BIRNAM WOULD

by Adele Evershed

There was anger and sadness among people who turned out over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend to protest at the destruction of a tree in Enfield thought to be up to 500 years old… The pedunculate oak, which was cut down on 3 April, was located on the edge of an Enfield council-owned park in north London and overlooked the Toby Carvery pub... Mitchells & Butlers, the owners of the Toby Carvery pub chain, said they cut down the tree after being told it was dead. —BBC, April 21, 2025

I was born in a time of unrest,
where tongues swelled against
religion and unfaithful wives,
riots in the street,
and resentments as large as cats
festering in unemptied bins.

I grew through it all—
pandemics and plagues,
great fires and floods,
watching people work themselves to death,
to be replaced as easily as spokes on a wheel,
bent on moving the carts forward,
but I was in no hurry,
so I was left alone.

The Thames iced over
while frost fairs and firing squads
amused the people,
and all the artists with numb fingers
captured the scenes—
though sometimes they painted over
dead children in the snow.
I never forgot they were there.

The wind moved through me,
leaving a coating of urban sprawl,
and I was the one left
bearing witness to
bombs, broken nights, boozy slashes
oozing rivers of blood,
the good and the very, very bad—
I survived it all,
until a man from a toby-jug pub,
came with a weapon of mass destruction
and cut me down.

Soon there will be no thing left
to tell the old stories,
and how will you know yourselves then?

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the valleys for the American East Coast. You can find some of her writing in Gyroscope, Free Flash Fiction, Trash Cat Lit, Janus Lit, and Poetry Wales. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Her third collection In the Belly of the Wail is upcoming with Querencia Press. She has published two novellas in flash, Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and has a forthcoming novella, A History of Hand Thrown Walls, with Unsolicited Press.

AFTERIMAGE

by Cathleen Cohen

Portrait of Kaylin Johnson (KJ) painted by Cathleen Cohen for the Johnson family as part of the Soul Shots Project the mission of which is to bring attention to and memorialize the lives lost and tragically altered due to gun violence. KJ was shot and killed in Philadelphia in July 2021.

Painting KJ’s portrait, I peer

at an image of this beautiful boy, shot

in his parked car, waiting

 

to ferry friends to soccer practice.

His mother sends photos that capture

his smile, his jaunty shoulders.

 

I can tell he was quick

with jokes, sparking others.

His mother says he’d jump 

to carry heavy bags 

for older neighbors,

even strangers.

 

The boy who shot him

was a stranger.

Afterimage is illusion.

The brain persists in seeing

what’s removed.

 

Sometimes color memory

is repressed,

sometimes brighter.

 

I cry when I take up the brush.

What about skin tone?

Reference photos lack 

saturation

and I never met him.

Or background?

 

Brick red for urban houses?

Cobalt for sky—something

hopeful?

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A poet, painter and teacher, she created the We the Poets program for children. Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, East Coast Ink, North of Oxford, One Art Journal, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Poetica, River Heron Review, and Rogue Agent. She authored Camera Obscura (Moonstone Press), Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press) and Sparks and Disperses (Cornerstone Press). Her artwork is on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery.