REWRITING THE BORDER

by David Chorlton

It’s doves and thorns and sunsets
all the way into night, and blue mountains
float away at dusk. The border
isn’t what it used to be, no
Spanish is the Lovin’ Tongue or Marty Robbins
riding out of El Paso. Used to be
a line between the cowboy sky
and shops whose colors overflow
to make tourists feel as happy
as they couldn’t be at home. A hawk still hovers
with each wing in a different country
and ravens cross over with ease when they
dip and dive for joy, but there are
no visas for the jaguars
drawn by the scent of survival. Twenty pesos
for a dollar, undocumented sunlight,
new lives for old and corridos
from the radio playing
on an August roof in Phoenix. Taco Tuesday
in El Norte, deportation
on the menu every day. A flag of wind
still flying west of Lukeville, hammer tap
in a mechanic’s workshop, trucks
with hearts of steel between
Brownsville and Tijuana, highway never
sleeping, flan for dessert. A family lost
and a Rufous-capped warbler
in southern Arizona, slow river
leading a line of cheap labor
to the interstate; wasn’t that a time
when water was the passport
for anybody carrying their first home
in their pockets. Cheap labor on the move,
supply and demand, a cupful of rain
for a day digging fields. A trogon
calling from the oaks and sycamores. Summer 
is his time before the sky opens;
fly south, fly north, never fly at all
for fear that dreams
come only in translation.

David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix who continues to learn what he can from the desert about writing and art as well as the natural world. 

LIGHTNING

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Trying to make sense of lightning is about more

than science. How long should students lower

their heads, consult their books, run computer

simulations and not look outside.

 

By the time you read this message a bolt will

have struck in dozens of locations, though

you might not have registered the flash. The smell

of ozone in your nose, learning to count for thunder.

Did you know lightning can be silent. An owl.

 

Friction travels from cloud to cloud. It’s over my head

I’ve heard

told. There’s a space in the great codes for interpellations,

gnostic meanings, hidden from the rabble: debates about what’s

in plain view

 

Can someone without sight see a storm.

What if they also cannot hear.   

Lightning can be a figment of the mind:

logos. But if we cannot make observations

what is science.

 

Every one of us has dreams. There were heat storms

over my crib. I couldn’t talk but in my gut I knew some

thing was wrong.

 

Let the infants cry. For the betterment of science.

Watch them, how they respond. From the blur comes

a woman’s features. Mother? But not the storm.

 

They cry because they know she’s an electric force,

violence with the texture of milk—

Jeremy Nathan Marks knows that his own instinct to try to enucleate the problem is a self-deception. But he's stubborn. He lives and writes (stubbornly) in Canada.

PAGES OF LIGHT (IN DARK TIMES)

by David Chorlton

(1)

Hard to tell

whether the wind 

last night was social unrest

or coyotes’ dreams as darkness flowing.

The lightness of touch suggested

nature whispering

                                 in the face of human discord

yet in the absence of a moon

and with so few stars

to give direction there were only the neighborhood palms

leaning on the moment

                                            as if time

had taken solid form and claimed

the desert underneath

the city as its first

and only home.

 

(2)

Stone-bright the way ahead

runs true to course, rising by the step

to a view of all things possible

and some

                 forever out of reach. All those things

that never change come what may

are out there, stubborn and holding their ground

through traffic jams and newscasts,

analyses and polls, discussions

that take truth

                           away just as the sun

has stripped first the outer skin

of the saguaro lying

where it fell two summers back

                                                            and subsequently

dried its flesh revealing the core

connecting tip to root, the inner life

revealed in code, an alphabet

surviving after language ends.

(3)

The peaks and dips along the ridge

rest easily this morning

against clouds too closely packed

for news to pass

                               from worlds beyond our own. 

Grey light, pigeon feathers

scattering from the rooftop cooling unit at house

four-three-four-seven

where a hawk endures a mockingbird’s attention

until he stretches out

                                        and eases into day’s grey light.

Nothing exists outside

his range of vision, he’s the headline and the story

circling higher than opinion columns

reach. Doesn’t need words

to know what he knows. Leaves emptiness alone

because the entire sky

                                          isn’t worth

the area he’s taken for a home.

 

(4)

A bright and tranquil morning

on the way around the pond where red-

eared sliders and secrets

move just beneath the sky

that floats across the surface to the reeds

at the farthest edge.

                                      A Black phoebe picks flies

and rumors from the air.

None are too fast for him,

neither the latest out of Hollywood

nor royalty’s ongoing

struggle to be important. What is true tastes no different

from what is not; he keeps dipping

and swerving

                         through politics, finance

and all the way down

to the feathers and bones left on the ground

still with a glaze of moonlight.

 

(5)

Arroyo walk, sidestepping the facts and

speculating whether

the boulder resting on the slope just past

where the trail dips came

to be exactly in position after

falling through space

                                        or was coughed out of the Earth.

Some facts are immoveable, too heavy

to be argued about. But someone’s always

naming parts, allocating

numbers, holding science

to the light and insisting explanations

matter more

                       than the experience

of stopping every time

to contemplate the mystery

that built the world before there was

a truth

             to lie about, when

only the stars kept records. 

 

(6)

Darkness left, light straight

ahead, the first sky of the day can’t decide

which mood to promise. The clouds

are carrying concealed, the sun’s

a lonely heart just waking up. 

One day looks

                          much like another, give or take

the shadows and the low high

in the forecast, rain

this afternoon on a street

for all weathers where showers dance

on asphalt,

                    heat soaks in

and wishes for a better world

go barefoot, once around the cul-de-sac

and back, beyond the visible, beyond

reality, beyond what even

                                                 the hawk can see

from his throne of wind.

David Chorlton lives in Phoenix with a view of a desert mountain and more interesting local bird life than many people expect in a city. The desert still teaches him about poetry in a way academies can never do.

WE WANT A PRESIDENT

a wish list

by Bonnie Proudfoot in collaboration with Betsy Mars

We want a president who moves in down the street, 
spends a week or two. Even if we live in Flint, NOLA,
Hindman, Gallop, Butte, or the Bronx.
 
Who stands at the feet of a chalk line 
around victims of gun violence and weeps 
with families, friends, neighbors of the slain.
 
Who Faces the Nation and Meets the Press, 
This Week and other weeks as well.
 
Who flies Southwest economy class, 
rides the F train, buys local, birdwatches,
who saves the spotted owl, the monarch butterfly
the spotted salamander and the gopher frog. 
 
Who celebrates the 4th of July with poetry.
 
Who protects women who want to bring babies
Into the world and defends women who don't,
stands up for anyone facing gender-based rage,
who nurtures babies and spends time with children, 
not to teach them how to grow up faster 
but to teach herself how to imagine more.
 
Who pays taxes, declares gifts, keeps promises,
learns other languages, uses them. 
 
Who opens the White House doors to heads of
non-profits and legal aid groups, to teachers, 
911 dispatchers, brain surgeons, rocket scientists, 
actors, musicians, dancers, artists, farmworkers, 
bridge builders, smoke jumpers, border guards, 
police, soldiers, not just to donors or glitterati
 
Who recycles the plastic she picks up 
on shorelines and riverbeds. Who puts
solar panels on the roof of the White House and
charges her EV fleet. Who walks or bikes.
 
Who calls out sulfur leaching through creeks, 
fish floating belly up in lakes and rivers, 
the scraped-off mountaintops of Appalachia 
and all abominations to earth in the name of profit
 
Whose compassion breaks us open. 
Whose gravity weighs on us. Whose hope
holds us steady. Who laughs her ample laugh
shakes her womanly hips, hoists her groceries 
in an NPR tote bag, asks too many questions, 
dreams bigger than we ever could.
 
Who sits with Native American elders, 
holds an ear to the earth 
and listens.
 
 
Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. whose poems can be found in numerous online journals and print anthologies. She has two books, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-written with Alan Walowitz. Betsy is currently and sporadically working on a full-length manuscript titled Rue Obscure.

 
Bonnie Proudfoot writes fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays. Her novel, Goshen Road (OU/ Swallow Press) received WCONA’s Book of the Year and was Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway. Her 2022 poetry chapbook, Household Gods, can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig editions, along with a forthcoming book of short stories, Camp Probable. Bonnie resides in Athens, Ohio.

THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE OF 2024

by Cecil Morris

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

In the other room the Presidents debate

or speak in sound bites, trade accusations,

paint themselves in camouflage of words

and I can’t listen, sickened by them both,

these two awful ghosts of elections past,

one a self-aggrandizing victim stew,

one the merest shadow of glory gone.

I hear myself and my sister in single digits:

I know you are but what am I, I am rubber

you are glue, bounces off me sticks to you.

This format guaranteed failure. It makes

my heart shrivel, my stomach ache and cry.

Have we learned nothing? I think of my kid’s

guinea pig Harry on his squeaking wheel.

He learned the sound of the vegetable bin

being opened and knew it was time to scream

for cilantro, for parsley, for something

that fed him. I think of Peggy Lee’s voice,

weary, worn, singing “Is that all there is?”

and wonder if we can save ourselves

from self destruction, from bombast and hate,

if we can learn to recognize what’s best

for us, for our children, and work for that.

I want to request asylum without

having to wait for years in a crowded line

in a country foreign to my dreams.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere. He and his patient partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between the cool Oregon coast and California’s relatively dry Central Valley.

LUCK OF THE IRISH

by Laura Rodley

on Saint Patrick’s Day

“Luck of the Irish” (2019) by Maggie O’Neill

Some people are consistently lucky:
the shamrock rests within their fingertips,
the pot of gold answers their dreams;
granted, the gold may be just a few quarters
they find in the road or spotting the special green cup
they sought to replace one broken,
or a friend they’ve kept all their life,
or a talent, like painting that they don’t let go,
writing, or singing, or building,
the hammer of persistence paying off,
magnets in their hands, their polarities
perfect, no misalignment,
straight shooters, consistent.
Is it the consistent faith
in their luck that draws luck to them
or is it luck is drawn
to those who dream it’s possible,
who keep their arms wide open?

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

ELEGY FOR LOST CITY

by Katie Tian

Two 13-year-old boys are under arrest for allegedly setting an 89-year-old woman on fire in Brooklyn. The victim said the pair never spoke a word to her before slapping her in the face and setting her clothes ablaze on the night of July 14 in Bensonhurst. —WABC, September 9, 2022

i. 

new york city / this city / your city / our city / home city / city of flightless ghosts & dreams turned fossil /  of dynamite rain / of mothers / who have swallowed debris / patchwork syllables / tissue-stuffed tongues / of the english language / so they may sit alone on the subway / earbuds of radio static / red-faced strangers shouting / go back to / hollowed embers of red lantern skies / where you / arms gathering fortune-cookie prayers / came from / contusions of memory like overripe plums / heard over the din of steel traintracks & shuttering constellations

ii. 

chili oil & raw scallions / one empty placemat at dinner / red-glazed pork belly / diffusing into smoke & rain-perfumed city / peanut oil fumes beaten into asphalt / beaten into muted sleep / sunday morning channel 5 / bleached blue light of the tv screen saying / 89-year-old / jade cracked like limbs on concrete / chinese woman / soot dusted off supermarket receipts / set on fire / iron melting pot america / suspects at large / teal skies of manhattan ashing themselves

iii. 

I had dreams too, when I was young. Before my grandmother cried trying to piece together a clumsy accent, before the sound of bodies hitting the pavement, before—I had dreams staring out at a sea so beautiful I could cry.

iv.

All the while, the carousel of death spins giddy like a top, our names scrubbed clean from its cratered streets. The sky scabs and bleeds over this land of the free. Take your time: peel this elegy ripe off the tarmac and cram it down your throat—

v.

elegy for lost city / gone city / city whose name we’ve unlearned / city thirsting / for love

Katie Tian is a sixteen-year-old Chinese-American writer from New York. Her work is published in Frontier Poetry, Polyphony Lit, Rising Phoenix Review, and Kissing Dynamite, among others. She has been recognized for her writing by Hollins University, Smith College, the Adelphi Quill Awards, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Apart from writing, she enjoys collecting stuffed animals and consuming obscene amounts of peanut butter straight from the jar.

DRY SEASON

by William Marr

So let me be clear: climate change is an emergency.  —Joe Biden, July 20, 2022

even the shadows

are dried to the bone

their whiskers sparse and brownish

 

with no dewdrops to moisten their throats

birds won't come to the window

to chirp

to waken dreams

to inspire

 

holding a dried-up pen

a poet stares at the blank sky

where not a single trace of cloud

is in sight

 

don't expect

tears of joy

anytime soon

 

 

William Marr, a Chinese American scientist/poet/artist, has published over 30 collections of poetry and several translations. His poetry has been translated into more than ten languages and is included in high school and college textbooks in Taiwan, China Mainland, England, and Germany. A former president of the Illinois State Poetry Society, he now lives in Chicago.

DON'T TOUCH MY DREAMS

by George Salamon

Illustration by Beppe Giacobbe for Harper’s Magazine

"Can technology shape our dreams?" 

—Michael W. Clune, "Engineering our dreams," Harper's Magazine, April 2022

My dreams are true, because they occur,

they are false, because only I see them.

It's an awe-inspiring arrangement, it

is both darkness and light, it frustrates

and enlightens, it is a human thing.

The heart beats as we sleep, our

eyes write down the stuff of dreams,

dreams remain within and out of our

world.

Our soul is endowed with two eyes,

one watches the passing of hours on

the clock, the other sees through the

the borders of time, until watching

passes into seeing through, and the

dream endures within us.

I don't want technology to tamper with

this burden and gift.

George Salamon is not happy about what technology has done to "engineer" our engaging and communicating with each other and wants it to keep its metallic hands off our dreaming, the happy dreams and nightmares. 

MY BIASED DREAMS

by Cindy Hill

People who have arrived from Ukraine wait to board a bus outside the main railway station in Przemysl, Poland, on March 12. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images via The Washington Post, March 13, 2022.

A boat carrying around two dozen migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya on Saturday, with at least 19 people missing and presumed dead, authorities said. Libya’s coast guard said that a group of 23 migrants—both Egyptians and Syrians—set off from the eastern city of Tobruk earlier in the day. Three migrants were rescued and taken to hospital. Only one body was retrieved and search efforts were ongoing, the agency said. The shipwreck is the latest tragedy at sea involving migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean from the North African nation in a desperate attempt to reach European shores. Libya has emerged as the dominant transit point for migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, hoping for a better life in Europe. —The Washington Post, March 13, 2022. Photo: Migrants in Tripoli, Libya on 19 October 2021. Credit: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Middle East Memo, March 14, 2022.

I dreamt about a girl, thirteen years old,

walking from Kyiv wearing a dark teal down

puffer coat, a white knit hat with pompom,

and her cousin’s moon boots, which kept the cold

away, though they’d seen better days. She rolled

her eyes and tugged her earbuds out, then frowned

and waited for her brother. She sat down

on tumbled piles of broken concrete, scrolled

through her phone, then arms-length, took a selfie.

 

I never dreamt a girl in Syria

was walking to the border of Turkey,

or of a girl escaping Libya

by boat, destined to sink in storms of dread,

though each had been alive, and now was dead.

 

My deep-sleeping brain may have remembered

how my great-grandmother’s remaining kin—

slaughtered by Ceausescu on a mountain

pass—were not so far away, as black birds

fly; and those wheat fields that I’ve seen pictured

on the news called to mind her deep-scarred shins,

sliced by brother’s scythe as they dropped grain in

sheaves then stacked in golden stooks. English words

could not console her for what had happened.

 

I dreamt about a girl whose looks I knew,

whose patterns were the same as those I’ve drawn

in cross-stitch on a pillowcase in blue

and gold or black and red, in sheaves of wheat

I’ve etched with cotton thread. I never dreamt

of girls whose stories I have never read,

though they had been alive, and now are dead.

Cindy Ellen Hill is an attorney, writer, musician and obsessed gardener living in Middlebury VT. She is that author of Wild Earth, a collection of sonnets from Antrim Press, and Elegy for the Trees, a book of sonnets upcoming from Kelsay Books. Her poetry has been published in Vermont Magazine, the Minison Project, PanGaia, Sagewoman, WildEarth, Vermont Life, Measure, the Classical Poets Society online, Ancient Paths online, The Lyric, and the National Public Radio Themes and Variations program. She is presently an MFA student at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

WE ARE UKRAINIANS TOO

by Jonel Abellanosa

"What love is greater than the wholesome and heroic love of your own country? What other love? Nothing else." In this detail from a painting by Carlos "Botong" Francisco are the words of Andres Bonifacio, one of the founders of Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galangan Katipunan ng Anak ng Bayan (KKK or Katipunan), a secret society organized in 1892 to gain independence from Spain through a revolution. Source: travels withcharie

Our ancestors knew subjugation forced

into throats where no words break, silence

sharp as bayonet, glass shards shimmered.

The noose gripping the tongue, expressions

of words deprived of sounds, fall and thud

turning choked air into death’s white light.

 

The garrote spells our history’s strangulation

in the hands of war criminals. Our heroes

and martyrs tell us we, with our rich lands

and seas, have to keep vigil how the heroic

unfolds where sunflowers are eternal as their

land. Our flag has their yellow and blue,

 

our dreams vast as their barley and wheat fields.

Ukrainians show, by their love for freedom,

they are Filipinos, too, their rights and reasons

to be free seven thousand as our islands.

They are our countrymen. Across our archipelago

bordered by disputed waters, we are also Ukrainians.    

Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, The Philippines. His works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Dwarf Stars and Best of the Net Awards. His poetry and fiction have appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies, including The New Verse News, The Cape Rock, Muddy River Poetry Review, Chiron Review, Invisible City, The Lyric, The McNeese Review, and The Anglican Theological Review. His poetry collections include Songs from My Mind’s Tree and Multiverse (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York), 50 Acrostic Poems, (Cyberwit, India), In the Donald’s Time (Poetic Justice Books and Art, Florida), and Pan’s Saxophone (Weasel Press, Texas). He is a nature lover, with three companion dogs—Yves, Donna and their lovechild Daisy.

HOPE

by Julian Matthews

to honor the families of passengers and crew of MH370 on the 8th anniversary of the airplane's disappearance on March 8, 2014

Click here for MH370: An Interactive Presentation by The Straits Times (Singapore), March 8, 2022

Hope is the cold metal hanger in my heart 

where I hang the coat of all my warm memories of you

which I put on to feel your hug, 

your firm arms around me

Hope is the candle I light and re-light in my mind

remembering all the ways you glowed

All the ways we melted into each other

I keep the flame lit so I can still feel

the burning longing for you to come home

to see grace in these shadows

Hope is the light I leave on all night, every night 

awaiting your return

Hope is a kite on the high wind

I hold on to this unfurling string, 

unwilling to let go

even as you get smaller and smaller in the distance

in the blue, blue sky

I shade my eyes as you merge in the lap of the light

Hope is stubbornly willing this line between us

to never, ever snap

Hope is the ship you last boarded waving your goodbyes

from the handrails

Hope is me waving right back at you from the port

my arm hurting as it gets heavier and heavier

and you, further and further

with the passage of time

Hope is your silhouette on the horizon

bobbing on this sea of heartache

Hope is the salty tears I cry on nights like these

that could fill the ocean between us

Hope is this piece of the broken plane

I found on the beach

that you may have brushed against lightly

as you walked down the aisle

This drifted debris I hold in my trembling hands

Hope is placing my ear against it, cheek against shard

to listen to your last message within--

I dreamt again of you last night

like the thousand dreams before

You grinned cheekily, your eyes smiling

as you stepped through the front door

I asked you, nay, demanded:

“Where have you been?!”

And you reached out, pressed your palm

against my chest, my honeycombed heart,

and replied calmly, sweetly:

“Here, always here, my love...”

Hope is knowing that is true

Hope is awakening to that truth

Hope is the only home I know

Julian Matthews is a former journalist expressing himself in the pandemic through poetry, short stories and essays. He is published in The American Journal of Poetry, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The New Verse News, among others. He is based in Malaysia.