TO EMILY DICKINSON, ON THE DEATH OF SINÉAD O’CONNOR

by Anne Myles

I’m thinking of you, centaur sister,

and of this other, lost now—

stripped words beating meters

against God’s battlements

Young I discovered both of you,

needing the keen of it—

hymns of love ingathered

only in separation

Two queens I can’t approach,

though I too felt the rising

to stitch the rage with beauty,

to feel my throat open

in despised prophecy–

flames of our temperament leaping

in stony rooms of limitation,

clawed by what we cannot name—

Both of you dead in your fifties

while I scan a new horizon—

still looking for that vanishing green

pasture to lie down in

Anne Myles is the author of Late Epistle, winner of Sappho's Prize in Poetry (Headmistress Press, 2023) and What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022). She is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa and lives in Greensboro, NC.

MAYFIELD

by Donna Katzin

In this photo taken by a drone, buildings are demolished in downtown Mayfield, Ky., on Saturday, Dec. 11, 2021, after a tornado traveled through the region Friday night. Ryan C. Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader via AP

Where cold and warming winds collide,

twisters—minions of an angry earth—                    

lash out in pain, flatten farms, homes,

houses of work and worship in their paths.

As roofs rain bricks in darkness,                               

mothers, fathers, sons, daughters,

sisters, brothers sit in cellars,                                               

making calls never returned.

 

When the wild ones have gone, survivors pick

through mauled metal, shredded remains.       

A bus lies on its back—a turtle shell

with the body sucked out.

Splintered ghost trunks rise  

like hands to heaven.

There are no voices now.

Even wind has no words.

 

Cadaver dogs sniff through rubble.

Crews root around the clock

for what is left of men and women

who worked the late shift,

even after alarms screamed,

for twelve dollars an hour

making candles to light consumers’ holidays       

at the factory now extinguished.                   

 

On Sunday morning, faithful gather,

console and hold each other,

interrogate the Almighty,

sing hymns of hope

to staunch despair.  

A few pray for the mother

planet we torture at our own peril—

who will not be patient forever.

 

 

Donna Katzin is the founding and previous executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

IN THE TIME OF PLAGUE

by Alejandro Escudé

When the so-called Black Death swept through northern Lincolnshire during the middle of the 14th century, sick and desperate people turned to the nearby Thornton Abbey's hospital for care. So many people died there that the members of the abbey's clergy were unable to prepare individual burials and instead had to bury the bodies in a so-called plague pit … But even though dozens of people were consigned together to a shallow mass grave over a period of just a few days, the remains were nonetheless treated with respect and received individual attention, according to a new study. Photo: A close-up shows part of the mass grave at Thornton, where the deceased were carefully positioned and placed in an organized manner without any overlapping. (Image: © University of Sheffield/Antiquity Publications Ltd.) —Live Science, February 18, 2019

Forty eight humanoid figures
on the archaeological diagram
of the Black Death burial site;
Thornton Abbey monks, patient,
pious, wrapped each individual,
performed last rites, conscious
of the space between negligence
and love, light separating all us
pilgrims making the trek out
to the country to die with hope
of afterlife. Why does the cross
resemble a key? Why is the answer
always more patience, a power
more like prayer than habit?
I won’t forgive some around me
despite our woes widespread.
Rat-psyche world, words heady
as a virus, our bodies buried
side by side so they don’t overlap
even in life. What is love but hope?
When one looses hope does
one loose the ability to love?
These monks didn’t. Wouldn’t.
I see their bony, medieval hands
sorting it all out in the dirt,
disease, blood, vomit, their
screams suppressed by prayer
and see the same monks in
the people wearing hazmat suits
today, leading those sick with
a new disease down the stairs
of an airplane, the disease itself
the shape of the airplane,
a cruise liner, an old couple
quarantined in their cabin,
taking it all in stride, they say,
unabated fear in their hands,
their jittery faces, those carried
away in China, yelling like
hostages, stowed away in clear,
plastic houses. Abbeys whose
hymns we’d rather not hear.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.