INAUGURATION IN NEW ORLEANS

by Elizabeth Larose

They are taking our roofers

our window washers

our builders

our preschool teachers.

They are killing white women

our poets 

our mothers 

our neighbors.

In my intestines the knots

have knots.

But last night was the Inauguration

Mass for the new mayor of Nola

beautiful Latina

Helena

and the new City Council:

a white woman

a black woman and 

five black men.

In the Cathedral-Basilica of 

St. Louis, King of France,

the queen, Irma Thomas sang

How Great Thou Art—I felt it.

We still have street lights 

that don’t work, so many,

potholes the size of small lakes

and tremendous inequality

still the knots have let go a bit

and my chest feels a little bigger

to hold my heart.

I heard Kamala Harris and Steve Scalise

were at the inauguration. 

And the lion lay down with the lamb.

Peace be with us

and with our Spirit.

Inaugurate that!

Elizabeth Larose is a visual artist from New Orleans with shows worldwide, including in NYC, The San Francisco Bay Area, Istanbul and Cartagena. She has also worked in education, from teaching to administration at international schools in Columbia, India, Turkey, and the U.S. Her poetry has been published in Leas Lit, Resilience in Writing, A Poetry Anthology, and The Ekphrastic Review (as of Jan. 22)

SUNDAY MASS IN OUR ARCHIPELAGO

by Karlo Sevilla

On January 24, 1571, feast of St. John the Baptist, the Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legaspi founded the city of Manila . He earlier took possession of Maynilad, the native settlement of Rajah Matanda and Rajah Sulayman on May 19, 1571 and firmly established Spanish authority in the newly conquered and untrammeled turf. The historic day happened to be the feast of Santa Potenciana and to honor her, she was made patroness of the new territory. Armed with the Spanish sword and the Cross, Legaspi, in his role as conquistador, apportioned a parcel of land for the church of the new settlement under the patronage of La Purisima Inmaculada Concepcion. —History of Manila Cathedral

Nearly 500 years after papal decrees were used to rationalize Europe's colonial conquests, the Vatican repudiated those decrees on Thursday, saying the "Doctrine of Discovery" that was used to justify snuffing out Indigenous people's culture and livelihoods is not part of the Catholic faith. —NPR, March 30, 2023


Another Sunday morning
inside the cathedral;
Baroque, built centuries ago.
First reader quotes a passage
about a people’s liberation
from coerced construction work:
 
And I have promised to bring you up
out of your misery . . . into a land
flowing with milk and honey.
          —Exodus 3:17.
 
Soon, the contrite and otherwise
partake in Holy Communion.
Finally, the priest bids us,
 
Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
 
We sing along to the final hymn,
then file out of the hallowed cathedral:
a proud Spanish heritage
from The Empire’s clergy,
built by dint and dirt
of our ancestors’
forced labor.

Karlo Sevilla of Quezon City, Philippines is the author of the poetry collections Metro Manila Mammal (Soma Publishing, 2018) and Outsourced!... (Revolt Magazine, 2021). His poems appear in Philippines Graphic, Philippines Free Press, Protean, Poets Reading The News, Line Rider Press, Radius, Unlikely Stories Mark V, I am not a silent poet, and elsewhere. 

TABLE FOR ONE

by Bonnie Proudfoot

Warm some olive oil, let it spread  

slowly across the bottom of a saucepan,

sauté chopped garlic, watch bubbles form 

around the edge of each morsel,

chop red pepper, some mushrooms,

some onions, use bite sized pieces, watch 

them soften, watch the onions turn 

golden, use vegetables so fresh 

that they offer up their essence 

to the sauce, add some chopped tomatoes, 

crush basil leaves between your palms, 

add a dash of red wine, fresh ground pepper, 

meanwhile bring salted water to a rolling boil,

add vermicelli or linguini, stir as the steam

fills the air, inhale. Then one by one

subtract the smells, the extra virgin olive oil,

the garlic infusion, onion, mushrooms,

the tomatoes ripe and juicy, 

the warm semolina, shaved parmesan, 

subtract the taste too, so the pasta

tastes like paper, the sauce, some warmish swill,

the vegetables add a bland kind of texture,

something to chew on, softer than stones,

sort of, the red wine is not worth the cost,

not really worth the trouble of decanting,

swirling. Subtract the guests at the table, 

add candles where they used to sit, 

relatives, neighbors, doctors and nurses, 

songwriters, teachers, students, bartenders,

barbers, and servers, 900,000 Americans.

Feed the birds, set the table for one,

watch clouds move across the sky,

say Mass, say Kaddish, say Grace,

try to remember how it used to taste.

 

 

Bonnie Proudfoot’s fiction and poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Rattle Poets Respond, and in many journals. Her novel Goshen Road (Swallow Press, 2020) was selected by the WNBA for its Great Group Reads and long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway award. Her first chapbook of poems, Household Gods (Sheila-Na-Gig Press), is forthcoming in  Summer of 2022. 

AS THE ANGELS PASS

by Alejandro Escudé

The coronavirus builds a far-reaching ladder-like apparatus from core helical amino acids (green) in its spike protein that latch on to its host cell, leading to infection. A computer model is simulating these dynamics on Longhorn, the subsystem of the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Credit: Numan Oezguen, Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine. —Phys.Org

I’ve been trying to write you, Covid-19.

The suddenness of the tree is more tree-like

after you and yesterday a woman told me

she preferred taking the elevator alone. 

I didn’t look her way when she said that, 

too tired to acknowledge the statement. 

The CDC says that the air is a ladder full 

of virus, but I already knew that, having 

climbed it like Jacob up to heaven and 

having seen the angels traveling up and 

down it wearing white satin masks, six feet 

apart from one another as they pass, the ladder

wide enough to allow for their wingspans.

I tried not to look at their eyes, furrowed

brows like their human counterparts, a bottle

of sanitizer at the base of the shaky steps.

I’ve been trying to write you, Covid-19.

Write you into the day after tomorrow

and write you into yesterday, when I found

myself in an auditorium with teacher

colleagues listening to the priest lead us 

through a mass as the rain fell and no one 

knew the sequestered work that lay ahead, 

how our hands would turn into hearts, 

sweaty, red, pulsing, our minds become 

oceans of solitude. I’ve been trying 

to write you, Covid-19. Letters afloat 

in the air like germs, words freshened 

by fear. If I write fast enough Covid-19, 

I figure maybe I can stay ahead of you 

as you swim the air, aloft, riding our 

anxious breaths, the teeth-life of humor, 

the tongue-bond of our historic griefs.

I’ve been trying to write you, Covid-19,

as you scrape clean our liminal spaces, 

wicked seed, atomic salt pillar, icepick.

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.

ON THE ALTAR

by Jacqueline Jules 

                                                                             

Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas— and likely in world history—has been discovered on Peru's northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic. More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow of what was then the sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire. —Kristin Romey, National Geographic, April 26, 2018. Photograph by Gabriel Prieto.

                                                                 

The remains of children and llamas in Peru
reminds me of Abraham, how he didn’t argue
for Isaac the way he did for Sodom and Gomorrah,
how he acquiesced, traveling three days as commanded,
building an altar, binding his son.  Imagine
Isaac’s terrified eyes until an angel appears
with new instructions.

Which brings me back to the bodies in Peru,
breastbones bent to extract 140 hearts
offered to appease an angry god, demanding
what’s most precious as ultimate bribe.

Like a folktale reinvented around the globe,
sacrifice is not confined to geographic region.
From ancient times, somehow humans have believed
we have to kill to demonstrate devotion.

When the angel told Abraham to offer a ram instead,
it was more than a revelation, it was a weaning.
Spiritually, we were babies, still sucking
on our first source of sustenance.

Think of how we despaired later on,
when the Temple was destroyed and
we were told we couldn’t burn animals
anymore. What can we put on the altar now?
We cried. How do we please now?

The answer still seems to baffle us.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field Trip to the Museum, Stronger Than Cleopatra, and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including TheNewVerse.News, The Rising Phoenix Review, What Rough Beast, Public Pool, and Gargoyle.

CHURCH CALL

by Antony Johae

Image source: City-Data

It was Orthodox Easter and the church was full.
The chanting of prayers stretched into the night.
The celebrants sat, then rose to sing
Crossing themselves in three-fold Love.
They awaited the glorious hour of twelve
When Christ would rise in saving Grace
And all would cry that He was risen.

Next to me a man with a phone
placed between us on the pew
he looking down at it constantly
and when his hand stretched out to it
it lit as though at his command,
then out when he withdrew his hand
as though its charge had gone – and slept.

He turned to me when the mass was done,
shook my hand with a friendly grip.
“Emad’s my name, I’m Syrian born.
And you, I think, from London – right?”
I told him I came from Colchester town
but he’d heard only of the Manchester team.
We chatted for a while about this and that
the church emptying as we sat.
Then he made to go. “Your phone,”
I said, it lying silent still.
Aghast at his forgetting
he picked it up and it at once
lit up, he whispering keenly,
“I’m waiting for a call from God.”


Antony Johae is a freelance writer and divides his time between Lebanon and England.