PALIMPSEST

by Greg LeGault

Marcus Jansen, “Rural America,” 2018. Oil enamels, oil stick, paper, cloth and spray paint on canvas. 50 x 74 inches. From the collection of Corrado and Christina.

Back in the day

fifty years ago

flames lit the night

as cities glowed.

Brother turned on brother

black on white

young on old

hawks on doves

chanting left on

canting right—

how terribly brief that

“Summer of Love.”

We raced into space

walked on the moon,

grieved when dreamers

were taken too soon

followed different drummers

with funkier beats

preached peace while running

wild in the streets

searching for answers

blowin’ in the wind—

“The old world will crumble

and a new one begin!” 

And through it all each America gleaned

that it was pursuing the American Dream.

 

Comes the day

five decades on

the flames still burn

the Dream seems gone.

Brother turns on brother

every color fearing white.

Radical left

ultra-right

patriot versus patriot—

who is us and

who is not? We

race to the brink

dance on the edge

armed to the teeth,

at odds is an image

and what lies beneath;

tectonic plates always

pushing and shifting

united states

untethered and drifting.

We hold up a finger

in hopes we’ll begin

to find the hint of an answer

blowin’ in the wind.

Something to tell us that what we are seeing

isn’t the end of American dreaming.

Greg LeGault is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Bethany College in Lindsborg, KS.

LONG AWAITED

by Imogen Arate

When the day comes

news anchors will 

imbibe on air

Doves will flock

to beat their wings

to the rhythm of bells

Clocks will spontaneously

chime to the relief

of nerves wound

too tight over fourteen-

sixty-one crawling days

caked to congeal in mud

slung by the barrel

Strangers will entangle

their gaze as momentary

lovers embrace compelled

by ecstasy that words 

from celebrated bards

will fail to capture

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of the weekly poetry podcast Poets and Muses. She has written in four languages and published in two. Her work was most recently featured in dyst, The Haifa Girls, and KJZZ's (NPR's Arizona affiliate) Word podcast.

BUILDING WALLS

by Megan Merchant

I have seen the most beautiful walls painted by children,
walls with crowds of hands shaped into doves and flowers
tall. I have seen the most beautiful walls sledged by exhausted
fathers who wear the stucco-dust home and lull their babies
into sleep with tales about how they gutted that great beast.
I have seen the most beautiful walls dressed for carnival, lined
with stars, and helmets in remembrance of our fallen. I have seen
the most beautiful walls drenched with ivy, an accord with nature,
water dripping into buckets down brick. I have heard the word
wall in a thousand clumsy ways, the buzz saw and hammer
being cleaned in the toolbox of his mouth, the easy-dirt of his words,
where we tunnel. I have seen the way men resurrect walls to keep
the light out, too afraid to meet the eyes of a woman directly. Because
he knows she has learned to see around the symbol, that it is not a greater
means of division, or a blockade, but a chance to climb, to see people
holding hands from a different perspective, high enough that their
bodies blur into one.

Megan Merchant is mostly forthcoming. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (Glass Lyre Press, 2016 Book of the Year), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming 2017), four chapbooks, and a children’s book with Philomel Books.

EMANUEL

by Ed Gold

We asked the red bottle-brushes blooming off the back porch,
we asked the woman who was singing and writing parking tickets,
we asked the colossal white blossoms of the magnolia tree,
we asked the cashier named Wilnetta at the Harris Teeter,
we asked the cedar waxwings swarming the holly berries,
we asked the new baby, Helena Wren Silverman,
we asked the hailstones striking west of the Ashley,
we asked the oil truck that overturned and blocked I-26,
we asked the helicopter circling the neighborhood,

we asked the couple holding hands under a maroon umbrella,
we asked the two mourning doves sitting close on the wire,
we asked the cardinal who placed a millet seed in his mate’s mouth,
we asked the aviator sunglasses forgotten on the porch table,
we asked the smudgy smoke of the citronella candle,
we asked the blue flowers on the Kleenex box,
we asked the juice glass with a decal from a moose hall,
we asked the first brown clutch of leaves in the green of the pin oak,
we asked the empty hammock on the porch next door,

we asked the crow we thought was an eagle until he cawed,
we asked the green anole who hopped on a branch and turned brown,
we asked the hawks whose chick refused to leave the nest,
we asked the loquat tree that didn’t blossom and fruit this year,
we asked the mutant sunflowers sprouting under the bird feeders,
we asked our neighbor whose throat is healing from radiation,
we asked the house finch on the sconce with his eye crusted over,
we asked the little boy who played dead under the pew,
we asked the mockingbird who sang for five minutes before starting over.


Author’s note: This is a poem I wrote after the massacre at the Emanuel AME church. We live three blocks away.

Ed Gold has a chapbook Owl and poems in the New York Quarterly, Kakalak, Cyclamens and Swords, Poet Lore, Gargoyle, and many others. He is a grateful member of the Long Table Poets in Charleston, South Carolina. Ed Gold lives in Charleston with his wife Amy Robinson.