THE TENDER THINGS

by Janette Schafer

after “We Have Not Long to Love” by Tennessee Williams 

The tender things are those we fold away. 

The lover who didn’t stay, would not say why.

The nephew who’d be the perfect son if only

he could stop drinking. A crow who eats berries

off your front porch until he doesn’t. A mother

who remembers the girl you were at 17, 

and only talks to that child even when she’s 53.

A sister who believes every cuss word is

a demon to cast out. A husband who thinks

every bad day at work is a reason to cheat. 

You’d like the world to try a little tenderness—

except that now Dolly Parton is dead, and today

you needed any ray of sunshine—

so you reach the end of a cassette, hit rewind.

Janette Schafer is a poet, photographer, playwright, and realtor living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Chatham University. She is the author of three collections of poetry and the chief editor of two poetry anthologies. Her writing and photographs have appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and websites, including Vox Populi, The Missouri Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and SWWIM.  She is a winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize. 

IN THE NEW CLIMATE

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

This is what it looks like when national parks are sacrificed for a #borderwall. Footage at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument via Kevin Dahl, NPCA Arizona Senior Program Manager pic.twitter.com/VE9UKziPzl

— National Parks Conservation Association (@NPCA) October 4, 2019

no need to migrate, so geese fly laps around the county
lake to lake at dawn, louder than garbage trucks.

A friend makes a demon cozy, so she doesn’t always have to face it.
She can know where it is even if she doesn’t know what it is

unlike mosquitos with valises full of Eastern equine encephalitis
come to visit. Swatting lunchmates, even on the face, becomes socially acceptable.

A friend draws stories with her own language of shapes not everyone can read.
That’s okay. Lilacs do not bloom this year; there is a mid-April blizzard.

Fawns come to the door wanting the cat to play.  Children holding hands
walk across a lake of grass. Yard lights never let the trees sleep, not deeply.

A friend grieves deeply and with laughter, at once. She raises monarchs
and tonight the government will poison them as well as mosquitos.

On her balcony flickers and doves fight squirrels and raccoons for seeds
and a little honey.  Tomorrow the butterfly rain.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske most recent book is Art Speaks with painter Mary Hatch. She tries to live outside as much as possible while owning a house.

THEY CAME

by Robert Knox

First they came for the immigrant children
And we looked away
Because the Leader's toady told us, "Those are not
our children"
And we looked at our own children,
and were reassured

Then they came for the people who cover their heads
or pray too much
And again we looked away
Because we were not Iranians, or Iraqis, or Gazans,
or children of the West Bank detained indefinitely without charges
And, as the man said,
those are not our children

Then they came for the abused, and those who accused their abusers,
and for the accusers' advocates,
and for those who fought against their abusers,
breaking into their hidden armories to take away their guns
            But we looked away, and jested at the comedie humaine,
because we were not ourselves the victims of abuse
or the advocates for the abused,
and, after all, we are "not his type"

Then they came for the ones who would never
play ball with Der Leader
The ones who would always be trouble
because they were cheated out of their land
or, perchance, had been enslaved
or who had once owned a country that the slave-owners wished
            to possess for themselves
or who, we feared, were willing to work
            for too little money
or who loved the wrong people
or who were unwilling to remain in their positions
            and to perform the tasks
for which they had been created by the distant Creator—
those varied and disobedient creations
of that stable genius
            somewhere in the sky

And then because no one else remained standing
            in our diminished patria,
neither advocates,
nor scribblers with their pencil over the ear,
nor Enemies of the People with their hand-held devices,
nor party of the workers
nor defenders of the beaten, humiliated and disappeared

able to kick the ball from his feet,
nothing was left for us to do
but to lay our own bodies before His feet
            As the painted, spiked, and horny-headed demons of extinction
cheered, and drank, and laughed, and danced upon the bodies
of their victims
and ran up history's score

Boston area writer Robert Knox is a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual in which his poems are regularly published. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award for poetry books published in 2017. Also a fiction writer, his novel Suosso's Lane, a story of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, was published in 2016. His novel Karpa Talesman recently won a competition for speculative fiction and will be published by Hidden River Arts.

THE ECO-DEMON

by Judith Barrington

What kind of beast—wounded or blind—blunders
across dunes, scattering sand with its bleeding limbs
or dives from the sky, fiery breath burning everything
that grows and breathes?

Take a good hard look at the colors of the earth—
even now, much remains behind and beneath
the concrete we’ve poured, the hills shorn of forests,
oceans hilly with trash.

This beast holds back the current of the river
with brute force harnessing the water’s power
to its own greedy strength. Fish slam into the dam
and fall back stunned.

Look at it all while you still can. Resolve
not to feel sorry for the beast’s thick skin
or its red, weeping eye. Step out, alone if you must,
but watch your back.


Judith Barrington has published three poetry collections, most recently Horses and the Human Soul and two chapbooks: Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). She was the winner of the 2012 Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize (Cork International Poetry Festival) and her memoir, Lifesaving won the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She teaches classes and workshops in the USA, England and The Almassera, Spain.