LIGHT

by Chris Reed

Flakes of snow glow orange like fireflies

over a winter field of bare and capped heads,

candles held high in the snow swept vigil.

Light gathers itself to the campus lamp,

lone glow behind a policeman’s head, 

his face like ours in shadow.

 

We connect light to morning and sight,

to warmth and touch, to seasons

of planting and harvest,

and in our winters, to what still returns

after the night, the storm, and the losses.

 

But light doesn’t care for our veneration.

Indifferent, it turns the glow back on us.

Red radiates off the side of a face at a window.

reflects the ambulance light in the night,

red hands holding back the drapes.

 

Flashes of gunfire on Bondi Beach

found celebrants honoring a festival

of light, light as healing and possibility,

as the connection and love that endures,

telling the story of an ancient flame.

 

I look up from my screen of news and photos

as light sends the shadow of a bird outside

my window, flying across my pale nubby rug. 

Sunlight paints the many leaves of the jade tree

and stretches along the floor to my feet.

 

Light remembers that in the beginning

it took on the job of radiance and promise,

and we took on the job of repairing

the vessels that we are, 

so that we might hold the light. 

 

In recent news photos, light is reserved,

embarrassed for us, 

embarrassed to have been the gold on snow,

the red glare on the cheek at the window,

the sun setting over a bloody beach,

— and asks — Can’t you do better than this?

Chris Reed has been writing poetry for five years. As a writer and a retired Unitarian minister she values the work of social justice and witnessing that is done through poetry. But admits she has sometimes had a difficult time reading news stories during this last year. And this is not a comment on her eyesight. Her first chapbook Two Years and Two Months was published last month by Finishing Line Press.

UNWRITTEN POEM

by Marsha Owens

if i were a poet of great repute

i’d fashion a poem of hope,

ask it to travel with me

alongside Breanna,

next to George Floyd,

so many others since...

young victims at school

ad infinitum,

and i would ask the poem

to be gentle with us

as we climbed words,

reached for understanding

dangling like a noose

 

instead i feel the poem resist

i watch it walk into hell

because no words exist

to save lives trapped

in gunfire.

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The New Verse News, The Sun, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Dead Mule, and Streetlight Anthology. She is co-editor of the poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning has been recently published at Finishing Line Press.

LOVE IN TIMES OF WAR

a poem for Palestine
by Maliha Iqbal

Thousands of people attended a joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial ceremony for victims of the conflict in Tel Aviv on Monday night, running the gauntlet of a handful of right-wing activists who shouted hated slogans. —Haaretz, April 24, 2023. Photo by Gili Getz, The Times of Israel, April 25, 2023.

The last thing that survives
When the frightened mother
Hides her littler children behind her
In the face of the hard glint of a soldier’s gun
The last thing that survives
When the eldest child loses his childhood and innocence
Because he is the only one left
To look after his little brothers and sisters
The last thing that survives
When the soldier stares at the picture
Of his dead daughter and crouches down,
Wishing to shut himself off from the world and sob forever
The last thing that survives
When little children lying in hospital beds
With IV drips attached to their arms
Smile through the bandages at their parents
To give them something to go on
The last thing that survives
When everything is covered with thick choking smoke
Like a massive cloud has crashed on earth
And all you see around yourself
Are dead bodies floating in the cloud
You vaguely recall the boom of the bomb
And the gunfire that shattered the windows of your home
The smoke strangles you, makes you tear up
But you don’t care because 
You have just remembered the scream of your loved ones
And right now you are too busy looking for them
The last thing that survives the night of war
Is the love that waits for the break of dawn.

Maliha Iqbal is a student and writer based in Aligarh, India. Many of her short stories, write-ups, letters and poems have been published on platforms Live Wire (The Wire), Creativity Webzine, Cerebration, Histolit, Countercurrents, Times of India, The Palestine Chronicle, Freedom Review, ArmChair Journal, Counterview, Good Morning Kashmir, Writers’ Cafeteria, Café Dissensus, Borderless Journal, The Cadre Journal and Indian Periodical. She can be reached at malihaiqbal327(at)gmail.com.

HUMANITARIAN PAROLE

by Jerrice J. Baptiste

Gone, morsels of light from the island 
       flickering in silent eyes.

 

He waved goodbye last Tuesday
      to the turquoise sea, mid-day sun 

 

choking on tears. His welcome meal

 

sliced papaya, crescent plantains, 

      conch in creole sauce. Smiles. 

My cousin’s soft lashes
       brush American stars. Glow reflects

 

on forehead, cheek bones, bridge of nose.

       Lips speak freedom, a new language.

 

My uncle hears his son’s voice 

       migrated among birds of the white season. 

Night churns slow. How can he keep still?

      One has left his cocoon.

       

Even from gunfire.  

Author’s note: Humanitarian Parole offers an opportunity for people arriving in the U.S to feel like humans. Approved non-residents landing for the first time are welcomed appropriately and can adapt under the right conditions of housing, employment, education, etc. They can be happy even if their family members left behind—in Haiti, in the case of the speaker’s uncle in this poem—miss them terribly. 

Jerrice J. Baptiste is an author of eight books and a poet in residence at the Prattsville Art Center & Residency in NY.  She is extensively published in journals and magazines. She has been nominated as  Best of The Net by Blue Stem for  2022.

THIS TIME

by Heather Newman

A police officer directed a bystander off the crime scene on the Boston Common. JOSH REYNOLDS FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE, September 12, 2017

1.

On a mid-September afternoon
in historic Boston Common
multiple gunshots were fired
near the bandstand, among bystanders, a brazen act,
police called it, locals say this never happens in Boston,
                                    it’s a college town.
A nineteen-year-old Hyde Park man
was critically injured. The shooting triggered
chaos in one of the nation’s oldest parks.
Police chased a man into a trolley tunnel at Arlington station,
a gun was recovered, three are in custody.              
Police believe it was not a random act.
But this is not a poem about terrorists or home growns
or viable solutions for
public safety.
Authorities say an argument preceded the shooting,
all people involved in the incident are known to police
                                    and it’s unclear if it’s drug or gang related.
This is a poem
about those who dodge a bullet and
those who are not dead, yet


2.

She calls me crying, barely able to speak, and I fear the worst.
Twenty minutes before, we had been chatting. She was
                                    on a mission to discover
a farmers market. She loves her classes, her roommate.
I’m thrilled; this wasn’t her first choice of schools.
Please, God, don’t let it be rape.
She tells me she ran from gunfire but she’s safe, back in her dorm.
I’m relieved. School is in lockdown.            
On the internet. Looks like they caught the shooter.
She says she thought about playing dead instead of running.
We had discussed this right after Sandy Hook.
                                    I’m in New York City and I’ve never run from gunfire.
Twitter says two of the three suspects fled on mopeds.
Impossible, she says. Those guys on the red vespas were not the shooters.
Are you sure you want to get involved?
She spent hours at police headquarters, couldn’t sleep for days.
I flew her home for the weekend, took her shopping.
                                    Statistics say this shouldn’t happen to her again.


3.

“When you hear ‘active shooter,’ you run . . .”
this epidemic, these pleas, how many die before
                                    another one
“It sounded like fireworks . . .”
flags lowered, legislation, time for congress to enact
                                    another one
NRA, massacres, stranglers, bombers, revolutions
prove we can’t stop
another one  
“These are happening too much, these shootings,”
thoughts and prayers, in God we trust
                                    another one


4.

But back to the Common.
This story won’t be found on CNN or Fox News,
The New York Times or The Washington Post.
It was just another boy
not enrolled in a college, somewhere in critical condition.
And three unnamed others, who knew each other and were known to police;

                                    they were released the next day.

Heather Newman is an MFA candidate at The New School (NYC.) Her work has appeared in Voices from Here, Vol. II, TheNewVerse.News, The Potomac, Two Hawks Quarterly, Aji Magazine, Matter, Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop and eChook.

HELL NIGHT

by Meaghan Ford

Image source: WBZ (CBS Boston)

I dragged all the blankets into the bath tub, raided my closets for pillows. Someone

told me to stay away from the windows and my bathroom is swallowed by the dark.

The police scanner snarls until I fall asleep, fitful. I dream about explosions and body 
parts walking disjointed through downtown looking for their owners. In the morning,

the only things in my refrigerator are water, eggs, and beer. And I've already had breakfast.

The tanks going by my window look more like a movie when I'm drunk. And I am not drunk.

My stomach is a swarm. The television glows. I'm making bare pasta in my bra, hair wet 
from the shower after the lockdown is lifted. Then, shots fired in Watertown and the city

is screaming again. While the bomber is pinned down in a boat my friends tell me about 
gunshots and flash bangs and how loud their fear is. They talk about blood and his age

while everyone waits for it to be over. And then dancing. The people flood the streets.

I eat all of the Oreos, put my feet up, and open each brown bottle slow, meticulous.


Meaghan Ford is a writer from New Jersey who fell in love with the big city shit. She's a regular at the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge  and has helped organize the National Poetry Slam in both 2011 and 2013. Her work has appeared in Amethyst Arsenic, Phantom Kangaroo, The Legendary, and The Scrambler; she was also a 2012 Write Bloody finalist. Most days she can be found lurking around the local food trucks or taking dystopian photographs in odd places.