ART AFTER GENOCIDE

by Indran Amirthanayagam

When distant bombs 
and bread denied 
leave no trace 
abroad except 
in heart and mind 
of reader and writer

where do we turn
in our countries
of refuge for 
the next impulse
to compose? To whom 
shall we address 

our song?
And should 
we eat and love,
or fast and be 
silent?
For how long?

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. His publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

DENVER VOICE (LESS!)

by Jacob Richards

I feel low;

low down.

The little street paper 

that i wrote for is shutting down

Woe is me.

It wasn’t much

A story a month.

It didn’t pay enough, 

to even justify the rewrites

but stubbornly, 

and at a loss to me and my family,

I carved out time and brainpower;

I called and emailed;

developed sources

attended meetings!

The gig; the last link

to a dream

of being a paid writer.

No matter how little it paid.

It was never about the $$$

but telling a story.

I think I will miss calling city hall

with questions

and having them fear me,

most of all.

Without a paper,

Who am I even writing for?

Why did I go to college?

Then I saw on 9 News...

The unhouse vendors of The Voice.

A man with a beard:

“When they told me 

they were shutting down,

I stayed in bed for three days”

An older woman, with red hair

And thick glasses:

“This is the longest job I’ve ever held in my life--

to be honest.”

A black man in front of a mural:

“I’m willing to do whatever it takes to keep this paper going.”

Perspective is everything.

Author’s Note: Please consider joining the growing effort to save The Denver Voice! Colorado's only street paper.  Donate — The Denver VOICE 

Jacob Richards is a writer, editor, activist, and wilderness guide in Western Colorado.

THE DEATH OF A POET

by Roxanne Doty

These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza. —Literary Hub, December 21, 2023

Before they were bombed from the sky 

warheads raining on their crucified city

littered with the bones of winter

and blood of children

they were a poet and a teacher

a mother and father who understood 

the hope of words, the way they slipped 

through walls and checkpoints

couldn’t be stopped by soldiers 

or guns, how they empowered

defied the laws of physics

and occupation and oppression

 

To the secretaries of war who murdered the poet

words were sterile instruments, tools

like wrenches and screwdrivers, hammers

from the hardware store, like bunker buster bombs 

and hellfire missiles from a rich country

with democracy and security on its lips

and complicity on its hands, to these priests

of destruction, the poet was a calculation

the result of collateral damage equations

estimates of death rankings of acceptable levels 

of slaughter

 

The poet was killed in their home 

and in a school and a hospital and a UN shelter

and a refugee camp and on a war-torn street

and waving a white flag

before they died the poet had asked

When shall this pass?

 

The poet understood that words are fragile

even with their power could crumble and die

they need an audience to listen

to absorb to act and the poet knew 

that all the children of Gaza 

are poets too

Roxanne Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her debut novel Out Stealing Water was published by Regal House Press, August 30. 2022.  Her first poetry collection will be published by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2024. Her short story “Turbulence” (Ocotillo Review) was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart prize for short fiction. Other stories and poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Quibble Lit, Superstition Review, Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, The New Verse News, Saranac Review,Gateway Review and Reunion-The Dallas Review.

WITNESS

 by Amy Shimshon-Santo

I am the person formerly known as _____ _____ - _____.

Now she is the bird left behind from the flock.

She is the figure weeping in the sand.

A witness, witnessed only by the sea.

I am not a war correspondent or a social media expert. 

I am not a documentarian of suffering.

Don’t worry. I have nothing to teach you and nothing to say. 

I’m just skipping words like stones along the water, 

knowing they will bounce and then sink down.

The birds laugh at us.

Birds side eye sonic jets and helicopters. 

Maybe they will tell the trees what’s going on — what they see and feel.

Last week I was a writer.

Today I am a barnacle on the belly of a whale. 

I am moaning like an underwater animal.

When did time stop? When will it start back up? 

Will it? Is this the new time, 

the timeless time, lost in unknowing?

I am not a flag.

I am no longer really a woman, I just gave birth to life.

I am not a faith, just faithful.

Oh broken bones and heavy stones

How far will you tumble?

How far down will you fall?

Six days ago was the sabbath. We gathered 

with 29 members of my family across four generations. Cousins with cousins. 

Sisters with sisters. Brothers and children and grandparents.

Six days ago was a Friday.

Today is six days past a moment of miracles, six days past the bomb.

24 hours x 6 ago there was a night where we could all lay down and hope to sleep.

If I am going to sit with the page I have to say that I don’t want to say

I want this to not be true.

Before I speak, I want you to know that I am wrong. 

Not because I know nothing but because everything is wrong. 

Not every thing but the big world of powers that evaporate worlds. 

I don’t want to remind my mind and relive what has become a beginning.

I don’t want to state the facts because the facts are a mush of kindnesses and disasters.

I am the person formerly known as a self.

I melted into the Mediterranean, sonic booms above our heads. 

My tears salt the water and make everything sting.

I want to tell you about the weeping. 

The mother collapsing onto her belly like a conch shell whose life has departed. 

She is the throw away, the detritus of those left behind.

Author’s note: I have been in three cities in Israel during this past week. I am from Los Angeles. My mother was born here in 1932 as a Jewish person under the British Mandate Palestine. I am a mother, a teacher, and a culture maker. I am deeply opposed to murder, torture, war, and intergenerational harm. War is the loss of lives and infrastructure and dreams and time. Torture and war are the worst uses of human energy and potential.

KING DOM’S DREAM KINGDOM

by Radice Lebewsu

The award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina, who was wounded last week in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant, has died from her injuries. Tributes to both Amelina’s activism and her writing poured in from across the worlds of literature and politics, after PEN Ukraine announced she had died in a hospital in Dnipro, surrounded by friends and family. Amelina, 37, won the Joseph Conrad literary prize in 2021 for works including Dom’s Dream Kingdom and had been nominated for other major awards including the European Union Prize for Literature. She largely set aside her writing after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, to focus on documenting war crimes and working with children on or near the frontline. —The Guardian, July 3, 2023

            “In death’s dream kingdom…”
                        —T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
            “Faith is…absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.”
                        —Stanisław Lem, The Star Diaries
 

Ukrainian Victoria Amelina has died
from injuries along with others; it was dinnertime.
It happened in the city Kramatorsk, more death, more grime,
another dozen dead at th’ restaurant where they had dined.
She had been documenting Russian war crimes for a year,
her prose attempting dealing with the horror and the fear,
like as her fellow writer Vakulenko tried to do, 
when he was killed in Izium in 2022,
his diary found buried underneath a cherry tree,
unchopped, like those in Chekhov’s arbour… arbitrarily.

Radice Lebewsu, an anagrammatic heteronym of Bruce Dale Wise, is a poet fond of Ukraine.