COLLATERAL DAMAGE

by Jocelyn Ajami

Credit...Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times, November 13, 2023.

In the competition 

over who is more 

the victim

who is more humane

no child votes.

No child, bruised 

and maimed

battered and beaten

claims membership 

to an aristocracy 

of woes.

In the competition over

who is more 

barbaric

no child, body

peppered with bullets 

propounds…

No child whose lungs and 

larynx collapse under 

the weight of boulders

vindicates the winner

raising his mutilated 

limbs in pride. 

In the competition 

over who is more 

human

no child condemns 

or commends

suffocating

underneath the flaming 

rubble, abandoned

and unclaimed 

in playgrounds 

of slaughter.

Blood void of bias 

splatters on stone

calligraphy of carnage 

to which no child

hurls

a single stroke. 

Jocelyn Ajami is an award winning painter, filmmaker and poet. Jocelyn has received several awards for her films, Oasis of Peace, Gypsy Heart and Queen of the Gypsies. She turned to writing poetry in 2014 as a way of connecting more intimately with issues of social conscience and cultural awareness. She has been published in several anthologies of prize winning poems. Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, she speaks five languages and lives in Chicago, Illinois.

MESSAGE TO MY DAUGHTER: WE COULD HAVE DIED TODAY

by Marsha Owens

A child weeps while on the bus leaving the Covenant School. (Nicole Hester/The Tennessean/AP via The WashingtonPost

but we did not… because having finished elementary, middle, and high school, also college, you, thank God, are still alive, and then you majored in education, once a noble profession, spent years as  an elementary school teacher and, with experience, qualified to be an assistant principal, but awhile back, you left the teaching profession for good because you decided it was   not a hill to die on (my words, not yours), and I retired from teaching years ago carrying my life with me, so I say now ‘thank you, Jesus,’  though I doubt Jesus has anything to do with this carnage that tramples America and children and schools today, that declares guns rank higher on the scale of necessities than education,  teachers, and  children’s lives.

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA, and at times, along the banks of the beautiful Chesapeake Bay. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The Sun, The Dead Mule, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Rat’s Ass Review, Rise Up Review, PoetsReadingtheNews, and The New Verse News. She is a co-editor of the poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning is available by Finishing Line Press.

CHANCELLORSVILLE

by Rick Mullin

The civil war that everybody fears

will one day bring our guns into the street

has been a virtual reality for years.

We are many battles in, replete

with bloodless disestablishment of norms

equating to the end-stop of a dream,

the downfall of democracy and state.

On Facebook, nobody can hear you scream.

It’s harmless when a friend posts, “Feel the hate”.

We laugh and like it and the hatred storms.

But this year the Epiphany may yield 

at last that dreaded outcome, civil war

with something like real armies in the field

and abject treason on the Senate floor.

With carnage in its more familiar forms.

Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.

CRIME SCENE

by Ilene Millman

“Taking Stock” by Keith Knight at The Nib.

If I were collecting evidence

wouldn’t I look at the tire tracks

tracing broken distances

living to dead

in stock dividends and expense accounts—

who has the motive—they who look like citizens

changing the map

leaving no forwarding address?

 

If I were collecting evidence

wouldn’t I analyze photographs,

video recordings, tweets

brittle as promises

and autopsy the bones

cracked like hope

and stacked deep

in boxes of discord?

 

If I were the one collecting evidence

shouldn’t I unpack the fingerprints

floating fibers, strands of hair

from the briefcases of influence

brushing what’s there to see

and lay them end to end

across this current carnage—

a measure of the outstretched fingers of God

or the smallest fisted hand?

 

 

In addition to writing poetry, Ilene Millman is a speech/language therapist currently working with school aged children and volunteering as tutor, tutor trainer and assessor for her county Literacy Volunteers organization. Her poems have been published in a number of print journals including The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Nelle, Connecticut Review, Paterson Review, Passager and anthologized in several volumes including the recently published Show Me Your Papers. She is an associate editor of The Sow’s Ear. Her first book of poetry Adjust Speed to Weather was published in 2018. 

DONALD J. T***P AND XI JINPING HAVE TEA OVER ZOOM

by Victor D. Infante  

Both linger at the mirror before a servant turns the computer on for them.
Appearances are everything in the Grand Guignol of nation states.
What's tardiness in the face of statistics? Numbers are balloon animals.
They can bend them into any shape they wish. To a point.

One is drinking Coca Cola from his teacup, sugar and toxins coursing his veins.
He has long forgotten ever quenching his thirst without metallic aftertaste.
In this, he is very much the embodiment of America.
The other has stopped taking honey in his tea.
Winnie the Pooh has claimed even this: An unfair comparison.
He is wearing pants. Let all the world know he is wearing pants.

There are no cameras, so neither talks of vaccines or death knells.
One has fortune, the other debt, and this propels the vacuous dance.
Nielsen ratings make a conversational cameo.
One explains it is a measure of value. The other knows this.
That's why he limits what is seen. Envy radiates across oceans.

One looks out the window at the bodies stacked across his lawn.
He wants to have them removed, but there's some inexplicable delay.
One decides to make a monument of charnel houses, frames carnage as a gift.
No one cautions against the idea: Indeed, it's all such men have ever given.

Victor D. Infante is the Entertainment Editor for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the content editor for Worcester Magazine, and the author of City of Insomnia from Write Bloody Publishing. His poems and stories have appeared in dozens of periodicals, including The Chiron Review, The Collagist, Barrelhouse, Pearl, Spillway, The Nervous Breakdown and Word Riot, as well as in anthologies such as Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, Spoken Word Revolution Redux, The Last American Valentine: Poems to Seduce and Destroy, Aim For the Head: An Anthology of Zombie Poetry, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, and all three Murder Ink: Tales of New England Newsroom Crime anthologies. He has serious opinions about RuPaul's Drag Race.

SYRIA

by Cally Conan-Davies

Photograph by Erik Ravelo from his 2013 sequence “Los Intocables” (“The Untouchables) featuring a variety of issues plaguing children around the world. “The right to childhood should be protected,” Ravelo writes.

plaster dust and blood
spattered face

strong words from diplomats
cannot touch or taste

what of us
compared to those

souls with eye-holes


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who expresses here her rage.

T***P'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS:AN ERASURE

by Floyd Cheung

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich

America,
transfer power
to a small group

not your victories
not your triumphs
little to celebrate
across our land

this moment
belongs to

historic
crucial
Americans

demand a righteous
system flush with
carnage
pain
one glorious destiny

The oath I take today is
For industry
armies
borders
and
wealth ripped

a decree to
power

a vision
America First
ravages

I will
with every breath
let you down

understanding the right
interests first

impose our way
for everyone

old alliances
will eradicate the Earth

the bedrock of
our country,
prejudice.

The Bible tells us, "How good and pleasant it is when
America is totally unstoppable.”

fear
miseries
national
divisions

black or brown or white,
salute the American
child

be ignored again

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless America.

Author’s note: Erasure poems preserve the order of words in the original text but delete many in order to create a new work, in this case a distillation of Trump’s inaugural address as it might have been heard by some.

Floyd Cheung has taught American literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, since 1999. His chapbook Jazz at Manzanar was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014.

TRAP DOOR SPIDER

by Devon Balwit

Image: windowlicker by M0L0D0Y at Deviant Art

Distraught at the news of machetes and truck bombs,
shooters and hostage-takers, scrolling through death tolls,

searching out agency, this man mutters, kill them all,
mutters round them up.  He curses and bangs, yet

flees the first splash of film carnage, protests I am too
tender, faints at the needle tugging blood.  He looks

no different than any other man, sleeps with his feet
tucked beneath his dog, goes any distance for a friend,

caresses his wife, hugs his children.  He’s a man as
ordinary as the leaf litter around the den of a trapdoor

spider, but trespass there, even lightly, and out he snaps.
What darkness in him awaits its trigger, what holds him,

palps at the ready?  He swears it isn’t bluster, but I
deny it, hoping that the humanness of his prey would

disarm him, that compassion would leave him hungry.
Surely, the cunning of his design was not made for this.

Devon Balwit wears many hats in Portland, Oregon.  Her poetry does likewise. Some homes it has found: TheNewVerse.News, Leveler, drylandlit, Birds Piled Loosely, The Fog Machine, The Fem, Dying Dahlia Review, The Yellow Chair, The Cape Rock, The Prick of the Spindle, Of(f) Course, txt objx, and 3 Elements.

HOW TO RULE

by William Aarnes



In your decrees seem as warm
and distant as the sun.

Keep moony doubts to yourself.

Corrupt the reliable bureaucrats;
let judges know they are judged.

Accept that good intelligence
surpasses wisdom:
much as you need savvy counselors,
in time you’ll have them jailed.

For maybe a decade,
count on the people’s ability
to confuse the flaunting of wealth
with the sharing of wealth.

Understand that a palace is no place
for living with a disaffected spouse,
that even a lover’s cottage becomes public.

Treat zealots as traitors.

Once they fill the squares.
you can’t control the crowds
(but, to keep the guard loyal,
acquiesce to carnage).

Keep those moony doubts to yourself.

If (when) the coup comes,
be somewhere else,
basking in the sun.


William Aarnes lives and writes in South Carolina.

MARS

by Howie Good

The god of carnage has grown

a balding man’s stringy ponytail.

Red, he says, means danger.

He shrugs his cruelly thin shoulders.

A tractor stands abandoned

in a field of what looks from here

like black puddles of blood.

The future will burn a full 40 days.

We will walk beside our coffins.

Starvelings will stare out

from behind barbed wire.

Mothers will shriek. There will be

nice grass in the cemetery.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.