THE TERRORIST

by George Salamon

Rahul Gandhi delivered a lecture at Cambridge University [February 28, 2023] on “Learning to Listen in the 21st Century.” Recounting how the yatra [the march he recently led through India] changed him, Gandhi said the interactions with the people who held his hand during the yatra trusting him as a brother and confided in him changed him as a politician, his perspective. As the yatra entered Kashmir, Gandhi said, "As I was walking, a guy came up and showed me a few men standing nearby. He told me they are militants. I thought I was in trouble because in that situation militants would kill me. But they did not do anything because this is the power of listening.” —Hindustan Times, March 3, 2023

Can anyone ever reach you?

Would we have to dissolve

into the white hot fire inside

of you to see you?

Would you talk with us then,

touching the rivers of fire

cooling in our own blood 

so we too become weightless

like you, no longer capable of

joy or grief, and rise for the

journey that unbinds us and

knows of no return?

Most of us remain weighed 

down, unable or unwilling to

submit to the exuberance of

terror that nothing can appease.

Terrorism is not merely an act

of terror, but also one of

nihilism

Its fire burns all—motivation,

victim and terrorist.

George Salamon recalls reading Hermann Rauschning's 1939 book TheRevolution of Nihilism meant as a warning by depicting Hitler's National Socialism as, at least in part, a "revolution of nihilism," a pact between leader and people for destruction and self-destruction. 

THE WATER COOLER

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

Blood stains and a small section of police tape show the scene where multiple people were injured following an overnight shooting at the Dior Bar & Lounge in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday, Jan. 22, 2023. Credit: Michael Johnson/AP

Gather round the water cooler

For the latest on the latest mass shooting

How many dead, how many critical

 

Let’s put our heads together and get the facts

Where the wounded hid, how many rounds

What the cops did and didn’t do

 

The victims have our thoughts and prayers

They have our attention

We are talking about it, talking and talking

 

Until talk turns to the next one

 

 

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island, and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and has had many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured several of her poems during the past year, including “How to Silence a Woman,” and “If I have loved you,” both of which won “Moon Prizes.” Melanie grew up in Vermont wandering the woods and fields and has never stopped wandering.  She leads nature and history field trips for Smithsonian Associates, the US Botanic Garden, the Nature Conservancy, Politics & Prose Bookstore, and many other organizations in the Washington, DC area.

COVID-19 LIPOGRAM

by Martin Elster

Kay Scanlon / Los Angeles Times; Getty Images

Masking my physiognomy
may blight my glorious bond with you.
Your shroud, part of your armory,
brings to mind this bugaboo

bugging all of us. So now
as you and I chat through our masks,
although your orbs and striking brow
may knit or grin, a ticklish task

awaits us: To concoct a way
to talk with hands, with nods, and know
that you and I can simply say,
“I want you!” though our lips won’t show.


Author's Note: This is a  poem without the letter “e."

Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, was for many years a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His career in music has influenced his fondness for writing metrical verse, which has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies in the US and abroad. A full-length collection Celestial Euphony was published by Plum White Press in 2019.

2018

by Ashley Green

Let’s talk about it.


Twelve and
the twenty-year-old touching
the back of your leg
where the shorts ended and your thigh began.

Thirteen and
the stucco pulling hair
from the back of your head and scraping
the backs of your arms
as his eighteen-year-old body
crushed you and
his hands pushed your legs open. 


Sixteen and
your classmate crawling
up your dazed, drunk body
unbuttoning your pants and
telling you
it’s okay.

Eighteen and
the boy you loved
forcibly turning you over
his grunts and moans
made you nauseous and
the pain of him inside you
made you cry.

Twenty and
 your neighbor corners you
 in his room and
tells you that you can’t leave
so you beg and
push and
cry and
his arms outstretch around you, caging you in.

Let’s talk about it and
 talk about it and
 talk about it until
 we are out of breath.
Let’s tell the world how
you bent our bodies and
bruised our skin and
made us bleed and
stole from us and
how we are still here
to talk about it.

Let’s talk about it.



Ashley Green lives in Southern California where she is surrounded by brilliant women.

NOT THE TIME

by David Chorlton

“This was slow and methodical,” [Bobby] Jindal said [of the Lafayette, LA movie theater shootings]. “It was barbaric.” The Republican governor, who is a candidate for the 2016 presidential nomination, was pressed on whether he should reconsider certain gun-control measures in the wake of the tragedy. He said now was “not the time” to discuss policy. —The Guardian, July 25th, 2015; file photo of Jindal at another time.

Remembering the shooter in a dark space
it all comes back in slow motion

but never slow enough
to be prevented. You might say

it was mysterious, the way the bullets
found random targets. All that remains

is to talk until no-one feels the pain,
as politics like poetry becomes

the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:
it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.


David Chorlton grew up in England, in a time when Westerns were the favored theme in TV entertainment, never anticipating that he would one day live in Arizona, as he has since 1978. His poetry has appeared widely, and FutureCycle published his Selected Poems in 2014.