MEDIC RETURNS TO OHIO

by Rick Wishcamper


The sounds of my
girlfriend loading the dishwasher
remind me of the marketplace in Sadr City
The clinking clanging always-so-close-to-shattering –
knives rub cold one against another
sharp along the spine, across the front of the throat.

A click could be…
and a mix of shouts, angry Arabic, may be…
and the general din escalates always louder and louder with
a pulse of panic buried
beneath the chaos of sound
sound.

The sounds move, shake –
take on a life inside
and images flash
and mix with voices, dishes, voices,
images of the dead
and dying.


Rick Wishcamper lives, writes, and works in Missoula, Montana. He recently completed an M.F.A. in Poetry at New England College and owns and operates a progressive real estate development business that searches for new solutions to the various problems of appearently conflicting needs between humans and ecosystems in western landscapes.

DIRECTIONS

by Gayle Brandeis


When Blanche Dubois arrived in New Orleans,
she was told to "take a streetcar named Desire,
and then transfer to one called Cemeteries
and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields".
After people in New Orleans were flooded
out of their homes, after they were left to rot
in the Superdome, they were told they could stay
on a cruise ship named Sensation, a cruise ship
named Holiday, a cruise ship named Ecstasy,
three Carnival Cruise ships docked in the Gulf.
Carnival charged FEMA more than their normal
tourist fares, even though evacuees don't get
the stage shows, the casino, the midnight buffet,
even though they don't get the holiday,
the sensation, the ecstasy. Blanche Dubois always
depended on the kindness of strangers.
What can we depend on but corporate
greed, administrative indifference?
Who can we turn to but one another, no longer
strangers when the waters rise like desire,
when the cemeteries float all around us,
when the Elysian Fields are clotted with oil
and the streetcars that could ferry us out
are all submerged, like stones.


Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperSanFrancisco), Dictionary Poems (Pudding House Publications), and The Book of Dead Birds: A Novel (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change. Her novel Self Storage will be published by Ballantine in 2007. She was named a Writer Who Makes a Difference by The Writer Magazine.

FITZMASS DAY

by Bill Costley


Lying-liars lie creatively on-camera,
in-print, anywhere media suck-it-up,
demonstrating just how it's done:

The Scooter takes 5 hits & resigns
& the Coulter lies: "I never heard of
Scooter Libby until 10 minutes ago."

The Rover, he's still dodging bullets.
Dubya's wurkin' so hard, hard, hard.
Cheney's no-where 2 B seen-o, oh

Ain't it, hard, hard, hard, Cheney?
Ain't it, hard, hard, hard, Cheney?
Ain't it, hard, hard, hard, Cheney?


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco chapter of the National Writers Union.

CROWS AND PINES

by Eleanor Brown Steele


Hurricane of feathers
crows storm in. They
heed the rallying cry
to the tops of pines.

What threat makes
them dive with shrieks
so fierce they shake
the forest?

The bombarded pines
seem not to notice,
but two bulky clouds
are hooked

by this public display –
this proclaiming of enemy,
this marking of avian borders.
My friend David tells me

about the book he’s reading,
about how we humans
are biologically designed
to defend and fight

to the end.
I tell him I won’t read it.
But I will ask these crows
what their take is

on the West Bank,
on Iraq. Where did
they stand
at Little Bighorn?


Eleanor Brown Steele holds an MFA from the University of Maine's Stonecoast Creative Writing Program. Her poems have appeared in the Puckerbrush Review, Earth First! Journal, Potpourri, Modern Haiku and Pudding Magazine. She was recently awarded a St. Boltolf Foundation Award for distinction in poetry. The hightlight of her week is teaching poetry to fifth grade students on Peaks Island, Maine.

ROSA PARKS 1913-2005

by Alisa Gordaneer


doesn’t matter if it’s rosa’s bus
there on the corner in the weeds, tyree says
it is so it is, and it looks just like that old 1947 thing
its windows open to the mourning doves
who nest in the seats, taking places
where white asses black asses all those
asses sat and got to work in mornings filled
with promise or flitting dreams
from last night, afternoons footweary
and ready for supper, feet legs backs heads aching
with the strain of days and only a few more pennies
in the pocket after fare. you can see why
at some point you just gotta sit down
for your rights until they park the bus
and it’s either drive with you or drive over you
because you have become
miraculous, you find as you rise up
to the applause of angels that this time
even the weeds are gonna rise along
and you hold out your hand to pull the soft
fluff off a dandelion the same hair as your
grandmother who taught you
cradled in her lap
said you sit here you sit anywhere you got
a right to be sitting
and you think of here sitting on these seats
where the doves are nesting now and the sky
is open through the windows as wide
as blue as free as all that.


Alisa Gordaneer is the editor of Monday Magazine, an alternative newsweekly in Victoria, BC, Canada, where she lives and writes on an urban homestead with her family. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of poems.

LIVING IN THE CONGO

by Linda A. Cronin

As many as 50 villagers, of Nindja in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, were carried off into the surrounding forest by armed attackers after a brutal assault.

Ever since the soldiers came
and took her daughter,
her hollow eyes stare into the air.
She crouches in the courtyard,
in the blazing sun, trying
to warm the chill from
her bones, and inside her, throbs
a hunger and an ache
that refuses to be silenced.
In a voice, barren of life,
she describes how each night
as the sun slips from the sky
and darkness falls, she heads
for the woods and spends her nights
cradled in the arms of trees,
staring at the stars above
with a single wish in her heart.


Linda A. Cronin, a poet and fiction writer, has recently finished her first collection of poems, Dream Bones. Her work has appeared in literary magazines such as The Paterson Literary Review, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Kaleidoscope, Rattle, and LIPS.

PLASTIC NOT BUDDHA REIGNS

by Barbara Schweitzer


The day glooms dark this afternoon
long before the appointed hour of dusk.
A fitful oak badgers the window
haunting the past like those pictures
of Munch’s scream. It’s a howling wind.

I’ve just returned from shopping
fighting to get the plastic bags
in the door before the huffs
make a brigade that discovers
flight in the modern elements
of carnage – I’ve heard new rocks
are germinating in earth from our
refuse, and lawn chairs as well.

I have tomatoes and cream cheese
and canola oil we’ve needed for a day.
We’re starving in abundance here,
our eyes profoundly impoverished
by TV images over which we can
only pour, corruption so deep
our hearts are forming new rocks too.

The weather has infected my mood.
Sunnier morning had me singing.
Now I can only remember rains.
Shattered things. Lives so different
from mine but made of the same
stuff. To see life as one whole thing
accepts poverty and ignorance and
only evolution to bring any peace.


Barbara Schweitzer is a poet and playwright living in northern RI. Her work has won numerous prizes including a merit fellowship from RI's NEA allotment. Her first volume of poetry, 33 1/3 (Little Pear Press) will be released in spring 2006.

DEMOCRATS' DILEMMA

by James Penha


Left
to be digested
in the belly of the whale
at sea

the end of our agony
like Pinocchio's nose extends
beyond the power
of the ayes
to see.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.

POLICE FIND CADILLAC BURIED IN WOMAN'S BACKYARD

by Rochelle Ratner


Blame it on the population growth. Blame it on the stock
market. Blame it on the government that set milk
regulations so they had to give up the farm that had been
in her family for generations. All she's left with is this
house and a yard that's less than an acre. She needs money
for dog food, and cat food. She hasn't dined in a restaurant
in nearly two years. What kept her going some days was
the thought of winning the lottery. Or maybe some
unknown relative dying and leaving her everything. Or
collecting on some insurance policy she didn't even know
she had. When her husband was alive, they lived fairly
well. Even as a child, her family was comfortable. Her
grandparents owned 124 acres. With only the one daughter
and the large house, they took in foster boys to help milk
the cows and feed the chickens. And as soon as those boys
learned to drive they wanted cars. As a little girl, she used
to walk in the woods and find parts of the cars they'd
pushed up there and abandoned: a horn, a door handle, a
broken mirror, what looked like the casing for a headlight.
To her, it was like finding buried treasure.


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

ON IMPACT

by Alisa Gordaneer


we’re not used to happy endings, the jet
circling los angeles for hours waiting until
emergency crews can foam the runway
with chemicals to keep it from burning
on impact.

there will be one.
impact, that is.
the television
screen captures the jet against blue
california sky at 20 thousand feet,
blue as the ocean lapping far below, blue
as the uniforms of the flight attendants who
must not show emotion.
we are circling.
we will land. thinking of their boyfriends
down there on the beach, of the number
written in lipstick of someone’s cell.

the passengers aboard just know they are waiting
for impact, though they expected to be
over des moines by now, eating lasagna
eyes upwards in prayer position to
screens and screens of tom hanks. this is
not what they expected. not how they
hoped to end.

but up here, a man kisses
the woman next to him, even though she has
a ring, even though they met just before boarding.
it’s a party, the last days, seeing the end of it all on
each tiny screen
but
as long as the fuel lasts, as long as they
are flying nothing can go wrong it’s only

on impact
everything begins
to change.


Alisa Gordaneer is the editor of Monday Magazine, an alternative newsweekly in Victoria, BC, Canada, where she lives and writes on an urban homestead with her family. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of poems.

THE DIRECTORATE OF TUBE ALLOYS

by Elizabeth Pietrzak


The Directorate of Tube Alloys
lined up among mighty masters of fate
remembers that a sleek polished silver
shell can mask exquisite terror. Anger
hides beneath a glistening rod, fat hate
feeds hot fear, god-ordained to dominate
shoves it down my throat until I whimper
or beg, to lie with my eyes closed eager
for more, nourishment which I learn too late —
my insides ripped apart and full with his
burning seed, infected fissures hammered
home. He is satisfied and I leveled,
tread marks on the desert floor, dry kiss
licking the dirt, faithful, devout, covered
in the feces of his tube alloys.

“By the year 1939 it had become widely
recognized among scientists of many nations that the
release of energy by atomic fission was a possibility.”
—Winston Churchill, “My Second Visit to the West”
from The Hinge of Fate.

Elizabeth Pietrzak of 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 working on her MFA in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is working on a novel as well as a collection of poetry, and has published her first chapbook, The Scent of Kisses in the Dark. She explains that the "The Directorate of Tube Alloys . . . refers to the title of the task force assigned to develop viable nuclear weaponry during World War II. . . . The threat of nuclear warfare has been surreptitiously shored up as our president supports replacement ‘detonators’ for current weaponry while not really committing to proper disposal of the old ones; i.e a great way to increase our stockpile without drawing too much attention. Meanwhile, the damage caused by depleted uranium from current warfare goes largely unchecked by the public. Nuclear war continues today, only in slightly modified form.”

1945-2005

by Kathleen Sullivan


Two days after the bright ball of light,
the smoke and blast of fireworks

over Times Square dispersed
for a little while both the heavy chill

of winter and the dread of a nation,
in a makeshift maternity ward

of an Army Hospital where
sullen nurses were gypped

of the laurels of restoring crippled
soldiers—I was born. Later

that year, in the sweltering season
another kind of fireworks

split minds open to the fresh
physics of power; made obsolete

in one blink, those old atomistic
pictures of ourselves as hard

glass marbles spinning in blissful
autonomy; bestowed on us

new ways to be very afraid,
to act like the gods, to suffer.

Energy, which would have made
even Zeus cry and throw down

his bolt of lightning, energy
like a million gold chariots

ascending into the heavens—
blossomed over a city in Japan

and flower, child, stone,
cup disappeared into a pure flow

of light, shadows burnt black
onto walls. What does it mean

to be born in nineteen forty-five?
Buried in the dank

space behind our basement's
knotty pine walls were tall stacks

of aerial photographs, "Reconnaissance"
"Top Secret" scrawled in red ink

across each glossy face.
Something about those pictures

we knew never to ask
my father—and sneaking peeks

I might as well have been looking
at pictures of naked men:

it seemed somehow so awful.
Did all our fathers have secrets?

If you tell me yours
I will tell you mine.

On clear nights, with photo-
sensitive film in his knapsack,

my father strode under the palm trees
of some South Seas island,

and over the sand, climbed
into a B52, flew through

the stars to Hiroshima. Telling
this, all I can see is a forest

of fuliginous mushrooms, each
fungal body solitary, breeding

underground in dirt cellars. Mush-
rooms, the same metaphor

psychotherapists use for shame.
On this anniversary I ask who

are we, the children born in the year
Roosevelt's round "Little Boy"

dropped? Tiny and pink or brown,
tumbling in the air with dirty

atoms, minds and bodies open
like wounds, cunning bundles

of energy, growing into history
and already marked?


Kathleen Sullivan lives and works in Maine as a psychotherapist. She is also an MFA student in poetry at Stonecoast, in Maine. She has a poem entitled "Icy Lips" just published in Animus. Email Kathleen Sullivan.

V@LKERIE FL@ME

A NEO-OPERA
by Bill Costley


Synopsis:
Winnip@c, veiled 3-headed goddess of cia-deception, destroys all who invoke her hidden name.

Cast:

• Winnipac, (helden sop.) goddess of cia-deception
• Valkerie Frame/Plame/Wilson (mezzo-sop.) priestess of cia-deception.
• Dubya Bush, (helden tenor), 43rd Potus.
• Dick Cheney, (basso) his vicious-Potus.
• Irv Libby (tenor), scooter to the vicious-Potus.
• Karl Rover, (counter-tenor) castrator to the Potus.
• Judith Miller (contralto), a priestess of the Nyt.
• FitzGerald, (brass-bar.), the Inquisitor.

Act I: Upon the broad banks of the Potomac.
Aria: “Bitch Goddess”

Dubya (helden):
Bitch, goddess,
bitch your best.
I will not rest.
I will not rest.
I never...rest.

Dick Cheney, to Dubya (sprechstimme):
Dub, who is this bitch?
What’s her f’n name?

Dubya stammering (sprechstimme):
Valkerie Flame; Valkerie Plame, a Valekrie, a f'n dame.

Act II: Way Out West.
Aria: "Way Out West"

Libby, to Miller (bel canto):
Way out West, where you vacation,
the aspens, they will be turning;
they turn in clusters, knowing
their roots so connect them.

Act III: At the Lincoln Monument, beside a flaming pyre on the broad banks of the Potomac.

Inquisitor Fitzgerald, seated on Lincoln’s lap, thwhispers (sprechstimme):
What did Miller make...of this reference to...connected roots?

Miller, below him, an abject supplicant, (bel canto):
The last time
I’d seen Libby
was August 2003,
at a ro-de-o
in Jackson Ho’
a man in jeans
and cowboy hat
approached me
and asked me
about a conference
I'd just attended
in Aspen, CO; Oh,
I had no idea
who he was...
until he told me.

Libby, thwhispering from behind a dusty screen (sprechstimme):
Judy – I’m Scooter…Libby.
Judy – you do not know me, but
Judy – you may someday name me.

[to be continued]


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco chapter of the National Writers Union.

THE HIPPO'S LESSON

by Robert M. Chute


As lumbering on land as a
great half deflated ball too awkward
to roll, but submerged this River Horse,
Hippopotamus, becomes an
animate cloud, a four legged whale
dreaming of the sea. But evolution
is so impossibly slow nothing
ever seems to happen -- but of course
it already has and somewhere in
an arctic or a tropic ocean
a whale breaches, blows, and dives,
its history so long it's long forgotten.
While we, we lucky few, we know
where we came from, if we care to listen.


Born near the Chute River, Naples, Maine in 1926, Robert M. Chute taught and conducted research at Middlebury College, San Fernando State (CA), and Lincoln University (PA) before returning to Maine as Chair of Biology at Bates College. Now Professor Emeritus of Biology, Bates College, Chute has a record of scientific publication in Parasitology, Hibernation Physiology, General Biology, and Environmental Studies. His poetry and collage poems appear in many journals including Ascent, Beloit Poetry Journal, BOMB, The Cape Rock, Cafe Review, The Literary Review, Texas Review. His poetry books include a three language reissue of Thirteen Moons in English, French, and Passamaquoddy (2002), and most recently, a three chapbook boxed set, Bent Offerings, from Sheltering Pines Press (2003). He is currently working on a series of poems based on reading scientific journals such as Nature and Science.