TRAJECTORY

by Carol Dorf

The problem set gives us: a stone, force, an angle.
Given this, predict when the stone will hit the ground.
Outside the book this problem grows more complex
even if there are no dragons to interfere with the trajectory.
Imagine a missile. No don’t. There’s no need to imagine:
haven’t you opened the paper today? Imagine a war
where children’s bodies form the location of the necessary
violence. Don’t authorities always say necessary?

Imagine or don’t the intersection between a missile
and an apartment block. The shoes, the plates,
a shelf full of exploded books. Imagine a graveyard,
damp with morning fog, petrichor rising, pollinators
slipping past the plastic flowers hungry for something real.
Imagine picking up a stone, two stones, and placing them
on a grave, where the story of nothing special here
is more important than a name, than the dates below.


Carol Dorf is a Zoeglossia fellow, whose poetry has been published in several chapbooks and in journals that include The New Verse News, About Place, Cutthroat, Unlikely Stories, Rise Up Review, Great Weather For Media, Slipstream, The Mom Egg, Sin Fronteras, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, and Maintenant. They are founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, and taught math in Berkeley.

OUR DICTATOR

by Carol Dorf

Art by Adrian Teal

When the young ask “Why
did you let it go on so long?”
they have forgotten

an essential fact—he was
our dictator—small fingers,

and disconnected
speech rhythms of our crazy
uncles raging on.

Carol Dorf has three chapbooks available, Given (Origami Poems), Some Years Ask (Moria Press), and Theory Headed Dragon (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry appears in Shofar, About Place, Great Weather For Media, Slipstream, The Mom Egg, Sin Fronteras, Heresies, Feminist Studies, Scientific American, and Maintenant. She is poetry editor of Talking Writing. She is interested in the intersections between poetry, disability, science and parenting. 

NO, TWILIGHT AND THE LAW

by Carol Dorf

The House voted on Thursday to pass a GOP-led bill that would ban transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports at federally funded schools and educational institutions. The bill is not expected to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House has issued a veto threat. But the vote shows that Republicans are working to spotlight the issue – and it comes amid a GOP-led push in states across the country to pass similar bills restricting transgender athletes’ participation in sports. The final vote was 219-203 down strict party lines. —CNN, April 20, 2023. Photo: People attend a rally as part of a Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31 in Washington, DC. Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

I tell my child
No, twilight is a given
I can’t slow the day’s passage to night
In the photo of the boardwalk through the swamp 
I support my child
as they lean back to look up at the trees
in a inversion of flight
For a while we called
it the Rumplestilskin phase
toddler jumping up and down in fury
Luckily the old oak floor held solid
There are so many things
about the world I would change for you if I could
though I wouldn’t do anything about the dogs
in costumes participating in the Pride Parade
And then—You travelled to the Pride Parade
wearing wings—with friends who also found
wings to celebrate and now you are all flown
All these laws that are disrupting
your flight path—Not in my backyard
but I’ll do my best

Carol Dorf is a Zoeglossia fellow, whose poetry has been published in three chapbooks. Her poetry has also appeared in previous issues of The New Verse News as well as in About Place, Cutthroat, Wordpeace, Unlikely Stories, Slipstream, The Mom Egg, Sin Fronteras, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, and Maintenant. She is founding poetry editor of Talking Writing.

SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS

by Carol Dorf


The nineteen year old boy
who needed a psych waiver
to join the army, mans
a checkpoint, organizes
a team to storm a 14-year-old
girl's house. They break
her open, smash parents, baby
sister. War crazed desire,
misfortune of boy who needed
a more restrictive
environment, in charge
of the guns.

After that boy serves
his time, along with his comrades
in slaughter, ten or fifteen years,
who among us will greet them?


Carol Dorf's poetry has appeared in The NeoVictorian, The Midway, Edgz, Feminist Studies, and Runes.

SOME YEARS ASK

by Carol Dorf

Some years ask, "Which side are you on?"
You might answer, "I'm on the side of the bees,
and the waters rising against the coastal shores."
You listen to a debate, and wonder, "Have I been
clear. Or I'm ok about reading dystopias, but
don't think I live in one, and don't want to find
myself there." I'm on the side of the kindergarten
children who tumble together on the rug, eager
for a story, after eating school lunches portioned
onto small trays. I'm on the side of the whales
who need quiet to hear each other calling across
the sea. And I'm on the side of the fat women,
and the crips, and every contractor who wanted
to be paid. "Which side are you on?" is
the refrain, while the future echoes on the screen.


Carol Dorf's chapbook Theory Headed Dragon is available through Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has been published in Glint, Slipstream, Spillway, Sin Fronteras, Antiphon, Composite, About Place, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, Maintenant, OVS Best of Indie Lit New England, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor of Talking Writing and teaches mathematics.

BERKELEY AND MYTH FEBRUARY 2008

by Carol Dorf


1) February 13

In the park outside my classroom, flags --
Twenty foot by thirty foot stars and stripes
Patriotic music blares from speakers.
They want us to be nice to the military recruiters.

Police in riot helmets, face plates lifted stand
watching 30 or 40 people.But this is Berkeley,
so there are bike cops in bike helmets,
and bareheaded community service officers.

Across the street pink signs, more flags, some stars
and stripes, some with peace signs; maybe 75 people.
In between, there are television trucks with their cranes,
reporters waiting for something interesting to happen.

Every 60 minutes, a new group of students, jams
to the windows to watch the action, and then I hustle
them back to their seats. "Find the vertex," "If a rocket is shot
directly upward with an initial velocity...," not the best example for today.

At lunch someone gives kids orange bandanas
and they walk around the park to protest the war.
The skateboarders watch at the edges, pissed off
that their playground has been given over to the big picture.

People come from all over the country to blast
patriotic rock and scold us into loving the war.
They imagine us in a myth of the sixties -- the houses
and apartments of our day-to-day lives invisible.

2) February 14

Valentine's Day, and the school fills
with balloons and stuffed animals.
Tomorrow is Lincoln's Birthday observed.
Gulls pick through the trash on the out-of-towners
side of the demo: coffee cups, bags of chips, napkins,
wrappers. Did they try any of our ethnic restaurants,
or Chez Pannisse alumni coffee shops? Berkeley's
industrious poor have already sorted
through the recycling leaving the rest of the trash
for the city to deal with. Next week, I'll teach factoring.
Today teenagers devour candy hearts.


Carol Dorf's poems have appeared in New Verse News, Fringe, The Midway, Poemeleon, Babelfish, Edgz, Runes, Feminist Studies, Heresies, Poetica, Responsa, The NeoVictorian, Caprice and elsewhere. She is a former editor of Five Fingers Review. She's taught in a variety of venues including a science museum, and as a California Poet in the Schools. She now teaches at Berkeley High School.
______________________________________________________

HAVE YOU ANYTHING TO DECLARE

by Carol Dorf


Every time I say no, I worry
Actually, first I’m angry, then
fear no will be someone’s turning point,
whiteboard erased to blank slate.

Have You Anything To Declare

I hate simile, prefer metaphor:
It is cold, a leaf trembles,
her lips tight with negation,
day fades too quickly into grays.

Have You Anything To Declare

I am afraid of war,
afraid of the American flag,
afraid of how happy we’ve become
at the sight of leveled cities.

Have You Anything To Declare

I am afraid of the ardor of my neighbors,
who declare solidarity, by breaking
a plateglass window, boxes of couscous
and jars of olives tumbling onto sidewalk.

Have You Anything To Declare

If I die before my child is grown
I’ll have left her in a world without siblings,
where she’ll be a meteor falling through night,
and I don’t have to power to stop twilight from fading.


Carol Dorf's work has been published in Runes, Coracle, Five Fingers Review, Transfer, Socialist Review (the issue Ron Silliman edited,) and Feminist Studies. She have taught in various venues including as a California Poet-in-the-Schools, at Vista College, at Lawrence Hall of Science, and in a large urban high school.

AQUIFER

by Carol Dorf


In the marrow of the world
stygobites retreat
from light to live protected,
translucent lives.

At a lab in Bethesda,
the Radiation Casualty
Management Team
researches blood boosting drugs
in event of nuclear attack.

Mr. Sumiteru Taniguchi
stood 1.8 kilometers away
from impact at Hiroshima,
an old man now, he takes off tie,
shirt, to reveal distorted flesh
burned away in childhood.

When geologists lower
the water for mining,
or pump it out to transform
green, partched earth,
every creature that has evolved
in the isolated aquifer dies.


Carol Dorf's work has been published in Runes, Coracle, Five Fingers Review, Transfer, Socialist Review (the issue Ron Silliman edited,) and Feminist Studies. She have taught in various venues including as a California Poet-in-the-Schools, at Vista College, at Lawrence Hall of Science, and in a large urban high school.

OFF DUTY

by Ann Neuser Lederer

Photo by Carol Dorf 

A man crawls
into his own bedroom
window.

It's already night.
He might be contagious.

Soon, a tone—a lone violin—
seeps through the shut room's door.

A grandma nudges—you
can join in with your dad.

A few bars, back and forth.
An unseen whispered conversation.

In the dark of the morning
he descends.

Instead of the bus he walks.
Invisible birds announce it is day.

All playgrounds are locked, the schools deserted—
the children still safe in their sleep.

Ann Neuser Lederer's poetry and nonfiction are published in journals such as Diagram, Passages North, Brevity, 2 River Review, and UCity Review whose "noteworthy" section presents ten of her poems. Her work is also honored in Best of the Net and Ohio State University's Vandewater Poetry Award; published in anthologies such as A Call to Nursing and The Country Doctor Revisited; and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze (2003), The Undifferentiated (2003), Weaning the Babies (2007), and Fly Away Home (2019). Ann was born in Ohio and has worked there and surrounding states as a Registered Nurse.