• Poems

    Jimmy Pappas: Crazy John

    Jimmy Pappas

    Crazy John

    We called him Crazy John
    because his epileptic
    seizures caused his eyes
    to roll in his head
    as he moaned
    with clenched teeth.

    At an assembly once,
    the teacher made me
    sit by him so we could
    fill in every seat.

    In the middle of a speech
    by the principal,
    he had a seizure
    and drooled on me.

    The rest of the day,
    I laughed about how
    Crazy John
    gobbed on my pants.

    Later that evening,
    while I was walking with
    my friends, he greeted me
    with a rotten-toothed smile
    as if he were my best buddy.

    I watched him walk
    into the front door
    of an apartment building
    we used to call
    the Puerto Rican ghetto.

    He opened the door
    by the window
    that all year long had
    one red Christmas bulb,
    an open invitation
    to all takers.

     


    Jimmy Pappas served in Vietnam during the war training South Vietnamese soldiers by teaching them English so they could work with American helicopter pilots. He retired from teaching at Somersworth High School in New Hampshire where he created the greatest accomplishment of his life: a popular philosophy class.  Jimmy Pappas won the Rattle Chapbook Contest with Falling off the Empire State Building, won the Rattle Readers Choice Award for “Bobby’s Story,” and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Rattle for “The Gray Man.” He now moderates a weekly themed Zoom event called “A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends” that encourages audience participation.

  • Poems

    Jimmy Pappas: Saigon Tears

    Jimmy Pappas

    Saigon Tears

    Tear gas drove my friend and me
    into an isolated area of Saigon.

    We passed through gates
    where South Vietnamese
    guards urged caution.

    Half blinded by the fumes,
    we sought refuge in a small hotel
    where we washed out our eyes.

    Long past curfew,
    we decided to stay for the night.

    A man came into our room
    with a line of young women
    and asked us each to pick one.

    Their eyes looked down.
    The weight of countless men
    fucking them like killing chickens
    had turned them into things.

    Laughing that he
    beat me to her,
    my friend made his choice
    of the prettiest one.
    His loud groans would end
    in an even louder sleep.

    I made my choice
    of the saddest one.
    My quiet voice would
    be a pathetic attempt
    to soothe her pain.

    I wanted her life to end
    with me holding her.
    I wanted to take her away
    before the man came back
    for her the next morning.
    I wanted to free her from this life
    that stole her humanity.

    Instead
    I cradled her in my arms
    to protect her from
    the rampaging engine
    of suffering roaring
    down at her,
    while my tears
    dripped down her back
    like holy water
    spilled over an altar
    to a godless world.

     


    Jimmy Pappas served in Vietnam during the war training South Vietnamese soldiers by teaching them English so they could work with American helicopter pilots. He retired from teaching at Somersworth High School in New Hampshire where he created the greatest accomplishment of his life: a popular philosophy class.  Jimmy Pappas won the Rattle Chapbook Contest with Falling off the Empire State Building, won the Rattle Readers Choice Award for “Bobby’s Story,” and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Rattle for “The Gray Man.” He now moderates a weekly themed Zoom event called “A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends” that encourages audience participation.

  • Poems

    Mary Alice Williams: Raising Gardenias

    Mary Alice Williams

    Raising Gardenias

    A woman raises
    seven children
    and gardenias in pots
    set out on tar bejeweled
    with broken glass
    next to the stoop
    in a public housing project.

    What will grow
    will grow,
    her credo.

    Gardenias she knows
    must be coaxed
    from balanced soil
    water and light provided
    in exact proportion
    fertilizer applied precisely.
    She knows

    they bruise,
    discolor
    at the petal’s edge

    at any point
    of heedless contact.
    Such blooms,
    fragrant, creamy
    demand
    deserve
    protection.

    Watched with care
    her potted prizes
    thrive.

    Given a lick and a promise
    by random elements
    cooled or warmed,
    parched or slaked,
    the children
    grow
    haphazardly

    bruised around the edges.


    Mary Alice Williams, a Rhode Island native, writes in Grand Rapids MI. Winner of the Dyer-Ives Poetry Contest judged by Conrad Hilberry, she is published in journals including Ekphrastic Review, Blue Heron Review, Peninsula Poets and the anthology, Sunflowers: Ukrainian Poetry on War, Resistance, Hope and Peace. She is a member of the Poetry Society of Michigan.

  • Poems

    John Hawkhead: politician’s pledge …

    John Hawkhead

    politician’s pledge
    if only there was more
    than teeth in his smile


    John Hawkhead is a writer from the South West of England who has published over 1700 poems all over the world. His book Bone Moon placed third in the 2023 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards and follows his 2016 publication Small Shadows – both from Alba Publishing.

     

  • Poems

    Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco: Gentleman’s Uniform

    Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

    Gentleman’s Uniform

    I want to talk about
    George Santos.

    The whole vibe.
    The layered sweaters.

    Where I live it is too
    warm for that, you’d take

    the blazer off. Loosen
    the tie. Scuff up

    the shoes. You’d clean
    your glasses on

    a corner of your shirt.
    I don’t like knots,

    is what I’m saying, how they coil

    around inside.
    I want things clear. I want

    the whole worm, not just whatever
    sticks out.

    I’ve known some liars.
    There’s a story

    that I always will avoid
    and seek — sometimes

    at the same time.
    White teeth blue

    eyes. How I thought then he might
    be dumb.

    I want to talk about
    what happens afterward. When

    it’s all over. How he pins his lapel pin back
    on his coat when he stands up.


    Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California’s Central Valley and works as a librarian at UC Merced. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals and in several chapbooks. She co-edits One Sentence Poems and First Frost.

     

  • Poems

    Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco: Earth’s Birthday Party at the Retirement Home

    Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

    Earth’s Birthday Party at the Retirement Home

    At the Earth’s birthday party,
    we don’t celebrate in years.

    That’s not a thing,
    the kids might say, or maybe

    did. Years
    were a construct, a way Earth

    could see itself.
    It was like pictures:

    here I was in my goth phase, and here’s
    where I had dinosaurs. Earth

    couldn’t talk to us, by now, its teeth
    were gone. We draped

    a sash across its shoulders, found a crown. It
    was a theme, as much as anything,

    a way to pick the music. Green and blue and brown
    balloons, just like from space.

    Aged to perfection, said a sign,
    like Earth was food.

    We had a cake and sang and Earth blew

    out its candles, asked
    who everybody was, when we would

    leave. We laughed and laughed. When

    it rained, we moved
    the party back indoors.

    Something happened, and the toilet
    overflowed, ran down the hall.

    If no one cleans it, there’s
    a canyon, someone said, like

    this was news.


    Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California’s Central Valley and works as a librarian at UC Merced. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals and in several chapbooks. She co-edits One Sentence Poems and First Frost.

     

  • Poems

    Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco: Body Talk

    Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

    Body Talk

    What if you’re Helen
    but their boats were made
    to kill?

    What if each part
    served some small
    purpose — here:

    where they will melt you
    down.
    Or here: where they will rip

    you up,

    will take your insides
    out, will tell you what they are. Say

    that you’re Helen, sick
    of hearing how they made

    the fucking boats.

    What if a woman
    and a whale are the same

    thing?

     

     

  • Poems

    Desmond Piper: When I Was Young

    When I Was Young

    Any decent thinking man knows

    that when he passes the ammunition…

    he is participating in the killing also.”

                                        -Larry Dewy

     

    When I was young
    I imagined justice would taste sweet.
    Like a righteous knight satisfied
    to combat ubiquitous evil.
    But I’ve never met such a warrior,
    nor such justice, rarely such evil.
    Justice is a bitter Merlot,
    or Sumatra. An aged Bourbon.
    Fragile recipes fraught with risk,
    borne of ancient, intricate processes.
    One small variance,
    the batch is intractably tainted.

     

    From tax payer to sniper
    we have blood on our hands.
    Some righteous, some collateral.
    We so easily become what we have vowed
    to destroy. Yet destroy it, we must.
    Bitter justice requires impossible accuracy.
    The exact recipe has been lost to humanity.
    Maybe we only briefly had it, traded it
    for a forbidden flavor so long ago.
    Maybe the righteous knight is a myth.
    Maybe he wrote poems in the evening
    trying to make sense of his day job.

     

    As a child I would steal a sip
    of my dad’s coffee,
    but preferring simplistic sweetness,
    my innocent taste buds grimaced.
    Every now and then I reminiscently indulge
    the blissful ignorance of Halloween candy.
    Now middle-aged, I’m more satisfied
    with a morning cup of black coffee.
    Or with dinner, a red wine.
    The naive shock metamorphosed
    into provocative contemplation.
    I’ve spread my wings.
    I’d never go back, even if I could.

     

    The tongue inside my graying head
    prefers bourbon over ice cream.
    The burn reminds me I’m still alive,
    the smoothness teases that maybe
    I still deserve pleasure.
    Conflicting sensations generated
    from a single event.
    Pride and shame
    Regret and anticipation
    Humor and horror
    You’ll never experience that
    in a jelly bean.

     

    Merlot. Sumatra. Bourbon.
    Adult flavors for an adult world.
    My burdened mind and slight bulge
    between L4 and L5 seldom consent
    to a full night’s sleep.
    Having wrestled with Power greater than
    myself, I’ve earned my limp
    and been rewarded with knowledge
    of precarious joy, mysteriously
    laced within the harsh and bitter
    flavors of real life.

  • Poems

    Nate Didier: Truce

    Truce

    We were just trying to kill each other, and beside you I now sit.
    I am exhausted.
    You are full of holes…
    …from the rounds I put in your chest.
    Your breathing is getting shallow, you don’t have much time. I will never know your name.
    I wonder if you have a family you won’t see again.
    I have a daughter I haven’t met.
    Your eyes get heavy. I wonder how you’d treat me if our situation was reversed.
    I wouldn’t want to be alone.
    So here I sit, shooing the flies aways as you take your last breath.

  • Poems

    Michael J. Galko: Regarding the half-eaten calves of midshipman Purvis off the Brazilian equator, 1812

    Regarding the half-eaten calves of midshipman Purvis off the Brazilian equator, 1812

    A fortnight
    since fire consumed the ship
    in the mid-Atlantic.
    Ten days since the last rain.

    The launch started with twelve.
    One jumped overboard
    with his madness, certain
    he could swim it.

    The next three
    were hoisted over
    with all due respect
    and ceremony.

    A fourth of these
    sank two days ago.
    Then, yesterday,
    Purvis passed.

    But his body rested astern
    by silent assent.
    What seaman
    has not regarded,

    with longing even,
    the fine tan legs
    of his fellow sailors?
    But these bloated shanks?

    Whose idea was this–
    this blasphemy
    against the vaulted
    primacy of the soul–

    this heretical notion
    that the dead’s flesh
    will somehow serve them
    after their death?

    Some few, their eyes
    red and scarce by day,
    have considered this

     

  • Poems

    Luther Allen: the strayed moon

    the strayed moon

    has lost its way. forgets
    where to rise and set.

    bulging, bulimic. confusing
    concave with convex. bangs

    on drums to make an entrance
    and whimpers as it goes down.

    neglects the sun, becomes grey.
    can’t manage to shine that old kind light

                                             upon the earth.

    wait. that’s not the moon.
    it’s us.     us.

  • Poems

    jim kacian: black tuesday

    black tuesday

    and the following week my various inboxes are filled with earnest notes asking after my safety and that of my family—I come to realize that I am, in a modest way, the face of America to these many and far-flung people, and what happens to America must happen to me—and I respond that I am unharmed for the moment by the terrible assault which has galvanized us all, but that it will be a long time in coming before we know the full extent of the damage that has been caused . . .

    after the tragedy—
    the neighbor boy behind a tree
    with his toy rifle

     

    *appeared previously in ephemerae

  • Poems

    Don Krieger: Four Poems

    For No Reason*

    The right carotid,
    a vascular case
    with stroke risk
    so I am here.

    For no reason

    her heart stops,
    her brain too.

    I know You from Your
    world and Scripture.

    You drowned everything
    when You repented

    the brutal world You had
    made. You murdered

    Lot’s wife
    for remembering

    her city
    as You burned it down.


    What’s her crit?
    When it comes back low,
    Where’s the hemorrhage?

    He cracks her sternum,
    closed heart massage
    minute after minute
    no rhythm or hope.

    You glorified Moses
    who lay in wait
    to murder.

    You hardened Pharaoh’s heart
    to alibi your slaughter
    Egypt’s first-born to the last

    When I take over
    the bone edges
    grind under my hands

    her pliant heart beneath
    soft and silent

    but then living

    pulsing
    pushing back.

    Time after time
    You boasted I do this
    so you know how mighty I am.

    Half her brain returned.
    They gave blood
    placed a pacer
    and an assist pump

    got her off the table alive
    but no further.

    How can I find You
    righteous and trustworthy,
    love You or even
    fear and obey You –

    it’s a hundred generations
    since You’ve spoken.

    Since then that surgeon turned
    to cosmetics, varicose veins,
    I work with numbers
    they don’t push back
    or need reasons.


    * originally appeared in The Red Wheelbarrow.

    Saturday Night on Call*

    A sheriff guards the operating room. Inside
    we fight. Her neck was broken in a brawl –

    she thrashes and spits as we hold her shoulders
    and head still, work to realign the bones

    constantly checking, dreading the worst,
    blunt silence, slack body. Hours later

    with neck straight, flipped on her belly,
    moving arms and legs before she sleeps,

    I step out for a breath. The surgeon
    is at the scrub sink, She’ll just kill someone else.

    That may be, I say, but we won’t have killed her.

    It’s been decades. I still dread and hope for her
    and I treasure the stubborn skill of that surgeon.


    originally appeared in Neurology.

    Dream Street*

    I left her the house
    and got a place on Torley.
    Each night the neighbors

    put chairs on the sidewalk,
    turn the TV face out, drink Iron City
    and watch the kids play in the street.

    I get home from work at 6 or 10
    or 2, shower and then sleep
    with eyes open:

    a child shrieking on a hospital gurney,
    her spine flayed and straightened,
    the smell of burning in my hair,

    a new mother life-flighted from the mall,
    brain shifting in the scanner,
    crushed by bleeding while we watch.

    We drink coffee and wait
    while a father facing doom in our hands
    says goodbye to his children.

    Each day I pedal in over the Bloomfield Bridge,
    or drive when called at night, never dreaming
    what will come next.


    * originally appeared in Verse-Virtual.

    Battle Fatigue*

    The surgeon carves, dissects, sears the bleeding.
    The anesthetist: numbness, paralysis, stupor.

    My part: to hear and report
    each limb’s electric murmurs,

    the brain’s muffled replies,
    mixed with the whine

    of machines, arrogance, fear.
    We fight for normal life on waking.

    We trust normal will return for us.

    They are out there, our charges,
    ten thousand who woke well,

    those who did not. I don’t recall
    their faces, just the smell

    of blood and burning,
    the urgent charge, uphold life,

    sick wonder when the lamp goes dark,
    why did I have to see that?

    *originally appeared in Neurology.

  • Poems

    Heidi Slettedahl: : Lavender Burned Black

    Lavender Burned Black

    We burned it, my sister and I
    that note you wrote on lavender paper.
    The lavender burned black and fell apart.​

    You slapped me when you saw
    the purple black ashes
    but I was numb to the tingle and neither of us cried.

    Oh mother, mother, I don’t want to know
    of wrinkled sheets and whispered conversations
    and feel the pain of trying not to love you.

    But I will not forgive the evenings
    you were gone, the days
    my father spent in anger, mending the cracks

    in the house’s foundation
    pounding the nails into soft, pliant wood
    drinking warm beer

    while you cooked dinner in tense, frustrated silence
    we all ignored
    until your anger flashed and caught me with your tongue.

    You taught me lessons even in your silence,
    the dance of avoidance, the masquerade.
    The anger

    lingers in that house you left.
    It sits in the corners with the heavy dust,
    A guest we don’t dare disturb.

    The anger follows you,
    reminds you of the ashes of your love letter
    and the daughters who burned the words you wrote.

    Its tendrils grasp for me
    as I realize my handwriting mirrors yours.
    Oh how the anger flashes when I see I write those letters too.

  • Poems

    F. J. Bergmann: Three Poems

    Guardian Demon*

    If you elicit true candor (which can
    be done in many ways, like sharing
    a six-pack, a fifth, or maybe even
    brownies with a special ingredient),
    you’ll find that pretty much everybody
    has a beef: some secret grudge or sense
    of injury (using the term “sense” loosely),
    something about which, with the right
    sequence of nods and grunts, muttered
    agreement, judicious use of the words
    Grandpop used for the kind of people
    he disliked without knowing anything
    about, you can get them to start being
    more outspoken, to meet up with others
    like them, to talk a lot about the kind
    of guns they own—like throwing a stone
    into a pond, to create circular ripples
    you can watch spread out, for fun.

    *First appeared in One Sentence Poems (2017)

    Losing*

    The uniformed security guard said he couldn’t help it,
    couldn’t change anything;
    he was just there to see that the eviction went smoothly,
    which it didn’t.
    You’d think they could have waited till after Christmas.
    Somehow the kid had managed
    to save enough from his subsidized job to buy presents,
    if not pay rent.
    He’d even tried to wrap them.
    He didn’t know how to fight it
    and his social worker was on extended vacation.
    All his damaged life
    had been planned by others around his circumstances,
    beyond his control.
    And when he saw all ruined by the whirlwind
    sweeping through his story,
    he let it take hold of him too
    and opened the window and began
    throwing his gifts into the street,
    where passersby picked them up
    and walked away with them.
    It was that kind of neighborhood.
    As he flung them he was shouting,
    “that one was for my mother,
    that one was for my sister, that one …”
    And throwing them out the window,
    that was for himself.

    *First appeared in Pemmican November 2009

    To the Victims*

    You, the ones who, captured, face to face with death,
    knelt to kiss the ground or spat through your last breath,
    your torturers, your killers, still concealed,
    remember damage done or harmed heart healed:
    the knowledge that in their midnight’s ascendant hour
    they chose to do these things, to use this kind of power.
    We vote or abstain: no reason to believe or doubt;
    no signposts mark the dangerous, descending route.
    To crush all opposition; to force through schemes:
    that’s the stuff of evil, bloody dreams,
    metalled with chrome-plate hate and driven
    by the corroded engine of religion.
    The clouds press down; the winds grow stronger;
    we’ve all seen better days, and longer.
    Now the last leaf of love falls in a black November
    and is burned, and no one is left to remember.
    There was a chance: we made our choices;
    there will be other years and other voices.
    Leaching into groundwater or suspended in smoke,
    you might be anywhere:
    your chemical signatures imprint a billion volumes of air.

     

    *First appeared on poetsagainstthewar.org 2003