THE PEOPLE IN GAZA KEEP DYING

by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Crowds of displaced Palestinians at a UNRWA-affiliated school in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on December 19th, 2023. Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP at Jewish Currents.

“You don’t need overt bloodshed to cause significant violence that ends people’s lives. Many people will die unnecessary deaths due to deprivation.” —Yara Asi quoted by Maya Rosen in “The Epidemiological War on Gaza,” Jewish Currents, January 5, 2024

 

This morning on my daily walk

I met a long-haired shepherd

with ambiguous eyes.

I slowed my pace,

watched the dog’s walker

rein the animal’s curiosity in,

winding tightly around her hand

the tether we tell ourselves

protects people like me,

who believe all others

will of course welcome the friendship

we assume they assume we intend,

and in that moment, the rage

I thought I’d put behind me

at the words of the poet

whose book I was asked to review

sent its own tether out,

and I heard myself again

reading his lines aloud

as I sat some months ago

alone among my books,

confirming I’d not misread

his refusal of history,

the willful pleasure he took

in a hatred I disowned long ago,

no differently, I have no doubt,

than that dog, under

the right circumstances,

would disown its leash,

and perhaps its master as well.

I don’t remember much

about my own opportunity,

except that I was standing

in my sophomore dorm hallway

while a man from a country

I knew nothing about,

except that I knew nothing,

looked at me with disbelief.

“You really believe those mothers

love their sons so little

that they bring them into the world

just to make them martyrs?”

I had not said exactly that,

but it was my meaning,

as its hatred was,

in poem after poem,

the lie that poet embraced.

I started to ask if the dog was friendly,

but the woman spit out, “Come!”

and pulled him hard into the gutter.

I let my question sink back into silence,

which I thought at first

was how I should respond

to that poet’s betrayal

of this art that saved my life,

but then I wrote the review.

It’s in the world. I want to know

what difference it has made.

Richard Jeffrey Newman has published three books of his own poetry, T’shuvah (Fernwood Press 2023), Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions 2017), and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), as well as three books of translation from classical Persian poetry, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications 2004 & 2006), and The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahameh (Junction Press 2011). He curates the First Tuesdays reading series, is the Executive Director of Newtown Literary, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College.

FOR VAL I GIFT YOU—YOU

by Joseph Hope

For Val I gift you a country 

without a government: without a place (segregation) 

for black or white or color riot. A song as soft as the snow.

I gift you rain in the desert. A bow without an arrow, 

so you don't hunt. I gift you a heart as big as Asia. 

A smile as warm as Summer. A will as strong as Africa. 

I gift you meditation as deep as the oceans of Europe. 

For Val, I gift you the pain of childbirth. The giggling that comes afterward. 

The innocence of a thousand childhoods. The riches of the earth. 

I gift your friendship. The (im)perfect family. Cry. Laugh. Cry. Laugh. 

I gift you the reasons to go on and on 

and never quit to try again and again. 

I gift you the rain and the bow; rainbow. 

The songs of the ancient. The hope of the future. 

I gift you miracle. Goodnews. 

For Val, I gift you—you.

Joseph Hope writes from Nigeria, West Africa. He believes he's a metaphor for what can be, what is possible. His works are forthcoming or already published in Reckoning Press, Timber ghost press, Evening Street Press, Zoetic Press, The New Verse News, Praxis Magazine, Ubu, AfroPoetry, Gemini Spice Magazine, Spillwords, SprinNG, Writers Space Africa, anthologies, and more. He's a reader for reckoning press. He was a fellow in the 2021 SprinNG Writing Fellowship. He tweets @ItzJoe9 & IG: _hope_joseph

WHEN IT IS OVER

by Katherine Tian

A weekend afternoon, the park near my room,

the stone table where my friends and I used to sit is covered with a thick layer of dust.

Untrodden weeds cross the dirt path.

When it is over,

we will come together like a wind gust.

Our friendship will only bloom.

 

After a long day at work, a nurse mother goes home with a sigh of bliss.

She can only embrace her toddling daughter with her gaze and tears,

close at hand, but on opposite sides of the canyon.

When it is over,

my little dear,

Mom will hug you in her arms with a long kiss.

 

During a festival, I walk on the empty square,

music and fragrance that once wafted through the restaurant disappear like a cloud.

Now only cold wind blows through.

When it is over,

the long-lost crowd

will gather again to breathe the free, healthy air.

 

Golden wedding grandparents pass away in isolation, looking at each other like new lovers.

The memory and close goodbye can only dwell

in the relatives’ sorrow hearts.

When it is over,

the belated remembrances and farewells

will turn into rainy tears and falling flowers.

 

I miss the sound of my teacher's marker scratching on the white board,

the crowd in the hallway,

the morning flock of school buses.

When it is over,

to my dear teachers, I will say,

in the back of the classroom, I will never fall asleep or get bored.

 

The early spring flowers are about to sprout.

The birds in the trees are singing happily as they cheer.

At this darkest moment of the pandemic,

my dear friends,

can you hear

the footsteps of the warm sunshine behind the heavy cloud?

Katherine Tian is a senior at Ward Melville High School on Long Island, New York. She is a long-time dancer and a long-term volunteer at a local elder-care center.

CLOSING THE BOOK ON GEORGE FELL

by Jimmy Pappas

Source: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund

Because of this I will weep and wail; I will go about barefoot and naked. I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl. —Micah 1:8


1.

the page of a book
            can be a leaf
                        can be a butterfly wing

a book in a college dormitory
            on a Saturday night
                        with a young man studying

can be a starting line
            can be a point of departure
                        can be a loaded gun

2.

closing a book
            on a young man studying
                        can be a wormhole

to travel across
            the United States
                         to California

to Vietnam
            to Cambodia
                        to death

3.

I closed the book
on a young man
studying.

A bit of light air
grazed my cheek,
pushed me along.

The weight of air
at sea level is 14.7
pounds per square inch,

but what is
            the weight of air
                         with friendship?

4.

How does a young man studying plead?

Like this: Please, guys, I'm in trouble.
I'm gonna flunk out. I need to study.
Please let me do this.

How does a young man ignore his friend's plea?

Like this: Come on, Man. It's Saturday night.
We're going to party. You can study tomorrow.
There's always time.

5.

How do you close a book on a friend who is studying?
Do what I did: Just take the cover and flip it over.

6.

What makes a breeze?
            The warm air of friendship rises.
            The cold air of ignorance settles.

7.

The breeze moved us through an evening of drinking,
through a day of lounging around until thinking became
exhaustion, became another day of forgetting
until you left us and we forgot about what we did.

8.

pages of a book are many butterfly wings

9.

a chance encounter in a Greyhound bus station

you had the smell
            of fear and death

my friend told you not to go
but you were not one to stir a breeze

10.

On May 23rd, 1970, I saw a giant beetle
lying in a Saigon gutter on its back
struggling with its legs to turn over.

That evening I made love to my girl friend
while you were humping the boonies in Cambodia.

11.

I don't know what the breeze told me that night,
but I did know it would always be there at my back.

It whispered in my ear,

            remember
                        butterfly wings are leaves

            remember
                        leaves of a book are butterfly wings

Something happened. I didn't know what it was.

12.

When I learned about your death,
I could not understand one thing:

How could anyone
            have expected you
                        to kill another human?

13.

I wear my military jacket to get in the mood.
I find your name on the Wall.

I place my
            right knee
            on the ground
I place my
            left arm on
            my left knee

In my right hand I hold a piece of paper
with a handwritten couplet on it:

Over the distance of 10,000 miles I heard your cry
of how very very much you did not want to die.

I set the paper down at the base of the Wall.
I rested my forehead on my arms. I could not pray.
I wanted to cry, but I was unable to.
Instead, I looked up and stared at my reflection.
I placed two fingers against your name on the Wall.

Behind me, elementary school children on field trips
ran through the grass laughing. They have not yet learned
that the world they see today will not be the same world
tomorrow. A breeze will blow and carry them along.
Today they do not understand, tomorrow they will.
They will feel the breeze and understand the butterfly.

One young boy who hangs back,
            frightened
                        by all the noise,
reminds me of George Fell,
            who must have been
            the gentlest soldier
            who ever lived.

Jimmy Pappas served in South Vietnam during the war as an English instructor with South Vietnamese soldiers in helicopter training. At the same time, George Fell, his friend from college, died in the incursion into Cambodia on May 23, 1970. On that day, commanders announced the death of 190 American soldiers, 500 South Vietnamese soldiers, and 8,000 "enemy troops" in what was described as a "success." One day, several years before that, Jimmy and his friends closed a book on George while he was studying one Saturday night. George flunked out of school, and their paths went in different directions. To this day, George's college friends still love him.

A SNOWDEN SIGHTING

by Rick Gray

I don't know who I'm betraying, my TV doesn't work, 
but I must confess I saw Ed Snowden yesterday
on Chicken Street in Kabul.

It was only a glimpse
from the cracked, glaring window of a coughing taxi
near a dangling, pine-scented Quranic quote

but I'm certain it was him.
He was clutching a naked chicken over a laptop
and had the hunted look of a refugee

sort of like everyone in town
sort of like me
maybe that's why I couldn't help waving

and maybe that's why he nodded back
in the secretive, American way of those
gone to ground

and searching for a cheap hotel room
to spend the rest of your life
not going crazy in.

You've been a bad boy, Ed.
Me too, though in a less Boozy way.
So when all this toxic dust settles

which you will soon learn the UN calls "fecal matter"
let's get together at an undisclosed location and
shoot the shit.

I encourage you to let the postmodern goatee grow primitive,
and ditch those glasses. They are as deadly here as a square Humvee.
I'll teach you everything like a big brother

though you probably don't like Big Brother
call me whatever you want
I'm just another one who fell

between the new, prismatic cracks
and am searching for the old rainbow of
friendship untapped.


Rick Gray served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. He was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie, and has an essay that will be appearing in the forthcoming book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. When not in Kabul, he lives with his wife Ghizlane and twin daughters Rania and Maria in Florida.