BALTIMORE CARGO

by Patricia Jakovich VanAmburg

Image source:  A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland (The Maryland State Archives, Annapolis MD and the University of Maryland College Park, MD)

Why did we not see cargo arriving
with the first slave ship whose
rotten timber roiled the harbor
leaving tobacco in our pockets…

cargo of manumission’s
low skilled “quasi-freedmen”
filling local factories for
twenty percent cheaper wages
and a city of transient pockets…

cargo of professional
“blood tub” rioters and
Know Nothing fraud
dividing a city until
free Blacks were pocketed
into segregated education…

cargo from World War II
steel Liberty Ships promising
jobs for thousands of poor
white southerners while
expanding corporate pockets…

cargo from decades
of racial blockbusting
depreciating neighborhoods
building heroin ghettos
bulging pockets of crime…

We should keep in mind
what we put in our pockets.


Patricia Jakovich VanAmburg teaches literature at Howard Community College in Columbia Maryland where she is also affiliated with The Little Patuxent Review. Her most recent chapbook is titled Watching for Birds.

FUGITIVES

by Philip C. Kolin

Drawing of fugitives running from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Image source:  A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland (The Maryland State Archives, Annapolis MD and the University of Maryland College Park, MD)

Black blood rushes from city
after city; running is now a crime,
guilty or not, the verdict is the same
and so is the punishment; backs
broken, heads smashed,
necks choked, chests exploded,
organs silenced; hope ended.
There is no escape, no plea, no trial.

Every black man is now afraid he wears an invisible
target only dashboard cameras can capture.
Hanging-noose ropes are strung around
the killing scene; black sons set in  buckled asphalt.
The community  fears that American history has
reversed itself, the  Fugitive Slave Acts
reenacted.


Philip C. Kolin, University Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the editor of The Southern Quarterly and has published more than 30 scholarly books on African American playwrights, Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Also a poet, Kolin has published five books of poems, the most recent being Reading God's Handwriting: Poems (Kaufmann, 2012), as well as hundreds of poems in such journals as the Michigan Quarterly Review, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, Christian Century, Spiritus, Seminary Ridge Review, America, and has co-edited Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita (Southwest Missouri UP, 2006) with Susan Swartwout.

MEANWHILE

by Earl J. Wilcox

Everth Cabrera bats against the White Sox in the eighth inning of the Orioles' 8-2 win at Camden Yards. The game was closed to the public. It was the first time a major league game had been played without a paying crowd, according to MLB historian John Thorn.  (Kenneth K. Lam / Baltimore Sun April 29, 2015)

The gulls from the nearby harbor start the wave.
The cotton candy droops, hot dogs cold, no beer today.
The organ player plays and sings Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
The bull pen players scratch where and when they please.
Rain or shine, the teams play on as if thousands were in the stands.
Abner Doubleday smiles, the Babe is baffled, Gehrig speaks to no one.

Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.

COOKIES AND CRACKERS

by Dennis Mahagin

People walk past burning cars near the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and North Avenue Monday in Baltimore. Violence erupted following the funeral service for Freddie Gray, who died a week after being arrested by Baltimore police. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images) via the Baltimore Sun, April 28, 2015

That cop, you just knew he was
drawing a bead on the small of the
whatever, and I pointed my flicker
at a plasma screen, watched
as a black guy caught his slugs; that makes
fourteen this spring, what does it mean,
a word, a deed, if anything? That cop
who dropped him in his tracks,
you just knew he’s a freak, a dick, squeezed
off each, in his freshly-pressed pleats. Jesus
why not come back, Lord, diminishing
admonishing, return? I pointed my flicker
at a screen, guts burned with nausea,
too much acid, what we learned,
later, that they'd snapped his neck
like a pork rind, the Galaxy vibrated
for my location, and sirens knew:
they whined. So I booted up
Facebook instead, time
enough the little box said Sign In !
-- to hear a litany of audio malware
in the head, the come-ons, for Liberty
Mutual, left Twix, white Twix,
the matrix, that runs, so subliminal
while one tries to get away. I pointed
my flicker, only to see he’s about to be
gunned down today, again:
Oh Zimmerman, CNN cuts to the bad
ad for Goldfish, breakfast granola bricks;
And we know a cop can be Garanimal,
maleficent nitwit acting out the script,
Zzzzzzt, Zzzzzzzzzt, a script, embedded
schemata, and no volition, as civil war;
hate is seeded there, from before.
Stars you see at night, no different
from day, burned through,
fossilized, and mostly light lives
in the eyes officer
inevitable, as the suspect tumbled
down, I did not realize it was still
running, had in fact been placed there
without knowledge, no warning,
audio files assembled on a hard drive,
tracking code, and slogans: they said
“meanwhile in the nation ... fifteen minutes
can save you,” -- so I pointed that flicker,
and it shook, yet I could not stay away
from CNN, the Galaxy, or Facebook.
“Fuck your breath,” said a cop, freak
we all know, Jesus Christ, come back;
toss the clicker to the fishes, lie, in
time, say we have learned, return.
At the Korean store, that linchpin
(or suspect) bought a sack
of Oreos, Big Gulp,
Triscuits.


Dennis Mahagin’s poems have appeared in magazines such as Juked, elimae, Evergreen Review, Everyday Genius, PANK, The Nervous Breakdown, and Night Train. His  latest book, Longshot & Ghazal, is available for purchase now, from Mojave River Media.

KALI YUGA

by Susan Roney-O’Brien

A Buddha statue is surrounded by debris from a collapsed temple in the UNESCO world heritage site of Bhaktapur on April 26, 2015 in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Photograph: Omar Havana/Getty Images via The Guardian.

Blood screams, floods rice fields,
dyes water red. A woman shrieks,
cries out in an unfamiliar language.
From behind the wall
a man growls
deep in his throat.

Outside a dog barks, a child wails
as though there is no country
beyond sorrow.
Over the balustrade
potted roses bear dark thorns.
It is just past dawn.

The Kathmandu Kumari,
red-gowned, is now five-years old.
She twists her naga necklace,
conceals the rash spreading
over her chest, pulls
at her tight black topknot

and between the capital and Pokhara
near Bandipur, the earth
cracks open. A small hill temple
rattles and falls. The world
shudders as the epicenter
sends tremors roiling.

Shiva strides through Kathmandu,
levels Narayanhti, topples buildings
smashes bricks, bodies to the ground.
All over Nepal, red blood flows,
a color we all know and recognize
in this epoch of violence.


Susan Roney-O'Brien lives in Princeton, MA, has won the William and Kingman Page Poetry Book Award, been nominated for 5 Pushcart Prizes, been selected NEATE's Poet-of-the-Year, works with young writers to publish their books, and has published widely in literary magazines. She returned from a trip to Nepal last week.

SING LIKE A PLANET

by Rose Mary Boehm





Our earth is humming.
Enormous, swirling loops of sound.
Very low key. Not for our ears.

The water churns against stone,
rocks move against rock. A potpourri
of vibrations--not concerned with the golden rules
of tonal phrasing--are echoed between mountains,
are bowled across oceans and penetrate tectonic plates.

Male humpback whales, the ‘inveterate composers’
of songs 'strikingly similar to human musical traditions’.
They sing only on calving grounds.
Very low key. Not for our ears.

We have organized sound and called it music.
Made it less daunting; ‘civilized’ what would otherwise
overwhelm. Millions of years of the planet's pulse
corseted into meter and tempo, pitch, melody,
harmony… an attempt to control our apprehensions.

Still, I turn my stereo to full volume. Vivaldi's concerto
for mandolin, strings and basso continuo
in C major will soon bring the neighbor
to my door complaining about that awful noise.


A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and a poetry collection (TANGENTS) published in 2011 in the UK, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a good two dozen US poetry reviews as well as some print anthologies, and Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet. She won third price in in the 2009 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse (US), was semi-finalist in the Naugatuck poetry contest 2012/13 and has been a finalist in several GR contests, winning it in October 2014.

BEADED BOUNTY

by Catherine Wald

“Much of the beadwork featured in many pieces — from Ka’igwu moccasins to a Ute tobacco bag — used tiny glass seed beads from Venice, Italy, acquired through trade with Europeans.” —Seattle Times review (February 20, 2015) of “Indigenous Beauty”  at the Seattle Museum of Art.

Fingertips clasping confetti colors, I grasp
                  glass beads of Venice to recount ravens,
                                    superimpose suns and hawks. In shades of
                                                      Roman frescoes, my fables spin out:
                                                                        breathless as clouds, self-contained as cacti.

Plunder purchased from ghost-people, even in service
                  of beauty, of love, comes at a cost I can't fathom as I
                                    caress and pierce these tiny hulks, adorn
                                                      my childrens’ tunics with their shimmer.

As I bead, prairies are denuded, tents torched.
                  As I braid, Armageddons are prophesied and fulfilled.
                                    As I stitch, our love affair with earth is defiled by
                                                      notions of ownership; our sons succumb to
                                                                        microbes; our daughters birth monkeys;
                                                                                          our rivers run black, then dry.

Catherine Wald's books include poetry (Distant, burned-out stars, Finishing Line Press, 2011), nonfiction (The Resilient Writer: Stories of Rejection and Triumph From 23 Top Authors, Persea Books, 2005) and a translation from French of Valery Larbaud’s Childish Things (Sun & Moon Press). Her poems have been published in American Journal of Nursing, Buddhist Poetry Review, Chronogram, Exit 13, Friends Journal, Jewish Literary Journal, The New Poet, Society of Classical Poets, The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly and Westchester Review.

WHEN THE WATER RUNS OUT

by Joanna Schroeder



When we run out of water
we will drink tall glasses of stones
from the riverbeds.
We will brush our teeth and rinse

with only the stream of our own saliva,
the trickle of blood from our own gums.
We will wash our hair with wine,
clean our bodies with vinegar.
We will shower the azaleas with time,
all the second hands pulled
from antique watches, gathered in a pail
to pour down like our memory of rain.
We will survive on the notes
of desperate songs, the ones
we haven't heard in years,
conjuring old lovers ghosts
so parched as we are
so thirsty,
even for our own tears.



Joanna Schroeder is an ex-punk adult from Columbus, Ohio.

ACROSS NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

by Judith Terzi

Across the Atlantic
a 13-year old imitates
as best he can with a crossbow
that kills a teacher.
Anniversary of Columbine
in a Barcelona school.
Blossoms on the verge
of unlocking in Colorado:
blue violet about to spill
across the San Juans.
Across the Capitol lawn
a gyrocopter glides to a stop.
No odes aboard, only
political prose for campaign
finance reform. Oh mail me
a poem, Mr. Mailman,
make it the lyric of the month.
I know you're someone's hero,
an elegy clinging to a wing,
like migrants hanging
to la vita on a shoddy ship
across the Mediterranean.
They sold their organs to pay
pirates in coyotes' clothing.
And across the bench sits
Dzhokhar, gaze pasted
to the scribble of alphabet,
bowls of letters across a page.
If onlys dangle between blue
lines like columbines hugging
the soil before the next rain.


Judith Terzi is a Southern California poet whose recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Off the Coast, Raintown Review, Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque). If You Spot Your Brother Floating By is her latest chapbook from Kattywompus Press.

INVISIBLE

by Michelle Marie

Source: NY Daily News

nothing is fixed
not the broken boat on the water
not the broken lives fleeing the forces of war
not the broken system that dehumanizes and deports

nothing stands
between those on board and
the breaking of the waves
not the luck that never holds out
not the promises that never pan out
not the border patrol that refuses to look out

for a ship lost at sea
in waters that never deceive:

only when your image is no
longer reflected in the water
do you begin to see yourself
the way the world sees you


Michelle Marie has written for Infita7 and Bluestockings Magazine.

VILLANGHAZALLE WITH FAUNA

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    at brilliancy of colors bleached to white;
    rage, rage against the dying of the coral reef.
 
elkhorn, staghorn, pineapple, red cauliflower, mushroom, precious red, blue, organpipe, star, brain, torch, cup, sun, bubble, cactus, column, finger, flowerpot, pillar, table, tube, stone, fire

    Before we've even plumbed the trove of life
    that shelters there, prey to manmade blight,
    we rampage, rampage, killing off the coral reef.

purple stovepipe sponge, striped cleaner wrasse, batwing coral crab, slipper sea cucumber, tomato clownfish, yellow nudibranch, magnificent feather duster, nurse shark, marine iguana

    At last we claim the ocean as our fief;
    ours is the absolute, God-given right
    to wage, wage war against the coral reef.

blue spotted sting ray, saddleback butterflyfish, sea whip, chambered nautilus, variable boring sponge, regal tang, purple sea urchin, olive ridley sea turtle, acropora crab, sharpnosed puffer

    When Gaia bore us, she produced a thief
    who, armed with outsize trawls and dynamite,
    would stage, stage the dying of the coral reef.

harlequin shrimp, reticulate brittle star, somber sweetlips, blue-ringed octopus, loggerhead turtle, minifin parrotfish, brown volcano carpet sponge, orange fireworm, flamingo tongue cowrie

    our legacies (and may our time be brief)
    of plastic scum and seas acidified
    presage, presage the dying of the coral reef.

deceiver fangblenny, chicken liver sponge, Christmas tree worm, yellow-bellied sea snake, zebra shark, flying gurnard, sunflower starfish, leafy sea dragon, spiny lobster, zooxanthellae

    The news continues dire, with no relief,
    no end to blind rapacity in sight.
    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    but rage, rage against the killing of the coral reef.


Esther Greenleaf Murer is a relic of the 20th century.  She was brought up on Thornton Burgess's Seashore Book for Children and has a lifelong interest in invertebrate paleontology. 

NATURAL ORDER

by Charles Frederickson

Natural order is the way
   Things are without outsider interference
      Mortals yet to learn how
         To coexist in balanced harmony

         Astronomers have discovered that our
      Universe is getting consistently darker
   Star numbers falling lost twinkle
Points of light diminishing returns

Global warming industrial contamination and
   Passive Indifferent negligence adversely effect
      Climate change air clean water
         Quick-change weather conditions increasingly erratic

         Misguided protectionism of unilateral one-sidedness
      Contributes toward disunity violence insecurity
   Making soiled earth a more
Unsafe unjust and uncivilized place

 More merciful kind compassionate tolerant
   World order is urgently needed
      To help save critical condition
         Endangered planet discovering emergency remedies

         Concerned eco-crusaders must embark on
      Mission Possible to ensure that
   Proud pasts lie ahead for
Future generations – all our kids

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 

A HEARTBEAT DISCOVERED

by David Chorlton

Hyalinobatrachium dianae

         

A frog nobody knew existed
appeared among the raindrops
in the foothills sloping down
toward the Caribbean.
It had been there all along,
as the Golden toad was dying,
as the Harlequin toad was losing
its forest, and while ultraviolet light
washed into the brightly
colored skins of tree frogs
and dart frogs, any one of which
would barely register
on the scale that weighs losses
until it becomes the last
and its call no longer
brings the nights to life.
The glassfrog is an inch of green
when it wraps its toes around
a narrow stem, and seen
from underneath, its heart
is visible through the transparent
skin, transmitting a signal back
up to the stars.


David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. In September, 2015, he will participate as a poet in the Fires of Change exhibition at the Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff (Sponsored by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, the Landscape Conservation Initiative, and the National Endowment for the Arts.)

WARNING FROM THE NORTH

by Kit Zak

Earth Day is April 22

 
Even before the shaman’s words, we knew
gulls screeched warning
water sipping the shore
the full moon, our lone night’s light, swollen tides
Newtok’s first six huts poised to surrender before the others.

Even before the Anchorage experts, we knew
Permafrost melt killing birds and fish,
winter ice, barrier against flood, icebox for our food
lifeline” for seals and polar bears—vanishing
ancestors’ dreams rippling in our sleep.
         
Even before the tribal grapevine,
we marked the tide, knew it was coming.
Heard about our brother whales’ distress
Denali sheep and wolves starving
lakes drained and trees burning.

Even before the talk of moving, we knew
millions to resettle one hundred tribes
and time galloping, winter winds walloping, huts sinking—
we knew.


Kit Zak lives in Lewes, Delaware, where she observes with disbelief the failure of the politicians to take up the issue of climate change. Her most recent poems are forthcoming in California Quarterly,
Portage, Poet Lore, and  The Albatross.