WE WERE, WE ARE, AWAKE

by Jennifer M Phillips

The papyrus PHerc. 1018. Credit: Biblioteca Nazionale “Vittorio Emanuele III,” Napoli–Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale

We’re finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum’s lost library: A whole library’s worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Nearly 2000 years later, we can at last read these lost treasures. —New Scientist, October 14, 2025

We were here. We saw. We remember.

Some of us even write down what unfolds

and teach our children unerasable stories.

We are awake enough to discern

canes and walkers supporting grandmothers

from flagpoles used as battering rams and spears;

to tell rioters from tourists. Our hearing is keen

enough to hear death-chants, curses and threats

not mistaking them for cheers or exclamations of joy.

We know when a phony rendition

is substituted for fact and blared out to the world.

We recognized a gallows set up on the stairway,

a guard being crushed, from a simple push-and-shove.

We can tell sexual assault from a too-forward pass,

and incitement to violence from a rousing speech,

and even recorded these things on our thousand screens

and continue to share them, and store them for history.

Nothing can be covered up for ever. In an X-ray lab, 

in a particle collider, means has been found

to decipher carbonized scrolls in Herculaneum's

two-thousand-year-old library, roasted by heat

of Vesuvius's eruption, philosophy

not quite incinerated. Do not think

that you can now obliterate the past

you deem inconvenient. Great-grand-children will know

what has happened in our time and who has wrought it,

and sort true from fake and good from evil.

January 6, 2021 and what has come after—

the war on our values and democracy—

we will remember, and keep telling the story.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (Wipf & Stock).

WHITE FLAGS, WALKING SOUTH

by Amy Wolf

I see* you, with your white flag raised on a stick, held high.

Child on your shoulder, two little legs dangling beneath your ears,

The hand not holding the white flag is grasping your son’s ankle.

A daughter walks beside you, a wife or mother follows behind, wailing.

Out of all of the Arabic I hear in the video*, I understand only Nakba,

But that is said often. Tragedy; expulsion; we won’t be going back, it says.

Your face is dirty, I think you have not had enough water to drink,  let alone to bathe

In, for a while. You look parched.

I look for your provisions; who is carrying the clothes you might change into,

The kitchen utensils, pots, pans, mattresses.

There is only you, and your youngers and elders, and one teenager

Carrying a bundle of clothes smaller than a suitcase.

He looks baffled.

I hear the words of the soldiers, hurrying you along.

They do not step into the picture to offer water, or comfort, or rest.

They are voices. I cannot impute any kindness to them,

Although you might convince me that a forced march from home

Is marginally better than having that home bombed and brought down on your head,

Doubling neatly as your tombstone and grave.

I see you, and I see my ancestors, in line to get on the trains.

With their small bundles, and cluster of relatives.

Yes, those trains.

Don’t look away.

Didn’t we say, never again?

Didn’t we say, when you pen a people in a ghetto, then make them abandon even that

For a long death march to an unknown place where there are too many bodies and not enough

Water and food

Let alone space to lay down

Didn’t we say that was genocide?

Didn’t we swear to speak up next time?

The Trail of Tears comes to mind.

Old people falling dead on the way, and children.

Women refusing to leave their young ones, and staying next to them to die in the cold.

This is not genocide porn.

I do not enjoy these pictures.

But I have met the ghosts of earlier marches.

On a cold spring morning in TN, a long-dead woman showed me

Where she killed herself with a knife to lay beside her child.

Willing to walk to Oklahoma, but not to leave her baby behind.

She said to me, “In the hall there, you are all dancing and singing and praying and setting out food for your ancestors.

Where is our food? We lived here. Feed us.”

I set out food for them, and prayer and song, and took the memory with me.

The humans walking from Gaza City to Khan Younis will be on that road for a long time,

Haunting all of those to come. Rebuking any who try to move into that space

With the same demand, dead or alive. “We live here; feed us.”

Centuries from now, should mankind survive on this planet,

You will still be able to see a line of white flags heading north to south,

Hear the sound of shuffling feet tired beyond reckoning of lifting up and setting down,

Listen to the cries of children and  the wailing of their mothers.

People like myself will be called in to do space clearings

And we will say, “I can’t tell them to leave. They live here. Just feed them.

Honor them.”

To my Jewish relatives I say this; you do not honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust

By consenting to and cheering on and excusing

A forced march

To crowded conditions

With little food

And less water.

Don’t you remember?

This is how it starts.

*The videos referenced by the speaker in this poem can be viewed here and here.

Amy Wolf is an LMT and energy worker who resides in Seattle, WA, and is studying writing.

EVERYTHING MARJORIE MAY HAVE NEVER SAID

by Chad Parenteau

We swore an oath. Does anyone remember the oath?

Free speech is essential, whether or not we recall it.

They continue to take our freedoms away. Can anyone

tell me what those freedoms were? I don’t recollect 

putting any of those freedoms back on when my mask 

came off. Who took my mask off? I can’t remember 

everyone who voted for me, but I know everyone did, 

and the only way I can win is if everyone forgets that 

I won. Protect the integrity of elections. If this could 

happen during the time of my election, whenever that 

is, I would really appreciate it. Remember when Black 

Lives Matter and Antifa fought over who would storm 

the capitol,  or so I’m told by people I can’t recall. Political

power  comes from the barrel of a gun. Mumia Abu Jamal

said that, according to my notes. That wasn’t free speech 

when he said that. Has America proven those words 

to be true? I’ll have to get back to you if the smoke 

ever clears. There’s two schools of thought to research. 

One of them is CNN, which lies about me. The other 

is NewsMax, which uses my complete sentences

but omits everything else I’ve ever said in my life, 

which I may or may not have said. I don’t remember.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, and Nixes Mate Review. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His second collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award.

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.

AS TIME GOES BY

by DeWitt Clinton

 "A sigh is just a sigh."    

—lyric by Herman Hupfeld

Some of us may have made it, or we at least pretend

We have made it, though all of us know we’re just

Kidding ourselves, but what else is there now that

A few of us can fill our lungs without stinging bats

That somehow did not find their way down into us.

We could also take the next hour (day) (week) (year)

To remember all those who have fallen, who did not

Know what in the world was inside of them, but it

Was inside them, and many who were nearby have

Also fallen down, some in the most hopeless places

Of the world, and as well, some in the most luxurious

Rooms not everyone could dream about, but still,

It might do us all some good to just remember what

None of us could ever imagine happening just like

That.

DeWitt Clinton taught English, Creative Writing, and World of Ideas courses for over 30 years at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater. He is a student of Iyengar Yoga, and occasionally substitutes as a Zoom yoga instructor for seniors in The Village of Shorewood, Wisconsin. His four collections of poetry include The Conquistador Dog Texts, The Coyot. Inca Texts (New Rivers Press), At the End of the War (Kelsay Books, 2018), and By a Lake Near a Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters (Is A Rose Press, 2020). A fifth poetry collection has been accepted by Word Tech Communications.

SOME DAY, PERHAPS...

IT WILL HELP TO REMEMBER THESE TROUBLES AS WELL.*

by Bonnie Naradzay

*Aeneas to his men, after theirs is the only ship

  to survive a violent storm at sea near Carthage.

         

Friends, a study of The Black Death states the plague 

may have come from outer space. The Mars Rover 

landed in a dried up lake. Perseverance is transporting 

images home from the red planet. On earth, we learn 

that magnetic north and south may be flipping sides, 

an ominous event, according to weakening attractions 

and ancient iron shards stuck pointing the wrong way. 

In Galveston, medical workers asked for a refrigerated 

truck to store the dead bodies. Thousands of turtles 

stunned by the cold have gone to a convention center 

in the backs of station wagons. Ted Cruz got on the plane

in jeans but went the wrong way, or the optics were wrong.

Sweet Thames, and Virgil, flow gently while I end my song.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry workshops at a day shelter for homeless people and at a retirement center, both in Washington DC.  Recent poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), Kenyon Review Online, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, Tampa Review, Poet Lore, EPOCH, Northern Virginia Review, Anglican Theological Review, Seminary Ridge Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.

THIS DAY WILL NOT JUST LIVE IN INFAMY

by Michael Mark

Shutterstock

For Lolo

 

Because it is your birthday, I’m going to ignore 

the four thousand people in our country who will die today. 

 

Because it is your birthday, I’m going to erase from my mind 

the insane president and treasonous riot he instigated

                                 

and the love video he put out to his thug followers as five people died 

during the siege of the Capitol, and pretend the polls are fake 

 

that say 45% of Republicans believe the breaking 

and entering was the right thing to do, and I’m going 

 

to drive to the card store – the good one, not the grocery

or the pharmacy with their picked-over puns,

 

but the fancy one that specializes in fine crafted, highly artistic 

expressions of earnest emotions, featuring 

 

only the cutest kitten and puppy pics, and charge 

at least six dollars and ninety-nine cents for ironic yet sincere stuff like: 

 

You’re not getting older—oh wait!—I just checked 

your sun dial—yes you are! Because it is your birthday 

 

I’m not going to even wonder if we should be celebrating 

considering today’s particularly disappointing jobs report

 

and the unnerving delay on stimulus checks and vaccines. 

I’m going to interrogate every rack on every aisle to pick out 

 

your perfect card, and because I can’t stop the riots 

or bring back the dead, or deliver the checks or administer the vaccine, 

 

I will, because it is your birthday, light the candle, and watch 

you close your eyes to the whole world and make your wish. 

 

Michael Mark’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Arkansas International, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Salamander, The Southern Review, The Sun, Waxwing, and The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry. He’s the author of two books of stories including Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

by Dawn Corrigan

At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.—The New York Times, September 8, 2020. Photo: A Somali woman carried wood to make a shelter in a camp for internally displaced people in December 2018. Credit: Mohamed Abdiwahab/Agence France-Presse —Getty Images via The New York Times.

   Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation
   can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely
   under the influence of a great fear.
   —Bertrand Russell


Never forget, they say, as if we have a choice.
Never forget, as though we have minds
eager to comply with orders, willing recruits
dropping to give us twenty, standing guard duty,
lifting the mask to suck in gas and mutter
our rank and SSN. But the minds we have
are AWOL at least half the time, poor soldiers
dropping their guns in battle, abandoning plans,
neglecting the mission in favor of a story
about us and that high school crush,
or us and a pile of money,
or us and a bottle as big as the world.
We remember, but not because they say to.
We remember because our minds like chaos
even more than peace. They urge us to remember,
a wish they share with that other they, the they
who made Father close his blinds forever,
Mother shiver at the sight of every plane.

Dawn Corrigan is still waiting for the Age of Anxiety to end.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT LIFE BEFORE THE VIRUS

by Lesléa Newman

I.
I remember shaking hands:
damp, sweaty hands and dry, scratchy hands,
bone-crushing handshakes and dead-fish handshakes,
two-handed handshakes, my hand sandwiched
between a pair of big beefy palms.
I remember hairy hands and freckled hands,
young smooth hands and old wrinkled hands,
red polished fingernails and bitten jagged fingernails,
stained hands of hairdressers who had spent all day dying,
dirty hands of gardeners who dug down deep into the good earth.

II.
Thousands of years ago, a man stuck out his right hand
to show a stranger he had no weapon.
The stranger took his hand and shook it
to make sure he had nothing up his sleeve.
And that is how it began.

III
I remember sharing a bucket
of greasy popcorn with a boy
at the movies
(though I no longer remember
the boy or the movie)
the thrill of our hands
accidently on purpose
brushing each other in the dark.

IV
I remember my best girlfriend
and I facing each other to shriek,
“Miss Mary . . . Mack! Mack! Mack!”
and the loud satisfying smack!
as our four palms slapped.

V.
I remember high fives
and how we’d laugh when we missed
and then do a do-over.

 VI.
I remember the elegant turn
of shiny brass doorknobs
cool to the touch.

VII.
I remember my mother’s hands
tied to the railings of her hospital bed
and how I untied them
when the nurse wasn’t looking
and held them in my lap.

VIII.
I remember holding my father’s hand
how the big college ring he wore
rubbed against my birthstone ring
irritating my fourth finger
but I never pulled away.

IX.
I remember the joy of offering
my index finger to a new baby
who wrapped it in her fist
as we gazed at each other in wonder.

X.
I remember tapping a stranger
on the shoulder and saying,
“Your tag is showing.
Do you mind if I tuck it in?”
She didn’t mind. I tucked it in.

XI.
I remember salad bars and hot bars.
I remember saying, “Want a bite?”
and offering a forkful
of food from my plate.
I remember, asking, “Can I have a sip?”
and placing my lips
on the edge of your cold frosty glass.

XII.
I remember passing around the Kiddush cup,
each of us taking a small sip of wine.
I remember passing around the challah,
each of us ripping off a big yeasty hunk.
I remember picking up a serving spoon
someone had just put down
without giving it a second thought.

XIII.
I remember sitting with a mourner
at a funeral, not saying a word,
simply taking her hand.

Lesléa Newman is the author of 75 books for readers of all ages including the poetry collections I Carry My Mother and October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard. Her newest poetry collection I Wish My Father is forthcoming in  January 2021 from Headmistress Press.

SEPTEMBER

by Shirani Rajapakse

Image source: Wikipedia

Remember, you said, that day. People
falling from the sky like stars,
burnt out flares unable to cling on. Fire

in the sky metal crashing above. Remember
how it felt as you looked up at the
heavens, the noise deafened

and the dust from the stars crumbled
into your eyes. Horrorstruck, was this the end?
Remember the smell, flesh, iron roasting

cheap like a giant barbecue in the sky
while all around the grey dust of construction
falling like haze on an early morn.

You screamed but no one
heard amidst the noise of a world gone mad.
You cried in vain for what you

couldn’t hold, then forgot as
the years flashed by and they made plans anew
leaving you out of it. No use to no one

anymore.  Remember how you forgot
it all, buried in your life, the chores, the rush
and swirl of work, the demands

of modernity. Remember how she felt falling,
burning, crying. But do remember
how a madman rose in the sky

one day to steal the future leaving her
with tears and nothing else except a few
burnt out shreds. Remember.


Shirani Rajapakse is a Sri Lankan poet and author. She won the Cha “Betrayal” Poetry Contest 2013. Her collection of short stories, Breaking News (Vijitha Yapa 2011) was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Award. Shirani’s work appears or is forthcoming in Linnet’s Wings, Channels, Spark, Berfrois, Poets Basement, Earthen Lamp Journal, Asian Cha, Dove Tales, Buddhist Poetry Review, About Place Journal, Skylight 47, The Smoking Poet, New Verse News, The Occupy Poetry Project and anthologies Poems for Freedom, Voices Israel Poetry Anthology 2012, Song of Sahel, Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, World Healing World Peace and Every Child Is Entitled to Innocence.