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. 

REOCCURING STORMS

by Marjorie Maddox

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Searchers Find Body of Killed Child in Oklahoma Tornado --AP, May 26, 2011
Woman Finds Boy After Mother Drives Van Into Hudson --The New York Times, April 13, 2011


Wind/Water, Oklahoma/New York,
the domestically symbolic bathtub/minivan,
two mothers.

And so fear gathers speed, swirls in
or out, grabbing—in its selfish velocity—each state
of who we are or were, what’s left
of our man-made lives holding tightly to the already-
born, the life still coming.

Temporarily wedged between faith and scream,
a mother sings reassurances as each
tree, board, sink, tub, life
twists and spins into the horizon
no one foresaw, grief beyond the boundaries
of such predictions, life splintered limb by limb,
like and not like (half a country away)

that other dream-turned-disaster:
depression’s dark tunnel twirling
beyond the imaginable, tires whirring
too quickly toward the Hudson,
fueling the speed of no-return,
a family’s last vision of sky flooded
with the damp wet of despair.

Except ten-year-old La'shaun,
who—between death and breath—
rolled down his window to let out fear,
then swam toward light.

And in Oklahoma, five-year-old Cathleen,
who, amidst the hurricane’s howl,
recognized hope in the heartbeat
of her unborn sibling:
that faint hum in the ear,
or that sudden surge toward possibility

into what one day even you and I—
after a particularly hard day of the ordinary—
might discuss as casually
as weather, as someone else’s life.


Marjorie Maddox is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania.

FIVE YEARS OLD

by Lavinia Kumar




On the cold floor of void the child cries.
And in the echo she hears only the buzz
of a fly she cannot see.  There’s no end
to the hurt in the fiery bumps once
her face, in the knife edge hackings
over her bottom half.  And he did it.

She brought him water as was proper
for a child.  Then in his room she heard
her screams and his loud breathing
as he tore the blue dress her aunt bought
for her birthday last week – her mother
would be so mad.  And then he did it.

And he did it again.  And more.  Punched
her face when she cried.  Now she feels
hardness of the floor.  Wants to run if
he’s gone.  Cannot move.  Hears the fly again. 
Cannot hear her mother.  Hears her cries.
He put candles in her.  She emptied when he did it.


Lavinia Kumar lives in New Jersey. Her chapbook Rivers of Saris is published by Main Street Rag and her poetry has appeared in several publications in the US and UK. She writes a blog for seniorsmagazine.org , and is an editor of children’s poetry at PoetryWITS.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DRONE PILOT

by Ann Bracken



     Based “Dreams in Infrared” by Nicola Abé 
     posted at Spiegel Online International, December 14, 2012.

He works in a windowless, air-conditioned container somewhere in New Mexico.
The pilot and his co-workers sit in front of fourteen computer monitors
and four keyboards.
Drone pilots at work.

The container is the cockpit where no one flies. They sit at controls
watching the Predator drone circle in figure eights
high above Afghanistan,
6,250 miles away.

The pilot sees a house made of mud
and a shed used to house goats comes into focus in the crosshairs.
He receives an order to fire and presses the button with his left hand.
Then he marks the roof with a laser.

The pilot next to him
pulls the trigger.
Releases a hellfire missile.
Sixteen seconds to impact.

The moments freeze, ticking by in slow motion.
The pilot can still divert the missile.
No one is on the ground. Three seconds to impact.

A child walks around the corner of the goat shed.

Second zero. The pilot’s digital world collides with the village
between Baghan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
The pilot sees a flash on the screen.
The explosion
the building collapses
the child disappears.

The pilot’s stomach plunges.
Did we just kill a kid? he asks the pilot next to him.
Yes, I guess it was a kid.
“Was it a kid?” they write in a computer chat window.

Someone they don’t know answers.
Someone sitting in a military command center.
Someone far away who observed the attack.
“No, that was a dog.”


Ann Bracken is a writer, poet, educator, and expressive arts consultant whose poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Little Patuxent Review, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire:Love Poems, Praxilla, The Museletter, The Gunpowder Review and Reckless Writing Anthology: Emerging Poets of the 21st Century. Her company, The Possibility Project, offers expressive arts programs for women of all ages. Ann is a lecturer in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Maryland.

HIS NAME

by Andrea Marcusa

Image source: Mansfield News Journal

The most pointless thing of all was how he wasn’t allowed to have his name stitched on his school knapsack – strangers can steal a child that way.  So were those vaccinations against diphtheria, meningitis, polio and the morning vitamin he hated – a chewable pink bear.  Or that car seat he was made to sit in on rides to school, even though most of his friends no longer had to use one, so futile. But there was something about his name – he’d taught himself to write it all by himself when he was two. Wanted everyone to use his full name. Not a nickname, not a shortened version. A good strong one for a boy.  Greek, after an apostle, after a king, and his grandfather in Alaska.  But that morning in the classroom with them all scattered around--there was no way to tell--no trace of it anywhere on him. But inside the neck of his too big, long-sleeved striped jersey, a strange, gloved hand peeled back the collar where he was found limp and face down, and that’s when they spotted it -- in black markered script. Dear child, in those first minutes, even your name was gone, displaced by the one on a hand-me-down from your brother, now a fourth grader in a classroom on the other end of the school, where he was crouched trembling, hiding in the closet.

Andrea Marcusa's  work has appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Ontario Review, The Antigonish Review, Copper Nickel, NewSouth, and other publications. Her work appeared in the essay collection, In the Fullness of Time (Simon and Schuster). She was a finalist in the Ontario Review’s 2007 fiction competition and winner of the Antigonish Review 2008 Fiction competition. She divides her time between literary writing and working in the areas of health care and sustainable agriculture.  She lives in New York City with her husband, two sons and pet cockatiel, Turko.

FIRST GLASSES

by Laurie Lamon

Fifty years ago I waited

in a room lined with

chairs where everyone

was old behind the dark

glasses that unfolded

and rippled, pressed

to eyes and temples,

and tremulous as my voice

when I read every street

sign and billboard each mile

home, 1963, the world 

for the first time hard

and fast and unmistakable.

Laurie Lamon's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Ploughshares, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Plume, and other magazines and journals, including 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days, edited by Billy Collins, and thePoetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. In 2007 Lamon received a Witter Bynner award, selected by Poet Laureate Donald Hall. Lamon has also received a Pushcart Prize. Laurie Lamon has two collections of poetry are The Fork Without Hunger and Without Wings, CavanKerry Press (NJ), 2005 and 2009. Lamon is a professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington and the poetry editor for Rock & Sling.