CHROMOSOME

by Darcie Whelan-Kortan

We heard no sound

as they jumped

from a hundred and more

flights up

Just a simple

 

toss

 

of body into air

 

And from our vantage point

below the smoldering towers

through the lens

to somber houses

across thousands of miles

as they fell

they all looked the same—

 

no clothes

no faces

no fear

 

Just a black outline

two arms and two legs

joined in the center

like the wiggling X

of a chromosome

a single, unseen, unnamed

living piece in the code

of who we are

lost forever

Darcie Whelan-Kortan has published in Motherwell and wrote the column Beyond Broken for Literary Mama. She is a featured writer on Medium. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College.

CRACKING THE CODE

by Dick Westheimer

This annotated image was taken by a parachute-up-look camera aboard the protective back shell of NASA's Perseverance rover during its descent toward Mars' Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. Using binary code, two messages have been encoded in the neutral white and international-orange parachute gores (the sections that make up the canopy's hemispherical shape). The inner portion spells out "DARE MIGHTY THINGS," with each word located on its own ring of gores. The outer band of the canopy provides GPS coordinates for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the rover was built and the project is managed. —NASA, February 25, 2021


Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. —Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life," April 10, 1899

The drogue deployed in a blue black sky
pulled nine Gs as it slowed the rover’s descent 
a rosette of white and red, it opened wide—
revealed to an observant few, a code

that drove the NASA team, words that T.R. wrote
of a strenuous life, of toil and hardship
of failure and strife: these are not a footnote
but the stuff of creation, of life’s drift

from the gray twilight to glorious triumphs.
There is no “easy peace,” just all the mighty things
from day to day, from here to enough
of how we end and how we begin, like

dying well
washing the dead
tending the sick
writing the one poem
writing the other
giving birth
being born
sitting silently, leaned against a tree
sitting silently 
listening
hearing
passing by a panhandler
sitting by a panhandler
depressed, getting up in the morning 
sleep deprived, suckling a baby
wiping shit from the butt of an aged parent
knowing from the taste of soil if it’s sweet
forgiving a friend
learning birdsongs.


Dick Westheimer writes poetry to makes sense of the world—which is made easier by the company of his wife of 40 years, and the plot of land they’ve worked together for all of those years. His poems have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, For a Better World, and Riparian.

ODE TO MY SHOPPER

by Sharon Olson

I was seventy-one and still counting
when I counted the grocery bags arriving
at my front door, each one labelled
I guess for the shopper’s convenience,
some mnemonic only he had derived,
Poems 1 of 8, Poems 2 of 8, and so forth,
and they were like poems, each item
of slightly different size and voice,
tuna can haikus next to sonnets of milk.

I chalked it up to coincidence, until
the next week new bags came, this time
marked Lyric 1 of 7, Lyric 2 of 7, so
we knew we were in some sort of
telepathic, telegrammatic finger-
tapping sync-apathy, as if he knew
I must write poems and would eat
to write them, not eating words
but snippets of lyric, edible syllables.

The market has stipulated one week
between orders, and I am as I said
earlier seventy-one and still counting.
And so I find myself wondering
what the next code will bring, what
subliminal message my messenger
will write to signal our connection.
He must be a poet, too, composing
behind the front lines and so essential.

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian, 71 and still counting. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019. She lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey where along with everyone else she waits it out. Her grocery bags truly did arrive marked as mentioned in the poem.