PLANTING TIME IN UKRAINE

by Anne Harding Woodworth

A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war. Credit: Vitaly Timkiv/Associated Press via The New York Times, March 20, 2022

The fibers of the breadbasket are unraveling.

Metaphor is of no use in wartime.

 

Call the breadbasket what it is: fertile country

that supplies grains near and far,

 

threatened now, as arable fields lie unplowed,

despoiled by the Bear at planting time.

 

Metaphor is useless. The tractor with plow

(or seeder) attached should be chugging out

 

into the fields now and on into the end of April—

but won’t be.

 

Man or woman on a tractor—easy target for the Bear.

But that’s metaphor, too.

 

Call the Bear what he is: greedy and cruel creature.

And not all bears. This one is a singular carrier of evil,

 

who leads his cubs to do his bidding.

There’s little grain left for the families,

for the animals, and none to ship out to Egypt,

Indonesia, Morocco, Israel, Spain, Tunisia.

Tunisia, once called a breadbasket itself,

until it was swallowed up by desert.

Now do you see how metaphors

don’t always work?

The world is hungry and hungrier, as the Bear

destroys fecund fields. No seeds will open.

No grains will be harvested. The breadbasket

empty, crushed. War destroys metaphor.

 

Food! is the only word left.

Anne Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry Trouble received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry.

MARS

by Howie Good

The god of carnage has grown

a balding man’s stringy ponytail.

Red, he says, means danger.

He shrugs his cruelly thin shoulders.

A tractor stands abandoned

in a field of what looks from here

like black puddles of blood.

The future will burn a full 40 days.

We will walk beside our coffins.

Starvelings will stare out

from behind barbed wire.

Mothers will shriek. There will be

nice grass in the cemetery.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.

5TH AND AVENUE E

by Stephen Cafagna

“Bus Stop” by Reginald Marsh. Image source: Encore Editions

i stod at the bus stop as a man late for work
looking down the street
wishing this bus would appare from thin air
I’d trade the life of every passing car for my bus

I stod at the bus stop alone
feeling as if i where to die at any moment
almost in shock that i wasnt

i stod as a man looking for his only ride
like when I was four
me and my father waited for the tractor
to take us around the apple ranch
i look down

staring at my hands
think if all i have done with these
ive build, destroyed, takin and give
but what did you do?
What was your triumph?

I stod at the bus stop as a boy
hearing the rpms
twine as when the transmission shifts
the complete stop
Kushhh! brakes awoke me to another dream…

And the only thing i had of my father’s was a glass from Venezuela
He died when i was 5, his glass went when i was 21
the corner where it broke still smells of old whiskey

I had my heart ripped out before
I dont like doing it to others, tho it happens…
Would you rather be the gun shot victum?


This poem by Stephen Cafagna is from his dissertation, finalized in Fayetteville. It functions in the interstices of language and urban life -- in dialect, representing a bridge of sorts, connecting the world of illiteracy, in all its unappreciated beauty, to the literary world.