Milk Bomb

July 2019 | poetry | 0 comments

When Buddhists were a national security threat a strange old world broke open, swallowing poems like prayers. America, land of the unfree fundamentally white, Christian. When all the world grows dark, a growing political crisis wraps itself in mortality poems love poems grief poems peace poems happiest place on earth poems. When bombs bullets rain down, Pearl Harbor 1941 December 7th David Tanaka, Japanese American surgeon, father, family, friend climbs a mango tree on a dead-end street raises his hands, seeks god’s protection, the tenor of his voice rising with dark orange brown, black smoke, war poisons lingers off water knees give way to soil tears to martial law ignorance to incarceration. He will die there, asphyxiated, by racially-based hatred. 77-years later, a large crater where hearts used to be. Pummeled with milk bombs the world opens its mouth & sings. Resistance poems, protest poems #MeToo poems, Black Lives Matter poems, refuge poems lgbt rights poems, school violence poems, liberation poems.

Sheree La Puma

Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in O:JA&L, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, Levee, Crack The Spine, Mad Swirl, The London Reader, Gravel, Foliate Oak, PacificReview, Westwind and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and taught poetry to former gang members.

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