THE PEACE PROCESS

by Rick Gray

                                               for Marie

When the elections were finally over
and the call to prayer
went soft

I slept through three whole dawns
not working and dreaming of giggling dolphins
before today's suicide muse

blew me sideways out of bed.
Three dead, six wounded ghosts
are flying across the page

towards a red ice cream cart, slanted,
and singing Happy Birthday
in Chinese.


Rick Gray served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. He was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie, and has an essay that will be appearing in the forthcoming book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. When not in Kabul, he lives with his wife Ghizlane and twin daughters Rania and Maria in Florida.

CHAMBERED NAUTILUS REVISITED

by Mary Cresswell

           after Oliver Wendell Holmes

Image source: Carnivoraforum

This is the ship of state
swimming backwards through a grimy sea
spewing foam, its hundred sticky arms
waving wild and pale and aimlessly.

Chamber after chamber fills and closes
blocking out what’s gone before.
No contamination can leak out –
thoughts sealed inside appear no more.

Adding empty gap to empty gap
the hulk is finally cast up on the beach,
where we toss it back and forth, and ask
what kind of truth had one time grown beneath.


Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. Her third book, Trace Fossils, came out in 2011.