DISPLACED PERSONS

by George Salamon

“Israel-Hamas war said to have… displaced 70% of [Gaza’s] population in a month.” —CBS News, November 7, 2023

The DPs fleeing Gaza remind me of those I saw in the hall of a Swiss railroad station after the end of World War Two—Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration and extermination camps, slave laborers from German war industries, resistance fighters from occupied countries… all had been waiting in DP camps in Germany, rounded up for "their own good," still not free men and women, still "inmates," still not possessing any rights, legal or human until the Red Cross and other aid organizations could open doors for "repatriation" to their old homelands or transportation to their new ones—their bodies pressed against each other, the faces of the men pale and gaunt, their eyes staring into a middle distance, the women clutching babies, their hair flapping around their heads, the hall reeking of hunger, sickness and yearning. When their eyes met they shuddered, stood there, unable to embrace each other. It is more than bodies that are displaced.

George Salamon did not know he was a refugee or "displaced person" when he, three years old, and his parents escaped one night in the fall of 1938 from Austria to Switzerland. He now lives in St.Louis, MO.

A POEM FOR UKRAINE

by David James

“Writing My Heart Out,” a painting by Gladiola Sotomayor.

I want to write a poem that will lick

 

your heart clean,

that will make you forget every nightmare,

 

every cut and scrape, every syllable of bad news you’ve ever heard,

a poem that will close your eyes and let you dream

 

of another life, perfect in its arc, where

all things, dead or alive, bow to your smile,

 

all clouds move to your breath, birds and desires and wishes

land on your forearm when you call them.

 

I want to write a poem to send all sadness into exile,

to fit all pain and despair onto one gaudy blue dish

 

that you can toss outside and ignore,

a poem so quiet you never hear it

 

come into your life, sit on your couch, sleep in your bed,

never hear its small footsteps on the floor.

This poem, which must be written under a moonlit

sky with eleven stars and one dog barking in town,

 

will end the world as we know it. No more death

or hunger or war. No more aging or sickness or weeping.

 

No more walking with your feet on the ground.

David James’ most recent book is Alive in Your Skin While You Still Own It.

THE AMERICAN VARIANT

by Pepper Trail

It has always circulated among us

We know that, and we know

Mutations happen all the time

So what makes this so virulent

So easily transmitted

Neighbor to neighbor, father to son?

 

It is airborne, that is clear

Transmitted on the breath

On the words carried on the breath

Capable of crossing great distances

Broadcast on the seething turbulence

Filling our air, our airwaves

 

Experts speak of it with awe

The terrible beauty of its design

How it targets our vulnerabilities

Binds to our fears

Produces an inflammation

Disorderly and wild

 

There are treatments

Not painless but effective

But the problem is this:

The genius of this variant

Its most deadly symptom

Is denial of the disease itself

 

And so the epidemic rages

The world waits for the crisis

For the fever to break

To burn itself out

Or to infect every last one of us

Burn everything up, at last

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

CORONAVIRUS SPRING

by Zeina Azzam 

What I want to say to the tulips
that emerged, again, in March:
I am so grateful to count on you.

There is nothing else to gird me
anymore. This beauty almost
makes me weep.

Do you see how different
the world is now?

And they tell me: no,
as we know it, the world is still the same.
The rains arrived this morning.

The nightingale keeps working so hard
to sing. The starling wails.

If sickness comes
I want to be like the wise tulips,
store energy in my heart bulb

and come back after a hard winter,
dressed in bright turbans
of orange and yellow and red.

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, editor, and community activist. She volunteers for organizations that promote Palestinian rights and the civil rights of vulnerable communities in Alexandria, Virginia, where she lives. Her poems appear in Pleiades, Mizna, Sukoon Magazine, Split This Rock, the edited volumes Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by Refugees and Bettering American Poetry, and several other literary journals and anthologies. She holds an M.A. in Arabic literature.