Gaza has become a funeral home, 
but there are no seats, 
no mourners, no bodies. 
In the caskets are nothing but 
what remained of the dead’s clothes, 
and on the crumbling walls are clocks 
that have not moved for fourteen months.

Copyright © 2025 by Mosab Abu Toha. Published by permission of the author.

I've never given birth.

Please forgive me
for mistaking
long walks
for children.

I find soldiers, rattles,
teething rings.

I wear bonnets
on rainy days

when river mud
is indistinguishable
from water.

If I drown unexpectedly
send bibs
in lieu of flowers.

Please forgive me
the strays. Animals
are often the warmest
friends.

But if I had a child
I'd run with the same
wild indifference
as a boxer.

And when the children cross
with pets in their arms
I think of how quickly
we become muzzles
in this belligerent world.

Forgive my decision
to leave the swaddling
for stitched bellies,
frizzled hair.

Whenever I look
into a mirror I look
into absence, how the fullness

and brightness of a bed
or saucer necessitates
the transparency

of things that cannot
give life.

If I were a branch, I would be
mesquite without leaves.

Why is there no word
for the male equivalent
of 'spinster'?

Sometimes, fresh from the levee
they ask for water.
I remember how I bathed you
with two quaking hands.

In a way, I was doing the math
for your eventual flight.

I used to think there was nothing
more cruel
than the transposition
of parent and child.

But what of the childless?

What of baskets
filled with painted eggs?

What of funerals
where the only light
sprays from grieving mouths?

The river abandons its banks.

We become strangers
to each other or brothers
who have never shared a meal.

We are pregnant with something
but it is not life.

Copyright © 2018 by Rodney Gomez. This poem originally appeared in Citizens of the Mausoleum (Sundress Publications, 2018). Used with permission of the author.

 

From space the river is loose thread.

Frayed but clearly discernible. 

A wall but not a wall. 

At county, a jailer winds it around his neck.

Surrenders to unconditional embrace.

Some will use it for a labyrinth. 

Others for escape as night dictates.

At the old Fort Brown emptied when a white woman cried

that a black battalion had committed the crime

of supposing the air could also be theirs

a room sparks as if drowned by gasoline.

Murder is too nice a word

for what was baptized in the water.

Now, at the little church overlooking despair,

a new kind of invasion replaces the old. 

Children in sisal sandals.

Old guns call new guns to scour the shore. 

In false panic

there is no such thing as empathy. 

Copyright © 2020 by Rodney Gomez. This poem originally appeared in Zocalo Public Square. Used with the permission of the author. 

Under Old West guitar and Jazz band trumpet,
where the riverboat steam horn blares,
you order a corn dog.

Beignets and étouffée
are down the way, cowboy,
you don’t have to put up with that.

But the sun dips into everybody’s eyes,
strollers full of screams rock by
and you

start searching, at the popcorn cart and in your life,
for something more
than everything

you’ve been settling
for.

 

Copyright © 2022 by Matt Mason. From At the Corner of Fantasy and Main (The Old Mill Press, 2022). Used with the permission of the poet. 

The Ocean has its silent caves,
Deep, quiet, and alone;
Though there be fury on the waves,
Beneath them there is none.
The awful spirits of the deep
Hold their communion there;
And there are those for whom we weep,
The young, the bright, the fair.

Calmly the wearied seamen rest
Beneath their own blue sea.
The ocean solitudes are blest,
For there is purity.
The earth has guilt, the earth has care,
Unquiet are its graves;
But peaceful sleep is ever there,
Beneath the dark blue waves.

This poem is in the public domain.

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

This poem is in the public domain.