BORDERS

by Howie Good

Nature abhors borders. A smoky haze from Canadian wildfires blots out the sun in Columbus, Ohio. An earthquake under the Sea of Japan shakes skyscrapers in LA. The Earth shares one skin. Borders are human constructs, a kind of illusion, lines that appear on maps without appearing on corresponding landscapes. Governments speak of the sanctity of borders. The smoke from far up north has turned daylight where I live a ghostly amber. There are no borders, really, only fences and patrols and checkpoints as if there were. Men have died by the millions defending what doesn’t exist.

Howie Good's latest poetry collection True Crime was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

TOXIC HYPERMADNESS

by Ron Riekki

“Hazing investigation into Mt. Ararat hockey team found pattern of ‘sexually inappropriate conduct’”

—Portland Press Herald, April 29, 2025

 

“Onondaga DA to Westhill Lax Players Involved in Alleged Hazing: Turn Yourself In”

—Finger Lakes Daily News, April 30, 2025

 

 

If you ask how long the effects of hazing lasts,

it’s till the end of poems.  No, longer.  As long

as the sleep of death.  It’s the length of a billion

leaves.  It’s the memory of dark in the middle

of your noon.  It’s fear ingrained in your home.

 

It’s moon in your chest.  It’s Macbeth debted

in the desks of my amygdala.  It’s absence of

absence when you just want peace.  It’s shaking

all night like an earthquake’s in your skin.  It’s

stronger.  Sin.  A hazmat at the door.  It’s a core

 

of pure Hell.  I know.  I was there, enlisted,

military, duct-taped mouths, ensuring futures

of gloom in your best days.  It’s essays I write

in the nightmares of night where I replay all

the replays of the fence and the ice in our eyes

 

when they gathered like witches, no, much

worse, more male, and more morbid, murmurs

of curse words and curses of teens carrying

canteens with jock-minds and abusive dads

recreating wrecks that had us calling suicide

 

hotlines for years with the gore of agoraphobia

from the memories of fence, but the problem

of your problem is forgetting our resilience,

all of those who have been hazed and are

battling the battles of the past—all the bullies

 

of the world can kiss my goddamn ass.  No!

On second thought, don’t touch us.  Just get

help, because you know what you did, and

who died—just one when I was in, one who

never got out; and I was more afraid of our

 

side than the enemy, but now that I’m free,

I turn to poets and poetry, which the bullies

don’t read.  But the resilient do.  And if you

were hazed, all poems are for you.  And this

world’s for you.  We inherit the earth by voice.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

BLOOM

by Annie Cowell

Songul Yucesoy's home in Samandag, southern Turkey was destroyed when a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck a month ago. —BBC, March 6, 2023

She raises soap sudded hands

from the washing bowl,

places them on her hips

and stretches out her aching back.

Behind her the house tilts,

crippled, less solid than its shadow, 

window frames sagging 

between cracks like craters.

On the table, rescued, somehow

unscathed, is a picture.

It is a shell-framed souvenir of life before,

when the table wasn’t orphaned

to the street. 

Now, the fruit bowl she hates

for its dull colours and chipped rim

sits beside the picture, uncomfortable,

with its solitary orange.

A white mould is beginning to blossom

on its skin.

She lifts the dying orange, 

cups it in her hands like a stunned bird

and walks the short distance 

to where her neighbours’ family inhabit

two makeshift tents, cobbled together

near the rubble of their home.

Her daughter’s friend, he of the wild eyes

and cheeky tongue, lowers his head

as she approaches, tamed and silenced

by the shame of survival.

The lump in her throat prevents speech,

so she dusts the orange 

bloom 

with her finger, takes the young boy’s hand

places the orange there. 

Squeezes. 

It’s the least, and the most, she can do.

Author’s note: Some of the events in this poem are imagined, but they were suggested by the facts in the BBC’s March 6 article “Turkey Earthquake: Survivors living in fear on the streets.” The suffering continues, even as the earthquake’s aftermath slips from the headlines.

Annie Cowell lives by the sea in Cyprus with her husband and rescue dogs. She has been published by Popshot Quarterly, Gastropoda Lit, The Milk House, and many others. She is a BOTN nominee. Her debut pamphlet Birth Mote(s) was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2022. Splashing Pink from Hedgehog Press is forthcoming later this year. @AnnieCowell3

AFTERMATH

by Erin Murphy

"Children Under the Rubble" is a drawing by Mohammad Hayssam Kattaa.

“After natural and man-made disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and explosions, victims may survive in voids that are formed naturally in collapsed structures.” —Science Direct 

 

 

First, look for voids: 

bathtubs, stairwells, ribcages 

 

of infant cribs, the clumsy  

geometry of cantilevers and lean-tos  

 

from collapsed roofs, gaps  

beneath desks where small bodies 

 

just yesterday learned  

to add and subtract. 

 

Next, make your own voids: 

slide flat bags between rubble 

 

to inflate makeshift rooms  

of dusty birthday balloons.  

 

Finally, chisel dates in your  

mind: one week, one month,  

 

one year since you packed  

a lunch satchel and walked  

 

your only child to school.  

This is when the void finds you.  

Erin Murphy’s latest book of poetry Human Resources is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review. 

YOU ASK WHO I ADMIRE

by Katherine Smith

I admire the bare branches of trees

for reaching into the sky

tinged pink by a winter dawn.

I admire my student for showing up

to class on this cold February morning

after she was evicted from her home

I admire lungs for breathing

the splintered air, bare fingers

for scraping frost.

I admire the baby still attached to her mother

by the umbilical cord

who survived

the earthquake.

I admire the uncle who found the baby

under the rubble.

I admire the father who sobs

my back is broken,

his grief a prayer.

And most of all

I admire the mother brave

enough to give birth

on this brave earth.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

HELPLESS

by Anne Harding Woodworth

Support the rescue efforts of the White Helmets.

     a prayer of sorts, Tuesday, February 7, 2023, 4:30 a.m.

In the quiet of this early morning, he’s left our bed

and walked into the hall, then to the kitchen

 

probably to get a “swig of klim,” as he calls it.

I move my foot over to his side just to feel the warmth

he’s left behind. At that moment, I know how survivors

in Turkey and Syria are shivering, reaching for warmth

where there is none, no lingering vestige of a spouse,

parent, child, no body next to them that said, “I’ll be right back.”

Buildings have fallen, din deafened, and then silent,

as snow passes into illicit spaces, upside down rooms,

and chairs drop into cold chasms of confusion,

terror, and pain with no one there to explain

what has happened. This is nightmare, a woman thinks,

held down in darkness between two concrete blocks

with one leg bent the wrong way. I tell her I am coming

with a blanket and lamp, but that too is dream

and will never happen. When he comes back to bed,

sweet-smelling of milk, I move closer to him

for his warmth, seeking comfort and more air

for those still breathing, buried deep in the rubble.

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of eight books of poetry and four chapbooks. Her recent collection is GENDER: Two Novellas in Verse, which was a Literary Titan Silver Award Winner. Her chapbook The Last Gun won the COG Poetry Award and was subsequently animated (at https://vimeo.com/193842252). Anne is a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA, which is opening soon after two years of restoration.

ZERO SUM HUMANITY

by Tricia L. Somers

“All the People—Oppressed by Black Cloud,” 1982, by Evelyn Williams

Under the rubble

Our loved ones, homes, and any kind of hope

We’ve been robbed

by a criminal we cannot see

Our loved ones killed and already buried

We are victims of this Climate Crime Catastrophe

Under a bridge

Huddled with our scared children

Our faith has been shaken

and our babies are still...shaking

Invite the world to witness your humanity

Anxious and jittery awaiting a fleeting glimpse

Like an endangered species or already extinct

Under hooves and cracking whip

We find ourselves in seeking but a mere chance

Have us to walk over your bridges

Only in shame do you chase us away

You don’t necessarily need an earthquake

for your country to crumble away

Tricia L. Somers can be found at Outlaw Poetry, Milk Carton Blog, and the upcoming Rat’s Ass Review for Winter 2021. Also the semi-annual print journal The American Dissident includes poetry, essays and debates with the editor, who is known to be somewhat testy. Issues 41 and upcoming 42.

EARTH QUAKE

by Joan Halperin

                                                                                                                    

To donate to Haiti Earthquake Relief via CNN, click here.

As she usually does when we dine,

when we laugh and carry on,

Margaret says “and we sit here in our bubble

while Haitians scurry around the rubble

attempting to extricate their dead.”

 

None of us wants Margaret at our table.

 

We pause. What can we do to help?

Donate clothing, food,  perhaps even toys.

Margaret says “Nothing like that will stop their strife,

will stop a boy from devouring garbage.

A toy teddy bear never saved a life."

 

None of us wants Margaret at our table.

None of us want to devour our ice cream scoops.

but deep in us a desire to save  our neighbors,

deep in us a knowledge that we own too much.

 

None of us wants Margaret at our table

but she finds the timber, lights the fire

 

flickering, that small spark,

almost available to touch.

 

 

Joan Halperin has been published in Passengers, Confrontation, Persimmon Tree, and others. She lives and continues to write at Orchard Cove, a continuing care residence in Canton Mass.

REBUILDING

by Indran Amirthanayagam

I did not want to write right after the crack, letting my mind fill slowly,

Caribbean and North American plates, moving side by side, whiplashing

each other for a moment, causing walls and roofs to tumble and Fortuné

to lose his bet, just one of several hundred dead already, thousands

with open wounds, tropical storm on the way. But there are some

cheerful consequences, the truce called by gangs so rescue trucks

and supplies can move south from Port Au Prince, heroism everywhere,

doctor performing surgeries on the tarmac, a man lending his propeller

plane to lift wounded to hospitals in the capital, hundreds digging

with pick axes, shovels, hands, to free family trapped under concrete,

sparing of human life at my friend's family compound, although

the famed swimming pool full of holy water has cracked and will

require repair, but faith remains in place, survivors have nowhere else

to turn but to internal (and external) resources. Aid ships are flying,

trucks rolling, but if only money I give can assuage pain, even if it buys

no pardon, if it means just that someone will get medicine, food, a blanket.

As for the political cyclone, early morning murder of the president,

and now systematic killing of investigators of the crime, these too must

be resolved. Murderers cannot be allowed to wipe away tracks, and

the memory of this latest natural beating can only be honored by building

with bricks, leaving space within foundation pillars, to allow for swaying

with the plates when they come together again the next time.

Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020) and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). Indran Amirthanayagam's Blue Window/ Ventana Azul, translated by Jennifer Rathbun,  is about to be published by Lavender Ink/Diálogos Books. In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.

HARBINGER

by Joanne DeSimone Reynolds

We breathe to wake and,

Lying-in-wait, imagine... 

 

The ground

Buckling off the east coast of

 

The nation,

Enacting the rough ride we just faced, still

 

Face, out of the gate. Look

To January—cold, and colder still ahead here,

 

Yet offering a look

Forward—face it, like an ancient god

 

—The sudden down-home decency

Of purple-tipped crocuses, the wrinkled

 

Unfurling we long to call

Hope in the airborne scent of witch-hazel.

 

 

Joanne DeSimone Reynolds is the author of a chapbook, Comes A Blossom, published by Main Street Rag in 2014. Her latest work is a set of 14 poems exhibited as part of The Art Ramble 2020, an outdoor public art installation in Concord, Massachusetts, sponsored by The Umbrella Arts Center in collaboration with the Concord Natural Resources Division.

FOR THE DARK

by Carol Alexander

A tsunami as high as 20 feet was triggered September 29 by a 7.5-magnitude earthquake and hit two cities and nearby settlements about 800 miles northeast of Jakarta, Indonesia. Here, a ship is wedged between buildings on a street in Wani, Sulewesi. Mast Irham/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock via The Washington Post, October 2, 2018

Dusk that is woven of sighs and a bomb of sparrows
shooting over the grass: a mild explosion before the thunder breaks.
For us the sighs, the birds, the thunder spin a little drama out of air,
while in the interval of eastern waves, a wall of ocean wipes out
even the shadow of the fisher hawks.  We glimpse the water,
hear cries tamped beneath thick mud in someone's cellphone video.

A group of women scream and disappear,  breath mingled with the wind.
So close to the edge, has this documentarian survived?

On the beaches they say lies anything, everything touching the human sphere.
Imagine tangled skeins of clothes, smashed up festival lights,
a wooden pipe sluiced of ash. Still bodies of the swimmers, beach strays,
amid the bamboo and pottery tiles. Bodies carried from the wreckage
either by the sea or living hands.  And as the rain comes down 9,000 miles away

we think of those frozen figures of Pompeii going about the quotidian
in their easy ignorance, and relic ourselves with open mouths upon this frieze.

Editor's Note: Global Giving, which funnels donations to local organizations, has raised $248,000 of its $1 million goal to help people in Sulawesi. The effort centers on emergency supplies such as "food, water, and medicine, in addition to longer-term recovery assistance to help residents." Global Giving has a 96 rating on Charity Navigator.


Carol Alexander is the author of the poetry collections Environments (Dos Madres Press, 2018) and Habitat Lost (Cave Moon Press). Her chapbook Bridal Veil Falls is published by Flutter Press. Alexander's poems appear in a variety of anthologies and journals, most recently Aurora Poetry, Belletrist, Bluestem, Cumberland River Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, One and Third Wednesday. She is a past contributor to TheNewVerse.News.

DOVES BY STORMLIGHT

by David Chorlton

Wednesday’s was a sky
to cleanse a sinner of his sins: apocalyptic
rays from sunset
streaming up against a storm
about to break. The telephone cable

between the alley and the house
sagged with the weight of light
from the sun in the west
while earthquake, war, and political
intrigue welled up in the clouds
behind it. All day

the numbers rose
of bodies in the rubble, refugees
and campaign propaganda
until the pale doves

on the power line
brightened into blazing commas
from a text whose words
the news had rendered
insufficient.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications on- and off-line, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His most recent book, A Field Guide to Fire, was his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson in Arizona.

THE GHOSTS OF ISHINOMAKI

by Luisa A. Igloria

In early summer 2011, a taxi driver working in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, which had been devastated by the tsunami a few months earlier, had a mysterious encounter. A woman who was wearing a coat climbed in his cab near Ishinomaki Station. The woman directed him, “Please go to the Minamihama (district).” The driver, in his 50s, asked her, “The area is almost empty. Is it OK?” Then, the woman said in a shivering voice, “Have I died?” Surprised at the question, the driver looked back at the rear seat. No one was there. A Tohoku Gakuin University senior majoring in sociology included the encounter in her graduation thesis, in which seven taxi drivers reported carrying "ghost passengers" following the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. —The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 21, 2016. Photo by Getty Images via International Business Times.

There was something
I was trying to finish—
A lunchbox
for my little one:
balls of pearled rice,
the pale white body
of a radish undressed
on the chopping board.

*

Take me
to Hiroriyama,
I say to the driver.
After we crest
the hill he stops.
The road disappears.
There is nothing there.
Every time, I die again.

*

I am a shimmer
in the twisted grass,
a shadow on rusted
copper. My hands,
two pale fish lost
in a river of red
at the ends
of my sleeves.


Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015.

APOCALYPTIC LULLABY

by Richard O'Connell

After the Portuguese of Domingos Carvalho Da Silva

Because the moon is bright and the night

Is simply announcing the dawn

And because the sea is hardly the sea

And the hose doesn't weep on the lawn

And because we've fouled the water and air

In this best of all possible hells

And because the light is simply a vibration

That excites our nervous cells

And because rock music hurts our ears

And the wind plays an aeolian harp

And because the earth breeds plenty of snakes

And goldfish are only carp

And because the plane is about to depart

And the raven repeats nevermore

And because we have to sit here and smile

Before the final big encore

And because yesterday does not exist

And the future will never come

And because we are doing a ballet

On the pin of the Hydrogen Bomb

Let's not rush to the wall and weep

And tear our hair and bewail our fate

We did as well as anyone could

Given our love and hate

And because we are pathetic clowns

Confronting the Apocalypse

Caught in the ruins of a collapsing world

Between earthquake and eclipse

Let's dance high on the hurricane deck

Before the ship slopes under our feet

Let's soak up the wealth of the sun

Before it loses its light and heat

Let's laugh at the whole wide universe

In our eyes reflected

When we close our lids it will be

As if it never existed

Let our laughter crackle across the cosmos

Where galaxies scatter and dim

Since win or lose we only leave

A trace of ash on the wind

Richard O’Connell lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Texas Review, Acumen, The Paris Review, Trinacria, The Formalist, Light, etc. His most recent collections are Dawn Crossing and Waiting for the Terrorists.

DREAMING NEPAL

by Valerie Sonnenthal

Saili, 25, from Selang, said that her 2-year-old son died in the earthquake and that her home was destroyed. She and her two surviving children are now living in a shelter with four other families. Credit: Gardiner Harris/The New York Times, May 9, 2015

silencing her words
lips moving
wordless breeze
swallowing syllables
caught like a tumor
growing slowly
her throat aching
hands twisting
body somewhere
dust thickened
eyes blink
between dreams
days
like yesterday
calm carrying on
errands at the market
life a dream
she once was living
thankful
now thick
in the thick
slow stuck time
floating in wait
weighted
by a city
she once knew


Valerie Sonnenthal joined the Cleaveland House Poets when she moved to Martha's Vineyard in 2006. She writes the Chilmark Town Column plus arts and lifestyle stories for the MV Times, Arts & Ideas magazine, and  publishes Errata Editions' Books on Books series. 

KALI YUGA

by Susan Roney-O’Brien

A Buddha statue is surrounded by debris from a collapsed temple in the UNESCO world heritage site of Bhaktapur on April 26, 2015 in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Photograph: Omar Havana/Getty Images via The Guardian.

Blood screams, floods rice fields,
dyes water red. A woman shrieks,
cries out in an unfamiliar language.
From behind the wall
a man growls
deep in his throat.

Outside a dog barks, a child wails
as though there is no country
beyond sorrow.
Over the balustrade
potted roses bear dark thorns.
It is just past dawn.

The Kathmandu Kumari,
red-gowned, is now five-years old.
She twists her naga necklace,
conceals the rash spreading
over her chest, pulls
at her tight black topknot

and between the capital and Pokhara
near Bandipur, the earth
cracks open. A small hill temple
rattles and falls. The world
shudders as the epicenter
sends tremors roiling.

Shiva strides through Kathmandu,
levels Narayanhti, topples buildings
smashes bricks, bodies to the ground.
All over Nepal, red blood flows,
a color we all know and recognize
in this epoch of violence.


Susan Roney-O'Brien lives in Princeton, MA, has won the William and Kingman Page Poetry Book Award, been nominated for 5 Pushcart Prizes, been selected NEATE's Poet-of-the-Year, works with young writers to publish their books, and has published widely in literary magazines. She returned from a trip to Nepal last week.

FOR YUNA. FOR HER FATHER.

by Paula Schulz

(CBS News) — Norio Kimura knows he may never find his daughter’s body amid the radioactive rubble of Okuma, Japan, his deserted hometown near the Fukushima power plant. Still, he returns as often as authorities will allow, looking for Yuna, his dead daughter. It’s what keeps him sane. The survivors of Okuma, about 11,000, left the town after the earthquake on March 11, 2011, most never to return. Yuna was one of 111 – including Kimura’s wife and father — who perished in the earthquake; her body is the only one not recovered there. Kimura has so far found just one of her shoes.

                    Fukishima five years later: only one unaccounted for


For Yuna: a small deity to keep her company forever.
For her father: one pink tennis shoe.

He can visit only ten times a year, stay only five hours.
So he does, come hell or high water or blizzard, though

there’s not even a cold hope of finding her now.
But their connection not grey waves

nor cesium 137’s silver melt can sunder.
The blind hunt for anything of Yuna’s:

to keep sanity and soul together
from rising sun to rising sun, year after year--

this is the heart’s grind and gnaw,
this is the stone permanence of love.


Paula Schulz has taught for nearly twenty years.  She lives in Slinger, Wisconsin with her husband, Greg.

APOCALYPTIC LULLABY

by Richard O'Connell

After "Apocalipse" by Domingos Carvalho Da Silva*

Video: "Apocalypse Lullaby" by The Wailin' Jennys, from their 2006 album, Firecracker.

             
Because the moon is bright and the night
Is simply announcing the dawn
And because the sea is hardly the sea
And the hose doesn't weep on the lawn

And because we've fouled the water and air
In this best of all possible hells
And because the light is simply a vibration
That excites our nervous cells

And because rock music hurts our ears
And the wind plays an aeolian harp
And because the earth breeds plenty of snakes
And goldfish are only carp

And because the plane is about to depart
And the raven repeats nevermore
And because we have to sit here and smile
Before the final big encore

And  because yesterday does not exist
And the future will never come
And because we are doing a ballet
On the pin of the Hydrogen Bomb

Let's not rush to the wall and weep
And tear our hair and bewail our fate
We did as well as anyone could
Given our love and hate

And because we are pathetic clowns
Confronting the Apocalypse
Caught in the ruins of a collapsing world
Between earthquake and eclipse

Let's dance high on the hurricane deck
Before the ship slopes under our feet
Let's soak up the wealth of the sun
Before it loses its light and heat

Let's laugh at the whole wide universe
In our eyes reflected
When we close our lids it will be
As if it never existed

Let our laughter crackle across the cosmos
Where galaxies scatter and dim
Since win or lose we only leave
A trace of ash on the wind


*Domingos Carvalho Da Silva,  prominent  Brazilian modernist poet (1915-2004).


Richard O'Connell lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Paris Review, Trinacria, Measure, Acumen, The Formalist, etc.

PARAPHERNALIA

by Kristina England

Image source: TaxProf Blog (in response to “The Sex Toys in the Attic” in the NY Times, November 9, 2013).

The most popular article of the week:
New York Time's "Sex Toys in the Attic,"
some older woman's concerns
about her "romping" days,
some toy she collected from a boyfriend.
Surely she's seen the news -
child porn ring broken up in Canada,
over 300 people involved.
Maybe she wrote the article before
the Toronto mayor took crack,
got cracked, cracked a nation.
Or she wanted to lighten the load.
God knows we need a good laugh
and perhaps the occasional mishap
of some not-so-cozy artifact
found under our mother's bed
is enough to pause this avalanche.
There is, after all, some innocence
left in this disjointed world.
And if there's not,
let's keep pretending
vibrators matter
in all these earthquakes,
tsunamis, the tremor
of our minds.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Gargoyle, Found Poetry Review, The Story Shack, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other journals.