POEM FOR SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC

by Sheila Black


1.

I think I know when I begin
where I stand, but when I google your name
and “poetry,” 143, 214 sites appear
in which I cannot find a single poem.

One says you are vilified by the greedy
gods of Capitalism, their thunder-lust of
acquire and destroy. Another writes a book which
“vents his rage” at your “brutal regime.”

And there is “America” in my head and
somewhere else the experience of
being “American,” which are not remotely
one and the same, struggling through memories
of therapy-speak and banana seat bicycles to identify
that “engine of commerce,” which in the
words of yet another website, “continues
its devouring march yard by yard across the
besieged planet.”

I had forgotten you were a poet until
the day you were found dead in your cell
(to much unspoken relief and more
despair), the circumstances mysterious—
murder, suicide, conspiracy, accident?

You see even in these few simple verses
how the words unspool, multiply,
become in the words of Lacan
“unstoppable engine of desire” ?

2.

A mad professor writes his opus of the
Neanderthals, who he claimed never gained
language but were experts in the teleology of
“hmmmm.” In other words, they sang.
Music he says is “holistic, the meaning
apprehended in simultaneity rather than being
tied to symbol, or to the narrative prison of
time always moving forward, in music “there is
never a reason distinct from emotion.”
His evidence for this? The Neanderthals'
society remained as it came into being unchanged
for a quarter of a million years.

Slodoban what can this mean for us, here, now?
Only what any fool could tell you:
Words are not to be trusted. Such powerful little
soliders, builders of utopias, raisers of palaces,
paradise. Do you still remember the stories you
were told? Here is a blue bowl. Here is a dead horse
whose eye is a flower of flies. Or:

swift, on horseback, the barbarians ride to the attack;
an enemy with horses as numerous as their flying arrows;
and they leave the whole land depopulated.
Some flee, and with their plowed furrows
unguarded, know their fields will be despoiled.
The poor products of their labor, in creaking carts
are driven with their flocks, all the poor peasant owns.
Among the refugees, some are seized as captives
and with their arms bound, march to an unknown fate;
they cast a sad eye behind them, at their homes and farms.
Some fall in agony, pierced by barbed arrows;
for the metal head of the shaft is loaded with poison.✦


Or again:

The wet logs on the open fire gave the only light to the closely packed peasants and their wives, wrapped in thick smoke. If I tried to penetrate the curtain of smoke, the most I could see were the eyes of the human beings, numerous, sad and glaring with some kind of fluid light coming from nowhere. Some kind of reproach, even threat, radiated from them, and many times since then they have awakened me from my dreams.✢

3.

Yellow flower, watch face, twig underfoot. I have
seen the famous film of you with the rifle, firing down on
a city landscape, which is perhaps Sarajevo, is perhaps
Kosovo, is a maze of dense concrete buildings and
walkways and boarded windows where people fall
suddenly at random. You smile when the gun fires, retort of
it in your hand. Your smile is what one might call
mirthless; it is a smile meant to show steadfastness of
purpose, bared teeth. When you wrote a poem,
how many drafts, how many hours or minutes
moving the words about on the page? Surely you
learned much of the alchemy of governance
—nouns of interest, strong-are verbs, the active spark,
the craft of forging an image with sufficient traction to
slide into the reader, O unimaginable place in the body
where such visions are held, breathe, and grow, Slobodan
so many states, instants of being, and the obverse—
those burst bodies under the spreading lindens, the men-

women-children-who-will-not-speak-never-no-more
words-who-have-joined-hands-with silence,

bodies seen in the grainy impressions of 16 mmm film
slick video stock, digital cameras, red flash and
light leaking into silver, capturing the whole mess.

And how can I slide down there, below the words,
into the bodies themselves on the layered ground
of the Croatian woods, leech into oak and ash,
the spring flower, carnivorous-looking in its mottled
creams and pinks, curled above them, tendriling,

for each word demands another, does it not? You,
Slobodan, stabbing pencil into paper with energy
as you did everything. Strongman. Now two hours
warming the search engine and not a single poem
by you in your language or in mine. Yet I can picture them
on the page. Noun, corrosive verb, rhetorical
flourish. Inspired by--- Meaning ---. Such small
beginnings, truly. Tell me one story you have never
spoken, one moment, be as humble and as accurate
as you can Slobodan, remember when you were small,
remember when you knew nothing? Here you are:

A doorway. There is perhaps some smoke somewhere.
A sky with skittish clouds. The wind is cold, iron, slice.
Or it smells of flowers as if of another world. Whose
face do you see? Whose voice calls out what phrase?

4.

Slobodan, name like a rock, You see how it all goes and grows?
And the engine, the engine creaks on? The Neanderthals
went extinct, too, swallowed, the Professor says, by their
inability to dream beyond, no single artwork of any symbolic
content or reference, but they had what we lack:
the hmmm of the moment, the hmmm that takes all things
inside it, as the original poets aspired, mixing dance, song,
and word into Molpe, in which the participants assume
their masks, no longer men or women but the hollow
reed, the bone cup through which the thunder crackles,

Molpe: A name. Greek for song. Another Siren. In the Whorl, the goddess
of music, dance, art, the winds, and lightness.

Historians describe that they moved and sang until the words were
swallowed, broken, garbled, the
name of the Siren, “Siren” chanted and
danced, as if the words themselves could be
distilled into the more-than-human-beyond where
language is said to lead.

5.

From their chests up they had the form of sparrows, below they were women. Mythologers say that they were little birds with women's faces who beguiled sailors as they passed by, bewitching with lewd songs the hearing of those harkening to them. And the song of pleasure has no good consequence, only death.✸

6.

Slobodan, you hear nothing,
look where the words have taken you. See the woods,
the silence of the earth? It is morning. A deadness in the
air. The sparrow sings regardless. And again the yellow
flower pushes up. The lightness that is not us.

___________

✦Ovid (Tristia, III, x.), describing a raid 2,000 years ago by the Sarmatians, considered Slavs by some historians, against the ancestors of today’s Albanians.

✢Gavrilo Princip, letter to a friend, quoted in Vladimlr Dediler, The Road to Sarajevo, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966, p.190. Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, thus triggering the First World War Gavrilo Princip, who was born In Bosnia (in 1894).

✸“Suidas” the unknown compiler of the The Suda, a tenth-century Byzatine Greek historical encyclopaedia of the ancient world, selection from Select Epigrams from The Greek Anthology Edited with a Revised Text, Translation, and Notes, by J. W. Mackail London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1890.



Sheila Black received her MFA in 1998 from the University of Montana. Her poems have appeared in many print and on-line journals including DMQ Review, Puerto Del Sol, and Blackbird. In 2000 she received the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize, given annually to one U.S. and one Mexican poet living along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Her first book House of Bone is forthcoming from CustomWords Press in 2007.

ON POLITICAL RAPIDS - LOSING GROUND

by Carol Elizabeth Owens

“[A] state of emergency was declared Tuesday [June 27, 2006] for…the District of Columbia. More than 2,200 people near a rising lake in Maryland were ordered to evacuate. Lake Needwood on the north side of Rockville was approaching 25 feet above normal [in] Montgomery County.” -- Associated Press (Jun. 28, 2006)

f.e.m.a.
is finally
on footing with the front-
line of disaster. floods must feel
funny when they’re running
close to the white
house’s

gated
community.
weather in the beltway
found a way to really keep folks
on their toes. fear’s exposed
and freedom’s not
the safe

haven
it once appeared
to be. equality’s
now on the same level with new
orleans. terror can take
different forms.
water

is just
one of them. race
and social stigmata
cause uprising, too. people may
be waist deep— government’s
likely to end
up wet.


Carol Elizabeth Owens is an attorney and counselor-at-law in Western New York (by way of Long Island and New York City). She enjoys technical and creative writing. Her poetry has been published in several print and virtual publications. Ms. Owens loves the ways in which words work when poetry allows them to come out and play. The poem "on political rapids -- losing ground" is written in a form called eintou (which is West African for "pearl," as in "pearls of wisdom").

BAG LADY

by Gary Beck


No longer young,
but not much older than me,
I have seen her often
in subway visions,
ravaged by her treasure
simmering in shopping bags,
her eyes the hunger of zoo animals,
with a wrinkled, worried face
that will not allow tomorrows.


Gary Beck’s poetry has appeared in dozens of literary magazines. His recent fiction has been published in numerous literary magazines. His plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes, and Sophocles have been produced Off-Broadway.

GEORGE W. BUSH LOOKS OVER THE DAY'S NEWS

June 3, 2006


by Rochelle Ratner


1.

In Vienna, a tax collector places a black attaché case filled
with the day's collections on the back of the toilet while he
takes a crap. He finishes, washes his hands twice to get all
the crud off, then leaves. By the time he realizes it's
missing it's of course been taken. Using a red marker,
George makes a note about how other countries waste
taxpayer's money. And he'll add some comment about how
all American public restrooms are stocked with extra toilet
paper.


2.

Some Canadian running for office accepted $27,000 in
contributions from school children. Raiding the piggy
banks, one challenger called it. Shaking down kids for their
lunch money, someone else said. Now they want to ban the
damn liberals from campaigning within 500 feet of an
amusement pier or kindergarten. George circles this one,
picks up the phone, asks an aid to find someone who'll
donate little plastic piggy banks his fellow Republicans can
hand out to promote family values. Only for senators
running for re-election. Only for those who don't speak out
against the war in Iraq.


3.

"Do not vote for the red coalition. Vote for a 20 percent
discount," a Czech sports store is advertising, trying to
make certain the communists don't gain seats in the
coming election. George taps his pencil against his
forehead as he thinks that one over. Czechs apparently
send out several ballots and you only return the ones
you're voting for, so he supposes that makes a difference. It
would never work here, would it? He taps his pencil against
his lips, chews on the eraser.


4.

Enough about foreigners. Let's put the focus back on
America. This country's really getting out of hand. A
woman in a Pittsburgh bus terminal tries to steal a bag of
peanuts, spits on two people restraining her, then slips out
of her shirt to get away, walks outside, takes off the rest of
her clothes and darts into traffic. Police chase her down
and take her to the psyche ward, but she's not facing
criminal charges. And what he wants to know is -- why
not?


5

Oh dear. It says here that Washingtonians love their game
of tag, wearing lanyards around their necks for admittance
to Congress, the State House, the Pentagon, the Supreme
Court, even some press conferences and museum openings.
And they display these tags like stripes on a uniform when
they go out for drinks after work. Sometimes four or five
tags will jingle around a man's neck, proving his
importance. He checks his wallet, his pockets, even the sofa
cushion, wondering where he could have lost the one they
gave him.


6.

Hot diggity dog! He knew Texas was in good hands under
Rick Perry's leadership, but it really took a genius to come
up with the idea of hundreds of video cameras along the
border, streaming live to computers everywhere. The
ultimate reality show. If you see something, say something.
Get the public, heck, get the whole world involved. He can't
wait to get home.


Rochelle Ratner's books include two novels: Bobby's Girl (Coffee House Press, 1986) and The Lion's Share (Coffee House Press, 1991) and sixteen poetry books, including House and Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003) and Beggars at the Wall (Ikon, October 2005). More information and links to her writing on the Internet can be found on her homepage: www.rochelleratner.com.

REMEMBER THE MAINE

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper


“Stay the course,” keep using force, no remorse for the dead and dying, “stay the course,” keep on lying, “ support the troops” without buying armored tanks, protective gear, keep on lying, victory’s near, Iraq’s free of fear, Saddam’s dead, the Ba'athist Party’s fled, the new government loves us, their flag flies above us, “Stay the course”, the fourth amendment shredded ,our soldiers beheaded, our phones tapped, our economy sapped, our stem cells discarded, our privacy disregarded, “Stay the course,” a Trojan horse, in North Korea, and Iran, Rove’s talking points, those he anoints.

“Cut and run” from our ports, “cut and run” from Katrina,“Cut and run” from the legislative arena, “Cut and run” from those who disagree, from those who see torture and rendition, an unaccomplished mission, Islamic sects in opposition, “Cut and run” from our sick and poor, from knock and announce at your door, leave no child behind, “Cut and run” from the scientific mind, “Cut and run” from Murtha, a man of honor, “Swiftboat him” so he’s a goner, “Cut and run,” from CIA agents outed, subpoenaed journalists who shouted. “Stay the course,” or “Cut and Run,” peppered words, a loaded gun.


Lucille Gang Shulklapper is workshop leader for the Florida Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress. Her poetry and fiction appear in journals and anthologies, including: Switched-on Gutenberg, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Slant, Common Ground Review, and others. She is the author of two chapbooks of poems: What You Cannot Have, The Substance of Sunlight, and one mini-chapbook : Godd, It's Not Hollywood. Living up to traditional expectations led to work as a salesperson, model, realtor, teacher, and curriculum coordinator throughout schooling, marriage, children, and grandchildren.

HAVE YOU ANYTHING TO DECLARE

by Carol Dorf


Every time I say no, I worry
Actually, first I’m angry, then
fear no will be someone’s turning point,
whiteboard erased to blank slate.

Have You Anything To Declare

I hate simile, prefer metaphor:
It is cold, a leaf trembles,
her lips tight with negation,
day fades too quickly into grays.

Have You Anything To Declare

I am afraid of war,
afraid of the American flag,
afraid of how happy we’ve become
at the sight of leveled cities.

Have You Anything To Declare

I am afraid of the ardor of my neighbors,
who declare solidarity, by breaking
a plateglass window, boxes of couscous
and jars of olives tumbling onto sidewalk.

Have You Anything To Declare

If I die before my child is grown
I’ll have left her in a world without siblings,
where she’ll be a meteor falling through night,
and I don’t have to power to stop twilight from fading.


Carol Dorf's work has been published in Runes, Coracle, Five Fingers Review, Transfer, Socialist Review (the issue Ron Silliman edited,) and Feminist Studies. She have taught in various venues including as a California Poet-in-the-Schools, at Vista College, at Lawrence Hall of Science, and in a large urban high school.

HOW THINGS CHANGE

by Mary Saracino


There are things in this world
over which we have no control:

tsunami tombs and earthquake
crevices swallowing whole

the hopes of men and women
unhinged levees drowning

the dreams of children
inept officials courting tragedy

averting eyes from sorrow’s pleas for mercy
food, medicine, a roof over one’s head

justice tarries too long in the land
of the unseeing, loses its way

still, outrage emboldens swollen
hearts, spreads compassion

like manure to fertilize charity
which still begins at home

though not every knocked door opens
the ones that do change things


Mary Saracino is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet who lives in Denver, CO. Her newest novel, The Singing of Swans, is to be published by Pearlsong Press in October 2006.

THE FIRST LADY

A FOUND TANKA
by Stephen Lawrence


Afghanistan will
be wonderful for tourists,
it is so exotic

and has a very, very
fascinating history.


Stephen Lawrence, who has an MA in English and Diplomas in Applied Psychology and Education, works for the South Australian government. His fiction and poetry has won or been shortlisted for twenty Australian literary awards, and he was guest author at the Adelaide Festival of Arts Writers' Week 2000. His third poetry collection, entitled How Not to Kill Government Leaders, was launched at Writers' Week 2002.

MEANWHILE IN AFGHANISTAN

by Elizabeth Pietrzak


Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, suicide bombers
threaten aid workers as well as the insurgent
American troops. Rumsfeld parrots:
"Improvements every day!"
while even our soldiers lack faith
that the Afghan Army will soon be ready
to face the Taliban on their own.

In a rare photo op, two Afghan soldiers
pose with an American-made AK-47
while Lieutenant Average American Soldier instructs,
like a father on the basics of how to operate a lawn mower.
Only this father's smile lacks genuine sincerity.
His movement betrays him as he leaves
the outdoor photo studio, he still has
reservations about turning his back
to the Afghan he has just trained and armed.


Elizabeth Pietrzak, Claremont, California, is a mostly-vegetarian poet who spurns the meat of global over-consumption in favor of a sustainable, locally grown lifestyle. She received her BA from the University of La Verne and is pursuing an MFA at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is writing her first novel as well as a collection of poetry, and her first chapbook, The Scent of Kisses in the Dark, was adapted into a performance by Kirsten Ogden in May 2005. She has co-authored a solo performance with Rob'n Lewis which is currently in development.

WORLD C(arved)UP

by Ed Webb

"Up to 1,000 Dutch fans watched their side play Ivory Coast in their underpants on Friday after they were denied entry to Stuttgart's stadium for wearing orange trousers with the name of a Dutch brewery which was not an official sponsor." – BBC

We must protect, we must,
The rights of those who have paid to own this space and time,
This moment of international silly-seriousness
We must protect.

Your garments are unofficial.
They may not protect,
They have not paid, they do not own,
This is not their moment.
Please bare your legs for capital
Which we must protect.


Ed Webb has never worn orange trousers, but might start.

DEMOCRACY . . .

by Maurynne Maxwell


Democracy in the Southwest United States at the End of the 20th Century
(early 1990s)

They want to put a wall along the border.
A wall comes down in Berlin,
goes up in the United States--
they propose this without irony.

A people without memory can do this.

What's the price of freedom in a market economy?
We can't afford idealism
(our ancestors paid in blood).
We are old money now, aristocrats of power;
we count the price.

Blood is always the true price.

Walls don't work, have never worked--
from Babel to China, from the Bastille to Berlin.
Desperation digs tunnels, builds balloons,
breaks through the strongest barriers, rebels.
Walls draw down lightning, cannot survive the storm;
Dreams drift through atoms of steel, stone, or flesh.

Freedom, that virus--
there is no cure.


Democracy in the United States at the Beginning of the 21st Century
(2006)

Repeat.
Repeat history.
Repeat with the wall.
Repeat with wiretaps.
Repeat with ISPs keeping records for the government.
Repeat with the President saying he thinks a dynasty is a good idea.
Repeat with the melding of Church and State.
Repeat with the rich getting richer.

Repeat history.
Repeat with wars,
especially with wars for freedom.
Especially if they're in another country--
over an ocean.
Repeat revolution.
But not next door.
Repeat with the wall.

Repeat history.
Repeat revolution.
Try out democracy--
someday it could happen.
Quit repeating.


Maurynne Maxwell is a native of Southern Arizona. Arizona was part of Mexico longer than it has been part of the United States. In fact, up until the 1400s, Arizona was just part of the world. If you were optimistic, you could say that Arizona and the United States were part of the world even now. At any rate, she would not really like to live anywhere else except maybe Baja, Canada, or Cornwall. Because even though we don't practice democracy in this country, it seems like we have the next best thing. Mauryanne Maxwell wishes she had the answer to perfection, but simply believes we must keep trying.

ARMED RESPONSE

by Lee Patton


ARMED RESPONSE
--warns every alarming sign
planted in each front lawn,
metal petals of SecureHomes,

Inc. Disarming, how only brown
arms tend empty yards to provide
the only motion, the only sign

that Beverly Hills bears life.
Brown arms guide the tools
and the whining, snippy machines

that manicure ever-green lawns
in February, tangerine-sweet.
Fruit’s a nuisance, though--

“Pablo,” Mycki wails, “that pulp
on the walkways? Clean, please?
Comprendes? Okay? I’ll be back.”

Sweeping uneaten fruit, does Pablo
recall his predecessors, braceros?
“The arm people,” whose manos never

knew manicures. While Mycki
day-spas her fingernails, Tanya
complains about “illegals--”

thinks they ought to be shipped
to Mexico “in manacles.” Mycki
says nothing, afraid of what

would jungle into her garden
without Pablo’s shears, so...handy.
Her Benz slips plush and silent

home, down the alley, swallowed
by garage. Someday, she’ll visit
her front lawn, she’s sure. Now,

though, Pablo mops up ripe pulp
and Mycki must write that overdue
check to SecureHomes, Inc., which

will plant a squadron of riflemen
front and back if any brute dares
pluck her Eden’s surplus fruits.


Lee Patton's work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The California Quarterly, and Hawaii-Pacific Review. Among other literary activities and awards: Finalist, the 2001 Lambda Awards for best novel (Nothing Gold Can Stay), 2006 Colorado Authors League short fiction award, The Borderlands Playwrights Prize in 1993 (The Houseguest) and the 1996 Ashland New Playwrights (Orwell in Orlando).

BUSH OPPOSES STEM CELL RESEARCH

A FOUND TANKA
by Stephen Lawrence


Each life is a gift—
these children I’ve brought today
are former embryos;

each of us started this way
and life can’t be exploited.

There is no such thing
as a spare embryo.
these kids remind us

each embryo is complete,
genetically intact.

This Bill will cross a
critical ethical line
and will bring about

destruction, dismemberment
of emerging human life.


Stephen Lawrence, who has an MA in English and Diplomas in Applied Psychology and Education, works for the South Australian government. His fiction and poetry has won or been shortlisted for twenty Australian literary awards, and he was guest author at the Adelaide Festival of Arts Writers' Week 2000. His third poetry collection, entitled How Not to Kill Government Leaders, was launched at Writers' Week 2002.

U.S. MINT CONFISCATES 10 RARE GOLD COINS

by Rochelle Ratner


Every time the phone rings she jumps, expecting it's her
father calling. She knows he's old and sick, knows she
should be in touch with him more often, but she has her
own life. She doesn't have time for all his stories about
watching Antique Road Show. Never before was he a
dreamer, but suddenly everything he owns might be worth
a fortune. The cast iron skillet and the pewter bird-in-hand
paperweight she easily found a place for. But not the coins
he gave her on her last visit – carton after carton, an old
gym bag, an even older suitcase. He wiped off the mouse
turds. He took each mint set apart to show her what it was,
most still in their shipping boxes, some in velvet cases. He
was sure there were some boxes missing.


Rochelle Ratner's books include two novels: Bobby's Girl (Coffee House Press, 1986) and The Lion's Share (Coffee House Press, 1991) and sixteen poetry books, including House and Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003) and Beggars at the Wall (Ikon, October 2005). More information and links to her writing on the Internet can be found on her homepage: www.rochelleratner.com.