BIRDSONG

by Bunkong Tuon

Abby Spangler and her sixteen year-old daughter Eleanor Spangler Neuchterlein hold hands as they participate in a "lie-in" during a protest in favor of gun reform in front of the White House, Monday, Feb. 19, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) via Boston Herald.

Here, in the Northeast,
There is snow on the frozen ground.
Birds are flying from the South,
Crying madly in the mourning sky.
A man with a gun is hunting them.
The branches shake against
My bedroom window.
Their song is plaintive,
Sad, and urgent.
My glass window will shatter
If nothing is to be done.
They sing about a teacher
Crouching in the broom closet
With her high school students.
A survivor says afterward,
“First we thought it was firecrackers.
Then my friends fell down,
One by one.”
They sing about the adults
Behaving like children,
Taking no responsibility
To protect the young.
They sing about the children
Acting like adults
Marching to that great mansion,
Lying on cold concrete,
Eyes closed.  Some held hands,
Others over their chests,
As if caught dead in prayer.

Bunkong Tuon is the author of Gruel (2015) and And So I Was Blessed (2017), both poetry collections published by NYQ Books.  He's also a contributor to Cultural Weekly.

TRIOLET TO A RAINMAKER

by Robert West




                                  “ . . . a society awash in gun violence . . . ”
                                                                    – Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2018


If only you could get this through your head:
   we’re drowning in a bloody flood of guns.
We need to stem the torrent, count the dead;
if only you could get that through your head.
You call for more guns, everywhere, instead.
   Who knows whose daughters might grow up, whose sons,
if only you could get it through your head
   we’re drowning in a bloody flood of guns?

Robert West lives in Starkville, Mississippi. His poems have appeared in Light, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Alabama Literary Review,  American Life in Poetry, and other venues. Co-editor with Jonathan Greene of Succinct: The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems (Broadstone Books, 2013), he's also the editor of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, published in two volumes in late 2017 by W. W. Norton.

GOD GAVE US THE RIGHT

by Howard Winn

Photograph by Erik Ravelo from his 2013 sequence “Los Intocables” (“The Untouchables) featuring a variety of issues plaguing children around the world. “The right to childhood should be protected,” Ravelo writes.

to bear arms
announces the high priest of
the Church of the Rifle
and not a mere mortal
even though the government
wrote the laws that
support the dogma of this
Faith where the AK-47
has replaced the wine
and wafer that becomes
the blood and body of
the redeemer who kills
children without a qualm
as part of the new sacrament


Howard Winn has just had a novel Acropolis published by Propertius Press as well as poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.