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I see shooting in the streets,
Men killing Men in other uniforms,
Risking their lives for bits of
Shiny metal
And fleeting ideals.
I see these Men cry
Clutching the red bodies
Of fellow uniforms.
I see bombing.
Advanced machines for killing
With the sole purpose of causing
Suffering,
Fire raining from the sky.
I see War.
I see Hell brought on Earth,
Death coming in waves of metal,
Thousands of rounds a minute.
I see the Genius of Man,
Twisted on killing each other.

But when the uniforms cant be
Seen, covered in blood,
We all die Men
Just the same.

The war came like a storm, sudden and fierce, tearing through their lives before they could even grasp the weight of it. She held her children close, breathing them in as if their scent could anchor her to a world that was slipping away. Her hands, trembling but steady, brushed the hair from their faces, memorizing the softness of their skin, the warmth of their little hearts beating beneath her touch.

“Stay strong,” she whispered, her voice breaking as she tried to hold onto the smile they so desperately needed to see. But in her chest, there was a storm she could not calm, a fear she could not hide. The world was shifting beneath their feet, and she could no longer shield them from the darkness that had come for them all. She kissed their foreheads, each one, as though sealing away the last part of herself with them. “I’ll be back,” she promised, though she wasn’t sure if it was a promise she could keep. Her hands pressed against their tiny faces one final time, and she pulled them close, desperate to imprint herself into their memories.

Her heart shattered when they cried, when they clung to her, when they asked, in innocent voices that could not fathom the cruel weight of the world, “Why do you have to go?” She wanted to tell them everything would be okay, that this was only a bad dream. But the truth was heavier than her love could bear.

She was a mother, and this was the hardest thing she had ever done—leave them behind, to fight a battle that threatened to tear apart everything she had ever known. But she knew that, in that moment, her strength would be what they needed to survive. She kissed them once more, whispering, “I love you” through tears that wouldn’t stop falling.

And then she turned away, each step farther from them a piece of her soul left behind. The world was a battlefield now, and the distance between her and her children felt as vast as the sky, stretching endlessly, painfully. She could still hear their cries in her heart, feel their tiny hands reaching for her, but she had to walk away.

As she stepped into the unknown, the weight of the promise to return pressed heavily against her chest. She would fight—for them, for the future that had yet to unfold. And no matter how far apart they were, no matter how long it took, she would carry them with her, every heartbeat, every breath, until the day she could hold them again

Crawl with me through the wormhole between the dumpster and recycling bin and
We enter a world where

Amicable chubby men run preschools
And are adorned with sleeping snot covered children.
Their lot is to grow old while each season brings babies to replace the older children.
And the men mourn at night, praying over romance novels read by dim LED lights.
These novels tell of a world where murder and rape are the currency of a lonely boring
interconnected hegonomy looking for a hero.

The harmonies are refined in the grade school choir. From the street you hear every meal and
subject change celebrated in dissonance and harmony, melody and ecstasy and sullen swelling
minor resolution. Sometimes children stand apart, on some mission to the bathroom or
delivering milk, agape at the beauty of it all.

There are no band-aids nor organic snacks but all the fairytales warn of monsters in the
trees, where the fruit grows.

Only girls have extra curricular activities. On pedestals, they are clad in padded uniforms and
whispered mantras by college educated women. Teen boys sit on bleachers with open math
books and talk of simple things. They do not swear. No,
They do not swear.

First grade teachers silence the classroom so they can concentrate on their own studies;
volumes of worn trade magazines and maps are the table cloth for messy hand-carved
manuscripts. The boys and girls silently revere the teacher’s desk. They don’t understand it,
nor does the teacher, but maybe someday there will be a masterpiece. Lego towers fall like
Babbel and are rebuilt over and over. It is quiet here, I can think clearly.

Fall harvest;
the rocket ship failed to launch… well it cleared the hops trellis and the Maypole, but then fell on
it’s side and gasped fire. Better luck next year. I hope the monkey is alright, even though we
are not allowed to speak of him again.

Mr. Brown lost to Mrs. Woyzeck in the boxing match. When she smiled, blood streaked her
handsome teeth. She took the medallion and put it in the trophy case with the others.
The highschoolers teach the middle schoolers because we learned long ago, Middle School
teachers were mentally ill. The highschoolers are paid by owning the debt of their parents, who
have trouble keeping jobs for they are often to be found in clearings in the woods, respectfully
disagreeing.

All law and foreign policy is decided by the annual 3rd grade poetry writing contest. The most
cynical drunks (principals) have to look away when the results are printed. They look away and
mourn their wasted lives of desperate reason and ambition.

This is no utopia; those who can not prove an absolute need to continue schooling are cast out.
They work at this and that until they lose everything in a divorce and return to work at the school
for minimum wage (Minimum wage was set some years back by Moureen, the 3rd grade poetry
contest winner, as only clean clothes, no food. Food is to be stolen from work so no dares to
quit).

The children of biological difference pine to be like the ‘norms’ and unburdened of their
invaluable gifts of perspective and empathy. They didn’t ask for this and how they wish to be in
the bleachers with the boys, talking the repressed economical dialect of anxiety.
Oh and how there is War. Global, regional and personal. The many grief counselors help you
plot revenge with whiteboards and colored markers. Gender is brutally defined by which organ
hurts the most when struck. We nearly beat the Russians last year behind 3rd grade Monica’s
rhyming quintuplet “Socket Fuck.” Eliminating weapons from global conflict made everything so
much more brutal. The human bite recovery ward works around the clock and only the best
pupils can dream of working there.

Come to the forest with me and describe the world you are from to the idle parents. They won’t
believe you, but they’ll let you speak. They’ll ask gentle questions about IEPs and nuclear
weapons and pity you. And isn’t that the scariest part of it all? In your sick fantasy world, trying
to heard is the most vulgar thing you can do.

You may re-emerge from the dumpsters to your old world, and even speak freely of this place.
But who will listen? Who will care?

I.

How heavy the tires that drive you
Through fireworks in the street.

How plain the lies that hide you,
The blood and myth behind you
Is nothing new to me.

Beautiful I find you,
To wrap two legs around you,
Surrounded by the safety of my fear.

Steady, love reminds you
To hold the tongue that binds you.
Silent grow the graves beneath our feet.

II.

Some of us wait in the sun
Of the new world
For an old word,
Nostalgic for its
Nonchalant intimacy
With death.

We straddle the splice
Between yesterday and tomorrow,
A moment ago and a moment from now,
Falling in love
And falling asleep.

We know that while
Our two eyes
Gaze each from either side,
They see one image,
The vision always shared,
A projection at the other end
Of the cone
A lone moon which,
Even on its fullest nights,
Is only half so.

III.

Sometimes it nice to imagine
Living in a big house with (),
Having things,
Like a boudoir,
That you don’t want,
And losing things that you do.

It’s ok to think that
You will be happy
With a compromise
Submitted to the arbiter.
You learn the long way
That the only promise of companions
Is to let go together.

Sometimes it’s funny to step back
And watch time in her performance,
Illuminating yesteryears with a present, single word.
You see how to be
Is to be bound,
She knows no future now,
And the past is still unfolding.

IV.

My father is a dark lord and his minions bring me dinner,
Making me a coin that never falls but
Flips into infinity while
My candles leave a tubal-cain
And the rest of me tries to save
The sounds of a mother tongue
From drowning in learned language.

What is left over
Walks in the mornings and wonders:

If we create the word (for love)
And the word carries meaning
And the thing (of love)
Becomes the meaning of the word,
Then what came first (by love),
The meaningful thing,
Or the word?

In each day’s sun or storm
Lived two hearts, to each other sworn
In all joys and sorrows, they knew
A bond unbreakable and true

But as time passed, life took its toll
Challenges arrived, out of control
A storm brewed, from within one heart
Tears, anxiety, and sadness, torn apart

Mental health issues, unseen and strong
Distorting the thought process, all along
Innocent love turns into a battleground
For reasons unknown to the other, profound

The once-clear skies, now a misty path
Shrouded in darkness, a lover’s wrath
Fears, paranoia, and insecurities dominate
Love, dwindling in a sea of hate

Now there were fewer of them, but Little Angel wasn’t quite sure how many.

Little Angel would count them later, in the dark, on the bed.

Little Angel had lined them up like soldiers, an army raised to fight against you.

Little Angel had set up a front of them, planning to attack you with them.

Of course, Little Angel didn’t really want to fight you,

only to see if you could manage to defeat the army.

Little Angel wanted to see you triumph.

Little Angel wanted to see the soldiers fall at the front lines.

It was perhaps an unfair fight against you,

since you hadn’t been given time to prepare for that first strike.

It was Little Angel’s fate to lead the soldiers to their own defeat.

But Little Angel had only brought them to the front for you.

These troops were meant to be broken by you.

Instead of embracing your beloved Little Angel,

your eyes filled not with love, but with fear.

For the red, snarling soldiers,
who grew in number each night,
filled you with such terror
that you became unable to act.

You didn’t want to fight them,
so you surrendered immediately
and slipped past the army, trembling.

They would never really attack you;
they were just standing there,
waiting to be struck down by you.

But you reassured yourself
that this wasn’t your battle to fight.

It wasn’t up to you to take on Little Angel’s soldiers.

Victory meant nothing to you.

So you left out of fear that the soldiers might wound you.

But, never having touched even one,
you didn’t see
that they were only made of paper.

Ripping off a bandaid doesn’t paint the right picture. It’s more like taking a couple of perfectly unique pages from two completely different books – maybe one an intellectual mystery, and the other a soulful romance – and expending an entire hot glue stick binding them together so that the only way to engage in an exercise of violent separation would result in catastrophic metamorphosis of flittery bits of plasticky paper flying everywhere. You’d then take this novel composition, now like the Latin on a penny, and bury it under the earth for a thousand years to pinch and squish and crimp under a millennia of sediment deposition until, finally, they might resemble an indistinguishable sheet. Then, and only then, would the phrase “ripping apart” suffice. But no longer is it possible to sunder page from page, a reverse alchemy of paginal compatibility; instead, a tear creates a pair and each new leaf retains the fabric and the fiber of the other. See, the bandaid metaphor just doesn’t do it justice.

I’ll never forget Dad’s
ever-changing eyes:
blue in his Air Force tie
hazel in his Navy sailor whites
green in the camo pants
he wore in the garden
as his hoe attacked the weeds.

His hand-eye coordination was astounding:
with a hoe, a bat, or a golf club
he could hit anything
anywhere he wanted.

He could chip the golf ball
so it would land and stick,
or read a putt and curve
the ball’s roll ever so
gently into the hole –
his touch on the club
was light and elastic.

He never told me why he painted
the putter head gold,
then sprayed gold glitter on it,
or how he earned sniper gold medals.

I never saw him shoot a gun
Except in Disneyland’s Frontierland,
There, he rested the rifle on his shoulder
Squinted his eye, and pulled the trigger.
“Oh yeah!” he’d say as Goofy’s head fell over.

He wouldn’t talk about
the Japanese box full of
coins, a medallion, and a large
machine-gun bullet that showed
signs of extreme heat.

What Dad would do
Is play basketball on the driveway
teaching me to put
backspin on the ball
creating a “shooter’s bounce”.
“They had a hoop on the aircraft carrier
that picked me up,” he told us once.
Why did you get picked up?
“Kamikaze” was the only word we got out of him.

One time in the driveway when I was about nine
he started yelling, covered his eye, and
ran to the gutter, picking up something.
“My glass eye just popped out!” he said.
“Oh daddy, lemme see” I said.
He kept his fist closed, but his eyelid was
flipped up, red and gruesome.
I screamed.

“Want to see my eye, or
should I put it back?” he asked,
He turned around, pretend popped it in,
then returned to grin and grab me.
“It’s a joke from the war” he’d say,
but no more.

During his last day, I learned
-melted bullet was from the kamikaze
that strafed the ship
-it crashed into the captain’s bridge
-his ship went down
-Dad grabbed that bullet rolling down the deck
-burned his hand, jumped overboard
-swam to another chance.

So many other memories he never shared:
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea
Those sights are buried with him.
And the glass eye?
One of the many tricks he played
to deal with the tense boredom of
waiting for the war: shooting hoops,
hitting mythical golf balls into the Pacific,
rolling and capturing baseballs on the listing ship’s deck.

Or, maybe that glass eye
kept the horrible sights he’d seen
from leaking out of the corners
Of his memory.

-Jenyth Jo

Get the dishes done
An ache in my belly
Take a breath
Send it there

It’s too loud in here.
Can you turn down the volume please?
HEY! Turn it down.
Don’t yell, breathe.

Order groceries through the app.
What’s that smell?
OK, diaper change bud!
Get the diaper and wipes ready
A chase ensues around the living room.

Write a poem
Bounce the baby up, down
Arm is cramping
Stopping,
Breathing.

By Chelse Robinson