THE SOUND OF THE WELL

by Shirin Jabalameli

Beneath a cracked and ancient dome,

the wind slips through fissures,

circling the hull of a stranded ship.

Coffee grows cold upon the table,

and the Sufi, in quiet prayer,

speaks to the blackness of a crow.

From the dragon’s mouth

a rope of light leaps forth

onto masks that melt, one by one,

their cracking faces ringing

like a forgotten church bell

through the air of poverty’s hell.

The city,

a fractured mirror,

sees its own face in a thousand shattered pieces

and screams.

The broken tick-tock of a clock

scratches the latch of time’s doors,

and from a silent well

the voice of a child rises,

still remembering the name of their mother.

The crow spreads its wings,

and the wind carries the scent of stale bread.

The Sufi stirs the coffee in a whirlpool

and with a sip drinks the world anew.

Shirin Jabalameli is a multifaceted Iranian artist, poet, painter, photographer, and writer. She has authored books including Crows Rarely Laugh, Apranik, and 101 Moments. Her latest work, an illustrated poetry collection titled 25 Fell from the Frame was recently published. Her poems have appeared in international journals such as Braided Way Magazine (USA), The Lake (UK), and The New Verse News (USA).

Shirin’s poem in its original Persian follows:

صدای چاه

زیر گنبدی ترک‌خورده

باد از شکاف‌ها عبور می‌کند

و بر شانه‌ی کشتی به گل‌نشسته می‌چرخد.

قهوه روی میز سرد شده است

و صوفی در سکوت

با سیاهی یک کلاغ مناجات می‌کند.

از دهان اژدها

ریسمان نور می‌جهد

بر ماسک‌هایی که یکی‌یکی

ذوب می‌شوند،

و صدای ترک‌خوردن چهره‌ها

چون ناقوس کلیسای فراموش‌شده

در هوای جهنم می‌پیچد.

شهر،

چون آینه‌ای ترک‌خورده،

چهره‌اش را در هزار پاره‌ی مخدوش می‌بیند

و جیغ می‌کشد.

تیک‌تاکِ از کارافتاده‌ی ساعت

کلون درهای زمان را می‌خراشد

و در چاهی خاموش،

صدای کودکی می‌پیچد

که هنوز نام مادرش را از یاد نبرده است.

کلاغ بال‌هایش را باز می‌کند

و باد بوی نمِ نانِ کهنه را می‌برد.

صوفی قهوه را در گرداب می‌چرخاند

و با جرعه‌ای جهان را دوباره می‌نوشد.

"A MESHUGGENEH IS ON THE LOOSE"

by Judith Terzi

& I'm sitting here with my morning

coffee watching a cockatiel 

slip tail feathers through his beak. One by

one. The ends have become ragged

with so much preening. "Rumba Poderosa"

by the band Incendio is playing 

on a cd. The bird begins to sing along, 

dance on his perch. He scurries

to the left, then rushes back to his usual

place in front of his big purple

mirror. You see, he imagines the music 

emanates from his constant mirror 

buddy. His identical twin. The bird is in love 

with his own image. I am in love 

with the bird. He sways back & forth to any 

music, but especially to a Latin beat. 

A rumba. A bolero. A tango. It's a kind 

of bird praying, a bird davening, 

you might say. While all this sashaying 

is going on, a committee is meeting 

in a sedate space on the opposite coast. 

You could say the nine members 

of the committee have been placed in a different 

kind of cage. One with carafes of

hot water & coffee, sweet rolls, bottled water.

No ladders, no pinwheels, no miniature 

crystal balls. The committee is subpoenaing 

witnesses, scratching every surface 

for any evidence anywhere data can be found. 

The bird is biting its cage bars in between 

chirps to "Rumba Poderosa." Rumba of power 

in front of his own image that he adores. 

I think he's calling me. I hear a wolf whistle 

while I'm writing this. "Let's get it 

over with," he's saying. "What's the holdup? 

A meshuggeneh is on the loose." 

Now he's started to preen his feet. He's biting 

his nails. The music has stopped. I'm 

eating a whole wheat bagel with cream cheese. 

I'm having a second cup of Joe. 

Judith Terzi is the author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay) as well as of five chapbooks, including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By and Casbah (Kattywompus). Her poetry appears in a wide array of journals and anthologies. A poem, "Ode to Malala Yousafzai," was included on a "Heroines" episode of BBC/Radio 3's "Words and Music." She taught French for many years in Pasadena, California, as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria. A new chapbook, Now, Somehow, will appear later this year. 

WAYS TO AVOID BEN SHAPIRO'S TWITTER DISDAIN

by CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue

Reinvent Mozart as a swastika.
Assert the superior caste of privilege-filled eyes,
while never mentioning your stigmatism.
Beige as the new black.
Be goddamned sure about something.
A hammer called reason to subvert any consideration,
Moral assumption as a knife to cut through the gray.
Go back in time and give Mohammed a hickey.
Dress all seed-vessels in the finest birthing habits.
Never look directly at those who rule us,
but use a mirror to avoid being turned
into stop motion playdough. Recite
The Pledge constantly under your breath:

There is a light that never burns out. I carry it 
under my tongue. When I stand on tiptoe, it will guide 
the unwashed through the wilderness.

CL Bledsoe is the author of seventeen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the novel The Funny Thing About… . He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs, with Michael Gushue, at https://medium.com/@howtoeven 

Michael Gushue is co-founder of the nanopress Poetry Mutual Press, and he co-curates the reading series Poetry at the Watergate. His work can be found in journals such as Indiana Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Gargoyle, The Germ, and American Letters & Commentary and his books are Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, Gathering Down Women, and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood (“a shabby and decidedly unhip neighborhood” —New York Times) of Washington, D.C. 

ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

by Scott C. Kaestner

Image source: The New York Times in solidarity with more than 350 newspapers editorializing today on the value of America’s free press.

The real enemy of the people are people

who don’t see themselves in other
people; in people unlike them
an undeniable commonality

in people our fate lies
people need other people
to hold up a mirror so as to say

“Listen people, we are one.”

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet and dream weaver who eats cereal twice daily. Google 'scott kaestner poetry' to peruse his musings and doings.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE MOSQUE

by Devon Balwit

Kristin Collins with the letter her son Abraham Davis sent to the Masjid Al Salam Mosque (Fort Smith, Arkansas) in apology for his actions. Davis had driven his friend to the mosque on which the friend drew swastikas and curses while Davis stood watch in the driveway.—The New York Times Magazine, August 26, 2017

“I wake up and look in the mirror and I just think, ‘Who are you?’”
 —Abraham Davis quoted in "The Two Americans,” 
The New York Times Magazine, August 26, 2017

I don’t know why I did it, why I did most things.
I wanted to be bigger, harder to squash. I didn’t even

do the drawing, just drove my friends to where they
scrawled the broken-winged Swastikas. When the police

came, later, no one was surprised. In fact, we all exhaled,
the cell a hole my life had been funneled towards. When

I wrote the mosque to forgive me, I startled myself. I never
expected they would, instead, just wanted to answer

the ghosts crowding my nights. I wanted to show
who I wasn’t. They forgave me. Now comes learning

how to forgive myself. Every day, I look in the mirror,
and I think: Who are you? I look myself in the eyes.

Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

AGAINST THE NEED TO WRITE POEMS IN THE AGE OF T***P

by Alan Walowitz

Photo Illustration by Jackie Friedman | Images courtesy iStock, Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Images via The Week

In poems the facts don’t seem to matter much
but these alt-facts just rip the poems right out of me—
the thought of madmen milling unvetted at our ports
to eat the still-beating hearts of our young
keeps me up long into the night, and sometimes gets so bad
I have to head downstairs for a late-night snack myself;
aliens hover at the polls ready to disguise themselves as the dead—
how can I make even a gesture toward a poem,
under these intolerable conditions.
Wordsworth knew it’s best to conjure up a lake lapping steady
and not fire up the hookah his friend had left as a house-gift,
though God know Coleridge has convinced me once or twice to try
and it’s worked nicely some dark and stormy nights
while waiting for an imagined visitor on business from Porlock.

Me, I prefer to know some things might be true—
the time on the clock should be approximately right,
then I can look outside and tell day from night,
though wrong from right has always been a tougher sell
in someone like me who likes to make stuff up.
But here they are the alt-facts lined up right outside my home
in pretty paper, ready to prop up whatever I might prefer to think—
a tsunami’s due that will make my property waterfront,
or a torrent of water slushed down any unsuspecting throat
will wash the truth right out of even the most innocent.
Whatever I feel, what joy, what many-splendored
wonders of this brave new world we’ve stepped into
across the threshold of the T***p-house mirror—
hell, there’s no longer reason to write a poem.

Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan’s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing. He’ll be reading at the Cornelia Street Café on Tuesday, March 7th at 6 pm.

HERE'S TO THE GREATNESS WE INAUGURATE

by Chris O'Carroll

The issues your wise tweets elucidate,
The tone you’ve done so much to elevate,
Lawsuits you’ll never settle (oh, but wait),
Women not hot enough to violate,
The torture you have pledged to reinstate,
The faith you feign but can’t quite fabricate,
The sanity you sometimes simulate –
These are the things that make our country great.

The faux respect world leaders cultivate
Now that a cartoon is a potentate,
The brownshirt crowd to which you gravitate,
The autocrats you hope to emulate,
Life-saving health care you’ll eliminate,
Your plastic swagger as you vacillate,
The bloated deity you venerate
In every mirror – these things make us great.


Chris O'Carroll has been the featured poet in Light, and has published poems in Angle, The Asses of Parnassus, The Orchards, Parody, and The Rotary Dial, among other journals.  D****d T***p has never called him "overrated."

IN THESE DESPERATE TIMES

by Joan Mazza 

Image source: WikiHow

I’ve taken desperate measures.
In my bedroom, I’ve hung a horseshoe
to prevent nightmares. Perhaps
I should take down the feathered
dreamcatcher gifted by a right-winged

lover. In these times, I say rabbit each day
on waking, consult the oracle
at the east end of the pond. It hops
away on Basho’s splash. I’ve taken up
a forked stick to walk the property
and search for water. It dips

everywhere. Pointing to the four directions,
I’ve drawn the number 8 in the ground,
added pebbles to the grooves—insurance
of good luck. Time to replenish my stock
of supplies. I’ve eaten through

my stash of dry and canned goods bought
when I feared Ebola, used up the sprays
for killer bees. I’ve dumped all the pots
with collected water for mosquitoes
breeding Zika. On my head, I plan

to make a nest to wear a ferret or a rat,
train it to defend my chastity and sacred
honor. I wear clothes inside out, careful
not to break a mirror, know empty vessels
rattle loudest. I drink quiet to calm down.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Slipstream, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art. 

HOLY HYPERBOLE, HILLARY!

by Jill Crainshaw





“I am Goliath and I will not be toppled by some sheep-herding
small fry! An eye for an eye.” A pompous fist-pump

pommels the air and pummels the bully pulpit preaching pretentious
promises of presumptive presidential potency. “Sticks and stones can’t

touch these bones and words are no worry either. Winners don’t
lose and I am not a

loser!” Whack! Thud. Kapow. ZZZZZZ----

---pop. ZING!

Ouch.

Penetrating porous clouds around his head
sling-shot slicing dicing slashing gashing backlashing

words of no worry to ballot-blessed bones unless

Ouch.

“Who dares to attack? I am invincible!”  Eeeee! Look. Behind
you. Through a glass dimly he sees

himself. Zinging demeaning
soliloquies. No boy David slinging stones. Just
himself. “Mini-Me staggers me!” “Holy hyperbole!  I think he shot
himself in the foot in his mouth.”

Ouch.

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Her poems have appeared in *82 Review and Five Magazine and in an anthology by Wicwas Press. She is also the author of a number of books on worship and theology.