DILEMMA

by Joe Amaral

The large, bold woodcut image of a supplicant male slave in chains appears on the 1837 broadside publication of John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery poem, "Our Countrymen in Chains." The design was originally adopted as the seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England in the 1780s, and appeared on several medallions for the society made by Josiah Wedgwood as early as 1787. —Library of Congress

Six minutes until game time
and the anthem is about to begin.

I’m afraid to kneel for inequality
in front of 11,000 drunk people

holding their hands half-heartedly
over hearts awaiting the start of

a collegiate soccer game where voice
rather than tangible action counts.

I want to avoid the hostile sneers of fans
awake in fake patriotism, ignorant to

police brutality. My kids follow the lead
of the crowd and stand. I ditch my family,

climbing concrete steps into the breeze-
way, my back to the flag, ducking into

a bathroom. The blood and soil floor is
piss-stained. I sort of kneel, listening as

the reverberation of a bad singer gravels
something antiquated and fragilely austere.

I feel for those going through the motions
dead-eyed. They know dutiful conformity

is an empty gesture unspoken. But a fist
in the air, a knee on the ground, now that

is no small token.

Joe Amaral works 48-hour shifts as a paramedic on the central coast of California. He has two young daughters, Zelia and Rui, and his wife Marina is a surgical nurse. They love spelunking outdoors, camping, traveling and hosting foreign exchange students. His writing has appeared worldwide in awesome places like 3Elements Review, Arcadia Magazine, Crow Hollow 19, The Good Men Project, The Rise Up Review and Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora. Joe won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award. 

THE NEW CURRICULUM

by William Aarnes

                        America First

At dinner tonight
our eighth-grader repeated

how all the kids just love
their Patriotism teacher.

She asked if we knew
that for centuries

people have misjudged
that Samaritan as good.

Each evening she seems
more and more suspicious

of our baffled looks,  
of our needing to have explained

something so self-evident
as the moral that only someone

alien to our way of life
would help a victim

who probably deserved
a worse beating than he got.


William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.

BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR

by Jean L. Kreiling






You gasp and smile at bright chrysanthemums
that bloom for just a moment in the sky,
and hardly give a thought to what becomes
of them, the black ash falling as they die.
But sometimes, buffeted by mighty booms
that follow flares of patriotic pride,
you think of patriots who met their dooms
amid such noise—red-white-and-blue’s dark side.
Why do we want to watch bombs burst in air?
Did Mr. Key imagine that we would?
That we’d perpetuate the din and glare
of combat?  Maybe we’ve misunderstood.
His anthem hailed a hard-won victory;
we’ve prettified the fires of tragedy.


Jean L. Kreiling is the author of the recently published collection, The Truth in Dissonance (Kelsay Books, 2014). Her work has appeared widely in print and online journals, including American Arts Quarterly, Angle, The Evansville Review, Measure, and Mezzo Cammin, and in several anthologies.  Kreiling is a past winner of the String Poet Prize and the Able Muse Write Prize, and she has been a finalist for the Frost Farm Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award.

SAND SONG OF MESOPOTAMIA

by Rob Cook

A wood thrush egg thrown out of the nest by a cowbird. (Image source: Tales From the Wild)

Today I wrote a song in which Syria moved its militia into a pregnant woman’s bed.

Today I wrote a song in which a shoe, and all the sinews enslaved to that shoe, were filled with swarms of infant IEDs.

Today I pollinated a song whose final flower with petals of butterfly warheads fled Iran.

Today I praised a song for the babies born with six mouths, six legs, six skinless stomachs, and a six-billion year half-life inside the furnace of every Iraqi sand tear.

Today, by destroying a song, I made sure there were enough beds and chairs to blunt a room’s nothingness, which means a never-ending scorpion’s thirst, its memory of the desert that doesn’t die.

Today I stole a song in which the homeless built houses and raised families and food that will continue growing inside their sunburned entrails.

Today I blamed a song in which the Midwestern snow originated from a drone’s healing circle many Pakistans away.

Today I excavated, from a plant’s groin, a song that infected the Madonna Mafia with a melodic sequence of sonar terrorism.

Today I exchanged a song for the terrorist elephants, the terrorist giraffes, the terrorist oxygen, the terrorist fern forests, the terrorist mercies of medicinal marijuana, the terrorist sunsets, the terrorist shark sleep, the terrorist carrots and celery and kale that do not leave the body, the intestinal photos of the Gaza Strip taken from the cries of a child, the war on shadows, the war on people who find enough to eat without having to plant pancreatic spores in the hells of the soil, the creek bed Lakota whose fully-subsidized drinking earns the status of enemy activity, and though I saved his name on a dollar that trusted me once, I won’t discuss the terrorist child helping a turtle find its little door in the terrorist grass.

Today I climbed to the top of a song that hid the houses inhabited by live chess pieces pillaged for money that can’t be comforted or fed or held in the hand.

Today I developed a song for the water as it died.

Today I protected a song for the water as it was ridiculed.

Today I harvested a song for the water hidden one carbon minute away in the mirages that revealed another child thriving from dehydration.

In the song I can locate the Syrian helicopter nests.

I can count all of the wind’s bodies.

I can count and remove those who’ve made it to the gas chambers of heaven.

In the song I can count the salvations taken from a child’s amputated leg and copy the Western patriotism that nourishes from far away his dirt dinners and his bomb wiring and the syringes used for drinking and for putting the rain back together.

I can abandon that song by deleting the shadows the child leaves unchecked as he crawls through the artillery-cold heroin forests of Afghanistan.

I can dismantle the song by betraying each bird when it sees the child leading his headless animals into the cruel churches of my hand.

Today I beat the last song to death with a bullet casing I stole from the rubble of all the songs that would never make anyone happy again.

Today I felt no remorse for the songs and their misplaced blessings.

Today I reported both hands for their terrorist ambitions—the one that grows its own grain and the one condemned for hiding every song inside the dust hospital where God sleeps by himself with the only feather that survived.

Today I promised I would protect his otherwise secure kingdom, safe because it remains empty except for the sins of a wood thrush weeping


Rob Cook's work has recently appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Zoland Poetry, Aufgabe, Rhino, A cappella Zoo, Caketrain, Weave, and Best American Poetry 2009. His most recent book is Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade. He lives in the East Village where he co-edits Skidrow Penthouse with Stephanie Dickinson.

ON ASPERITY STREET

by Gail White





My deep Southern family
all loved to eat:
Thanksgiving dinners
and barbecued wieners
and fish fries with hushpuppies
in summer's heat.
We were just middle class
but we made both ends meet
and we put on no airs
but we did have our pride,
and nothing to hide
on Asperity Street.

Our patriotism
did not need a push
below Mason-Dixon--
we voted for Nixon,
we voted for Bush
(even W. Bush).
We didn't drive Cadillacs,
didn't wear fur,
but all of us knew
who our ancestors were.
Adultery always
was very discrete
and no one was gay
(or at least didn't say)
and our drunks drank at home
on Asperity Street.

We respected ourselves
when our fortune went smash
and we looked down on people
who couldn't pay cash. 
We gave up our steaks
but we still paid the rent
and the government (Yanks)
never gave us a cent
Whatever our plight
we stood on our own feet. 
We looked out for ourselves
and owed nobody thanks,
but formed into ranks
of the Christian and white,
the politically right
and the forces of light
on Asperity Street.


Gail White is a frequent contributor to journals favorable to rhyme.  She is the featured poet in the first issue of Light on-line and winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Prize for 2012.  She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.