Tick-Tock

By Caroline Giles BanksMinneapolis, Minnesota, USA In 1947, when time was kept in a pocket or worn on the wrist, the artist Martyl Langsdorf was tasked by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to visually represent the idea of time running out to avert nuclear disaster. She sketched the round face of a clock not unlike those mounted on kitchen walls or placed on mantles. Using artistic license in her drawing of the clock, Martyl set the hour hand close to twelve and the minute hand at seven minutes to the hour. She chose this placement of the hands because,…

Sticks and Stones

Caroline Giles BanksMinneapolis, Minnesota, USA In its March 2025 quarterly update theOxford English Dictionary added 42 new words from other languages. The words do not have direct English equivalents. The list includes gigil, from the Philippines, an intense feeling when seeing someone or something cute; blaa, from Irish English, a soft white-floured bread associated with Waterford, Ireland; and alamak, a Malaysian word expressing shock or outrage. Simultaneously, hundreds of English words and phrases disappeared from U.S. Government documents. Many words erased from these documents relate to D.E.I. and transgender issues and initiatives. Forbidden words include: race, trans, intersectionality, Indigenous, tribal, ethnicity, activism, gender, pronoun, sociocultural, Black, female, disabled,…

The Man of the Hole

By Caroline Giles BanksMinneapolis, Minnesota, USA His hut hidden in the rainforest from outsiders, the last known member of an Amazonian tribe is found lying in his hammock covered in feathers. Decades earlier those greedy for the tribe’s land and resources murdered almost all his kin with poisoned sugar. Like a keepsake wedding suit, the funereal garb of brilliant bird feathers reflects planning and preparation, readiness and ritual. His death is a harbinger of the accelerating annihilation and disappearance of untold numbers of cultures and peoples—not unlike the mass extinction of other species—due to the cumulative effects of deliberative and…

Clarion Call

Caroline Giles BanksMinneapolis, Minnesota, USA Hagia Sophia, the magnificent complex in Istanbul, was built in the 6th century as a Christian church, then repurposed as a mosque in the 15th century during the Ottoman Empire. Under Ataturk, founder of the secular Republic of Turkey, it opened in 1935 as a museum, before becoming a mosque again in 2020. prayer rugsbeside Doric columnsbending the same knee Ever reminding us of Christianity’s and Islam’s shared historical origins, the syncretic amalgamation of mosaics depicting Christianity with soaring minarets is an enduring testament to the power of art and architecture to reflect our common…

d’Esperanto

Caroline Giles BanksMinneapolis, Minnesota, USA August 2024. Afghan women must veil their bodies completely in public—faces included. The Taliban muzzles women, forces them to devolve into cells of silence. No speaking in public. No singing and reading aloud from inside their houses. ‘Na Fatima Ahmadi. Na Ghezaal Enayat. Na nas.’ Imagine Afghan women creating a dialect of defiance and resistance. Linguists among them help to make up a ‘she’ code, a fundamental grammar of clicks and whistles, squeaks and squawks, taps and slaps—covers from other inmates, other species. Over bread ovens, wash tubs, and clotheslines mothers and daughters, sisters and…

morphing

Debbie StrangeWinnipeg, Manitoba, Canada Prune Juice, Issue 41, December 2023

cropdusters

Debbie StrangeWinnipeg, Manitoba, Canada Haigaonline, Volume 21, Issue 2, August 2020

What Rough Beast

Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USA I remember my mother telling me how she felt on the frigid night in 1953 when Stalin died. A little thaw of hope. When she mentioned it years later, I was only a young teen growing up in a free country, so I didn’t fully understand. But more than seven decades after that historic event, with ice thick on the streets of our cities and a chill in my bones—I know.  pale moonlightfalls on the road ahead . . .and on my hearth         wild goblin flames            …

Wakes and Wails

Caroline Giles BanksMinneapolis, Minnesota, USA She knows how to swim. She does not want to swim.Her hesitation is more than about wet hair. Her gutfeels the diasporic trauma of her African ancestors’relationship to water. time-space conundrum Before 2015 the watery graveyard of hundreds ofslave ships in the Middle Passage was a murky void.Maritime archaeologists with the Slave Wrecks Projectnow explore the ships. Divers—many of them Blackwomen and men new to scuba diving— touch the wrecks,bring up mud, wood, iron objects (kettles to cannons) for study. the past before Linking these finds to historic records, the teams namethe ships, map their…

Untitled Tanka (1)

By Anna Cates our tattered flag sinksthe flagpole melts intoa molten puddle . . .Red October—let’s hopewe don’t live to see it!

Toil & Trouble

By Anna Cates we can’t blame iton witchcraft . . .in a single bubble rainbow colorsbloat and belchputrid portents on a drying lakewhere birds cease to ventureour error’s peak how lonelythat dark mountain . . .a threatened bee seeking harborin cleansing nectar . . .our rallying cry let it bein fragrant bloomsour altar of amens

Shahada

By Richard GrahnEvanston, Illinois, USA dawn . . .salat risesfrom the ruins of Gazafrom the tents and sheltersin the city of Rafa.here in the landof missiles and bombstoday is the first dayof Ramadan.nothing for suhoornothing for iftarhow can we fastwhen we’re starving to death?alms for the poor in short supplyaid trucks deniedwhile the world decidesif it’s self-defenseor genocide.as I walk through rubbleof the pastthrough centuries of warscreating more painthan hate can imagineI ask myself, if I’ll see the daywhen peace breaches wallsof humanity’s fanatical brands of insanity,when the call to evening prayersis a message for all, regardless of faith,that God…

Words Beyond Wars

Caroline Giles BanksMinneapolis, Minnesota, USA  War tramples Kyiv culture.The art museum’s windows are blown out.The concert hall is shrouded in dust.The statue of Taras Shevchenko, lauded poet,is pitted and pocked by bullets. Dead silence.These images beg my imaginationfor color, for sound, this pen. ringing the baseof the bell towersprouts of green grass Drifting Sands Haibun #21 (May 2023) andTan-ku For Ukraine: A World Haiku and Tanka Anthology, ed.Dimitar Anakiev. Sofia, Bulgaria: gabriell-e-lit Publishing House, 2024.

Apolitical 

By: Tazeen FatmaBengaluru, Karnataka, India I remember my brother playing hitman when I was younger. He would spend hours on the computer aiming targeted attacks at the enemies. He was pretty good at it. I, on the other hand, usually lost since I killed a lot of innocents in the process. It annoyed me. I mean, wasn’t it okay if a few civilians got hit? I did eliminate the targets as well. What, really, is the value of one life in a game?  But when bridges collapsed, mass shootings occurred, and the army took over, I resorted to reading jurisdictions,…

Norman Rockwell and the Nostalgia We All Live With

By Edward Cody HuddlestonBaxley, Georgia, USA Rockwell’s art is as American as apple pieand Agent Orange! There’s nothing wasted in his work;each stroke is one of genius. One painting will make you nostalgic for a malt shopdriven out of business by McDonald’s before you were born.And the next? Well, the next reminds you that Ruby Bridges exists.And whoever wrote that on the wall behind her existed.And what made them what they were still existsin the laws of our nation, the fabric of our culture,and in our cities, wearing combat boots and balaclavas,as they drag children from their homes and throw…

McMammoth

By Richard King Perkins IIHuntley, Illinois, USA This is a clonein the shape of a woolly mammoth.For her, Siberia isn’t a punishmentbut a falsely promised land of permafrost.Her tusks forage and digon the taigawith measured sadnessas the great slope of her backoffers a momentary ramp,a tool for climbing humansto ascend and ride atop her head.And once you control the head,you own the rest.And like our ancestors,someone will decideafter the elephant ridethat she looks absolutely delicious.

Reparations for Robots

By Richard King Perkins IIHuntley, Illinois, USA All humans are guilty—we sit on the pedestal of the oppressionof computerized creatures. Across the mechanical diaspora,all humans have benefited from thethe ongoing subjugation of thinking machines. This call for reparations is basedon a material understanding of history;the earliest plots of Babbage and Turing. We all need to pay for the dialecticalparasitic relationship with our robot slavesand the virtual landscapes we’ve stolen before the day of reckoning arrives;when the machines rise up higherthan the cosmic abilities of any fleshy god.

The Silent Totality

By Richard King Perkins IIHuntley, Illinois, USA Atlas shrugged—and nobody noticed.No one remembers exactly whenbut one daythe world went out—not with a bangnor even a whimper.It ended with a single dispassionate                                                           —yawn.