THE LIBRARIAN AT THE SCHOOL WHERE EVERY CHALLENGE SUCCEEDS

by Cecil Morris

Photo by Stu_Spivak

The Bible is among dozens of books [including the graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank's diary and numerous books with LGBTQ+ themes or characters] removed from this Texas school district. —NPR, August 18, 2022

I like our high school library now—the high ceiling,

the tall windows inviting light, the shelves throwing

their long shadows onto each other, their blond wood,

so easy to dust and polish now. Something stately,

a little grand, a little minimalist—a kind

of puritan austerity, I think you could say,

now that all the books have been withdrawn, all the ideas

removed from circulation, stored now off site and out

of sight. No more books to face or edge or try to dust,

those uneven tops. No more rows of books to cull

for the out of date, the never read—or checked out,

at least—the ones defaced by flip-page cartoons, or drawn-

in dicks, or very personal slurs that should be kept

to lavatory stalls. No more issuing fines

for books late or lost. I know, as librarian,

I should miss the books, both learned tomes and flights

of fantasy, but this vacuous cleanliness

appeals to my love of order and simplicity,

and the kids—the students—still come in with their phones

where they can find the whole world in bite-size chunks,

where they can Google, scroll, and cite Wikipedia.

And I do not have to check anything out or in

or shush any heads bent over the little lights.

I guess this is what the school board and parents want.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, divides his time between Oregon and California.  He has poems in or forthcoming from 3Elements, Ekphrastic Review, English Journal, Evening Street Review, Hiram Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Scapegoat, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.

SYCAMORE, SYCAMORE

by Sally Zakariya

“Today we published the results of this quantum supremacy experiment in the Nature article, ‘Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor.’ We developed a new 54-qubit processor, named ‘Sycamore,’ that is comprised of fast, high-fidelity quantum logic gates, in order to perform the benchmark testing. Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds, and from measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output.” —Posted on October 23, 2019 to the Google AI Blog by John Martinis, Chief Scientist Quantum Hardware and Sergio Boixo, Chief Scientist Quantum Computing Theory, Google AI Quantum. Photograph of the Sycamore processor by Erik Lucero, Research Scientist and Lead Production Quantum Hardware.

Hello world, things are changing.
What I knew only as a shag-bark tree—
Sycamore—now names computing
power beyond imagining, now quantum,
supreme, superlative, incomparable.

A dance of particles, tangling, entangled.
To Einstein, “spooky action at a distance.”
To me, complex mystery of mysteries,
wonder of intelligent wonders.

How can I comprehend such power
and speed, such limitless possibilities?
Like us prone to error, but unlike us
capable of brilliance beyond measure.

A human attempt to emulate creation?
Perhaps. Or is it proof how far our
mortal minds can reach?


Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is Muslim Wife (Blue Lyra Press, 2019). She is also the author of The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table.

BABEL

by Rachel Voss

As a poet in the Internet Age, you find, through a quick search,
that the image you seized upon during a walk to do laundry is not,
sadly, an original one: Trump Tower of Babel.

(And that search just as swiftly uncovers the wisdom of the tarot—
apparently—did you know this?—the Tower card—yes, likely a reference
to Babel—is a trump card which immediately follows the Devil

and is associated with “sudden, disruptive, and potentially destructive
change”—truly, you’ve stumbled into an online abyss of hidden meanings
and Wikipedia distractions.  Return to your laundry.)  Crestfallen,

I do, but realize that as with all myth, it’s what you make of the story
that matters.  Is it a “fact” to hoard like grain in a pyramid built
by literal nonsense, rigid and unyielding?  Or is it a metaphor to continually

mine, one that will somehow always yield gold?  I settle on the latter,
settle into the chatter of the mind, replaying last night’s conversations:
the hungry talk, the ravenous listening, the bread, the wine.

What communion this?  A pop tune, perhaps, a drunken howl—no,
we will never be saints—choral support, the words we somehow all
remember, liked a mantra turned and returned to.

And so the story isn’t about the modern-day Nimrod, the hubris of phallus
gesturing lewdly heavenwards—it’s about the confounding tongues, mysterious
in their multiplicity, voices beautiful in their baffling difference

from our own.  We’ve been talking a lot about ‘doing something’—
and I think the talk, remarkably, is something.  Sing, goddess,
of “a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn’t” (Bishop)—

a cry that turned into the voice we use when we want to be heard
at a noisy party, or over the din of the city, or ignorance, or when you’re looking
for the right words to say, I can’t understand you, not anymore, we need

to go back to the time when we all used the same language,
a song as elemental as a beating heart, the sound that a human being
makes when it says, I’m here, we exist, and I want you to know

what I mean.

Rachel Voss is a high school English teacher living in Queens, New York. She graduated with a degree in creative writing and literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her work has previously appeared in The Ghazal Page, Hanging Loose Magazine, Unsplendid, 3Elements Review, Silver Birch Press, and Bodega Magazine, among others. 

BELATED

by Megan Collins

I’ll admit I did it, too—loved a lion
I’d never heard of until he was dead.
Scrolling through photographs, I fell
for his amber eyes. I even noted how—
in some poses—he seemed as benign
as my golden retriever, asleep at my feet.
When I read of the arrow in this lion’s side,
the forty hours he suffered, I felt my throat
stiffen like cooling wax, felt my eyes
sting as if exposed to flame.

For days, I said his name—Cecil, Cecil—
but I had to Google the woman (Sandra!)
who died in a jail cell, who’d been dragged
from her car, pulled by her collar like a dog.
I loved her, then, too—how she fought
in ways I’ve never had to, how her smile
in photographs made me want to smile back.
Her laughter, I imagined, would sound like a song.

But—how easy it is to love a victim.
How easy to love what’s already gone.


Megan Collins holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. She teaches creative writing and literature in Connecticut, and is also an editor of 3Elements Review. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Compose, Linebreak, Rattle, Spillway, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. 

SHOULD NEVER

by Jay Duret

On the grassy plains of Siberia 42,000 years ago, a baby woolly mammoth fell into a sticky mud hole and choked to death, leaving her mother to grieve for her. Now this little mammoth is the star attraction of [London’s] Natural History Museum’s Ice Age exhibition, which opens [May 24]. Because of her riverbed location, her body was . . .  pickled by acids formed by bacteria that entered her body soon after death, which was then frozen in permafrost. . . . Her DNA is well preserved and there are very few samples of this type of mammoth. --Daily Mail (UK), May 21, 2014

Image source: SingularityHUB

 I.

Should never
I see that now.
Twisted by logic
Played by logicians, swept
By the force of cunning argument.
Should never.

Debate will do that.
The river of words
Slow, languorous even, at the edges
Where you first step in.
Gently seductive, gently urging,
Gently gently gently down the stream.
But further, towards the sluicing middle, the current
Irresistible. The logic, the argument, the hard claw of debate.
Irresistible.
I was carried down the stream.
I am sorry.
Should never.

I blame Google.
It is one thing, after all, to search for words.
We do that.
We are human; we have no choice.
But pictures? Images?
This should be taboo.

Once I saw you I could not straighten my thinking.
I knew the arguments, heard the debates,
I have a mind that can hold opposing ideas in balance.
In equipoise.
But the swoop of your ivory. Its magnificent curl.
The rich dignity of your coverings.
As a people, we dream of a coat like your colossal swinging fur coat.
We hear in dreams the deep poundings of your stride
Turning tundra to grassland, step by booming step.

To see your image was to fail you.
Should never.
Should never have brought you,
Woolly Mammoth, Woolly Mammoth,
I should never have brought you back.

II.

I was born in a glass tube in a clinic in LA
Cloned from a morsel of DNA, that DNA exhumed
From a nugget of amber,
Or a bubbling tar pit, or a fossil in the Dakotas.
My papa, not mammoth, not woolly,
A balding man in a white lab coat
With bad breath, like he stunk inside,
Like all humans.
Stunk inside.

I don’t speak human.
Human sounds won’t pass my mouth.
We took a vow, my brothers and sisters,
Even as we dwindled,
Even as the light that burned within us
Flickered
We would never utter words that had been spoken
By humans or their kind.
Poisoned meat. Poisoned grasses.
The rapaciousness of hunters.
The voraciousness of human hunger.
You hunted us down. You ate us up.
All of us.
Extinction.

I know why it is you brought me back.
I know what it is you want.
The debate, the logic, the business with Google; all lies
I know why you brought me back:
You want me to blow life into you.
You want me to give a gift of words.
But I won’t speak them.

To be extinct is to be beyond words.
Beyond any words, beyond all words,
Human words, mammoth words, it doesn’t matter.
I am beyond words.
I am dead to words.
I don’t speak human.
I took a vow.

Jay Duret is a San Francisco writer and illustrator. His stories have appeared in many online and print journals. He blogs at www.jayduret.com and welcomes feedback at jayduret(at)yahoo.com. 

SOCRATES AND CASEY ANTHONY, A DIALOGUE

by Jan Keough

The poet's photoshopped image of Casey Anthony with Socrates and a young student in Raphael’s "School  of Athens".

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The Florida sheriff's office that investigated the disappearance of Casey Anthony's 2-year-old daughter overlooked evidence that someone in their home did a Google search for "fool-proof" suffocation methods on the day the girl was last seen alive. . . . WKMG reports that sheriff's investigators pulled 17 vague entries only from the computer's Internet Explorer browser, not the Mozilla Firefox browser commonly used by Casey Anthony. --Huffington Post

The wily fox, as some called Socrates,
spoke with Casey Anthony the other day
at an unknown cellular location.

Casey, in hiding after the trial, and Socrates,
freed from bodily inconvenience after his trial,
converged to resolve a thorny dilemma.

“Which is best,” she texted, “to escape punishment and live to regret?
Or to face the punishing side-effects of actions
made from a selfish and immature attitude?”

Socrates, reclining on his metaphysical marble couch,
lifted the Droid close to his eyes.
Texting was not his favorite method of communication.

He preferred to gaze directly at those
who wished to be freed
from the burning disgrace of ignorance.

“Tell me,” he began,
“which Browser is best to use,
Internet Explorer or Firefox?”


Jan Keough lives in RI and the internet.  She is co-founder of The Origami Poems Project which aspires to free the poet by promoting micro-chapbooks of original poetry.