BLOOD ISLAND

by Sheikha A.

Mohammed Hajjar/Associated Press

''The [US-sponsored proposal for a] ceasefire would evolve into a permanent end to hostilities and the release of all hostages in a second phase. A final stage would see the launch of a major reconstruction effort.'' —The Guardian, June 12, 2024

This planet will become a museum;

the future nodes of our past karma

will live in corridors without walls, 

where displayed in liquid sunsets 

will be an imagined version of blood 

because it will no longer exist: extinct 

artefact impossible to save for relic. 

Humans will be dissolved vapour 

from a combustion that was meant 

to enforce power; and, neutralists 

chose to write words to write-off

histories. Our veins will be draped

like decorative tinsel over our future. 

The dominant climate being eternal 

outrage, and no one to alter the code 

to turn back time to halt the rockets 

in the skies. Ahlan wa Sahlan, we 

greeted ourselves into their homes, 

and then eviscerated. Ma’afi mushkela, 

we will now help rebuild it from scratch.

Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her work appears in a variety of literary venues, both print and online, including several anthologies by different presses. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Vietnamese, Greek, Arabic, Polish, Italian, Albanian and Persian.

RELICS

by Anne Harding Woodworth

“We have found a holy thing in a chest,”

said lead archaeologist Professor Gülgün Köroğlu.

“It is a piece of a cross.” UPI.com, August 2, 2013

Photos, undated and curled,
4x6s, 5x7s, lie out in the garage
in a metal chest, some framed, some loose,
some stained with wine and oil,
places miles away with names forgotten,
forgotten eyes and smiles,
pieces of you and me that have lain buried
decades, centuries, millennia,
to be remembered in swabs of saliva
from the inside of a cheek someday.
They will ask: who were our mothers?
when did we live? how did we die?
From the photos nothing will be known
of cracked ribs, nothing of teeth
(though they’ll say we ate grains, of course).
And what about the nutshells
at the bottom of the chest?
Carbon 14 will determine that squirrels
entered it a half-life ago. And surely
it’s the squirrels that gnawed
that rough slat of wood among the photos
with its ancient glyphs of black ink along the edge,
a stick that measured, or so they will say,
the height and width of a holy thing.


Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of four books of poetry and two chapbooks. Her work is widely published in literary journals and on line in the U.S. and abroad. She divides her time between the mountains of Western North Carolina and Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the poetry board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.