MOTIVES

by Abby Caplin

My neighbor has nodded to The Goon, some policies 
he approved of—arresting students in despair  
over genocide, mass firings, unmarked vans 
pulling people off our streets here, in America, 
and sending them to concentration camps. 
The Goon breathes on his mirrors and people 
quickly evaporate. But what really motivates 
my neighbor is his bank account, his investments 
dying like those rockets exploding over the gulf 
of American debris, so now 
he’s finally speaking up. It’s kind of fun, 
my amusement for the day, seeing him 
chided on social media by the Faithful, 
who say pipe down, in six months you will see 
how wonderful your life will be.

Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared in AGNI, The MacGuffin, The New Verse News, Pennsylvania English, Salt Hill, Stirring, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2024 and a nominee for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Abby is a physician and the author of A Doctor Only Pretends: Poems about illness, death, and in-between.

THE TERRORIST

by George Salamon

Rahul Gandhi delivered a lecture at Cambridge University [February 28, 2023] on “Learning to Listen in the 21st Century.” Recounting how the yatra [the march he recently led through India] changed him, Gandhi said the interactions with the people who held his hand during the yatra trusting him as a brother and confided in him changed him as a politician, his perspective. As the yatra entered Kashmir, Gandhi said, "As I was walking, a guy came up and showed me a few men standing nearby. He told me they are militants. I thought I was in trouble because in that situation militants would kill me. But they did not do anything because this is the power of listening.” —Hindustan Times, March 3, 2023

Can anyone ever reach you?

Would we have to dissolve

into the white hot fire inside

of you to see you?

Would you talk with us then,

touching the rivers of fire

cooling in our own blood 

so we too become weightless

like you, no longer capable of

joy or grief, and rise for the

journey that unbinds us and

knows of no return?

Most of us remain weighed 

down, unable or unwilling to

submit to the exuberance of

terror that nothing can appease.

Terrorism is not merely an act

of terror, but also one of

nihilism

Its fire burns all—motivation,

victim and terrorist.

George Salamon recalls reading Hermann Rauschning's 1939 book TheRevolution of Nihilism meant as a warning by depicting Hitler's National Socialism as, at least in part, a "revolution of nihilism," a pact between leader and people for destruction and self-destruction.