ESCAPE

by Paul Hostovsky

He crab-walked up and out of there
and I can’t help admiring him a little for that

especially since they keep replaying it on TV 
and thousands of cops are combing Pennsylvania 

and they haven’t found him yet. And I can’t help
rooting for him a little as though he were

the underdog, and not a killer who stabbed
his girlfriend to death in front of her children.

My God. They will never get over that. Have you
ever found yourself rooting for the wrong 

side? Crab-walking is moving sort of sideways
and diagonally in an awkward, furtive manner. 

Please pass the popcorn. I wonder if they’ll ever
find him. Voyeurism is sort of furtively taking

pleasure in disaster, catastrophe, pain, and without
ever feeling the pain, or ever getting caught.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.

COUNTING THE DEAD

by Susan Cossette

Gilgo Beach, Long Island 2011

Call me Melissa.

He called me whore,

tucking my cell phone and cash

in his hip pocket.

He put me to sleep by the shore,

wrapped in burlap 

among the brushy scrub.

They pull my bones 

from the rocky sand,

my skull from a plastic bag—

Alas, poor girl,

we don't know who you are

but will poke the dry bits left of you

back at the lab.

Faceless, nameless shadows,

trading our flesh for cash.

Now, we matter more in death.

I spend my days counting the dead,

gathering my silent sisters one by one.

Some missing hands, or heads,

my job is to piece them together,

to make them beautiful again.

Megan, Maureen,

babies waiting home for you,

did you ask for this?

Amber, no one noticed you were gone,

feeding the hunger in your veins.

You didn't deserve it.

None of us did.

I found you all,

in the snow squall

of that December night.

Black beach, flashing police lights,

silence broken by sirens

and the hollow hum

of the crime lab generators.

What remains?

Crude holes in the tangled brush,

the buzz of rush hour traffic.

I regard the hot pink spray paint lines

faded on the sand,

marking the boundaries of our world.

A silver medal nailed to a tree.

Crime scene.

Author's note: This is a poem I wrote way back in 2011.  I am originally from the Metro New York area, and this story was all over the news more than a decade ago.  The story of these women haunted me. This past week, it appears that there is some resolution to the story.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

MONA’S HEAD SPEAKS

by Tara Menon

A grinning man who decapitated his wife and paraded down the street with her head in his hands has been jailed for just eight years in Iran. Mum-of-one Mona Heydari (above) was just 17 when she was dragged from a car outside the family home and killed in February last year, a court heard. Her husband Sajjad Heydari and his brother Heydar carried out the brutal attack in Ahvaz, the capital of the southwestern Khuzestan Province. Mona, who had been married since the age of 12, had fled her violent husband with another man, the court heard. However, the woman was tracked down in Turkey by her own father - named as Javid in local media - who returned her to her violent husband. The man allegedly used Interpol to trace his daughter and returned her to Iran, where her husband - who is also her cousin - slaughtered her, claiming she had shamed him. —The Mirror (UK), January 19, 2023

How much is my head worth
in my country?
Beheaded that is
with pools of blood.
Eight years?
So little for my murderer.
Why not seventeen
for every year I’ve lived?
Or eighty minus seventeen
assuming I’d have become an octogenarian.

I fled his violence,
but my family lured me back to Iran
with assurances I’d be safe. I was not.
And then my family pardoned my husband
else he’d have been killed by the state.
No woman is free from danger

when unfair laws lurk.

 
Ask Mahsa Amini,
who was killed for showing 
a bit of hair peeping out of her burqa.
 
Look up at the sky
where we hover
waiting to enter heaven
after justice finds its way to earth.
We could blow the clouds, strike lightning bolts,
thunder from above forever.
The weight of our souls burdens hearts, 
but no one knows
we’re also present inside palpitating organs
to get across our message.

Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her most recent poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Arlington Literary Journal, San Pedro River Review, and The Loch Raven Review. Her latest fiction has appeared in The Hong Kong Review, Litro, The Bookends Review, Rio Grande Review, and The Evening Street Review. She is also a book reviewer and essayist whose pieces have appeared in many journals.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

by Katherine Smith

Artist: Steve Brodner via Pinterest

On the Senate Majority Leader

The oaks do not aspire
to spirit or imagination,
but grow straight up.
Indifferently

casting their shadows
over the saplings,
they search
for unopposed light
 
to fall from their canopy                       
into the shadowy ridged bark
of withered trees.
So too

there are human beings—
you know their names—
whose principles are limited
to domination and money.

They are called champions,
these proud lucky ones
that kill everything
that lives

beneath them.


Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

DIRE WARNINGS

by Linda Lerner

Image source: Linda Lerner

we were warned to keep away from strangers
to be suspicious of anyone not like us

people of other races and of different religions from ours
atheists and all free spirits especially artists

we were warned about sleeping in other people’s homes
eating food we weren’t familiar with

getting overexcited and too emotional about things
of danger lurking in sleep away camp and open road clubs

discouraged from swimming, bike riding getting too much sun
we were warned about touching ourselves and

of men who only wanted one thing
about drugs and sex and how “the more you get the more you want”

we were warned about many things
but nobody warned us about the trees

we played ring around the rosy under
that kept the sun from burning us

trees whose leaves dazzled us with color every autumn
infested with fungus or mold and dying of root rot

environmentalists sent out alarms with  predictions
we dismissed along with climate change as nonsense

nobody warned us that the trees would become killers
and uproot lifting up slabs of concrete from under us

break thru iron gates into homes flattening cars 
killing anyone in their way

nobody warned us…


Linda Lerner's Takes Guts and Years Sometimes (New & Selected Poems) is published by New York Quarterly Press.