TALKING ABOUT TREES

by Bonnie Naradzay

 

 

Father of Baby Shot Dead by IDF in Hebron: I Stopped When Asked, Then They Opened Fire. 'The soldier was about ten meters away from me. He saw me, he saw my wife and the children. The car windows were not dark, it was daylight and everything was clear. You can't say he didn't see that it was a family,' Fahed Abu Haykal told Haaretz, June 6, 2026.
 

I’d like to write like Tu Fu, whose poems
are like branches of trees reflected in water –
 
the branches of trees.  Like a group of trees seen
through clouds or mist, they appear, then disappear.
 
But I learned that today Israeli forces murdered
a Palestinian baby, in the West Bank, in Hebron.
 
He was in his mother’s arms, in a car the soldiers
shot into. They’d ordered the driver, the baby’s father,
 
to stop, and he did as they said, and raised his hands
in submission. The baby’s mother sustained shrapnel
 
injuries near her heart, may not survive.  The soldiers
had been standing idly in the street. After firing
 
into the car, they walked unconcernedly away from
their carnage. Today in Gaza City, Israelis aimed
 
a drone at the Jawazat camp for people who’d been
displaced. The drone killed seven, wounded 15 others. 
 
How can I honor the lives of Palestinians?  Like a group
of olive trees, they are destroyed and made to disappear.


Bonnie Naradzay is the author of Invited to the Feast (Slant Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Journal of Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, The Georgia Review, Cumberland River Review, Dappled Things, New Letters, Poet Lore, Rhino, Innisfree, and many other journals.  While at Harvard University’ graduate program, she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Poetry.”  She was a winner of the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize (a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary). Three of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She is a 2017 graduate of the St John’s College Graduate Institute. She has led poetry classes at the DC Women’s Jail and currently leads weekly poetry sessions at Street Sense and at a retirement community both in Washington, DC.   

SIGNPOSTS IN DANTE’S ECOLOGICAL HELL

by Richard L. Matta

Illustration by Gustave Doré (1832-1883)

third climate opinion—

the surgeon says

why did you wait so long

winnowing wheat

a merchant trades

for a farmer’s daughter

bulldozed forest…

a herd of cars running

at the burger joint

oil and gas

a lobbyist drills 

for a politician 

water rations

a city meeting 

boils over

flame throwers—

a spirit departs 

from a scorched tree 

one more war crime

the drone creates 

a poisonous cloud

a disposal contractor

doubles his profit

leaking drums wetland

mineral reserves

one more leader leaves

a pit in Africa

Richard L. Matta grew up in New York and now lives in San Diego. Some of his work is found in Ancient Paths, Dewdrop, San Pedro River Review, Third Wednesday, Gyroscope, and many international haiku journals.

EXTENDED MAGS FOR KING GEORGE III

by Dave Day

Source: For the Sake of Arguments

Grapeshot, grapeshot

British artillery and redcoat musketmen

undone by Rhode Island farmboys

heeding the militia’s call

bearing

fully automatic AR-15s with

laser sights and aerial drone support

the colonists spray the loyalists

in the killzone

nine-millimeter sidearm

dum-dum jacketed softpoint

magnum ACP

thirty rounds for Lord North and

the madman King George

to enfilade the tyranny of

the House of Hanover

well-regulated militiamen all

comporting with the history and tradition

of SEAL Team Six, which was founded after

the Battle of Agincourt

the militia, our militia

selfless minutemen doffing

tricorne hats, brass buttons gleaming on

ballistic body armor, hurrah!

Dave Day is an attorney from Honolulu, Hawaii.  Dave has published poetry in The Ekphrastic Review and The New Verse News, and extremely nonpoetic articles in the Hawaii Bar Journal and Emory International Law Review.

PRAYERS OF WAR

by Peter Witt

On May 20, Dmytro Kozatskyi, a soldier of the #Azov Regiment posted his photos of the defenders of #Mariupol, calling on the world media and those who can help to distribute them. "Well, that's all. Thank you for the shelter; Azovstal is the place of my death and life. See you".

I.

I hear the drums of war banging

as recruits shoulder their weapons,

while merchants of arms pray

half-heartedly for peace knowing

money is to be made

off the mayhem and suffering.

II.

Somewhere safe and hidden,

a barely 19 year old guides

a drone capturing images

of hospitals, schools, that

will soon smolder with

the aftermath of airborne

mechanized chaos...silently

he offers a prayer for the living

and soon to be dead.

III.

Mother with teething child,

walker propelled grandparent,

and shivering family dog

board a train that chugs

its way to the western border,

rails singing "pray with me,

pray with me."

IV.

Someday, when bodies

are counted, refugees

and soldiers hobble home,

there'll be an annual day

of remembrance of victory

and defeat, speeches made,

loved ones honored,

as the priest asks

the assembled to bow

their heads and pray.

Peter Witt lives in Texas.  His poetry has appeared in a variety of online and print publications.

BY ANY OTHER NAME: SPRING TRAINING ANGST

by Earl J. Wilcox

If some kids played it on the Pittsburgh

streets with only a Wiffle ball, a crooked

stick, and one lad to keep it from the gutters.

 

If they played it on a loamy garden patch

in an Arkansas village with a ball made

from old socks around a ball of twine.

 

If kids of any age and many sizes

played the game on a sandlot

in Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic.

 

Even if the Japanese kids decided to

practice ten hours a day just to make

the team for the family’s pride.

 

If the boys of summer began practice

in winter, in a game that no longer

uses bat boys, has no fans in the stands... 

 

And if this game has no hot dogs or

peanuts and Crackerjacks and many

players wear kerchiefs and masks

 

And if they can no longer blow bubble

gum or eat pumpkin seeds or swat each

other on the butt after a terrific play.

 

And if the balls and strikes are called

by a robot squatting behind the screen

in the stands or hovering in a drone.

 

We will still call this game BASEBALL.

 

Earl Wilcox dedicates this poem to the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose "Baseball Canto" remains the iconic tribute to our national pastime.

NEW MATH

by Tricia Knoll

We have to assume other people do his math.
Fill out the multiple lines on multiple forms
with different answers depending on to whom
he is giving his tax returns. Maybe he is even
math challenged and would never check
those figures for exaggerations. How would
he know one from the other; his life is base-ten
on bloat. We know he thinks parts per million
of CO2 in the atmosphere are not proportionate
with disturbing one fraction of a second of his time.

The military did the recent math for him,
he hadn’t asked until late in the game
about the rules: how many people could die
to balance the loss of a drone. He says
one hundred and fifty is too many.
Not proportionate. (And ludicrously
low we suspect.) So are they sitting
around right now trying to decide
what is the right proportion? A figure
that works for a world teetering
on the brink of another war disaster?
Math you can explain to a child
who can hold up two fingers
to tell his age?

He might be able to handle the old daisy oracle.
It’s pretty simple. Pluck a petal. Pluck a petal.
He loves me. He loves me not.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies. She is spending a lot of time pulling up invasive species in a woods, thinking about math and probabilities.

STRAIT OF HORMUZ,AN OPERA IN ONE ACT

by Sharon Olson

Photo credit: (AP/Shutterstock/Salon)

Everyone assumed it was unmanned,
everyone it appears but the Drone family,
Papa Drone who had proclaimed
he could fly the damned thing blind,
Baby Drone, excited about his first flight
but not tall enough to see out the windows,
and Mrs. Drone, who suddenly lamented
her husband’s lack of hands-on experience,
doubting whether he could really turn
the craft around on a dime, such that
when the familia found themselves
engulfed, bobbing among flotsam,
she cried out even though no one
could hear, Won’t someone please 
bring me the head of Pompeo?

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019. She currently lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey where she is a member of the U.S. 1 Poets’ Cooperative, and also of the Cool Women Poets critique and performance group.

1984 + 2016 = SO IT GOES

by Lylanne Musselman

@kailadougherty

Over I-94 and Belleville Road
in Midwest Michigan a drone
hovers, flits, and zooms eerily
gathering information on every-
day people; common seagulls
enjoying their routine dips and
gathering of leftover bread littered
on the ground, whine as the spirited
intruder interrupts their communion—
the white cloaked birds lift in flight,
screeching prophetic warnings in unison.

The constant hum, droning on and on
draws nearer to me as the birds scatter
farther and farther away, catches
my attention with its foreign presence,
diverting my thoughts from the page
and the once calm moment with a latte
to how absurd life in America has become—
Orwell warned us, Vonnegut imagined it,
their science fiction has finally invaded
our reality.

Lylanne Musselman is an award winning poet, playwright, and artist. Her work has appeared in Pank, Flying Island, TheNewVerse.News, The Rusty Nail, So it Goes, Issue 3 and many anthologies.  A two-time Pushcart nominee, Musselman is the author of three chapbooks, and she co-authored Company of Women: New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press, 2013). Presently, she teaches writing at IUPUI, Ivy Tech Community College, and American National University.

YELP REVIEW — MALHEUR NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

by J. Bradley

Image by Adam Rosenlund via Boise Weekly, Jan. 3, 2016.

To you, the line between your version of us
and them comes down to a quick draw,
a pithy line after the bullet finds its mark;
dehumanization is the only way
you can justify your ammosexuality.

You ignore everyone that calls you 'terrorist'.
You point out that if you were a terrorist,
you would see drones flying above you
like birds of prey. You forget how terrorism
built this country treaty by treaty
blanket by blanket, ballot by ballot,
bullet by bullet.


J. Bradley is the winner of Five [Quarterly]'s 2015 e-chapbook contest for fiction.

CLIMATE CHANGE

by Joan Colby

The Great Wave at Kanagawa (from a Series of Thirty–Six Views of Mount Fuji), Edo period (1615–1868), ca. 1831–33. Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849); Published by Eijudo. Polychrome ink and color on paper; 10 1/8 x 14 15/16 in. (25.7 x 37.9 cm) (Oban size). H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (JP1847). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The tides steal the bones of the cities
Like feral dogs. This is how warming engages a civilization
Built on greed. Ambition fuels the cyclones that rove a landscape
Where the earth’s deep gases are fracked from their caves. Drones
Concentrate on brevity, the riskless killing. Fires rage
In the eucalyptus where no aluminum carapace can save us.
The earth shakes with grievous faults. A wave
Rises in a template of doom on the Japanese woodcut.
No place is immune.
In Mumbai, the boy thief says a bad life
Is still a life.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

SAND SONG OF MESOPOTAMIA

by Rob Cook

A wood thrush egg thrown out of the nest by a cowbird. (Image source: Tales From the Wild)

Today I wrote a song in which Syria moved its militia into a pregnant woman’s bed.

Today I wrote a song in which a shoe, and all the sinews enslaved to that shoe, were filled with swarms of infant IEDs.

Today I pollinated a song whose final flower with petals of butterfly warheads fled Iran.

Today I praised a song for the babies born with six mouths, six legs, six skinless stomachs, and a six-billion year half-life inside the furnace of every Iraqi sand tear.

Today, by destroying a song, I made sure there were enough beds and chairs to blunt a room’s nothingness, which means a never-ending scorpion’s thirst, its memory of the desert that doesn’t die.

Today I stole a song in which the homeless built houses and raised families and food that will continue growing inside their sunburned entrails.

Today I blamed a song in which the Midwestern snow originated from a drone’s healing circle many Pakistans away.

Today I excavated, from a plant’s groin, a song that infected the Madonna Mafia with a melodic sequence of sonar terrorism.

Today I exchanged a song for the terrorist elephants, the terrorist giraffes, the terrorist oxygen, the terrorist fern forests, the terrorist mercies of medicinal marijuana, the terrorist sunsets, the terrorist shark sleep, the terrorist carrots and celery and kale that do not leave the body, the intestinal photos of the Gaza Strip taken from the cries of a child, the war on shadows, the war on people who find enough to eat without having to plant pancreatic spores in the hells of the soil, the creek bed Lakota whose fully-subsidized drinking earns the status of enemy activity, and though I saved his name on a dollar that trusted me once, I won’t discuss the terrorist child helping a turtle find its little door in the terrorist grass.

Today I climbed to the top of a song that hid the houses inhabited by live chess pieces pillaged for money that can’t be comforted or fed or held in the hand.

Today I developed a song for the water as it died.

Today I protected a song for the water as it was ridiculed.

Today I harvested a song for the water hidden one carbon minute away in the mirages that revealed another child thriving from dehydration.

In the song I can locate the Syrian helicopter nests.

I can count all of the wind’s bodies.

I can count and remove those who’ve made it to the gas chambers of heaven.

In the song I can count the salvations taken from a child’s amputated leg and copy the Western patriotism that nourishes from far away his dirt dinners and his bomb wiring and the syringes used for drinking and for putting the rain back together.

I can abandon that song by deleting the shadows the child leaves unchecked as he crawls through the artillery-cold heroin forests of Afghanistan.

I can dismantle the song by betraying each bird when it sees the child leading his headless animals into the cruel churches of my hand.

Today I beat the last song to death with a bullet casing I stole from the rubble of all the songs that would never make anyone happy again.

Today I felt no remorse for the songs and their misplaced blessings.

Today I reported both hands for their terrorist ambitions—the one that grows its own grain and the one condemned for hiding every song inside the dust hospital where God sleeps by himself with the only feather that survived.

Today I promised I would protect his otherwise secure kingdom, safe because it remains empty except for the sins of a wood thrush weeping


Rob Cook's work has recently appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Zoland Poetry, Aufgabe, Rhino, A cappella Zoo, Caketrain, Weave, and Best American Poetry 2009. His most recent book is Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade. He lives in the East Village where he co-edits Skidrow Penthouse with Stephanie Dickinson.

TO A DRONE

by Mary Cresswell

The Justice Department will publicly release a secret 2011 memo that provided the legal justification for the killing of American terrorism suspects overseas, according to a U.S. official, following extensive pressure on the administration to do so. --Karen DeYoung and Sari Horwitz, Washington Post, May 21, 2014 [Image source: World Mathaba]

Sonnenizio on a line by William Blake (‘To the evening star’)

Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening
swooping nefarious above our lives
like some fairy tern. When we know
to pay the fare, you help us, sure –
but if we don’t, you go feral,
throwing us to the wolves, a fair cop
in some snoop’s book. The ferryman
collects our words, ferrets out
our fairweather friends and foes
and provides a fair copy to those
who think their welfare under threat.
In classic times, the Pharos did better,
keeping ships on course, sailing fair.
Spying on us is none of your affair.


Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. Canterbury University Press will publish her fourth book, Fish Stories, next year.

THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH

by Jean Varda

Proximate image source: The New Yorker

               for Sergeant Cory Remsburg


Would you lose an eye, a leg, a hand
to serve your country
to bring us freedom and democracy

Will you lie in a ditch unconscious,
shrapnel in your brain,
to help us understand freedom and
give democracy to the family who
died in the drone strike

Will you lose your hands, your voice,
your mind, so we can understand
the bullets dug from the bodies
of the two pregnant women
the six children laid out on
stretchers, never to open their eyes,
the father who could not protect
them now in pieces

Will you lose your eye,
your leg, your hands,
your mouth
so the children that did
not survive the bomb
will know freedom and
democracy, justice
and equality


Jean Varda’s poetry has appeared in: The California Quarterly, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Lucid Stone, Poetry Motel, The Santa Fe Sun, Avocet A Journal of Nature Poetry, River Poets Journal and Prompt Online Literary Magazine. She has published 5 chapbooks of poetry, most recently, Carved from Light and Shadow by Sacred Feather Press. Her poem “Sister Morphine” that appeared in Red River Review was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in the Sierra Foothills of Northern California where she works as a nurse and collage artist.

DRONE PILOTS DO IT REMOTELY

by Howie Good

Predator Drone Pilot. Image by Wikimedia Commons. Proximate source: Australian Popular Science.

By the bomb’s
early light,
faces appeared
crippled
and blind,

and where
the centuries
crisscrossed,
there were
wilted flowers
to braid in wild
witchy hair.

“A disaster,”
I repeated,
but louder
this time,

a strange way
to find out
that the voice
I needed
was the one
I already had.

My children
waited for me
to say more.
“Go to sleep,”
I ordered,

never even
thinking
to explain

that if you
don’t sleep,
you can’t
very well dream.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the 2013 chapbooks Echo's Bones and Danger Falling Debris, both from Red Bird Chapbooks. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.

TWENTY QUESTIONS: THE AMAZON DRONE

by Earl J. Wilcox

Is it bigger than a bread box?
Animal, mineral, or vegetable?
Does it leap over tall buildings?
Will rain or sleet or gloom of night stop it?
Can I get two with egg rolls?
Is there an extra shipping charge?
Does it know I live in Mom’s basement?
Can I still have my copy of Playboy delivered here?
Will it bring me ice cream in July?
Can it find me in North Dakota—or Timbuktu?
How much should I tip it?
Where will it sleep at night after a hard day?
Can it ring my door bell?
Will a flock of birds threaten it?
Will it scare my cat?
Can I kill it with my BB gun?
What will happen to my UPS guy?
Does it have gender?
Will there be a graveyard for defunct drones?
Is this the way the world ends?


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to TheNew Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.

TO THE SPIDER

by Jonel Abellanosa






              For Edward Snowden


In our culture of constantly buying
evolving fear greed for control sells,
you’ve been demonized.
Who doesn’t imagine
the searing bite, the poison?
Whose skin doesn’t bristle
at your absent tiptoes?
I’m in time to watch
you weave your mandala’s
inner circles counterclockwise.
You’ve more to share:
not to overreach,
to take only what strays
in your space,
to listen only to your surroundings.
As you still,
the peace-laureled dictator’s
lies echo:
More innocent men, women, children dying
as unmanned aerial warfare
perfecting technology
and doctrine won’t drone
as pesky mosquitoes into your web.

 
Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, the Philippines.  His poetry is forthcoming in Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature, Anglican Theological Review, the PEN Peace Mindanao anthology, Dirtcakes journal, and has appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Qarrtsiluni, Red River Review, Fox Chase Review, Burning Word, Barefoot Review, Philippines Free Press and Philippine Graphic magazine.

AFTER THE BOMBING

by Howie Good

Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Every bush strung
with shreds of bloodstained light,
there’s so much still to suffer,

an Atlantic of emptiness,
greasy & barely moving,
a slow-creeping blue creation,

like the drone of flies
from an adjoining world.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DRONE PILOT

by Ann Bracken



     Based “Dreams in Infrared” by Nicola Abé 
     posted at Spiegel Online International, December 14, 2012.

He works in a windowless, air-conditioned container somewhere in New Mexico.
The pilot and his co-workers sit in front of fourteen computer monitors
and four keyboards.
Drone pilots at work.

The container is the cockpit where no one flies. They sit at controls
watching the Predator drone circle in figure eights
high above Afghanistan,
6,250 miles away.

The pilot sees a house made of mud
and a shed used to house goats comes into focus in the crosshairs.
He receives an order to fire and presses the button with his left hand.
Then he marks the roof with a laser.

The pilot next to him
pulls the trigger.
Releases a hellfire missile.
Sixteen seconds to impact.

The moments freeze, ticking by in slow motion.
The pilot can still divert the missile.
No one is on the ground. Three seconds to impact.

A child walks around the corner of the goat shed.

Second zero. The pilot’s digital world collides with the village
between Baghan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
The pilot sees a flash on the screen.
The explosion
the building collapses
the child disappears.

The pilot’s stomach plunges.
Did we just kill a kid? he asks the pilot next to him.
Yes, I guess it was a kid.
“Was it a kid?” they write in a computer chat window.

Someone they don’t know answers.
Someone sitting in a military command center.
Someone far away who observed the attack.
“No, that was a dog.”


Ann Bracken is a writer, poet, educator, and expressive arts consultant whose poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Little Patuxent Review, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire:Love Poems, Praxilla, The Museletter, The Gunpowder Review and Reckless Writing Anthology: Emerging Poets of the 21st Century. Her company, The Possibility Project, offers expressive arts programs for women of all ages. Ann is a lecturer in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Maryland.