Tag: Poetry

America Is Waiting

By Georg Koszulinski

 

maybe it’s the white bodies
leaving the ball

or maybe it’s the tuxedos
and gowns that walk like
ghosts across the mall

maybe it’s the black bodies
chained across checkpoints
subverting iconographies
of hate

or maybe it’s the cops
who stand in silent symmetries
beneath the rain

maybe it’s the sadness
in their eyes—
the dreams they sense
were always lies

maybe it’s the protestors
who take to street in
dark of light

the man with movie camera
who walks among them—
shadows, voices, line of sight

maybe it’s the war veteran
deaf in left ear—
metaphors find their way
into lived experience

maybe it’s the young woman
who lost her friend to
mass arrest

she tries to breathe, believe,
reprieve

maybe it’s the parade of state
cavalry, missiles, golden
power shower

maybe it’s the communion of souls
in the crossroads of the streets

the man singing in Mandarin
before the camera—
not knowing the words
we believe he sings
for peace

maybe the voice was the first weapon—
no shield against the
sounds of aggression

maybe the voice
was first song—
to breathe, to sound
commune as one

January 20, 2017, Washington, DC

 

Georg has been making films and videos since 1999. His award-winning works have been presented at hundreds of universities and film festivals around the world, most recently at the Atlanta Film Festival, San Francisco DocFest, and Experiments in Cinema. Many of his documentaries and experimental essay films are also available through Fandor. His nonfiction and poetry have been published in Gold Man Review, Blue Collar Review and Blotterature Literary Magazine. His current documentary project, White Ravens: A Legacy of Resistance focuses on the Haida Nation and the cultural resurgence taking place on their islands of Haida Gwaii. Georg is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he teaches filmmaking.

Image credit: A still from Georg’s documentary America Is Waiting. View the  trailer here.

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An Explanation

By Faith Breisblatt

 

As far as I’m concerned, there was only
one choice. If I turned down every

candidate who objectified women, I’d vote
for no one. You get through the bad and focus

on the good.
Did I feel dirty? Yes.

Look at how much he relies on his daughter—
kind of reminds me of my ex-husband.

The man knows how to build things.

If you don’t like something,
there is a label to shame you.

This is a Christian country
paying for some else’s abortion.

Now I’m deplorable?
Poor Bill Cosby.

It wasn’t all racist white people. When my great grandparents came,
they had to learn English.

My family moved from Canada because of the horrors
of socialism. Look,

I’m not saying there are people who shouldn’t
be helped. I’m no racist.

I’m looking for a brighter future.
I laughed him off just like everyone else.

 

A found poem, written from articles in the New York Times, “‘You Focus on the Good’: Women Who Voted for Trump, in Their Own Words” and The Concourse, “Trump Voters Explain Themselves.”

 

Faith Breisblatt is a social worker living in Boston. Her writing can be found in The New Social Worker, Oddball Magazine, Found Poetry Review, Scripting Change, Toe Good Poetry, Boston Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Original, unaltered image originally published by the New York Times.

Insomnia

By Amy Shaw

 

Maybe it’s because
These hours are quiet
Without bread or shoe
Dropping on dirty floor

Maybe it’s because
I am alone needed
No more   Maybe

It’s the darkness
Which somehow feels
More vivid and light
Than the dreams I had

Maybe it’s the wine
I drank with dinner
Maybe it’s my fault

The dishes undone the bed
Unmade the face unkept
The homework unchecked
The picture unframed

No one would call me
A clean freak—though I was

Voted “Most Likely To Succeed”
In the seventh grade   Maybe
It’s because I did
Succeed   The bills are paid

The children fed the husband
Satiated a job well done today
My patient said I cared
More than the doctor

And me just a PA—always
Just a—

Stepmom white divorced woman blessed
The waitress asked
“Are you just one?”
Before I sat down to dinner

On my own   I thought—
Not really
Sometimes but usually
Only at night—

 

Amy Shaw is a cardiology PA living and working in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She turned to poetry after the recent election to focus on the personal in what feels like a world coming apart at the seams. Her poems have been published on PoetsReadingtheNews.com.

Photo credit: Jim Pennucci via a Creative Commons license.

What I Want

By Judith Prest

 

I want the open sore
our country has become
to finish draining
and start healing

I want the kneeling
football players
awarded trophies
for honoring the fallen

I want the ancestors
to gather, sing us songs
of solidarity
stroke our brows while we sleep

I want to see the homeless rise
from subway grates, park benches
I want their empty bowls filled
with opportunity and blessing

just once,
I want to see billionaires
breaking bread with single moms,
parolees, runaways, bag ladies

I want the grandmothers, the mothers
to have enough time, enough money,
enough food to feed
and nurture all who come to the table

I want to see reconciliation
trump racism and genocide
to see compassion become our currency,
law to become infused with love

 

Judith Prest is a poet, creativity coach, mixed media artist, photographer and workshop leader. She has taught creative writing, expressive arts and creativity and healing workshops in prisons, community centers, retirement communities, libraries, schools, retreat centers, and at her home based Spirit Wind Studio. A retired school social worker, she works part time leading Recovery Writing and Expressive Arts groups for adults in day treatment for addiction. She believes that creativity is our birthright as humans and that accessing and using our creativity is a wonderful strategy for healing ourselves and the planet. Her poetry has been published in seven anthologies and in literary journals, and she has self published three collections of poetry over the past twenty years. She lives in rural upstate NY with her husband and three cats.

Photo credit: Gaspar Torres via a Creative Commons license.

On the Knees of Metal Gods

By G. Louis Heath

 

Someday soon, better later, the icons we
Worship will leap from their cathedrals

To quick pulses, the implosive blood of
Impulse. On that surge, the hooded eyes

Of eternity will blink, or they will not.
The existential surge of non-being rises

On the tide of fathomless hearts till the
Fates take their measure. Some fates cut

Threads, some do not. That is the simple
Algorithm of a globe balanced on knees

Of pricey metal gods. Let us lock arms and
Bury these false gods far from their silos.

 

G. Louis Heath, Ph.D., Berkeley, 1969, is Emeritus Professor, Ashford University, Clinton, Iowa. He enjoys reading his poems at open mics. He often hikes along the Mississippi River, stopping to work on a poem he pulls from his back pocket, weather permitting. He has published poems in a wide array of journals. His books include Leaves Of Maple and Long Dark River Casino.

Photo credit: Mark Miller via a Creative Commons license.

Female Fellow at the American Film Institute Doheny Mansion, Beverly Hills, 1971

By Penny Perry

 

She pulled up in her dented VW, twenty
miles from her cockroach-filled kitchen.
Five feet tall, wearing a three-dollar dress
from Lerner’s. The dress long and black,
looked expensive. N.O.W. had picketed
the all male institute the year before.
Marble floors. Carved wood staircases.
Louis the 14th chairs. The study where
one Doheny murdered another.
The dining room with the gold chandelier
that tinkled and rose when Hitchcock
or Truffaut screened their latest film.

Most of the male fellows looked well-fed
and had smooth white hands. Over wine
and brie in the Great Hall that first night
the men surveyed the female fellows.
Will announced she had nice-sized breasts
for such a small girl. Gilbert whispered
the women here were dogs, present
company excepted. A compliment from Ivan:
Her dialog was sharp. She wrote like a man.
Sam said because she was a writer she wasn’t
a real woman. At dinner, she and a directing
fellow, Susan, sat across the table from

Gregory Peck. Head twirling: The Louis
14th chairs. The chandelier. Dizzy with
wine, she and Susan fantasized bowling
Sam’s head down a long marble hall. Work
days, bent over her dime-store notebook,
her pen unzipped the page. She wrote under
a gnarled sycamore. Her boys, two and three,
splashed in a stone fountain. One day, chicken
pox, red as poppies, bloomed on her sons.
Male fellows came down with the pox.
Sam had sores on his thumb and on his tongue,
a wound that would scab, but not heal.

 

Penny Perry is a six-time Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in California Quarterly, Lilith, Redbook, Earth’s Daughter, the Paterson Literary Review and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Her first collection of poems, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012) earned praise from Marge Piercy, Steve Kowit, Diane Wakoski and Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She writes under two names, Penny Perry and Kate Harding.

Photo credit: Doheny Mansion living room courtesy of University of California.

Bathsheba wants to write #metoo

By Crystal Stone

 

Her husband enlisted: eager to fight,
eager to serve. She was a good wife,
accepted this. She could argue, but why
fight? The last night the sun set pale
in their wine by the garden. The last
kiss was fragile—lips thin and chapped
with goodbyes. In his absence, she bathed
behind a wickerwork screen, enjoyed
the iridescent rainbows of shampoo bubbles,
the way soft light manicured her nails,
the curl of toes beneath hot water,
the volume of hair as humidity twirled
fingers around her loose locks. The king
would watch from the roof, share this private
moment with her. If the rainbow is god’s
promise to never flood the earth again,
why not her eyes, too? Or her body?
When a king calls, what can a servant do
but wait, for the coming to hang her
stomach in effigy of the life she once had
and the child to rip her sharply, as if only
worn fabric of her newly retired silk gown?

 

Crystal Stone is a first-year MFA candidate at Iowa State University. Her work has previously appeared in The Badlands Review, Green Blotter, North Central Review, Jet Fuel Review, Southword Journal Online and Dylan Days. When she’s not writing poems, you can find her on her roller skates blocking for Team United Roller Derby.

Photo credit: Image of Jean-Leon Gerome’s Bathsheba from Wikiart via a Creative Commons license.

War

By Rachel Custer

 

In the same way that an old man without a home
is more likely to be bearded, war shuffles
first into small towns. Picks up cans ‘longside
the rurr-route. War knocks first on the faded
doors of the poor. He’s a carnival barker, this
one, his eyes full of young men with bodies
that want to eat the world. War leads a boy
to the highest point, says all this can be yours.
War stands in a lineup with the regular suspects
and do his eyes shine. Do his face look pretty
next to them old boys. War sits in the gas station,
drinks bad coffee with old friends. War sees
the harvester chewing down the field like a man
kiss his way up a girl’ leg. Pastor invites him
to church to say a piece. You wouldn’t believe
how funny war can be, and how he knows
the best stories. War leans in to the needs a boy
could never speak. That lifelong smoker’s voice.
Says: Listen, boy, I can take you somewhere real,
can make you somebody new. Same old women
ain’t for you. You ain’t for here and nothing else.
War look all day long like a poor farm boy, with
eyes like he went somewhere. But see his hair?
That cut a city style, a rich man cut. War tell you:
Boy, the places you’ll see. Boy never hear what
war say through his smile, never hear a word
war say after war say but.

 

Rachel Custer’s first full-length collection, The Temple She Became, is available from Five Oaks Press. Other work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, B O D Y, [PANK], and DIALOGIST, among others. Visit her website at www.rachelcuster.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: Image of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica by tiganatoo via a Creative Commons license.

 

“We have Eric Garner’s air in our lungs tonight” – Andrea Gibson

By Eve Lyons

 

1.    Justin Damico
Some say he’d just broken up a fight
Some say he was selling loosies
We’ve seen him hanging out here before
Always up to no good
Always looking to start trouble.
Damn you, Daniel, damn your pride.
Now we’re both stuck on desk duty.

2.    Ramsey Orta
We all got smart phones these days
We can all be journalists
Don’t matter anyway, even when we get it all on tape
Police officers’ word is bond.
Brown peoples’ word ain’t shit.
Three weeks later I’m the one arrested
While those murderers keep their jobs
No justice, no peace.

3.    William Bratton
I grew up in Dorchester in the 50s and 60s
Graduated Boston Technical High school,
went into the army. I paid my dues.
I’ve been police in two different cities,
ran the MBTA police for a spell.
I know my way around this kind of thing.
Being commissioner isn’t the same as being police
More politics than policing
My job is to make people feel safe,
believe the system isn’t rigged.
But these days I dine with the mayor.

4.    Eric Garner
“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me.
I’m tired of it. It stops today.
Everyone standing here will tell you
I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing.
Because every time you see me,
you want to harass me.
You want to stop me selling cigarettes.
I’m minding my business, officer,
I’m minding my business.
Please just leave me alone
please just leave me alone.”

 

Eve Lyons is a poet whose work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including recently in Hip Mama, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, and the Jewish Literary Journal, as well as Lilith and Word Riot. Visit her website at evealexandralyons.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: Louis Lozowick’s lithograph Lynching, 1936, from The Smithsonian via a Creative Commons license.

 

Peace

By Alice King

 

You are afraid of it
You are afraid of it because of what it could do to your heart
Melt it?
Thaw it?
Maybe just a little but not enough to make waves crash
And slam against rock
Bones stone hard
Refusing to be broken are broken
I smell your gas
It burns my lungs and those of my children
My little boy stops breathing in my arms
I would cry but my own breath is being drawn
Into the air before me
I feel a ghost around my neck
Clawing its nails into me
I hear shouts and laughter as I pass
Echoing like fire in my ears
You are afraid of it because it might make me more human
With your flesh and blood on my bones
What do you see when you look back at yourself?
Eyes any color, skin any tone
I flee but the punishments only change
Flesh-hungry bullets to protests in the streets
I am afraid to walk outside
You are afraid I am the one who wants you dead
Yet you ought to know I came because I want to be alive

 

Alice King is currently a senior at Longwood University, majoring in English, with a concentration in creative writing, and she studies under Mary Carroll-Hackett. Alice is passionate about writing and social advocacy, and enjoys her writing time and time with her cats. Her work has been published in Crab Fat Magazine, Sacred Crow Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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Photo credit: Megan Coughlin via a Creative Commons license.

Tragic

By IE Sommsin

 

Tragic, that whore of a word, conjoining with demagogic scheme and crazy scam and the most shameful patriotic sham, to dress up the bleak disaster they bring.

It’s wonderful how one word neatly pricks swollen outrage, obscuring rightful blame

so there’s no cause to curse and name by name the breathtaking scum and their clever tricks and words woven to hide their vicious traps.

You may think your indignation’s burning, but it’s the wheel of history turning—

only friction and smoke, you trusting saps. It’s fate; shit happens, and that’s all you get, not justice, not remorse, never regret.

 

IE Sommsin, a writer and artist from Kentucky, lives in San Francisco and has a fondness for sonnets.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you like what you’re reading, please make a contribution to the cause. Give a sawbuck here.

Photo credit: Christopher Najewicz via a Creative Commons license.

Our List

By Eric Lochridge

 

We are making a list of people who could hurt us.
Their names often are not easy to spell.

Could Al Sharkey, auto mechanic in Michigan,
be one of the al-Sharki clan of Yemen?

With no easy way to know, our list
will claim he is not one we can trust.

House to house, Arshad to Na’im to Zufar,
our list will compile the odd names,

dotting its I’s and crossing its T’s
uniformed men in the driveway,

pistol escorts prodding neighbors to trains
bound for a safe space—towers and spotlights,

mass showers and razor wire fence.
Our list will keep track of them like before,

tattoos down their wrists,
hoods to keep them calm as falcons.

Disinterested in true identities—blessed,
brave, honest—our list will ask questions

about alternate spellings and correct pronunciation.
If the answers do not satisfy, if the interrogations fail

to muster remorse, penitence, respect,
our list will feel obliged to enhance its techniques.

To hear the names it wants to hear, our list
will hurt those who have not hurt us.

 

Eric Lochridge is the author of Born-Again Death Wish (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Real Boy Blues (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and Father’s Curse (FootHills Publishing, 2007); and the editor of After Long Busyness: Interviews with Eight Heartland Poets (Smashwords, 2012). His poems have recently appeared in WA 129 and Hawaii Pacific Review. He lives in Bellingham, Washington.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you like what you’re reading, please make a contribution to the cause. Give a sawbuck here.

Photo credit: Stephanie Young Merzel via a Creative Commons license.

A love poem for my sister in revolution

By LJ Hardy

 

Your jaw
set fierce
in the shape of battle
clenched
against the storm
you face
by the weapons
of a life
I long for
when I’m lost here.

My feet grounded
precariously
in the roots of intention
integrities
inconsistencies
in the record of my birth.

Your name
unfamiliar to my lips
like the taste of sweet Lanzones
grown from an earth
where my history
has drawn the blood of yours.

Your eyes
traveling the grounds of sinew
landscapes of war.

My love
knows what I want
from you
to fill anemic spaces
market forces
American skin.

To draw
surplus from your bones
for stories
poems.

To build factories
fill emptiness
with crunch
Balut
baby ducks
in eggs
slivers of fish
for breakfast
dried.

Chants from jeepneys
passing cities
apples cost more than mangoes
you say
pointing out
an example I will draw on a thousand whiteboards
guiding students
smash imperialism
Imperyalismo Ibaksak!

Pristinely perfect rice
hungry bile
from long days and nights of protest
in sun
on floors
a bucket of glue.

Surplus capital
Me plus you.

 

LJ Hardy is an anthropologist engulfed in the world of academia where she researches and writes about health equity and social justice. After a life-threatening illness and the politics of 2017, she has gained the clarity to realize that it is time to write from the heart. She lives in the Arizona mountains with her daughter, 3 dogs, 14 chickens, and two ducks.

Photo credit: molybdena via a Creative Commons license.

Nabokov Shuffled

By Rony Nair

 

attention spans close in on revolving doors

where Russian roulette is doled out for free in carotid bands, in naked lunches that cavort in restless smiles—the buddha lay somnolent as a vegetable while you cut me off

and said you had to go. 3 seconds into somnolence where we take deep breaths and wade in

a second adolescence. selfish as always, selfless in doling out epithet and time.

clocks whose second hands circle left hands touching tumors on your spine.

lurching forward they cling to new buddhas of suburbia

revving in, all newness and culverts

raised in purple haze, long engagements entrapping only the parents of holy cows, anxious as ever

to sever their own triptych memories of surrender.

 

ripped up pieces of Piscean horror, innuendo

explodes across November rains and shattered plates, over mid-western skies fumigated with grass and marijuana spines. legalized in cavorting around.

our demise.

 

Rony Nair has been a worshipper at the altar of prose and poetry for almost as long as he could think. They have been the shadows of his life. He is a poet, photographer and a part-time columnist. His professional photography has been exhibited and been featured in several literary journals. His poetry and writings have been featured by Chiron Review, Sonic Boom, The Indian Express, Mindless Muse, Yellow Chair Review, New Asian Writing (NAW), The Foliate Oak Magazine, Open Road Magazine, Tipton Review, and the Voices Project, among other publications. He cites V.S. Naipaul, A.J. Cronin, Patrick Hamilton, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine and Nevil Shute in addition to F. Scott Fitzgerald as influences on his life; and Philip Larkin, Dom Moraes and Ted Hughes as his personal poetry idols. Larkin’s collected poems would be the one book he would like to die with. When the poems perish, as do the thoughts!

Photo credit: Woodcut illustration of the zodiac sign Pisces used by Alexander and Samuel Weissenhorn of Ingolstadt, from Provenance Online Project.

Two Poems by D. R. James

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Still

It all recurs for the maimed, how they remain,
or don’t, atop the plots of the buried. Those
who could do something table the question.
They relax in the rocker of their certainty,
a war, any war, an abstraction that walls off
the bursting specifics. A twenty-something friend
found he’d deployed to sort body parts. Arrayed,
they’d survive the fever sweeping a land we
could never know. Welcomed by the white-blue
atrium of a foreign sky, he’d prowl his perimeter
until his duty tapped him. Then the oven-sun
would relight his nightmare, the categories
of bone and flesh his production line. What
achievement could signal his success? What
dream in the meantime could relieve raw nerve?
The perfect tour would end when he was still
in one piece, a nation’s need ignoring the gore
behind the games, the horror nestling into
the still-living because still in one piece.

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OK, Here’s What We Do: An Allegory

Well, we enlarge the grown-up table for
the far-flung fragments of our Family.
Here’s our current Winter spent in agony,
here’s our disrespected Sister, here is War
that mushrooms undiminished, glibly tears
our global Soul to slivers. And here We are;
and here’s a Brute beside us so bizarre
that nearly nothing else we’ve known compares—
as if we’d acceded to some greater Hell.
Ah, but here’s what’s left of human Dignity.
Seated here’s Resolve to trample Travesty.
But there’s our Greatest Fear that’s hard to quell. …
Hey, this isn’t fatalistic Falderal!
We must make sure the table’s set for All.

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D. R. James’s six collections include Since Everything Is All I’ve Got, Why War, and Split-Level. Poems and prose have appeared in various journals, including, Coe Review, Dunes Review, Friends of William Stafford Newsletter, HEArt Online, Hotel Amerika, North Dakota Quarterly, Passager, Rattle, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and Sycamore Review, and anthologies, including, Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford and Poetry in Michigan / Michigan in Poetry. His new collection, If god were gentle, was published by Dos Madres Press in December 2017. James lives in Saugatuck, Michigan, and has been teaching writing, literature, and peace-making at Hope College for 33 years. Read more about James here.

“Still” first appeared in Tuck, September 14, 2017, and also appears in If god were gentle.

Photo credit: Brad Montgomery via a Creative Commons license.

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National Day of Atonement

By Marc Alan Di Martino

 

Scream at the empty mirror of the sky,
the waiting blue, the blinding cosmic eye,
until your pain lathes the Plutonian rim
of the Solar System.

Scream at the crystal ceiling of the sky
until it cracks up like an electoral map
of the United States, our jagged earthly cry
a collective bootstrap.

 

 

Marc Alan Di Martino is a poet, translator and teacher whose work has been published in Rattle, Verse-Virtual, The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and the Journal of Italian Translation, among others. His interview with award-winning translator and poet Michael Palma was published in Faithful In My Fashion (Chelsea House, 2016).

He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Perugia, Italy, where he works as a teacher of the English language and is an avid skateboarder.

 

Photo credit: Kenneth J. Gill via a Creative Commons license.

Trophies and Ribbons

By Victoria Barnes

 

On a late November morning
toddlers and children drag
their parents’ silky purses
stuffed with glossy trophies and ribbons
to the sewing room.

They embroider golden
monograms,
add coats-of-arms in crewel,
tie silver coins
that dangle from purse seams.

Their parents nod.

By the rose evening
the children sing quietly
of imaginary gardens with lush fruit
and canary gingko trees,
their chores complete.

Suddenly a flash: electrified air
shatters their dreamy songs
and the children scuffle into
a protective circle
without armor or weapons,
holding hands, facing outward,
singing in fear.

Silver coins drop, tinkling.
Monograms sparkle and spark
to ash as the children drop
the purses, scattering
trophies across rocky asphalt,
their parents’ folly exposed
by the flaming wrath of decency.

 

Victoria Barnes is a diehard native Californian who has chopped lettuce, taught creative writing, owned a toy store, and specialized in Montessori education to earn a living. Her Ph.D. is in mythological studies and depth psychology, with research focusing on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Her home is in the redwoods of northernmost California where she writes poems and takes photographs. She sneaks out from behind the insulating Redwood Curtain to spend time with family in Philadelphia and Boulder, Colorado, as frequently as possible. Enjoy more of her work here.

Photo credit: Kit-Bacon Gressitt via a Creative Commons license.

Who Will Kneel for You: Artists Speak Out

From The Root

Anna Deavere Smith and a chorus of artists recite the poem “To Kneel,” by Kathy Engel, in support of 2018 NFL protests and the right to dissent, and against racist police violence.

 

 

 

 

 

Visit The Root – Black news, opinions, politics and culture

Cartoon credit:  Drew Sheneman, Newark Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.), via a Creative Commons license.

Cop Sonnet

By Keith Welch

We’d like to think that all our cops are fearless

that their well-trained minds are sharp and quick

but certainly they’re worse than useless unless

they can tell a pistol from a stick

Or when a suicidal person’s begging

for an ending to their tortured grief

does a policeman’s duty include abetting

desire for a terminal relief?

The cops who will not see us as their equals

will never act as though our lives, too, matter

and so we’ll go on seeing violent sequels

where more of us will end up dead or battered

Of course the real problem: our society;

the driving force: our middle-class anxiety.

 

 

Keith Welch lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he works at the IU Bloomington Herman B Wells Library. He poetry has been published in Writers Resist, Literary Orphans, and Dime Show Review. He is currently writing a series of poems about how much he hates the winter in Indiana. Read more of Keith’s work at librarymole.wixsite.com/keithwelchpoetry and follow him on Twitter @Outraged_Poet.

Photo Credit: You can’t barricade an idea by Dying Regime via a Creative Commons license.

Two Poems by Peggy Turnbull

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Kristallnacht, Again

In Indiana, empty-headed cornstalks wave
at the interstate. Peeling wooden crosses
lurk among the goldenrod, forgotten.

Deployed decades ago with evangelical zeal,
they decorated Appalachian highways when
my friend Daniel still lived in West Virginia.

They unleashed his crystal nightmares of Vienna.
He knocked at our screen door, asked,
If they come again, will you hide me?

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July Evening, West Virginia

I gather stunted apples
from the garden
peel them, carve out
their bruised flesh
put them to simmer
with cinnamon

On the radio
a woman’s voice
recollects the death
of a famous poet
how his friends
sat on the floor for hours
attending the old Buddhist
as he slowly let go

I don’t have time to meditate
A child needs me
I stir the pan
certain he will love
whatever I find good

The poet at last surrendered
left his queer poems
to the living
for queer children
to someday find
and gain strength
from the joy of their holiness

We eat and go outside
watch fireflies blink
as the darkness grows

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Peggy Turnbull is a poet and former academic librarian who has worked in public colleges and universities in Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Read her recent poems in Postcard Poems and Prose, Mad Swirl, Nature Writing, and Three Line Poetry. She is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and blogs at peggyturnbull.blogspot.com.

Photo credit: Ashley Harrigan via a Creative Common license.

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