CHARLOTTESVILLE ECLIPSE

by Sally Zakariya

Messages are left on a chalkboard in Charlottesville on Aug. 10, 2018. (Jim Urquhart/Reuters via The Washington Post)

The light went out that week.

A violent march, a loathsome flag
a stunning show of moral blindness
and then the sun itself went out
hiding its light, ashamed to see
such darkness in the world.

Closing its fiery eye, the sun shut out
the hate, the taunts, the torches
the brutality and bigotry
the disregard of justice.

Earth turned, the moon moved on
along its cosmic path, and sunlight
shone once more. And now another
year, another march. But the light
of reason still has not returned.

Sally Zakariya’s Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry has appeared in 70 print and online journals. She is the author of When You Escape (Five Oaks Press, 2016), Insectomania (2013) and Arithmetic (2011), and the editor of Joys of the Table (2015). Her chapbook Personal Astronomy is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

CHARLOTTESVILLE: A CAUTIONARY TALE

by Deborah Kahan Kolb

The Nazis have returned. To Charlottesville, VA.

        Pale wizards, frenzied mass, mad with purity.

Wands ablaze, heads of skin, howling blood and soil.

Tell your Jewish son. Repeat the story. Pray.

        Tell him he will never replace the whiteness of their line.

He will never replace never replace the blood pooled in the soil.

Tell your son the truth about the trains of yesterday.

        When children came in cattle cars and left as clouds of ash.

When memories were skin, bones, weeping bloody soil.

In Charlottesville the torches turn the nighttime into day.  

        Long ago these torches fired ovens for the Jews.

Step-children of goose-steppers want blood spilled on their soil.

Tell your Jewish daughter. Find the words to say

        They are raging to destroy her with fire and a flag.

Swear never again never again. No more blood for soil.

    

        Now you’ve told the story that bears repeating every day.

You’ve told your son. Now try to drain the olive from his skin.

You’ve told your daughter. Try to drain the darkness from her hair,

        Fix the hook that is her nose. Bury the blood lost in the soil.

Deborah Kahan Kolb is the author of Windows and a Looking Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and the recipient of numerous poetry awards, including the 2018 BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) award. Much of her poetry is informed by the unique experiences and challenges of growing up in, and ultimately leaving, the insular world of Hasidic Judaism. Her work has appeared in various print and online publications, including Poetica, TheNewVerse.News, Literary Mama, 3Elements Review, Poets Reading the News, Tuck, Rise Up Review, Writers Resist, and Mom Egg Review.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SORROW IN YEMEN

by John Guzlowski

Dozens of children, many younger than 15, were killed in a Saudi-led coalition airstrike that hit a school bus in northern Yemen on Thursday, according to the Houthi-controlled Health Ministry. The children were on a field trip when their bus was struck at a market, the first stop of the day; 50 were killed and 77 injured, according to the ministry. Most of the children were inside the bus when the airstrike hit, according to a local medic, Yahya al-Hadi. The International Committee for the Red Cross said a hospital it supports in Saada had received 29 bodies of "mainly children" younger than 15, and 40 injured, including 30 children. —CNN, August 10, 2018

Sorrow is the gift
God gives to teach us
what won’t last,
what will fall and be left
on the side of the road
by the mother lost
among refugees.

Sorrow teaches her
the value of screaming.

It will last longer
than bronze shoes,
longer than her baby’s
photograph.

Nothing else she loved
is left. The home in Yemen
God bestowed? The husband
whose love was worth so much?
The baby?

The gift of everything is lost,
the way a penny is lost
In the dirt around her.

All that’s left
is the road she stands on—
that and the sorrow
He bestowed, the scream
that ends in screaming.

John Guzlowski's writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Rattle, Ontario Review, North American Review, and other journals.  His poems and personal essays about his Polish parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany and refugees in Chicago appear in his memoir Echoes of Tattered Tongues. Echoes received the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer Foundation's Montaigne Award for most thought-provoking book of the year.  He is also the author of two Hank Purcell mysteries and the war novel Road of Bones.

AN ATHENA FOR MODERN TIMES

by Elane Gutterman

Marking the 25th anniversary of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s appointment as a Supreme Court justice.

Wielding her intellect 

and legal spear, she protects

the wronged and oppressed.

Decades ago, this Ruth,

shrewd as a snake

defended the right

of frat boys in Oklahoma

to buy their beers, at the same age

as their female peers,

knowing the nine men on the Court

would surely see the slight.

Then she could carry on

with women’s less frothy fight. 

Seated as one of the Nine, 

on a Bench that moved Right,

she is often caught 

in the minority,

yet delivers her dissents

with sword like flash,

crystal-gazing 

through owl-like glasses, 

that current losses will morph

into future triumph. 

She still invokes Sarah Grimké, 

warrior from an earlier era --

I ask no favor for my sex.

All I ask of our brethren

is that they take their feet

off our necks.

Now, the oldest

Left on the Court,

Bader Ginsburg’s battle gear

for the Supreme --

those lace collars.

Through poetry as advocacy, Elane Gutterman is rallying support for the NJ Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act (bills A1504 and S1072 pending votes in the NJ Assembly and Senate this fall). Her villanelle “Misplaced Rage” a response to Dylan Thomas’ iconic villanelle, was recently published in U.S 1 Summer Fiction Issue, July 2018. Her poems have also been published in Kelsey Review, Patterson Literary Review, and TheNewVerse.News.

DARWIN AT WORK

by Howard Winn

When watching orangutans in nature documentaries, it is easy to imagine them as graceful rulers of the canopy; to whom climbing and brachiating through the trees is as natural and simple as breathing. This, however, would be an incorrect assumption. Just as toddlers learn to walk from following their parents, and through plenty of trial and error, young orangutans too must learn how to navigate the world around them. As the largest arboreal mammal in the world, orangutans face a steep learning curve when first grasping how to maneuver on their own in the forest. —Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, August 1, 2018

If humanity does not change its ways
soon there will be no orangutans
we are told by the latest scientific
findings and the survey of these
strange beasts who seem like the
crazy cousins of homo sapiens
but in a world run by the rules of
business capitalism these sub-human
beasts have no union to protect their
status in a jungle with profit hidden
in the vines and the rain forests
just waiting for the latest entrepreneur
to make the proper business move
perhaps Chinese or Middle Eastern
to join the one percent who own
the semi-civilized world stash the
profits off-shore and buy expensive
real estate in London or New York
while the residual orangutans in
their diminishing jungle residences
find themselves as homeless as
the other immigrants of this time
with no where to go and no welcome
there or anywhere even if labor
is running short in the civilized nations.


Howard Winn's novel Acropolis is published by Propertius Press. He has poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

IF ONLY ORCAS ATE SEAWEED

by Linda Stryker

The orca named J35, or Tahlequah, carrying her dead calf on the seventh day. Credit: Ken Balcomb/Center for Whale Research via The New York Times: “The Orca, Her Dead Calf and Us” by Susan Carey, August 4, 2018.

Our babies are dying, she said
without words. Look!

as she held up her newborn
and newly dead on her nose.

Days go by, and she still
clings to the tiny she-orca.

Do something! she says
without words. Look!

Our clan will die of hunger,
where are the salmon we

feed on? grandmother
orca says without words.

Our babies die of hunger,
as do we. You, humans,

can solve this. You must,
she says without words.

Her loud voice carries over
the waves and into hearts

who want her to live, but
who know she cannot.

Linda Stryker writes from Phoenix, Arizona, and is a volunteer radio reader for Sun Sounds. Her chapbook Starcrossed was recently published by dancing girl press. Her creative writing has been published in Highlights for Children, New Millennium Writings, Ekphrastic Review, Third Wednesday, and Chiron Review, among several other venues.

CALIFORNIA STATEWIDE FIRE MAP, AUGUST 2018

by Ron Riekki

Source: CAL FIRE

for Zachary Schomburg and Nick Flynn

“Where the hell is global warming?” —DJT

“The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” —DJ Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three


I used to sit on the shore and watch the waves,
but now the shore is closed and the heat waves

and I’m seeing death in the woods and feeling
death in the air and hearing death on the radio

and knowing death is lurking next to Death so
that there are two deaths everywhere that I look

at all times and the death is the death of booths,
the death of voting booths, the death of all

of the animals near the voting booths and in
the voting booths, except there are no voting

booths anymore, just the rigor mortis of these
electoral colleges that are universities with no

freedom of speech unless you count death
speech, the threats to countries, when we don’t

want to concentrate on the fires, on the air
outside of my apartment right now with its 154

red listing of unhealthy and main pollutant:
atmospheric particulate matter, which really

means death but we can’t say death when we
mean death, and what I mean is the newspapers

are having the headlines of California Ablaze
except that we’re told all media is fake that

death is fake, although here we’ve had more deaths
from forest fires in the last year than in the last

decade combined and we are becoming the last,
with the death taste in my mouth—can you

taste it?—The cereal I had this morning was death
brand.  And the milk was death.  And the bowl

was made out of death and I ran after my death-
bus but missed it so I walked through the forest,

a shortcut, except the deer were on fire and my
head was filled with the particles of death

because death is made up of the little things,
the smallest moments of ignorance, the tiniest

bits of hate, until they pile up and I just read
the graffiti near my apartment: CALIFIRENIA

with dotted capitalized Is in cartoonish flames
and 1.4 million acres is burning in thirteen

states with the third-degree burns of the earth’s
crust, the earth’s nerve endings being destroyed,

its skin swelling, the way these wounds tend to heal
poorly, and the heat is a death and the death is a heat

and this is not theater but rather our lives, my life, your
life

Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and Undocumented (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).

THE WORDS MATTER

by Tricia Knoll

McKibben warns us loud and clear.
Stop pussyfooting about climate change.
Say, shout, shriek, yell Climate Crisis.

My friend makes sandwiches for 400 firefighters
near the Dufur, Oregon wildfire . . . and comes back
later to cook dinner. She knows: Climate Crisis.

Another friend in LA with asthma says
I can’t breathe and she is choking,
Climate Crisis.

When you dowse your spring-flooded living room studs
with bleach, splash it heavy and roar:
Climate Crisis.

When the people who have known one island
where their ancestors lived and died take a boat
to somewhere else, their chant is Climate Crisis.

When you’re hot and the heat breaks all records,
you know that elders and babies are dying,
and you weep, Climate Crisis, Climate Crisis.



Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who is witnessing her state setting a record for the number of 90 degrees in one summer. Her most recent collected poetry is How I Learned To Be White (Antrim House, 2018).

A BISHOP RESIGNS

by Jack Belck

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” by Michael D’Antuono

Priests’ upward gazes to God
go also downward to where
wild male animals loiter,
battling to escape,
to do what God orders.

But those battles seen or unseen,
become mere memories for those,
confessed to but not confessing,
elevated to the bishopric.

Their own wild animals’ flights
are proven when bishops
replace pants with gowns.
So too cardinals and popes,
secure, satisfied neuters
ignoring young priests
battling anew
and children sacrificed
on celibacy’s stained altar.


Jack Belck is a retired university publications editor.

OUR FAR-FLUNG FOOTSTEPS

by Devon Balwit




I came for the beaches but stayed for the O rings,
for the liter bottles, tooth brushes, buoys and bags,
for the shush of takeout boxes at dusk.

I came for the palm fronds shivering like dancers’
fingers but stayed for the orange-pinafored crews,
rubber-booted, working against the tides.

I came for the frigate birds and brown pelicans
but stayed for the seals strangled in rope,
for the whales, gullets splitting with PCBs.

I came for the once-in-a-lifetime memories,
the honeymoon and anniversary, but stayed
for the imprint of kin, our far-flung footprint.



Devon Balwit lives scarily close to the Cascadia Subduction Zone. She has six chapbooks and three collections out in the world. Her individual poems can be found here or are forthcoming in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, Cultural Weekly, Triggerfish, Fifth Wednesday, The Free State Review, Rattle, Poets Reading the News, etc.

FIRE REPORT FROM DUFUR, AUGUST 3 2018

by Penelope Scambly Schott




In the kitchen of the school cafeteria
Becky and I stood at a makeshift counter
slicing 140 heads of romaine lettuce
to make salad for the 400 fire fighters
headquartered in the school parking lot

Terry was opening enormous cans
to make spaghetti sauce for 400 people
I have no idea how many cans it took
None of us wore those little head nets
like the lunch ladies in old cafeterias

A red-faced young man replaced bags
in the gray industrial garbage pails
The district superintendent stopped by
to see whether we needed anything
He’s also the high school football coach
 
Someone reported the wind had shifted
and we wondered aloud whose farm
between which of the back roads
Becky and I kept slicing up lettuce
We were getting really fast at our job

A farmer just a few miles south of us
ignited his best crop of wheat in years
to create a fire break that might save
his neighbor’s house and outbuildings
Somebody’s horses panicked and ran

This morning my house smells smoky
and I can see smoke rising over the hill
The missing horses are still missing
The wind is blowing seriously now
I have no good ending for this story


Author's Note: So far we’ve had four named fires spitting distance from here. It’s feeling damn near apocalyptic. Yes, my house is safe—there are 400 fire fighters headquartered across the street at the Dufur school.


Penelope Scambly Schott, author of a novel and several books of poetry, was awarded four New Jersey arts fellowships before moving to Oregon, where her verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Several of Penelope’s books and individual poems have won other prizes. Her individual poems have appeared in APR, Georgia Review, Nimrod, and elsewhere.

POST-TRUTH VILLANELLE

by Ned Balbo

‘President Trump . . . can usually be counted on to blame “both sides.” Be the topic race relations, international affairs or the “civility” debates, Trump often refuses to point a finger.’ —Eugene Scott,  Washington Post,  July16, 2018

“We’re not so innocent—I blame both sides,”

the President declares. The sound bite fades,

and one more false equivalence provides

fuel for our growing fears . . . What purpose guides

the morning tweetstorms that alarm his aides?

He says he’s innocent but plays both sides—

victim, aggressor . . . Taking aim, he chides

“fake news” or deep state Dems for his misdeeds,

reporters stonewalled when his staff provides

truth-challenged briefings . . . Shrugging, he abides

the torch-lit violence of Alt-Right brigades,

or followers gone rogue—“I blame both sides,”

he tells us—but when bribe or blackmail leads

him to berate our allies, order raids, 

or mock due process that the law provides

for refugees, he bellows forth, divides

us,  stands with tyrants proudly, adds, “Besides, 

what’s done is done. There’s no point taking sides”—

Who profits from the chaos he provides? 

Ned Balbo’s books include Upcycling Paumanok (Measure Press, 2016) and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line), awarded the Poets’ Prize and Donald Justice Prize. 3 Nights of the Perseids (University of Evansville Press, forthcoming) was selected by Erica Dawson for the 2018 Richard Wilbur Award. He recently concluded three years as a visiting faculty member in Iowa State University's MFA program in creative writing and environment. He is married to poet-essayist Jane Satterfield.

CRIME

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

T***p Administration Mulls a Unilateral Tax Cut for the Rich 

—The New York Times, July 31, 2018

I see him frequently

When I drive downtown,

A small, bent, gray man

Dressed in greasy, ragged clothing

And dragging a wooden pallet,

Piled high with overstuffed black trash bags,

Along the sidewalk

Heading to God-knows-where,

If anywhere.

The effort required 

For each Sisyphean step he takes

Is an act of heroism,

And he trudges on,

Almost doubled over, eyes never looking up,

Past fast-food restaurants and taquerias,

Beauty shops and appliance stores and locksmiths,

Pulling his load 

Like the ant impossibly towing the elephant.

I have seen old women and men on the street,

Our sisters and brothers,

Pushing grocery carts full of torn jackets and frayed blankets,

Broken radios and artificial flowers,

Empty bottles and unmatched shoes,

On their way perhaps to the midnight shelter

Or the encampment under the bridge

Or the cardboard boxes behind the supermarket.

I am 75 years old

With enough resources, 

Barring calamity,

To remain housed and fed

From now until the final tick-tock

At the end of my time,

And what I ask myself is not

By what blind, stupid luck am I not they,

The wretched and exhausted and defeated, 

But instead,

Why does America not take care

Of all those in need?

Why does America create suffering

Rather than relieve it?

Why do some few matter and most do not?

Is the United States of America a country

Or a crime?

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World, and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California.

SILENCER NIGHT: AN AMERICAN XMAS

by Gilbert Allen

A multi-state lawsuit was filed Monday afternoon that seeks to block a government settlement that would give the public access to downloadable plans for 3D-printed weapons. —CNET, July 30, 2018

Timothy was sound asleep

beside his snoring pup

when at 11:55

his cellphone woke him up.

The toddler got out of bed

exactly as he’d planned

and tiptoed quickly down the stairs                     

to claim his contraband.                                                    

Suspended from the fireplace

(thoughtfully unlit)

a pair of portly pantaloons                                     

seemed just about to split.

And nearly touching the gas logs

a pair of blackened boots

hung with heavy dignity

in artificial soot.

He waited on the bottom step

for Santa to emerge.

Although the toddler longed to speak,

Timothy fought the urge.

Saint Nicholas beheld the tree

besieged by piles of stuff.

He rubbed his beard. He checked his list.

“I think Tim has enough.”

He opened his Emergency Sack

to cram some presents in.

A little face froze into pure

cherubic porcelain.

Tiny Tim beheld the man                                       

and grabbed a plastic gun.

(His father often lectured him

upon The Castle Doctrine.)

In Santa’s sack lay Heavenly Piece.

(He fumbled to confirm it.

Like any self-respecting Claus

he had a carry permit.)

So both invoked Amendment rights

they separately reckoned.

Toddler and Saint both stood their ground.

The First shot; then, the Second.

The plastic gun was not a toy                               

but crafted by Tim’s mother,                                               

who thoughtfully had fired up                              

her 3D copier.                                                                       

So now two lie beside the tree

each in his Xmas red.

Saint Nicholas punches 9-1-1

before his phone goes dead.

Two sleeping parents hold their peace               

behind their bedroom door.

A pit bull plays with a RoboMouse                      

stirring upon the floor.

Gilbert Allen lives in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. His most recent books are Catma and The Final Days of Great American Shopping.