Lament for Mariupol It is impossible to get lost in flattened ruins as grainy char will always point you towards hell, and tall buildings wavering in the hazy Slavic evening no longer obstruct violent red horizons. This long-forgotten place, squeezed between the wide European plain and the cold deep of the Azov Sea, is nowContinue reading “Lament for Mariupol. a poem by Jack J. B. Hutchens”
Category Archives: Poetry
3 poems for Ukraine. by Katia Kapovich
Chronicles of this war In February the world became silent like a mouse, you open a comp to see a falling house, an old man embracing what is left, a puppy, while in the background burns a flying canopy that somehow flew through the broken window glass. So the old man takes an empty bottle,Continue reading “3 poems for Ukraine. by Katia Kapovich”
Ancestral Home. a poem by Olga Stein
Ancestral Home My mother’s and my father’s parents, babushki, dedushki, cousins galore were born in Ukraine, in towns and cities, whose names make up familial lore. Odessa, Zhytomyr, Kyiv — known to me places comprise a timeline, whole lines of descent that emanate from memories, where half-familiar faces return and sweeten them like a belovedContinue reading “Ancestral Home. a poem by Olga Stein”
Another thing about a war. a poem by Nina Kossman
Another thing about a war Another thing about a war (besides the thing we all know, the one about killing) is that, once it begins, you have no right to talk about small things, such as koalas, trees, melting ice, poems, and paintings, which, when you think about it, are worth talking about more thanContinue reading “Another thing about a war. a poem by Nina Kossman”
Messenger. a poem by John Eliot
Messenger 4.10 a.m. I’m not looking for someone awake, just saw you on line, don’t really know you. We met, I found you cold. My wife tells me you are warm, kind; maybe it was me, full of himself, il poeta, the concert. Signed a lot of books that night in late sun and beautyContinue reading “Messenger. a poem by John Eliot”
Sonnet for Floating. by Paul Ilechko
Sonnet for Floating I was between the diamonds of the earth’s moisture floating on a raft on a lake and I had fallen into a dream where everything kept disappearing until I was surrounded by nothing but sky and then in my dream I realized that the sky was in fact a mirror image ofContinue reading “Sonnet for Floating. by Paul Ilechko”
2 poems by Debra Black
a bad case of the asymmetrical blues or how to survive a pandemic a cracking, thrumming, vibrating, anxious heart beating, rising, throttling, digging deeper into paranoia, drifting into illness, echoes around the world. body counts, pieces of humanity strewn across the sky, hidden in the Duomo tattered and weary, the end of the world. theContinue reading “2 poems by Debra Black”
What Hunger Costs. a poem by Susan Glickman
What Hunger Costs I. All every creature wants is to survive virus or human, bat or pangolin – though in this case we may resent its drive life’s just cells mutating from within. That’s why we like to pillage habitats not ours, arboreal or aquatic, looking for stuff to use. We don’t care that theContinue reading “What Hunger Costs. a poem by Susan Glickman”
3 poems by Emily Hockaday
Household Mirages In an alternate universe, we painted this wall yellow— goldenrod like a kitchen should be. I see our shadows cross entryways and hover over the wall by the stove. Your hands were the setting sun, bringing down the hanging plants for thirst. In another universe, the two-bedroom is a three-bedroom, or only aContinue reading “3 poems by Emily Hockaday”
3 poems by Patrick Connors
Virus We are all having the same nightmare, overcome by an invisible, relentless enemy completely unable to protect ourselves. People are dying by the dozens doing the work, we take for granted. Undervalued, often underpaid labour suddenly something we can’t live without. People are dying alone in soiled beds made up of despair. They lieContinue reading “3 poems by Patrick Connors”
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