WESTERN BLUEBIRDS, AMERICAN ROBINS

at the Peace & Justice 2020 (virtual) Fair (Vancouver, U.S.A.)


by Gwendolyn Morgan

Gwendolyn Morgan reads her poem in this video.

this is how it begins
first Light: cheerio song of Robins
loops of blue sky between stars
Eagle whistles before anyone wakes up
prayers in Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew
Chuukese, Cambodian, Russian, Swahili
100 languages spoken here as
the alphabet arcs toward aleph
alleluia of red-breasted Robins
golden dome of Sikh temple
Celtic Cross of Catholic, Presbyterian & Unity Church
Methodist or Lutheran hymns, so many Christians
the Bahá'í and UUs have every symbol represented
even the Pagans are putting peanut butter & raspberry jam
on whole wheat toast before you
who is putting honey on sopapillas, honeycrisp apples,
drinking Masala chai or sweet tea?
who has lost their homes due to fires?
looking at privilege:  who was evicted this week?
who was arrested?
Break it down like the U.S. census
the unmarked car outside the housing complex
“No solicitors” sign outside the apartment door
“I’m not soliciting” the ICE agent says
flashes a gold star or badge with implicit bias
scan the skin color, then license plate
drinking an Americano while they wait for you
Wait! this isn’t justice
the peace & justice fair is on Saturday every year
Sabbath day of rest for everyone
who goes to a synagogue or is Seventh Day
Rainbow Flags flying next to Black Lives Matter
upside down Americana
the Western Bluebirds gather at the river
singing their own prayers, plain song
1000 languages, songs of other species, intersectionality
the watershed of white fragility, white supremacy
unspoken privilege of having more than enough
when the child in front of you hasn’t had breakfast
no money in the purse for groceries, no savings account
no internet access, maybe a chrome book from school
with a sticker of a white llama on it
this child is hungry for more than justice
losing their breath for peace
this is how it begins.

Gwendolyn Morgan is a Pacific Northwest poet and artist who serves in interfaith Spiritual Care in a medical center in the midst of COVID19.  The Clark County Poet Laureate 2018-2020 in Washington State, her third book of poetry Before the Sun Rises is a Nautilus Silver Winner in Poetry. Gwendolyn and her spouse Judy A. Rose focused on poetry and music during a Winter 2020 Centrum Artist Residency. As a multiracial family in a multispecies watershed, they are committed to equity work and inclusion for all.

PASSAGE

by Daniel Brown

in memory of victims of the

 16th Street Baptist Church bombing,
Birmingham, AL, September 15, 1963

They crossed the river of Jordan early.

They went across the water
walking down Sunday school stairs.

Adie Mae Collins
Cynthia Wesley
Carole Robertson
Carol Denise McNair

Never made the passage of age
to young womanhood or Motherhood

They are remembered this day
and will be each year.

Hate is able to merely explode
it has no other course.

Passage that is abruptly destroyed
leaves us empty

So we demand rites of passage
the grace of aging for peace and justice

To cross the water with dignity when time comes due.

Daniel Brown is a retired Special Education teacher. He began writing poetry for his own pleasure but is now interested in sharing his work. He reads regularly at CAPS (Calling All Poets) in New Paltz NY and has been published in Chronogram Magazine and TheNewVerse.News. He resides in Red Hook, NY.

IN JEOPARDY

by Gary Glauber

 

My potent potable’s amber glow

reflects the lights and I reflect

that we are in jeopardy.

Everything has become a contest.

Surviving a Global Pandemic for 1000, Alex.

Science becomes a new focal point.

The game is charged with toxic partisanship

and many ignore even the obvious clues.

It’s a contest rife with unfathomed wonder,

close and chaotic and requiring an overall knowledge

that frightens the general populace,

yet the game continues to another round.

Heading to commercial, the camera

pans over a studio audience—too old, too white.

Suddenly, a few minutes of pharmaceutical ads

tells me of exotic brand names that can cure my ills

so long as I’m fine with a litany of side effects 

that seem worse than the targeted ailment.

And soon we are back. Alex battling

against his own threatened mortality;

contestants making small talk 

while trying not to self-embarrass

through slow or ignorant response.

Alex may chide them for being too young

to know a particular answer, and this

is the microcosm of how culture shifts,

the ways generational views differ on 

what defines patriotism, which lives matter.

Rule of Law for 600, Alex. 

Conspiracy Theories for 800.

The numbers indicate much is at stake

as we collectively head into the final round.

The category is irrelevant:

life revealed as a ruthless game.  

What are the parameters of true compassion?

When is a life worth less than economic progress?

Do the necessary math, then

wager it all when you realize this:

all the answers have been phrased as questions 

for far too long.   

Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He champions the underdog, and strives to survive modern life’s absurdities. He has three collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit) as well as two chapbooks, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press) and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize. Another collection, A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing), is forthcoming soon. 

SUMMER WINDING DOWN, SALISBURY, 1666

by Sharon Olson

The king is always allowed to do as he wishes.
And so he chose our city, our neighborhood,
as a hiding place from the plague abound in London.
We who live here are weavers, our hands and feet
engage with our looms, the steady thwacking,
for shawls and lap rugs and the tightly woven arras
behind which the king is kept safe, wrapped in his silks.

The king never travels alone but brings his retinue,
his retainers, the men and ladies waiting on him,
jesters, hangers-on, crowds he thrives on
who gawk at the royal trappings, and yes,
the shiny bubble of pestilence has journeyed
here as well, so that each time we entered the church
we could hear the names being written in the parish book
of Salisbury, St. Edmunds, beginning in July:

Elizabeth Clark, of ye plague
Sarah dau of John Conduit, of ye plague
Martha Bartlett, widow, of ye plague
Elizabeth wife of John Conduit, of ye plague

until in September the buriall column in the ledger
overflowed, in Salisbury alone five hundred died.

The king has had his carnival, has come and gone.
Long live the king.


Editor's Note: “Many of the more affluent city members left London when the plague broke out, including King Charles II and his entourage who left the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Lawrence, to deal with the plague while the king and court retired to Salisbury; they possibly brought the plague with them in the process, as it broke out there after they arrived.  Once this happened, the king and court retired to Oxford to wait it all out.” —Today I Found Out


Sharon Olson is a retired librarian who lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.

THE CHOKER-IN-CHIEF

by Jack Powers





The virus is just like hitting a few bad shots. It happens. You just have to keep your head down, you know, stay positive, play through it. Suddenly you'll be hittin' beautiful drives again.

People dying from the virus is like losing golf balls. You're gonna lose a few! Everybody does. Everybody. I mean, you can't waste time hunting for 'em. You gotta play on!

And these protesters! A bunch of punks leaving their divots and driving their carts on the green! Not raking the traps. No respect for property. They're ruining our beautiful course! Where are the rangers? Where are my rangers?

All these marchers chanting Equality! don't get it. You've got golfers. You've got caddies. The golfers are doing the caddies a favor, really.

The stock market is just like the scorecard. Everybody hits a couple of bad shots. You miss a putt or two. But did you make the big ones? Did you win?

All I'm asking for is a mulligan. One mulligan! What have you got to lose?


Jack Powers is the author of Everybody's Vaguely Familiar. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere.

SUBURBAN SMOKE

by Alejandro Escudé

Sometimes I visit the suburb of LA
I grew up in. There was a park
a block away from the house we rented.
I played little league baseball there.
It was a park, like a park with swings
and a pool. Now it’s a homeless encampment
and the little leagues are gone.
Maybe baseball is gone too—I can’t tell.
I mean I watch it. I root for the Mets
because that’s the team I was on
when I was a scrawny lefty outfielder
because there was no way
the coach was playing me on first base
or shortstop. I was lucky if I got to bat.
The coach was a winner; if you’re American,
you know what I mean by that.
I was lucky if I got to bat.
I remember hearing the LA riots looming
in the east; a hornets nest of helicopters,
the smell of smoke, a cacophony of sirens.
My father talked of Reginald Denny
he said: “I just crossed that intersection.”
His face pale. “I had so many tools
in my truck too.” Maybe that’s what
a suburb is, a place where one just
barely avoids the tragedy of America.
Oh there were lawns, basketball hoops
above garage doors. On Sundays,
it was very quiet, and I don’t remember
talking about the President.
He wasn’t a big fat face in the sky.
There weren’t goose-stepping posters
lining every citizen’s mind, a fear-bomb
exploding each half hour. In every suburb,
there’s a Beirut, a Moscow, a Jerusalem,
a Kenosha, a T***p bent over in his driveway,
cutting up a freshly caught rattlesnake.


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.

FIRE SEASON IN OREGON

by Penelope Scambly Schott

The white daybed in the corner

between crammed bookshelves

An afghan of crocheted squares

draped across the rocking chair

Forty years of talk over supper

A spark and a festive red flare

The dangerous minutes we took

stuffing both cats into the pick-up

Fire Evacuation, Level 3: Go Right Now


The lavender glass perfume vial
from the grandmother’s dressing table

the silver pendant the mother hung
from around her scrawny neck

The yellow Brooks Brothers dress shirt
the father wore to his office

A stained first edition of Mending Wall
signed in person by Robert Frost

plus wallet and passport and computer
and checkbook and cash and bed pillow

and two days’ worth of clean underwear
and the pill bottles and a nice cold Pepsi

and two lightly browned slices of toast
with just the right amount of butter

Author's Note: We are safe but 1/10 of the population has evacuated, and friends have lost everything. One poet friend of mine lost her house but saved her alpacas.


Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

FIRE INCANTATION

by Miriam Steinbach

    oh, bitter flame     run
run until you find home again     I know
you tripped over your own skinny legs
behind your mother’s church, knee caps crowned with
     shards of glass     I know
     the sting     I know
the swig, then scorch of vodka trickling over
bare bone, the taste of
     copper and salt     I know
     the screaming days     I know
     the flickering rage     I know
this isn’t death, this is a reset
life will breathe again,
in our garden of ash


Miriam Steinbach is a college student and poet based in Salem, OR. She enjoys being outdoors, playing cello, and posting poetry on her Instagram (@baldmilk).

SOMETHING ABOUT NERO

by Lois Marie Harrod

Dave Whamond, Canada, PoliticalCartoons.com

Though writing poetry
often seems like fiddling
while Rome burns,

perhaps we should remember
violins were not invented
until the 15th century,

long after the Great Twiddler died.
Neither pencils or pens then,
nor ballpoints and computers

on which we’ve been fiddling
since confined long term
to our virtual prisons.

In fact  (it’s nice to have a fact)
if Nero played on anything at all,
it was on a cithara—

though Tacitus claims
Nero did not scrape the strings,
but warbled The Sack of Troy

in his best operatic voice
while Rome burned faster
than California.

Tacitus offers no eye-witnesses
to confirm his story, just as now
no known epics attest

how many times or in what situation
Nero referred to his legions as losers.
It is has been corroborated though

that this Nastiest of Emperors
used the land cleared by his fire
to build a Golden Palace

with surrounding Pleasure Gardens—
and that perhaps is worth noting
in a poem or two of toppled monuments.

Lois Marie Harrod’s latest collection Woman was published by Blue Lyra in February 2020. Her Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton and at The College of New Jersey.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

by Dawn Corrigan

At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.—The New York Times, September 8, 2020. Photo: A Somali woman carried wood to make a shelter in a camp for internally displaced people in December 2018. Credit: Mohamed Abdiwahab/Agence France-Presse —Getty Images via The New York Times.

   Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation
   can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely
   under the influence of a great fear.
   —Bertrand Russell


Never forget, they say, as if we have a choice.
Never forget, as though we have minds
eager to comply with orders, willing recruits
dropping to give us twenty, standing guard duty,
lifting the mask to suck in gas and mutter
our rank and SSN. But the minds we have
are AWOL at least half the time, poor soldiers
dropping their guns in battle, abandoning plans,
neglecting the mission in favor of a story
about us and that high school crush,
or us and a pile of money,
or us and a bottle as big as the world.
We remember, but not because they say to.
We remember because our minds like chaos
even more than peace. They urge us to remember,
a wish they share with that other they, the they
who made Father close his blinds forever,
Mother shiver at the sight of every plane.

Dawn Corrigan is still waiting for the Age of Anxiety to end.

LOSERS AND SUCKERS

by Nan Ottenritter

My Dad 

Date of enlistment:                                         21 May 40

Education:                                                     grammar 8, high school 2, college 0

Military occupation specialty:                       Surgical Technician 86

Battles and campaigns:                                 Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Central Europe

Demobilized at the

convenience of the Government RR 1-1:       July 28, 1945

Mustering out pay:                                         $300

For five years, two months, and eight days my Dad served

our country, proudly defeated fascism.

He is my hero, our hero, our American hero.

I wouldn’t trade him for all the fathers in the world.

Nor will I let anyone call him a loser or a sucker. 

Call him that, call me that too for I 

carry his beliefs, his pride, and his trauma.

I was enlisted as an American on the day of my birth,

I am a warrior up until this day, and I will never

muster out, have Donald’s government demobilize me,

stop campaigning for voting rights, justice, equality, 

health care: the battlegrounds of our time.

I will soldier on. Our current enemy will be defeated.

Author's Note: The first half of this is a found poem with language taken from my father’s discharge papers. Battles are unique to time and place, yet have commonalities. I will fight on, not only because it is right, but as an homage to my father and all service men and women.


Nan Ottenritter is a poet and musician who lives in Richmond, VA.

FOOLS AND LOSERS

by Michael L. Ruffin

My Fools
My grandfather (Army fool, Europe, WWI)
My father (Navy fool, Pacific, WWII)
My father-in-law (Marine fool, Pacific, WWII)
My uncle (Army Air Corps fool, Europe, WWII)
My three brothers-in-law (Air Force, Army, and Marine fools, Vietnam)

My Losers
My mother's (before she was my mother) fiance (Army loser, killed in France, WWII)
My cousin (Army loser, wounded in Vietnam)
My fifth-grade teacher's husband (Army loser, killed in Vietnam)

I know, and I hope
you know, that
they aren't really
fools and losers.

I also know, and I hope
you also know, that
anyone who thinks they are
is a fool and a loser.

It takes a real fool to think
of service as foolishness.

It takes a real loser to think
of sacrifice as losing.


Michael L. Ruffin is a writer, editor, preacher, and teacher living and working in Georgia. He posts poems on Instagram (@michaell.ruffin) and prose opinions at On the Jericho Road. He is author of Fifty-Seven: A Memoir of Death and Life and  of the forthcoming Praying with Matthew. His poetry has appeared at TheNewVerse.News, 3 Moon Magazine, Rat's Ass Review, and U-Rights Magazine.

THE RUT

by Pepper Trail





They are coming out of the hills into town
Young bucks, spiked with peachfuzz velvet
Old bulls, necks thick and haunches heavy
Veterans of the autumn brawls of many years

They enact the understood rituals of threat
Send signals of dominance, await submission
This has worked among themselves forever
In the sparring, none got hurt, usually not

But now, nothing is enough for respect
Not the bellow, the big beard, the big arms
Not the waved flag, the holstered sidearm
Not even the AR-15 - nothing is enough

So there will be trouble - how not?
Baffled by the strangers in their way
Hearing only challenge in the voices raised
They lower their heavy heads and, blindly, charge


Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

NO NEWS

by Paul Hostovsky

There was no news today,
said the anchor
on the 6 o’clock news,
laying her pen down quietly,
removing her audio feed,
smiling a truly beautiful
sad smile, then gracefully getting up
and walking off the set.
And although the people
were still dying all around,
still killing each other off
all over the world, the world
itself still dying, our leaders still
leading us over its proverbial edge—
though greed was still
masquerading as good,
and though love was still
greater than fear—even though fear
was still mostly winning out—
all of a sudden, today none of it
was news. Because it was
all the same as yesterday.
And yesterday was the same
as the other yesterdays.
Which somehow, incredibly,
was news today. The news
was that there was no news.
This was big news. Genuine news.


Paul Hostovsky's newest book Deaf & Blind is forthcoming from Main Street Rag.