SOUNDINGS

by Ann E. Wallace

In Australia, the magpie 

pipers have sounded the alarm. 

Strange singing sirens lure 

us to belated attention,

whistling their learned panic 

cry as we lean in and stare.

How clever they are, these 

crows turned mocking jays,

turned canaries in the fires.

We pull out our phones, press

record and listen in awe 

at beaked imitation of man

made warning calls. Months, 

years after the flares and shouts 

of scientists, of firefighters,

went unseen, unheard, 

the birds learned too 

late to speak our language. 

As the heat swells, billows

to flame, and sucks each breath 

dry, hot angry licks sneer 

and force us to the water’s edge. 

And the rescue boats come 

too late, too few to heed 

the magpies’ urgent call. 

Ann E. Wallace has a new poetry collection, Counting by Sevens, available from Main Street Rag, featuring work about the realities and joys of life in contemporary America, motherhood, and illness. Recently published pieces in journals such as Mom Egg Review, Wordgathering, Snapdragon, Riggwelter, and Rogue Agent, can be found on her website. Twitter @annwlace409.

POEM BURIED UNDER THE SHED

by Kelsey Bryan-Zwick 

Photo by Richard Baker, Concord Monitor, May 2, 2019

Buried under the rhododendron, left cold in a back
alley dumpster for the garbage person to deliver
to indiscriminate piles of city landfill, torn to
nothing by screaming seagulls, or tossed like so
many refugees seeking asylum, to the bottom of an
ocean more likely to be remembered as graveyard
did you think our stories would be pretty as we are?

Covered in lipstick, hair braided, words worn like
a dress, did you think our fight would be somehow
less violent than the all wars described to you in your
history books?  Well they don’t gag and bind you
with a patriarchy of rules meant to diminish your power
and your voice because they think you’ll have
nice things to say. As we shed the millions of slights
and insults meant to define us, we don’t even know
our own skin.

And when you hear us at first maybe it will just
sound like a siren, almost indiscernible from all
the white noise, but then unmistakable, an ill pitch
in the stomach, a long sickening wail, some
visceral animal, a tearing crawling shriek, clawing
our way through the silence.  After so many years in
exile, the truth is hideously real: the monster we made
our monster to love.

Kelsey Bryan-Zwick is a Spanish/English speaking SoCal poet and artist with a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in Literature/Creative Writing.  She is the author of three chapbooks, the most recent being Watermarked (Sadie Girl Press) a hand-bound edition which intermixes both her poetry and art.  Disabled with scoliosis from a young age her poems often focus on trauma, giving heart to the antiseptic language of hospital intake forms.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, Kelsey’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in Rise Up Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Incandescent Mind, petrichor, Like a Girl, Lummox, A Poet is a Poet No Matter How Tall, Eunoia Review, and Redshift.

AMBULANCE

by A.K. Das

A day after a tribal man had to walk 10 km carrying his wife’s body on his shoulder in Odisha’s Kalahandi (India) after failing to get a vehicle from a government hospital, a probe was ordered Thursday to ascertain the circumstances which led to the incident. Image source: The Indian Express, August 25, 2016.

The snow-white body, red beacon, siren
fitted on the top,
the ambulance waits at the hospital’s gate
for emergency calls.

A tribal man pedaling his pregnant daughter
to hospital, bringing back home
the mother and her newborn
again on his bicycle;

a poor laborer walking on foot,
dead body of his wife on his shoulder,
his little daughter following behind
in teary, stunned silence;

two men carrying on a dangling pole
a load of mangled, broken corpse
of a woman;

they all call frantically—
but no ambulance for them.

Yet the snow-white body, red beacon, siren
fitted on the top,
the ambulance waits patiently
at the hospital’s gate
for an emergency call from a VIP –

ready to move out,
speeding, blaring, flashing red light
through the snarling traffic.


A.K. Das, a retired civil servant in India, has had three books of poetry published: Another Voyage, Skyline Aglow, and Cherry Trifle.

NEW DARK AGE

by Richard Schnap

A crowd in Selma, Alabama before the historic March 1965 march. Photograph by STEVE SCHAPIRO, “The Long Road from Selma” in The New Yorker, 22-29 December 2014.

I hear the cry

Of a distant siren

Wondering if it will bring

A mother to tears

And I hear the words

Of a holy man’s sermon

Instructing small children

On the best ways to kill

And I hear the testimony

Of a fat politician

Saying that those tortured

Got what they deserved

And I hear the ticks

Of a madman’s clock

Moving with precision

Backwards in time

Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.