YELP REVIEW: NORTH CAROLINA STATEHOUSE

by Jesse Bradley

Here, the sorest losers are a swarm
of wasps; they treat democracy
like a neck trickling with sweat.

With enough stings, your throat swells
until the protest dies
before it can leave your tongue.


J. Bradley is the winner of Five [Quarterly]'s 2015 e-chapbook contest for fiction.

FLEEING MOSUL

by Seree Zohar

Between 700 and 1,000 people arrive daily from the embattled city of Mosul to the stretch of UN-run refugee camps just 20 kilometers east of the city's outskirts. —CNN, December 18, 2016. Photo: Iraqi IDPs (internally displaced people ) from fighting in the village of Shora, south of Mosul, reach an Iraqi army checkpoint on the northern outskirts of Qayyarah, which was liberated from ISIS but is still engulfed in thick black smoke from oil wells set ablaze by the retreating militants. IDP’s who reach Qayyarah are then taken to the Ja’dah IDP camp, October 2016. Ivor Prickett—UNHCR via Time.

Homing pigeon launched through dawn, your rhythm alights on me,
fingers, gloats, dehisces: prayer, your cadence chooses me.

White flag?  We hadn't time to buy one.  And nothing here stays white.
Brethren!  We are light!  Scourges thunder news to me.

Amorphous tented Mama,  my weary footsteps echo yours.
Did I once beg for makeup?  To age so young no more amuses me.

On red-moist stone the thrashing dove’s heart seeks its startled head
as the moon shatters her mirror.  A hone-edged screeching nooses me.

In gasps accursed by memory, sounds palpitate, untongued.
Sheared of speech, my youngster throat: its grunted coo accuses me.

They thrill to this: to snatch and strip, recast their prophet’s land
where, slim as a rising blade, a martyr grooms, then bruises, me.

Mama, snatch up your hem and run, for torpor now diffuses me.
My spilling psyche frays.  My throwaway martyr loses me.


Seree Zohar has work published or forthcoming in various print and online venues.

LEAVING ALEPPO

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

An older man was evacuated from a rebel-held neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, on Thursday, December 15, 2016. Credit Karam Al-Masri/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times, December 15, 2016

single line they walk
besieged eyes merely looking forward
forward one step in front of another
tired beyond tired
fatigued beyond fatigued
weary beyond weary
their sorrow faceless like themselves
their burden a city of ruins
they will carry forward
in their eyes their hearts
forward one step in front of another

Sister Lou Ella Hickman is a member of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament. She has been a teacher on all levels and she has worked in two libraries.  Presently she is a freelance writer as well as a spiritual director. Her poems and articles have been published in numerous magazines as well as a poem in After Shocks: Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo and a poem to be published in Down the Dark River edited by Philp Kolin.  Her first book of poetry, she: robed and wordless, published by Press 53, was released September 1, 2015.

RETURNING AMERICA TO GREATNESS: A TRUE STORY ABOUT GIRLS IN EARLY 1970s DETROIT

by Sue Reed Crouse

Image source: bOiNGbOiNG

One summer afternoon, L walked alone to the party store and bought a few ropes of Bubs Daddy Sour Apple gum. Past tiny houses, owned by the UAW dads, Mustangs on blocks in the garages; her world of city-wide curfews and cars. The Boys from the next block, armed with sticks, rounded the corner whipping leaves from low-hanging branches. They were old enemies from the Worm Wars, which had tapered off when the girls lost their fear of worms. At the height of The Wars, The Boys had ambushed them, tied them to the fence behind Mr. Taylor’s garage, and doused them with transmission fluid pumped from a tank he kept on hand. The girls hid their red, oily clothes from their mothers who would likely scold, boys will be boys. They were older now, yet she could still smell the oil, like scorched plastic, and taste it. Hey, The Boys mumbled, wanna see something cool? Toward the alley, behind the hardware, L followed. As she offered gum, Frank, grease under his fingernails, reached for the neck of her blue-flowered top and ripped, leaving her half naked in shadow with a scratch down her chest. L crouched against the cold wall of the hardware and worried about being grounded. There was M, back speckled with bruises which the girls saw when Miss G made her change into gym clothes. Attempting a smirk, M said that her boyfriend Ryan had gone all the way on her in the gravel behind the strip mall. Some of the girls were impressed because Ryan was in high school; others called M a slut. No one thought victim. There was C who was beautiful and didn’t care about The Boys. One day, she came to school with bruised arms and scratches on her face. A group of jocks, led by Chuck, knocked her off her high horse. They had held her down and scratched her face with open safety pins. Everyone said they did more, too, but C stopped talking that year and walked with her arms crossed and head down. T was playing the new record, Cherokee People for Larry when he shoved his hand down the front of her jeans. N was held down in the back of the school bus while The Boys took turns groping under her blouse. All the girls had their bra straps snapped. Are you a turtle? No? Then why do you snap! Back then, the girls knew that boys would be boys. Back then, the girls knew that The Boys needed to fuel their locker-room talk. Back then, girls learned that humiliation came with their gender, just like their monthly periods and sometimes, it seemed, more frequently. Back then, is where half of the electorate wishes to return. Back then, promises the president-elect, king of locker-room talk, sexual molester, voyeur, fan of violence, now on his third (and ever younger) beauty-queen wife, is where he will lead us.

Sue Reed Crouse is a 2011 graduate of the Foreword Program, a two-year poetry apprenticeship at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Much of her work is elegiac in nature, exploring themes of grief and loss after losing Laura, her 20 year-old daughter in 2008. Finding fresh ways to explore this universal theme through image-driven poetry helps her navigate the sorrow and, hopefully, help others who grieve. Crouse’s work appears in Verse Wisconsin, The Aurorean (Showcase Poet), The Talking Stick (First Prize, Honorable Mention), Grey Sparrow, Earth’s Daughters, Damselfly Press, Midway Journal, Sleet Magazine, Unhinged, Little Lantern Press and a chapbook entitled Gatherings: A Foreword Anthology. Her manuscript One Black Shoe was a finalist for the Backwaters Prize last year.

RESISTANCE

by Joan Colby



You learn to build strength
By resistance. Hoisting the 10 pound weight
With your shattered wrist,
Screwed and bolted into a titanium plate
Inscribed with a disaster you’re
Overcoming.

If passive resistance means folding
Your hands in the semblance of prayer,
The resistance you are practicing
Is one of cold steel clutched
In your fist and lifted
Like the torch of liberty.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

RESISTANCE

by Kim Drew Wright

The lady beside me drips
drops from the bridge of her nose,
runnels from her forehead

A lithe blond in the back makes
it look easy, head pressed to mat
bending as told

Sweat collects in towels, clothes
I am a bottomless pit
of fluid, the rain water of continents spill

out of me, one bead at a time,
like the first burst of rain in the Garden
of Eden. I hear how it lands on a leaf,

how the apples glisten.


Kim Drew Wright has fiction and poetry in numerous journals. The Strangeness of Men, her debut collection of short fiction and prose poems won both a Silver IPPY and Finalist in USA Best Book Awards. She is a human rights activist and lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and three children.

I'VE STOPPED COUNTING THE DEAD

by Jean L. Kreiling

She's not sure that she should suspend
her vigilance, but keeping track
has done no good, has brought no end
to savagery.  As she looks back,
it seems that nothing else has made
a difference either:  votes or signs
or marches or laws disobeyed
or protests sung.  So she resigns
herself to silent grief and guilt,
her anger now an exercise
in mute restraint.  The tomb she's built
from watchful tears and numbered sighs
commemorates too many shames.
Let someone else keep counting names.


Author’s Note: The title of the poem is a remark overheard from an elderly activist.

Jean L. Kreiling’s first collection of poems, The Truth in Dissonance (Kelsay Books), was published in 2014.  Her work has appeared widely in print and online journals, and she is a past winner of a New England Poetry Club Award, the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Contest, the String Poet Prize, and the Able Muse Write Prize.

THE LAST BRIGHT MOTES

by Devon Balwit

President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that “nobody really knows” whether climate change is real and that he is “studying” whether the United States should withdraw from the global warming agreement struck in Paris a year ago. —Washington Post, December 11, 2016

The feather star unfolds itself forward, frond
            after frond, like an Escher stairway,

impossible, yet in perpetual motion, somewhere deep
            off the coast of Thailand, unaware

that protection of its ocean has been handed
            to the oil-hungry, who will crack

the sea floor until it oozes black, until such creatures
            dance only as bright motes in memory,

those who love them too weak to halt the juggernauts
            of greed and indifference.

Devon Balwit is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon. She has a chapbook Forms Most Marvelous forthcoming from dancing girl press (summer 2017). Her recent poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News before as well as in numerous print/on-line journals, among them: Oyez, Red Paint Hill, The Ekphrastic Review, The Cincinnati Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Timberline Review, Trailhead Magazine VCFA, The Prick of the Spindle, and Permafrost.

ALEPPO

by George Salamon





Wretched Aleppo,
Bereaved by death
Who grants no audience
To human flesh
As humanity prepares
Another feast for death.
After Auschwitz it  was said
"No more poetry."
After Aleppo, I say
More poetry to instill
Reverence for flesh
Sacrificed for evil vapors and whims.

George Salamon grew up in Europe during the slaughter of World War Two and now, from his home in St. Louis MO, reads about and looks at pictures from man's latest crimes against humanity in Aleppo.

IF THIS IS MY LAST MESSAGE

by Freesia McKee 

To see Ismail Alabdullah's heartbreaking video tweet, go to https://twitter.com/SyriaCivilDef/status/808834482610589697

for Aleppo

if danger crescendos
like a heating tea kettle

jaw of a broken jar
open as the mouth of the moon

if I die
still young

remember that I died
as people have always
died

as you lie

listening

do not remember me for
this last message

remember the song I sang

if you sleep through
what we lived for as it burns

think about my smoke
how when it touched your skin

you turned away

Freesia McKee is a working poet. Her words have appeared in the Huffington Post, Gertrude, Painted Bride Quarterly, Burdock, and Sundress Press's Political Punch anthology. She co-hosts The Subtle Forces, a weekly morning show on Riverwest Radio in Milwaukee.

ALEPPO

by Peleg Held


Source: Twitter, 5:59 AM, December 13, 2016

There is a city.
It is not our city.
Its broken buildings are full of bodies.
They are not our bodies.
In that city syllables are run through and strung
together into long cords of rough names
that, if they were washed clean and laid
end to end, would reach right to our doorstep.
But our names are not rough names like these.

Someone, somewhere behind the wall, is banging on a pipe.
Or are they screaming for help?
We cannot say for sure.
If indeed, there are still words coming
from any body in those broken buildings
they are strange words, not our words
yet.

Source: Twitter, 7:11 AM, December 13, 2016

Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

PANTOUM FOR THE ARTISTS

by Alejandro Escudé

A person with the Oakland Fire Department takes a photo of the artwork on the front of the "Ghost Ship" warehouse in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016. The Fruitvale district warehouse caught fire on Friday, Dec. 2, killing 36 people. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group via East Bay Times)

The artist dies in a house of fire, the exits unknown.
A wreck bastardized, a crow suspended from spokes.
Why was nothing done? Where has the fire begun?
Separated by the smoke, the artist gags and chokes.

A wreck bastardized, a crow suspended from spokes,
The city rumbling past, a bridge full of nothing-souls
Separated by the smoke, as the artist gags and chokes.
Coffee here, coffee there, cold nights like unlit coals.

The city huffing past, a bridge full of speeding souls,
But the artist seeks more, a hive of unpredictable acts
Sipping coffee here and there, on cold coal-less nights,
Squatting in the cheap happenstance haphazard tracts.

The artists seeks more, the unpredictable hive acts
In such a way that cannot serve the absconding rest
Squatting in the priciest prime premeditated tracts.
Every fire begins in disarray or in an empty chest.

And so, the artist will not serve the absconding rest
And there is nothing to be done. The fire has begun
In the city’s forsaken disarray, in the penurious chest.
Artists live in a house on fire, all the exits unknown.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

THERE WAS A FACE

by j.lewis

Image source: ACLU Capital Punishment Project

Former Eagle Scout set to be executed for Alabama killing

—Fox News, December 7, 2016

two and twenty years ago
one life went out
with details that are
of course, on record

the extinguisher
one score and two years later
after all appeals have failed
sits on the infamous row
while a state plays
mother may i with scotus
anxious to finally do
unto him what he did
unto another

i am not from alabama
cannot even tell you
where i was that day
when one life and some
unimportant sum of money
were taken in huntsville
video rolling, rolling

today i saw his face
where else but on facebook
an absolutely ordinary face
and when i asked google
for details, for explanation
there was the face again
over a caption from fox
that called him
a former eagle scout

and i wondered
how does one become
a former eagle scout
is there a ceremony
a court of dishonor
that strips away
all merit, all honor
as if to say
we never knew you

and would that hurt
any less than dying
or would the former scout
even care at this point
knowing how determined
a certain state can be
when they want to be sure
you remain forever unable
to reclaim that eagle

Editor’s Postscript: Ronald Smith was executed on December 8, 2016. See “Alabama's cruel and unusual execution of Ronald Smith” —Scott Martelle, Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2016

j.lewis is an internationally published poet, musician, and nurse practitioner. His poems have appeared online and in print in numerous journals from California to Nigeria to the UK. a clear day in october, his first collection of poetry and photography was published in June 2016. A chapbook is forthcoming from Praxis Magazine in early 2017.

ADVENT

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

for Nina Ciel Norgeot

Soon again
The baby will be born
The angels will sing
The shepherds
Grateful for the distraction
On a cold uneventful night
Will visit the poor family
In the stable
The magi will observe
An astronomical anomaly
Pack up their camels
And head toward its light
And we will be reminded once more
Of the news we so easily and often forget
That every newborn child
Redeems our ruined world

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesday and others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.