ANOTHER LION MEETS WINTER

by Jennifer M Phillips

Time to step back from your long labors, Joe,
and let the eager young ones try their hands.
You've kept the long watch safe all night, we know,
and spared the ship of state from bergs and sands.
Heed the prophet's words, predicting, at his finish,
"another will increase, and I must diminish."
 
Your whole career you've served the working jack,
walked the union picket-line, yanked foreign jobs home,
foreseen future industries, retooled the work,
and understood such tasks are never done.
How it pains the industrious will to step away
before well-laid plans arrive at light of day.
 
It goes against your conscientious grain
to leave unfinished what's urgently needed
for this time of tempestuous fire and intemperate rain,
but the ground is prepared and a good harvest seeded.
Trust our resilient future, its competent folk,
to find new pathways for new repairing work.
 
You've fought for justice, remedy, and franchise
on an uphill slope and seen strong weapons shattered,
and though, as always, demons and enemies rise,
you've braced to hold the line when it has mattered.
Now there is a rank of fresh supply behind.
Fall back with honor. Trust the guiding Mind.
 
Democracy feels a fragile edifice
that monks must sweep away when prayers are done
like a painting in sand that time and wind erase.
One God-breathed moment: hearts are not the same.
See: the fresh art commences, the template resurrects;
renewed hope finds voice, as the Spirit directs.
 
O world-sorrow always with us, wars that never end,
but flurry like grackle flocks from one tree to another;
Many losses borne; retirement's one more to mend.
Your back is strong, your loves close by, your  team calls you brother.
you've led us by your best lights, and now will lead in this.
Believe that a gallant soul is never purposeless.

Jennifer M Phillips is a bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower, with two chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (Blurb, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Phillips' work has appeared in over 100 journals, and is currently twice-nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize.

RISKY

by Colette Tennant

People walk past a crater from the explosion in Mira Avenue (Avenue of Peace) in Mariupol on March 13. (Evgeniy Maloletka/AP via The Washington Post, March 15, 2022)

streets filled with rubble,

a bombed maternity hospital, pregnant women

bloodied, lying on gurneys in a swirl of confusion,

Sasha, a baby goat with broken front legs,

trying to nurse a vet tech’s ear.

Her owner promised she’d return for her

because she loves her.

 

We watch the news from Ukraine –

refugees bundled against late-winter cold,

In between these stories, news channels

run commercials for various cures –

Nucala for severe asthma sounds great,

but it might cause shingles.

Trelegy treats COPD yet increases

the risk of thrush, pneumonia

and osteoporosis.

Farxiga, for chronic  kidney disease,

could lead to dehydration, fainting, weakness,

genital redness and swelling, and hypoglycemia. 

 

It’s a tricky balance,

the cure and its reaction, so

military experts sit with newscasters,

their hands folded on the studio table.

They discuss various scenarios

for how to help Ukraine, each one

peppered with what ifs.

One possible cure – establish a no-fly zone

unless Putin reacts with chemical weapons.

Supply warplanes to the Ukrainians,

order an airstrike on that 40-mile-long convoy,

but any of those moves might start World War III.

It’s a terrible quandary,

this war we watch between commercials –

trying to find a remedy for this devastation,

knowing the reaction may be awful.

 

Colette Tennant is an English professor living in Salem, Oregon. She has two books of poetry: Commotion of Wings, published by Main Street Rag, and Eden and After, published by Tebot Bach. Her most recent book, Religion in The Handmaid’s Tale: a Brief Guide, was published in September, 2019 to coincide with Atwood’s publication of The Testaments. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in various journals, including Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Ireland Review, and Southern Poetry Review.

NOBODY SAID FLEAS

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Could America’s pandemic response be any more medieval? 

—Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, June 30, 2020

The Great Mortality produced, when it came,
a five-year torment for the Gothic mind.
Wise men—there were not wise women then—
proposed these causes: conjunct planets, corruption,
close-by swamps, over-consumption of fruit, dung.
Further, they condemned corpses rotting in ditches
or in makeshift graveyards. Folk understood their murrain
as the footprint of God’s fury, a penalty for their lapses.
Nobody said fleas. Nobody said rats.
If a citizen sprouted buboes there were nostrums:
banishing foul “vapors,” balancing ill “humors,”
drinking urine, yours or others’, holding a dead snake
or a live hen against your afflicted skin, burning spices,
using potions: Unicorn or theriac, Four Thieves Vinegar
or if you were well off, powdered emeralds.
The pious tottered along scourging themselves.
Most cures contained a fair amount of opium.
To stop the spread of plague without a remedy,
the Fourteenth Century would separate the sick from well
for 30, then for 40 days under the law of quarantine.
The US tried isolation for a month or two, then gave it up.
Despite the pestilence, news from the government was
they were on it, but since it exploded as a novel virus,
what could they promise? After that, they faked the data,
muzzled experts, gas-lit, spread the blame, and when their
constituents asked, without a remedy, how do we survive
contagion? Their answer was, wear masks, stay home
or keep six feet apart. However puzzled, folk understood
they must persist in using the regime's meager directions,
or perish en masse. Proving our regime no more advanced
than our forefathers, salvation just past what politicians
can imagine, just past their careless, medieval reach.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks. Her poems have appeared on line and in anthologies.