR UNDER MACQUARIE STREET

by Martha Landman

The artist Mike Parr will be buried underneath a road for three days as part of a new performance work at this year’s Dark Mofo festival in Hobart. Parr will be buried below the bitumen in the central lane of Macquarie Street, which passes through the Hobart city centre, in a container measuring 4.5 metres by 1.7 metres by 2.2 metres, and the road will be resealed once the container is in place for traffic to continue as normal over the site. The work, entitled Underneath the Bitumen the Artist, is intended to be a comment on the violence of Australia’s colonial history. It will begin at 9pm on Thursday 14 June when the container is buried, and close at 9pm on Sunday 17 June, when Parr will make his exit. “When Mike Parr asks to be buried under the streets of Hobart, it’s hard to say no,” the Dark Mofo creative director, Leigh Carmichael, said in a statement.“Underneath the Bitumen the Artist acknowledges two deeply linked events in Tasmania’s history. The eventual transportation of 75,000 British and Irish convicts in the first half of the 19th century, and the subsequent, nearly total destruction of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population.” —The Guardian, May 25, 2018 Photo: Dotted white lines mark the spot where the hole for artist Mike Parr will be dug. —msn news, May 26, 2018

Let me be your experiment
I have nothing left to do
take me in your solemn arm
drown me in bloodshot eyes

Eat my fingers, my toes
I’m barefoot, supple as an apple
sip me through a bloody mary

thirty years’ fasting
unleashes a wishbone,
rainbows! Devour them!

Bury my madness in your rib cage
Paint me underground, taste the danger
                               beneath the surface

paint brushes, sketchpads, grinders explode —
a fire stoked in total silence
your walls breathe me

Mike Parr being painted in his own blood for his 2016 performance art piece Jackson Pollock the Female. Photograph: NGA via The Guardian, August 17, 2016.

Martha Landman lives in Adelaide, Australia.  Her work has appeared in various online journals and other anthologies.

A PSALM FOR REQUIEM LIVING

by Jill Crainshaw

FeedMeister GIF

“Call for the wailing women to come.”

                Jeremiah 9

she wails
raw voice keening
fists pounding wild winds
chest-cracking sobs
sucking storm-weighted air
for breath

we thought we could live forever
under this steely sky-scraping canopy
if ideas and institutions
would just refuse
to become dinosaurs

did we forget—
our species
inhabits a house of
long-dead dinosaurs
(who mastered the tricky
art of survival
a hundred times
longer than we have)
—so far

she crashes against
a jagged shoreline
mad beauty
digging sandy shallow
graves for wordy lyrics
never enfleshed in song—

grandpa’s wet eyes
look skyward
as his beloved lies dying in
their wrinkled marriage bed
while he harvests her favorite
spring peas from a
fresh-furrowed garden
one more time

—if i could paint on the horizon
all the love i’ve known in my life
i would need a
bigger sky—

she falls silent

anger retreating

sun alighting silver-winged

on salt-saturated sands

an uncertain balm in

this gilead

when we buried her
he wept
as the church choir
encircled her burial plot and
music and mourning
linked arms to rise
up from the earth
and weave
a hopeful hem onto
the grief-worn
fabric of the firmament


Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

by Rick Mullin





Here we have the world turned on its head.
It comes: The Zero Hour Inauguration.
Skies grow orange and the trees glow red.

It brings to mind the burial of the dead,
but for the living, an incarceration.

Here we have the world turned on its head!

The flower girl imparts a sense of dread,

the chessmen might despair of compensation.
Skies grow orange and the trees glow red,

we can’t remember what the thunder said

and heavy metal rallies in formation.
Here we have the world turned on its head!

The Angels’ sermon: Prismic Light instead
of Fire. Bagpipes drone in affirmation,
skies grow orange and the trees glow red,

the sentence fragments drop like molten lead
into the auric ghost holes of a nation

where we have the world turned on its head.
The sky grows orange and the trees glow red.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.

DEATH COMES FOR THE COMMANDANT

by Bruce Dale Wise

Castro will be buried at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in southern Cuba. Photograph: Jonathan Watts/The Guardian.

        "Cambiar de amos no es ser libre..."

                —José Martí

The flags are at half-mast, beside the palms out in the air.
The Sun is shining over Revolutionary Square.
The people stroll about, meandering. Not much has changed.
The silence shows. The individuals are rearranged.
The statues and the towers, still, remain . . . another day.
The avenues, the walkways, and the latest news are gray,
as are his ashes, his cigars: Fidel Castro is dead.
Havana cannot hold him longer in white, blue, and red.
It's time to go, to leave the capital, alone, uncoil,
to Santa Ifigenia in Santiago soil.

Bruce Dale Wise is a poet and essayist who writes under various charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms). The creator of new poetic forms, like the tennos (10 lines of iambic heptametre), his publication credits include magazines and ezines under his own name and various pseudonyms. This tennos is an example of his docupoetry. Among poets he admires are Cubans José Martí and Nicolás Guíllen.

THE VATICAN'S NEW DECREE ON CREMATION

a sonnet
by Richard Hacken 

The Bios Urn is a fully biodegradable urn designed to convert you into a tree after life. But is it okay with Pope Frances?

New guidelines came out this past Tuesday from Vatican City
Regarding burnt human remains, whether powdery or gritty:

Set them neatly in places that are sacred and Catholic-approved;
They should never be scattered or otherwise randomly moved.
They should not be compressed into dice or shot deep into space:
They were once a live human, so show them the requisite grace.

Don't partition your loved ones (who've suddenly gone caput)
Between Mantua, Aspen and waters just off of Beirut:
Resurrection makes difficult repatriation of soot.

It's more pious to plunk our deceased into boxes beneath
The terrain and to add a memorial ribbon or wreath!

So rather than storing your mom in a crate on the shelf,
Understand the subtext into which such theologies delve:
"If you claim to be faithful, then don't make an ash of yourself."


Richard Hacken has published in TheNewVerse.News a few times. He has also translated into English seven poetry collections of Galsan Tschinag, a Tuvan shaman from Mongolia who writes in German.

DESCANT ON OUR DEFORMITY

by Rachel Voss

Richard III's skeleton as found in the grave beneath a parking lot. The remains of the King who died in the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485 were reburied in a tomb in Leicester's Anglican cathedral on March 26, 2015.

What’s more naked
than bones?  The whitewashing
of history, a ghostly rose

to honor the dead.  Which
dead?  “It doesn’t look like
the face of a tyrant,” a woman

said.  Hasn’t she heard
of Shakespeare (who couldn’t
have written a better ending),

or known any real sons of bitches?
It costs a lot of money
to look this immortal.

The onlookers point their thousand several phones,
and every phone takes several similar pictures,
and every picture condemns us all for vanity.

Now is the spring of our
reinterment.  Despite
the line of worshippers

and the royal craze, I, for one,
am determined to hate
the idle pleasures of these days.


Rachel Voss is a high school English teacher and lives in Queens, New York. She graduated with a degree in creative writing and literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her work has previously appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, Borderline, WORK, Blast Furnace, and The Prompt Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in Newtown Literary and the Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology.

MY BROTHER

by Kelly Jadon

A Palestinian laborer in Israel. Image source: Jerusalem Post

he works with his hands

digging, building, construction

labor

tunneling mountains

putting up walls of steel

one week and three hours

away from home

as many men

to feed families in the north

each Sabbath, driving highway

with cash, eggs, vegetables

a smile, a hug, treats for five children

dinner kept warm

chicken with sumac,¹ roasted batata²

fattoush³

yet, my brother is late today

we wait

his wife, Nagla, calls his cell

it rings, no answer

two hours

she phones again

and again, no answer

time moves slowly in the East

with God—in His time

finally, the call comes

not my brother—another

his voice, dry as crackers

raspy, hoarse

Nagla screams

unsure, I take the phone

“allo?”

…”your brother, ahhok,⁴

he was found, hung,

from the 4^th story…”

recoiling in shock

my mind recalls

John—who died on Patmos⁵

Stephen—outside the gate

with stones⁶

and Peter—who like

my brother,

was taken where he

did not wish to go⁷

“a nightmare” cries Nagla

our mother tongue

a cousin

my brother’s faith

the world cannot comprehend

for kosmos⁸ thinks as the Cretans⁹

fleshy,

and is natural

without Spirit

full of sin

autopsy, three days, Nazareth

we buried him today

within our crypt—

all others pushed aside

making room for his box

the city present—though media

stayed away—left unreported

yet 30,000 saw the truth

of one of the least of these

who came to bid him goodbye

kiss his coffin

scream, cry

this one, my blood, our blood

he is—one of us

the body

his blood, like Abel’s,

cries from the ground beneath

our crypt

covered over with the Blood

of al Messiah¹⁰

awaiting the Great White Throne

when bodies rejoin spirit and soul

“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”

Who sees all, knows all

--even, the evil intentions of men

whose wrong thoughts toward murder

led them to believe that

no one is watching

_________________________________________________________________

1. sumac—an edible Middle Eastern ground spice

2. batata—Arabic for potato

3. fattoush—a Middle Eastern salad which includes squares of dried or fried pita

4. ahhok—Arabic for brother

5. Patmos—a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, meaning  “my killing”

6. Acts 7:56-60, Bible

7. John 21:18-19, Bible

8.  kosmos—Koine Greek for “the world”

9. Cretans—Koine Greek for those from the Greek island of Crete, meaning “fleshy”

10. al Messiah—Arabic for “the Messiah”

Author' note on the poem: A story that has gone unreported, but just happened a few days ago--to an in-law, in Tel Aviv.

Kelly Jadon is a graduate of Spring Arbor University and holds a degree in English with a concentration on poetry.  She is a teacher, poet, and writer.  Her poem "To Taste The Oil" was recently featured at the University of Colorado "Eye Contact" event as an audible poem.  Her poetry has been published both online and in print in several literary journals. Her poetry book To Taste the Oil: The Flavor of Life in the Middle East was published in June 2014 by Into The Deep Books.

PICKING UP A HITCHHIKER IN MAY

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

"The burial of the dead is Humanity 101."
—Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet, NPR, May 6, 2013

It’s messy when they die
in winter, he says. The dirt
is too cold to work with then.
I tell him I will consider this
when I die. Just give me two-weeks’
notice, he says, quoting a joke,
and it occurs to me humor
must be an unwritten
prerequisite for a grave digger.
I ask him what he thinks
about the recent uproar in Boston,
no one wanting the bomber
buried in their own backyard.
Well, he says, I’ve always thought
we should have a special section
for the politicians. We could put
him here with them—in a place where
we let the dogs run.
In the space before I laugh,
I remember the story
the undertaker told about how
in the middle ages they considered
suicide the ultimate crime.
But since you can’t punish a dead man,
they took out their ire on his corpse
and buried it at a crossroads
to be trod on forever. He said,
“If we do not take care of dead humans,
we become less human ourselves.”
The man next to me says,
“You know, I give every person I bury
the gravedigger’s promise.”
We are almost to the cemetery gate.
“I say, I’m the last person who’s ever gonna
let you down, and the last one
who’ll ever throw dirt on you.”
He laughs a laugh so real
I can smell the earth thawing in it.


Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poetry has appeared in O Magazine, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion and in her children’s lunch boxes. She is a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. Favorite one-word mantra: Adjust.