WAY OF LIFE FOR THREE YOUNG WOMEN

by Joanne Kennedy Frazer 

in observance of International Women’s Day

Elizabeth 

20 years old,

junior at an elite US university,

majors in physics.

Awarded a summer internship,

she will fly to Asia,

live at a Japanese university

while conducting research.

 

 

Gabriella

tiene 20 años,

completed high school, 

college beyond reach,

worked menial village jobs

until employment options dried up.

She will travel a perilous journey 

to the US in search of new opportunities. 

 

 

Bahija

تبلغ من العمر 20 عاما

student at college

on a campus now rubble, 

her family is no more, all slaughtered.

Hunger, destruction, death are her relatives.

When bombings start she runs to unsafe shelters

pleading with the world, why are you not helping us?

Author’s Note: UN International Women's Day, March 8, occurs during Women's History Month.  The UN resolution declares "full enjoyment of human rights...(requires women's) active participation, equality and development..." To honor its intention, I imagine and enter into the stories of three women "internationally" to illustrate vast differences in their lived experiences. While there has been modest advancement in some parts of the world, we have a long way to go globally in realizing the UN resolution.

 

Joanne Kennedy Frazer, a former justice and peace educator/director for faith based entities, enjoys spending her silvering years writing poetry and publishing in numerous anthologies, journals, and ezines. Her work is informed by social justice concerns and beauty of the natural world. She has written two chapbooks. Most recently, Seasonings (Kelsay Press) has been nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award.  She lives in Durham, NC.

FINAL EXAM WEEK AT NC STATE

by Jerry Krajnak

Last week, students at North Carolina State University concluding their first week of finals learned of terrible news: two apparent student suicides. “This is heartbreaking,” Chancellor Randy Woodson wrote in a community message Thursday. “And I know there’s little I can say to console the deep hurt or heal the immense grief felt by the family and friends of these young people and others we’ve lost this year. What I can say is that I, along with so many caring members of our community, share in this grief.” Such messages have become familiar on the Raleigh campus this year, where 14 students have died, half of them the result of suicide. —NC Newsline, May 1, 2023. Graphic by Chiara Zarmati for The New York Times.

Two more students killed themselves this week.
That’s seven on campus this year. We watched the news,
wondered if some fool would wander off Hillsborough Street
with an AK-47, start shooting one day.
But the perp we should have feared was here on campus
all along, hiding among the beautyberries,
under dawn redwoods. Academic demands
and social pressures lay in wait to spring
on those he'd already chosen. Our seven this year.
Our two this week. We wonder who is next.
 
Our Pack depleted, we mourn as we lug our stuff
to our Moms’ waiting mini-vans.  As a mower roars
or as we pause before springing off a board
this summer, we will think about the need they all felt
to escape the crushing pressures that shattered their lives.
We’ll memorize 988. Return in August, 
greet friends, view them with new eyes, listen 
to them more closely. Hope they will do the same.

Jerry Krajnak gardens, writes poetry, and worries in his North Carolina cabin. Recent poems appear in Autumn Sky Poetry, Rat’s Ass Review, The New Verse News, The Examined Life, Star 82 Review, and other journals.

(NONFICTION) THE SÁMI WORD FOR ‘HELP’ IS VEAHKKI! AND I YELL IT IN MY DREAMS TONIGHT, AND ALWAYS

FOR SACHEEN LITTLEFEATHER AND MISKOPWAAGANIKWE

by Ron Riekki

Above: Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, known as Áillohaš in the Northern Sámi language (23 March 1943–26 November 2001), was a Finnish Sámi writer, musician and artist.

“I am not saving my life for the future” 

—Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Trekways of the Wind 

 

Tomorrow I go in front of a board 

to speak on the allegations that I 

was “speaking of native issues too 

frequently in class.”  When I heard 

 

these allegations, no, this allegation, 

no, this pissing-on-a-bonfire, I had 

the revelation of being had.  I had, 

yes, in class, spoke of indigenous 

 

issues, not realizing it’s a crime, 

but I am guilty of being native, of 

being Sámi, of being Karjalaiset, 

of being of a background where I 

 

hear, here, “I’ve never heard of 

that.”  The that falling flat.  And 

it’s a board of seven people.  And 

it makes me think of the time in 

 

Berkeley, where I was walking 

down the street and saw a black 

man, around 70 years old, peace- 

fully being drunk, on a bench, 

 

buzzed, yes, eyes red, yes, and 

leaving the world alone, then 

a police car drove up and an 

officer asked the man some- 

 

thing and he said something 

and another cop car pulled up 

and another cop got out and 

another cop car pulled up and 

 

more police got out and then 

a van pulled up, a cop van, 

a SWAT team reaction for 

this septuagenarian swept up 

 

so quickly into the back of 

the swallowing vehicles, all 

painted black, as if to mock, 

as if to mask them in night 

 

where the body was taken 

and I stood there and realized 

how there is the centrality of 

overreaction, of SWAT-style 

 

action movie hyperbole where, 

in the end, there is the pairing 

of kissing the woman while 

killing the man who didn’t 

 

matter, the man who was 

reduced to villain and a woman 

seduced by cliché and audiences 

in the dark, snoring.  And a First 

 

Nation playwright in Montreal 

told me that Hollywood cinema 

is all about conflict, that they 

love conflict, because colonialism 

 

is hearted in conflict, but native 

playwriting and screenwriting and 

story is about community, not con- 

flict, not the incarceration of their 

 

films, but instead about connection, 

and he said that there was a reading 

where afterwards a white man 

raised his hand and said he’d have 

 

to be honest and he said the play 

was boring, and behind him was 

a group of Anishinaabe who were 

all in tears, their sleeves filled 

 

with tears, and this man was 

bored.  And tomorrow I don’t know 

if I am getting kicked out of college 

or if I’m getting killed out of college 

 

or if I’m getting left in decorticate 

position, funeraled, how I was told 

that I was not only speaking too 

much about native issues, but I was 

 

being too “aggressive” with how I 

was talking about native issues and 

an elder, Red Pipe Woman, on 

the phone told me, “Oh, let me get this 

 

straight: a native person is being 

told they are ‘aggressive.’  They’re 

telling you that you’re being ‘savage’ 

by speaking of native issues.”  And 

 

our laughter was as normal as all 

the tall clouds above, and our laughter 

was sky-deep, and our laughter was tears, 

and the grey clouds were coming and 

 

I love walking in the rain and I walked 

home and I wondered if tomorrow 

they were going to try to destroy me 

and tomorrow I am going to find out. 

 

And tomorrow I am going to find out. 

And I will live even if they kill me. 

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

CLOSING THE BOOK ON GEORGE FELL

by Jimmy Pappas

Source: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund

Because of this I will weep and wail; I will go about barefoot and naked. I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl. —Micah 1:8


1.

the page of a book
            can be a leaf
                        can be a butterfly wing

a book in a college dormitory
            on a Saturday night
                        with a young man studying

can be a starting line
            can be a point of departure
                        can be a loaded gun

2.

closing a book
            on a young man studying
                        can be a wormhole

to travel across
            the United States
                         to California

to Vietnam
            to Cambodia
                        to death

3.

I closed the book
on a young man
studying.

A bit of light air
grazed my cheek,
pushed me along.

The weight of air
at sea level is 14.7
pounds per square inch,

but what is
            the weight of air
                         with friendship?

4.

How does a young man studying plead?

Like this: Please, guys, I'm in trouble.
I'm gonna flunk out. I need to study.
Please let me do this.

How does a young man ignore his friend's plea?

Like this: Come on, Man. It's Saturday night.
We're going to party. You can study tomorrow.
There's always time.

5.

How do you close a book on a friend who is studying?
Do what I did: Just take the cover and flip it over.

6.

What makes a breeze?
            The warm air of friendship rises.
            The cold air of ignorance settles.

7.

The breeze moved us through an evening of drinking,
through a day of lounging around until thinking became
exhaustion, became another day of forgetting
until you left us and we forgot about what we did.

8.

pages of a book are many butterfly wings

9.

a chance encounter in a Greyhound bus station

you had the smell
            of fear and death

my friend told you not to go
but you were not one to stir a breeze

10.

On May 23rd, 1970, I saw a giant beetle
lying in a Saigon gutter on its back
struggling with its legs to turn over.

That evening I made love to my girl friend
while you were humping the boonies in Cambodia.

11.

I don't know what the breeze told me that night,
but I did know it would always be there at my back.

It whispered in my ear,

            remember
                        butterfly wings are leaves

            remember
                        leaves of a book are butterfly wings

Something happened. I didn't know what it was.

12.

When I learned about your death,
I could not understand one thing:

How could anyone
            have expected you
                        to kill another human?

13.

I wear my military jacket to get in the mood.
I find your name on the Wall.

I place my
            right knee
            on the ground
I place my
            left arm on
            my left knee

In my right hand I hold a piece of paper
with a handwritten couplet on it:

Over the distance of 10,000 miles I heard your cry
of how very very much you did not want to die.

I set the paper down at the base of the Wall.
I rested my forehead on my arms. I could not pray.
I wanted to cry, but I was unable to.
Instead, I looked up and stared at my reflection.
I placed two fingers against your name on the Wall.

Behind me, elementary school children on field trips
ran through the grass laughing. They have not yet learned
that the world they see today will not be the same world
tomorrow. A breeze will blow and carry them along.
Today they do not understand, tomorrow they will.
They will feel the breeze and understand the butterfly.

One young boy who hangs back,
            frightened
                        by all the noise,
reminds me of George Fell,
            who must have been
            the gentlest soldier
            who ever lived.

Jimmy Pappas served in South Vietnam during the war as an English instructor with South Vietnamese soldiers in helicopter training. At the same time, George Fell, his friend from college, died in the incursion into Cambodia on May 23, 1970. On that day, commanders announced the death of 190 American soldiers, 500 South Vietnamese soldiers, and 8,000 "enemy troops" in what was described as a "success." One day, several years before that, Jimmy and his friends closed a book on George while he was studying one Saturday night. George flunked out of school, and their paths went in different directions. To this day, George's college friends still love him.

OUTSIDE THE CAMPUS COMFORT ZONE

by Chris O’Carroll

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans. -- New York Times, 5/17/14

It should be noted that none of the schools cited in the Times article have actually implemented a policy that would mandate trigger warnings, and that college classrooms have often served as testing grounds for vital policies that might at first have seemed apocalyptic or Pollyannaish. Trigger warnings could eventually become part of academic environments, as unobtrusive and beneficial as wheelchair ramps and kosher toaster ovens. --Jay Caspian Kang, “Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind,” The New Yorker, May 22, 2014


Our syllabi have warning labels now.
We fear that certain stuff in history
And literature classrooms could somehow
Become a “trigger” for PTSD.

Slaveowners, Nazis, and the KKK --
These are a few rogues from the gallery
Of sadists calculated to dismay
Students with special sensitivity.

The cross, the rack, the bullwhip, and the stake;
Rape, warfare, genocidal tyranny --
There’s only so much college kids can take
Of painful truth about humanity.

We warn them and invite them to avert
Their eyes from education that might hurt.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in First Things, Folly, Measure, The Oldie, and Snakeskin, among other print and online journals, and in the anthologies The Best of the Barefoot Muse and 20 Years at the Cantab Lounge.

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND: ISLA VISTA, 2014

by Marjorie Maddox

Aftermath. Photo by Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times. “Seen through a bullet hole, IV Deli Mart owner Michael Hassan cleans up his store near UC Santa Barbara. A gunman fatally shot someone there.”

     “Authorities on Saturday afternoon removed three bodies from the apartment of the suspect in Friday night's shooting rampage that left seven people dead in Isla Vista, near UC Santa Barbara.” --LA Times, May 24, 2014

On this weekend for honoring the dead,
more dead, the radio blasting updates
between ballads, Beach Boys, the “Battle
Hymn of the Republic.”

Friday night post-graduation
in a college town not unlike ours,
sorrow drenched in war songs and the same
bloody questions we’ve mourned before,
each grief mounting beyond what we feared
possible, and possible again,
the way the radio keeps blaring
Sousa, worse-case-scenarios drumming still
worse long after we’ve tried
to turn the knob, silence the sound waves,
to finally and forever
disconnect the throbbing beat
between each patriotic wave
of the half-mast flag.


Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox’s book,  Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013), focuses on living in an unsafe world. In addition, she has a new ebook, Perpendicular As I ( Kindle version, Nook version, Kobo version).

A DREAM ACT

by Sandra Larson

        In memory of Joaquin Luna Jr.

18-year-old Joaquin Luna Jr. took his own life in November 2011 in his home in Mission, Texas. His parents reported he was depressed because, although a very good student, he was receiving only rejection letters from colleges and was also disappointed when the Dream Act failed to pass through the US Congress.  He did receive one acceptance letter after his death. 

Image source: Tucson Citizen

 

He pressed the revolver

underneath his chin

and fired.  

Its force

toppling

his forest

of feeling,

a wind storm

sapping his life

pieces now

splattered

on the bathroom tiles.

Quiet,

hear the dripping

of hope, the draining

of dreams for college,

a career in engineering.  Blue-

prints on the floor.

His desk is neat.

Letters stacked

upon it ask,

Are you a citizen?

The steely word –illegal?

Illegal, illegal

echoes

through the rooms

ricocheting

off his parents,

brothers’ grief.

The only response,

of puffed-up politicians,

Build a wall, build a wall, a wall!

America shoots another one.

A native of New Jersey, Sandra Sidman Larson is a retired manager and leader from the nonprofit world in the Twin Cities of Minnesota who has lived and traveled coast to coast and across the seven continents for work and for adventure. She’s been writing poetry for a quarter century and most recently she was selected for the Foreword Program at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, a program established to assist promising writers produce a manuscript for publication. Along the way she has seen her poems appear in magazines and journals and she also has three published chapbooks.  In 1996 poet Naomi Shihab Nye nominated her for a Pushcart Prize.