Tag: Israel

Murderers by Marc Alan Di Martino

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Murderers

“Meditate che questo è stato.”
—Primo Levi

Let’s make a deal: for every time you ask me
how ‘my people’ could do such a thing—
bomb an apartment building, starve innocent
children, shoot journalists—I get to ask
how ‘your people’ were able to herd ‘my people’
for centuries into ghettos, cattle cars,
ovens. We can make it a game of poker
between God and the Devil, only
they’re wearing disguises so no one knows
who’s who, as if it made any difference
anyway, God or Devil, Israeli or Palestinian,
gentile or Jew. We’ll play this psychotic hand
with a stacked deck for the rest of our lives
and then our children’s lives, our children’s children’s,
tweaking the muscles in our poker faces
until the flesh tightens into a mask
and tongues become poisonous little vipers
concealed behind our teeth, stretched
to the thin shield of a smile, perfectly white
and malicious.

*

Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024—longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

This poem was written in response to the following news story.

Two Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Dear Bobcats
We gather together now as true family instead of regular family
because we are far flung brave creatures and these are wild days.
I know people don’t see us very often.
We will not curl on your feet to sleep but
will accompany all your dreams.
Even if you see only one of us
in your whole lifetime.
Like the foxes, or single sleek coyote you witnessed
running up a major thoroughfare in your city,
then blink! Gone. We, the armadillos and snakes,
in the Year of the Snake, will be recognized.
We root and rumble, curl in a hollow.
We find our quiet ways.
Our numbers shrink, but we don’t do math.
We persist. You too must live like this.
*
Email Gift from Israeli Poet
          For Naomi from Naomi
People in Israel are reading the names
of dead children and babies.
Speaking them slowly, each syllable a tuft of hair.
Pronouncing ages in holy succession.
Eight months, seven years. Hebrew speaker
shaping Arabic rolled from the throat,
rich with respect. Why can’t this be
our only way? Two years, eleven months.
Hendia Janan Bilal. Rafik Mahmoud Darwish Abdullah.
Blanket wrapped bodies, crushed,
mutilated, torn. The perfect ear ripped
from the perfect head. What did the mothers do next?
Catholic ex-president on beach
staring east. May he imagine you every day.
May you be the wind ruffling him.
Don’t stop. He didn’t stop. Onward.
His own dead daughter had my same name,
same as the Israeli poet who sent this video.
His granddaughter, recently a mother, too. Our name is
HUMAN (Holy Mary Mother of God).
The video lasts eleven hours plus.
*
Naomi Shihab Nye’s most recent books are Grace Notes – Poems About Families, Everything Comes Next, and The Tiny Journalist. She is a Palestinian-American writer on faculty at Texas State University.

Two Poems by Nathaniel Gutman

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I Hear the Sirens Wailing

When an approaching firetruck’s siren fills the air,
my German Shepherd stands erect, head tilted,
a plaintive howl resounding from her gut,
alerting the neighborhood wolves,
claiming her ancestry.

When I see the first pictures of carnage,
hear air-raid sirens wailing,
the echo of her primal cry crawls up my spine,
but all I have in my throat,
on October 7,
is a broken whimper.

*

SETZUAN

She’s a prostitute. She’s a man. She’s pregnant.
She’s fourteen.

Tuesday, I fly 8000 miles to see her,
prostitute, man, pregnant,
in Tel Aviv.
She transforms doing Brecht on stage,
downtrodden women, evil men who rule them,
his feminist-Marxist vision:
The Good Person of Setzuan.

On our way back, parents of young women hostages,
peacefully march along the road, demanding:
Netanyahu, go! Now!

We roll down windows, they come close,
we honk our horn in support,
and to shove away the contagious pain
in their raw eyes.

*

Nathaniel Gutman is a filmmaker who has directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Witness in the Warzone (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen). His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tiferet Journal, Pangyrus, LitMag, Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry.

Normal by Nathaniel Gutman

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Normal

Hungry, Dad, she asked when she picked me up at the airport.
They spoiled me with an upgrade on Lufthansa,
polite, reserved flight attendants,
a chef with a Toque Blanche, inspecting a tiny guinea fowl breast,
carefully turning it skin-side down.
Hungry, I said.

She took me for pizza at a beachfront Tel Aviv restaurant.
Embraced by steamy air mixed with Mediterranean breeze,
I was instantly home.

Growing up here everything was crazy,
good-crazy but crazy,
and I always dreamt it would one day be normal.
I looked around, noisy, laughing, young people,
cool hair, designer t-shirts, loud music.
Is it finally a bit normal? I asked.

The war broke out the next morning,
a siren sent us to her saferoom.
We’re good here, she said,
even if there’s a chemical weapon attack,
except if it’s a direct hit.
Then, on TV, we saw the first images,
kids in the desert music festival
slaughtered by Hamas terrorists.

For a moment it looked almost normal, I said.
Looked, she responded.

*

Nathaniel Gutman is a filmmaker who has directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Witness in the Warzone (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen). His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tiferet Journal, Pangyrus, LitMag, Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry.

The Dream by Judy Kronenfeld

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The Dream

For eons, we cannot talk, my brother, my sister.
I am one of them to you; you are one of them to me.
And we each know—knives held between our teeth—
how murderous the other is, or wants to be.
Our stories calcify in isolation, yours a holy shrine
visited only by your people, mine a holy shrine,
visited only by mine.

But then, as ages pass like clouds
in time-lapse video, something you say,
my sister, my brother, pierces my armor.
A small, surprising chink has already appeared
in yours, like the sun startling at dawn
on the Summer Solstice, behind the Heel Stone
at Stonehenge.

For many generations more, we live
with the inconvenience of incomplete
defenses. And now comes the point when
the dream wants desperately to pull
the rabbit of hope out of the black
hat of horror. But the dreamers
say to the dream There is no magic. Or, How arrogant!
You cannot possibly know my lived experience.

Still, the dream keeps beginning, dreaming itself,
fantasizing. One night, when I am dreaming,
one of my people names her first-born son
with two names, one in my language,
one in yours. One night, when you are dreaming,
one of your people names his first-born daughter
with two names, one in his language, one in mine.
Let us imagine Ezra Bassam, let us imagine Hanan Ahava—
each child born with an imaginary sibling,
a brother, or sister bound to him or her, with whom
each freely walks on the land they love,
practicing, practicing…

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s full-length books of poetry include Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and widely in journals. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025. Her eighth collection, a chapbook of poems, If Only There Were Stations of the Air, will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in early 2024, and her ninth, another chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements!, will be released by Bamboo Dart Press in June, 2024. Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside.