END OF THE LINE

by Howard Winn

Chinese Communist Party leaders are afraid that the Dalai Lama will not have an afterlife. Worried enough that this week, officials repeatedly warned that he must reincarnate, and on their terms. Tensions over what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 79, dies, and particularly over who decides who will succeed him as the most prominent leader in Tibetan Buddhism, have ignited at the annual gathering of China’s legislators in Beijing. . . . Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet. --New York Times, March 11, 2015

The train has reached the
station and will be taken
out of further service.
All passengers please
proceed to the platform.
It is reported as possible
that the Dalia Lama may not
choose reincarnation bringing
to a close the ageless reign
of his timeless essence in order
to thwart the Red Capitalists
now milking crony connections
to make the nouveau riche of
the modern China connected
to the high end real estate
of London, Paris, and New York
and who desperately still need
their own dogma for the Tibetan
region the Chinese covet as
also prime real estate where
they can park the excess
Chinese now filling their
historical land and deposit their
young like money laundering
shady deals in the best Ivies
and yet they desire Shangri La
as their very own and this
is what the 14th Dalai Lama
will short circuit if his spirit
says no more and no return
in the new body of some
favored infant for number 15
no matter what the descendants
of Mao wish they can only pretend.

Howard Winn's poetry and fiction has been published recently in Dalhousie Review, Galway Review, Taj Mahal Review, Descant (Canada), Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Evansville Review, and Blueline. He has a B. A. from Vassar College and an M. A. from the Stanford University Writing Program.

ABRAHAM'S PLAN, SEPTEMBER 2014

by Jed Myers

Detail of “Abraham” (1502) by Filippino Lippi at the Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

I might beseech Ishmael, by my old body’s language,
to take the cushioned seat by the window, the one
where I think he’d be the most comfortable. But the sun
in his eyes at that angle? I don’t know. And the carnage
in midday glare—how could that view leave him sanguine
to talk with Isaac at all? I could draw the shade,
or suggest the carpeted floor, like where they once played
under both mothers’ gaze. Oh, how could they hang on
to those days like I do? Isaac will call for a chair
too far from his brother, not in the same light. So I’ll offer
dark tea, sage water, or something stronger,
to soften the crystalline disdain in the air.
This could be the day they discover, neither is tougher
and neither can have his way. Or must we go longer?


Jed Myers is a Philadelphian living in Seattle. Two of his poetry collections, The Nameless (Finishing Line Press) and Watching the Perseids (winner of the 2013 Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), are being released in 2014. He won the 2012 Mary C. Mohr Editors’ Award offered by Southern Indiana Review, and received the 2013 Literal Latte Poetry Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Fugue, Atlanta Review, Crab Creek Review, Sanskrit, South 85, The Tusculum Review. 

LOST FLIGHT

by David Chorlton

Between the disappearance
and the find, there is a time
imagination flies
to an altitude above
unhappiness or discontent

and circles the globe
following the possibility
that nothing is wrong, that
the pilot simply tired
of gravity and when
his announcement was broadcast
in the cabin, all

the passengers applauded.
A wonderful lightness
took hold at a cruising speed
of survival with a view
down on the earthly struggle
where bad news

is the only kind expected,
but waiting for a signal
we can watch

for the perpetual flight
passing overhead: a silver
arrow pointing
at beyond, at
wherever it is
such freedom ends.

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and still sees his surroundings with an outsider's eye. This helps his writing projects, which include a new poetry collection,"The Devil's Sonata," from FutureCycle Press.