A YOUNGER NETANYAHU RETURNS TO ADDRESS HIS OLDER SELF

by Gordon Gilbert

"What terrorists do is target the innocent deliberately, and therefore my definition of terrorism is… the systematic and deliberate attack, murder, maiming and menacing of innocent civilians for political goals.... You can tell a lot about terrorists and what happens when they come to power. Those who fight for freedom and come to power do not impose terrorism.  Those who do, who fight in terroristic means, end up being masters of terroristic states."  —Benjamin Netanyahu to William F. Buckley on Firing Line, May 30, 1986.

Ah, Bibi, habibi!

 

You are not the man I thought I'd be,

no, not the one I find I have become.

I always knew how absolutely

power does corrupt.

I see now how just knowing that

was not enough to keep me

on a path of righteousness,

or save me from myself,

my own worst enemy.

 

So much suffering for all,

and in the end,

so much worse for Israel,

even now, as I,

the man you used to be,

confront you!

 

But no, I must say "we."

I am the former you.

Can you not see

you once were me?

 

We are taking down with us

our own beloved Israel!

 

Ah, Bibi, habibi,

what have we become?

Gordon Gilbert is a resident of the West Village in NYC who got through the pandemic taking long walks along the Hudson River.

WHAT IT TAKES TO LIVE HERE

by Joseph Hope

Gunmen have killed at least 30 people in northwest Nigeria in the latest round of violence in which hundreds have been killed so far this year and thousands more displaced. —The Washington Post, October 18, 2021. Photo: Some members of the Nigerian Armed Forces Sniper Unit. Stefan Heunis/AFP via Getty Images via The Conversation, October 18, 2021

What it takes to live here.

                 Numb. Wait for the news:

unknown gun men killed an 

             unknown number of people, 

go to bed and hope there is 

             tomorrow, of course there is 

always tomorrow 

                       and aways bad news, 

a man named Naira 

                       fell from it high horse 

and broke more than a neck. 

                         The president said shoot 

the protesters, No, 

                      the Army chief did, No, 

an unknown fraternity bigger 

than the government gave the command, 

we don't know who fired 

                                 but we know who died. 

Pretend. Pretend you're happy 

and unhurt, riddled with holes and alive. 

Try to live on unpaid  

                               salaries for months 

and save enough to buy a house 

                          from unpaid pensions. 

Understand to plan your future  

                           on nothing but prayer, a lot of it 

that the church overflows and spill

into the street                         like chemical waste. 

                  Understand ghost walking, 

understand the rhythm of bullets, 

                          understand the many ways you could 

die gradually until blood              looks like red paint, 

                  until bodies piled like groundnut 

pyramid appear 

              as a necessity.

                       It would take more than 

the blood of children drooling from the altar 

                       of terrorism to 

inflate your already               deflated emotion. 

The superpower           of being a Nigerian 

is that you can              make comic of death, 

dance in anger,             and swallow grief 

like your daily                  vitamin supplement.

Joseph Hope is a student of Usman Danfodio University, Sokoto, Nigeria. He is currently studying applied chemistry. His works are forthcoming or already published in Reckoning Press, Evening Street Press, Zoetic Press, The New Verse News, Praxis Magazine, AfroPoetry, Gemini Spice Magazine, Spillwords, SprinNG, Writers Space Africa, Nthanda Magazine, 5th Chinua Achebe Anthology, Ariel Chart, Best "New" African Poets 2019 Anthology, and more. He's a reader for Reckoning Press. He was a fellow in the 2021 SprinNG Writing Fellowship. He tweets @ItzJoe9 & IG: _hope_joseph

JANUARY SIXTH

by Diane Vogel Ferri

The Jan. 6 rally of Trump supporters before the assault on the Capitol.Credit: Nina Berman/NOOR/Redux via The New York Times.

Let us not forget 

how we heard the crack of the breach

in every state, the unholy war

with bloated flags waving

dishonorably, whipping

in the felonious wind

Let us not forget

the terrorism of groupthink

the righteous pounding and shattering

the victims in their glory

holding blue-line banners

while violating blue lives

Let us not forget 

what we saw in real-time

the slurs we heard

the trashing of Jesus

of our tax dollars

our house a crime scene

Let us not forget

the present disremembering

of the big lie

how it is in the past now

consequences suffered only

by the dead

Diane Vogel Ferri is a teacher, poet, and writer living in Solon, Ohio. Her essays have been published in Scene Magazine, Cleveland Stories, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Good Works Review among others. Her poems can be found in numerous journals such as Plainsongs, Rubbertop Review, and Poet Lore. Her previous publications are Liquid Rubies (poetry), The Volume of Our Incongruity (poetry), The Desire Path (novel) and her newest novel No Life But This: A Novel of Emily Warren Roebling.

CHEMICAL WARFARE

 by Gil Fagiani

Introduction: Hallucinations, defined as the perception of an object or event (in any of the five senses) in the absence of an external stimulus, are experienced by patients with conditions that span several diagnoses but most often show up in those suffering from schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorders. This poem is based on such a patient.

Richmond Center for Rehabilitation, Staten Island

 

I’m affected by the crisis of terrorism. I don’t want to put a burden on you, but I have a burden on me. The staff here is mean and sneaky, and uses laser guns to shoot poisonous chemicals in my room. They are immigrants who come from the countries that President T***p says export terrorism. The smells are powerful and cause my nose to be stuffed. The staff is aggressive, and if I say anything to defend myself, they write me up. That means I lose my privilege to order Chinese food on Friday night! The director says I talk over her and refuses to speak with me. If I complain to the other staff members, they say I’m “popping shit” and try to frame me. Look at my record: I’ve never bothered anybody here. The only one who understands me is my social worker. I’m having some lucha—struggle—with the poisonous gas and smoke in my room. I could use a garlic necklace and a water pistol filled with holy water. I’m forced to leave the toilet unflushed and my bathroom door open. This way, the smell of my waste products can block out the poisonous smells. I’ve seen homeless people in subway tunnels burn fires to get rid of poisonous smells. I’m trying to get in contact with organizations like Greenpeace, the Greek Orthodox Church, Amnesty International, and Jews for Jesus—to ask for help.

 

Gil Fagiani (1945-2018) was a translator, essayist, short-story writer, and poet. He  published six books of poetry including his Connecticut Trilogy: Stone Walls, Chianti in Connecticut, Missing Madonnas; as well as his collections Logos, A Blanquito in El Barrio, and Rooks; plus three chapbooks, Crossing 116th Street, Grandpa’s Wine, and Serfs of Psychiatry. 

INNOCENCE

by Jo-Ella Sarich

Credit: Jorge Silva/Reuters via Aljazeera

You were
the bawdy older sister; we thought we were
coquettish, the fish
on the end of the hook. Your tears
were a map traced upon the backs of doors; the other land
of someone else’s pain. I count the seagulls
carving new wounds across my eyelids -
30; 40; 49; someone said ‘terrorist’,
and our world shifted
just that fraction like a coin flipped. Now this mirror,
now this dress that
makes my thighs look like the Port Hills
at dusk and you hold me,
for just a moment and say,
I know what it means
to bleed inside. Some say
Aoraki’s feet are awash in his tears; some say
tears are just the ties that bind us. Men are
shouting in loud voices while our parents
are in bed; in summer we shook, now
we stand still. You call me, the one
who taught me how to count
with both hands and I try and
imagine how you feel
in Orlando right now, holding a lock
of my baby hair and praying,
Is nothing ever sacred?

Jo-Ella Sarich is a lawyer, writer, and mother to two young girls living in Pito-one, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her poems have appeared in a number of print and online publications, including New Statesman, The Lake, Cleaver Magazine, Barzakh Magazine, Quarterday Review, Shoreline of Infinity, takahē magazine, Shot Glass Journal, the New Zealand Poetry Society’s Anthology for 2017 and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017.

BABES IN ARMS

by Rasma Haidri

CBC News photo of Munich mall shooting mourners superimposed over Munich Beer Hall photo from Muenchen.de.

The snap from Munich shows my daughter, her boyfriend,
a guy with glasses, all holding plastic beakers
of beer, half empty or half full (depending, right?)
She texts:         Nice today, no clouds!
                        Spending afternoon at music festival
                        in the neighbor village

I peer over her shoulder at the tiny crowd of bare legs,
shorts, tank tops
      Text:                BE CAREFUL!
then try to find a smiley that means: I don’t want to be one
of those mothers but baby, please
don’t go to a music festival in a Bavarian village,
not this week - I send the one with gritted teeth, maybe
that’s how I feel, follow it with pink hearts, just in case
   
      She texts:         Haha I will smiley heart kiss
New snap: crowd closer, I see eight and a half full
bodies, five times that many heads, myriad arms and legs,
it’s a mass of youth - always young people these days, at camp,
a mall, concert - how will she be careful? And why do the men
in this crowd have no faces? They block each other, look down,
turn away from the camera, all but that guy: black eyes, but no
backpack, or that one gazing at nothing, what he’s thinking?
I don’t know, I don’t even know what ‘careful’ means

Three thousand miles away, all I can do is practice
my tenet of blind faith
      Text:                HAVE A GREAT TIME!
add, as sacrament, the smiley with cool shades, scroll
with invented optimism to get the party hat and dancing senorita,
musical notes and microphone, and because she is still my daughter,
not one of the numbered in Munich last month, write       I LOVE YOU!

She sends two more snaps
                              Really nice here smiley heart kiss
                              I love you too!

and I see him: baseball cap, at the edge of the frame
or there, left center, wearing a fedora, dark beard, or at least
a five o’clock shadow, and he’s carrying something big and black,
a bag, and wearing a watch - or that guy staring straight at me
around the shoulder of a wild 1960s shirt, he’s got that
clean-shaven Anders Behring Breivik look

Ding, alert: in the final snap they are on the ground,
boyfriend, sister, my daughter between them, screaming
smile, wide surprised eyes, making that pose
all millennials make, the ones who grew up seeing themselves
on digital screens in fun Mountain Dew commercial scenes

I stare at the photos, it was just such a concert last week,
a village in Bavaria like this, a young man like him
or him, or that one under the tree -- there are so many
standing in groups or alone
looking down at the screens of their phones
as I do here, at my own

they are scanning the crowd for Pokemon
I am looking for the kid with the gun

Rasma Haidri grew up in Tennessee and makes her home on the arctic seacoast of Norway where she teaches British and American studies. Her poems and essays can be found in anthologies by among others Pudding House, Seal Press, Bayeux Arts, Marion Street Press, The Chicago Review Press and Grayson Books, and in literary journals such as Sycamore Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, Runes, Kalliope and I-70 Review. Her most recent poetry can be found in, Veils, Halos and Shackles: International Poetry on the Abuse and Oppression of Women.

BIN LADEN’S PORN STASH

by Michael Shorb

The conservative group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit Monday, demanding that the Central Intelligence Agency comply with a Freedom of Information Act request submitted last year for pornographic materials recovered during the May 2011 U.S. raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. —Politico, March 8, 2016. Comic strip by Matt Bors, Daily Kos, May 20, 2011.

midnight behind the razor wire,
after the dreary paper work
plotting the deaths
of millions, the grunt
work of recruiting a second
and third tide of brainwashed
suicide attackers, even an icon
steeped in the dark
needs to kick back,
close the door on prying
wives or sons or underlings,
stick the thumb drive in—

no pasha, nor hated
solomon himself boasted
such a harem: breasts pillowing,
thighs glowing gold in
a sinking sherbet sun,
arms embracing him,
sockets wet and waiting,
passionate sighs and secret
whisperings --

now the hard drive’s gone,
every keystroke and synapse
etched in ether, you and
your thirst for mayhem’s
washed clean and dumped
into the sea, only
the hoarse and bloody
schoolboys remain,
mumbling your name
as they search, lost
in the rubble of paradise.


Michael Shorb was a poet, fiction writer, editor, and children's book author. As an international poet, his poetry has been published in more than 100 magazines and anthologies, including TheNewVerse.News, Michigan Quarterly, The Nation, The Sun, Salzburg Poetry Review, and Kyoto Journal. He was the recipient of a PEN AWARD, won a Merit Award for the Franklin-Christoph Poetry Contest, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lived in and loved San Francisco. Michael succumbed to GIST, a rare form of cancer in 2012.

Editor’s Note: Michael’s widow Judith Grogan-Shorb sent TheNewVerse.News this eerily timely poem which Michael wrote soon after the death of Bin Laden and the subsequent Reuters story of x-rated videos found in the Abbottabad compound.

HOME GROWN TERRORISM

by F.I. Goldhaber

In the years since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has suffered sixty-five assaults associated with right-wing ideologies—“sovereign citizens,” white supremacists, and anti-abortion extremists—and twenty-four by Muslim extremists, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, at the University of Maryland. You might think that this underrepresents the risk of a spectacular, high-casualty attack, but, as my colleague John Cassidy has written, the security officials who protect the public against both domestic and foreign terrorists say the domestic risk is greater. The terrorism experts Charles Kurzman, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Schanzer, of Duke, surveyed nearly four hundred state and local police agencies, and found that the “main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists but from right-wing extremists.” . . . It will take time to discover what mix of ideas and madness contributed to the attacks in Colorado Springs and San Bernardino. But it is a different kind of madness to pretend that we’ve learned nothing about why these types of events happen. In a study published this year in the journal American Behavioral Scientist, Mark Pitcavage, of the Anti-Defamation League, examined thirty-five “lone wolf” attackers—their tactics and ideas, and the consequences of their actions. He found that “ideology seems to have played a substantial role in the majority of the violent acts.” Nearly two-thirds of the attackers had a clear sense of what they were doing to their “perceived enemies,” and why. —Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, Dec. 2, 2015. CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY NICK COTE / THE NEW YORK TIMES VIA REDUX VIA THE NEW YORKER

The hypocrites rage on, refusing to accept responsibility
when one of their own slaughters police, doctors, and innocent bystanders.
The rhetoric that sends terrorists to attack women seeking health care
erupts anew as those fomenting hate spew vitriol across airwaves.

No one questions why medical facilities find it necessary
to have safe rooms and armored doors. Too many accept how easily those
with criminal records and mental instability acquire weapons.

Those who immediately condemned all Muslims after some radical
fundamentalists violated their own religious texts to bomb and
shoot Parisians, urge us to wait for all the facts when their protégés
splatter the blood of strangers and destroy buildings on American soil.

Violent extremists threaten the U.S., but they call themselves "Christians,"
use Bibles not Qurʾans to justify destruction and murder. We won't
eradicate terrorism if we ignore the ones we raise at home.


As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, F.I. Goldhaber produced news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now, her poems, short stories, novelettes, essays, and reviews appear in paper, electronic, and audio magazines, ezines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies.  Her newest book of poetry Subversive Verse collects poems about corporate cruelty, gender grievances, supreme shambles, political perversion, and race relations. 

DOWN IN THE GRIT OF MUSIC NOTES

by Anna Hawthorne

Down in the grit of music notes, a drop of blood lay drying
though soon another concert would flow, becoming more than a tide
why did they shoot the messenger here
when all we wanted was to dance
a pitterpatter firecracker they thought, while glancing at their cell phones for news
of an impending storm . . . low pressure was sensed yet not obeyed
and they ran for the nearest door with a ringing sound delayed, a resonating hover over the empty stage


Anna Hawthorne is a conservationist, birder, and a painter working on a book about the extinction of birds.

GOOD BOY

by Laura Rodley





You made it, speeding squirrel,
barreling cross black asphalt
as five cars careened
towards you each way,

north and south, no bombs
tied to your body, just
soft grey fur, acorns awaiting.

What know you about bombings
in Paris, 128 killed,
I’m ready for love
what know you

about guns in kindergarten
I’m ready for love
what know you but the rumble
of the road, earthquakes

that pass as the cars swirl by
and you’ve made it to high ground
leaves barely moving
as your tiny feet scramble up.


Author's note: I’m ready for love from Bad Company’s song "Ready for Love."

Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

TERRORISM AND ITS MODES

by Austin Alexis

I compare it to a wintry night:
kale and other crops won't grow:
its land sits barren, dry.
It is defined by lies.
The bodies and shards it scatters
disintegrate in The New York Times.
Its causes it fails to justify
so its effects lack resonance.
By definition it is a cry
whose message, unheard, belies
what it wants to say.
Unpersuasive, it never asks why
its arguments don't make loud sounds
like shopping malls crashing to the ground.


Austin Alexis has published in or has work forthcoming in The Long Islander, Home Planet News, Paterson Literary Review, The New Verse News, The Ledge and other journals. His full-length collection is Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press). His chapbook is For Lincoln & Other Poems (Poets Wear Prada Press). He teaches composition and literature at a CUNY college in Brooklyn and lives in Manhattan, New York City.

INSTRUCTING INGENIOUS INDIGENES

by Sultana Raza

‘Noble Juveniles’ 2014 Sultana Raza Mixed Media

Cocooned in comfortable zones
will the well-heeled ‘educate’

starving millions
forced to beg for work,

borrow permanently,
steal sympathy in grim daylight?

Billions of babies aching to learn
the basics of how to melt glaciers,

cause virgin forests to shrink,
help economy spurt/stutter

after earning enough to consume
as mindlessly as those ensconced

in miles of matching carpet
wall-paper, curtains, trivialbilia,

with too many bulbs,
burning too brightly too late at night.

They’d have a better shot
of being treated nobly

royally, exaltingly
if somehow they got out word

of how they suffered
at the hands of an enemy

that necessitates
the creation, maintenance, and sustenance

of the ‘defense’ industry.
Defending the rights of kids

to stale mouthfuls, rags,
a semblance of childhood

under the highest roof in the world
would be so much more justified

highlighted, applauded,
if only they’d dramatically denounce

popular enemies
of nations who actually possess

rational weapons of mass destruction
who ‘helped’ create

said empty-headed adversaries
in the first place.


Of Indian origin, Sultana Raza has an MA in English Literature. Her short stories and poems have been published in Ancient Heart Magazine (Australia), India Currents (USA), Szirine (USA), Kindred Spirit (UK), Cygnus Review (UK), Arabesque Review, London Grip (UK), Literary Gazette (USA), All Things Girls (UK), and Caduceus (Ed. Yale University, USA), Beyond Bree, (an American MENSA newsletter), the Peter Roe Series, (Tolkien Society UK), The Whirlwind Review (USA), Writer’s Asylum (India), and Silver Leaves Journal #5 (Canada). An awarded artist, Sultana Raza has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in the USA and Europe. She has also participated in international art shows, such as the Nightshow at Riccione, Italy, B.AGL Postbanhof during the Berlin Art Week, the Biennale of Chianciano, Italy in 2013; and ArtExpo New York (alongside Andy Warhol), and Art Monaco in 2014.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

by Lawrence J. Krips

Your article from February ninth
said nothing of how our terrorist search
protects no one but brings internecine fear
and what is it we teach?
So your author says of all the foiled plots
homeland has been saved many a day
not mentioning we’ve lost our country;
the freedom to be free, the world in dismay.

                        ~

I read your editorial on peace
and wonder when our nation will love,
love some space, just one small piece,
love even ones we hate.
My suggestion for your readers
is to start with loving us,
then we will stop killing our leaders
and then cease killing every one else.

                        ~

All I can say
is bless the N.R.A.
Who else to defend our rights
against unconstitutional insights?
The best protection is to arm.
More automatics keeps us from harm.
The radicals steal our guns
by stealing our rights one by one.

                        ~

The drones,
the killings,
the Americans.
Robot dragons
spit their fire.
the haste of death.
Blood spattered dreams –
            whose?
have died.

                        ~

We need to keep drilling.
Capitalism runs upon it.
We need to keep on killing.
This control is our ace in the hole.
We need to have more money
to serve the people who deserve.
We need to have soldiers in the army
to protect our preserve.

                        ~

Your anorexic take on modern psychotherapy
left me less than informed or cheered.
The lucid truth is therapy
is as good as the therapist.
And despite your insecurities about process
those that remain in the land of effects
remain in a territory tending toward death
instead of here in the thick of the juice.

                                                                                                                                             
Lawrence J. Krips is a writer and an empowerment coach.  His poems have appeared in Rhode Island Writers Circle Anthology, Origami Poems Project and Tifferet.  In 2012 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry.

COMING-OF-AGE POEM USING 50 WORDS THAT MIGHT CAUSE THE NSA TO FLAG YOU AS A TERRORIST

by Martin Ott

Image source: popdecay.

Source for the 50 words in the poem: Business Insider: Australia.

His impatient mother would place her mace in an indigo
purse, and badger him, “Slow-poke the artichoke,”
for preferring Reno to the college snuffle, beef market
of lacrosse tossers, Jello shots, and credit card fraud.

His sometimes flame Jasmine got him in the zone,
loin to loin, on the basement couch, their chosen niche,
utopia of quiche and salsa, his red-headed Capricorn
quick to unzip for sex, and call his thrashing fish a minnow.

His friend Jack told him to run, Austin nerd, full of cocaine
and malaise, afraid of Texas, and dropping dead from blowfish
darts from gorilla boyfriends transformed into clandestine snipers
with Ninja stealth from keyhole eavesdropping on his sister’s friends.

Today he suited up, Roswell cowboy, not afraid to strap on his big
asset, his Macintosh, to face the fangs of starving career advisors
peering at him like a veggie burger without French fries or a bun,
the enigma of missing something almost as hard as missing none.


A former U.S Army interrogator, Martin Ott currently lives in Los Angeles, where he writes poetry and fiction, often about his misunderstood city. He is the author of 3 books of poetry: Underdays, Notre Dame University Press (to be published in 2015); Captive, De Novo Prize winner, C&R Press; and Poets’ Guide to America, co-written with John F. Buckley In 2013, he published his debut novel The Interrogator’s Notebook, Story Merchant Books. His blog - writeliving.wordpress.com - has thousands of readers in more than 75 countries.

FOR WALT AND ALLEN

by Rick Gray

                                                                 

My name is announced before takeoff.
It’s JFK again, but this is a new terminal.
I haul my carry-on past rich kids pouting
In First-Class, already juiced,
 and step back onto the homeland.

Outside waits a man in a blue uniform and a silver badge.
“Are you a writer?” he asks.  There are tribal scars
On his fat cheeks.  I don’t ask.
“Follow me,” he tells me, and we walk together back
Down the tube to America. Our footsteps echo out of rhythm.

At the American Airlines check-out desk ten men are hovering over
my lost notebook of poems. I relapsed in the wine bar and my God punishes.
A man no older than thirty introduces himself as Tim from the Terrorism Task Force.
I told him I was not impressed, and that I believe in respect for elders.
I’m very traditional that way, Tim. Maybe it was my years in Africa when I lived in a hut.
Tim’s training did not include humor and, confused, he steps away.                                                          

The Boss moves in, a man with the pink alcoholic shade my ancestors taught me.
His face looks frozen in 1974. Very pre 9/11, with a suit that looks
lifted from the costume room of The French Connection.
“You’re a poet?” he starts. “You said it,” I swing back at him, “not me.”
“ A woman found your notebook and was very alarmed,” he frowns.
I try to break his Popeye scowl with a grin. He goes grim.

“Your poem called Bomb Threat is of concern,” he continues,
Lifting a torn page out of my notebook. Everything is written in green.
“And your comments about Homeland Security we all find curious.”
“That shit is weird,” the black guy with the scars exclaims. Everyone nods before
French Connection waves them still.

“I’m missing my plane,” I say, and a cop tells me to forget about flight.
“What was your destination?” another one asks.
I am going to Afghanistan to teach Shakespeare, I calmly explain.
I finally get my first laugh. But when I tell them to go fuck themselves, fascist pigs,
They’re back to business with my notebooks.     

But not I.
No, I now have a growing audience of passengers for the Paris flight
And I was raised not to waste. Children are starving in Africa.
THIS IS NOT AMERICA! I shout to them.                                                                                  
I AM BEING HELD FOR POETRY! I cry, and don’t know why I raise my fist.
This must be the oral thrill of the spoken word I’ve read about    
And I can feel Whitman and Ginsberg grinning below the New York dirt of JFK.
“Front page!” I bluff to the boss, flushed with my little fame, “New York Times!”
and pull out another notebook and start writing, staring into his badge.

Walkie-talkies come out and soon an alternative ticket is being printed.
They give an Irish cop the job of returning my notebooks; no one else will touch them.
“Hold onto these,” he gives me a wink I might, in a better mood, call Whitmanesque.
“It’s a shitty job,“ he apologizes as I take back my poems and head to another gate.
“Any good publications?” I hear him call out to me.
“Nope,” I shout back, “my job sucks too.”

Oh America, I don’t want to leave you!
I want to stay and write poems that make men huddle in airports!
I want to be pulled off your American Airlines and asked by scarred men if I’m a writer!
I want to make speeches about liberty to passengers to Paris!
I want to alarm everyone in the country!
But instead I’m off to another stupid war
To pay for my daughter’s ballet.
No one in America responds to my resume,
only these lost notebooks that don’t pay.
So before I step away from my homeland
I get one last jab at the Irish cop trailing me.
“I’m coming back soon!” I shout back at him from the tube.
“And we’ll be waiting!” he calls back to me, waving a little blue book.


Rick Gray served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. He was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie, and has an essay that will be appearing in the forthcoming book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. When not in Kabul, he lives with his wife Ghizlane and twin daughters Rania and Maria in Florida.

THOUGHTS ON TERRORISM

by David S. Pointer




The Boston Marathon
Bombings had me thinking
about the Olympic Games
in 1972 when Black September
killed athletes, and the world
has never come to laud acts
of terrorism, and can’t find
the will for lasting world
peace yet nobody seems to
know how much ethical
deliberation it takes to light
a fuse, build a bomb or lie
on TV about drones killing
all those global children


David S. Pointer served as a Marine military policeman from 1980-1984. Currently, he serves on the advisory panel at “Writing For Peace.”