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Another child is dying in Gaza as I type. Another one now. And now. And now.
A mother slides into the blood of what’s left of her son, her daughter, and picks up a severed hand to hold, one last time. A father gathers the pieces of his children into a Ziploc bag so they can have a grave that isn’t under their shattered home.
In Israel, women wait, wail for their husbands, their sons, to come home. Will they? Will they still be themselves if they do? And what is happening to the women and girls still held by Hamas, who slink through their tunnels, paid for with bread money, meant to feed their people?
Does anyone outside Israel remember the music festival now? The kibbutzes now? The murdered families? The hatred that was ejaculated into women, into girls, before a shot to their heads?
And Ukraine. Do we still weep for Ukraine two years into Russia’s invasion? Or think of Sudan, ten months into a war of unspeakable violence that must be spoken and loudly, for all the world to know. A war that’s been invisible to the West, including myself. With gang rapes (there are always gang rapes). And the killing of parents in front of their children (there is always killing of parents in front of their children). 1.7 million refugees have fled their homes.
In Russia, Navalny is dead. Who will fight for a different vision of Russia now? Who will dare oppose power now?
For those of us at WordCity Literary Journal, the poetry and most of the prose in this issue deal with war. It is dedicated to those lost to and lost in the violence of humankind’s collective failure to love one another enough not to take aim and kill. It is an indictment of our failure to elect (where that is possible) leaders who understand that the loss of one innocent life is one too many. A memorial to our human failure to see ourselves and our loved ones in the faces of the “other.”
We have no solutions here.
Terrorists and authoritarians and the corrupt, those who have destroyed their own humanity for the sake of power, and hide from the consequences of their own crimes, will not stop and will not surrender.
At the same time, on the streets of our cities, in our shops and workplaces and schools, we throw sticks and stones with our words, too foul to repeat here. Too foul, too, to close our ears and refuse to hear.
Antisemitism is on the rise. Islamophobia, too. And instead of reaching to one another with compassion and mutual sorrow, to many of us tighten our fists with hate for one other and for each other’s flags.
Stop. Just stop.
That’s what we ask.
Take this time to read. Read aloud, even. Listen. And really listen to the words in this issue. To what those who are in pain have to say. And then go out and love your neighbour, knowing that everyone is your neighbour.
Please.
Fiction. edited by Sylvia Petter
William Cass
Reckless
When I was a little boy, I lived for a short time with my uncle’s family while my mom, his younger sister, spent a stint in rehab. He had a big house on a lake in a wealthy enclave of Detroit and stayed home most of the time, so I was never sure what he did for work. Besides his wife, who I remember as grim and generally invisible, my cousin, Gary, also lived there. I was nine at the time, and Gary was a few years older. He wasn’t happy about me moving in and treated me with open disdain. As a result, I avoided him and sequestered myself in the bedroom they put me in. The room had a small roll-top desk, antique and mahogany, that I loved and which my uncle had owned since before he was married. I was intrigued by all its little nooks and hidden crannies; for some reason, it felt both exotic and cozy to me. My uncle knew how I felt and held a similar affinity for the desk, and it created a kind of quiet bond between us.
My mother’s rehab stint, which was finally a successful one, ended after six weeks, and I returned with her to Cleveland where they’d grown up and where she’d secured a job in a halfway house. Even with our proximity to my uncle’s family, we had no real contact with them again that I was aware of aside from Christmas cards. My mother eventually ran several halfway houses in the area, and I matriculated through college there, too, before beginning my career as an elementary school teacher in an older suburb nearby. My brief marriage ended abruptly when my wife left me for another man, but I filled my time afterwards outside work as best I could with activities like long walks, baking, and trying to learn to play the clarinet. My mother passed away not long after my divorce, just after I turned thirty, and several years later, I received an email at work from Gary telling me that his mother and father had died, too, in a car accident.
“I located your email address on your district’s website,” he wrote. “I remembered from one of your mom’s Christmas cards that you’d been teaching in Middleburg Heights. Anyway, I wanted you to know about my parents’ deaths and that my father left you that old roll-top desk of his in his will. I don’t have your home address, so I shipped it to your school. Hope that’s okay.”
I was in my classroom during a lunch break as I read his message and sat back shaking my head when I finished. I frowned as I re-read it and wasn’t sure how to reply, so just typed, “Okay, thanks. Very sorry for your loss.” Then I logged off and stared out over the empty student desks. It was raining, I remember, the sound of it mingling with student voices from the cafeteria down the hall. I’d already begun imagining which important items I’d store in the desk and how I’d arrange them.
Maria Saba
Dad’s Work
My mother sews. She buys yards and yards of white fabric, cuts them into long pieces, which she stiches together to make large sacks. Once, when she was out, I went into one and rolled around on the floor. I couldn’t see her coming because I was inside the sack. I heard her scream and tried to unwind myself. She pulled me out and then she squeezed me in her arms and made me promise never to do that again. I didn’t understand why but promised just to stop her tears.
My father shoots. On the last Friday of each month my father takes me to work. We carry these white sacks and place them on a shelf. Then my father takes his gun from a cabinet and goes to the prison courtyard. I spread my notebook and crayons on his desk at the office. I tear up a page and put it aside to keep a ledger.
Yek, do, seh. Bang.
I hear a thud and draw a line on my ledger and then a two-storey brick house with four windows, two on each floor, and a purple door.
Yek, do, seh. Bang.
I hear a thud and add a line to my ledger and a chimney to my house. Smoke goes out of the chimney toward a yellow sun with rays spreading in all directions.
Yek, do, seh. Bang.
Non-Fiction. Edited by Olga Stein
Olga Stein and Yahia Lababidi
Conversation
He who fights monsters should see to it that, in the process, he does not become a monster.
— Nietzsche
Open Letter To Israel
By Yahia Lababidi
Tell me, what steel entered your heart,
what fear made you rabid,
what hate drove out pity?
How could you forget
that how we fight a battle
determines who we become.
When did you grow reckless
with the state of your soul?
We are responsible for our enemy.
Compassion is to consider the role
that we play in their creation.
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
Strange, how one hate enables another;
how they are like unconscious allies,
darkly united in blocking out the Light.
Yes, we can lend ideas our breath, but ideals —
Peace, Justice, Freedom — require our entire lives,
and, all who are tormented by such ideals
must learn to make an ally of humility.
Truth and conscience can be like large, bothersome flies —
brush them away and they return, buzzing louder:
30,000 souls lost, 2/3 of whom are women & children …
these are unbearable casualties to ignore.
To speak nothing of the intangible casualties:
damage done to our collective psyche, trust, and sleep.
No more nightmares. Please, give us back our dreams.
We can still begin, again, and must.
Wisdom is a return to innocence.
* * *
I do not love you right now
By Olga Stein
I do not love you right now,
though one day I may.
Right now, I do not love the you with angry eyes,
intense and beautiful.
(Pardon me, for the unintended exoticizing;
and for nearly writing exorcizing, by mistake.)
I see you standing across the street
beneath the arched doorway with colourful stones,
announcing the gateway to a home.
You remind me of a panther, with eyes that watch,
wait for me to lower my guard,
so you can spring and tear me to shreds.
I do not love this you.
You do not acknowledge the beauty in me/us.
One day, when you begin to love me back —
when you smile and call me sis or aunt or your Rita —
then I will love and honour you
perhaps more than myself.
* * *
Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution
Reflections on the Anthology and on Activism in the Arts
I have been thinking for a time of what I’m about to say from an outsider’s perspective. Well, the world is small enough to make all of us insiders.
This is another insider’s perspective.
Iran is on the other side of the world. Ukraine, on the other hand, is a little bit closer to us here in Canada, and if anyone here has been transfixed by the war in Ukraine, they will most likely know that Russia uses Iranian drones against Ukraine’s cities. Similarly, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard army has sent thousands of Syrian refugees our way with the part it played in viciously suppressing the uprising against Syria’s dictator.
If Canadian citizens can’t always count on their safety in China, as we saw with the imprisonment of the two Michaels, Canadians also can’t count on being safe in Iran, where twenty years ago the journalist Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian citizen, was tortured to death in Tehran’s Evin Prison.
There’s all that to ruminate on at a time like this, and there’s also the simple reality that women’s rights are human rights. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate spoke here in Toronto in September 2023. This was Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian woman.[1] She was a judge in Tehran before the Islamic Republic swept her and other women off the bench. So she resumed her career as a human rights lawyer, and she’s now forced to live in exile. What Shirin Ebadi told her Toronto audience was that democracy in Iran would come in through the gate of women’s rights.
We can no longer imagine a working democratic government anywhere on earth where one-half of the population are second-class citizens and all leadership positions are reserved by law and custom for men alone. And we can’t imagine a benevolent, humane, or even workable society that marginalizes its women.
Put simply, it has been 44 years since the revolution that led to the Islamic Republic, and a large part of Iran’s population has had enough. We would say that the regime has lost its legitimacy: its aims and ideals no longer ring true for the people, and its systems and methods don’t serve any desirable purpose for them. You can compare this disillusionment and frustration with the level of alienation the populations of Eastern Europe felt towards their own governments before the Berlin Wall fell.
But a government that has lost its legitimacy can still carry on if it has cold steel in its heart.
Over the years there have been periodic waves of protests in Iran. Many of these were quashed with rivers of blood, sometimes targeting the country’s minorities for special violence. The protestors complained about things like the government raising prices of necessities, or the national election commission falsifying the count in the presidential election. Yet it took one atrocity against a single woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, to spark the revolution (no mere protest) happening now, which is a call for an end to the system, not for its reform.
The slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran and by their supporters outside Iran is now recognized worldwide: Woman, Life, Freedom. It encompasses hopes and ideals for all people everywhere. The poetry anthology we are publicizing and supporting aims to echo the cry “Woman, Life, Freedom,” and to spread it.
Literary Spotlight. Lisa Pasold in Conversation with Sue Burge
For this issue, I am delighted to be interviewing Lisa Pasold, a peripatetic powerhouse of a writer who defies definition!
Lisa, you are a very well travelled writer and I know you are based in both Paris and New Orleans as well as having grown up in Canada. So firstly, how did you become a writer? Did you know from early on that that’s what you wanted to do and did where you were living at the time feed into/influence your writing? What drew you to Paris? Was it the city’s rich associations with literature, language and culture or something else…?
I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time that I could read. The first book I read for myself was Dr Seuss’ Hop on Pop, a poetry classic of sorts. Growing up in Montréal, I heard many languages—two official ones, French & English, but also a great cosmopolitan range of other languages including Kanyen’kéha (Mohawk) the main Indigenous language of the area. My parents accumulated books in every room of the house, from Shakespeare to Sci-Fi paperbacks to multi-volume academic histories of Peru. Plus, while I was a kid, my mother was studying to get her Masters degree in Canadian Literature—a radical move in the 1970s, since Canadians traditionally studied “classics”, aka European writers. So, from the moment I understood books were a thing, I also understood that literature was alive, especially as I went with my parents to all kinds of readings—formal university author talks, bookstore launches, and wild hippy performance events. I started writing “officially” when I was six, making chapbooks out of left-over fabric and paper bags—my mum was very into recycle/reuse before it was cool, so there were always craft materials available. As for Paris, that was more of a chance encounter: my father is originally Czech, and when I was twenty, I wanted to rediscover my European roots; since I don’t speak Czech or German, I ended up in Paris for purely practical reasons—I can speak French. But then, I fell in love with the city.
Books and Reviews. Edited by Geraldine Sinyuy
Winter’s Reward of Words. A Review of Books by Gordon Phinn
Books Referenced:
Dirty Money, Financial Crime in Canada, Christian Leuprecht & Jamie Ferrill, (McGill/Queens 2023)
The Scent of Flowers at Night, Leila Slimani (Coronet, 2023)
Stray Dogs, Rawi Hage (Knopf Canada 2023)
The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society, Christine Estima (Anansi 2023)
Imagining Imagining, Gary Barwin (Wolsak & Wynn 2023)
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, Raja Shehadeh (Other Press 2023)
Like Figs in Autumn, Ben Bastomski (Delphinium Books 2023)
Instead, Maria Coffey (Rocky Mountain Books 2023)
And The Andes Disappeared, Caroline Dawson (Bookhug Press 2023)
Two Purdys, A Double Portrait, Brian Purdy (Pottersfield Press 2023)
Some would say summer at the cottage or the beach, while others might argue for the cool departures of autumn, and yet others the front porch with the first tastes of spring sun, coffee, toast, fruit of one’s choice, but for me winter is the optimum season for postponing one’s life with all manner of narrative detours, the poetry of exhilaration, exhaustion and all points in between. Those long hours of dark can become a contagion of cozy once the burden of indoor chores is shoved aside. Skiers and skaters need not apply, while domestic pets are required to sleep by one’s slippers.
Now that that is taken care of let’s plunge into the snake pit of Dirty Money, where moral compasses always point to cheating, a sobering compendium of financial skullduggery right here in our home and native land. With chapters like “Washing Money In A Canadian Laundromat”, “Taken To The Cleaners: How Canada Can Start To Fix Its Money-Laundering Problem”, “Underground Banking In Canada”, “Canadian Cryptocurrency Conundrums: A Socio-Technical Systems Analysis of Crypto Laundering In Canada” and “Task Specialization in Organized Crime Groups: Money Laundering and the Montreal Mafia”, you can see the breadth of the investigative scope involved. If you found yourself satisfied with the one or two articles and scandal scooping you may have come across in the popular press, then go no further. This worthy collection is aimed at those involved in the field as analysts, investigators and ambitious thesis architects. It belongs on reference shelves where it can be consulted for the deep dive it provides. Make no mistake though, our beloved country is up to its neck in financial irregularities and illegalities, despite the continued efforts of those involved in its discovery, exposure and eradication. If I may go all Zen on you for a moment, both problems and their solutions arise simultaneously out of the void, ready to be activated. Life invites you to cheer for whatever team strikes your fancy, and it has lately come to my attention that purveyors of lies and fraud seem to be doing awfully well in the heroes and villains’ stakes.
Diana Manole’s Praying to a Landed-Immigrant God.
A review by Adriana Onita
“Stubbornly I keep writing poems in Romanian”: Review of Diana Manole’s New Dual-Language Collection
Diana Manole immigrated to Canada in 2000, but she never stopped writing in her mother tongue. After twenty-three years in the country, her seventh poetry book, Praying to a Landed-Immigrant God / Rugându-mă la un Dumnezeu emigrant (2023), found a home with Niagara Falls, Canada-based indie publisher Grey Borders Books. This English-Romanian dual-language edition surprises the reader with every turn of the page:
Mă încăpăţânez să scriu versuri în româneşte
şi mă îndrăgostesc de fiecare cuvânt
Stubbornly I keep writing poems in Romanian
and falling in love with every line
Manole wrote all but three of the autobiographical poems in this collection in Romanian and then co-translated them into English with her long-time collaborator, Adam J. Sorkin. The book is curated into seven parts, with six of the sections corresponding to different periods of the author’s new life in her adoptive country. Baring captivating section titles such as Diana-canadiana în lumina albastră / Diana-Canadiana in the Blue Light (3 August 2000 – 16 August 2002), this collection invites the reader into an intimate story of immigration, with lush yet precise, flirtatious yet brutally sincere language.
Poetry. Edited by Clara Burghelea
Alexia Kalogeropoulou
A moment of silence
A moment of silence
for the human masses
that boarded once
on the trains
with etched skin
and then they disappeared
from visible
and invisible death machines.
A moment of silence
for the innocent
who are buried today
in holy lands.
For the children
of Palestine
who are looking for their mother
among the ruins
with crimson wounds
in the soul and the body.
A lifetime of silence
for the human suffering
that corrupted mouths are encouraging
from wealthy apartments,
and Pontius Pilate's silence allows.
They are not numbers, they are persons
like you and me.
And their life is sacred,
like yours.
Where did the memory of death go?
Jennifer Wenn
One Malignant Spirit
Like waves on the ocean
they crest and roll past,
always another in their wake,
tragic echoes of a timeless truth:
just one malignant spirit in power is needed,
lusting to warp the world
around hallucination,
each name a poisonous desecration
that will not be written here,
just one clawing at all and sundry
to draw in and corrupt,
to reveal and empower depravity,
just one to accrete a mob,
together spawning a
river of murdered voices
as singular as bread-line prey of a sniper,
as multiform as victims in a mass grave.
Antony Di Nardo
Among the Trees
What kind of times are these
when a conversation about trees
is almost a crime
because it implies silence
about so many atrocities.
—Bertolt Brecht
You add a teaspoon of honey,
amber and gold, to the headlines you read
and stir until you have an opinion
You pick sides
like I pick a trail through the woods
where I live on the same side as the trees
apples and cherries, rivers of larches,
maples and hemlocks,
woodlands for keeping things quiet
You know the smell of concrete, of rubble
and blood, rebar and death, the stench
of bullets and blades
You’ve been to Beirut and back to the past,
back to Aleppo and the wailing of walls,
back to the future that has come and has gone
You pick sides like I pick the colours of autumn,
amber and gold, the scarlet of maple,
ruby and red like the blood in our veins
You pick sides—green apples or cherries,
half empty or full, your left from your right,
how we should live and who we let die—
as I step into the woods
where the trees are at peace
and I walk among them
Lisa Reynolds
These Hands
These hands have touched the dead
Mothers, fathers
Little ones I can’t bear
To speak of – but carry
Life should not be like this
Not end like this
Cries echo
Can you hear them
Hear their disbelief
Adrienne Stevenson
Target Practice
when as children we played games
we could always touch home
and be free
home the lodestone of our lives
sanctuary and comfort
welcoming, secure
now, engage empathy, consider
homes not all that far away
turned upside down
no longer shelter, warmth, rest
pinpoint-shattered peace
only rubble remains
lest we feel complacency
those same places turned unawares
into a rapid-fire future
Mona Mehas
Report
Tyrant's forces left country a shambles
world court demanded he pay
he scoffed at arrest warrant
flew through the dark
to conceal damages
turned a deaf ear
to mothers' pleas
empty arms
hardened hearts
How many more must suffer
as hawks and doves argue?
Marsha Barber
Raw
What use is poetry
except to say
our hearts hide
in safe houses—
burned alive,
in kibbutzim—
babies slaughtered, fed
to fire,
in the desert—
girls raped near corpses
tortured and defiled.
What use is poetry
as captives lie
in their blood,
no light, no warmth, no balm.
We stumble through
this darkness,
ruined, raw
our only hope—
to clutch
our bloodied pens.
First published in Am Yisrael Chai anthology, ed. Rabbi Menachem Creditor, 2023
Carole Giangrande
Doctor and Cat
Gaza; heard on BBC
It doesn’t matter whose side he’s on.
Forget sides. I can’t help thinking
of this doctor, stunned, soul pierced
by suffering; how, dazed, he searched
for his terrified cat; knowing the touch
of his bloodied hand would comfort
a frightened creature, knowing her softness
would bring him rest. In time, he found her,
cradled her, child-innocent; tiny cries
against the terrible darkness; how I imagine
his whisper, there now, murmuring
humble words she could not grasp,
hoping his voice, at least, could calm her,
hoping his gentleness mattered,
having forgotten what battle
he’s supposed to fight, lost as he was
among the dead, holding
in his arms inchoate sorrow, cry
of this earth, our grief.
Jay Yair Broadbar
Untitled, it is
too raw on the eye,
too raw for the pen.
The seen cannot
be unseen.
A crib—emptied save a small
teddy sodden in curdles of blood.
The young woman yanked out
of an armored jeep, her back
to the screen, cherry-red
splotches congealed on her jeans.
A wall lined with family photos—
young marrieds, elders bearded
in old country sepias, a smile
at the tractor’s wheel:
all mute, untouched—
all else uprooted, over-
turned. Strewn. More
blood. More bullet holes.
Mansour Noorbakhsh
How Come?
After, "Prayer For Sunset" by Leonard Cohen.
Today could still be a good day.
Believe in occasional love.
A hunter, a friend of mine,
spent a whole night atop a tree coaxing a bear
that followed the smell of burnt honey to its death.
“How come?” I asked him.
“Leave a door open for imagination.
A chance to love.”
“Bear symbolizes rebirth
because of its hibernation
and re-emergence.” He answered.
Weapons run out like death itself.
Prayers come to back up the shortage.
What does not end is the disturbed sleeps
of explosions.
There is a market that trades imaginations for weapons.
Where the imagination of love is sacrificed
by the myth of rebirth.
Rebirth, a used excuse to justify wars.
Jameson Chee-Hing
A Fallen Sun
The sun shines
We do not see
Blinded by rage
Wars
Senseless slaughter
We hurt each other
The sun shines
Darkness in our hearts
Consumes us
There is goodness in us
We do not see
That light so bright
Burning like a thousand suns
But buried
Veiled
Like a fallen sun
Why must it be this way?
The sun has fallen
It may never rise again
Why should it?
Why would it?
When will we ever learn?
Sheila E. Tucker
knitting socks
how much more can I hear and see
of our macrocosm
seared onto tv screen
blasted into newspaper
cellphone tablet radio
mother of two naked
lying face down dead
metal screws hammered into torso
bullets through saturated pelvis
husband’s body nearby
except for his head
which rolled down a ditch
eyes and mouth wide open
how much more can I hear and see
children crushed under concrete
bullets tearing through teenagers
grandmothers’ limbs trapped
boys stiff from hypothermia
fathers carrying dead daughters
cheek bones prominent
jaw line sharp
how much more can I hear and see
through centuries past and future
invasion torture subjugation
iconoclasm suppression appropriation
enslavement then and now
one-percenters then and now
apathy fury revolution war
then and now
then
and
now
how much more can I hear and see
oh yes you say but many are kind
think of doctors without borders
church ladies knitting socks
food kitchens shelters
second-hand sneakers
charities and don’t forget
a simple smile
will brighten someone’s day
no! not enough I tell you
not enough
Masayuki Tanabe
The Little Girl in a Bomb Shelter
As Putin’s war rages
Like the fire of the netherworld
A little girl sings “Let it go”
In a bomb shelter
To lift the dampened spirits
Of the people there
If I could speak to her heart
I would say
“Keep singing brave child
Don’t let your heavenly voice be silenced
And encourage others to burst into song
No matter how infernal life gets
You are the Anne Frank of your generation
The world needs people like you
To inspire them
To douse the flames of their indifference
History will remember you
As a bastion of hope
And an emblem of courage
If you don’t let dire circumstances
Slay the beautiful cherub within you”
Geraldine Sinyuy
The Meditation of a South Sudanese Refugee
Why has the ground under my feet become so shifty?
Why has the comportment of the government become so dirty?
When and how did we get here?
Why are the mountains grumbling like a charged diarrhea?
How long shall I walk these winding roads of displacement?
I behold cracked feet and broken faces,
Starveling children clinging to dehydrated mother’s breast,
Can’t you see the eyes baked white in hunger?
Oh you that cause this displacement,
Tell me,
Can one person occupy a whole nation?
Why can’t you let the people be?
I mourn the loss of loved ones
Slashed by the swords of the enemies,
Swarming in on humans like bees,
The senseless helpless gun bearers,
How long will you wait to repent?
You soldiers
of death!
How long will you torment the innocent with your charged irons?
How long will you keep doing wrong?
Pratibha Castle
In the Slips
While the world watches,
Violetta, clad in years
the measure of a week,
journeys from Odessa
with her doll and cat
and a Granny, face
a crumpled map
of lifetime drills
framed by a scarf
the colour of loss
compels a soldier boy
put this flower in your pocket
hopes his flesh, rotted
into trampled mud
bone and blood
transmutes to
a claggy womb,
will birth a crop
of smiling sunflowers
and a mob
of men in black
as if spectators
at a cricket match
watch a tank
grizzle over cobblestones
across the city square
while a man
sprints into its path
scoops up a hand- grenade
underarms it
at a pile of stones
the dog-end
dangling from his lip
a red-eyed fuse
Adriana Onita
Shaheed شهيد
"As you prepare your breakfast, think of others."
— Mahmoud Darwish
Today, I learned a new word.
شهيد Shaheed. Witness.
One letter separates martor from martir.
One who knows / One who knows the truth.
* *
Reem—a cerulean laugh when your grandfather Khaled
tosses you into the air.
Hind—two pigtails, braided with almond blossoms.
A high-pitched voice on the phone: come and get me, please come.
* *
Israel kills five children in Gaza every hour.
You tell me: This line isn't necessary.
A poem should be a refuge.
Marthese Fenech
Shavasana
And how can the light in me
Honour the light in you
When my light burns so dim
Because I can’t hold
Downward dog for fifteen seconds
Without thinking about the
Fifteen children
Who have lost limbs and lives to rockets
In the time it takes me to get the pose
Right
Or when I stand in Vrksasana and stretch my arms
Like branches to the sky
I do not see the stars
Just a constellation of scars
And I think of all the olive trees
Uprooted like so many lives
And child’s pose
How do I rest in child’s pose
When
When
When
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