WHAT POPE LEO MIGHT BE THINKING

by Lynne Barnes

Your mother was ill and away

when you were very little.

Did this mean that one of your

foundation beams was laid out as clay,

creating that listing psychic gait

that seems to have hobbled you

since toddlerhood?

 

Your early language threw darts

of defense against harm inside

your family’s nest of punishment

alternating with neglect.

You began sharpening knives

of revenge, destructiveness

back then, just to survive.

As you matured, you were mentored

by those who were traumatized like you.

 

Oh, if only your resilient spirit had been

gifted just a little more warmth

at your first hearth, perhaps your sense of

self-worth would not have become pea-sized,

inside and protected by, a hot air balloon.

Heated molecules of fear inflate

that bubble of space around your core.

 

Your borders are so thin and vulnerable

that you must strike first, slur people away

to feel safe, and your re-tells of conversations

all have others referring to you as sir.

 

You use loser, lowlife, liddle, lightweight,

for others. And for yourself you say

tremendous, perfect, winner, greatest,

and speak with clueless pride

that other humans kiss your ass.

 

You, dear sir, learned so early to strike first,

before anyone could breach your fragile border,

see the size of your ego infirmity,

but now, power has enriched, fused your childhood’s

uranium grains into a global nuclear cruelty.

 

We must fight, drain your power, disarm you whose wounds

block you from the language of human love and care.

As we face off we’re terrified, but also Sad!—witnessing

a fellow human walled off from the beauty of empathy as prayer.

Lynne Barnes is a retired psychiatric nurse and librarian who has lived in San Francisco since 1969. Her poetry memoir, Falling into Flowers (Blue Light Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY8 MARCH 2022

by Mary K O'Melveny

Today, please celebrate all

the women we have lost.

In every war and cease fire.

On slaver’s ships. On thirsty

desert treks to walled borders.

In back-alley rooms without

anesthesia. Locked in basements,

without papers or escape routes.

Asleep in bed. Hitching a ride.

Nursing bruises or starving babies.

 

Our losses rise like mountain peaks.

Ukrainian women huddle in subways,

clutch children, family pets, a few

hastily gathered objects from lives

they will likely never know again

or tattered photographs of loved ones

they may never see again. Even in

safer worlds, friends die of causes

that repurposed money, refocused

attention could have remedied.

 

Some fade away from neglect,

inattention, dreams downsized

by school guidance counselors,

religious zealots, patriarchy.

Others drop dead without a whimper

on a sun-dappled afternoon. One friend’s

memories vanished by midnight

stroke; another’s by subtle daily

erasures. Open our mouths wide in

praise of all. Let songbirds loose.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

INTERIOR

by Dale Ritterbusch

Image source: U.S. Air Force

Two dogs bark back and forth, a common
interruption in summer, but this a cold
night in March, still a foot, maybe more, of snow
on the ground.  He listens, stops thinking
for a moment, turns back to his book,
but nothing holds his attention.  Returned from
a long trip to the interior of a place
he had never been before, he
wants to reflect yet at the same time rid himself
of everything he’d seen: a man bit by a venomous snake
who just sat down and waited;
long worms white and thin as spaghetti
swimming like sea snakes in the drinking water;
bodies carved with machetes,
their limbs swelled in the sun like bratwurst;
and children living in the ruins
of a colonial mission, suspicion in their eyes
when any adult walked near.  These were all
things he’d known or heard of before, of course,
no matter where he traveled or when.  Field workers,
maimed and limbless because of mines, neglect, political
philosophy, it didn’t matter.  Better to stay home
and read about the world, to let considered reflection
or a splendid forgetting get in the way,
like that small boy in the road
the convoy didn’t brake for, because no one
stops for anything in that place


Dale Ritterbusch is the author of two collections of poetry, Lessons Learned (1995) and Far From the Temple of Heaven (2005).  He is a Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where he teaches creative writing and literature.  Currently he is the Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English & Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy.