THE NEW DHARMA BUMS

by Bradley McIlwain 

When I could not sing

Drunk on disillusionment
And pain 

Shiva drank the poison

From my throat 
To free my spirit 

From city lights

That burned too bright 
My past cremated in ashes and bottle caps

Too much bar puja

Midweek between pints 
And poetry 

Searching for Kerouac’s

Drunken Dharma Bums
Looking for enlightenment 

In the Desolation Peaks

And the road is a ghost 
Holding out my thumb 

Like old Dean Moriarty 

The highway line a rehab
Of breakthroughs and breakdowns.

Enlightenment 

A bridge that burns 
At both ends 

And the only way out

Is in;
The only way to the universe… within

Hopping freight trains 

In early morning fog
The lakes and forests 

Of America 

On fire with desire 
Boxcar wine and scrawl 

Of poet pirates 

Prophesying on 
The great railway lines 

Swallowing the landscape 

Like a serpent 
Of what might have been…

Vasuki

Coiled in the winds 
Of immortality 

Carries me to the desert 

Of mirage and reality 
Of starlight and self doubt 

A new Mahabharata

Through doorways 
Of non Euclidean dreams

Where the chaos 

Of freedom is born 
In the dust of factory floors;

Discarded verses 

Rediscovered in dust 
Swept up and drank 

From voices with dry tongues 

As a tonic for the cause.
The well spring of hope 

Lies just beyond the sun,

My rucksack as heavy 
As the heart of the mountain’s back.

Bradley McIlwain works as a Teacher-Librarian, where he strives to provide meaningful and inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and advocacy. He believes that poems and poets can be agents for social change. Bradley’s latest book Dear Emily was published by Roasted Poet Press last year.

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.

NIGHTMARE IN UTAH

by Dawn Corrigan

A sign at an abortion-rights rally in Miami on Thursday. (Lynne Sladky/AP via The Washington Post, May 26, 2019

A particular kind of dystopia has arrived, and we’re beginning to see its fuzzy outlines. It would involve a whisper network on social media. It would entail announcing “Off to go see Navy Pier!” and then going instead to an abortion clinic. Thousands of women would have to learn—or remember—how this all worked before 1973, when desperate women also had occasion to visit their cousins, old friends, and aunties. —Monica Hesse, The Washington Post, May 26, 2019

Last week they closed the border
and ever since we've been on the run,
wearing black clothes, travelling at night,
food and water in packs on our backs.
We've arrived at the state line and stare
longingly into Nevada. The sentries
are scattered but they have a clear shot
at us here. We're not far from the railway.
I've heard they're stopping the passenger trains
but maybe we could hide in a freighter.
Given time and a lot of luck we might wake up
somewhere new, someplace with more rights
and bodily autonomy than we're used to.

Dawn Corrigan works in the affordable housing industry in Pensacola, FL and serves as assistant editor at Otis Nebula.

PRESUMPTION

by Catherine Wald

Image source: NY Daily News

So many are the barriers we cross –
mountains, rivers, doorways in
and doorways out – we can’t
pause at every junction
to ponder the alternatives,
consider every sharp stake
we might be impaled on; every
body of water eager to swallow
us up; every potential mechanical
malfunction in a world dominated
by machines.

What would life be like if,
every time you drove across a
train track, you had to wonder
what your kids would do without
you, how your gas tank might im-
plode on impact, who you are likely
to kill without meaning any harm?

What we presumed:  SUVs
are invulnerable, trains
are stoppable, each of us
has the right to traverse
any obstacle that blocks
our path.

Were we wrong?


Catherine Wald has frequently taken the Metro North train from New York City to Valhalla. Her books include poetry (Distant, burned-out stars, Finishing Line Press, 2011), nonfiction (The Resilient Writer: Stories of Rejection and Triumph From 23 Top Authors, Persea Books, 2005) and a translation from French of Valery Larbaud’s Childish Things (Sun & Moon Press). Her poems have been published in American Journal of Nursing, Buddhist Poetry Review, Chronogram, Exit 13, Friends Journal, Jewish Literary Journal, The New Poet, Society of Classical Poets, The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly andWestchester Review.

JOURNEY TO AUSCHWITZ

by Philip C. Kolin

Leave quickly. Pack the remnants
of your human dignity: a change
of underwear, a toothless comb.
Put name tags and addresses
on your luggage to make sure
it is returned. "Take care of yourself."
"Don't stay away too long."

Expect to be stomped, squeezed into cattle cars.
Sing the national anthem
through the rattling slats.
But into what country is escape possible?
There is no Poland anymore.
"Your journey is outside history.                                        
With history comes understanding."                                    
Disfigured bodies look like question marks.      

Children start kindergarten on this journey.
Lesson one: teddy bear arms and eyes
ripped off;  classmates' heads
smashed against train wheels.
Lesson two: classes never end.

The trains always arrive in the fright of night.
Demons dressed in midnight and truncheons yank
fouled bodies from the car.
A woman drops her suitcase;
a dead baby falls out.

Dogs gnaw toes and fingers
into bloody stubs.
"The air smells like burnt sugar. "                    
You breathe in the hearts
and minds of  your neighbors from Lodz
who arrived before you.
The selection process starts:
Death now or death later—that's the choice.

But death will not free you
from Auschwitz. Each night
the dead are  counted
in the lineup at the Appelplatz.
Their bodies searched
for crumbs of green bread,
but their pockets are always empty.
Prisoners  prop them up
in the barracks to get their share
of thin soup and lice-thick bread.

A man with typhoid
and no eye for his socket
whispers to the corpse next to him:
"You must remember when I can't."

A voice across the shadows warns,
"We were not brought here to think.        
We are here to survive."

Author's note: This poem is indebted to and quotes from the survivors of the Holocaust whose interviews are included in Broken Silence, a series of five foreign language films collected by Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Visual History Foundation and produced by James Moll.


Philip C. Kolin, University Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the editor of The Southern Quarterly and has published more than 30 scholarly books on African American playwrights, Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Also a poet, Kolin has published five books of poems, the most recent being Reading God's Handwriting: Poems (Kaufmann, 2012), as well as hundreds of poems in such journals as the Michigan Quarterly Review, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, Christian Century, Spiritus, Seminary Ridge Review, America, and has co-edited Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita (Southwest Missouri UP, 2006) with Susan Swartwout.

BUFFALOED

by Susan Vespoli

Use this link to the Sierra Club to send a letter to the Department of Interior Secretary Jewell and President Obama today telling them we must protect public lands from fracking.

Big shoulders, dark and burly like Mike Tyson,
2,000 pounds of bull that’s bred with Harley,
some think I’m buffalo but I’m a bison,
an herbivore who’s getting pissed and snarly

at lack of media blitz—where is the news?
Cameras should be filming this whole story
of Badlands, Bakken shale now fracked by crews
near national park, in remote parts of prairie.

Holding tanks, pump jacks of wells surround
my habitat at Roosevelt National Park.
Damn noisy trucks and Amtrak roar through town
with oil; pit flares scare away the dark.

Will someone witness for me, snap pix with phone?
Please save me. Fracking’s fucking up my home.


Susan Vespoli recently traveled to North Dakota where she met a bison at a porta-john. She teaches English and Creative Writing at a couple of Arizona colleges. Her work has been published online, in print, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.