FRIDA KAHLO AS A KEYCHAIN

by Terri Kirby Erickson

My Frida Kahlo keychain, a gift from a longtime
friend in Lubbock, is made of felt, hand-embroidered 
with the brightest threads. Her pink floral headdress 
 
is rainbow-shaped, her eyebrows like a minimalist 
painting of a bird in flight—one solid line, double-
arched, meeting in the center of her forehead. With
 
eyes forever closed, this keychain Frida is always 
smiling. She never had polio or walked with a limp. 
Her spine and pelvis were never broken, her uterus 
 
never pierced by an iron bar. In fact, she has no body, 
only a lime-green tassel where her neck should be. 
To her, Diego is just a name, not a faithless husband, 
 
no one to whom her tortured letters were addressed. 
Hanging from a set of keys, she cannot know the fate 
of brown-skinned immigrants gathered like herds 
 
of cattle, handcuffed and transported, the families who 
may not find each other again, the crying babies, their 
stolen mothers. Keychain Frida has no arms to paint 
 
their pain in vibrant colors—a small portrait of herself 
in the corner of the canvas, boldly staring, her blood-
red heart dangling between her breasts like a pendant.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of award-winning poetry. Her work has appeared in “American Life in Poetry,” Latin American Literary Review, ONE ART, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Rattle, The SUN, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many other literary journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, International Book Award for Poetry, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina, USA.

HOLDING OUR BREATH

by Lynnie Gobeille

Image source: Benenden Health

I just sit where I’m put, composed

of stone and wishful thinking 

—Margaret Atwood, “Sekhmet, the Lion-Headed Goddess of War”

This year’s tree is fake, like so much of 2020’s News.

Last year’s was real—but died a short tortuous death 

four days out- fully  decorated- needles dropping onto my hard wood floors

hauled back to Home Depot.

Where I begged for a refund of my money.

 Yes, I has used coins  I had saved in a plastic jug all year just for this one purpose—

 A REAL tree—hauled home by me—placed there – in all its Glory.

Now Dead… 

But that was last year—Pre 2020.

Today? My fake tree is up—my Mother’s Ornaments placed   “just so”

another chance to recreate memories.

How foolish we Humans are.

We  think—

God will forgive us for our sins.

We hold our collective breaths as Fauci says-

He will not be with HIS family this year.

We sigh—

If he can do it? 

So can you & i.

After all these years—Lynnie Gobeille is STILL passionate about poetry.

DÓNDE ESTÁ MI MADRE

by Roger Aplon

 

A child weeps & her cries reverberate throughout the dingy warehouses,

makeshift barracks & swarming

extraction camps, it

 

ricochets across the desolate plains of west Texas & southern California &

southern Arizona & the mesas

of New Mexico.

 

A child weeps & his tears threaten to drown the tongue-tied Christians, Jews

& Muslims, they dampen dinner tables

in Portland, Maine &

 

Poughkeepsie, New York & St. Louis, Missouri & across the Rockies &

across the sea to Honolulu. Children weep &

parents weep &

 

a once-proud people cringes in the wake of what it has allowed & what it

has wrought & what it is to be

dishonored.

 

Between bouts of fear & trembling these kids are heard to ask ¿ Dónde está mi madre?

          —¿Dónde está mi padre?—

¿ Dónde estoy?

 

‘Where Am I?’ rings off-key like a cracked bell—like a symbolic “liberty”

bell, cracked but still resonant, reminiscent

of what has been lost but might still be.

 

Roger Aplon has published thirteen books: one of prose poems & short fiction: Intimacies;  twelve of poetry, including the recently published: Mustering What’s Left—Selected & New Poems—1976 – 2017 from Unsolicited Press. He lives in Beacon, N Y & publishes the poetry magazine: “Waymark – Voices of the Valley.”

ZOMBIE

by Howard Winn

‘Donald Trump may have signed an executive order to end the separation of families at the southern border, but his administration is not making any special efforts to immediately reunite the 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents under his “zero tolerance” policy.’ —The Guardian, June 21, 2018. Photo: A tent encampment in Tornillo, Texas, to house immigrant children. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images via The Guardian.

The ghost of Goebbels creeps
through the edges of our current
landscape as he whispers lies
again and again until the innocent
believers think they know it is
the truth and although the ghost
swallowed the cyanide with his
wife after murdering his children
with poison in the temporary
defeat of his deceptions and lies
which seemed to have a life of
their own because it is too easy
to believe what the weak want to
believe to give them faked strength
as the powerful gain even more
power and cash as they delude
the defenseless and have no empathy
for the fragile and vulnerable
since winning the unequal struggle
is all that matters to the bigoted
no matter the wounded and their pain


Howard Winn's novel Acropolis is published by Propertius Press. He has poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

KINDNESS

by Mary K O'Melveny

José, 5, carries with him a drawing of his father, whom he has not seen since they were separated upon arriving in the United States from Honduras. —“The Daily,” The New York Times, June 20, 2018. "And the president’s order does nothing to address the plight of the more than 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents under the president’s 'zero tolerance' policy. Federal officials said those children will not be immediately reunited with their families while the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration proceedings. "—The New York Times, June 20, 2018

Some of us are always trying to be kind.
Even in smallest ways.  Even as the known
world self-destructs around us, shards of
optimism falling from the sky before we even
have a chance to look up to see what has
shifted us off our comfortable axis.

I’ve got a chipmunk problem in my yard.
The tiny furred creatures have popped up
everywhere, sending showers of dirt
into the air like it was Yellowstone.
I cannot kill them even though I want to.
They will not leave even though I have raged

at them, insulted them and their ancestors.
My neighbor brings a have a heart trap
so I can remove them kindly.  He baits it with
peanut butter.  Soon the trap has a frightened
occupant.  I cannot bear to look out for fear
of crying.  The prisoner is soon relocated.

The trap is replaced.  A new chipmunk takes
the bait.  He too is repatriated to a new territory.
Capture and repeat.   The metal trap looms larger
each day as an unending array of innocents are
tempted by creamy nut paste.  Soon enough,
I begin to worry about babes left behind in tunnels,

about mothers and fathers  grieving for lost children.
One day a chipmunk plants itself on my deck
and looks in through the window.  My kind self
huddles behind the blind.  I will not make eye contact.
This is the humane way, I say to myself, even as I begin
to imagine each trapped rodent wearing an orange

jumpsuit as interrogators gather nearby with pen
and paper waiting for the inevitable confessions.
One night, the trap is sprung, its detainee freed from
house arrest.  I am thrilled.  Then I learn that a bear
has likely done it.  Probably thanked me for the easy meal.
Now I am lost in my worst fears.  There is no kindness in my yard.

How could I have thought otherwise?  This is how
it always begins.  Good intentions vanishing
like some dying star,  rationalizations
reverberating across celestial centuries.
Turns out it is our unwavering belief
in our self-righteousness that is the trap.


Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals.  Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age will be published by Finishing Line Press in September, 2018.

MAGICIANS

by John Kaprielian

Illusionists use tricks
and deception
lies and distraction
to delight
us with their
feats of impossibility
but we know they
are not sorcerers
or wizards
but subtle and artistic
con men whom
we allow to
twist our perception
to bewilder and amuse.

The magicians have
taken over
and conjurors run amok
making children
disappear and
bending the laws of
nature and man
to perform their
sickening sleight of hand
turning babies into pawns
women into whores
and men into criminals
with a wave
and a word.

But illusionists must
guard their secrets
hide their tricks
or the curtain falls away
and we are embarrassed
and ashamed
by just how easily
we allowed ourselves to
be led
to preposterous
conclusions.

Expose their secrets
and their lies
the tricks of their foul trade
the woman sawed in half
is quickly mended
the family torn
apart
will never
ever
be the same.

John Kaprielian is a Russian linguist by training and has been employed as a photo editor for three decades. He has been writing poetry for over thirty-five years; in 2012 he challenged himself to write a poem a day for a year and in 2013 published the 366 poems in a single volume, 366 Poems: My Year in Verse. He has also had poems published on The Five-Two Poetry Blog and in the anthology Live at the Freight House Cafe. His poetry ranges in subject matter from the natural world to current events and politics to introspective and philosophical themes. He lives in Putnam County, New York with his wife and son and assorted pets.

ASYLUM

by Thomas R. Smith

   Why does my country so often stand
   On the side of the mean and the cruel?
           —Ed Sanders, "Nicaragua"


Sometimes I think these recurring dreams
of insecure wandering aren't personal
at all, but the world dreaming through me.

Again last night, I had no bed, searched
a strange town with darkness falling.
Our country has strayed so far from that

young and fearless prophet it professes
to worship.  Kidnapping children from their
parents at the border, making criminals

of asylum-seekers.  A Honduran man
separated from his wife and child by ICE
kills himself in a cell described as a "kennel."

Does the man who calls himself President
and the cowards and bullies who enable
him really believe they can have power

without responsibility?  The five
percent feeding on forty percent of
the planet arms itself to keep the starving

away from the table.  So we drift toward
our destruction, uncaring, cruel, refusing
to enter into a human future.

In dreams we are relentlessly pursued,
can find no place to lay our heads in this land
of the Ego, the Dollar, and the Holy Gun.

In time our bad faith will make our nation
a prison, in which we serve our sentence
not for having killed, but for having killed

not for survival but for luxury.

A Honduran girl cries as her mother is search and detained near the U.S. Mexico border on Tuesday in McAllen, Texas. Credit John Moore/Getty Images via Slate, June 14, 2018

Thomas R. Smith is a poet and teacher living in River Falls, Wisconsin. He teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His most recent poetry collection is The Glory (Red Dragonfly Press).