WHAT IS HERE

by Mary K O'Melveny

Perseverance

has landed today

on Mars.

Curiosity will have company.

Everyone is eager for news:

Red cinnamon rocks.

Long dead grey lakes.

Dust filled grooves.

Caves chiseled into canyons

like a Henry Moore garden.

Layers of mystery

embedded in swirls of rock

marbled as a fine steak.

We are always looking

for something

to make sense of.

Something that explains

our odd and quirky selves,

the reasons we love and lose,

fight over nothing sensible,

torture and torment.

We are always looking

for history,

for memory,

for stories,

for permanence,

for renewal.

The deeper we dig,

the less happy we are.

So we fly off

to other realms

hoping to learn more

from long dead planets.

Hoping there is something

new under the sun.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

AFTER THE ELECTION

by Joan Mazza

“The Truth Dawns,” a painting at Fruitful Dark.

                I’ll never tell a lie. —Jimmy Carter, 1976.

And now the long trek back to sanity, without

a daily outrage or ten, without the avalanche of lies,

earthquakes of violations of the Hatch Act,

projecting corruption onto others. We’ll climb

back to believe in science based on evidence,

dismantle claims of conspiracies without basis.

We’ll embark on a clear plan to tackle a virus

that has tackled us, one that will kill another million

in the world before its spread slows. Let us return

to curiosity and real conversation without name-

calling, without mocking names and appearance,

without shaming skin shade and hairstyles. Let’s

educate ourselves about nuance and subtlety,

the fluidity of gender and identity, how temperament

and preferences change across our lives. Let us teach

our children how to manage complex emotions

and validate their experience of confusion. Let’s preach

honesty as a practical living strategy, more than a virtue.

Finally decent, we end the gaslighting and distortion,

the refusal to be transparent after the promise.

Let’s accept truth as not always pretty, but embrace

it as a guide toward what is real and tangible

as apples, tactile and heartening as someone

looking into your eyes and squeezing your hand,

comforting as a poem at a president’s inauguration.

Joan Mazza worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self, and her work has appeared in Italian Americana, Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia where she writes a poem every day and has been baking bread since before Covid19.