SCHOOL SAYS KIDS PAID TEACHER CASH TO SKIP GYM

by Rochelle Ratner


And so, as she entered sixth grade, she became aware of
exactly what money could buy. A dollar a day doesn't sound
like much, but it was more than her allowance. She became
adept at finding money between the sofa cushions and the
cushions in the back seat of her mother's car, she was quick
to spot coins left on dressers, sometimes pocketing part of a
tip at the coffee shop. Then some creep squealed to his
mother and the teacher was found out. The other kids
didn't mind much, for them the fun was in cutting and
getting away with it, and most of them didn't cut every day
the way she did.


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.

SHE BELONGS TO US

by Lee Patton


the exploded contents of her toy purse
as well as what remains of her brains
after her skull got hammered

She belongs to us,
plus videos of her prances at family picnics,
plus dances at pageants and recitals, plus
that dollar she saved from the tooth fairy

She belongs to us,
privacy pulverized like her tiny sex--
"left-over meat loaf" the reporters said--
"The right to know is sacred, sovereign," so

she belongs to us;
her mystery spices our loafin’ staff lunches
our theories about family secrets
salt to season strangers' wounds

She belongs to us
because we felt so violated, so victimized
No, we never knew her, not in person
No, we weren't there, exactly, but

she belongs to us
Why, we could snap the necks of our kids
we could fuck our own flesh and blood
but we're not that kind of people, no

Not even the killer gets final possession
She remains with us
Gimme that dollar, doll


Among several quarterlies that have published Lee Patton’s work: The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The California Quarterly, and Hawaii-Pacific Review. Among many anthologies: Hawaii-Pacific Review’s Best of Decade, XY-Files, including the title poem in What’s Become of Eden: Poems of Family at Century’s End. 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).

COME HERE COWBOY COME HERE

by Spiel


see this virgin soldier boy
stilled in his prime
bagging elbows
coding knees

hey
come here mr. president

come here
phony cowboy
texas blueblood come here
see this virgin boy
counting toes fingers
and spines

go ahead if you must
line up for the rapture
with your clown hat on
mr. president
or better yet
come here come here
to face this boy
who could not bare
his superior officer’s stare

so he was demoted
from near-nobody
to nobody
bagging lips brains
and livers for transport
back home
to the u.s.a.

come here awol cowboy
show this kid your thumbs
the parts of you which prove
you could have lifted something
greater than a crawford chainsaw
(trimming limbs of a less bloody sort)
and he will show you bags full of
thumb-knuckles tips and fingernails
zip-coded for shipping without really
knowing who nor where they came from

this virgin kid
whose virgin sweetheart awaits him back home
this naïve boy who bought your bring em on boast
who figured he could prove he was a man
a mighty christian at war
as he watched you pray with your eyes shut

but this boy’s feet turned to sand
as you waffled on your why
and his girlfriend sent a message that you’d lied
and unlike all his buddies he’d never felt
the privilege of his sweetheart’s blood yet
here he was all smeared in the blood of thumbs
(not thumbs like yours with tidy fingernails)
plus baby’s scalps and tiny hands and too much
splintered bone splattered in human dung
of young men
just like him

come here come on
bigshot-target cowboy
forgive this virgin kid who cannot stand
to face you cannot look you straight
eye to eye
be humbled in his presence mr.
cowboy without a horse to ride
tell him that you’re sorry
that you led him so astray
admit you never really had the mandate
thought he won’t know what mandate is
he is a simple kid
a no body

do this phony cowboy
get down on your knees

sob yourself to bits and pieces

then hope     then beg this kid
can spare some space in his bags
to squeeze your fragments cast astray
with other odds
and ends to code them back
to general delivery

to see if they
(aside from all this more noble flesh and bone)
just might stand the test
for the presence of human d.n.a.


Spiel is uncommonly comfortable taking us on journeys into deep secrets many share but find too personal or too dark to reveal. His passion and forthrightness are evident in poems of conflict, curiously human short stories and odd bits of art published by scores of independent press magazines. Soon to be released will be come here cowboy poems of war, a Pudding House Publications chapbook, its third since 2003, of Spiel's poetry.

RULES FOR ENGAGEMENT: THE MORNING AFTER

by Bonnie Naradzay


In the beginning, Beirut, set like pearls
against the stunning Mediterranean blue,
could have taken your breath away.

Qana, the village where tanks gunned down
citizens in Biblical proportions:
Now ten years later, attacked again,
the casualties once more are children.

“It was an accident. It was their fault,
their own fault for hiding among civilians,”
the general chortled: “When you sleep
with a missile, sometimes you don’t
wake up in the morning.”

Life has assumed a strange and stunted
quality. A Koran lies open for prayer,
a school notebook creases a pillow.
A crushed sandal, a can of beans.
And a book, blasted into a splintered
olive tree. The child who choked
to death – what was his sin?

The shock and awe, a mimicry,
was planned for over a year.
Officials express regret.
Money and arms, a global outcry,
those involved not authorized to speak.

The killing of children:
such catastrophes happen.
The families wanted to flee
but were too poor and had no
transportation.
Besides,
families in cars were targeted,
and convoys carrying medical supplies,
milk factories, grain silos, the airport,
bridges, mosques, entire Christian villages.


“Death leads to a pause,
not a cease-fire. Claiming
the moral high ground,
officials express regret.”

The toll: exile and subjugation.
The 1982 invasion of Lebanon
killed 18,000 people,
the awful symmetry
of 18 years’ occupation,
the Shiites suffering most,
giving birth to Hezbollah.

Pummeling the West Bank midwifed
the rise of Hamas which begat
the bulldozing of Palestine.

The Morning After Pill reduces the risk,
ends rather than prevents pregnancies?
Pharmacies tout a Morning After Koolaid
that ensures amnesia of past calamities.


Bonnie Naradzay, a student at the Stonecoast MFA program, has poems forthcoming in JAMA and Innisfree and has published in numerous online journals. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

FUNDAMENTALLY

by Robert M. Chute


Since answers breed questions
as the bubble of knowledge swells
the border between unknown
and known also expands. So
as long as reason reigns
its motto must be "We don't know."

When reason's safe in its cage
and certainty's curtain descends,
then there'll be peace. Progress ends.
The top finally teeters and falls.


Robert M. Chute’s new book from JustWrite Books, Reading Nature, poetry based on scientific articles, is available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

HOLLYWOOD MOON

by Deborah P. Kolodji


Jealous
of the glamour
from meteor showers,
she hogs up the sky, wants to be
a star.


(August 2006: Annual Perseid meteor shower to be dimmed by bright gibbous waning moon)


Deborah P. Kolodji's new chapbook of cinquains and haiku, unfinished book, is available from Shadow Poetry. Her first chapbook, Seaside Moon, is a winner of the Virgil Hutton Haiku Memorial Chapbook Award. She is one of 17 haiku poets included in The New Resonance 4: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku by Red Moon Press.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE DAY

by James Penha

Yesterday . . .

We went home
after too long being
where we thought we belonged.

Astronomers voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

The parents of an Austrian schoolgirl missing for eight years said a teenager who apparently escaped from a cellar prison is their daughter.

More Israeli soldiers walked out of Lebanon — some smiling broadly and pumping their fists, others weeping or carrying wounded comrades.

The German government secured the release of a Bremen resident who has been held at Guantanamo since 2001.

A huge granite statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II was moved from the Cairo square where stood for more than 50 years.

Today . . .

Where we thought we belonged
so long
we know we never belonged . . .

"I have a slight tear in my eye today, yes; but at the end of the day we have to describe the Solar System as it really is, not as we would like it to be," said Professor Iwan Williams.

"Honestly, I didn't think that I'd still experience this," said Ludwig Koch. "She said: 'Dad, I love you.' And the next question was: 'Is my toy car still there?' It was Natascha's favourite toy, I never gave it away in all those years.

Some sang a traditional Hebrew song with the lyric: "We brought peace to you." Others wept as they returned to their country, exhausted by the fighting.

The German foreign intelligence agency, BND, was more pointed in its discussions with the director of the CIA's Berlin office: "The guy is a harmless nut job, let him go."

"Ramses will be happy now," said Zahi Hawass.

Tomorrow . . .

We
stone pharaohs
and prisoners
we occupiers,
and victims,
we false stars

can return home.

The solar system will not collapse.

James Penha edits The New Verse News.

THERE’S A PICTURE IN THE PAPER TODAY

by Sadaf Qureshi


I like the way it works its way up into my mouth,
the way it sounds when it escapes
an-eh-mauws-it-y
It starts out hard-headed and proud
But by the time you get to the third syllable it has lost its staccato,
Instead it flows like thick liquid,
as though it has slipped on the wet surface of my tongue,
and when you expect it to finish off staying down,
it gets back up and regains its composure- but with a lost severity.

There’s a picture in the paper today,
About the lives they led
And what that has all been reduced to- a muddle of paraphernalia scattered on a sidewalk,
About the living, breathing, feeling, human debris that
War has left in its path,
About animosity in action
Civilians collect their belongings from their shop
that was damaged by Israeli air strikes in southern Beirut, Lebanon
That is the picture in the paper today.
The picture has it looking as though
Animosity never had to wipe the dirt off a scraped knee,
Or bare a bruise on its shin
It looks at though it has never had that humbling and humiliating opportunity
To get up and recover from a miss because it never does miss
Never trips up
Never forgets to strike
It looks more unrelenting and nimble than it sounds.

Still, they say that looks can be deceiving
They never say anything about sounds


Born in Lousiana in 1990, Sadaf Qureshi is entering Junior year at Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey.

LIBERATION

by Leann Doyle


And here we are, already referring to devastation like
none we have ever known, wreckage rivaling, surpassing
Pearl Harbor, whose date no one in my generation
remembers anyway, replacing, upgrading with 9-11, 9Eleven,
titled like a convenience store, looping catchy like a commercial
hell, nevermind respect somber tones, we are at war, no time to
spell to say September, maybe if it happened in May, maybe, but
Christ, September, who has the time, the patience, we’re too busy
watching the price of oil rise hunting terrorists gauging
weakness surrendering privacy and finding
jobs, but it’s like the soldier said on the news,
it’s not every day you get to liberate people

and see, look at the bare-footed children, dancing in
their muddied Iraqi streets, dancing in your living room
in plasma, flat-screened clarity with their white smiles and
their mismatched, faded clothes standing ankle deep
in mud in filth in spent shells in yellow-boxed provisions
flashing a thumbs up to the camera and hey,
if they know thumbs up then they must
know high five and McDonalds and hooray American
iconography, never mind thumbs up and thumbs down
means live or die in somebody’s history, and the

soldier crying on the news, he misses his motherwifedaughter
and his breath hitches and his voice cracks
and some cameraman was extra careful to crop his shot
so that none of the anger or profanity or hatred,
none of the pledges for vengeance retaliation
jihad, none of it bleeds into this shot
so that I can empathize and sympathize and
sigh deeply at the rightness
of this shot, and fill my lungs
my head with the knowledge that
it’s not every day you get to liberate people

and I won’t care that I am supposed to hoard a three day
supply of food and water in my one bedroom apartment and
duct tape my windows closed (what about the vents the exhaust
fans, air comes through and won’t I suffocate if duct tape
turns out not to be porous and should I just go out
and buy some plants, my own private oxygen supply)
and pay four dollars a gallon for gas and be subject to
random checkpoints and be called un-American anti-American
if I don’t hang a flag tattered flapping from
the antenna of my car because, hey,
it’s not every day you get to liberate people,

and what about that couple called to duty, called away from their
newborn son for a year or two or more, don’t feel bad that this
child will only recognize his parents from pictures like a game
of memory like the alphabet and he will learn the story of his
parents at bedtime like a fable like a fairy tale
and still not know them as mommy and daddy when (if) they return but
it’s not every day you get to liberate people

and everyone has suddenly become so careful with their elocution,
taking pains to enunciate so Iraq and attack don’t rhyme in
any context because this is not an attack this is a liberation
this is a freedom movement this is not Vietnam,
this is Persian Gulf II, a continuance, a sequel,
the same but with different plot twists and bigger oil fields

a father’s legacy a government’s nepotism
and more merchandising, but look, America knows
a good thing needs to be franchised and it’s a promise, troops
will be in and out like a quick fuck like a game of ring
and run like a trip to the store for a missing ingredient
but quick really means indefinite, it means we don’t know,
it means it’s finished when it’s finished and in this lexicon
quick is calculated in years not days, weeks, or months
but it’s like the soldier said on the news,
it’s not everyday you get to liberate people.


Leann Doyle holds a BA in Media Studies and Digital Culture from Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, CT, but currently works full time as a secretary at a local college on Long Island to pay her bills. She is an artist, writer and avid reader with too many ideas and not enough time in which to execute all of them.

TASTE OF AN EMERGENCY

by Carol Elizabeth Owens


“The [sheriff’s] dispatcher asked again why [the female caller] needed the deputy to return. ‘Honey, I'm just going to be honest with you, OK? I just thought he was cute.’.”

– CNN.com (Jul. 14, 2006)

hero,
i would savor
a moment of rescue
for the intimacy of it—
i would dial “9-1-1”
just to see if
you come.


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 "taste of an emergency" is written in a form called eintou (which is West African for "pearl," as in "pearls of wisdom").

MICKEY AMIDST THE RUBBLE

by John Newmark


Mickey sits amidst the rubble,
And my mind wanders to Gavroche,
Singing as he gathers bullets.

Hugo describes him as mystical.
Mickey is mystical, too.
There's not a speck of dust on him.
Fresh from a store,
Or playroom
Of a photographer's child..

Hugo tells the story
Of a failed revolution
Through his invented characters.
He kills Gavroche,
For he knows it will elicit a response.
But he is writing a novel.

The propaganda is passed off as real.
The real pictures would be horrible enough,
But the photographers can't resist
Adding toys, stuffed animals,
And mannequins to the mix.

The hardened reader
When he sees Gavroche die,
Doesn't cry,
Because he refuses to be manipulated.

By staging these pictures,
The photographers
Are unintentionally
Providing an excuse
To ignore the reality.


John Newmark lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and has performed at open mics for thirteen years. His poetry and fiction have also appeared at Newspoetry, EOTU, The Landing, Bewilidering Stories, MillenniumShift, and Scared Naked Magazine. More information can be found on his website.

WHEN HOPE IS DEAD

by Robin Shepard


When hope is dead and buried with the rest,
A great gladness wells up across the land.
The devils of history spring out from their nest.

Voices of crackpots contend with the best,
And legions of militants strike up the band
When hope is dead and buried with the rest.

Heroes and deserters are honored with zest
At a feast of carnage on blood-soaked sand.
The devils of history spring out from their nest.

The slaughtered innocents still are blessed
to die before the flames have been fanned.
When hope is dead and buried with the rest,

The old gods are treated to a proper inquest.
Their towers topple and they leave the grandstand.
The devils of history spring out from their nest.

Good becomes evil and evil’s a lovefest.
The world turns round as if it’s been planned.
When hope is dead and buried with the rest,
The devils of history spring out from their nest.


Robin Shepard has had poems in The New York Quarterly, among other journals. Shepard received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College in 2006 and is at present a development officer for a California community college and a collector of mid-century arts and crafts.

TENANT LEAVES BEHIND 70,000 BEER CANS

by Rochelle Ratner


99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer; if one of
those bottles should happen to fall, 98 bottles of beer on the
wall. 98 bottles of beer on the wall… And what seemed like
98 campers piled in the nauseating yellow bus, pushing and
punching one another, going on some stupid field trip. God,
he hated camp. Years before he reached adolescence he
wanted to just curl up in his room with the door shut. Well,
he's grown now, he's got his own apartment, and for seven
months he actually held a job as a stock boy in a huge
discount store. Too many people there, half of them asking
him questions, the other half pushing some brat in a
stroller. At least they taught him how to stack and balance.
99 bottles of beer on the wall… Hell, 99 bottles don't even
scratch the surface.


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.

THE BOMBING OF AL-JAMALIYEH, LEBANON

by Ann Tweedy


In the front loader, among other
displaced limbs, ride the legs
of the mayor's son, traveling
one last time, from leveled house
to cemetery. See, cries the mayor,
pulling one out, this was my son,
a sportsman who practiced tae kwon do.

Of all the ends love could come to,
why this one?


Ann Tweedy grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. She has been writing poetry ever since she moved to the West Coast in 1996. Over fifty of her poems have been published or are forthcoming in publications such as Clackamas Literary Review, Rattle, Avocet, Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Stringtown Review. For her day job, she works as a lawyer on behalf of Indian tribes and divides her time between Seattle and Skagit County, Washington.