DONALD TRUMP’S BIRTHDAY PARADE AS IF CELEBRATED IN GAZA

by Roberta Batorsky

U.S. Army photo by Bernardo Fuller • Public domain

In orderly formation 

the parade’s vanguard 

advances:

a scrawny teen carries 

a flag depicting an empty bowl,

leads a battalion of stiffly marching, 

starved children.

The main detachment 

follows. These children, 

missing various limbs, 

some aided by crutches or 

in wheelchairs sport head bandages,

slings, plaster casts or eye patches,

proceed down the fairway 

in wobbly, uneven rows.

The rear guard, made up of

several pint-sized caskets,

is solemnly wheeled 

past the reviewing station,

its tail end brought up 

by a lone small girl

soulfully bugling “Taps.”

These casualties-

heart-rending results

of senseless war;

We must break ranks 

with our generals,

blend into their procession,

embrace fully their humanity;

no other way.

Day is done

Gone the sun

Thanks and praise

For our days

As we go

This we know

God is nigh

Roberta Batorsky is a Biology teacher, poet and freelance science writer. She has published poems in Fine-lines and Heron Clan and is working on her first poetry book. Her science blog is https://solipsistssoiree.blogspot.com and her instagram is RobertaBatorsky_poetry.

THE KING OF CHICKEN STREET

by Rick Gray

Chicken Street, Kabul. Source: Streets of Afghanistan Project

Not yet fourteen, he swings on donated crutches like an old jazz hand
Brushing the bad news lightly to his orphaned platoon.  

Cute won’t work anymore, the foreigners are all leaving the war.                        
Our new mission is grabbing anything they abandon.

Slip thick blankets off their emptied beds, still warm with home dreams.
Seize their Pop-Tarts, some good glue, and those spittoons. I have ideas.

And the general’s long strategy desk we saw on that looted TV, he commands,
Smash it into firewood with your remaining little hands.

We’ll need the heat.  And the meat, he squints, lifting his right crutch and aiming
Its chicken-bloodied tip at a shadow taking cover underground.

The others understand.
Any rat alive, or close enough. 


Rick Gray has work currently appearing in Salamander and has an essay forthcoming in the book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. He served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and teaches in Kabul, Afghanistan.