ALMA MATER

by Catherine Gonick

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather in front of Sproul Hall during a planned protest at UC Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., on Monday, April 22, 2024. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

A goddess of silence carries

my severed right arm

 

my Zionist  

arm they call 

 

genocidal among

many other names.

Silently moving

out of sight

through camps

where the righteous

sing from tents 

it waves goodbye.

   

I hear

the blood of words dry

feel the pain

of my phantom limb. 

Catherine Gonick's alma mater is U.C. Berkeley. She has published poetry in journals including Live Encounters, Notre Dame Review, Forge, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and in anthologies including Support Ukraine, Grabbed, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She works in a company that slows the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate. 

MY FATHER'S TREES

by Rikki Santer

The Yatir Forest in Israel ends at the border with Palestine. The largest human-created forest in Israel, 12-square-mile Yatir was created in the 1960s on semi-arid land with four million trees, 90 percent of them Aleppo pine. —National Geographic, March 24, 2023

after Hamas, after Gaza

A ring of trees in Israel

encircle his legacy, a memorial

from his bowling buddies

three decades ago. The certificate

declared from Leviticus:

When you come to the land

you shall plant trees.

My father never visited that land

and neither have I but I trust

his trees are there still in the Negev Desert

perhaps an arboreal Heinz 57 of carob,

redbud, olive, almond, pear, cypress,

cedar, and oak. 

Bologna sauce is what my father

cooed he’d squeeze out of me

when his hugs were hymns

in gratitude for finally finding

the good life with wife, daughter, son.

His ideas of assimilated Jewish

migrated to my secular shaping. 

Synagogue just on high holidays, 

Sabbath just another Friday night

for cheeseburgers and Hogan’s Heroes. 

And Zionist? He was more B’nai Brith 

bowling league and temple dues.

These days I imagine his Israeli trees

forsaken by milk and honey. Their roots

sponging up bloodshed. Their skins

trembling with gunfire and bomb.

Their bent architecture davening

a shameful Kaddish.

Their barren fractals of branches

reaching and reaching 

for nothing but air.

Rikki Santer’s poetry has been published widely and has received many honors including several Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2023 she was named Ohio Poet of the Year.  She is currently serving as vice-president of the Ohio Poetry Association and is a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council.  Her twelfth poetry collection Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.

NEW BEGINNING IN ISRAEL

by Lenore Weiss

Menachem Begin (Mark Reinstein/Getty Images)

Menachem Begin was Dodo’s first cousin.
She and my mother were best friends.
Dodo lived on the ground floor.
We lived on the other side of the apartment building.
Sometimes I babysat her dog Cocoa who pooped
on the living room rug before she returned home
from vacationing in Israel where she drank coffee
with her cousin, the same Menachem Begin.

Dodo’s mother was Mrs. Bagoon who lived
under the elevated near Southern Boulevard
and painted her veins purple with Gentian Violet
wearing support stockings that made her feet sweat.
Her brother was Menachem’s son
whose family came from Russia, and as far as I knew,
Israel was a collection basket for the poor and huddled masses
all yearning. Sharon, from third-grade, went to Israel
with her mother every summer to plant a tree
in her father’s memory, and Aunt Clara sent money
through her women’s organization.

I never remember my mother or father
sending money to Israel even though Menachem Begin
was Dodo’s first cousin, but they did send me
to a Zionist sleep-away camp
because that’s where Dodo sent her daughter
who really liked it. My father didn’t talk much
about Israel, at least not in English, or about the family
he’d lost in Hungary, but made it clear
he didn't think Zionism was the same winning ticket
others hoped for, not the same
new beginning for the Jewish people
even though Menachem’s
last name was spelled like that.

Lenore Weiss serves as the Associate Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Editor for the Mud Season Review and lives in Oakland, California with Zebra the Brave and Granola the Shy. Her environmental novel Pulp into Paper is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press as is a new poetry collection, Video Game Pointers from WordTech Communications.

IF THEY SAY "JEW"

by Michael Fisher

if they say “jew,” or
if they say “muslim”

if they say “greedy,” or
if they say “dirty”

today is my birthday
I spent it watching the numbers come in from Gaza
refreshed my browser window over and over

mathematically, one number is always greater
than another

if they say “rag-head,” or
if they say “kike”

if they say “zionist,” or
if they say “jihadist”

the Gaza strip neighbors Israel and Egypt
it is home to 1.816 million or less

my own neighbor has a chocolate lab
and a gun

he hates that I can't change my oil,
build a shed, hates that I
spend my days reading books and the news

I hate that he never considered the morality of chaos theories
and loves classic rock

still, when I pull in, I look out for the lab
he waves and adjusts his baseball cap when he sees me

can it be that easy?

they say “sub-human,” “terrorist,”
“child-killer,” “fascist,” or
they say “genocide,” “genocide,” “genocide”

I shut down my computer for the night
tomorrow numbers will grow

I wish I could say I watched the fireflies
surround the bright eyes of a dog through my window


Michael Fisher is the author of Wolf Spider from Plan B Press and Libretto for the Exhausted World on Spuyten Duyvil Press.

DECEMBER ONCE AGAIN

by Diana Woodcock

"Jazz Beat" painting by Debra Hurd

What can I write to shed light
on this dark December night?
A Connecticut town grieves for
twenty-six dead—victims of the latest
school shooting.  Tibetans are setting
themselves on fire for freedom,
ninety-five since February, 2009.
Listening to musicians walking the bass,
feathering the line, I let the blues take me,
wrap me in the Great Mystery.

All are one, meant to sing and sway
together, to love.  The blues is all about
love, longing, loss, listening,
improvising, sharing our stories and
struggles, recognizing each other
as sister and brother.

Look into the faces around you
moved by music—see how they
seem familiar?  What better way
to pray for justice, an end to violence,
than to sway to the swing of jazz?

A Pakistani girl shot in the head
because the Taliban cannot understand
her hunger and yearning for higher
learning; they do not recognize
she is their sister.  Let the blues take me.
shape my prayer for peace, lead me
to transcend nihilism, alienation.

Listening to the blues, to the sounds of
migrant workers in this oil-rich desert town.
Thinking about blood diamonds,
underground railroads, women and girls
sold into the sex trade.

This is Advent season, time
for preparing for the light.
Long dark December nights.
Listen to the blues.  Gaza.  Aleppo.
Keep listening.  The call to prayer
mid-day, the mosque.  Revisionist
Zionist leaders.  Jihad.  Refugees.
Cambodian children amputees
still playing among landmines.

Dear jazz drummer, please
keep feathering the line.


Diana Woodcock’s first full-length collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders—nominated for a Kate Tufts Discovery Award—won the 2010 Vernice Quebodeaux International Poetry Prize for Women and was published by Little Red Tree Publishing in 2011.  Her chapbooks are In the Shade of the Sidra Tree (Finishing Line Press), Mandala (Foothills Publishing), and Travels of a Gwai Lo—the title poem of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  She has been teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar since 2004.  Prior to that, she lived and worked in Tibet, Macau and Thailand.