January 2020 | poetry
In a shared taxi, beet yellow in the
Carolina sun, an old woman describes
her exodus from a town overrun with
Jews. They trampled the Angel Oaks,
she crows, lining their
pockets with real estate deals.
In stopped-time, we could craft a retort:
That’s rather offensive, or Would you
like to finish Hitler’s work? or (with
a sidelong glance) Don’t you realize
you are riding in here alongside filthy Jews?
In her defense, the tropes drone on: we
are bankers, hypnotists, engines of overthrow.
Flame-wars grow fierce over statements by
Congresspeople. It’s blood libel and
bulbous-nosed caricatures all over again.
In a hospital in Ohio, bedpans clinking,
death rattles just around the bend, while
a doctor tweets a promise to pass the wrong
medicine to her Jewish patients. Firemen
hesitate to spray because all houses matter,
sirens of the muezzins, their truck a long red
tongue licking the wounds of the street.
Alisha Goldblatt
Alisha Goldblatt is an English teacher and writer living in Portland, Maine with her two wonderful children and one lovely husband. She has published poems in Midstream Magazine, Georgetown Review, Mockingheart Review, the Common Ground Review, Literary Mama, and Portland Press Herald: Deep Water, as well as essays in the Stonecoast Review, The Wisconsin Review, and MothersAlwaysWrite. She was a featured poet in this fall’s Belfast Poetry Festival. Alisha also released a children’s book, Finding a Way, about her son’s rare chromosomal disorder and the beauty of acceptance.
October 2019 | poetry
or (a Letter to My Brother I Wrote, Ripped, and Retaped)
Real men should be afraid of nothing,
especially not of other men.
But what of those they don’t consider to be real men?
What about the fear of even touching their blood
because it probably has AIDS?
The fear that makes every son a blessing;
every gay son a curse:
a death in the family,
a non-existent thing,
a vanishing.
A faggot for allowing your heart to decide.
Faggot for letting your back arch
like a dog in heat for another man to make you his.
Faggot for breaking your mother’s heart,
and her father’s father’s,
and his Father who is in heaven:
hallowed be His name;
hollowed was yours on her lips
when she used to ring your wrists
until your 6-year-old hands went numb,
yelling into your big brown eyes,
wishing that you were more like me.
Your place in the afterlife hijacked
by one who loves women
just like he’s supposed to,
and takes it without complaining:
because prayer can fix anything—
like Vicks VapoRub—
because Don’t worry it’ll pass
will also pass, and you will be judged
by people who call themselves family,
who hate you because you’re not what they
think a man should be:
what your Creator made you as
when He made you the way He made you.
He loves you, along with all the angels
in eternity who are cheering for you
to grab your piece of heaven by force.
The hell I tortured you with
when I joined in because I didn’t know any better,
because I’d rather be wrong than be your brother,
because protecting you meant making myself weak.
Back when I wasn’t strong enough to be strong for you;
when you were stronger for the both of us,
and all of those that needed to form a mob
in order to be strong against you.
When I wanted to protect you from yourself
and all the evil in your veins—
the meth in your madness—
after you told me you had HIV.
How I wished for you to be 6 again
so I could finally be stronger than you,
and wrap you in my arms against your will
until you cried yourself to sleep.
I’d carry you to your room
and heal your wounds
with my kisses.
But even in your weakened state,
you wouldn’t have needed my help
the way the phoenix doesn’t
need a firefighter to aid it
as its heart burns to ash,
or a sculptor to fashion
its feathers anew from cinder.
There will always be men
who will hate you to feel like men,
preaching the Gospel of Jesus, love incarnate,
hiding behind His cross their fear of faggots—
killing Abel, the world’s first gay man and martyr,
time and time again
out of jealousy
because God loved him more
Jose Oseguera
Jose Oseguera is an LA-based writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. Having grown up in a primarily immigrant, urban environment, Jose has always been interested in the people and places around him, and the stories that each of these has to share. His writing has been featured in The Esthetic Apostle, McNeese Review, and The Main Street Rag. His work has also been nominated for the “Best of the Net” award (2018 and 2019) and the “Pushcart Prize.” He is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection “The Milk of Your Blood.”
October 2019 | poetry
The holiness of sunrise
trampled down
by people in cars
rushing to work
In cracks of roads
plants shoot up
grasping the air
without certainty of survival
DAH
DAH’s ninth poetry collection is SPHERICAL (Argotist Press, 2019), and his poems have been published by editors from the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Canada, Spain, Poland, Philippines, Singapore, Australia, Africa, and India. He is a Pushcart nominee, Best Of The Net nominee, and the lead editor for the poetry critique group, The Lounge. DAH lives in Berkeley, California where he teaches yoga to children in public and private schools while working on the manuscript for his tenth poetry collection. His eighth book is Full Life In The Day Of A Poet, selected poems (Cyberwit Publishing, 2019). Visit: www.dahlusion.wordpress.com
October 2019 | poetry
We’ve come out of the dust
in our mother tongue
not to praise the people
with astronomical hoards of bucks
and numbers, but those who’ve risen
out of volcanic ashes, those pushed
into labors for biddings not theirs,
who’re capable of envisioning peace
between nations when negotiations
take work with credible research
and willingness to hear clearly,
while a missile fires off at the twitch
of a ring finger. We’re here to give
our piece to the masters of war
who may be disinterested in seeing
what’s before them, as they duck
responsibility for the consequences
of their acts just to maximize profit.
Every day the masters of war fight
the human consensus, masters who,
stumbling upon disputes, provide
not wisdom but lethal arms to every
side, who in the face of Earth’s limits
of materials wage their public war
for control and to gut education.
And yet we’re here to recognize
those who’ve stood for peaceful
coexistence, who understand links
of firing off a missile to destruction
on the ground, who can envision
many years of peace, with altruism
toward those in need, and not forget
that war is a catastrophic collapse.
James Grabill
James Grabill’s work appears in Caliban, Harvard Review, Terrain, Mobius, Shenandoah, Seattle Review, Stand, and many others. Books – Poem Rising Out of the Earth (1994), An Indigo Scent after the Rain (2003), Lynx House Press. Environmental prose poems, Sea-Level Nerve: Books One (2014), Two (2015), Wordcraft of Oregon. For many years, he taught all kinds of writing as well as “systems thinking” and global issues relative to sustainability.
