by Jack Hirschman

Here truths Hrant Dink,
here braves.

In our grave mouths
the light of his courage

pulsates like deathless
hearts beating against

all genocidal, fat and
fatuous nationalisms

and their pure killers
who are filth’s origin

and the lies that poison
even the rivers

of mothers’ milk.
Hear Hrant Dink’s truth

and remember to re – member
the amputated body

of the soul of the world,
and pass his glory forward.

by Jack Hirschman

How many inmates
are weeping
in their cells tonight,

having got the word:
Janine Pommy Vega
has died.

They adore her and
when she came
to them every month

they adored her more
and more and more
until poems broke out

of their mouths, for her.
She had instinct
to the quick that made

exuberance write poems
that surpassed the tick
of time’s dumb clock,

and made them stick
like flies to flypaper from
the ceiling of despair.

She once took me to the
Maximum Security wing
of a prison to read

my poetry, where I met
what seemed like the gang
at the candy – store corner
in The Bronx or Bedstuy:
there was Blackie,
there was Satch,

my old buddies, in that
clubroom, and they were
terrific poets now

because of Janine, who
spoke soul to them
and liberated it

from inside each.  O yes,
she’d been a friend
of Allen Ginsberg,

a lover of his lover, Peter
Orlovsky, for a spell,
and Andy Clauson when

her heart was attacked
by everything from
crippling arthritis, hep c,

and all those vestigial
bones of scag and
kabayo nights;

and O yes, Italian cities
and Sarajevo too
adored the way

she’d enthuse a crowd
reading poems with a
rhythmic maracas,

leaving audiences
lilting to themselves
after she left the stage.

But ah, and oh, it was
in prison, that university
of now, where she

turned men who’d killed
at 19, 20, 21 into voices
that went over the walls

leaving poems of liberty
liberating every yardbird
and all their wings.

by Richard Jackson

Sometimes we are amazed to find that we are still alive.
Sometimes we reduce the world to a single street and
the street to the lamppost under which a man reads his fate.
Sometimes we fasten ourselves to the sound of the mole
as it nibbles through the earth.  Sometimes we are the earth.
Sometimes our words release all the sounds we have forgotten.
Rows of Cypress line the road to the next town.  You can see
the salt flats bare their souls to the sky.  Sometimes a flight
of crows passes through our own souls.  In fact it is the story
Roberto Bolano tells of the tortured girl, how they place
a live rat inside her vagina.  There’s this sideshow we call
our lives.  There are warehouses of emotion we rarely touch.
There’s a pier that never ends.  Piles of newspapers with no
front page.  But sometimes we are terraces of hope.
Sometimes our wayside crosses turn into doors.  Sometimes
we open them.  Sometimes we see more when we look
through a spider’s web.  All our desires are tourists with
faulty maps.  No one listens anymore to the violins of
the meadows.  As for myself, I can’t understand the bird
that sings at the mass graves near Srebrenica.  My head is
an aquarium, My heart is a sieve.  Sometimes we are an aria
in search of a singer.  Sometimes our shadows shiver without us.
Sometimes tomorrow falls on yesterday.  The sluice gates are
opening.  The highway wakes up.  Sometimes we just need
to endure the weather of love, the gusts of despair, the trestle
of tomorrow.  Sometimes, just sometimes, the sandbags we live
behind are never enough, a whole world begins to move in the
light of a swaying lamp, and I sit down to write this, the levees
of language failing, the heart floundering, the world on a barge.

by Anselm Hollo

reading a book on how to become a better person
Zophiel the cat touches my leg and asks me
“Why don’t you write a book about becoming just a pretty good person
& by the way what happened to my late night snack ? ”