PETE HEGSETH IS TRIED FOR MURDER

by Christine Sikorski

Cartoon by Gary A Huck

for all victims of recent U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific

 
The ghosts of the fishermen and their living wives file in, filling every seat.
The judge, old uncle of a murdered man, enters, pulling on a red jacket. 
The prosecutor, a murdered man’s wife, calls the roll of the 234, the order
in which they will testify, the order in which they died. 
 
The ghosts tell what fell from the skies, each blood-thirsty, exploding surprise, 
tell, too, of their cries for help, answered by more fire. Evidence is presented: 
bomb fragments, charred boards, limbs skimmed from the sea. Hours pass. 
Lunch is served in the corridors. Night comes. Blankets are spread on the floor. 
 
One afternoon, two weeks in, the children enter, hand in hand, take turns 
stepping into the witness box to describe crying mothers, cramping stomachs, 
empty places their fathers used to be. No one sits beside the defendant and, 
because this is a nightmare, no one permits him to speak. 
 
On the last day, a jury of grandmothers finds him guilty. The judge sentences him 
to a solitary life at sea, fishing, his catch to be surrendered daily. The ghosts 
are permitted to toss bombs at him periodically and may almost let him drown. 
But they must haul him up again, place the net back in his hands, this killer 
 
who is so confused about what it means to be a man. 

Christine Sikorski’s work has appeared in The New Verse News, coastlines review, Waterstone, Little Patuxent Review, Quartet, One Art, This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant and Academy of American Poets Prizes. She has taught at two universities, the Loft Literary Center, a homeless shelter, a community center, and other venues. She lives with her family in Minneapolis.

REMINDERS

by Phyllis Wax

Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian man in the occupied West Bank, stripped him naked, tied his arms and legs and then zip-tied his penis, he, his family members and another witness said on Wednesday. “I thought I was going to die,” the man, Suhaib Abualkebash (above), a 29-year-old shepherd, told The New York Times. “I thought this was the end.” Photo by Afif Amireh.

Even as ghosts their bones

are visible: ribs, backbones,

sticks of arms and legs.

But the occupiers in the West Bank,

the army in Gaza,

do not see the ghosts

of their ancestors,

do not hear their rattling bones

or their ghostly admonishments

not to duplicate the cruelty done to them,

seem deaf to the idea that never again

means not to anyone.

Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee, where she observes the goings-on of the country and the world and is being cured of her delusions. She has read in coffee houses, bars, libraries and on the radio, and has participated in poet/fiber artist collaborations. Among the journals in which her work has appeared are Gyroscope Review, Writers Resist, Jerry Jazz Musician, Rise Up Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Wordpeace, The New Verse News, Naugatuck River Review, Your Daily Poem, Feral.

FEEL FREE

by Nick Allison

Nick Anderson cartoon

To don a bright mask for the faithful to see
To placate the flock and pretend to believe
To drag the dead weight of unbroken chains
To laugh until laughter devours the pain

To plant the old flags and ring the new bells
To raise up the prices and see what still sells
To imagine that freedom is only a jest
To swallow your pride till it rots in your chest

To close all the windows and fasten the doors
To bury your secrets beneath the sea floor
To climb golden stairs till you stand at the top
To fall with the world when at last it all stops

To bolster your ego with glory and praise
To purchase a past with the fortune you’ve raised
To summon the fire and melt back the ice
To never look once at their sacrifice

To turn up the volume and smother the cries
To vanish in shadows and cover your eyes
To cut out your tongue to spite your own face
To put profit above the whole human race

To pull out your hair and to tear at the walls
To pave over gardens and silence the calls
To load up the cannons, the weapons of war
To never once ask who the cages are for

To dream of the faces you’ve lost all at once
To wake with their shadows and feel their cold touch
To walk through the mirror and linger a while
To shine your dark shoes and lie with a smile

To pin every failure on somebody else
To go to your grave deceiving yourself
To polish a crown and call yourself king
To scream for the stillness your riches won’t bring

To weep late at night in a bed all alone
Your palace of pleasure turned prison of stone
Surrounded by ghosts who won’t let you be
You’ll ask yourself why 
you still don’t feel free

Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, college dropout, and writer based in Austin, Texas. His poems and essays have appeared in The Shore, Eunoia Review, HuffPost, The Chaos Section, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. He recently curated and edited the poetry anthology Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age. “While the Elk Were Moving” is adapted from the introduction to that collection. More of his work can be found at TheTruthAboutTigers.com and @nickallison80.bsky.social.

WHAT A CHILD NEEDS IN A WAR ZONE

by Jerrice J Baptiste

The impact of armed conflicts on children around the world reached devastating and likely record levels in 2024, according to an assessment by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). —UN News, December 27, 2024

Child searches for sweet embrace
of mother, father or next of kin.
Child finds limbs
along the way, a blueish face once  
known, red eyes that stare 
into bleak unknown.

You, soak dry mushrooms this season. 
Serve warm broth to this child
from a dead zone 
while agile mind can still imagine
a world of peace and freedom. 

You, gather essence of the earth to feed
desolate orphan, fruits, nuts, seeds
moonbeams for dreams.
Child will need your lap to curl on when
the sounds of night 
frighten even ghosts who have seen, 
who have heard explosions of hearts.

Jerrice J Baptiste is a poet, educator and facilitator of poetry for healing and self-expression. Her new book of prose poems is titled Coral in the Diaspora published by Abode Press (August 2024).  Her writing has been published and is forthcoming in The New Verse News, Artemis Journal, Urthona Buddhism and Art Magazine, The Dewdrop, Shambhala Times, The Yale Review, Wax Poetry & Art, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Mantis, Penumbra Literary & Art Journal, The Banyan Review, Kosmos Journal, Silver Birch Press, and many others. Her collaborative songwriting and poetry are featured on the Grammy-nominated album Many Hands Family Music for Haïti. 

MARCH OF THE POSTER BOYS

by Scott LaMascus

for Robin Davis

He Took His 68-Year-Old Secret to Court and Finally Confronted His Ghost: Robin Davis (above) spent a long career in finance and philanthropy haunted by what had happened to him as a boy. Could an unusual trial on Long Island help him find peace? —Michael Wilson, The New York Times, August 5, 2024

The poster boys for this malady 
each stare into their mirrors hoping to see the ghost
they would be able to fight now
their feet are no longer frozen to the spots

of their only crimes — the car ride with a coach, 
an after-school job, a church’s back room. 
They gather now in a spectral locker room of boys
chosen by chance and dark intention, charged 

and armor-plated by twenty, thirty, sixty years
of silent shame driving them to something else.
However much success they find, the juries snicker
and some doze, nodding away at lack of blood

and gore, for they cannot see the fright of spirits
gathered on each side of the glass, a throng of 
poster boys facing ghosts who picked them out 
of the schoolyards of time. No justice can redress 

the fraids on either side of the mirror, peering 
in with one hand on gavel and one on a scale, 
sometimes seeing the wispy victims, sometimes not,
I suspect. All velocity has settled now into sleep.

The pardon Robin seeks is in that mirror, too,
as he speaks before the harsher judge and jury all in one,
a lone poster boy standing again before his ghost
testifying now into the wisp of time he cannot unimagine.

Author’s Note:  This poem puts Davis (and me) into the company of a myriad of ghostly perpetrators and ghostly victims. A “fraid” is the technical name for a gathering of spirits, in this poem’s vision a two-sided confrontation of ghosts of perpetrators and of survivors. The poem also turns on found language from the Michael Wilson article including the three F’s (fight or flight or freeze) quoted by Wilson from the courtroom testimony of the psychologist, Valentina Stoycheva.

Scott LaMascus is a writer and public-humanities advocate living in Oklahoma City. His recent work may be found in World Literature Today, The Writer’s Chronicle, Bracken, Red Door, and Epiphany.

THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE OF 2024

by Cecil Morris

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

In the other room the Presidents debate

or speak in sound bites, trade accusations,

paint themselves in camouflage of words

and I can’t listen, sickened by them both,

these two awful ghosts of elections past,

one a self-aggrandizing victim stew,

one the merest shadow of glory gone.

I hear myself and my sister in single digits:

I know you are but what am I, I am rubber

you are glue, bounces off me sticks to you.

This format guaranteed failure. It makes

my heart shrivel, my stomach ache and cry.

Have we learned nothing? I think of my kid’s

guinea pig Harry on his squeaking wheel.

He learned the sound of the vegetable bin

being opened and knew it was time to scream

for cilantro, for parsley, for something

that fed him. I think of Peggy Lee’s voice,

weary, worn, singing “Is that all there is?”

and wonder if we can save ourselves

from self destruction, from bombast and hate,

if we can learn to recognize what’s best

for us, for our children, and work for that.

I want to request asylum without

having to wait for years in a crowded line

in a country foreign to my dreams.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere. He and his patient partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between the cool Oregon coast and California’s relatively dry Central Valley.

WHITE FLAGS, WALKING SOUTH

by Amy Wolf

I see* you, with your white flag raised on a stick, held high.

Child on your shoulder, two little legs dangling beneath your ears,

The hand not holding the white flag is grasping your son’s ankle.

A daughter walks beside you, a wife or mother follows behind, wailing.

Out of all of the Arabic I hear in the video*, I understand only Nakba,

But that is said often. Tragedy; expulsion; we won’t be going back, it says.

Your face is dirty, I think you have not had enough water to drink,  let alone to bathe

In, for a while. You look parched.

I look for your provisions; who is carrying the clothes you might change into,

The kitchen utensils, pots, pans, mattresses.

There is only you, and your youngers and elders, and one teenager

Carrying a bundle of clothes smaller than a suitcase.

He looks baffled.

I hear the words of the soldiers, hurrying you along.

They do not step into the picture to offer water, or comfort, or rest.

They are voices. I cannot impute any kindness to them,

Although you might convince me that a forced march from home

Is marginally better than having that home bombed and brought down on your head,

Doubling neatly as your tombstone and grave.

I see you, and I see my ancestors, in line to get on the trains.

With their small bundles, and cluster of relatives.

Yes, those trains.

Don’t look away.

Didn’t we say, never again?

Didn’t we say, when you pen a people in a ghetto, then make them abandon even that

For a long death march to an unknown place where there are too many bodies and not enough

Water and food

Let alone space to lay down

Didn’t we say that was genocide?

Didn’t we swear to speak up next time?

The Trail of Tears comes to mind.

Old people falling dead on the way, and children.

Women refusing to leave their young ones, and staying next to them to die in the cold.

This is not genocide porn.

I do not enjoy these pictures.

But I have met the ghosts of earlier marches.

On a cold spring morning in TN, a long-dead woman showed me

Where she killed herself with a knife to lay beside her child.

Willing to walk to Oklahoma, but not to leave her baby behind.

She said to me, “In the hall there, you are all dancing and singing and praying and setting out food for your ancestors.

Where is our food? We lived here. Feed us.”

I set out food for them, and prayer and song, and took the memory with me.

The humans walking from Gaza City to Khan Younis will be on that road for a long time,

Haunting all of those to come. Rebuking any who try to move into that space

With the same demand, dead or alive. “We live here; feed us.”

Centuries from now, should mankind survive on this planet,

You will still be able to see a line of white flags heading north to south,

Hear the sound of shuffling feet tired beyond reckoning of lifting up and setting down,

Listen to the cries of children and  the wailing of their mothers.

People like myself will be called in to do space clearings

And we will say, “I can’t tell them to leave. They live here. Just feed them.

Honor them.”

To my Jewish relatives I say this; you do not honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust

By consenting to and cheering on and excusing

A forced march

To crowded conditions

With little food

And less water.

Don’t you remember?

This is how it starts.

*The videos referenced by the speaker in this poem can be viewed here and here.

Amy Wolf is an LMT and energy worker who resides in Seattle, WA, and is studying writing.

CONVERSELY…

by Regina YC Garcia

Bracha Lavee Art Studio

All land is holy/land was holy 
until it is not/until it was not

Land that has been 
planted/has been penned
by hearts beating contrite/or 
hearts lying unrepentant 
with feet that have walked/ or 
feet that have occupied 
and minds with thoughts of peace/ or 
minds with thoughts of plot

The land-now restructured 
The laws-now revised
The people-once free/the people-now contained
live inflamed/ live in flames

We wonder of war
We wail of death
All of it waged by hands
some clean/ some unclean

The terrain, at least large enough,
seems to be not enough and
struggles to be/desires to be reframed/ to be reclaimed
     by new ghosts/by ghosts of old.


Regina YC Garcia is a DAR American Heritage Literary Award Winner and a Pushcart Nominated Poet, Language Artist, and English Professor from Greenville, NC. She has been published in South Florida Poetry Journal, Amistad, Black Joy Unbond, and numerous others. She has also contributed to a variety of podcasts, documentaries, and musical and literary arrangements including the Sacred 9 Project (Tulane University) and an Emmy award winning episode of the PBS art show Muse. Her debut chapbook The Firetalker's Daughter was released in March 2023 by Finishing Line Press.

THE GHOST OF THE OLD COUNTRY

by Kathryn A. Broderick

My grandmother is from the Old Country

A land of winding cities, valorous heroes, and ancient towers

Across the green-glass seas.

 

She whispers words that flow like water

As she sparks to life stories in that distant place

—But lowly and in secret, shamed by her foreign tongue.

 

Yet her secrets drip into the new life she’s crafted here

Coloring the edges of suburbia in Anywhere, USA

A resilient stain that assimilation cannot wash away.

 

The dust of butter-rich tea cakes

Cling to her withered fingers

As she weaves tales of her faraway home.

 

She tells me of the wild Baba Yaga

A witch that lives in a hut atop a mighty bird’s leg

And the ways to escape her enchantment.

 

She often weaves together the push-pull of escape and return

Haunted by the melancholia of self-imposed exile

As she tries to accept her unwilling divorce from the Old Country.

 

In her garden, soniashnyk bow their golden heads toward the sun

She calls the flowers her little kings with many-petalled crowns

She rests in their shadows as she paints pictures of her lost home.

 

My grandmother died before I knew the Old Country meant Ukraine.

She told me tales of its beauty. I never knew of its death.

She fled from its capital as a child.

 

Her father did not survive the journey

—at least, not as the same man.

Ghosts lingered in his heart.

 

The famine turned into skeletons those that remained.

Their bones returning to the embrace of earth in unmarked graves.

“Have another tea cake,” she’d say. “You look hungry.”

 

What was it like to be Slavic and living in America during the Cold War?

Living under the hostile glare of suspicious eyes branding you an enemy?

Surviving against your will as your family withered away?

 

I sit in the shadow of her sunflowers

Listening to news of Russia’s unprovoked attack

And I feel her fingerprints upon the pulse of the Old Country.

 

The heroic threads and tragedy lining each of her secret stories

Now shout at me from modern headlines.

We dwell in dark times—but in the darkness heroes rise

At least, as my grandmother said, they do in the Old Country.

Kathryn A. Broderick’s work has appeared in First Line and Mirror Dance. Her second novel Gorgon Crown will be released in June 2022.

LETTER FROM SOLITARY

by Katherine West

March 2021

The birds are singing 

and it isn't snowing 

We have our vaccines 

and schools are open 

It is warm enough to sit outside 

but too cool for forest fires 

In sunny spots brown grasses are turning green

from the inside out 

The cat hasn't shed her winter down

still sits on my lap for warmth

She is my most intimate companion 

on this March afternoon in 2021

I have survived the shipwreck 

that tossed me up on this desert island 

on this alien planet 

this solitary confinement 

for a crime 

I didn't commit 

And although Spring is coming 

I'm cold

I could be old and all 

my relationships memories 

I could be dead 

and all my lovers ghosts 

sitting on the side of my bed 

that empty symbol of sleep

and love 

that flag 

that empty symbol of unity 

at half mast 

Half the time 

the ghosts hold my cold 

hands in their cold hands 

whispering platitudes 

like therapists 

over the phone 

like friends 

on a screen 

They cannot hold me 

They cannot hold me down 

as I drift like old smoke 

old scarves 

as I fray

unravel 

silk skeins 

cool 

weightless 

slim 

as threads 

of red sunset 

resting like raptors 

on the updraft 

like strands

of blood 

lovely 

and unloved 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. Using the name Kit West, Katherine's new novel, When Night Comes, A Christmas Carol Revisited has just been released, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in March of 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing. She is presently at work on the sequel to When Night Comes. It is called Slave, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist.  

THE FLORIDA CASE BEFORE THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION

by Lavinia Kumar

Cornelia Adele Fassett (1831-1898), Florida Case Before the Electoral Commission

                  

If Cornelia Fassett were here today,

she’d have painted a disputed election even larger.

 

The piece would have Facebook friends and tweets,

shown her Supreme Court chamber streamed live to millions.

 

Samuel Tilden won many more votes

but Rutherford Hayes fought the Electoral tally—

with twenty Electoral votes too short

he claimed voter intimidation and all sorts of fraud.

 

A Commission stood to create a miracle,

and debated nine days about voters in four states.

 

And, lo, they sought and found the needed,

which switched the Electoral College to Republican.

 

Ah, yes, it is said that history repeats,

but ghosts will tell that is not true of miracles.

Lavinia Kumar is currently interested in writing of unsung women of the past, Her poetry has appeared in US, Irish, & UK publications. Her books include Hear Ye, Hear Ye: Women, Women: Soldiers, Spies of Revolutionary and Civil Wars and No Longer Silent Women: the Silk and Iron of Women Scientists.

LUXURIOUS FEAR

by Rebecca Leet

Source: We Do Geek

My head sinks into the pillow

and fear floats forward

like a ghoul set to stalk my dreams

 

so easy to keep ghosts

tautly moored when sun shines,

before night ingests hope.

 

I worry past the present pandemic

past the wild, sad souls ensnared

by visions of prurient perfidies

 

to a time closer than we dare declare

when swelling seas, infernos of forests,

acres of arid, fallow farmlands

 

push civilization to survival of the fittest

and my newborn grandchild, one day,

must claw over others or succumb.

 

Then morning comes and as I sip tea

news reports speak of children suffocating

from poison gas in Syria        girls kidnapped

 

by Boko Haram in Nigeria      a boy killed

in a random shooting five miles away.

And I realize my fear, today, is a luxury.

 

Rebecca Leet lives a stone's throw from Washington, DC.  Her collection Living with the Doors Wide Open was published in 2018.

TEXT 911 FOR RESERVATIONS

by David Feela

Summer camp, scrapped
for the Taliban at Camp David,
the outing such a secret
not even the Taliban knew

if there’d be time for swimming
before their bombs blew.
The commander and chief
counselor promised

hot dogs and marshmallows,
airplane rides, and maybe
if they were good a story
around the campfire

about thousands of ghosts
who still haunt the woods.

David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook Thought Experiments won the Southwest Poet Series. The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. A collection of his essays How Delicate These Arches was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Unsolicited Press released his newest chapbook Little Acres in April 2019.

THE STUMBLING STONES

by Mark Tarren

A candle and roses laid on a set of Stolpersteine in Berlin at a commemorative ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Photograph: Eliza Apperly —The Guardian, February 18, 2019

So they walk.
This invisible procession of ghosts,
a march of mist.

Hidden amongst the alleyways
and cobblestones

of forgotten footprints
in stone and snow.

A fingerless glove
caresses a patch of brass.

Here I am

His words
shadows in the air.

Kristallnacht.

His home
the face of the past.


The girl recognises him.

The Boy with the Jasper Eyes.

They used to play and sing
in the alleyways of
snow and school satchels.

She could smell the scent
of leather between them.

His musty jacket.
The fragrance of childhood.

She could only see
the back of his head
as they walked.

An innocent almond
in its collared sheath.

She remembers his gentle hands.
His careful smile.

Please turn around.

The Boy with the Jasper Eyes.

His words fell to the floor
of stone and snow
in their quiet knowing.

Three pebbles rolled
off the tongue onto

The Stumbling Stone

Here I am

Then she was alone.


The girl suddenly felt tired.
It was as if the whole of history
was buried deep behind her eyes.

A Grave for the Jews.

It was then she noticed the fire.

A window. A fireplace.
Laughter. Papa’s arms.
The smell of pine.

The taste of boiled lollies.

There was no brass plate
beneath her feet.

No Stolpersteine.

My name is Anna

and I live here.


Mark Tarren is a poet and writer based in Queensland, Australia. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary journals including TheNewVerse.News, The Blue Nib, Poets Reading The News, Street Light Press, Spillwords Press and Tuck Magazine.

SCOTUS BLUES

by Gail White


Image: an inherited photograph at the UF blog of Marsha Bryant.

Matriarchs of my Southern childhood
warned me of predatory men
in theaters, woods, wherever I
might dare to venture out alone.
Mostly I shrugged it off, but now,
thinking of predatory men,
I say to their matriarchal ghosts
Oh, were you right, were you right again?


Gail White is a formalist poet with work in many journals, including Measure, Light, First Things, and Hudson Review. She is a two-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her latest book Catechism was published in 2016 by White Violet Press.

THE WEIGHT OF WATER

A Rhupunt by Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

The white man buys
With gold-plate lies.
His honor dies
On rocks that stand.

With greed, with guile,
Pale fists defile
The streams with bile
That poisons land:

“Hail, bottom line!
For leaks, a fine;
Let squaws drink wine!”
We understand

Their appetite
For oil will blight
Our sacred site,
Yet they demand

We yield this ground.*
Despoilers pound
The earth, and mound
Its bones and sand

With metal paws.
The hungry jaws
Of drill that gnaws
Devour our land.

Their serpent’s bite
Pours black of night
Through earth despite
Our protests and

Appeals to law.
So from the maw
Of death we claw
The dead, command

Their ghosts with dance,**
Add spear and lance
Of spirits’ stance
To human hand.

We string each bow
With words, strike blow
In court; the snow
We will withstand.

Foes agitate
With stones of hate;
Lakota wait
On rocks that stand.

* Current plans call for the Dakota Access Pipeline to pass under the Missouri River less than one mile upstream of the Standing Rock Reservation.  The Lakota have protested on the grounds that the project will contaminate their sole source of drinking water and disrupt their sacred lands.  



**By 1890 the Lakota faced starvation as a result of the U.S. Army’s systematic decimation of the buffalo, their primary food source. Members of the tribe began to practice the ghost dance, which was said to harness the spirits of the dead to fight on behalf of the living.  Sitting Bull was arrested for refusing to stop this practice, and the resulting conflict led to his death and the subsequent massacre of his supporters at Wounded Knee.

Elizabeth Spencer Spragins is a linguist, writer, and editor who taught in North Carolina community colleges for more than a decade.  Her tanka and bardic verse in the Celtic style have been published in England, Scotland, Canada, and the United States.  Recent work has appeared in Quarterday Review, Society of Classical Poets Journal, Bamboo Hut, Skylark, Atlas Poetica, Halcyon Days, and Peacock Journal.  She lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA.

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.

THE BURIAL BOYS OF EBOLA

by Alexa Poteet

Sherdrick Koffa, estranged from his family because he helped burn bodies during the Ebola outbreak. Credit Samuel Aranda for The New York Times, December 10, 2015

In Monrovia,
the wakes used to go on for weeks.
The living applied ointment to the dead
with gentle fingertips, kissed
their eyelids shut. Scrubbed under fingernails,
pressed through earrings. Sewed garments of gold, green
for those who would never dress themselves again. Bodies
were not washed but made new and dirtless
for the next life. Their pockets stuffed

with coins. Working men
went days without food to buy
mahogany caskets, marble markers
and plots large enough for houses.
On Decoration Day, brigades
of families brought bleach and good towels
to polish the hand-chiseled tombstones.
This, Liberia once said, was how to cross
into the next life. To keep ghosts
from weeping at your bedside in the night.
There were no burial boys then, you see.

Now—goggled, gloved, otherplanetary—they arrive. Breath
and sweat trapped in a terrarium of plastic. The medical
membrane that keeps good in and bad out. Underneath,
the pockets of their oil-stained clothes
brim with matchbooks. The tools
of this trade are plain.  The boys don’t cry
anymore because the masks fog in the heat. Burning,
the state says, is the only way

The mourners scream, beat their heads with fists
for children set ablaze. Their hair curling into
charred sulfuric tendrils, skin blistered
black.Their pooled blood—an acrid human ore.
Burial boys is a misnomer;
usually, they don’t have to.

Guardians of a safety no one can bear
to want, their belongings litter the street
outside childhood homes. Familiar voices break
in the telephone: You burning body?
Then I’nt want see you no more around me.
The Ministry of Health did not invite them
to the ceremony where foreign doctors
clasped hands with the president.

It sends them moonshine in old cassava crates
once a month. Easy, because they live together;
there’s nowhere else. At night, they pour
cloudy liquor for each other. Clean fingernails
before shooting up
until their minds are spotless.


Alexa Poteet is a poet and freelance writer from Washington, DC with a master’s degree in poetry from Johns Hopkins University. Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, Lines + Stars, and PennUnion among others. She has also enjoyed staff positions at the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The National Interest.

SCOURING

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

COLORADO SPRINGS — A gun battle erupted inside a Planned Parenthood center here on Friday when a man armed with an assault-style rifle opened fire and began shooting at officers as they rushed to the scene. The authorities reported that three people were killed, a police officer and two civilians, and nine were wounded before the suspect finally surrendered more than five hours after the first shots were fired. —NY Times, Nov. 27, 2015. Photo by ISAIAH J. DOWNING/REUTERS via NY Times

I cannot leave while the wind sings in its cold November voice, exercising spruce limbs above the roof, full of spirits and souls perfecting their escapes: my husband’s colleague, the Paris dead,
unmourned strangers caught up, baffled.

Wind is not what they imagined. Always alive, it blows songbirds from the sills. Smashes streetlights and scatters the shards like leaves.

Below in the ugly solid house, cats sleep on quilts, still, while limbs thrash, cross themselves. Wind is the terrorist with no intention: unequal heating of the earth’s surface, dared by anemometers to blow harder.

Spider webs inside the window and the window tremble. Ghosts of people I once loved make room for the freshly dead. The sound of a train with the force of a bomb lifts our jackets then our bodies and snatches flesh from our faces.

Unsaid fury and unspoken endearments, wind is the thunder of my body breaking up like river ice and letting go. Lost souls from anywhere on the globe pluck at the sleeves of  the living. I am what you will be.  This whirlwind tears boats from their slips, clothes from the line, hope from the future.

Today’s gale prefaces snow with no regard for our journeys; it smoothes our problems into a dull continuous roar and cleanses them of impurities. They return to us, still problems but smoother, speaking a language we don’t understand.


Elizabeth Kerlikowske reports here from time to time on the news here and there.