INSIDE THIS MOMENT

by Sarah Mackey Kirby

Image: A woman sits while people cross a nearby destroyed bridge as they evacuate the city of Irpin, northwest of Kyiv, during heavy shelling and bombing on March 5, 2022, 10 days after Russia launched a military in vasion on Ukraine. (Photo by Aris Messinis / AFP) via Planet Custodian

live the lakes,

the tethered sun,

the warm bread

slathered thick

with morning slaughter.

 

The trees refuse to

keep their distance,

limbs outstretched to catch

drops of raining hurt.

Spray us first, they say.

 

We’ve been here before.

Our trunks are strong

and old

and know

the ways of bombs.

 

The ones of us who’ll go

will grow again. From mud.

From bullet-casing ground.

Seedling sprouts through

crimson ash at dawn.

 

We are tired, the trees say,

but we’ve been made for poets

to scrawl about

and cry about

as we stay firmly placed.

 

The people wear their shoes

with newfound purpose.

The wind blows. The rivers flow.

The moon glows. They all know.

They remember.

Sarah Mackey Kirby grew up in Kentucky. She is the author of the poetry collection The Taste of Your Music (Impspired, 2021). Her work appears in Impspired Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, The New Verse News, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She holds an MA in Teaching and a BA in Political Science from the University of Louisville.

KĀKOLŪKĪYAM

by Nicholas Katsanis

An Afghan soldier pops up from his tank to signal a U.S. warplane bombing Al Qaeda fighters in the White Mountains of Tora Bora in Afghanistan on Dec. 10, 2001.(David Guttenfelder / Associated Press via the Los Angeles Times)

The owls and the crows are at war

Embroiled in bitter struggle for control of their dominion

Ill-defined by borders and perceived advantages

The owls are old and therefore wise

Or so they tell themselves to make-belief

Convince their childrens’ children of their superiority

Supremacy of poise and purpose, they persist

Until foibles morph into fact,

Poorly begotten truth whose tangled roots are lost—conveniently—in antiquity

The crows are young, confident, energetic

The skies’ embrace belong to them, they preach

For they are fast and nimble

Intimidating in their murder, or so they teach their children

Schooling them in the virtue of their virility, their singularity of purpose

The owls and crows are at war

Bickering over holes in trees

Despite the endless forest that surrounds them

Beak on beak and claw on claw

They decimate each other’s numbers

Each pointless victory and defeat

Treated by triumphalism and defiance in equal measure

The owls’ corpses are offered eternal absolution

The crows’ mangled bodies heavenly promise of peace and honey

Both declaring divine providence over the Final Rights

Both bereft of true wisdom

The owls and the crows were at war

Embroiled in bitter struggle for control of their dominion

Until the lightning in the forest burned

And the rain fell upon the smoldering stumps

And there was nothing left to war over

Author’s Note: Inspired by the Panchatantra collection of classic Indian fables, this adaptation examines the current/perpetual secular and religious tension in Afghanistan post-collapse.

Nicholas Katsanis is an author and poet of magical realism. You can find some of his micro fiction (50-word stories, stories in 100 words) as well upcoming pieces in Literary Stories and elsewhere (including magazines that do not have the word ‘Story’ in their titles). He lives and works in southern Florida. Follow him on Twitter @nicholaskatsan1

DIASPORA SPEAKS

by Indran Amirthanayagam

A Palestinian girl in the rubble of her home in Gaza.Credit: Fatima Shbair/Getty Images via The New York Times, June 2, 2021

Who controls the narrative, the media space, the buzz?

Who dominates headlines, chats with editors, balances

the story? Who reduces trauma to numbers, who has not

experienced pulverizing stones, his parents' home razed

at close hand? You and I who read together in safe

countries, saved by fleeing parents in search of peaceful

neighborhoods to raise their children. Now, we face a cousin

across the water crying I want to be a doctor, a nurse,

to save my family, now this. What am I to do with this?

With this stone, this shrapnel, this broken washbasin?

What am I to do, to play hide and seek with ghosts?

Do something, people. Stop the killing now. Stop

the killing here, everywhere. Stop the killing.

The poem has a purpose, these words are not useless.

Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020) and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). Indran Amirthanayagam's Blue Window/ Ventana Azul, translated by Jennifer Rathbun,  is about to be published by Lavender Ink/Diálogos Books. In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.

WHEN WE'LL ALL MARCH TOGETHER

by George Salamon

Detail of the cover of Katie Mack's book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking).

Does it all end, or can we keep on in our merry way indefinitely?… We have doom and destruction of our own to worry about, arriving faster and faster… Plague is rampant. The Arctic Circle is on fire. Still, I find it helpful—not reassuring certainly, but mind-expanding—to be reminded of our place in a vast cosmos. —James Gleick in his review of Katie Mack's book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) in The New York Times, August 4, 2020

Walked out of my confinement to
Gaze at the sun, moon and stars,
Colossi of our universe, they
Make our world go round,
Turning the wheels, rising
Above our shrinking horizon.
We touch their grandeur to
Sustain our hope and striving.
Shivering, I crash instead into
Our rush into losing everything
There is to lose: day, night, the
Center itself, I ask if our purpose
In the universe is found in such
Disposition, or lost by it as well.


George Salamon lives in St. Louis, MO and most recently has contributed to One Sentence Poems, The Asses of Parnassus, and TheNewVerse.News.