WHITE FLAGS, WALKING SOUTH

by Amy Wolf

I see* you, with your white flag raised on a stick, held high.

Child on your shoulder, two little legs dangling beneath your ears,

The hand not holding the white flag is grasping your son’s ankle.

A daughter walks beside you, a wife or mother follows behind, wailing.

Out of all of the Arabic I hear in the video*, I understand only Nakba,

But that is said often. Tragedy; expulsion; we won’t be going back, it says.

Your face is dirty, I think you have not had enough water to drink,  let alone to bathe

In, for a while. You look parched.

I look for your provisions; who is carrying the clothes you might change into,

The kitchen utensils, pots, pans, mattresses.

There is only you, and your youngers and elders, and one teenager

Carrying a bundle of clothes smaller than a suitcase.

He looks baffled.

I hear the words of the soldiers, hurrying you along.

They do not step into the picture to offer water, or comfort, or rest.

They are voices. I cannot impute any kindness to them,

Although you might convince me that a forced march from home

Is marginally better than having that home bombed and brought down on your head,

Doubling neatly as your tombstone and grave.

I see you, and I see my ancestors, in line to get on the trains.

With their small bundles, and cluster of relatives.

Yes, those trains.

Don’t look away.

Didn’t we say, never again?

Didn’t we say, when you pen a people in a ghetto, then make them abandon even that

For a long death march to an unknown place where there are too many bodies and not enough

Water and food

Let alone space to lay down

Didn’t we say that was genocide?

Didn’t we swear to speak up next time?

The Trail of Tears comes to mind.

Old people falling dead on the way, and children.

Women refusing to leave their young ones, and staying next to them to die in the cold.

This is not genocide porn.

I do not enjoy these pictures.

But I have met the ghosts of earlier marches.

On a cold spring morning in TN, a long-dead woman showed me

Where she killed herself with a knife to lay beside her child.

Willing to walk to Oklahoma, but not to leave her baby behind.

She said to me, “In the hall there, you are all dancing and singing and praying and setting out food for your ancestors.

Where is our food? We lived here. Feed us.”

I set out food for them, and prayer and song, and took the memory with me.

The humans walking from Gaza City to Khan Younis will be on that road for a long time,

Haunting all of those to come. Rebuking any who try to move into that space

With the same demand, dead or alive. “We live here; feed us.”

Centuries from now, should mankind survive on this planet,

You will still be able to see a line of white flags heading north to south,

Hear the sound of shuffling feet tired beyond reckoning of lifting up and setting down,

Listen to the cries of children and  the wailing of their mothers.

People like myself will be called in to do space clearings

And we will say, “I can’t tell them to leave. They live here. Just feed them.

Honor them.”

To my Jewish relatives I say this; you do not honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust

By consenting to and cheering on and excusing

A forced march

To crowded conditions

With little food

And less water.

Don’t you remember?

This is how it starts.

*The videos referenced by the speaker in this poem can be viewed here and here.

Amy Wolf is an LMT and energy worker who resides in Seattle, WA, and is studying writing.

ANTIGONE IN MARIUPOL

by Bonnie Naradzay

Mariupol, Ukraine 17 April 2022. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko

I searched the ruined city for my brother

to consecrate him with a proper burial.

Snow was still falling in the cold spring then.

I stopped at a body pockmarked with bullets;

the fingers on each hand had been bent backwards.

I came upon a corpse without a head. 

Do I know him?  Oh, they are all my brothers,  

in mass graves everywhere, shoved into ditches, 

dead in the midst of life from this unholy invasion.

Now I myself am buried—in tunnels below the city,   

refusing to surrender to the enemy king who said

not even a fly will be allowed to leave alive.  

Sentries are everywhere, barricading the doors. 

Where oh where is the civilized world?

Some day, perhaps, Sophocles will create a tragedy

for people to witness—and make sense of this.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry salons at a day shelter for homeless people and also at a retirement community, both in Washington DC. Poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review online, Tampa Review, Florida Review online, EPOCH, The American Journal of Poetry, and others. While in graduate school, she took a class that Robert Lowell taught: “The King James Bible as English Poetry.” In 2010 she was awarded the New Orleans MFA poetry prize: a month’s stay with Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary in her castle in Northern Italy. While there, she had tea with Mary, heard cuckoos calling during mating season, and hiked in the Dolomites.

AUGURY

Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in Mankato, MN. He was awarded the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize for his poem “Fieldstone” and was the recipient of the 2014 String Poet Prize for his poem “The Autumn Way.” A book of his collected poems, Orbital Paths, was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

DANGEROUS WOMEN

by Elizabeth S. Wolf

It was her first concert
out with friends. The gang of girls.
Besties since babies, they said.
They picked outfits and did their hair,
one high ponytail,  smoky eyes. They listened
to their parents lecture and promised
to follow the signs and obey the rules and
not take drinks from strangers and
oh my god mom, relax. It’s a concert.
Not a bar. Not a North-West Derby
brawl. Just a bunch of girls
dancing and screaming to their
favorite songs. It was Ariana Grande
live on stage: Manchester Arena
Manchester England
22 May 2017.

Three girls, who decided
at the last minute not to wear
kitten ears- three bold teens
walked into the concert as if
they owned the world.

One girl died on the floor,
shattered; the last thing she saw
bouquets of pink balloons
rising towards the ceiling.

The second girl bled from wounds
scattered about her body. She is
in hospital now, hooked up to tubes,
waiting on tests. For several hours
she asked so many questions, over
and over, but now she does not.
She answers the doctors queries,
shifts for the nurses hands: yes, her
ears are still ringing; yes, she still
smells burnt tubing. She sips water
and stares. Shell shock, they whisper.
Her ma and da take turns at her
bedside or tending the others
back home.

The third girl went home
uninjured. She spent a little
longer in the loo and got
separated from her friends.
She lost her voice
screaming for hours.
Now she won’t talk, doesn’t
eat, doesn’t drink. She lies
curled on her bed, clutching
the string from a pink
balloon. When she goes
to the bathroom, her mum
stands by the doorway, crooning
a lullaby. They call her
uninjured, because
she didn’t bleed
at the scene.

She lay in her bed while
day broke up night, again
and again. And on the third
day she called her mum.
Mum, she whispered, wide eyed,
after the bomb there was blood
on the walls, I got so scared.
I was alone! she said,
alone alone. But then
I saw a lady, almost like you,
and she stopped running to lift
up a little girl who had fell.
And the girl, she just hung
on, and I remembered to
look for the helpers.

That’s right, said her mum,
stroking her hair. Look for
the helpers.

And then I was running and screaming
and in the big room, in the hotel,
there was a lady, black as pitch, she
smelled like soap, said the girl. And
I was shaking and looking all around
and she came and held me. I
don’t even know who she is.

That was Amina, said her mum.
She works for the hotel, she
cleans the rooms. She left her own
country to flee the bombs and
find food.  Now she lives here.
And found you.

Mum, said the girl. I know what I want
to do now. I know.

What’s that? asked her mum.

I want to be a helper, said the
girl. And she got out of bed.


Author’s note: Characters and some incidents in this narrative are fictional although descriptions are based on news reports from Manchester.

Elizabeth S. Wolf writes because telling stories is how we make sense of our world, how we heal, and how we celebrate. She seeks that sliver of truth amidst the chattering monkey mind. Also, she sings loudly while driving. Elizabeth’s chapbook What I Learned: Poems is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in fall 2017.

THE RIBCAGE CLINGS TO A LOVER TIGHTER AFTER YET ANOTHER TRAGEDY

by J. Bradley

A man and woman hug on the streets of Manchester. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA via The Guardian, May 23, 2017

The talking head reads the names of people
who are no longer people. The expert
offers the hypothesis that the network paid for.

You ask this lover whether he knew
anyone in the building. He wipes his tears,
shakes his head. You try soothing him,
your tips coaxing his grief.

Once, you invented a shoulder
for a lover who knew someone
who died by bullet, explosion.
He heard the whir of helicopters
for weeks after it happened.

When he asked you to move in,
you left behind your shoulder,
a note: this is all I can offer you.


J. Bradley won Five [Quarterly]'s 2015 e-chapbook contest for his collection of flash fiction Neil. He is the author as well of the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014) and the prose poem chapbook It Is A Wild Swing Of A Knife (Choose the Sword, 2015).

THE WATER PARK IN AUGUST

by Melissa Fite Johnson






I. Before

After Kansas City soccer, Children’s Mercy
Park, we drive south for home, two hours away.
The world’s tallest water slide looms at Schlitterbahn,
lit green at night, the spiral walk-up staircase
Godzilla’s head and body, the slide its tongue
unfurling.  Who would ride that monstrosity,
my husband and I joke, and it is a joke, menacing
as that structure is, because we’re safe in our car,
or feel we are at least, our breakable bodies and soft flesh
dashing down the highway in our aluminum bubble.

II. After

I imagine the boy they found in the pool
also felt safe, at least initially, strapped in his raft.
Higher than Niagara; faster than a cheetah;
steeper than any ski slope!  The website called the slide
jaw-dropping.  The website called the slide
gut-wrenching.  I shouldn’t read the stories.  They don’t
bring him back.  They all show the same picture:
brown eyes freckled nose dark hair baseball cap.
Baseball bat on his shoulder.  Ears like mine, elfish
tips that stick out, tinged red from the sun warming his back.

Melissa Fite Johnson’s first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book.  Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Broadsided Press, velvet-tail, and elsewhere.  Melissa teaches English and lives with her husband in Kansas.

THE MOON'S SURFACE

by Austin Alexis


Devastated long ago by asteroids,
and now stark—
a grim, gray landscape filled with unease.
That's the damn sad moon in bereavement,
resembling the American spirit
after one-too-many catastrophes:
a harbor blasted by bombs dropped from the sky;
a mass shooting
and then another, another;
an attack—terrorist or otherwise—
on a random June morning.
Ragged, scarred, the moon replicates the American soul
stumbling from one tragedy to another,
another, and the another.



Austin Alexis's full-length collection is Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, 2014).  He has poetry and fiction most recently in the anthology Rabbit Ears: TV Poems and in the journals Home Planet News, J Journal, TheNewVerse.News, and Chiron Review. 

THE MILITARY DIET IS KILLING ME

by Sarah Frances Moran

Image source: The Military Diet

For breakfast I have a piece of toast with peanut butter.
My stomach grumbles 4 hours later.

For lunch I have crackers, cheese and an apple.
I drink one liter of water. I think, I might waste away
on this diet.

At dinner I have a portion of fish with two sides
of vegetables.
I cringe at the way the kitchen smells like someone passed gas
as the broccoli warms up.
I’m grumpy because I want a beer.
I’m grumpy because I want something more filling.

Three hours later as I lay in bed
My stomach begins making noises like an asteroid
has landed in the pit of it
and everything inside is on fire.
I think I’m dying.
I decide to eat whatever the fuck I want in the morning.

In the seconds while I dramaticize my hunger pains
6 people die.

The science of hunger is felt by 1 billion people.
I am not actually one of these people.

I’m sure one of these people lives in the same city as me.
I decide gluttony really is a sin.
More so than the popular sins in the news these days.

When I get up in the morning,
I do not eat whatever I want.

On my drive to work,
two grackles fight over left over something in the
middle of the road.
It is a fierce battle that nearly gets one of them hit by an
on-coming car.
My on-coming car.

I am hungry. My stomach turns.
I will not die fighting over food,

but I should concede to battle a hunger
larger than my small belly.

Small as a fist.

1 billion people won’t eat a fist full of food today.
Grackles fight over crumbs in the road.
6 people will die every minute because they have nothing to eat.
Our world is overflowing with tragedy…

but my largest tragedy
is I won’t get a beer today
I will not drink a beer today
I cannot drink a beer today

and I think I’m going to die.


Sarah Frances Moran is a stick-a-love-poem-in-your-back-pocket kind of poet. She thinks Chihuahuas should rule the world and prefers their company to people 90% of the time. Her work has most recently been published or is upcoming in Maudlin House, Blackheart Magazine, Red Fez and The Bitchin' Kitsch. She is Editor/Founder of Yellow Chair Review.

BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR

by Jean L. Kreiling






You gasp and smile at bright chrysanthemums
that bloom for just a moment in the sky,
and hardly give a thought to what becomes
of them, the black ash falling as they die.
But sometimes, buffeted by mighty booms
that follow flares of patriotic pride,
you think of patriots who met their dooms
amid such noise—red-white-and-blue’s dark side.
Why do we want to watch bombs burst in air?
Did Mr. Key imagine that we would?
That we’d perpetuate the din and glare
of combat?  Maybe we’ve misunderstood.
His anthem hailed a hard-won victory;
we’ve prettified the fires of tragedy.


Jean L. Kreiling is the author of the recently published collection, The Truth in Dissonance (Kelsay Books, 2014). Her work has appeared widely in print and online journals, including American Arts Quarterly, Angle, The Evansville Review, Measure, and Mezzo Cammin, and in several anthologies.  Kreiling is a past winner of the String Poet Prize and the Able Muse Write Prize, and she has been a finalist for the Frost Farm Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award.

CANNIBAL KING,or EVERYWHERE IS SANDY HOOK

by Howie Good

God, if there is one,
must be a very old man
who sits on a stool
in the shade of a sidewalk tree,
now & again dozing off,
his stubbly chin
dropping onto his chest,
while not far away
bat-winged dogs
devour the schoolchildren
he’s just too full
to devour himself.


All proceeds from Howie Good's latest book of poetry,  Fugitive Pieces (Right Hand Press), go to the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley.

FOR THE ESTRANGED ON MOTHER'S DAY

Imps of Insomnia
by Larry Litt

Image source: Becky Says Things

True Nature doesn’t give a damn.
Imps in darkest tossed nights
Sleepless chattering monkeys
Waken me analyzing
My life screaming
“Tragedy begets Empathy!”
As if I needed a
Hole in my heart repaired.
Monkeys feel estrangement
Shout “What’s it for?
What’s this silent pain all about?
Why can’t it be healed?”
I know now there’s no healing
Just accepting the boundaries
Of betrayal, anger
And eternal shame.
The mad poet took all offered
In his path of pleasure.
The payout is never
To hold a child with
Love again.
Biting lips with empathy
At families reconciled
In Hollywood movies
With a sadness too great
Even for the big fake screen.
True Nature is silent
Does not give a damn
Or consent to relief.
Were I more like True Nature
Could I still write this poem?


Larry Litt is a writer and performer who can't decide if he’s a 'dirty old man, 'smart olfart' or 'recently bathed geezer.’The NY Times has called his work "Wryly conceived, politically provocative." New Littany Editions coming soon.

THE DEMISE OF THE MONARCH

by Tricia Knoll

“Monsanto’s Roundup and genetically modified crops are harming everybody’s favorite butterfly.” -- Warren Cornwall, Slate, January 29, 2014
 
“The monarch earned a mention yesterday at the summit between the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada. ‘We have also agreed to work on the preservation of the monarch butterfly as an emblematic species of North America which unites our three countries,’ Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said at the conclusion of the one-day summit.” -- Tim Johnson, Miami Herald, February 20, 2014


Lear floated his orange and black king-robe
over a land of riches, undivided by boundaries,
surrounded by gilded butterflies of court,

assuming he had many to choose
from, the daughter-flowers of his loins,
his flight certain in reign and retinue.

Sorrow. His good world
not so good. Poisoned. Vicious.
Short-sighted. All he took

for granted a last wingless jump
from a low cliff, obscure.
His day of the monarch dwindling

as branches wind-ripped from firs,
the flattering tongues of milkweed
and sycophants lying, patterns

dividing machinations
of the false from the loyalty
of the good

magnetized migrations.
Lear asks Cordelia to share
who wins, who loses.

This monarch,
the oldest who hath born
the most.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland poet, snowbound alone in her house for seven days. Her chapbook Urban Wild is now available from Finishing Line Press.

A GREEK TRAGEDY

by BZ Niditch

Yannis Ritsos (Photo source: http://mhsteger.tumblr.com/)

Even the ancients
would be surprised
when news had
to be whispered
by great old trees
outside captive cities
of knowledge
and you can no longer
listen in
to debate issues
in Athens
of all places,
it leaves us breathless,
that one quiet day
there is silence
by the news waves
on your beautiful side
of the sea,
for it is to language
we turn when rising up
at the amazing sun
with our eyes open,
to comprehend
what this portends,
not since Yannis Ritsos
your great poet
had read his poem
"Epitaphios"
publicly out loud
at the Temple of Zeus
in that dark day in 1936
speaking for the worker
murdered by Mataxas
and his work banned
when life was unveiled
and were exiled to Lemnos,
and then Yannis,
imprisoned and exiled
during the military junta
spoke again to us
from islands of forceful
words in Gyaros
and you made dictatorship
and censorship uncomfortable
to the democratic world,
rise up again partisans,
remember Ritsos
who stands with you
wanting to hear
the latest news
occupying your mind
defying all attempts
at these fresh outbreaks
against all democratic souls,
speak again Yannis Ritsos
to us, and like before
public opinion will rally
by the Temple of Zeus
and only fascism will die.


BZ Niditch's latest international poetry appears in the Alembic, Outlaw Poetry, Vscorpiozine, Exercise Bowler, Third Wednesday, Dead Snakes, Prairie Winds, Big Hammer, Main Street Rag, Epiphany, London Grip.