KĀKOLŪKĪYAM

by Nicholas Katsanis

An Afghan soldier pops up from his tank to signal a U.S. warplane bombing Al Qaeda fighters in the White Mountains of Tora Bora in Afghanistan on Dec. 10, 2001.(David Guttenfelder / Associated Press via the Los Angeles Times)

The owls and the crows are at war

Embroiled in bitter struggle for control of their dominion

Ill-defined by borders and perceived advantages

The owls are old and therefore wise

Or so they tell themselves to make-belief

Convince their childrens’ children of their superiority

Supremacy of poise and purpose, they persist

Until foibles morph into fact,

Poorly begotten truth whose tangled roots are lost—conveniently—in antiquity

The crows are young, confident, energetic

The skies’ embrace belong to them, they preach

For they are fast and nimble

Intimidating in their murder, or so they teach their children

Schooling them in the virtue of their virility, their singularity of purpose

The owls and crows are at war

Bickering over holes in trees

Despite the endless forest that surrounds them

Beak on beak and claw on claw

They decimate each other’s numbers

Each pointless victory and defeat

Treated by triumphalism and defiance in equal measure

The owls’ corpses are offered eternal absolution

The crows’ mangled bodies heavenly promise of peace and honey

Both declaring divine providence over the Final Rights

Both bereft of true wisdom

The owls and the crows were at war

Embroiled in bitter struggle for control of their dominion

Until the lightning in the forest burned

And the rain fell upon the smoldering stumps

And there was nothing left to war over

Author’s Note: Inspired by the Panchatantra collection of classic Indian fables, this adaptation examines the current/perpetual secular and religious tension in Afghanistan post-collapse.

Nicholas Katsanis is an author and poet of magical realism. You can find some of his micro fiction (50-word stories, stories in 100 words) as well upcoming pieces in Literary Stories and elsewhere (including magazines that do not have the word ‘Story’ in their titles). He lives and works in southern Florida. Follow him on Twitter @nicholaskatsan1

ADAM NAMING THE AMERICAN BEASTS

by Eric Fisher Stone




Adam cupped a narrowmouth toad
in hands oiled by prairie loam and named him
Narrowmouth Toad, chickadees he called
Snuggle Pandas. The Kiowa told him
not to christen bison while their scraggly clouds
hooved the booming plains. They belong
to the Creator, as does their names.

The peccary he baptized Gruntsnout
and the Gila monster, Lavatooth
before the natives banished Adam
to South America where Cortez walked
gonging in steel and helped add
Spanish words to llamas, capybaras,
comet-long arapaima fish
in the Orinoco, poison frogs like blue fire,
tapirs dancing through green chapels of ferns.

With all local words replaced, they were free
to varnish crowns from Incan gold,
blush Naples’ gardens with tomatoes, claim
man’s dominion over gulls and bitterns
and erase the world with their tongues.

Eric Fisher Stone lives in Ames, Iowa where he is a graduate student in Iowa State University’s MFA in Writing and the Environment program. His poetry has recently appeared in Poets Reading the News, Strange Poetry, The Hopper, Dime Show Review and is forthcoming in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry.