CASSANDRA SPEAKING AFTER OCTOBER 7, 2023

by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt

I huddle in a thicket  I have been through this for centuries 

Seeing   not stopping it  hearing screams  pleas  screeches  shots 

 

I still want to whisper to yell to stave off disasters 

but my words are ghost breath traveling down centuries 

 

I know about the arched spine in pain 

the bones whittled down thinned by loss 

 

I know the closed eyes that can’t stop seeing 

blue eyes brown eyes hazel ones drained of hope 

 

I know there are no sentences for horror for killing 

Just broken words like ankle bone breast bone thigh bone 

 

No dreaming flesh   no dreaming bodies 

No dreaming breath   always prophecies that come to pass 

 

No one listens to my warnings   just darkened earth  

withered grasses   stones of remembrance  

 

And the  blue thread of an empty story 

in an endless labyrinth of grief 

Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at SUNY New Paltz where she taught creative writing, memoir, creative nonfiction courses as well as American Literature, Women’s Literature, the Literature of Witnessing, and Holocaust Literature. Her poetry has been published in over one hundred journals including The Cream City Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review,  Phoebe, The Chiron Review, Memoir(and), The Westchester Review, Wind, and The Vassar Review. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. She had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000). Her chapbook The Earth Was Still was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time,  by Word Temple Press. Her volume of poetry Foraging for Light was published by Finishing Line Press.  And her chapbook about Bess Houdini, the wife of Harry Houdini, entitled Over the Moon Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini, recently was published by Palooka Press.   

ELEGY ON BLEACHED CORAL

by Cally Conan-Davies

Huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching across hundreds of miles of its most pristine northern sector, were recently found to be dead, killed last year by overheated seawater. More southerly sections around the middle of the reef that barely escaped then are bleaching now, a potential precursor to another die-off that could rob some of the reef’s most visited areas of color and life. Photo by Terry Hughes et al./Nature.—The New York Times, March 15, 2017

Solar panels
on my roof
useless as ships
come to grief

Shrouded in
monsoonal rain
where the forest
meets the reef

A vague etching
of something strange
of levelled ghosts
passing away

Hue of the Eucharist
the chalky waste
of mute Cassandra's
stranded face

In shallow water
quiet and wet
like a long forgetting
human brain


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who lives by the sea.

CASSANDRA

by J.D. Smith

Cassandra is remembered more for being mad
than being right, says a friend
bowed under his burden of consciousness.

Sharing the load does not lighten it,
and we've yet to find a balm
for the chafing beneath its weight.

Nor are there enough drinks to dilute
the day's high tide of graphs.

Though ragged, the saw teeth of data points
belong to blades that level islands,
slice through tusks and hives
along with the customary forests
and, snagging, bring up empty nets.

The menu is long, and served with questions.
Whose sins are we eating besides our own?
When might this banquet end?


J.D. Smith’s third collection of poems Labor Day at Venice Beach was published in 2012; his first humor collection Notes of a Tourist on Planet Earth the following year.. His poems have appeared in journals and sites including 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Texas Review, and Dark Mountain 3.