NEW Poetry from Drew Attana, recalling the days of duck-and-cover defense drills, and the horror of today's school shootings.
"My father told me his school had drills during
the missile crisis. They had to get
beneath wooden desks and lace their fingers
to protect their skulls from the coming blast,
a proper helmet against fiery debris."
NEW poetry from Alia Hussain Vancrown that mixes the spiritual with the ordinary.
"Where does the will to live
exist, when year after year,
loved ones row out
into the darkness, and only
the vessels return?"
and then a day passes
and you still don’t have a doctor
and you’ve got
cancer
and you’re 37
and you still don’t have a doctor
The camel is at the top of my tree,
but he cannot climb to the silver star.
We ride on his humps
to mummies also bound to the earth
and pyramids of mud and brick.
And now there are green walls,
babies fall out of me,
mountains crush the horizon,
and the coyotes stalk our cats.
I watch my feet, how they tread on graves,
and my hands weave blankets before the sun can rise,
blankets with the constellation of Libra,
with its binary and double stars,
claws of the scorpion and scales,
its home built on air.
She can wear anything she
wants now, jeans, a t-shirt, a backwards baseball cap, a
food-splattered muumuu, or even nothing at all.
Nobody’s left to see her do her work, tugging
stubborn teeth free from blast-cleaned skulls
with a rusty set of pliers, a
string tied to an anvil, an old claw hammer.
He seemed to know
everything and nothing, as if space-time
ran right through him and he merely channeled
its Tao. He could feel the rhythm, the rhyme
of all things, understood the untrammeled
Force in all its power.
