Tag: war

Three Poems by Edie Meade

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Coming Storm

fleeced inside the cell, undefined violence flashes purple.
still chain-smoking on his balcony as windows close for bed,
the new neighbor, a slapping flag, a Marine retiree vanity plate.
I know the barometric plunge, whipping white the maple leaves.
he snaps beer tabs, snaps at a family unseen, snaps at his dog.
lightning takes a long time lacing its boots downriver to us.
he’s not much older than me, and how I remember Fallujah,
old men and boys crying on the curb, the forbidden from leaving,
who never left. and rags after. low-res red. phosphorous Pompeii.
does he still feel under-boot the crushed chalk bone, insensible
explosions wherever he goes? snapping. memory a flash bang.
from my bedroom I monitor the first-degree face, mulch-pile
chest smoking uncontrollably, turned by pitchfork, drifting
wind over water. the storm rolls in on caissons of thunder.

*

February 14

I lay on the floor trying to unhear screams, the city
screaming into its elbows to stifle what it knows.
The neighbors rise fighting, and I’m afraid
to seek answers to the questions I have. Google,
can AR-15 bullets pierce a brick wall? How
do hiding mothers keep their children quiet?
Is the screaming in my middle ear or a fold
of nervous tissue? Is it me? Is it only me?
Car doors slam and engines ignite and I remain
on the floor, keeping close to the world without
beds, those born and born again shivering pink
each morning waiting to receive spring’s augurs.
Geese shadows labor over the window so low
I hear their wings threshing. None cry out.

*

Two-star Hotel, Myrtle Beach

look I don’t want to catch anything
don’t want to kill the ocean
creatures, only stare at my feet
for hours, collecting beautiful bones

be first, or fiftieth, to comb the dawn
beach while the water’s out
taking care of its salty business
is that too much to ask?

a domestic situation ends in handcuffs
pleas break the boardwalk
crowd outside the Bermuda Sands
but the lazy river goes on

Black & Milds in the kiddie pool, sandy beds
I rate this hotel five stars for the riff-raff
for they come by it honestly, no bugs
in my room— no, spiders do not count

barnacles barnacle, I shell shells, terns turn
over a pink plastic carnation decoy
bright as sushi, what once was
a revolution, plastic, now an island

in a vortex visible from space
how must it loom to turtles below
a jellyfish or ominous mushroom
cloud, the manmade tropical depression

named for each of us in time,
we’re attached to our disasters
if not multitudes, we contain
teaspoons of colorful beads

in our brains, micro-plastic’d, sad,
bedraggled as the streets after Mardi Gras
a man in the lazy river laughs like a cough
or coughs like a laugh, what’s the difference

at rock-bottom, where the party is a sickness
the sickness is a party

*

Edie Meade is a writer in Petersburg, Virginia. She has been recently published in Room Magazine, Invisible City, The Harvard Advocate, JMWW, The Normal School, and Litro.

Four Poems by Spencer K.M. Brown

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I’VE HEARD STORIES

Like that landscape painter who pushed his goat hair
Brush across canvas for hours until two Coors
Cases were empty beside him and he passed out,
Waking to see some lonesome countryside more
Beautiful than he’d ever witnessed himself, as if
In delirium angels took pity, touched his art
With their golden fingers.
How one morning he felt something give
And pulled three teeth from his skull.
He keeps them in a cigar box,
The landscape hangs over a stranger’s fireplace.

Like my neighbor who only drank wine—
“Like Christ Hisself”—gallons at a time.
How he could turn gnarled stumps
Into foxes, honeybees, angels; how when he was carving
A crucifix for his parish he lopped off his left thumb
With the adze but never panicked.
Now that left thumb is in a jar on his windowsill
Catching light all day beside rosemary
He keeps trying to root in creek water.
The crucifix is still in the church, blessed now,
Where people come and kneel before it.

Like me—the nightmare I keep having.
Strapping my boys in the car, my breath
Toxic enough to blow a fuse.
Colors blended and beautiful but twisted
As a cottonmouth about to strike.
How I get in the car, despite the wind, the light,
My own flesh and blood tugging me back.
Then I turn the key.

I’m not blessed to make anything beautiful,
Not a landscape or stump,
Dust, and awaiting return—
For now, blessed only to wake.

*

IN A SILENT WAY

My wife digs her hands into black soil,
Flesh scraping against meat of the earth—
Brown loam speckling her pale, slender fingers,
Veins blue as heavy water, she takes hold of a root and tugs
Heavenward, commanding the earth by some grace
Bestowed by the very dirt she digs and tends.
The soil—like me, it writhes for her.

She runs a finger across a ring snake’s scales
As our son lets it slither between his fingers.
She dusts dirt from skin, gathers beans, tomatoes,
And sun-bruised flowers in her hands.
She touches my hand and says nothing.
Watches the garden, our boys—
She thinks of something I’ll never know.

She draws me from clay.
Her breath expands my lungs,
And how I wish I could grow roots,
Tree myself into this very ground
Where she will be tomorrow,
And the tomorrow after.

*

THE HILLS ARE QUIET BUT IS IT REST

It’s not the hills to blame for shrugging into hibernation.
Regress is grace, knowing when to be quiet,
When to raise your voice, given intention mirrors the divine.
But who’s to say buck-a-roo—
Now’s the time to make peace with worms, my grandfather said.
I wasn’t born bleak as him.
Grace is only slippery in greasy hands.
Drive enough nails and you’ll hit a thumb, God knows.
It’s in the picking up the hammer with broken hands though.
It’s in closing eyes and gasping a thousand feet deep.
Just know nothing is ever as imagined, not the weight of snow
On the cypress boughs, not the finger held over candle flame.
The worms know though—when to feast and fast.
The privilege is knowing the line that holds us,
Knowing when to still soul and close eyes,
When to unfold knife and get to work.

*

RUMORS OF WAR

I can’t stop thinking of the time coming when men will go mad,
Kill whoever isn’t insane like them.
My father used to tell me nothing good happens
After 10 p.m., he used to say drive like everybody else is drunk and on drugs.

He used to get up every morning at dawn, hair muskrat-wild,
Praying far deeper than the roots of any Judas Tree
For mercy, redemption, and mercy again.
I think about the mad people saying, “You are mad—You’re not like us.”

How they’ll bash skulls against curbs like drums
Keeping time to a rhythm droning in their ears.
All the way down, turtles and madness—
Except my old man, quietly escaping three wars:

Hearing, speaking, seeing.
How the one he keeps fighting—the one never
Televised, the one no one will ever tune out—
Rages in the heart.

The trick, he says, is to sit alone in a quiet room,
The room will teach you everything.

I’m a good citizen of this land. I do my part.
See—I pick up this inchworm, move it from here to there on the dogwood leaf.

*

Spencer K.M. Brown is a poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina where he lives with his wife and three sons. He is a finalist for the 2023/2024 CMA National Book Awards, and winner of the Penelope Niven Award and Flying South Prize. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Salvation South, Scalawag, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and the poetry chapbook Cicada Rex. His novel Recommendations for a Departing Soul is forthcoming from Regal House, (Fall ’27).

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 Martin Willitts Jr

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Bringing Bodies like Kindling Wood

There are times, when the sky opens up and cries.
The sky cried all the time, it seemed, in Vietnam.
I tried pulling bodies out of the line of fire,
out of mud, out of endless caustic rainfall.
I’d find parts of a human and bring wounded back.
Often, death could not wait, and I’d arrive too late.
Rain was juxtaposed at intersection of life and death.
Rain did not care about longitude or latitude of pain.

In Vietnam, it rained bullets in Agent Orange skies.
On my last mission, the day before going home,
carrying a man, I hit a trip-wire, and I lifted into the sky.
Doctors took skin grafts from my arms to my burnt feet,
without medication, rain confessed to my wounds.
I learned what it is like to be carried out alive.

* 

On the Battlefield

During the shelling,
bullets sing as they pass by me.
I’m kneeling over a body
opening my field medic kit.
He is not going to make it.
He sees my concern, my averting eyes.
He asks the million-dollar question:
Where is God in all this?

I can’t save him.
I can barely save myself.
At this moment, religion abandons us.
What are we supposed to believe in?
During this moment of fear, sweat, and death,
I find no easy answer.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He was nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award; 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; 2014 Broadsided award; 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, November 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided “Poetry on The Bus” which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bi-lingual poems from 7 different languages. He has over 20 full-length poetry collections including “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Still Point Press, 2024); “Not All Beautiful Things Need to Fly” (Silver Bow Publishing, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Collected Works” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and forthcoming, “Bone Chills and Arpeggios” (March Street Press, 2025).

Three Years Later by Julia Kolchinsky

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Three Years Later

When it began, we feared the end
would come too quick, like summer rain, but war
leaves roots and heliotropes towards flame, a sunflower

weighed by grip and reaching. A Baba stuffed sunflower
seeds into an invading soldier’s pockets, you’ll end
up in our soil, she told him, but at least your war

will grow you, turn you into something beautiful. War
is water that drowns as it quenches. The sunflowers,
like open wounds or mouths, demand it doesn’t end

like this. War doesn’t end in sunflowers, it begins—

*

Julia Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS, PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist of the Miller Williams Prize. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, with nonfiction in Brevity, Shenandoah, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.

Everything is Connected by Martin Willitts Jr

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Everything is Connected

It’s pointless to regret what might have been.
Just ask my father about the Second World War,
when his cannon backfired,
killing everyone else immediately, and leaving him deaf.
He knew what it was like to be covered in blood splatter.

I can picture my father, limp on red ground,
when some field medic, checking for pulses,
brings him back to safety. War explodes time.

I know the loneliness of choices,
as a field medic in Vietnam,
how survivors feel guilty making it alive,
other men never going home.

I can almost see my father
waking up on a cot in a hospital, unable to hear
some doctor asking, “Can you follow my finger?”
The doctor’s lips moving silently,
my father not responding.

I also know this story:

my father had a war buddy
who promised to fix him up with a woman he knew.
She worked in a factory where they made weapons
that helped increase killing.
When she witnessed all those wounded men
next to my father, she quit her job.
She became my mother.

When I received my draft notice for Vietnam,
my mother hid the mail. She knew war subtracts,
leaves some wounds you never see.

I volunteered to be a medic. I couldn’t imagine killing.

War numbs many of us. I know what it’s like
to walk through fields of dying and wounded men,
needing to leave the dying behind.
I touched death. It felt human.

My mother never forgave me for being that close to death.

My father never told me what it was like to be a survivor;
I had to learn the hard way.

My mother tip-toed around problems, biting her tongue,
frustrated with his deafness.

I could never tell my son about war,
although he loved playing with toy soldiers.
He might have thought it odd when I suggested
needing a toy medic, although he never said anything.

We never know where life goes,
and choices narrow into vanishing points.
Not being able to talk out issues
leaves scabs on a heart.

And, I have to admit,
I could not tell him the toll war had taken on me.
I could not talk about Vietnam for years.
I kept those secrets inside me,
a locket of misery.

I still have problems talking about it.

War creates another type of deafness.
I am trying to remove those bandages of silence.

It’s time to carry out the wounded.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He was nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award; 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; 2014 Broadsided award; 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, November 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided “Poetry on The Bus” which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bi-lingual poems from 7 different languages.

He has over 20 full-length poetry collections including “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Still Point Press, 2024); “Not All Beautiful Things Need to Fly” (Silver Bow Publishing, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Collected Works” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and forthcoming, “Bone Chills and Arpeggios” (March Street Press, 2025).

Two Poems by Tresha Faye Haefner

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Why I Write About Flowers in a Time of War
Because so many can’t write
about the jasmine blooming
in the flowerpot this morning.
Because they can’t see
the sun rise over a window box of mint
or go looking in the pantry for coffee and dried figs.
The blood is still wet on bowling shoes,
on camouflage book bags,
and patches of dried earth under the olive trees.
There are people who will never know
the peace of a red-bud breaking open
or the helplessness of roses drying in a neighbor’s yard.
But if a flower fights for anything
It’s only for the right to live, in a forest or field
Where it will feed dragonflies and pollinate more of itself.
Tigerlily spreading its yellow self, swallowtail landing
On a patch of purple lantana.
Because nature is not a distraction, but an instruction.
Rivers feed oceans. Dying logs feed
grubs who recreate the soil.
The soft liver of any dying animal
responds to its collapse by giving back
whatever it had. The only response to violence
is to throw your body as deep as you can
into the darkness, until something takes hold
of you, and uses your dying sorrow
to bloom.
*
One Day A Bird
Ate the last hate in your heart.
Plucked it out like an oily black sunflower seed
and flew away.
You went for a walk in your neighborhood, past the church
That wasn’t yours, past the signs for political candidates
You didn’t much care for. You didn’t mind.
There was really no time anymore to be angry at your last lover
Or the one before that. Or to send bad feelings to the mayor of your city,
Or the governor of your state.
You liked this feeling of being cloudlike and unencumbered.
You learned to like your neighbors,
Even the ones who flicked cigarette butts on their lawn.
And the woman at the grocery store who never smiles at you.
Even the fences didn’t bother you anymore. They were ugly, yes,
But they belonged to someone hungry, someone who liked being warm
on cold nights and drinking hard-cider
and the feel of clothes out of the laundry machine.
Everyone, you realize, is the same when they are watching
YouTube videos of a cat, or sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting for news.
You had been angry before, at all the people who wouldn’t worship
your thoughts, or pray to your private wishes. But that was before.
Before that bird came and plucked the last hatred out of your heart.
And where was it now, you wondered?
As you stared at the sky, waiting for it to circle back
and land on the ugly, ugly house
that once had been a collection of trees
and now was somebody’s home.
*
Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and a 2012, 2020, and 2021 nomination for a Pushcart. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear” was a finalist for prizes from both Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. It was published by Pine Row Press under the title When the Moon Had Antlers in 2023. Find her at www.thepoetrysalon.com.

The Family I Just Met by Marianne Szlyk

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The Family I Just Met

Having seen only old country portraits
in the parlor, graduation pictures
without smiles, hectic-colored prints of saints
and martyrs, eyes rolling, hands clasped in prayer,

I thought that Dad’s side of the family
was grim. They came from behind the Curtain,
iron folds falling, about to slam shut.
Left behind, Dad’s uncle Alex was shot.

In the boxes of snapshots to unpack,
I found my grandfather’s laughter. He sat
in his low armchair, roaring at the show
Mom’s card-playing, movie-going folks loved.

It was Christmas. The war was long over.
He didn’t have to open his market,
butcher meat still in short supply, sweep floors
until you could have eaten off of them.

He could sit by the radio and snort
at the show my friends’ families in the Bronx
loved, laugh at the snapshots his children took:
Bobby throwing snowballs, my dad leaning,

taking a smoke break, dark sunglasses on,
Bobby a cowboy on the horsehair couch
while his sister Irene rolls her eyes, smokes,
and Rita sits close to Henry, her beau,

the young Polish man just home from the war.

*

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Green Elephant, and ONE ART. Her fiction has appeared in Mad Swirl, Impspired, and Storyteller Poetry Review. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and I Dream of Empathy are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She and her husband, the writer Ethan Goffman, live with their black cat Tyler who likes to hang out with them while they write.

Two Poems by Olga Livshin

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A Tulip in a Besieged City

Like a soft bomb.

Like a clock,
if the clock knew
it might not go on.

It holds one petal to the side,
an ethereal skirt.

The dark, furry pistil,
fit to create, to mess something up.
The bloom, ready to croon its orange-black insides out.

A smattering of sand falls from the sky.

Petals remain
bright gathered flags.

*

Blowout

Our reading about the war in Ukraine
is tonight, here in morning-washed Miami.

I said to Julia: At least we will have beautiful hair!
Aching for our homeland, I paid strangers in a salon
to comfort our hair.

Or maybe I wanted to cover up
our knee-bent, back-curved, salty-eyed content
with presentable form,
and prettiness is an ally.

Or maybe, in the room next to my mind –
five thousand miles away –
an explosion killed a three-year-old boy
in his bed, in the night.
My phone shook with this news.
But why am I getting curled
when I have to straighten myself out?

Julia’s hair is like a river of dark metal
brushed aglow. My girl’s big laughter,
a yearning flame. Love this blowout!
she says to her stylist. Her love of love,
and voice like a beautiful animal.
She stands up, spins around,
sweeps me into a hug,
not compressed by gender or history,
amplified by what we must endure.

*

Olga Livshin’s work is recently published in the New York Times, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and other journals. She is the author of the poetry collection A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (2019). Livshin co-translated Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (2023) and A Man Only Needs a Room by Vladimir Gandelsman (New Meridian Arts, 2022). As a consulting poetry editor for Mukoli: A Journal for Peace, she reviews poetry from conflict-affected communities across the world, with a focus on Eastern Europe. She lives in a suburb of Philadelphia.

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.

Dust of Snow by Laura Foley

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Dust of Snow

I thought I was done
mourning war
learning to savor

a faceful of snow
from the shaken pine
without remembering

the water dripped
on my father’s head
his torture into a coma

surviving four years
in Japanese prison
to become my father

in the same war Stefan
escaped on skis
from Poland

across the Tatras into Lithuania
and then Russia
and became my husband

now long since gone
this dawn after snow
as the new war invades my mind

and sun lights a thin white line
rising from the chimney
of a peaceable slate gray house

where I live with my wife
on a wooded hill
but see the smoke

of bombed buildings
barely noticing how snow
dusts from the arms of a pine

drifts like a beautiful ghost
or an angel I wish
I could send to Ukraine.

*

Laura Foley is the author of eight poetry collections. Everything We Need: Poems from El Camino was released, in winter 2022. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, One Art Poetry, Poetry Society London, Crannog Magazine (Ireland), DMQ Review, Atlanta Review, Mason Street, JAMA, and many others. Her work has been included in many anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Laura lives with her wife, Clara Gimenez, among the hills of Vermont. www.laurafoley.net

Two poems by Carla Sarett

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They Made Wars

We drank sweet Turkish coffee
and talked long into the night
of mothers who lost children in cities,
who locked them out of houses in thick rain,
who foresaw snow on a warm spring day,
how snow fell after their words.

By dawn, we forgot which stories
we had told and which we had forgotten
in the eagerness of our first revelations.

By starlight, we whispered our terrors:
Giant mothers outgrew houses.
They made wars without anyone noticing.

We never mentioned fathers.
Those pale and harried men.

*

no one says it

Deirdre’s sending
love w/ exclamation points
love! love! love!
John texts it (love)
no point wanting
a love letter she knows
that’s not the #love
they’re sending
& that song
love love love
all you need is
not the #love
she needs

*

Carla Sarett’s recent poem appear or are forthcoming in Blue Unicorn, The Virginia Normal, San Pedro River Review, The Remington Review, Sylvia, Words and Whispers and elsewhere. Her novella, The Looking Glass, will be published in October (Propertius); and A Closet Feminist, a full-length novel, will appear in 2022 (Unsolicited Press.) Carla lives in San Francisco.

The Night You Returned by W.D. Ehrhart

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The Night You Returned

A road crew was paving the highway
the night you returned from the war.
It was March; they had set up floodlights;
the black viscous tar steamed in the cold.
The workmen didn’t notice you.
Why would they?
You weren’t any different
from all the other passersby that night
or any other night, just another car.
They had a machine;
they were laying macadam
mile after mile.
Black. Viscous. Steaming.
Mile after mile after mile.
Deep into the night.

W. D. Ehrhart is an ex-Marine sergeant and veteran of the American War in Vietnam. His latest book is Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems, McFarland & Company.

Five Poems by Ron Riekki

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The Kid Who Drank Himself to Death During the War

lived in the barracks right across from mine.
His face was all brilliant with light, like
the sun hitting the ocean. And they hit us
in boot camp, the revelation of that, how
the recruiters don’t mention this little fact,

or they did—unsure if they still do it now,
but my suspicion is yes, the fists all bone
and temple, the church of war. I remember
my mind before the explosions, how it used
to think properly, or maybe it didn’t, the river

near my home owned by the mines now,
oranged. I walked to it yesterday, stared
down into the deranged red, so close to
the color of blood. I pulled up my hood
and walked home. I can walk though.

*

I Worked in Prison

My jobs have all been fist fights for cash.
When I was a boxer, I started getting tremors,
the doctor telling me to stop or they’d become
permanent. I stopped. They stayed. I thought
about how I’d been a boxer my whole life,
even before I was boxing, how the military
takes your skull and kills it. Sure, you can
still live, but it’s a bit like your body is
a house that’s been built, but abandoned,
foreclosed, possessed, a sort of Satanism
to corporation, a sort of corpse-creation,
that reminds me so much of prison, how
there were all these sons in there, no sun,
the paleness of their skin, everyone, no
matter your race, how it looked like they
were all fading, their psyches, their souls,
the violence where if they ever got out
I knew they’d be changed, how violence
stays in your veins, how a bloody life
stays in your blood, how we really,
honestly, could do anything else other
than what we’re doing and it’d be
better, but we’re promised to this cash.

*

(lucky) I Work in Medical

Which means medical works
me, because medical doesn’t
work, because of this equation:
politics + medicine = politics,
and the nursing homes aren’t
homes and there isn’t nursing
there, because the CNAs and
the med techs and the EMTs
are all making minimum wage,
which means my partner fell
asleep driving the ambulance,
turning it upside-down, just
like his life, trying to make

the torment of rent, how it
tore into us, you, me, every-
one when even the EMTs
don’t have health insurance,
and we know that the word
minus ends with US, because
it’s all about erasers, melting
pots where the kids come in
overdosing on marijuana and
one of them says, But you can’t
overdose on pot and I tell him
Well, you are right now and
it’s beautiful—hyperemesis,

how it is, this existence where
the overdoses are normalized,
where my uncle, his heroin
addiction in a hick town, how
I call him and he answers,
voice in slow motion, the ice
outside his window so loud
that I can hear it, the blizzards
of poverty (the anti-poetry),
A Cell of One’s Own and
we’re owned and I’m ranting
about the renting because I
am worried as hell about home-

lessness because the word virus
ends with US and this won’t
get published unless the editor
has been to the pub and is OK
with saying f- censorship—too
afraid to write the word, too
afraid to talk about how when
they play the sexual harassment
training videos at work, everyone
does a play-by-play commentary
like Misery Science Theater 2021,
how we’re all Orwelled and all it
takes is one hospital bill to end a life.

*

In This Poem, I Am Happy and Blessed

but it’s a short poem. It’s a poem where God
gives me a bird, walking, at my feet, how I
almost didn’t see it, the thing rainbowed as
all hell. Who makes something that beautiful?

I snuff out my clove, hurry inside to my cubicle.

*

I Can’t Stop Winking

It’s a defective muscle. My trauma-head
all butchered. But people misread it, think
I’m flirty. Or that I’m sharing some sort
of secret with them. They look directly
in my eyes with a look like yes, I under-
stand too or yes, I saw it as well. Saw
what? The occasional frown, sometimes
a wink back, sexy. But I’m twice
their age. I want to apologize, say
that my eye is owned by history, but
they just move on, their bodies so
perfect, able to control everything.
How do they do that? How?

*

Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). Riekki co-edited Undocumented (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited The Many Lives of It (McFarland), And Here (MSU Press), Here (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book).

From the back porch of a war by James Feichthaler

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From the back porch of a war

I wish I could be like this dandelion —
patient, awaiting rains. Thousands are dying,
and we’ve been told to stay inside our homes
to keep the numbers down. The squirrels aren’t buying
such lousy edicts, rummaging through our garden
for anything to stuff between their gums.
They don’t have bills past due or rent to pay,
patients to tend to, politicians’ lies
to aggravate their fears in these dark times;
oblivious to the shortage of supplies
in hospitals, to a panic that only comes
when having too much (as a luxury)
infects the brain. Here, on this warm March day,
their hoarding means new life is on the way.

*

James Feichthaler is a poet and essayist whose work has most recently appeared in Sortes, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Martin Lake Journal, and the Mad Poets Society’s Local Lyrics series. His new book The Rise of the COVFEFE, a poetical satire of these divided and uncertain times, was recently published by Parnilis Media. He is also the host of an open mic reading in Manayunk, PA called The Dead Bards of Philadelphia.