ON FLAG DAY I THINK BACK TO MY YOUNG STUDENTS SPEAKING

by Jane Herschlag

Photo: Jane Herschlag

                  
               Two planes, each crashed into one tower.
               People got hit by flying pieces of glass and concrete.
               All people care about the dead people and their families.
               We need to make flags.  The blue part stands for liberty.
               They draped a big one on the collapsed building.
               In France they were praying and many countries sang,
               God Bless America.

Despite the terrorists’ actions they see love in the world.
They see the pure, mythical America
as I saw it in childhood, the country that
saved my family from Hitler when others refused.

Our big red-white-and-blue blowing in the breeze—
a dwarfed pride still swells in me despite our lost democracy,
our taint of WMD’s, of Corporations Are People,
of Monsanto’s GMOs, for the first time in the history of the world,
changing the DNA of humans, animals, vegetation,
contaminating organic farms.

As wealth rules, America declines,
ethics fall to the toxic curb, along with the poor.
Betsy Ross what do you think of us now?
Each of your stitches were sewn with hope
and wishes for America’s wisdom.

I can’t even find my thread; it’s hidden
under years of fallen bodies,
corrupt bankers’ viscous lies.
Big Pharma and giant chemical companies
have smeared our red and blue into
our white stripes of virtue.  Our field of blue is dotted,
not by stars, but by lobbyists demands.

I want our flag to mean what it used to mean,
when city colleges were free, after
the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements.
I want my flag to wave for immigrants,
lesbians and gays.  I want again
to be proud of being American.


Jane Herschlag, a former apparel designer, textile designer, teacher, and model home decorator,  has a degree in Apparel Design, a B.A. in Creative Writing, and Women’s Studies from Hunter College.  Her Masters in Creative Writing is from CCNY.  Jane has won numerous writing awards and placed 1st with her  photography/poetry at Richter Assoc. for the Arts in Danbury.  She is an avid poet, photographer, and loves to Stage Homes for selling, refinancing, and simply enjoying.  She has shown at the Danbury Fair Mall, Midtown Café in Danbury, at the historic building—30 Bridge Street in New Milford, at American Pie Restaurant in Sherman.  She combines her passion for the visual and the written by writing ekphrastic poetry, poems inspired by the visual.  She curated readings at the West Side YMCA in NYC for seven years and has run a peer workshop since 1997.  Her Docu-Poetry collection Bully In The Spotlight is published by Pudding House Publications.

REQUIEM

by Ed Bennett

FALFURRIAS, Texas (Reuters)  May 15, 2013 - Mounds of dirt decorated with fake flowers sit at the northern edge of the cemetery in this town about 80 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Small metal placards mark the graves of the unknown, generally by gender, while others simply say "bones" or "skull case." Photo credit: REUTERS/Eric Thayer.

Quietly,
in the twilight breeze
of an unforgiving desert
we few are arranged
in a mourning group,
a broken minion
for the passing
of the nameless ones:
a young mother
or older sister,
a boy about eight

found between the cholla
and voiceless stones
that hid them from the road
where La Migra rules
and the crosshairs of
the militant ones
guards a sanctified border
in the darkness.

We left water
every mile or so
on the hidden route
where they sojourned,
the brown skinned tribes
of new Israelites
short one Moses and
a caring God’s sight

where the guardians
cut the water jugs
and these two died,
tongues swollen,
a mile south
of the springs.

Coyotes lament
to the waning moon,
a song for souls lost
in the eternity
of the killing night,
the calculus of death
for a too young woman,
a boy yet to live.

Adios,
nameless friends,
may your days be cool
beside Eden’s brook,
the fruit of God’s heavens
be your eternal bounty.

And may our days be riven
by our lost contrition,
may the appeals of patriots
weaken in the echo
of this desert marked
in the blood of innocents.


Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.

REV. BOEHNER'S HOMILY

by Ed Bennett





We have devolved,
you and I and the others,
the men and women around us
bunkered into our place,
our last stand
until the next one,

without a step or glance
into the middle ground,
the no-man’s land
of negotiation, reasonableness,
the anathema of all things
neither black nor white.

This is why we speak the parable
of vaginas with an off-switch,
the blood right of automatic fire,
the self imposed exile of
twelve million of those
who have the wrong accent.

We will ignore
the needs of those
without a lobby or PAC
but will make citizens
of every sacred corporate logo.
Let us pray.


Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.

ETHNICITY IN MY SMALL TOWN

by Emily Ramser

Image source: Newspaper Rock

“We have Asians here,

shouldn’t we get an award or something for that?”

Partin whispers as we turn

Our heads like zoo goers watching

Animals in cages. With all

Their colors, it wouldn’t surprise me

If someone shouted

“Amazing”

or used the rifle hanging in the window

of their pickup truck to hunt exotic pelts.

It’s so unusual here to find

Someone not of pale snow or cream

Walking the streets that

They all turn their heads

And stare

Like they’re watching zoo animals

In cages. 

Emily Ramser grew up in Sacramento's gay district, or at least experienced puberty there, but later moved to the southern Bible-belt of North Carolina to finish out her high school career. Rather than average society, she prefers to surround herself with furries, Baptist seminary students, and high school dropouts. Emily works with Impact Magazine editing religious testimonies and translating them into Spanish and is also a reporter and columnist for Wake Forest-Rolesville High School's paper, The Forest Fire. She has been published multiple magazines, but prefers to stick business cards with her poems scribbled on the back on coffee shop bulletin boards.