TAKING BACK MALA ROHAN

by Sarah Russell

 

The snow came silent, pure,

a quilt of feathered white

to cover wreckage of the war.

Few saw the snow’s allure—

just ordinary men who stayed to fight.

The snow came silent, pure.

This ragtag, patriot corps

were confident they’d stall Goliath’s might

despite the wreckage of this war.

Russian bodies dead, left unsecured.

Tanks smoldering, explosions in the night.

The snow came silent, pure.

Families, hid in cellars, reassured,

emerged again with trembling to the light

and saw the wreckage of the war.

Old Praskovia clutched her apron. She’d endured 

two wars, was broken by the sight.

The snow came silent, pure

to cover wreckage of the war.

Sarah Russell’s poetry and fiction have been published in Kentucky Review, Misfit Magazine, Rusty Truck, Third Wednesday, and many other journals and anthologies. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She has two poetry collections published by Kelsay Books, I lost summer somewhere and Today and Other Seasons.

THE USUAL AMERICAN ELEGY

by William Doreski

In Michigan, another school

shot up by vain disgruntlement.

The freshly dead were tossed aside

by the rush of unbridled history.

I’ve never fondled a gun

with the affection that’s its due.

 

I’ve never savored the death

of a twelve-point white-tail stag

or even a rabbit hopping

toward its fate in a tasty stew.

The boy who fired that pistol

wanted to kill for reasons

 

I probably shared at his age.

But the guns my great-uncles gave me

to make a man of me remained

unloaded, unloved in my closet.

Later I gave them to an aunt

who liked to kill small animals.

 

Today the wind ruffles the pines

with affection absent from life.

The cold challenges my parka

with its warped and stubborn zipper.

I should wander deep in the woods

with orange safety vest averting

 

bullets from careless hunters.

A hundred people shot to death

every day in our enchanted world.

I keep an empty brass cartridge

on my desk to remind me that

like Mayakovski I could shoot

 

myself anytime I wish.

I don’t wish. The blowing dawn

brings a pale layer of blue,

and the ruined families of the dead

face another day of absence

indifferent to the winter sun. 

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

DÓNDE ESTÁ MI MADRE

by Roger Aplon

 

A child weeps & her cries reverberate throughout the dingy warehouses,

makeshift barracks & swarming

extraction camps, it

 

ricochets across the desolate plains of west Texas & southern California &

southern Arizona & the mesas

of New Mexico.

 

A child weeps & his tears threaten to drown the tongue-tied Christians, Jews

& Muslims, they dampen dinner tables

in Portland, Maine &

 

Poughkeepsie, New York & St. Louis, Missouri & across the Rockies &

across the sea to Honolulu. Children weep &

parents weep &

 

a once-proud people cringes in the wake of what it has allowed & what it

has wrought & what it is to be

dishonored.

 

Between bouts of fear & trembling these kids are heard to ask ¿ Dónde está mi madre?

          —¿Dónde está mi padre?—

¿ Dónde estoy?

 

‘Where Am I?’ rings off-key like a cracked bell—like a symbolic “liberty”

bell, cracked but still resonant, reminiscent

of what has been lost but might still be.

 

Roger Aplon has published thirteen books: one of prose poems & short fiction: Intimacies;  twelve of poetry, including the recently published: Mustering What’s Left—Selected & New Poems—1976 – 2017 from Unsolicited Press. He lives in Beacon, N Y & publishes the poetry magazine: “Waymark – Voices of the Valley.”

A CHILD'S PASSPORT

by Rick Mullin

Illustration by Dan Carino for PRI.

Before the monster went away, I told her,
little boys and girls were fingerprinted,
photographed, required to pledge allegiance
to the flag and quizzed on history
at gunpoint in a room without their parents.
All to see how they would hold up under
torture and to gather data points
required to follow every move they made.
Of course I reassured her things have changed,
despite the uniforms and bullet-proof
enclosures for the customs officers
and soldiers and the yellow paperwork.
I told her not to worry when they called
her name. To just let Daddy do the talking.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Transom.

THE FABULISTS

by Devon Balwit

Alex Jones, whose InfoWars website is viewed by millions, says that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was an elaborate hoax invented by government-backed “gun grabbers.”Credit: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times. “In three separate lawsuits—the most recent was filed on Wednesday in Superior Court in Bridgeport, Conn.—the families of eight Sandy Hook victims as well as an F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting seek damages for defamation. The families allege in one suit, filed by Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Bridgeport, that Mr. Jones and his colleagues ‘persistently perpetuated a monstrous, unspeakable lie: that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged, and that the families who lost loved ones that day are actors who faked their relatives’ deaths.’” —The New York Times, May 23, 2018

In a post-truth world, your loved ones never died,
all 26 of them spirited back into bodies,
you, nothing more than performers of grief, hacks
for hire by unseen puppeteers. That pietà
where you held your six-year-old, confirming
his fatal wound, never happened, you expert
in manufacturing mourning. Your child’s brother
wonders how he can be told to doubt his memories,
wonders why anyone would suggest such an erasure.
Why would the President promise, I will never let
you down—but to the wrong ones, the deniers?
Fathers struggle to explain this to surviving children.
Mothers march grimly into the court house.
Twenty-six truths stand in stubborn admonishment.



Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.