WAR CHILD

by Kay White Drew

“A new study of children living through the war in Gaza has found that 96% of them feel that their death is imminent and almost half want to die as a result of the trauma they have been through.” —The Guardian, December 11, 2024

of course I’m sure this war will

kill me   please wipe the slate clean

this lifetime was an error   a mistake   our home

our village   pounded to rubble   our next

home rubble too   father shot dead   mother

sister   brothers   all gone   don’t know

if they’re alive   or dead   just me out here

alone in the rubble   not a scratch

on me   why have I been spared

I beg Allah   if he even exists  

to take me   to Paradise

can’t I please just  

get this over with

Kay White Drew is a retired physician whose poems appear in Bay to Ocean Journal, Pen in Hand, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Gargoyle, and New Verse News. She’s also published short stories and several essays, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a memoir, Stress Test. She lives in Rockville, MD with her husband.

MANDATE

by Laura Rodley

My eyes see the road but my hands

steer the wheel, car ahead,

snow banks to my right,

more snow falling. It feels 

like a hundred years

now and still I have not

heard from you my daughter.

The daughter that was just a wish,

a dream, an incessant urge,

a tug to the infinite

and so I reached my hands

up and pulled you down

from clouds full of precipitation,

the month was November that

you were born, the isle of snow,

but conceived in February

on Valentine’s Day, my hands

full of the eyes of your father,

the sky filled with snowflakes.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and just off the press, As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

THIS DAY WILL NOT JUST LIVE IN INFAMY

by Michael Mark

Shutterstock

For Lolo

 

Because it is your birthday, I’m going to ignore 

the four thousand people in our country who will die today. 

 

Because it is your birthday, I’m going to erase from my mind 

the insane president and treasonous riot he instigated

                                 

and the love video he put out to his thug followers as five people died 

during the siege of the Capitol, and pretend the polls are fake 

 

that say 45% of Republicans believe the breaking 

and entering was the right thing to do, and I’m going 

 

to drive to the card store – the good one, not the grocery

or the pharmacy with their picked-over puns,

 

but the fancy one that specializes in fine crafted, highly artistic 

expressions of earnest emotions, featuring 

 

only the cutest kitten and puppy pics, and charge 

at least six dollars and ninety-nine cents for ironic yet sincere stuff like: 

 

You’re not getting older—oh wait!—I just checked 

your sun dial—yes you are! Because it is your birthday 

 

I’m not going to even wonder if we should be celebrating 

considering today’s particularly disappointing jobs report

 

and the unnerving delay on stimulus checks and vaccines. 

I’m going to interrogate every rack on every aisle to pick out 

 

your perfect card, and because I can’t stop the riots 

or bring back the dead, or deliver the checks or administer the vaccine, 

 

I will, because it is your birthday, light the candle, and watch 

you close your eyes to the whole world and make your wish. 

 

Michael Mark’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Arkansas International, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Salamander, The Southern Review, The Sun, Waxwing, and The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry. He’s the author of two books of stories including Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).