HANDLER'S HANDS

by Michelle DeRose

First skin shrivels

without touch. Parent's

palm to baby's back

an initial prayer

for safe-keeping, offered

in heart's rhythm.

 

How maimed the hand 

that releases the leash

on a dog trained to maul.

Strokes fur to praise puncture,

urges sic, not stay.

Fingers turned incisors

on blue fields of fifty

rip red strips

on a father's back,

pierce our beating core.

A member of a foster family for newborn wards of the state of Illinois as she grew up, Michelle DeRose witnessed first-hand how simple touches soothed some of the many infants her mother nurtured. A life-long dog-lover and -rescuer, she still wonders if she and her husband rescue dogs or they rescue them. The perversion of this most basic of communication--love and calm conveyed when one living being gently touches another--blatantly revealed in ICE's actions in Washington state against Wilmer Toledo-Martinez should repulse us all.

RUST BELT

by Steve Deutsch

Sure, we loved the hats and hoopla
the rhythmic chants of lock her up,
but we are not a stupid people.
We know full well this patchy place
between the slag heaps
and the scrub pine--
these crumbling houses perched behind
the padlocked plant once known
for truck tires,
will never be great—
or even good.

You say rust belt
and mean the measure
of empty factories
and gutted storefronts.
The jobs bled out.
The eyesores left behind to moulder.
But the rust is mostly in us.
Too many years of children
born to little hope.
Too many years of promises
from windbags in dingy union halls
and air-conditioned buses
painted red, white, and blue.

This afternoon, I take my maul
to the wood pile
by the rusted chain link fence.
Crisp and clear,
It is a fine day to bust things up--
And the making
of that splintered shattered kindling
with a body that burns
is as near as I will ever come to joy.

Steve Deutsch, a semi-retired practitioner of the fluid mechanics of mechanical hearts, lives with his wife Karen in State College, PA.  He has published most recently in Misfit Magazine, Eclectica magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, The Drabble and TheNewVerse.News.