HANDLER'S HANDS

by Michelle DeRose

First skin shrivels

without touch. Parent's

palm to baby's back

an initial prayer

for safe-keeping, offered

in heart's rhythm.

 

How maimed the hand 

that releases the leash

on a dog trained to maul.

Strokes fur to praise puncture,

urges sic, not stay.

Fingers turned incisors

on blue fields of fifty

rip red strips

on a father's back,

pierce our beating core.

A member of a foster family for newborn wards of the state of Illinois as she grew up, Michelle DeRose witnessed first-hand how simple touches soothed some of the many infants her mother nurtured. A life-long dog-lover and -rescuer, she still wonders if she and her husband rescue dogs or they rescue them. The perversion of this most basic of communication--love and calm conveyed when one living being gently touches another--blatantly revealed in ICE's actions in Washington state against Wilmer Toledo-Martinez should repulse us all.

GOING DEEPER

by Cecil Morris

Yellow No. 5 food dye. (Matthew Christiansen/U.S. National Science Foundation)

“Scientists use food dye found in Doritos to make see-through mice.” —The Washington Post, September 5, 2024.

I had seen her naked—more than once—
that was fun for a while—and arousing too—
but now I wanted more—more than surface—
more than skin-deep knowing—superficial titillation— 
Armed with tartrazine—good old Yellow #5—
in truth a bag of pulverized Doritos—I massaged
and massaged my beloved—the bony plain
between her breasts and then the smoothness of her scalp—
a slow and steady knowing entering my hands—
and just like the Stanford scientists said
in their Science article—all became clear—first
my own hands’ knobby bones and tangle of tendons, 
my rushing blood—then my beloved’s off-white sternum,
her ribs, her elusive peek-a-boo heart—the clench
and release of her love—and through her scalp
and skull her brain at work, her thoughts a mist
on sea breeze borne, a mesmerizing swirl
in which I fell— It was so good—sublime—
old Spock’s Vulcan mind-meld—and overwhelmed
I collapsed and hummed my sated sound—
and she sat up—her chest, her head aglow—
and asked if it worked— 

Full disclosure: neither my beloved nor I have
attended Stanford not even for a swim meet
or football game and neither marijuana

nor LSD were directly involved in this.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. He and his partner, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

POST-ELECTION BLUES

by Peter Calder

after seeing a small rally of people in George Square, Glasgow (file photo above) following the recent election results in the UK

He says they’re
all in on it.
Every single 
bastard one.
 
They know what 
they are doing.
Death of Scotland.
That’s what he says.
 
Politicians. Scientists. 
Journalists.
All of them—
Liars.
 
A ripple of hands
startles a pigeon
and sends the flock
soaring above the square.
 
But this Rally—he says
is rewriting history.
A pocket of truth 
in a new skin suit.
 
And I guess he’s right.
It is just skin 
holding us together.
We’re all in on it.
 
The left. The right. 
The indifferent.
Every single one of us 
wrapped up in it.
 
From Westminster 
to Glasgow lies
a body, bruised 
in patches of blue.
 
It happens almost
unnoticed. The birds
loop and scatter 
on the ground.
 
An old man
tosses crumbs—
and the flock
follows.

Peter Calder is a Primary School teacher living and working in Glasgow. He is the co-founder and editor of the Hull based magazine Descent Spread and has had poetry and short stories published in various UK-based magazines.

BATHING BEAUTIES

by Karen Olshansky

I’ve always despised Martha Stewart,

her smug, “I can cook anything from scratch, 

decorate a table with weeds from my

yard,”and, her hints:

add a Lazy Susan to your fridge,

label everything,

make a triple fudge multilayered cake

while dictating an article on preventing mildew,

create a blender smoothie from 

home grown vegetables,

and, most importantly,

how to be the perfect prison inmate by teaching yoga.

My first swimsuit was a

two piece blue stripped beauty

with a skirt bottom.

I loved it, the only problem was that after a hard afternoon

of playing in the shallow river waters, 

my top would

drift upwards to reveal tiny nipples, my mother would say,

“just take off your top” but that was bad advice for a 

self conscious little girl.

at 16 I wore a one piece tank suit with four buttons on 

the front outlining my breasts,

my mother thought I looked wow, 

I felt that my thighs were fat.

At 26, I had a grown-up two piece with a skirt bottom.

After a dip in the ocean a much older male relative said,

“You are a fine figure of a woman” which made me 

feel slightly dirty, never did wear that outfit  again.

Now when I go swimming, I hide accordion skin,

vein lined legs, and falling body parts

by wearing a long sleeve caftan

that drapes towards my ankles.

Martha Stewart, who, at 81, throws her perfectly coiffed hair

around like she is making a Clairol commercial, dons white (white!)

bathing attire that shows

the full top half her breasts. 

My grandmother and her friends would go swimming 

unashamed of the blue streaks threatening to

escape from their legs, belly fat and breasts hanging low 

as ripe peaches on a tree.

They never heard of Martha Stewart.

Karen Olshansky lives in Marin County California with her husband and a well fed Koi named Pickle Face. She writes poetry in order to maintain her sanity. Her work has appeared in The Literary Nest, Tuck Magazine and the anthologies Lingering in the Margins, Life in Ten Minutes, Unspoken, and The James River Anthology.

ANGUISHED SOUL

by Jerrice J. Baptiste and Roodly Laurore

Dèyè mòn, gen mòn. (Beyond every mountain, there's another mountain.)

—Haitian Proverb

A woman walks past local authorities removing the bodies of men that were set on fire by a mob in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, April 25, 2023, a day after a mob pulled the 13 suspected gang members from police custody at a traffic stop and beat and burned them to death with gasoline-soaked tires. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph) April 25, 2023

Sadness in his chest, 
his spirit weakens,
enemy of our race.
 
I’m still a young girl grinning, watching him smile. 
Now, his smile vanishes quick, unlike gun 
powder floating in air, we both know the scent well.  
 
“Free my heart,” he says.
His mango tree awaits, bandits pluck his luck.    
Our island is still awake, sleepless 
1,460 nights, and centuries of anguish. 
 
You snooze, you lose your life.
 
No banana leaves to fold his skin. 
Wrap, wrap his chest to become 
a bullet vest, impenetrable.
 
No difference from his friends’ ashes 
at noon or during the early moon.    
 
“My soul courts pain and grief,” he sighs.
I fall deeper in disbelief. 
Nothing to catch either one of us. 
No net large enough from any fishermen. 
 
When will the rays of hope appear?
Sunshine after anxious nights. 
 
Loss of kinetic energy. Craves the little joy of
scooping young coconuts like we used to  
in the countryside. Flamingos on a distant beach.
 
Now, my uncle wishes 
one day to enjoy 
the pink side of life. 

 

Roodly Laurore was born and raised in Haiti. He is an engineer and poet. His poems are published in Kosmos Journal, Autism Parenting Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician, and others.  Roodly lives in Haiti with his wife and two sons. He collaborated with his neice Jerrice on this poem.

 

Jerrice J. Baptiste is an author of eight books and a poet in residence at the Prattsville Art Center & Residency in NY.  She is extensively published in journals and magazines such as Artemis Journal, The Yale Review, Mantis, Eco Theo Review, The Caribbean Writer, and many others. Jerrice has been nominated as Best of The Net by Blue Stem. She has been facilitating poetry workshops for eighteen years.

ZENO IN AMERICA

by Dale Wisely

A Black teenager was shot in the head by a white homeowner in Kansas City, Mo., after showing up at the wrong house to pick up his siblings, lawyers for his family said. Family members identified the victim online as Ralph Pual Yarl, a 16-year-old high school junior. You can contribute to a GoFundMe to help pay for the boy’s hospital bills.

 

Imagine a bullet approaching its target. It may help to think in slow motion. Let’s say it’s seven inches away from impact. No, let’s say eight because it is important for us to be able to divide readily. No pesky fractions. Haven’t we had enough fractions? Eight inches and... slow that bullet way down. Before it reaches skin, layers rich in capillaries, then skull... but if you’d rather think of, say, a sheet of drywall, that will do. So do. Do think of drywall.

 

Before the bullet makes contact it must pass the four-inch mark. Then the two-inch mark; then it’s just an inch away from, let’s say, plywood. Sheet metal. Or a STOP sign on a rural road. We can’t avoid fractions after all. When we keep dividing, we get fractions.

 

Then one-half inch. Then a quarter inch. Almost there. But next is the last one-eight inch. Stop there. Or halfway from there to the target. It doesn't matter where you stop. Just stop. Wherever you stop, think of that as a place where nothing is struck. Where the space left to travel is nothing and everything. Where nothing is pierced, shattered, ended. Where everything is as it was. This is a place where things go so fast and have so little space remaining and so little time left. Where a thing is about to happen but never does. I’m trying to say that this is a place where the skin remains intact and blood is retained in vessels, and bone unshattered. 

Dale Wisely runs Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, publisher of the journals Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unlost, Unbroken, duality, and first frost.

VIRA

by Jaime Banks

A mother who scrawled contact details on her two-year-old daughter's back while fleeing Ukraine has described to the BBC her desperation in that moment. Sasha Makoviy said she wrote little Vira's name, age and some phone numbers on her, in case the family were separated or killed while fleeing Kyiv. "In case of our death, she could be found and would know who she is," Ms Makoviy explained. The family are now in France where they feel "surrounded with love and care". —BBC, April 12, 2022

Her Kyiv apartment shakes

from the bombing. A woman

draws her two-year old close,

with permanent pen

scrawls the name Vira 

her birth date

parent’s names

grandparents’ names

telephone numbers

on the child’s slender back,

her hand shaking. 

If something happens,

she slants to think,

may this child be delivered

into familiar arms.

Numbers inked on skin

once a sign of barbarity,

now a mother’s only prayer.

Jaime Banks writes about family, home, and spirituality in everyday experience. She was recently awarded first place prize in the Bethesda Local Writer’s Showcase Poetry Contest, and her work is featured in the anthology Leading from Within: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead. A communications specialist and freelance writer, she resides in the DC area.

RIFFS ON "POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN"

by John Minczeski

"poetry makes nothing happen"

—W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

Some nights, like this one, something  

thuds against the house, a tennis ball or branch  

from the shrub below our bedroom window.  

  

Poetry makes nothing happen.  

I mean, we lie awake   

as a bitter wind slashes at the house.   

  

We have no need to shelter in a mosque or subway,   

but still my heart aches. Poetry makes nothing   

happen. It could be a deer  

  

that got into fermented crabapples.  

It could be a deer gnawing the shrub  

below the window. Some windows  

  

crack from the cold. Some explode.  

Poetry makes nothing happen  

and life goes on as if there’s no bounty  

  

on our ordinary world. Remember when the oracle  

said a great general would win the battle?   

The moon continues its unhurried changes  

  

as it has in the small forever of my life.  

It makes nothing happen, poetry. Skin cracks  

in the cold, like a tax on breathing.  

  

Stepping inside to instant warmth  

from the wind, we tell each other  

what we already know about brutality   

  

and winter. Once again poetry has made   

nothing happen. People go on dying daily  

for lack/ of what is found there.   

John Minczeski is the author of A Letter to Serafin and other collections. Recent poems have appeared in Tampa Review, The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Cider Press Review, Bear Review, North Dakota Review, and elsewhere. 

WHAT WE LEARNED IN 2020

by Katherine West

The globe of Earth has shrunk, a small balloon

losing air sinking against the blue blue sky

to land exactly in my hand, all mine 

to know the pain of every land, all you 

and you and you, all me in mirrors new 

as stars on windy nights of sharpened light 

that cuts my chest that makes me bleed your time

cut short then so is mine the years so few 

now less the globe a shriveled wrinkled skin

I cup as gently as a fallen bird 

my own true love I carry home to bed 

I tuck you up, I slide beside so thin

we fit, an old and folded map, a world 

of continents that kiss, of coasts that wed.

 

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.  Using the name Kit West, Katherine's new novel When Night Comes: A Christmas Carol Revisited has just been released, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing.  She is presently at work on the sequel to When Night Comes. It is called Slave: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist.

UNTIL THE SICKNESS CAME AMONG US

by Penelope Scambly Schott

"Knee" by Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890), February-June 1886: chalk on paper, 10.2 cm x 13.6 cm. Credit: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

We hadn’t really understood

the lunatic loneliness of skin.

Now, it’s the careful withholding

of the over-eager hand,

the lack of the comforting pat

on a friend’s shoulder,

no quick notifying tap

against a stranger’s sleeve,

no glad hug of greeting

or clinging hug of goodbye

Now we need to caress

the hand-smoothed bannister,

the weave of the couch,

bumps on the pickling cucumber,

the rough skin of our elbows,

or the childlike folds

of our own getting-old knees.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

TEAR GAS AND WOAD

by Peleg Held

A nude protester—dubbed later “Naked Athena"—faces off against law enforcement officers during a protest against racial inequality in Portland, Ore., on July 18. Credit Nathan Howard/Reuters via The New York Times.

Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem. —Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars


She fingers the blue on slowly, feralled in its wake;
she counts the steps from inside out the fenced-in fields of grace.

A vitrumned likeness wavers, a cats-lick from the rim,
in the tea cup in the circle of the saucer's closing ring.

Let the tongue tip shape the watchword in the shallows of its bow;
let sentry sleep and serpent sing beneath the shuddered vow.

Here is where their end is born; there is nothing at the gate
but ink and skin, the sylph herself: the cunt-directed state.

Caesar may misread you in the peripherals of his glass
or more likely overlook you, a needle in the grass

but as you plunge into his heel he will see the face
of what gives womb its dark and what gives blood its taste.


Peleg Held lives in Hiram, Maine with his partner and 21 chickens led by the world's tiniest rooster, Gavroche-That-Lives.

CHARLOTTESVILLE: A CAUTIONARY TALE

by Deborah Kahan Kolb

The Nazis have returned. To Charlottesville, VA.

        Pale wizards, frenzied mass, mad with purity.

Wands ablaze, heads of skin, howling blood and soil.

Tell your Jewish son. Repeat the story. Pray.

        Tell him he will never replace the whiteness of their line.

He will never replace never replace the blood pooled in the soil.

Tell your son the truth about the trains of yesterday.

        When children came in cattle cars and left as clouds of ash.

When memories were skin, bones, weeping bloody soil.

In Charlottesville the torches turn the nighttime into day.  

        Long ago these torches fired ovens for the Jews.

Step-children of goose-steppers want blood spilled on their soil.

Tell your Jewish daughter. Find the words to say

        They are raging to destroy her with fire and a flag.

Swear never again never again. No more blood for soil.

    

        Now you’ve told the story that bears repeating every day.

You’ve told your son. Now try to drain the olive from his skin.

You’ve told your daughter. Try to drain the darkness from her hair,

        Fix the hook that is her nose. Bury the blood lost in the soil.

Deborah Kahan Kolb is the author of Windows and a Looking Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and the recipient of numerous poetry awards, including the 2018 BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) award. Much of her poetry is informed by the unique experiences and challenges of growing up in, and ultimately leaving, the insular world of Hasidic Judaism. Her work has appeared in various print and online publications, including Poetica, TheNewVerse.News, Literary Mama, 3Elements Review, Poets Reading the News, Tuck, Rise Up Review, Writers Resist, and Mom Egg Review.

RELAXING INTO BLACKNESS

by Orel Protopopescu

 “He [Obama] was not always free to relax into his blackness, out of fear that it would frighten white America." —Michael Eric Dyson,  The New York Times, June 24, 2016

Although my winter skin is sallow,
a pale olive the world calls white,
my eyes and ears and pores
absorbed many shades of blackness
in New York in the sixties
in the middle of Long Island.

When I relax into my blackness,
I’m back in the music of the streets,
homes and churches of my childhood,
back with the old folks who called me baby
like they’d given birth to me,
their pupils widened in welcome,
back where doo wop groups sang
in the halls of Hempstead High
and we spilled out of choir to join them.

Where are you now, besides alive in me,
sweet-time brothers Andriamaharu,
who taught me to speak French,
a few words of Malgache,
and how to make a dance of laughter?

Fast and deep run the dark waters
that take me everywhere, bathed
in the fine and mellow vibrations
that forever slip like syrup
from the throat where Billie Holiday
birthed her blues, a fierce beauty,
a deep ease like a pair of taps
laying down paths I never want to leave,
sounds I never want to stop hearing,
like the voice of my then best friend,
abused for “talking like a white”
who said, in her Jamaican lilt,
“I don’t know what color a voice has.”

Oh, to relax again in the hammock
of our blackness, sharing secrets,
dividing the gold of the world between us.

Orel Protopopescu, children’s author, translator and poet, has been published by major houses (Simon&Schuster, FSG, Scholastic) and her book of translations, A Thousand Peaks, Poems from China (with Siyu Liu) was honored by the New York Public Library. Orel won the Oberon poetry prize in 2010. What Remains, a chapbook (2011) followed. Thelonious Mouse, her fourth picture book, won a Crystal Kite, 2012, from SCBWI.  A Word’s a Bird, her animated, bilingual (English/French) poetry book for iPad, was on SLJ’s list of ten best children’s apps, 2013. Her poetry has appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Light, Lighten Up Online, and other reviews and anthologies.

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BISON

by Peg Quinn

“On Monday, May 9, 2016, President Obama signed into law the National Bison Legacy Act, which designates the bison as the official mammal of the United States. . . . Lobbying for the official mammal designation was a coalition of conservationists; ranchers, for whom bison are business; and tribal groups, such as the InterTribal Buffalo Council, which wants to ‘restore bison to Indian nations in a manner that is compatible with their spiritual and cultural beliefs and practices.’ . . . Before the mid-1800s, bison (also called buffalo) lived mostly in the Great Plains, but were also found throughout the continent. . . . The U.S. Army led a campaign to wipe out bison as a way to control [native] tribes. . . . Columbus Delano, secretary of the interior, wrote in 1873: ‘I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western plains, in its effect upon the Indians.’ —Elahe Izadi, The Washington Post, May 9, 2016.  Image: A colored-pencil drawing by Peg Quinn of a bison’s head.

A bison's bladder holds seven pounds,
about one gallon, enough
for indigenous people to use
for storing water, clothing,
or food when hunting

Horns sufficed as drinking cups,
or carrying hot ash from one fire
to start the next

Fur became blankets,
papoose and moccasin lining

Skin became saddles, or, when
stretched over low lying branches,
sewn to form teepees, clothing,
quivers, drum heads and ‘canvas’
for recording the year in pictures - their
‘winter count’ during freezing blizzards

String was pulled from sinew
then threaded into carved bone needles

This is no metaphor:
drumming sticks were made
by dropping a round rock into
a testicle then wrapping with tendons
to the end of a stick

Sinew binding teeth and hooves
made door rattles outside the teepee
for announcing a visitor

Bones were carved into knives,
scraping tools, and toys while
tails had second lives swatting flies

Eyes, brains, tongues and organs
were reserved as treats for tribal elders,
meat, berries and fish the daily diet
Snacks were made from intestines
packed with dried herbs and jerky

Though no one knows how they used the nose,
it’s no wonder they were worshipped

Peg Quinn grew up in a rural area outside Lincoln, Nebraska. As a child, she once got her head stuck between the tail and rear-end of a life-size buffalo statue in a public park. Today, she teaches art and paints theatrical sets in southern California, always wearing a bison ring made from an Indian head nickel and morns how they were slaughtered as a means of controlling indigenous people. Her Great-Grandmother was Sioux. 

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN

by Judith Terzi

Not the Grand Canyon
California oak  
sycamore
Not the city park
the swings  
the dandelion
Not the baseball  
the G-O-A-L
Not the community garden
the harbor  
anchor of vessel
Not the daisy  
the buttercup
the Mojave
Not the poet
the potter
Not the artist
the artist
Not the walls
of books
allure of fireflies
walls of museums
Not the grasshopper
on a tea rose
a tea rose
Not Beethoven
under summer stars
And not the Venezuelan
who conducts him
Not the steel of Disney Hall
Not the wind of steel
the cut of space
Not the waterfall
the wildflower
the thickness of skin.


An educator and poet living in Southern California, Judith Terzi's poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Caesura, Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo), Raintown Review, Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s & 70s (She Writes), Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque). Her most recent chapbook, If You Spot Your Brother Floating By, is a collection of memoir poems from Kattywompus Press.

A CLASP

by George Held





So as I left the hygienist’s chair, white-clad Reesha
Said she’d taken a cruise to Turks and Bermuda
And, despite sunscreen, her tawny skin had turned
Black as the Nigerian queen Amina’s,

And I said, “Look at my sad white skin,”
Reddened and pebbled by actinic keratoses
(and smeared with cream to spare it from cancer)
And then I said what was on my mind about

Charleston, the city of Charles (whose name isn’t even
In the Bible), where white-racist hatred had burst
From a gun barrel and killed Pastor Pinckney
And his prayer-meeting sisters and brethren,

And I thought of all the black forbearance, the black
Sympathy, the black nobility that has steadied
A course that might have burst into whirlwind, war
And more deaths of worthy men and women,

And we two, Reesha and I, standing face to face
In the cramped space between high-tech dentistry
And the human race, the only race, clasped hands
And said to each other that in our own history

We at least are friends as I hoped that I was not
Just a superannuated white man
Deluded that he was without the taint
Of racial prejudice.


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

THE PUPS

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Wildlife services in California are being pushed to their limits this year. Since January 2015, every month has set a record in sea lion "strandings," mostly sea lion pups, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There has been an unusually high number of sea lions stranded since January," said Justin Greenman, assistant stranding coordinator for NOAA on the West Coast. "Stranding does happen, but just to give you perspective, 1,800 [sea lion] pups have been responded to this year alone. We responded to 1,600 strandings total during the entire year in 2013," he said. Stranding is the official term to describe marine life that "swim or float into shore and become beached or stuck," according to NOAA. Greenman said California has had warmer weather than usual this year, and, while NOAA is still conducting studies on the Channel Islands to get a more proven explanation, warmer water drives the food source farther out or deeper into the ocean, where the colder water is. When food is farther away, the mothers are away from the pup too long in search of food, and return with little food or too few nutrients for a growing sea lion. —CNN, March 18, 2015

The pups
rise like shaking hands
out of the surf,

with their skin
held like bunched blankets
round their shoulders. They aren’t
yours.

Who should claim them?

From the road, they are the color of the sand –
easy to miss. Think

of them:
their wide steep eyes,
and their bones like broken sticks.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Word Riot, The Kentucky Review, Paper Nautilus, The Lake, and The Tule Review, among others.

THE REASONS WHY

by Kristin LaTour

South Sudanese rebels seized a strategic oil town last week, separating terrified residents by ethnicity before killing hundreds, the United Nations said. "We believe that at least 400 people were killed in Bentiu in the past week," said Toby Lanzer, the top United Nations official in South Sudan. Before the attacks, some rebel commanders broadcast messages on local radio warning certain groups to leave town. "Others broadcast hate messages declaring that certain ethnic groups should not stay in Bentiu and even calling on men from one community to commit vengeful sexual violence against women from another community," the U.N. Mission in South Sudan said. At one hospital, Nuer men, women and children who refused to cheer the rebels were killed, according to the United Nations. --CNN, April 23, 2014

We killed them because it seemed the best thing
at that time, that time being one where both sides
were firing guns, in the context of having guns
that can shoot fast and accurately, bullets traveling
through walls and doors like jets puncturing clouds.

We killed so many because they were not stopping
not even to reload, just hurling fire and metal at us. Or
they were running away and we gave chase, falling on
their necks with our teeth. It wasn't until after we saw
they had no shoes, no weapons, but the blood was sweet.

We killed the women and children for aesthetic reasons.
Their genes were not the same as ours, not entirely, and
our skin is fairer than theirs. Their skin reminded us of stones
and the sky during a storm. Falling rocks and lightning
are dangers. The land seems brighter now without them.

We killed even the crops and livestock because it was a drought
and the fields were dusty, the leaves curling. No one would eat
such miserable gleanings. The chickens and pigs left foul
odors we could not stomach, and the rare cow was bloated
and called for milking. We didn't like the sound, so mournful.

We killed the songs and dances, the ceremonies and paintings
because they reminded us too much of our own when we were
far from our homes, sleeping in abandoned factories and keeping
watch over the night with just a small fire burning. We remembered
our wives and mothers voices and steps, how the priest blessed us.

Kristin LaTour's poems have appeared on The New Verse News and in journals like Witness, Fifth Wednesday, Adanna, dirtcakes, and Rock and Sling. She has three chapbooks, the most recent being Agoraphobia from Dancing Girl Press, 2013. She teaches at Joliet Jr. College and lives in Aurora, IL.

MARS

by Robert Wooten

This artist's rendering provided by NASA shows the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. NASA announced Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012, it plans to send another Curiosity-like rover to Mars in 2020. (AP Photo/NASA)

Mars would be the perfect place to begin
to look for water underneath the surface.
It is under something, under my skin.

After we get there, we may find it in
the rocks, when we arrive by outer space.
Mars would be the perfect place to begin.

If not in rocks, it may be frozen
under the soil or in a deeper place.
It is under something, under my skin,

that to find it we may go deeper, then,
going down farther at a faster pace.
Mars would be the perfect place to begin.

But will we become earth’s poorest citizens,
taxed by vast holdings in the Martian race?
It is under something, under my skin.

What next?  the chance of oceans deeply hidden,
drillings with the hope of finding a trace?
Mars would be the perfect place to begin.
It is under something, under my skin.


Robert Wooten's poems currently appear in Long Story Short, Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Trajectory, Convergence, and  The Fifth D . . ..