THE ARCHITECTURE OF DEMOCRACY

by Jim Kelly

To replace a house,
it is ill-advised
to randomly weaken
the foundation.

To tamper with gas lines
while informed only
by ignorance.

To pull wires
without knowing
where they lead
or what they serve.

To rip out windows
and collapse
the hand-designed,
custom wooden frames.

To remove the roof
during rain
before the expensive,
antique floors
are protected.

To pull down walls
without understanding
how weight is distributed—
how each beam,
each brace,
each hidden support
helps hold up
the whole frame
of Democracy.

And some now shout:

“Damn the building codes.”
“Damn the building plans.”

As if survival itself
were an inconvenience.

As if restraint,
inspection,
and measured repair
were enemies
instead of protections.

Forgetting:
a reckless demolition
does not always end
with open sky.

Sometimes
it ends
with collapsed Democracy.

Jim Kelly is a California poet whose work explores democracy, race, and social justice. His poetry has appeared in Litro Magazine, Urban Pen Magazine, and Urban Poems.

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.

WIRE CUTTERS

by Bill Sullivan

"Cutting Barbed Wire" by Toyo Miyatake (circa 1944/1945).

Somehow Mr. Miyatake was able to smuggle in his lenses,
build a makeshift box camera out of what scraps were available
in the Manzanar Internment Camp. Confinement could not
constrain his ingenuity, his spirit, his need to document injustice.
So we have a black and white record of this shameful action
as well as photos of a resilient, proud people to absorb and remember.

               I am looking at his image of a raised arm, a hand
clutches a wire cutter, as if it were a lifeline, its blades open,
ready, eager, one senses, to sever a strand of razor sharp barbed wire.
In the top left-hand corner, we see the guard tower looming
over the scene. Yes, a given time and place. A dark piece
of our past, but it could have been taken at one of the Nazi
concentration camps, a Siberian gulag, any one of too many
political prisons. Clashing symbols; the desire to be free
and the drive to imprison.

               I am thinking of the suspicion, fear and greed
that led to the confinement of Japanese Americans decades ago
but also, the recent images of Central American children separated
from parents, crammed into cages, lying there on concrete
or thin pads, alone, sobbing, some silently, Brown children, vermin
to some, quarantined, held as hostages to convince their parents
to return to their countries and to deter other asylum seekers
from crossing the border. All that cruelty to assure the whiteness
of America prevails.

Has a photographer pressed his shutter, captured
the indifference and abuse in this house of horrors?
Has a filmmaker documented the bewilderment
and innocence of children, the anguish of parents?
So that after the wires are severed and they are free
and united, we and our children's children can see,
know shame and anger, reap love from the ashes
of our history.

Shoes and toys left at a port of entry to the U.S. in Tornillo, Texas. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images accompanying “Toddlers fend for themselves in immigration court thanks to Trump,” an op-ed by Sen. Richard Durbin, Chicago Sun-Times, August 17, 2018. "The policy began in secret. The Trump administration denied such a policy existed. And when it finally acknowledged that migrant children were being separated from their parents at the border, chaos ensued. Only now is the full picture of what happened and why becoming clear." —The Daily podcast presents "Divided."

Bill Sullivan taught English and American studies at Keene State College, co-authored books on Twentieth century American poetry, co-produced two documentary films, and most recently published Loon Lore: In Poetry and Prose.

ODE TO THE GOD OF FRAYED WIRES

by Megan Merchant 

High speed flash bird flight photo by R. W. Scott via Pinterest

How terrible it is to pretend
that god has a hand in it,

that he built windows into the river,

that the man I lay with is his image,
hums divine,

and that the smallest deaths
are trade-ups—

child-soldiers for his army,
collecting their milk-teeth in a jar.

I wake to the news of bombs,
and a flight of cardinals

from my window that sees
only miles into the world—

their red breasts choking the light.

I have to imagine that his hands
shook at the bomb’s final inspection,

frayed one of the wires, so that
it stunted, landing as an ache,

and not a shattering.

But also that he cursed the blessing
of foresight,

the all-knowing ruin
that no one saw coming,

soundless as a wintered sun.

Megan Merchant lives in the tall pines of Prescott, AZ.  She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (Glass Lyre Press, 2016 Best Book Award), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, 2017), four chapbooks, and a forthcoming children’s book with Philomel Books. She was awarded the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, judged by Juan Felipe Herrera, the Poet Laureate of the United States.