BRIEF SONNET FOR SNOOPS

by Jen Karetnick

Image credit: mjak / 123RF Stock Photo

The government is reading my emails,
they say. I wish they’d read my poems instead.
I would submit them for review as shells
of free-verse, villanelle grenades, bomb threats
whose line breaks they can’t unworm from their ears.
I would send them to the front lines to serve,
volunteer them as SEALs, special forces,
if that’s what it takes, poems leading the charge
in the fight to be the best in the world,
submissive soldiers of allegory
and slant rhyme. But poems are dismissed as girls.
Metaphors don’t receive the attention they
deserve. My emails are scanned, deleted,
the poems in them no gun to anyone’s head.


Jen Karetnick is a Miami poet with three published chapbooks, the latest called Landscaping for Wildlife (BigWonderful Press, 2012). Her next two books, an anthology of South Florida poetry and prose, Sun-Struck Matches (Tigertail Productions), and a cookbook, Mango (University of Florida Press), are forthcoming in fall 2013 and fall 2014. Jen works as the Creative Writing Director for Miami Arts Charter School and a freelance food-travel critic and writer. These poems are from a manuscript-in-progress, My Buddha Wears a Pout.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

by Howie Good

Image credit: monamakela / 123RF Stock Photo

“Boon,” our two-year-old says,
standing on the driveway
and pointing up at the sky.

He means “moon.” There isn’t one.

And in case you haven’t heard,
a suicide bomber in the Mideast
or Midwest or somewhere
detonated a dynamite vest.

My heart curls in on itself –
a matter, everyone just assumes,
not of character but chemistry.

At the first decorous drops of rain,
the leaves tremble, as if raised
on a bleak diet of curses and slaps.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com. 

THE AFTERMATH

by Tricia Knoll






At the very finish,
when all the banners fall
and the sirens silence on to home,
legs knocked out from under
holding dear traditions
in our cheers for those who dare
their best and longest and smartest
of what is mammal in us
and human racing
for the joy of wind
in our hair, and the silver blanket
descends, doubling us at the waist,

someone will count
all the ways we hurt
and all that we have lost.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet who has run three marathons -- each a learning experience of potential and patience. She ran this morning in full sun behind a garbage truck -- and left home the fantasy that she was winning Boston.

ABOUT APPLES

by Rick Gray





Yes, I heard about your bombing today.
Another improvised scrap of death
Planted inside a truckload of apples.

This isn’t about your success.
It’s about apples, driven by ordinary men
into this raped and hungry city every day.

Round, delicious things glowing yellow, green, red,
A traveling circus nourishing even beggars
Quick enough to lift the fallen.         

I have spied blue angels
Slip these wounded below burqas
And carry home your civilian dead 

And all along the muddy roadsides
People you cannot control pile them in little pyramids
Like temples to the God you hate

Who needs no prophet
or book
Only her sweet juice

And a mouth with a few real teeth
Willing to bite down hard
and chew.


Rick Gray was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie. He served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul.

A ROUTINE BOMB

by Michael Ratcliffe



“Hardly a week goes by in Germany without an unexploded bomb from World War II being found at a construction site or in another location.  [This past Wednesday, 3 April 2013, one such bomb was found in Berlin.] Authorities detonated a bomb in Munich on Tuesday night, August 28, 2012, after efforts to defuse it were unsuccessful. It wasn’t the only bomb scare in Europe that week.” --Der Spiegel On-line, August 28 and 29, 2012


A bomb, five hundred-fifty pounds
of rusted steel, corroded wires, decayed explosives,
found beneath Munich’s center
where it lay hidden since World War Two,
buried in the rubble left by other bombs,
covered as the city rebuilt and tried to forget war;
uncovered by workers sixty-seven years later.

In beer halls and cafés, homes and offices,
curiosity and questions:
When was the last bomb found?
How will it be disposed?
Should we be worried?
This relic of the past,
this failed deliverer of death,
becomes part of the city’s chatter,
along with the economy,
the Greek debt crisis,
and the unseasonably hot weather.

The experts, unable to defuse the bomb,
decide to detonate,
and make plans for a controlled explosion.

At the dinner table, a family talks
about other bombs, routinely disposed—
one defused just the week before in Nuremburg.
They pass the meat and then the bread
and talk about the planned explosion.
The children ask if they will see the blast,
but they are in the evacuation zone
and must leave in the morning—
father suggests a day in the Alps.

A mother leaves her downtown office
and makes her way home, her usual route closed.
It was her country that dropped the bomb.
This is all so strange and foreign—
just part of the European experience, she tells herself.
She assures her children there is no need to worry,
old bombs are found all the time.
Her young daughter listens, but has heard that bombs kill.
She tugs on her mother, and asks if they will be okay.

An old woman remembers bombs falling,
and all the friends and relatives lost to those that did not fail.
She knows bombs kill.
She draws the curtains across the windows,
goes to the basement and huddles in a corner,
where she thinks about her mother
and how they would hold each other tight
whenever the bombs fell,
and pray they would be alive the next day.

August 28, 2012:
A Sufi cleric killed in Dagestan;
four dead in a truck in Kandahar;
one dead, seven wounded in Fallujah;
twenty-seven killed in Damascus;
bank windows shattered in Athens;
a memorial service for Israelis killed in Sofia.
In Aleppo, men, women, and children huddle in fear
as their government continues to bomb the city,
sometimes striking as they stand in line for bread.
In Munich, experts covered the bomb with sand and straw.
The controlled explosion shattered windows,
sparked a few fires, which were quickly doused.
The next day, the city returns to its routine.
In the beer halls and cafés, homes and offices,
talk turns to the economy,
the end of August holidays,
and the much-needed rain
that turns the bomb’s crater
into just another muddy hole.


Michael Ratcliffe lives and writes in the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington area.  His poems have appeared in Symmetry Pebbles, Loch Raven Review, Do Not Look at the Sun, Poetry Quarterly, The Copperfield Review, The Little Patuxent Review, and You Are Here: the Journal of Creative Geography.

FRIDAY, MARCH 1st, 2013

by Ron Singer

Drawing by Derek at Most Everybody Lives their Lives

Did the lights go out? Bombs begin to fall?
The lights did not go out. Bombs did not fall.
Nothing was literally sequestrated:
no property seized; no juries isolated.

But a bomb did begin to tick, loud already,
and the poor, already isolated,
looked ahead to being sequestrated,
foreclosed by trickle-down democracy.


Poems by Ron Singer have appeared in numerous magazines, e-zines, and newspapers. Some of these poems have been anthologized and/or set to music. His three published books are A Voice for My Grandmother, The Second Kingdom, and The Rented Pet. He recently completed three trips to Africa for Uhuru Revisited, a collection of interviews with pro-democracy activists (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press, forthcoming).