THE FALL

by Jan Steckel

Tamir Rice memorial. Source: NBC News.

I don't want to be Joan of the Narrative Arc here,
wielding my flaming sword of story to drive you out
of my personal bleeding-heart-liberal paradise, BUT
here's a prompt: write a poem using the words
grant, bell, garner, brown, ford, and rice.
Employ a light touch, no sing-song or doggerel.
No sentimentality, please. No rants.
Attention to form but not formality.
Invoke all the senses. Let me see, hear, feel
what the twelve-year-old saw, heard, felt
waving that BB gun around the park.
The gold and orange leaves of Cleveland.
The smell of them rotting in rainwater.
The black-and-white pulling to the curb.
The crack. The pavement rushing up.


Jan Steckel's poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, The Bellevue Literary Review, Yale Medicine, American Journal of Nursing, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere.

THE DAYS AFTER

by Catherine McGuire

Our streets are filled with the dying –

not like Freetown or Dakar, where flies feast,

but boys in blue hoodies, dark-haired girls

with taped mouths, lowering themselves to asphalt,

lying on wet roads and looking up

at the thousand-eyed headstones our cities erect

to cover the dead. I Can't Breathe.

Above them, the window eyes glow with money,

with silk-suit rituals to appease a Quad of Horsemen

who are already too near. The children below

give themselves lovingly to the pavement;

no real fear of death can penetrate the young.

But they've offered their hearts

to those who have been pierced – they've seen mothers

crushed and groping, tear-drenched or too numb for tears.

They've seen the impotent rage – that they can feel –

and they lend their bodies, their voices

hoping to be the horns that sounded so pure

that Jericho itself came down.

Catherine McGuire is a writer/artist with a deep interest in philosophy. Using nature as a mirror, she explores the way humans perceive themselves and their world. She has poems published in the US and abroad and has four chapbooks: Palimpsests, (Uttered Chaos, 2011) Glimpses of a Garden, Poetry and Chickens, and Joy Holding Stillness.