Writing on the Wall

Trace chalk dust memorializes

my childhood blackboard. Washable, 

no-muss markers replace broken 

crayons in tin cans in my old 

Chicago brick school house.

Capital and lower-case cursive 

letters on my elementary class 

walls pushed penmanship, no 

longer required by tech teaching 

and digitized communication.

I input my password on today’s

screen to catch news bytes, poke

family and friends, travel to virtual 

Ireland, and print anything – guns to 

gowns, from my 3D printer. The only

scene that hasn’t changed since 

I was a Windy City school girl is 

the news – Russian-American tension, 

Arab-Israeli conflict, world hunger, 

end-of-the-world pollution. Will there

be an app developed to fix 

the human condition?

© Patsy Asunción, 2018

Abandoned school in New Orleans
Photo by Tiffany Bailey
from Wikimedia Commons

Oz Dreams

Oz is the land

we dream of

on nights when giants stalk

the gloomy woods,

and wicked witches wait

beyond the curve of the yellow brick road.

Dorothy, sturdy and ever cheerful,

braves the terrors lurking there,

giving courage

to orphans everywhere.

© Peg Latham,  2016

Haitian orphans after the 2010 earthquake
Photo by Marcello Casal Jr, for Agência Brasil, a public Brazilian news agency
from Wikimedia Commons

To My Father on His 100th Birthday

The bent wood of the empty highchair

Darkens each year, even though the caning

Holds up against the long-departed weight

Of your tiny body crying out for its first

Solid foods, even as the influenza raged

Around you and the bodies piled up.

My sister posts a photograph I’ve never seen,

You in your grandfather Lucius’s arms, 

Grandmother Frances stiffly looking on 

In her dark full length dress, the wood

Paneling dark and your father’s darkness

Not yet revealed in his downward loving gaze.

Your eyes alone look outward their innocence

Unfocused on any of the hammers fated later

To fall, your father’s becoming a stockbroker

In 1928, your wife’s madness, your daughter’s

Crib death, the corporate world’s finding

That you were another expendable engineer.

The wondrous light in your eyes appears now

To forgive it all in advance, under your father’s

Eyes saying silently I have made something good

Even though twelve years later he would put

His head in the oven, and thereafter would smoke

Himself to death while you sailed sea and sky.

The walls you built left a shadow so far behind

The scrim of unwanted memory that it is only

Now that I can see him, standing there at thirty

In bright tie and rounded collar tips his gaze

And his father’s gaze on you and your eyes

Only now, in a century’s blink, are my eyes.

© Bill Prindle, 2018

van Campen family portrait in a landscape
by Frans Hals, with the baby lower left
added by Salomon de Bray
Toledo Museum of Art
from Wikimedia Commons

THE CITY OF LIGHT—PARIS AGAIN—NOVEMBER 2015

Now we are a tear in the shape of a person—

a tear that screams.

Or maybe we are a blood-drop who is a person—

blood that wails

and walks or rather stumbles

upon our planet formed

to be a blood-drop, a teardrop,

and the entire planet is screaming.

The planet and we, made for one another,

are pain moving upon pain.

The planet floats, reels

upon a foundation

that is not a noble elephant,

a patiently pleasant turtle,

or the dependable shoulders of Atlas.

The planet floats, reels

upon perhaps sounder foundation—

whole horror.

Now we know that there are Believers

who adore horror.

Those Believers may rejoice

when joy is destroyed,

supposedly convinced

that the only purity is pollution,

cruelty the sole permissible cult,

death the one true faith.

So the soul, like the Earth,

attains the purity of worshipped pollution.

Terror thus may compose reality,

and a screaming tear, a drop that is a person,

will not be heard.

Who among gods in the depths of height

can concoct help, healing, wellness?

Has hope been conceived yet,

a mirror in the void to answer

our own agonized shining?

And yet, despite terror, we do shine at times,

a shape, a drop trained by love,

that survives by shining

for the sake of shining.

The curve of a tear may be defined therefore

as a smile, a smiling blood-drop.

Are we brave enough to re-invent fun

as wellness inconceivable

by its well-trained killers?

Is killing the same as believing?

Somewhere, Someone has conceived of purity

that is fun, which is not pollution.

“Those Believers want to destroy

the things worth living for—

food, wine, friends.” 

© Stephen Margulies, 2017

Christmas Illumination Champs-Elysées, Paris
Photo by Didier Boy de la Tour;
Koert Vermeulen principal lighting designer & Marcos Vinals Bassols artistic director
from Wikimedia Commons

Christmas in My Heart

for Scott Coskie, a talented theater director who 

loved Christmas and everything Disney

Defying December winds

one blustery day,

we happily strung Christmas lights

across your front yard.

Dressed in Disney ornaments

your tree, glistening through the window

as inside, tinseled shelves of snowy cotton

set a stage for village life.

Within my mind, there still exists

a dancing Pinocchio,

the gift your heart couldn't help but crave

one Christmas long ago.

Watercolor memories,

abstracted and blurred,

melding Christmas past into Christmas present,

alive and aglow,

bringing you back each year 

as angelic characters fill my ears

and Christmas comes to my heart!

© Shelly Sitzer, 2017

Pinocchio and Cantinflas marionettes
at the National Puppet Museum
in Huamantla, Tlaxcala, Mexico
by Alejandro Linares Garcia
from Wikimedia Commons

Understanding Fiction

A two-year-old calls out “Ring, Ring!” and hands us

a play phone, and we take it and say “Hello.”

We carry on a full conversation

if need be, and chances are we need to,

smiles and all. 

                         Does it matter if the child

doesn’t follow all that we say? We could

speak of Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck

or pray for our long-dead Uncle Hutchins,

so long as the illusion is strong.

Chances are the child plays another game

while you talk, stacking bright rings on a peg,

perhaps, or painting her nails with a toothbrush

and the dog’s water bowl.  

                                            When she grows up,

she’ll not remember much more than the phone.

Uncle Hutchins remains just a name

on a list in the family Bible,

and the giants of jazz are just as dead

as he to this child who recalls nothing

but the faded pink phone we held, our voice,

our presence. 

           It’s a time of worthy deceit,

don’t you think? And this poem a parable

that says fiction can carry a good truth,

and  that we who write know the lessons

of irony better than most; we can conjoin

the two ends of this lie about a phone

into something strong enough to outlast

this moment and carry her on somewhere

we don’t now know, but which, if we are lucky,

we’ll live to write about some day.

            © David Black, 2017

Corbin Fleming, brother of 2011 March of Dimes National Ambassador
Lauren Fleming, plays with United States President Barack Obama's telephone
during his family's visit to the Oval Office on 7 February 2012.
Photo by Pete Souza, posted to White House Flickr Account.
From Wikimedia Commons 

Pegasus Dream

A wild Pegasus grazes

next to Star B Stables in Virginia,

ready to spread his lacy wings

and rise above the weepy clouds.

But the preverbal horse

relies on the words of a fickle poet

to make him fly.

If only there were just a Pegasus problem,

an idle poet could solve it.

If only there was just one lie,

a word could make it right —

to awake the dreamer,

to raise the dead.

The brilliance of words brings confusion —

they were mighty, now they are useless.

A peek at a stranger’s grocery list

tells me more than a hundred poems.

Pegasus glimpses the leafy forest,

the steep road to a grassy field,

lusts after the weepy clouds.

But the pathetic horse cannot wing his way

without the words of the fickle poet.

On the wooden porch stands

an abandoned broken rocker.

Pegasus and poet left

to wring out a few more lines

from memories of the leafy forest,

the steep road to a grassy field,

the weepy clouds.

The sunken, colorless eyes of Pegasus —

the defeat sprang from euphoria.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2017

Four Muses and Pegasus on Parnassus
Painting by Caesar van Everdingen, c. 1650
The Hague, The Netherlands
from Wikimedia Commons