SPRING, WEST OF ALEPPO

by Scot Siegel


The flowers listen intently now
It is the sound of everything

happening all at once
The hum is so high it is almost

inaudible now. The definition
of atrocity––sharp blades,

bright green shoots amidst
the oil drums––a matter of scale

they say. The rules of engagement
shift like a mountain of sand

Daisies unfurl in the shadows now,
unlikely alliances…

Everything is about to change


Scot Siegel lives in Oregon.
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SELECTIONS FROM "COWBOY BROKE"

by Diane Raptosh


           I

            The U.S. is broker than all get out is how it’s been put.
                                                              I’m broke, no bread, I mean like nothing,
                     Ray Charles belted, and he meant it. The wood thrush

     through twin voice boxes sings with himself. Bup bup
              bup. You can break the bank, break land, break fasts: a horse
                         that’s Cowboy Broke is double  fried.

                                              Betty ate some bitter batter. There is this game
             plan called the Double Irish Defense. It quietly
     moves firms’ profits

                                               through Ireland and the Netherlands, clean
         into Bermuda.
                                         This land is growing cash

                  the way Old Brooklyn sprouted
                                 weed in guiltless backyards: sanitation workers
                                                               seized more than nineteen tons of pot

                                             from city lots alone, summer of ’51. The next
            year, a crop was found beside the Brooklyn
                   Federal Building. Alongside dandelion rosettes. And tissue pips.

                             Declare a war on that.



             II

                                    When strapped for cash you can’t exactly stick up Carl’s Junior.
                             I’ve got kids, like I said.  Their eyeballs glide back
and forth across my face the way ant larvae sway

             to say feed me. You ever stared into that? Sutton never would
                                rob a bank if a baby cried or a woman freaked at the sight
  of his Thompson. He’d step outside to roll a Bull Durham

                                        or try on some waterproof pants for his window washer disguise.
    I like to think of him as my stunt-double, the single
                                                              meal at my table. If you have one

                                                                       buck in your wallet that’s more
                             than the tax burden of Citibank for a year.    Fine
                                      is not a sound. I didn’t have a plan. The sun began mooning me

that July day, nudging me toward the front doors of Wells Fargo.
             That was my first one. It takes thirteen
                                                               million calories to raise up a child. Times that

                                              by three, and that’s a ton of Spicy BBQ Six Dollar Meals,
                    even at $3.99 pre-tax—sometime during which deal Wells Fargo
            guped a whole firm that hopes to keep being called  Wachovia    Wachovia    Wachovia


          III

I’ve hovered on the Twitter trends for days.
                                               But nowhere did this fact click through—
              The Fortune 500 now runs the Republic. Hit-and-run

                            sleight of hand and tongue—Peter Piper picked
                                                      the purse of pickled workers. Prisons
                        both empty towns and keep them alive.

            Videos of me tucking a gun at my waist and a wad of fat
                                       bills in my left-hand front pocket went suddenly viral. I need money
      to feed my kids, you see

                                              me say. The sheriff ID’d me through telephone tips.
            They claim I wasn’t living with children
                                    at time of arrest, but that’s a flat lie.

                               The gun wasn’t real, the fierceness a stunt to veil frailty: I had toquit
            my barista shifts just before Christmas. The Kickin’ Cup filed
                      a complaint. Couldn’t make bills. The system

                                                                    will have to call you back. What’s just one inch
                      past the edge of the universe?     A small band
of men have made off with the wealth. My cellmate always smelled like malt vinegar.


            IV

                                Among us rosarians, the line dividing old
                       and modern roses is 1867—the year the hybrid tea
                                     was introduced. The antiques earned their bloated

                                odors: the Boule de Neige, a Bourbon, spouts white blooms
                         that smell like cold cream. A single blossom
           of Sombreuil, the white-flowered climbing tea,

                             fills a whole room like thoughts
     that choose to groom their own
              thinking. When I sing in the shower, I swerve

to the left to make room
               for a possible harmony. Towns
                                 get their prisons and fill them

                                                                         with folks who vend their dime bags.
                                But for stealing a billion dollars?
                                                                         The Declaration of Independence

                                                           was printed on hemp. Right piece
                                                     of art if you ask me,
                                                  little nets of madness on the writing.


Diane Raptosh teaches literature and creative writing at The College of Idaho. She has published three books of poems, Just West of Now (Guernica Editions, 1992), Labor Songs (Guernica, 1999), and Parents from a Different Alphabet: Prose Poems (Guernica, 2008). Her work has previously appeared in The New Verse News. She may be reached at draptosh(at)collegeofidaho.edu.
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SPRINGTIME IN JAPAN

by Sari Grandstaff


springtime in Japan
radiation plumes spreading...
a country mourning


Sari Granstaff's poetry appears in Pirene's Fountain, MiPoesias, Modern Haiku, The Heron's Nest, Frogpond, Contemporary Haibun Volume 12 and Riverine:  An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, among other journals and anthologies.  She lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York State where she is a member of the Hudson Valley Haiku-kai.
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CEANOTHUS

by Buff Whitman-Bradley


In the break between storms
I go out into the front yard
To smell the blossoms
Of the ceanothus

These are gloomy times
Rain day after day after day
But seasonal sadness
Is the least of our problems

Japan decimated and radioactive
From earthquake tsunami meltdowns
Iraq Afghanistan Libya
The objects of lethal US affections

All over the world
The stench of rotting economies
Hundreds of millions in agony
While the buzzardly few lick their chops

Yesterday in icy rain
Two thousand of us angry fools
Marched and shivered in the streets
For freedom justice and peace

This morning the scent of ceanothus
Does not offer comfort or refuge
But sharpens the sense of injustice
Magnifies the impatience with oppression

A pause for a few aromatic whiffs
A perfumed interlude for re-imagining
The fragrant possible world
Then back into the fray

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals.  With his wife Cynthia he is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, Outside In,  and co-editor of the forthcoming book About Face: GI Resisters Turn Against War (PM Press, 2011).  He is also co-producer/director of the documentary Por Que Venimos.
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ACQUAINTED WITH WARS

by Earl J. Wilcox

After Robert Frost, March 26, 1874-Jan. 29, 1963

I am one acquainted with wars,
their bravado, mock heroics,
faux patriotic feelings,
their shrill fake thrill of shells exploding
in the skies like celebrations to kill.
I am one acquainted with wars.


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.
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TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FIRE - MARCH 25, 1911

by Phyllis Wax



Wednesday, Dec.15, 2010  (Reuters) A fire at a multi-story garment factory near the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, killed 25 people and injured more than 100 on Tuesday, police, firefighters and doctors said.  More than 10,000 people, most of them women, work at the complex ....
     
Immigrants
locked in
to prevent pilfering                     

Low-paid seamstresses
waiting to be searched
at the finish of work                                 

A careless match             
and a pile of scraps
flares—                              
                                                          
Smoke fills the workroom
Flames climb the stairs
of the twelve-story structure

On the top three floors
young women and girls                             
most Italian or Jewish

Fire truck ladders stretch
only to floor six     From windows             
on nine, a hundred feet up, they jump

to keep from being burned alive, bodies
thudding as they land
bodies piling up outside

Others burn to the bone
charred skeletons bent
over sewing machines

One hundred forty-six die


Phyllis Wax muses on the news and history from a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI.  Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Your Daily Poem, Wisconsin Poets' Calendar, Ars Medica, Out of Line, Verse Wisconsin, Seeding the Snow, A Prairie Journal, The New Verse Newsand many other journals and anthologies.  She can be reached at poetwax(at)yahoo.com.
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INVINCIBLE FORTITUDE

Poem by Charles Frederickson; Graphic by Saknarin Chinayote

 

“Fudoushin” imperturbable resolutely invincible fortitude
Characteristic kanji hiragana katakana steadfastness
Tattooed ethos overcoming great odds
Seamless tightly knit fray togetherness

“Gaman” uncomplaining perseverance starbright spheres
Stoicism gracefully enduring impossible hardships
Unbent radiance rising above horizon
Glistening teardrop pearls hand-knotted restrung

Collaborative up-stARTISTS Charles Frederickson and Saknarin Chinayote have created more than a thousand colorful hand-drawn, colorful e-gadfly etchings. Art gallery exhibits can be accessed in the archives of Ascent Aspirations, Listen and Be Heard, New Verse News, Poetry Cemetery and Avant-Garde Times. Published covers and graphics artwork have appeared in Dance to Death, Decanto, Eclipse, Poetry Sz and Taj Mahal Review.
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SIREN

by Danielle Jacobowitz


The dust of uncountable years
had settled into her skin,
turning her hair
a startling shade
of white.

We froze
as the aging sea
stretched and shook,
watched wordless
as she opened her mouth
and closed it over the land,

dragging her teeth
and raking her fingernails
down the walls
of our homes,

leaving the earth
ridden with holes
for her to leak through.

"What of our children?"
we cried
as her terrible lips
receded,
leaving only tremors
to remind us
of the one
she returned

in her unfathomable
mercy.


Danielle Jacobowitz has been writing poetry for twelve years. She has been published once in the Seacoast Entertainer in Portsmouth, NH. Four months ago, she moved to Seattle, WA for a music teaching position.
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MT FUJI IN RED

by Alan Catlin


One of Kurosawa’s last dreams:
a panorama of chaos,
thousands fleeing
a nuclear meltdown
with nowhere to go.

The sacred, black mountain
in red:
six reactors exploding
in the distance;
a horizon built on flame.

What remains after:
a woman with two
infants, a man not her
husband, encompassed
by clouds of color coded
fallout, a wasteland
of useless possessions
on a precipice overlooking
a drowning sea.


Alan Catlin has published numerous chapbooks and full length books of poetry and prose. Pygmy Forest Press is publishing the collected "Deep Water Horizon" poems.
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ON STONY SKIN

by Jed Myers


Today, the earth did not shake
these particular streets.

From my window, each time I looked,
the scene emphasized stillness—

except for some rain, wind
bending the branches, crows

out of and under cover, fast
clouds, cars and planes,

and that squat old woman in her coat,
coming out when it wasn’t pouring,

to sit on the bus stop bench and smoke
one more cigarette. The earth

appeared satisfied to hold
itself together here, to let

things ride. Today,
on this stretch of Pacific shore,

no shudder of the stony skin
we stake our lives in—no ruptured

pipes around unharnessed dragons,
no ocean surges swallowing

whole towns, nor human
tide drifting up like ghosts

out of mangled lives. Tonight?
It hasn’t happened yet…

Drops turn to rivulets
across unbroken glass.

I, like the rest of us—
like most around here, bones

intact—will set the clock
and somehow sleep. Tomorrow’s

packed—things I’ve got to get to
down the hairline-fractured road.


Jed Myers is a Seattle poet and singer-songwriter. His poems appear in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and in the new Rose Alley Press anthology, Many Trails to the Summit. By day he's a psychiatrist with a therapy practice and teaches at the University of Washington.
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ENDURING OCCUPATION

by J. D. Mackenzie

The invasion began in the early hours of March 20, 2003 in Iraq.

With all the reminders that I’d forgotten
our anniversary, my first thought was
how insensitive of me.
This day meant so much to us both.

I’d neglected the date
made no special plans
but couldn’t forget this time of year.
The whole world remembered it, too.

I didn’t get you a card, never thought
to ask you what you wanted.  It wouldn’t
surprise me if you felt that I didn’t care
because every year degrades your dignity more.

Confession: I took you against your will.
You’re a battered woman in a torn burqa
who deserved better than this, but I can’t seem
to let you go because breaking up is hard to do.

On March 20, 2003 our relationship got off to a rocky start.
The statues came down, the banner bleated
Mission Accomplished and all that that pretended.    
Do you remember your ephemeral smile, through tears?

Can we agree ours is a relationship
that can’t endure another year because
both of us know that it just isn’t working?
Can this be the last anniversary
we don’t celebrate together?


J. D. Mackenzie remembers the invasion of March 20, 2003 and a few days later the then-President Bush II prancing about an aircraft carrier deck in front of the Mission Accomplished banner.  If media folks and political leaders neglect to get this story right, it's up to poets...
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SCALE

by Shana Wolstein


Sometimes, I watch movies made for children
—for them we let life remain simple.
Today, like that, I watched a fish desire
to be a little girl and the ocean
chased after to reclaim her. The whimsy
of paved streets used as roadways for ancient
fish that slide across mountains like trains; but
this is no longer simple. I wonder
what other whimsy has fallen ill in
the wake of the real wave. What hope fell when
a thousand bodies washed ashore, when just
yesterday I heard only two or three
hundred dead. (To think that only could curb
such a thing.) In the movie, the ocean
is the mother, the father, an evil
wizard; they forgive humanity for
the promise of love. As mom and dad they
come together, we never question why
they began apart, if this disconnect
is to blame. The fish wants to be a little
girl because of love, because she loves a
little boy who promises forever.
But today there is Japan, wiped clean—
the promises we made to the ground and sky
that we had formed something there, in-between.
Is this our space for blame? At one point, we
hoped for time. Long enough to question life:
the how of living, the why. Now we hope
only that it does not get worse. We hope,
like Ponyo, for balance. To set the world
against what we wish and to find order
in this design. For the fish drank blood and
that bonded her to land: her sisters, swirls
of schooling fish, their red scales like linen
uniforms, their eyes bulge out like scared kids.
Now the ocean laps the blood of Japan
and finds itself bound there too. Energy
swells and threatens to engulf again and
we buzz in the saturated air—
not breathing, to hold a kiss like flying.
Because Ponyo ends in the air and we
end, forever falling away from it.


Shana Wolstein is currently studying toward an MFA at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Her work has appeared previously on-line at La Fovea and is forthcoming in Third Coast Magazine.
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KNOCK KNOCK

by Lauren Camp


I got the pinking shears out and sliced up today’s newspaper.
Little airborne triangles of newsprint fluttered to the floor.
Libya became Lib,
Lib became Bill, and I remembered my friend,
how when we were kids in 1973,
we belted out the Oreo song
(back then all TV commercials qualified as songs
in my limited musical library).

But I won’t sing it for you now.
There’s nothing to sing about.
The news is thick enough that three pages hurt my palm.
The scissor blade was dulling.

The flickers all tell knock-knock jokes this time of year,
and another part of the house sinks into a hole.
I pull you outside to see the damage.
We stand in the platter of mulch I tossed down
to cover Elizabeth’s double-headed black hollyhock seeds.
Look down, I say. You’re stepping on them.
They’ll never grow now.


Lauren Camp has published a book of poems, This Business of Wisdom (West End Press, 2010). She is an accomplished visual artist and a radio host for Santa Fe Public Radio. A recent guest editor for World Literature Today, her poems have also appeared in Leveler, dirtcakes, Upstairs at Duroc, and other journals. She lives, works and blogs in a rural farming village near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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FAMINE

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