WE'RE SITTING AROUND A TABLE NOT FAR FROM THE RUSSIAN BORDER

by Ron Riekki

A Chinese artist, a Russian musician, and American poet,

and we talk about surveillance, sharing how dangerous it is

to be an artist, after speaking with a local who told us about

the tensions with Russia, how they're like a choking fog,

and the musician from Russia says it's all propaganda there,

says she doesn't care, that her voice will never be voiceless,

tells us about being taken in by the Russian police and how

she brutalized them with truth, was let go, and then let go

of her country, emigrating, immigrating, Euro-ricocheting around,

and hanging out with Pussy Riot, doing anti-war campaigns,

and we speak of the ten percent of the Russian population

being tortured, and she speaks of physical torture and

emotional torture and the torture of propaganda, and

the Chinese artist talks about holding up signs in Hong

Kong that were all white, not allowed to have signs with

actual words, so this haunting image, this effective image

of hundreds of artists and writers and protestors and students

holding up these white signs, ghost signs meant to haunt

politicians, and the American poet talks about being hunted

by the Trump administration for a pro-Islamic, pro-immigrant

tweet, how the administration administered paperwork to his

home, pages and pages and pages of warning, how watched

we are everywhere, he says, he thinks, he feels, and we are

near the Russian border, except it's shut down, too dangerous,

and here we are, doing art that is too dangerous, and having

this conversation that is too dangerous, so dangerous that

we turn off our phones to make sure we are not being listened

to, because we want to create the form of our words, rush

home and turn our conversations into lyrics and artwork

and this poem you are reading now, written near a border

that is rotting with worry, a border that lacks moonlight tonight.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

TO MUSCLE MEMORY

by Lynnie Gobeille

"Automat" (1927) by Edward Hopper

He says he plays by muscle memory
Stares off into space while on the stage
In some sort of out-of- body zone.
He asks if writers ever feel that way.
Do we experience the Zen
Of lost time and space?

I think of countless meals burned,
Eggs exploding on the range,
Long past “boiled”—moving on
To become lethal weapons;
As I sat patiently
Waiting for the arrival of the Muse.

I tell him—
Maybe that is what love will be
In this time of Covid19 and
Social distancing is really
All muscle memory with no touch.
I tell him not to worry—after all—
Hell—this is nothing new to us.

Artists are used to creative isolation.
And all this fear over Solitude?
—Just another name
For how we live our lives.
He picks up his guitar and plays—
I turn back to my computer.

Our words hanging there
Along with our silent fears
To be digested later.


Lynnie Gobeille: Co-founder and retired Co-Editor of the Origami Poems Project. Champion of all things Poetry & Magic.

I HAVE HAD FRIENDS IN GREAT NUMBERS

by Judy Katz-Levine




There are barbed wire fences in my dreamless nights.
And hands caught in nets, children growing who cannot whirl.
There are torches tonight, and chants to drown saints.
And simple good people who want a steak at lunch, or hummus with a carrot.
I have had friends in great numbers, who watch with prescient eyes
of brown and green and black and gold and hazel  and azure-
The marches of hatred, the chants of those with bludgeons for
Writers, and I am one, journalists, and the films in black and white
Reeling through the avenues where magnolias should bloom,
Where souls are not crushed , because we will not permit it.
Where freedom fighters/writers are ploughed down like deer on the highway
In the nights of barbed wire fences in my dreamless dreams.
Because we will stop it, my friends.
I could tell you, my friends, who will come into my garden of ripening tomatoes, roses.
Who will give me echinacea with pink flowers, who will swim with me in sweet lake water,
And who will read my poetry for 40 years, keeping it a secret until the most crucial moment
That determines a hidden mountain behind the mist of decades.
I have had friends in great numbers, who take me to the ocean, and we have shared
The small rises and falls of our children in laughing texts.  We will not tolerate
We will not accept, these marches from a haunted hunted slaughtering, a genocide past, a genocide that echoes other genocides, and other genocides, and others
To be revived?  Forget it.  We’re here.  We know the score.
The lurid lips of nazi clowns shouting hatred slogans, the mowing down
Of friends?  We will speak/act now, we will stop this insanity.

Judy Katz-Levine is the author of these books: When The Arms Of Our Dreams Embrace, Ocarina,  and When Performers Swim, The Dice are Cast.  Her new collection The Everything Saint will be published by WordTEch  in August 2018.  Poems have appeared recently in Kritya (India), Stanzaic Stylings, Ibbetson Street, Salamander, Blue Unicorn, Springhouse Journal, Peacock Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, and many others. Also a jazz flutist, she just played a 3 hour gig at the Farmer's Market in Needham MA.

ELECTION DAY APPROACHES

by Joan Mazza

Image source: “The Never-Ending Nightmare That is This Election” by Tom Tomorrow

Anxiety is a necklace of barbed wire, ankle bracelets
shackled to a boat filling with water. We know we’re
going down. I wake gasping, unable to tell dream
from reality, my bed a rocking sea. That muffled
sound of a crying cat—locked in a closet? —
an owl on this chilly night. I open the window
to listen, but he hoots only once more. Autumn scents
drift in with the cold, heat vent blowing at my feet.
In bed, fragrance of old dog and woolen blankets,
shadows of barking. This isn’t Mineral or Richmond,
but unnamed rural Central Virginia, oak trees and crows
content in their ignorance of news and election polls,
unable to comprehend the concept of email or fraud.
No, they understand fraud, who cheats and misleads
instead of warning of danger. The crows know who’s
a friend because even birds show their true colors.

Who goes there? No one answers. Silence—
the gift of second sleep. Today, I’ll be part of a panel
of writers talking to those who want to be published
but don’t write. Hopefuls with empty notebooks ask
about agents and fees, not about craft. They could win
the Pulitzer, Booker, and Nobel for their ideas alone.
They’ll be on TV, have their own show. About what,
they don’t know. No one asks, Joan, how can I become
a better writer? What books might be instructive by example?
This trend toward magical thinking will ruin us, as if
the most bombastic white men could offer salvation,
a cure for bad judgment. I whisper, Mon Dieu! although
I don’t believe in any Dieu, not Thor or Zeus
or even Aphrodite. My old dog makes her little cough
that means, Come back to bed, and I do, wearing fleece
and flannel, not barbed wire, my mind still shackled.


Author’s Note: Based on Twenty Little Poetry Projects by Jim Simmerman.


Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Slipstream, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.