AT THE MAINE LOBSTER FESTIVAL

by Jake Murel

Maine Lobster Festival, August 2-6, 2023

Click, clack, clock, go calling claws

Of arthropods in steel-cage cells,

Clambering en masse to escape the maw

Boiling broth, bubbling hell.

 

Snap, snip, clip, cameras click,

Twice-captured crustaceans, cowering each

Jostled and jumping, tossing kicks

Against suffering steam in seething screech.

 

Crack, crick, creek, shells break

With silent shrieks in summer sun

As tourists taste torture that makes

Lobster death-camp fun.

Jake Murel is a private individual and, as such, does not enjoy biographical statements. His own poetry has appeared in The Journal of Formal Poetry, The Lyric, and many other venues.

THE CONCENTRIC CIRCLES OF WAR

by Katherine West 

“A Room of Memory” by Chiharu Shiota (2009): old wooden windows, group exhibition Hundred Stories about Love, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

Inside, there's a memory of neighbors on an evening porch, of burning then warming sun, of a half-feral cat leaving freedom for langurous hours of touch, of cold night then the warmth of a shared bed. 

Inside, there's a fire going and moody jazz in the background, an old watercolor of a Ukrainian boy and girl in traditional clothes. They are on their way to market; seen from behind and one side, their bodies are full of purpose. 

Inside, there's the sound of birds outside; sometimes just wings whooshing back and forth, sometimes a little squawk and chatter. Faraway, a songbird. 

Outside, sun is trying to warm the morning. Outside, clouds are burning off; red ants are waking up, appearing at the door of their mound like holy men dressed in the color of life. 

Outside, the first truck rumbles down the gravel road, kicking up its own cloud. Outside, the crack of target practice, to the south, a helicopter.

Outside, the first shell drops on an apartment building already abandoned by its residents who now live in the subway. The first paratrooper touches down. The first tank goes up in flames. 

Outside, the first wildflowers glow like a small sunrise amongst dry, white grass. Outside, the ravens are mating aloft. 

Inside, is poetry from Ukraine. 

You are the train that will pour

burning wine on the skin,

so that it will blaze

madly

(Natalka Bioltserkivets)

Outside, is poetry from Ukraine, a long line of refugees with bundles, like leafcutter ants carrying off the petals of roses.  

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. She is also an artist. 

2021: WHEN CICADAS COME BACK AGAIN

by Susan Terris

Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Turn of the 21st century, and 17 year cicadas had surfaced again in New Haven as I visited my girlhood friend Callie, daughter of another Callie—she: heavy, sedentary, called Big Callie but long gone by 2000. There, with the spring crocus pushing up, we crunched along the sidewalks strewn with empty shells shining in morning sun like gems of silver and gold, unable to escape still-live cicadas that sounded like water in a mad cascade. Years ago, cicadas had come just before Big Callie died of breast cancer. Then my friend—who had married a widower with two children—made him one again not very long after my visit. Yes,  my Callie died of breast cancer, too.

 

Now I worry for Callie’s daughter, her daughter’s two daughters. And then remembering her and the fragility of cicadas reminds me how my own cells had multiplied to breast cancer and 17 years later my sister’s, until I began counting off years and wondering what lay waiting for my daughter and my sister’s daughters, our clutch of granddaughters. Thousand upon thousand of empty shells and countless dangeous cells and the cascade of fears waiting out their own cycles, buried and dormant, until live and invasive

Susan Terris’ recent books are Familiar Tense (Marsh Hawk) 2019; Take Two: Film Studies (Omnidawn) 2017, Memos (Omnidawn) 2015; and Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk) 2012. She's the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and one play.  Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. A poem of hers appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXI. A poem from Memos was in Best American Poetry 2015. Her newest chapbook is Dream Fragments, which won the 2019 Swan Scythe Press Award. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal.

GUN CONTROL

by Jonathan Flike



Revolution dreams every policy
opposed to red elephant values
Southern successions revisited
saving colors that don’t run
from freedom hating Kenyans,
change witch doctor huts to prefabs
justifying semi-auto ownership
and mass killing violence with
discount T-shirt slogans,
“guns don’t kill people
people kill people.”
Simple facts that baseball bats
murder less than quickly changed clips
on unsuspecting movie goers
temporary burdens on six
pallbearers carrying bodies
safe to the grave
the only safety guaranteed
soon forgotten by the masses.
Public discourse talks of
policy’s failure to divert death
in totality never touching
the golden cow with a
butt branded number two,
refuse the compromise saying
one life saved is worth more
than circular retorts
clouded necessity for
exploding shells
stashes of bullets
caches of guns
simply to hoard
till the day the Democrats
come to take it all away
failing to confirm America
lacks any form of
self-control.


Jonathan Flike is a writer, artist, and starving student. His poems have appeared in Viewpoints and Wilde Magazine. Jonathan’s first major collection of poetry, Tales from Room 225, was published in June, 2011. His second collection, It Gets Worse, is set for a February 2013 release date.