HOMELESS

by John Valentine

Dharmik Vibes

What is madness but nobility of soul
at odds with circumstance?
—Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” 


At home once in the universe,
the old physicist
used to weave theories of everything
in the cat’s cradle
of his mind. How orderly the atoms
danced, how fleeting the
half-life of years. Wrapped now in rags,
his words spoken
only to the wind, he signs the language
of loss, hands tangled
in mudras, like a manic Buddhist, or an
operator at the
switchboard of chaos, pulling wires,
answering calls,
frantically making connections on the
streets
of the fallen.

John Valentine is a retired philosophy teacher living in Savannah, Georgia.

A HOUSE IN GAZA

by Christopher Woods

Shutterstock file photo

In her mind is the locket

She thinks about so much.

Inside it, wrapped in blue ribbon,

A single strand of black hair.

Her firstborn.

She can’t stop thinking about it,

That hair, how it would be

To see it again, how she might hold it,

Go back to the house

That disappeared

When the bombing began.

If she could know this hair again

Her memory might rest.

 

But she won’t open the locket.

She can’t.

Maybe it’s been too long,

The hair might dissolve in the air.

Maybe birds would carry it away.

 

No matter how much she wants to

She will not open the locket.

She keeps it hidden,

Safe in a drawer, in a room,

Inside a house on a small road,

In a dusty village that no longer exists.

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show Twelve from Texas was performed in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. His monologues have also been performed at The Invisible Theatre in Tucson and the Pro English Theatre in Kiev, Ukraine. He has received residencies from The Edward Albee Foundation and The Ucross Foundation.

A RECOLLECTION ON PEARL HARBOR DAY

by Katherine Leonard

It's blotchy the past

the silent man

in his uniforms

 

the child knows his withdrawn presence

but sometimes he would play

with her    for short bursts       when she was very little

 

he lived in a world of diesel and flame

oil and water mixed on the destroyer deck

bomb dropped where he stood 5 minutes before

 

gun turret melted metal and pieces of arm

face blood leg and black smoke

his men faceless except in his memory

 

daily    weekly            yearly the men lay 

submerged in his South Pacific 

they were with him through his submarine assignment

 

in the mouth of the River Kwai          bands of broken brothers

breaks the hearts of the survivors

breaking broken like metal shards 

 

until one day

that fragile plank holding those shiny dress

officer shoes broke

 

And he with that plank and metal splinters

sank too

consumed by the black rolling sea

 

of his mind now in command

of his hand

on the rope

 

Author's Note: Poem for my father, Commander Robert E. Leonard, USN Ret. who served in the South Pacific in WWII at a time when PTSD was unknown and silent men and women were numerous and all rejoiced mightily at the fall of fascism in Germany, in Japan and in Italy.

Katherine Leonard is the author of the chapbook Requiem for the Beekeeper (Bottlecap Press 2024). Her poems have been published in Sonora Review, Querencia Press Anthologies, Hole in the Head Review, Speckled Trout Review, FERAL, Allium and Stone Canoe among other journals and anthologies. She is a graduate of the Syracuse YMCA Writer's Voice (formerly Downtown Writers Center) Pro Program in poetry. She has been a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse/nurse practitioner. Her writing has been deeply influenced by time spent in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado for space and heat and Vermont and Maine for ice and clarity and by living in Washington, DC for lies and redemption. She is married to the woman with fire in her guitar.

FLACCID JUSTICE FOR MONSIEUR TOUT LE MONDE

an Erasure

by Betsy Mars

Dominique Pelicot and 50 Others Guilty in Rape Trial That Shook France: A court sentenced Mr. Pelicot to 20 years after he admitted to drugging and raping his wife, Gisèle, for nearly a decade, and inviting strangers to join him. The case has made her a feminist hero. —The New York Times, December 19, 2024

they appeared to represent a cross-section of men:
The court heard from their wives,
 parents, 
friends
and children, 
who mostly described them 
as kind people incapable of rape
 
after watching videos of them penetrating Ms. Pelicot 
while she lay inert, sedated and often snoring loudly 
the defendants didn’t think of those acts as rape 
 
among the terms they used were 
“involuntary rape,” 
“accidental rape” 
and disassociated rape:
“rape by body, but not mind”
every defendant fully knew

he had drugged his wife 

without her knowledge

a playful threesome

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. whose poems can be found in numerous online journals and print anthologies. She has two books, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-written with Alan Walowitz. Betsy is currently working on a full-length manuscript titled Rue Obscure.

LEVERAGED BY BRAIN ROT

by Mark Danowsky

Following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people had their say, we’re pleased to announce that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’… ‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”. —Oxford University Press, December 2, 2024

I remember the landscape 

before chatbots 

 

After all, it was

only two years ago 

 

My mind is a limited 

large language model 

 

I take in material

I share material

 

I forget if I took time

to synthesize the material 

 

My biases and missteps 

are not about extra fingers 

 

I fear The Paperclip Problem

less than I fear the race

 

This race has been trending 

towards the bottom 

 

We know major players 

but consider a dark horse 

 

It could all go sideways 

except for the 1%  

 

Meantime, we’re burning 

all available fuel 

 

The deafening buzz—endless 

noise on my mind

 

All I can talk about 

is what I consume 

 

While I remain aware 

I contain stories 

 

The storyteller in me

is trained by misdirection  

 

I mean the need to hold

irreconcilable truths 

 

While seeking the answer 

to some nebulous void within 

 

I know this brain rot

as a weak pulse 

 

I fear mediums 

and messages 

 

The troubling satisfaction 

of pulled attention 

My hacked mind 

knows susceptibility

 

Everything is content 

and I am a heavy user 

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is the author of four poetry books. His fifth book, Take Care, is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press.

LAUGHTER

by Joanne Durham

            in honor of Kamala Harris

 

Laughter floats across borders.
Laughter releases bitterness from my tongue.
Is it a crazy laugh or laughter for a crazy world? 
You can tell a lot by a laugh*.
 
Laughter doesn’t need to sit at the head of the table.
You can’t bulldoze laughter.
Laughter loosens clenched fists.
Laugh me into your fear. Who laughs alone?
 
Infinite peals of laughter fit on the head of a pin.
Rain of laughter bathes a breathless sky.     
Belly laughter lightens the mind.
Children aching from laughter never forget that joy.
 
A woman’s laughter sings, I am more than sorrow.
If laughter is a cackle, please, bewitch us.

 
*Comment by Harris’s Republican opponent in the 2024 Presidential election. 

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). She lives in the swing state of North Carolina where laughter is an important part of keeping up the fight.  

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

by Ferdi Wheeler

While people currently make better assistants than chatbots… A.I. can already do a good enough job handling many administrative tasks. Widespread use of chatbots could potentially shift the duties of executive assistants away from rote tasks and toward more strategic problem solving, or replace humans altogether. —Brian Chen, The New York Times, March 29, 2023

AI is rife now,

with its failings and its pre-eminence,

but as for the former,

there are many warnings:

like that  it is easily mistaken,

its facts are dodgy,

and it gives many explanations

of the same faulty kind;

well then, I think,

the engineers have recreated

the perfect human mind.

Ferdi Wheeler is a South African and retired archivist. He lives in Bloemfontein, a city in the Free State Province. He published in print and online in local magazines. His short stories and poems appeared lately on Litnet and Roekeloos—Plek van die Uitverkorenes. He writes in Afrikaans and English. Examples of his work can be viewed by Googling “Ferdi Wheeler Litnet.” He holds a Masters degree in Communication.

SALMAN: ELECTION

by Indran Amirthanayagam

“[Salman Rushdie’s wounds] were profound, but he’s [also] lost the sight of one eye... He had three serious wounds in his neck. One hand is incapacitated because the nerves in his arm were cut. And he has about 15 more wounds in his chest and torso. So, it was a brutal attack….The world is going through a very troubled period. I think nationalism is on the rise, a sort of fundamentalist right is on the rise… From Italy to… throughout Europe, Latin America and the US, where… half the country seems to think that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump. And they admire this man who is not only completely incompetent and a liar and a crook, but just a farce. It’s ridiculous.” —Andrew Wylie (Rushdie’s agent) in an interview with El País, October 22, 2022

 

Salman has lost

an eye, an arm

paralyzed, but

 

nobody has

stolen his mind;

he thinks freely,

 

sees, and turns

to see the rest of

what a man can,

 

gazing on the

horizon into

future time

 

on the cusp of

another election

where intolerance

 

rages at the gates

and in Congress,

and he directs

 

his other hand

to write.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

REBOUND

by Devon Balwit

A mind in a body, we want

the body not to suffer,

but bodies must learn

 

what illness is. To avoid

unpleasantness is to leave them

vulnerable to reinfection.

 

How tempting are blister-packed

nostrums when better

is to roll in our fever sweat

 

and full inflammation, each cell

a diligent student

of never again.

Devon Balwit is trying to put her final days of isolation to good use and is crossing her fingers against her own rebound.

SYCAMORE, SYCAMORE

by Sally Zakariya

“Today we published the results of this quantum supremacy experiment in the Nature article, ‘Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor.’ We developed a new 54-qubit processor, named ‘Sycamore,’ that is comprised of fast, high-fidelity quantum logic gates, in order to perform the benchmark testing. Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds, and from measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output.” —Posted on October 23, 2019 to the Google AI Blog by John Martinis, Chief Scientist Quantum Hardware and Sergio Boixo, Chief Scientist Quantum Computing Theory, Google AI Quantum. Photograph of the Sycamore processor by Erik Lucero, Research Scientist and Lead Production Quantum Hardware.

Hello world, things are changing.
What I knew only as a shag-bark tree—
Sycamore—now names computing
power beyond imagining, now quantum,
supreme, superlative, incomparable.

A dance of particles, tangling, entangled.
To Einstein, “spooky action at a distance.”
To me, complex mystery of mysteries,
wonder of intelligent wonders.

How can I comprehend such power
and speed, such limitless possibilities?
Like us prone to error, but unlike us
capable of brilliance beyond measure.

A human attempt to emulate creation?
Perhaps. Or is it proof how far our
mortal minds can reach?


Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is Muslim Wife (Blue Lyra Press, 2019). She is also the author of The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table.