THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE

by Mary O'Melveny

Women at the site of a car-bomb attack in Kabul in May 2017. Credit Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times.           Afghan photographer Shah Marai was among the nine journalists killed in Kabul on Monday as they “rushed to the site of yet another bombing, when a second attacker detonated his explosives amid the reporters and first responders. Altogether 25 people were killed.”  —The New York Times, April 30, 2018          A week before, “on April 22, 2018, an ISIS-affiliated suicide bomber in Kabul, Afghanistan killed at least 57 and injured more than 120 people lining  up to receive national identity cards that would allow them to vote in  the country’s parliamentary elections.  Twenty-two women and eight children were among those killed.  A neighborhood resident,  Mohammad Kalgrim, told a reporter ‘I have carried so many bodies that I cannot even talk.’ Most survivors of the blast said they were no longer likely to cast votes.” The New York Times, April 22, 2018

Our dead lie scattered
like funerary flowers
while tattered voter cards
sift downward past shards
of glass.  Entwined with ashes,
like ribbons of faded hours,
they land in drainage moats
where torn school uniforms
drift past like tiny boats
in reddened waters.

We must endure, if able,
the weight of such sorrow.
A small girl whose pink schoolbag
becomes her final pillow.
The body of her young mother,
hollowed out like a vessel.
A clerk, smothered by debris,
lists at his wooden table,
still holding forms and pencils,
his stricken face sallow.

We bore them all away
from places that had heard
their final words.  We worked
all day harvesting slain
neighbors like crops.  None shirked
as firemen tried to wash away the sins
of our street corners
and cordons of policemen
tried to contain mourners
wailing above the din.

Once, the things we ferried
were cups of cinnamon tea,
books of ghazals, prayer carpets,
promises of prophets.  We passed time
at windowsills or waiting in lines.
We pursued relief from lesser grief
like failures of imagination.
Now, we move evidence of ruination.
Unbalanced by weight of what we carried,
we have been silenced.

Mary O'Melveny is a recently-retired labor rights lawyer and "emerging" poet living in Washington, DC and Woodstock, NY.  Her work has been published in various print and on-line journals and on blog sites such as Writing in a Woman's Voice and Women in Woodstock.  Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age will be published in September, 2018 by Finishing Line Press.

NOT READY TO BE SILENT

for James Baldwin

by Carolyn Gregory

“The week started with scenes from a cellphone video of an African-American man lying on the ground being fatally shot by a Louisiana police officer, and an astonishing Facebook Live feed of a woman in Minnesota narrating after her African-American boyfriend was killed by an officer during a traffic stop. It ended with horrific live television coverage of police officers’ being gunned down by at least one sniper at what had been a peaceful march protesting the police shootings.” —The New York Times, July 8, 2016 Photo: A spray-painted mural on a building on Foster Drive in Baton Rouge, La., on Thursday, where Alton Sterling was shot to death by a police officer two days earlier. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times.

No, I do not want to be integrated
into a burning house
where the roof collapses
and firemen die in the rubble,

forced to stay silent when
the sirens fly by in the dark
and guns shoot the innocent.

I do not want to live
in a field of burning red poppies,
shocking in their color
against fallen gray homes
bombed down to bedrock.

My life means more than this.
I am not ready to walk silent
into a cemetery to lie down
with all the unnamed dead.

Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Main Street Rag, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ygdrasil, Seattle Review. Her first and second books were published by Windmill Editions in Florida.

REPORTING IN FROM THE SKY

by Kristina England





Last night, I forced myself into slumber
as a nine alarm fire left my State in grief,
two Boston firemen perishing in the ashes.
Now, sky-based for five hours,
I click the internet icon on my phone
receive no connection.
Too cheap to pay for inflight service,
I know nothing of the ground,
of my family, my country,
only of what I see -
the periwinkle sky,
my unfinished seltzer,
aircrew maneuvering the aisle,
and my travel buddy, one Deb Fisher,
her head tilted to the right,
arms crossed,
the soft breath of sleep
moving her forward in time.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Gargoyle, The New Verse News, The Story Shack, The Quotable, and other magazines. Her first collection of short stories will be published in the 2014 Poet's Haven Author Series.