PANTOUM: THE TALIBAN TALI-BANS WINDOWS

by Steven Croft

No more open casements, no more moments at windows

Bring back the view of flowers and the love-burned orchards

Buildings now a punishment, knowing prisoners love windows

Talibs say: "Seeing women through windows is an obscene act"

Bring back the view of flowers and the love-burned orchards

To bodies now haram, faces now haram, our voices now haram

Taliban warn: "Seeing women as women is an obscene act"

Captive in darkness, dark-bitter roots till these walls come down

To bodies now haram, faces now haram, our voices now haram

At breast, our babies, throats filled with milk and woodsmoke

Captive in darkness, seeds for flowers, till these walls come down

No more subterranean, no more cavemouth blocked

At breast, our babies, throats filled by milk and woodsmoke

In the candlelit square of mirror, I hope myself, hopeless

No more subterranean, no more cavemouth blocked

But for the world I've stopped hoping, hope tombed long ago

In the candlelit ghosts of windows, I see myself hopeless

My pain bleeds down the panes, alone with my punishment

For the world will not see us, our hope tombed long ago

For the world will not see us, it stopped looking long ago

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

COLLECTIVE NOUNS FOR BIRDS

by Katherine Page

Workers at the Field Museum in Chicago inspecting birds that were killed when they flew into the windows of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. Credit: Lauren Nassef/Chicago Field Museum, via Associated Press, via The New York Times, October 8, 2023

There’s a circumference of concrete paths 
around earth’s freshwater body
down which you ride your bike.
Cold flutters sharp on pink knuckles,
evening cicadas once a deafening scream,
the size of a hummingbird with a tymbal spring
now ghosts gripping tree bark shells.
Some people have bells or shout
on your left but you pedal gently
around clumps of walking friends,
air cupping October leaves as they twirl
petals and click to the asphalt below. 

You can’t stop looking at the telephone wires,
the gray space of sky between intersecting lines,
the softest eruptions of birds blooming into flight,
their punctuations of gravitational ease—
comma comma question—
a cote, a murder, a brood, 
a flock, a worm, a quarrel, 
a charm, a scold,
a trembling. 

Nearly a thousand died last night,
warblers, waterthrush, yellowthroats
slamming warm, flapping bodies into the brightness 
of a shoreline Chicago glass. 
It’s impossible to see where one things starts
and another one ends.
Now even in a first floor apartment
you can still imagine the pattering
of rain on the roof. The maple hands are turning,
neighborhood cats waul through the dark.
In the morning, 
a dove coos in the evergreen 
outside your tiny window.


Katherine Page is an elementary school teacher and writer living in Chicago. She is working on a manuscript about teaching and learning. She has poems published in Beyond Queer Words, Awakened Voices, Evocations Review, Green Linden Press, Open Minds Quarterly, Wingless Dreamer Press, Rough Cut Press, and Passengers Journal. She is a graduate of the 2022–23 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Collective in Denver, CO.

EMPTIED

 by Andrena Zawinski

The streets and playgrounds, the courts and fields are emptied. 

The string of row house swings emptied of coffee klatches 

across porch rails. Silence on cobbles glistening in morning dew, 

heady scent of honeysuckle wafting by windows we close. 

Framed by the limits of imagination, ears cocked to a sparrow’s song,

sun setting on pyramids, creek beds, ice floes, desert flowers 

past our views of the world, ghosts carousing night winds 

of our mourning, all the eyes on clear skies boasting stars above

moored cargo ships, snow capped peaks, the sweaty rainforests.

Our windows view the emptied harbors, farmlands and vineyards, 

fire escapes and stoops. All of it emptied of the large and small 

solitary pleasures of our fractured lives in this godawful air.

Andrena Zawinski’s poetry has received awards for lyricism, form, spirituality, social concern, many of them Pushcart Prize nominations. Her latest book is Landings (Kelsay Books); others are Something About (Blue Light Press PEN Oakland Award) and Traveling in Reflected Light (Pig Iron Press Kenneth Patchen Prize) along with several chapbooks. She founded and runs the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and is a previous contributor to The New Verse News.

WHEN WE KNOW THE DANGER

by Brooke Herter James

when it means pushing
the bureau across the bare floor
to jam the door shut   hiding

behind the curtain    cowering
beneath the chair   between the legs
of someone bigger  stronger

when we know the scary
inside is worse than
the whatever out there

can we open the windows
and take off our masks
just long enough to scream?


Brooke Herter James is a poet and children’s book author living in Vermont.

THE HUGE HOUSE HALFWAY UP MY NEIGHBORHOOD'S STEEPEST HILL

by Tricia Knoll

 

Image source: HDRcreme

You have to pass it to get out of the bowl we live in,
to get to the abandoned school yard we’ve claimed as a dog park.
The hill is steep. Most walkers slow down by the showy red brick mailbox,
except for that woman who pushes a three-wheeled baby carriage.

The house is empty. First the fan in the third floor window disappeared.
Two bright yellow rent-a-trucks parked outside for three hot days.
The dainty Japanese maple in the cedar planter withered.
Leaves clog the front gutter. No one has raked the backyard.
They left a garden hose coiled like a brown snake
in a ceramic pot. The pump is turned off so the waterfall
water in the pond is green frozen slime. (I hope the cattails survive.)
Someone mowed the lawn in late November and pulled up wilted hostas.
I picked up a sodden newspaper months ago. Unlit Christmas lights
drape from the deck supports. The lady with the golden retriever
said it’s a foreclosure.

Nothing posted from the bank or a realtor. It’s the largest house
around. Not easy to sell, I guess. I thought someone ran a mail order business
on the first floor.  They put out flags for every holiday,
even St. Patrick’s Day. The house reminds me of an old green truck
that died on a back road so the disgusted farmer walked away wondering
how long it would take it to become a rusted-out derelict.
The man with the rescue boxer named Bridget says it’s a bankruptcy.
Vacant window-eyes stare down on us, not in judgment,
more like disbelief. The silence disturbs me.
Three teenage boys in hoodies used to shoot hoops out back.

What does a house that big sound like without people?
Does the furnace ever rumble to keep pipes from freezing?
Does wind tom-tom the picture windows? Pierce of tinnitus, a low whistle
in forlorn solitude? The next-door-neighbor heard one coyote howl
beyond the slatted fence, three answered back. Maybe mice moved in.
It would take a big family to fill that house.

I wish someone would put up a sign.

 
Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet -- who passes by this house several times a  day. She runs up the hill but slows down at the mailbox. Her chapbook Urban Wild will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2014.