A Man Walks Into An Embassy                                                                             

For journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.  1958-2018

by Annie Klier Newcomer


A man walks into an embassy and he never walks out.

Like the migrating pelican seeking nourishment
found dead in Alabama, black electrical tape
wrapped around its beak, rope binding
one wing to its feet, its dark feathers
blending in with the ground cover of stone.

Like black rhinos stalked and poached for horns,
religious beliefs and fun, damaged animals
moaning, tortured before dying while bow hunters 
spend hours tracking their blood trails.
Like a starfish dismembered, waiting for regeneration.

A drone of 15 lures, takes out one lone wolf. What
cowardice in this? What satisfaction in such sport?
Suitcases dripping with coral far more red
then a blood moon. The Haunting has begun. Free Speech
disappears if his words are allowed to fall off the page.


* * * * *

"A Man Walks Into An Embassy" is part of Annie Klier Newcomer's new poetry collection Comets: Relationships that Wander (Finishing Line Press, February 25, 2022).

Annie Klier Newcomer teaches poetry classes at Turning Point, a Center for Hope & Healing in Kansas City, Kansas. She also helps coach chess for After-School Programs in mid-town KC. Annie writes as a way to connect and to add value to her life. Presently she is an editor for Flapper Press Poetry Café and a member of the Key West Cigar Factory Poetry Group.

Mass

by Kelly Nickie


I smiled at him
not because
he was the designated
Don Juan
in this shit hole of a bar
it was his overconfident grin
all teeth
gleamed in my direction
politely excusing his tall and boned frame
brushing my body
I reciprocated
with my best
gawky but forgiving grimace

Thirty minutes later
he sideswiped me
excused himself again
slurred a fuzzed apology
did not mean
to bump into me

but made sure
not to leave
without rubbernecking
down and up
and then
up and down
my mass of
skin
blood
bones

then
the excited shriek of a woman with a high-strung pony tail
summoned his name
made him turn around
ready to embrace


* * * * *

Kelly Nickie is an avid reader, writer, and coffee drinker living within the perimeter highway of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She finds mundane objects and phrases of the everyday and turns them into second thoughts. Her work has been published in Pure Slush, Juice, Generation, Door = Jar, and in the Winnipeg Free Press.

 

Twisted

by Kelly Nickie


Seeking refuge
beneath cotton polyester

Cannot get past
these knots
tightening around my organs

I used to treat them
with positive affirmations
administered by daytime TV

A black dog got in here
he pants loud against my ear
nuzzles along my vertebrae

I’ve tried to move him
but his eyes water
with his whine

now it feels
too warm
to leave


* * * * *

Kelly Nickie is an avid reader, writer, and coffee drinker living within the perimeter highway of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She finds mundane objects and phrases of the everyday and turns them into second thoughts. Her work has been published in Pure Slush, Juice, Generation, Door = Jar, and in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Cupboards

by Susan Peters


I once slept in a beautiful bed.
Under an array of finely stitched samplers,
quilts and frilly things, made by my fingers alone –
starched, perfect bed linens.

I would awake in that bed starving,
exhausted from dreams that made me work and
rework  those impossible equations that punish untidy
minds.
Plagued with fevers so hot that your hair, if you were there,
would have caught on fire if you came close.
There were insects of my making in the kitchen of that house -
I let the birds in through the window so the birds would eat those
insects  and then deliberately, without conscience,
let them pick the cupboards clean,
until I left.

It seems pleasantly unfair
that now I awake next to
you.
there are no insects and no
fears. The coffee is thoughtful,
kind,
a blue jay peeks in the window, calls
“Thief!” pecks at nothing and hurries off.


* * * * *

Susan has come recently to poetry and is experimenting with the discipline of form poems.  She has published several poems on the front page of Open Arts Forum and in Amethyst Review.  She divides her time between being a consultant and poetry.

 

The Pursuit

by Alexis Garcia


Where do you go to find
Something that isn’t lost?
Is there a place where 
Souls go to recuperate?
After the existential dread sets in
Most things that consume our every waking minute
Cease to matter
You examine your life and come to the
Realization that we are all just matter
A collection of cells
Sent to take up space
Programmed to continuously reinvent ourselves
But where do the discarded parts go?
How can we be so sure that what is left in the past
Must stay in the past?
You could try to recreate who you used to be
From the fragmented bits 
But it won’t be the same
Can we really move forward if
We keep leaving ourselves behind?


* * * * *

Alexis Garcia is a queer Hispanic writer from New York, NY. She graduated from Manhattanville College in 2017, where she studied Creative Writing and Criminal Law. Currently, she works as a paralegal at a personal injury law firm. A few of her poems have been published in the anthologies UNITED: Volume RED and UNITED: Volume HONEY with Beautiful Minds Unite LLC and Upon Arrival: Threshold with Eber & Wein Publishing. She has had more of her poems accepted for publication in Ariel Chart, Third Estate Art, Door is a Jar, Mixed Mag, Air/Light, along with other literary magazines.

 

HOW I VOTE

by Dian Sousa


I vote for Anaconda
its name a slither of magic.

I vote for the tree
in which it sleeps,
for the sharp birds
who warn of its waking.

I vote for the river,
for its silvery gods,
piranha who bite
clean to the pearl of bone.

I vote for the canopy and the cloud
one slick, one drunk
I vote for the song and the shade,
for the rain that washes,
for the wind that ushers us home.

I vote for our home
the blue one
to which we all belong.
None more than the other.
Whose every name is as
beautiful as every other name.

Neofita.  Hamid.  Treyvon.

I vote to belong equally
to this country on our blue earth,
understanding that a country
is just an imagination
whose limits become its borders.

I vote for a country
that praises the borderless
imagination of blue;
its oceanic mind
and cobalt heart.
Not so much a vote—
but a declaration of reverence.
I vote for empathy and imagination
to become our new currency.

I vote to put Winona La Duke on the twenty dollar bill
and Audre Lorde on the hundred.

I vote for poets
who say moon
smiling as they drown
because they are lunatics.

I vote for lunatics
because they seldom have homes.

I vote for the saints who shelter them
because they are lunatics.

I vote for the lunar cycle
moving in the belly of women.

I vote for Woman—
same as the Earth.

I vote for the round of her hip,
for her wholeness,
for her skin like mud
and her laugh like bread.

I vote for mud and bread
because they are both good.
To walk.
To eat.
To levitate
in joy
we could at least try—
together. 
The girl in the biblioteca
and the boy in the mosque

I vote for what feeds us—
the little fields full of kale,
the coconut tree and the deer-skin drum

I vote for the deer and the Labrador,
for the appaloosa,
the wolverine,
and the forty foot snake
even though it scares me.

I vote for the people—
but never for the ones wearing suits.
They scare me.

I am afraid of their suits.
Their suits are uniforms
formed against us.
Their lines held by the ledger and the gun.

But their words are useless.

They hold no moon.
No Earth.
No seed.

They do not speak the language of beauty.
They have said nothing beautiful in a thousand years.
 
I vote for Beauty—
for the ragged, courageous people who make it.

I vote for their raggedy dance
and for the dirt under that dance.

I vote for the dirt,
for the water,
for the single cell,
that became a fish.
For the fish
that crawled to land,
opened its mouth
and took a breath.

I vote for that breath.
I vote for the hope in that breath.
For its improbable song
that sang us to our feet,
for our feet that walked us into being.

I vote to continue being

In hope.
In beauty.
In love.
I vote for us.


* * * * *

"How I Vote" is from Dian Sousa's book The Third Power: Poems from the San Luis Obispo Women's March 2017-2020.

Dian Sousa is the reverend and head mother of The Center for Mystification and Delight. She offers her poems as anthems in the matrifocal revolution. She hopes they will help dismantle the heave, ugly walls of patriarchy. She has written three books of poems and is at work on a fourth. Her most recent book is The Marvels Recorded In My Private Closet (Big Yes Press, 2014). She is a recipient of a 2019 Luso-American Fellowship to the DISQUIET: Dzanc Books International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.

 

Do you still believe in spring?

by Tanya (Hyonhye) Ko Hong

 
A lonely bird knocks 
on a kitchen window
 
Is there still a world? Deserted school 
playground, buttercup lip gloss, unopened,
 
cold french fries, uncertain future
Hope like rotten lemon juice
 
An ambulance siren sings 
Red and white glitter against 
 
sidewalks Tonight someone 
dies alone A patch of lotus
 
flowers exude fragrance 
Sunrise yellow, tea green, salmon pink
 
Though some think it dead, its seeds can
germinate for thousands of years
 
Later the lotus blooms 
magnificent in the deepest mud
 
I pray this poem finds in your darkness, 
hands reaching through ghost light
 
In the remaining space of this postcard
I write, I still believe in love


* * * * *
 
"Do you still believe in spring?" was inspired by the students of Tanya Ko-Hong's Fairfax High School Poetry Workshop during the pandemic. It was part of a virtual poetry reading (7 April 2021) performed in conjunction with artwork WE,OUR,US by LA Metro artist Susan Silton, for the future Metro Westside Purple (D Line) Extension Wilshire/ Fairfax Station.

A Korean version follows below.

 
 아직  봄을 믿습니까 ? 
                    
 
외로운 새가 부엌 
창문을 두드린다
 
세상이 아직 존재하나? 텅 빈 학교
운동장, 뜯지 않은 새 미나리 립글로스,
 
차가운 감자 튀김, 불확실한 미래
썩은 레몬 주스 같은 희망
 
구급차 사이렌이 노래하고
반짝이는 빨강, 하얀 
 
불빛이 인도에 반사하고
오늘 밤 누군가  홀로 죽어 간다 
 
진한 연꽃의 향내가 진동한다
해같이 노란, 차 잎같이 연한, 연어같은 분홍 
 
우리가 죽었다고 생각하는 연꽃 씨앗은 
수천 년 후에도 발아가 되고  
 
가장 깊은 진흙 속에서 
연꽃은 반듯하게  피어난다
 
이 시가 어둠 속에 있는 당신에게 
손을 뻗어 신비의 빛에 닿기를 기도한다
 
이 엽서의 남은 공간에
나는 사랑이라고  쓴다

Tanya (Hyonhye) Ko Hong is a bilingual Korean American poet, translator, playwright, and cultural curator. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Tanya was the first Korean-American recipient of the Yun Doon-ju Korean-American Literature Award and the 10th Ko Won Memorial Foundation Literature Award in 2020. Weaving together two cultures, Tanya’s poetry gives voice to multiple generations of Korean and Korean-American women. Her most recent collection is The War Still Within  (2019, KYSO Flash). www.tanyakohong.com