NOT/KNOT

by Alison Luterman

Palestinian children killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza:  Here is a list of the names we know, from more than 11,500 children killed during Israel’s war on Gaza. Even this is less than half of those killed. | Al Jazeera Newsfeed

If I'm being honest about it
and I'm probably not, 
I've had my head in the sand
all this time, not
like an ostrich, but like a person
who doesn't know which voice to listen to
amid the explosions and the shouting,
and I don't know what I'd do 
if I were in charge of anything
over there, which, 
thank God, I am not,
I don't know anything
anymore, but still—if the price
of the place
is to kill and kill
and keep killing
children,
and if you had to
see it up close, for yourself,
the small, shattered bodies, 
the homes, markets, schools, the
hospital
with its roof torn off,
the piles of naked, bound men
loaded onto a truck
going nowhere, and be told, not
for the first time,
that this was all being done
for your supposed benefit
or ultimate safety—
then what? Not
in my name, we say, 
but that does not
change anything 
on the ground, the knot
of history, too snarled and 
tightly matted with the blood 
of innocents, cannot
be picked apart
by even the most nimble fingers, 
and the riddle: 
how many babies' bones
are worth the illusion
of a homeland?  

Alison Luterman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently In the Time of Great Fires from Catamaran Press. She teaches and writes in Oakland, California. 

TERRITORY

by David Chorlton

“El Jefe,” a jaguar last seen in Arizona nearly seven years ago, was spotted in the Mexican state of Sonora last year, researchers confirmed recently, reviving hopes that the species can thwart the border wall that bisects its natural habitat. Above: El Jefe in the Santa Rita Mountains in Arizona on April 30, 2015(AP). Below: El Jefe is seen in the central area of Sonora, Mexico in November 2021(AP). —The Washington Post, August 10, 2022

Land remembered

from the distance of a century

turns into rock and light afloat

on a thread of water

that runs down from a mountain and sings

to the stones in its path.

Here comes night with the moon in its teeth.

Here comes a prayer

with blood on its lip and a heart

that beats time with a past

it’s come to reclaim. When belief

has soaked back into sky

the sky wears a pelt

cut for survival as all the land beneath it

turns mysterious blue

and a jaguar at a water hole

licks away the stars. He’s invisible

all the way inside himself

and quiet as a holy man who went

into the desert for its solitude.

He’s shed one country’s language. Its grammar

ran as liquid through his limbs

and he spat out punctuation every time

he moved in for a kill. Here’s a pool

of thirst.

             A red cloud of breath.

Some bones.

                   A heartbeat running

underground.

                      Homeland.

 

David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix. While jaguar sightings are ever elusive, he is content to know that the big cats have allies in their quest for survival, such as the Northern Jaguar Project.

THE OTHER SIDE OF A WALL

by Mara Adamtz Scrupe

                       out beyond the blest kingdom

amongst the trackless traders & slavers & affluent technocrats 

            lands amassing & bomb shelters & clandestine

            airstrips & marble-tombed 

bathrooms & gated havens to get off on        on the other side

             

of the wall lizards dart in & out or lie in heat benumbed       

            amongst the Burdock catch-spring 

spurred ovate bolls/ reckless rule-less ghost moths skim

&lek/ scroll & whitecap        billow& spray exploding 

in quiver-pleasured olfactory raves & gullies            out beyond

                        the blest kingdom

insect/ amphibian/ mammalian females choose their mates

whilst the males of the species           

entice them uncontested/ none abstain in a homeland       

convinced of its quiddities

            I mark & mind an ancient détente as the eighty richest 

chock-full ride it out from a distance            

it’s a bad bad 

business the way the wall says                       

            inhale/ exhale            expect              nothing

as the dam diggers stem the flood over the faceless fence 

            & the wounded unwing-ed collapse & orange peacock-

eyed butterflies remind me 

            of rope & strand of knot & sign & climb 

& hold on tight           for dear    dear             

at the bottom of this breach 

holed & don’t they know it        up here  though

             on top between squab & hassock 

common six-line racerunner skinks queue a line 

            from my chaise across the porch floor not stiffs

            buried under a dune on the other side of a wall      

but languid/ marking a border

                        they simply                 slip over

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is the author of five poetry collections: BEAST (NFSPS Press, 2014), Sky Pilot (Chapbook, Finishing Line Press, 2012), Magnalia (Chapbook, Eyewear Publications, 2018) and a daughter’s aubade/ sailing out from Sognefjord (winner, Fledge Poetry Competition, Middle Creek Press, 2019). She is the winner of the 2018 Grindstone Literary International Poetry Competition, and the Brighthorse Press Poetry Book Prize for her manuscript in the bare bones house of was which will be published in 2019. Her poems have appeared in international literary journals and magazines and she has won or been shortlisted for the Kay Murphy Poetry Prize, Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, BigCi Environmental Fellowship, Erbacce Prize, Fish Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Prize, Bristol Prize, and the National Poetry Society Competition, among others. She divides her time between her farm in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains piedmont and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she is Professor of Fine Arts and Creative Writing at The University of the Arts.

DESIGN

by Gil Hoy

Climate change demonstrations are expected to take place worldwide in the lead up to the Paris summit [File: AP via ALJAZEERA]

In third grade, I often trekked to my best friend's home
up the street, a backpack of books
strapped to my small back.

We flipped through pages and pages then,
in a quiet little study in a corner of his red brick house.
The glow from the fireplace flames
illuminated the russet wood on cold winter days---
like a solemn Friends meeting house.

My friend’s mother sometimes would set out
milk and cookies for us to eat.

They looked like planets of dirt and black rocks
circling two white stars.  She was always so kind
and so warm. The earth is a sky blue marble
with white swirls from the vantage point

of the sterile rock of the white moon,
so pretty and elegant.

The better the book, the more you didn’t
want it to end.  You start with chapter one.

If there were twenty, by the time you got to ten or so,
you were tormented by the prospect of finishing.
And the pages went by so fast then, like a speeding bus
you run after but miss, and you knew that the end
was coming, like the last bite of a favorite meal.

It occurred to me on one of those quiet
unspeaking afternoons that my death
was much like my book, and that I was on chapter four.

I wasn’t deeply troubled because there was still
so far to go. But the words and the pages
seemed different then, each page a whole day nearer,
as what remained of the unread pages
grew thinner and thinner.

Today, I am sixty years old. My angst is different now.
I read about ISIS and Paris murders, Trump’s fantasies,
Ben Carson's portrayal of his younger years, and Rubio’s
foreign policy. I listen to a grayer noble black President
talk about protecting the homeland, gun control, climate change
and medical care for the poor.

I hear grievous political candidates say
what they think you want to hear because
it’s politically expedient, rather than do the country’s business.

You grow tired of hearing grown men lie,
and you come to doubt our institutions and the law---
no polish will remove that stain.

I wonder now if the world can survive its woes
and whether the grandchildren of my grandchildren
will even get here. Perhaps nuclear war

with just too many missiles and countries involved
for the world ever to recover, or a pretty colorful solar storm
much more powerful than the one in 1859.

Maybe global warming, disobedient armies
of self-preserving computers, or runaway asteroids
exploding oceans, like ruinous bombs raining down
on villages of the weak. I worry that the world

is like my old third grade book, now more worn
but still true, and I have no idea what chapter
the world may be on.

What does it mean that the Milky Way
is just one of billions of galaxies?  What immortal blacksmith
or powerful imagination created infinite space?

Is the universe dying? Can we read its obituary in the stars?
Given the big bang, like an explosion of planets
from the head of a ruderal species,
futures of finite and infinite duration are both possible
depending upon physical properties and the expansion rate.

Some scientists say that the universe is flat like a silver dollar
and will expand forever, contingent on its shape
and the role dark energy plays as the universe ages.

Otherwise, the big rip tears the earth away,
like a murderous albino spider on a white flower carrying away a dead moth,
or a lion’s fearsome symmetry in a death spiral with a spent zebra.

The ephemeral perfection of goldilocks planet has always been
that it is not too hot and not too cold, with just
the right amount of water.

When I got to my friend’s home on that rainy afternoon,
I learned that his mother had died that morning.

The house was so cold and so dark. I didn’t know what to do.
But I knew there was no time to waste.

Had she played a part in stopping her heart from beating at such
an early age?  How many oceans and mountains had she never seen?
And in what directions? What had I to do with being at her red brick house,
at that time and on that day? I didn’t know.

But I filled up my backpack and started the long trudge
back home.  For I knew there was no time to waste.


Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer, writer and poet. He studied poetry at Boston University, while receiving a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Gil received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. His poetry has appeared most recently in Third Wednesday, The Write Room, The Eclectic Muse, Clark Street Review and TheNewVerse.News.

WOEFUL MISERY

by Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote

Amnesty International published a report early Wednesday accusing Israel of war crimes in its 50-day war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip this summer, saying its military showed “callous indifference” to civilians in airstrikes on homes that felled entire families. NY Times, November 4, 2014

Global sympathies aroused supporting disheartened

Palestinians constantly suffering imposed indignities

Humiliated confused cheated cursed outraged

Only recourse uncivil wronged rights

Born into unfortunate misbegotten circumstance

In-denial bias prejudice intolerance narrow-mindedness

Everything old is new again

Long deserving own sovereign homeland

There are more than fifty

Israel laws that discriminate against

Palestinian citizens of Israel including

Land access education criminal procedures

Nakba Catastrophe Palestine’s native inhabitants

Were turned into stateless refugees

Second class non-citizens driven out

Apartheid however you label it

Profound inequality enforcing conspiracy laws

Series of walls military checkpoints

Separating displaced refugees West Bank

Gaza Strip Golan Heights families

Twisted armlock crying Uncle Sam

Ungrateful one time too many

Lobbyists playing politricks mistreated threats

Unsettled grievances claiming tsouris heartburn

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1