DEMO

by Michel Steven Krug

Jeff Koterba / Cagle Cartoons

In the House

there’s treachery afoot.

 

A leader sandwiched by volleys

of red sensation

and

what formerly was known

as consensus.

 

And the price to be paid:

parliamentary

demo-

li-tion. 

 

I move that the Country

Avert economic infanticide

By installing cold showers

That spray the margins where

Passion plays like theatre 

To astound the outer rings.

Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and he litigates. His poems have appeared in Sierra Nevada Review, Jerry Jazz, Whistling Shade, St. Paul Almanac, Liquid Imagination, Blue Mountain Review, Portside, New Verse News, JMWW, Cagibi, Silver Blade, Crack the Spine, Dash, Mikrokosmos, North Dakota Quarterly, Eclectica, Writers Resist, Sheepshead, Mizmor Anthology, Poets Reading the News, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven's Perch, Main Street Rag and Brooklyn Review. His collection Jazz at the International Festival of Despair is scheduled for publication by Broadstone Books, in the spring, 2024.

PREGNANT AND TRAPPED IN MARIUPOL, UKRAINE

by Claire Matturro

“Pregnant women moved from Mariupol hospital were sheltering in bombed theatre.” —Sky News, March 26, 2022. Photo: Mariana Vishegirskaya, an injured pregnant woman walks downstairs in a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

At first we acted brave as we hurried

Inside the theater to flee mortars.

We had food and water, but I worried

Heavy with child if I’d make the border

If buses didn’t come. We sang bold songs,

then our food ran out, the water was gone.

Missiles crushed the walls, so we ran for trees,

as if feeble branches could stop the siege.

My baby kicks as an old man stopping

By me in the forest offers toffee.

He says “don’t chew it. It is the last one.

Let it melt slowly upon your tongue.

Chocolate and mint, a bit of sweet cream,

like the bold songs we used to bravely sing.” 

Author's Note: This sonnet is a heart-felt response to recent news stories about the continuing ordeal of people in Mariupol. The first eight lines are based upon direct news accounts—including the shelling of the theater where many took refuge and the wait for the humanitarian relief via the Red Cross buses. However, the last six lines, after the turn in the sonnet about the man offering the pregnant woman the last piece of candy, are wholly imagined. I wanted to show something of the kindness and courage of the Ukrainian people, which is so often reflected in news stories, and to offer at least a hint of hope. 

Claire Matturro has been a journalist, a lawyer, and a legal writing teacher at Florida State University and University of Oregon. She is the author of seven novels, including a legal thriller series published by HarperCollins, and is the co-author of a recent novel. She is an associate editor at Southern Literary Review and lives in Florida.

THE LAYOUT OF TWO STORIES

by Barbara Simmons

San Jose Mercury News, March 18, 2022

It strikes me first because I want

to replicate the cover story, its

filling up the top-half of page one with

students costumed for their roles in Beauty and

the Beast, and fill the bottom of this page, the

story line the same, but now removing it from San Leandro,

taking it to Mariupol, setting up production there for

the same play, with young Ukrainians in the roles of Belle,

The Beast, the talking Armoire and the flickering Lumiere, 

all taking turns rehearsing for the opening night. The local

story tells of students whose dramatic arc

had lost two years, pandemic’s having moved them away

from stages and onto screens. The story from another world

shows readers columns, perhaps Corinthian, now holding air,

the theater they adorned now roofless, the drama playing out

a theme of death and rubble, shrapnel-scarred skeletons, smoke

the scrim. Who may have played these roles we do not know, those

killed as they sought refuge in a theater basement. 

The layout

is the story: partitioned narratives reveal two worlds, one

where drama’s curtain rises to roles donned, 

the other where the drama is demise, 

where nothing’s left for anyone, for any of us, 

to understand.

Barbara Simmons, a native Bostonian residing in California, a graduate of Wellesley College and The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins, is a retired teacher and counselor.  She explores the communion of words as ways to remember and envision.  Publications include Boston Accent, The NewVerse News, Soul-Lit, and Capsule Stories. Offertories: Exclamations and Disequilibriums is her first book of poetry due in Spring 2022.