MOUNT PENN (SE ACABO)

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Do the lookout oaks speak English

and remember George Washington

are the spotted beetles from Asia

that people mistake for Lady Bugs

harbingers of a polyglottal future

here in fortress America

Pennsylvania Dutch speak

German

children invent their own

pidgin

Jefferson thought in French

But it’s Spanish that’s spoken all around

the mountain’s foot where you can get a fade

a dye job a shave and look like

you just stepped out of De Leon’s fabled fountain

dripping with what was supposed to have been Florida

Not this Keystone State

No more for the Union Dead on a rainy train ride

to an Adams County graveyard in November

the battle has moved from Lincoln’s beard to the barrio

la bodega si, se puede

The DAR and descendants of Confederate

Veterans, they like their café con leche

se acabo.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada for now but spent election day 2004 working in Reading, PA. Like many, he's watching the US election with nauseated optimism. You can follow him on Substack @sandcounties. 

TRAIN A-COMING

by Christopher Woods

Trains move toxic chemicals through small towns daily. Most aren't prepared for disaster. In the wake of the East Palestine, Ohio, disaster, other train towns wonder: Are we next? —Grist, July 12, 2023

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Chappell Hill, Texas. His photographs can be seen in his gallery. His most recent work is poetry chapbook WHAT COMES, WHAT GOES. 

STRAIGHT TALK FOR AMTRAK JOE

by Patricia Phillips-Batoma 

One of the photos Lunden Roberts posted on Instagram of her daughter during a trip to Washington.

After Maureen Dowd, “It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President,” The New York Times, July 8, 2023

Mr. President, for the love of God, learn to count to seven—
one boy, six girls—and include the one named Navy.
Be quick. You hold a ticket for the good old train to heaven.
 
You love to fist bump all of America’s little children,
except one who hopes you’ll call and waits so patiently.
Please, Joe, for God’s sake, learn to count to seven.
 
What’s more she’s cool. A true made-for-shades Biden.
Gift her your good name and wrap it in some empathy.
Snap to it, you hold a ticket for that good old train to heaven.
 
It’s embarrassing to have to give a President a lesson,
and hard truths voice themselves with such severity.
So, no more malarky, just count all the way to seven.
 
Once those pearlies close, you might sense some tension,
the sound of heart space, forever and forever empty.
Too late, the good old train pulls into the eternity of heaven.
 
Spare her the taunts, this awful earthly aggression.
Navy! Navy! Not a welcome baby!  So can you maybe,
Joseph Robinette Biden, count all the way to seven?
Even presidents hold a ticket for the good old train to heaven.

Patricia Phillips-Batoma is a writer and teacher who lives in Illinois. She has published poems in Skylight 47, An Capall Dorcha, The New Verse News, Off Course, and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis.

I CLIMB ABOARD THE TRAIN

by Hannah L Brooks

Elnaz Rekabi on Instagram

A female Iranian rock climber, who did not wear a hijab at an international competition in South Korea, has returned to Iran as Iranian groups based abroad raised alarms over her fate back home. Elnaz Rekabi, 33, competed without a hijab during the International Federation of Sport Climbing’s Asian Championships in Seoul on Sunday. Videos of her wearing a headband with her hair in a ponytail while competing spread on social media. —CNN, October 19, 2022

I slide into a seat.

I slide through videos tagged @mahsaamini.

Women wave black hijabs as they march.

A cluster of men beat another

curled on the ground.

 

NPR posts: A rock climber forgets,

or forgoes, her hijab; becomes ‘accidental hero.’

Comments exhort the reader 

to pray. 

They say: She was called back. 

They say: She will be arrested.

They say: She will die!

 

I imagine the climber speaking:

                                      Climber.

                              A

             AM

I

                                       Heaven.

                       Toward

        Climb

I

 

I climb.               I go home.

Either way, I move 

closer to heaven.

 

Outside my train window, I see the river 

and a perfect blue October sky.

I watch the waves rise

as the wind whips the water. 

I think: in some places, we cannot move without a hijab.

Here, we are free to wear what we want.

I wear black.

Most of the passengers wear black. 

Black has become de rigueur;

as if we are in mourning,

forced to bear the unwanted.

Hannah L Brooks is a retired surgeon and now writes. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in Chronogram, Hudson Valley Magazine, and the podcast Anamnesis.  She founded the Newburgh Literary Festival because she lives in the Hudson Valley, and it was necessary. 

LIFE EXPECTANCY

by Martha Deed

Gravestone inscription: Erected in memory of Mrs. Kezia Cutter, wife of Mr. Richard Cutter, departed this life Dec. ye 1788, in ye 63rd Year of her age. "Watch ye, that live, for ye don't know / How near you are to death. / Or what may give the fatal blow / To stop your fleeting breath."

Life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2021, for the second year in a row. It was the first time life expectancy dropped two years in a row in 100 years. —NPR, August 30, 2022

You could die of a sudden attack in church
be run over by a buffalo in Montana
be felled by a tree if you wielded an ax unwisely
or TB, smallpox or Typhoid
in a bomber over Northern France
starve
drown at sea
die in childbirth
fall off a horse or a runaway train in the Rockies
be kicked by a Union officer’s horse between battles
be killed at Deerfield or in Narrangansett Swamp
by a rogue at a card game in Deadwood

Death was just around the corner in those olden days
Everyone knew that life was a delicate thread
stitching oblivion before birth to oblivion after death
survival provisional and linked to mere chance

The old-timers knew
You can’t turn your back on death
Death can find you any place any time

But now—now we 21^st Century descendants
in a time of shrinking life expectancy
think we control our destiny
having survived hiding under desks
to fool the atom bomb

Now we do not await the trickiness of Fate
Now we have to look for the nearest exit
the place to run, hide or fight
at the grocery store or church or school
because we have turned nasty
or have not silenced others who have turned nasty—
the nastiest among us declaring supremacy
and the right to kill at will
die quickly on the street
or slowly by telling all the scientists
to go to hell

Martha Deed's poetry has appeared in The New Verse News and most recently or forthcoming in Moss Trill, Mason Street, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Grand Little Things, The Skinny Poetry Journal. Her poetry collections Under the Rock (2019) and Climate Change (2014) and a third collection forthcoming from FootHills Publishing. She is a retired psychologist who makes trouble with poetry inspired by crises and other mishaps around her house on the Erie Canal in Western New York.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD KENTUCKY HOMES

by M. N. O'Brien

In an interview Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said the agency is preparing for severe weather events of similar magnitude. “This is going to be our new normal, and the effects that we’re seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation,” she said. —The Washington Post, December 13, 2021

Echoes of memories: the crunching gravel

under departing tire trucks drowned out

by a howling freight train. Gnashing

through the house, using its churning debris,

corpses of livelihoods to kill more. Leaving

only the warm December stones behind.

In the distance, coal is exhumed

with Kentucky's unbridled spirit.

M. N. O'Brien received his B.A. from Roanoke College, where his work was published in On Concept's Edge and received the Charles C. Wise Poetry Award. His work has appeared in SOFTBLOW, Right Hand Pointing, and The Ekphrasis Review. He currently lives in Christiansburg, Virginia, taking seasonal jobs that do not interfere with writing poetry. He despises writing about himself in the third person.

ANGEL

by Alejandro Escudé

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022. Above: Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas (three panels), 30 7/8 × 45 3/4 in. (78.4 × 116.2 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum’s 50th Anniversary 80.32. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In the flag painting the flag

goes and is going into the flag

and it takes us with it

the flag that is into the flag 

beyond what we do when

we surf the net, as a nation

we’re a flag entering another flag

and a flag after that one. 

Jasper Johns knows this, 

or does he? You mustn’t ask

him you know. The interpretation

lags behind the artwork always

like a little girl struggling to keep up

with her father who is walking

too fast for her keep up 

but is she really unable to keep up?

The truth is leaving us, and you,

and taking a train to a new epoch

where a train will travel into

another train and another train

after that toward a sunset

that sets within a sunset and 

(you guessed it) another sunset

after that—because it was

Warhol who engineered the first

internet, an ad box for Brillo

that became box after box

after box. So Johns does too

with his flag and other things,

which is what a country is

…things.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

LOVE & HATE ON A PORTLAND TRAIN

after the last words of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche

by Scott C. Kaestner





hate versus love on a train
hate slashes at love, stabs
love in the heart, claims two
brave souls who defended
love in the face of hate and
as love lays dying on that train
a victim of hate, one last brave act
one last message of love, one last
ounce of love to give offering hope

"Tell them, I want everybody to know, I want everybody on the train to know, I love them."

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, a dad, Lakers fan, guacamole aficionado, and leftist dreamer. Google 'scott kaestner poetry' to peruse his musings.

LAMENTATION

by David Radavich

Is Putin on the "Trump Train"? —Scott Stantis, Chicago Tribune, July 28, 2016.

For Donald

I am hearing the dirge
of my people.

The sound gets louder
and louder, like a train
approaching a station

which has been waiting
and waiting
as an eager slave.

Soon all the passengers
will board and slowly

the landscape will pass
by windows waving
at amber grain.

I stand at the crossing
with torn eyes.

I remember when
the country rose in wings
and did not hope
for engines

hard on
their dark way.

David Radavich's most recent poetry collections are The Countries We Live In (2014) and a co-edited volume called Magic Again: Selected Poems on Thomas Wolfe (2016).  His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe.  He has published a variety of articles and is current president of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

OIL TRAIN DERAILMENT, MOSIER, OREGON JUNE 3, 2016

by Margaret Chula

Oregon has called for federal regulators to ban trains carrying oil in the state, ramping up pressure for more stringent safety checks weeks after an oil train derailed near Portland, the first major oil-by-rail accident in a year. —Business Insider, June 16, 2016

This summer,
figs ripen too soon
and drop
their soggy pulp

in the town
where nothing
eventful
has happened

since a murder
of crows nested
in the orchard
and wiped out
the cherry crop.

On the hottest day
of the year,
wind surfers gather
on the banks
of the Columbia
hoping for a gust.

Mothers sit outside
the ice cream shop
licking cones,
waiting
for their children
to get out of school.

In the shade
of a big leaf maple,
old men drink beer
and talk about
tractors.

At noon,
the sound
of the train whistle
as it rounds the bend

and then
a deeper sound,
like an empty well

as, one by one,
sixteen oil cars
tip over sideways
and burst
into flames.

Black oil
smothers
the orange poppies

   snakes
      along the ground

         slithers into
            the cold river.

Author’s note: This poem was written immediately after the oil train derailment and fires in Mosier, Oregon. My husband and I were about to close on a condo there. We're actively protesting trains of Bakken crude oil passing through towns along the Columbia River.

Margaret Chula has published seven collections of poetry, including Grinding My Ink which received the Haiku Society of America Book Award. She served as poet laureate for Friends of Chamber Music in Portland, Oregon, and as president of the Tanka Society of America from 2011-2016.

EASTER SUNDAY, 2016, LAHORE, PAKISTAN

by Janet Leahy

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and six-year-old Zainab Jamshed could not wait to spend the day at the park with her family. The young girl - the only one in her family - had already arrived in Lahore's Gulshan-i-Iqbal park when a massive suicide bomb went off a few metres from a children's play area, killing her and at least 69 other people. Hundreds were also wounded, and most of the victims were women and children.The attack, which was claimed by a breakaway Taliban faction, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, was aimed at killing members of Pakistan's Christian minority gathered at the park to celebrate Easter Sunday. However, most of those killed were Muslims - like Zainab. —Aljazeera, March 28, 2016. Photo: Forensic officers look for evidence at the site of a blast that happened outside a public park on Sunday, in Lahore, Pakistan, March 28, 2016. Credit: REUTERS/MOHSIN RAZA

   

After Church on Easter Sunday
families go to the park
children play at the blue fountain,
on the hilly gilly, on the train.

Families at the park
in Lahore Pakistan, children
ride the hilly gilly
parents keep watch.

In Lahore Pakistan
Christian and Muslim children play
parents keep watch, but do not see
the young man padded with explosives.

Christian and Muslim children
wait for a train to ride
explosives detonate
the park runs with blood.

There will be no more trains to ride
the blue fountain
runs red with blood
after church on Easter Sunday.

Janet Leahy lives in New Berlin Wi, she is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her work has been published in The Wisconsin Poets’ Calendars, in journals, anthologies, at TheNewVerse.News and other poetry web sites.  She has published two collections of poetry.

END OF THE LINE

by Howard Winn

Chinese Communist Party leaders are afraid that the Dalai Lama will not have an afterlife. Worried enough that this week, officials repeatedly warned that he must reincarnate, and on their terms. Tensions over what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 79, dies, and particularly over who decides who will succeed him as the most prominent leader in Tibetan Buddhism, have ignited at the annual gathering of China’s legislators in Beijing. . . . Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet. --New York Times, March 11, 2015

The train has reached the
station and will be taken
out of further service.
All passengers please
proceed to the platform.
It is reported as possible
that the Dalia Lama may not
choose reincarnation bringing
to a close the ageless reign
of his timeless essence in order
to thwart the Red Capitalists
now milking crony connections
to make the nouveau riche of
the modern China connected
to the high end real estate
of London, Paris, and New York
and who desperately still need
their own dogma for the Tibetan
region the Chinese covet as
also prime real estate where
they can park the excess
Chinese now filling their
historical land and deposit their
young like money laundering
shady deals in the best Ivies
and yet they desire Shangri La
as their very own and this
is what the 14th Dalai Lama
will short circuit if his spirit
says no more and no return
in the new body of some
favored infant for number 15
no matter what the descendants
of Mao wish they can only pretend.

Howard Winn's poetry and fiction has been published recently in Dalhousie Review, Galway Review, Taj Mahal Review, Descant (Canada), Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Evansville Review, and Blueline. He has a B. A. from Vassar College and an M. A. from the Stanford University Writing Program.