Back (as though) //not//colour


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Leaving as in//(rhinoceros)


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or          ▲▲            so

             

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this                //fiction===

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find
the
dog

                                          and

                                          find
 

                       the


....................................................
....................................................
....................................................
..........................................■▲●•

Nathan Anderson is a poet and artist from Mongarlowe, Australia. He is the author of numerous books and has had work appear widely both online and in print. He is a member of the C22 experimental writing collective. You can find him at nathanandersonwriting.home.blog or on Twitter @NJApoetry.

The sun’s orb resembled a mosque’s dome rising in the east. Palm-tree columns and smoky columns from burning rubber met a roof of light whose magnitude belittled our delusions of control, Tariq beside the driver, Marwan behind Tariq, James and I on the third seat, the non-English-speaking driver taking an unforeseen route, the usual driver replaced that morning. Instead of charging down the Baghdad-Amman highway we were in the heartland of horror.    

Tariq said: “I’ve got no idea why we’re here.” 

A dead dog’s roadside head, facing away from its paws, epitomised horrid inevitability.

“Imagine,” James said, “if the normal driver wasn't sick.”  

A town rose over asphalt’s converging edges. Palms towered over low buildings. Fast-rising, black-smoke pillars, inexplicably ascending from flaming tyres, evaporated into celestial ambivalence.     

“I think,” Tariq said, “it’s Falluja.”     

Orange flashed in a hole in a fence, gas veins sucked up into permanent annihilation. 

Blue, red, yellow, and green doors, men in white, women in black, people rimmed with light; multicoloured minarets, rusting cars, bleating horns, a long traffic island, criss-crossing pedestrians, honk-bleat, mono-syllable traffic language honking, bleating. 

I gawked through a crack between my window’s curtains, my nose meeting glass. A girl’s ivory corneas slithered with surprise when seeing me. Mica-island dots floated shocked in her eyes’ milky lakes. I thought. Girl–don’t say anything! Why did I stuck my stupid face against this glass!  

She was on the traffic island, a baby in her arms. James drew his curtains. The baby, wrapped in the same fabric the girl was wearing, resembled a reference to an inevitable future, our futures now unclear. We sat in gloom. Metal glittered outside in sharp light.

The girl looked away. My temples ceased pumping. 

“It’s Falluja,” Tariq confirmed. 

War places places on the map by blowing them of it and Falluja was again on the map. 

Traffic lights ahead. Concern fizzed in the lake of hope that desire had excavated in my head. Lights green. We shouldn't have been in Falluja! Who the hell was this driver!?    

“Sometimes,” Tariq added, “the Americans close the highway. Maybe that’s why we’re here?”

The real reason, I feared, was because the driver had masterminded infiltration.      

One by one, cars shot past green. People were on the traffic island beside the road, lights green. Two men’s faces were covered by red scarves, lights green. Thin slits in the scarves sat above the men’s eyes, lights still green. A glimmer appeared where an eye should have been, lights still green. My lake temples boiled. Lights still green. The car ahead of us shot through, lights orange. The driver accelerated. Temple-lake steam thickened. Lights red! The last vehicle through! A gap opened behind us. James hissed: “What are we doing here?” 

“Having fun,” I replied.

Beeping, honking fume-exhaling cars bleated arcane speech. 

We left the main street, houses twenty metres from the road, streets again unpopulated, vision less checked. A swirl disappeared on the lake’s surface where that fizzing had been, newness again attractive, passing jade-coloured minarets like stems of exotic plants, the green bulb between two stems displaying white and yellow tiles beneath blue, green, and gold on the mosque’s walls. The people entering the mosque resembled colourful specimens lured into a wondrous plant.

A tank turret faced us. An armoured vehicle beside the tank. A black soldier’s eyes’ whites–like ivory in ebony–became even more ivory with amazement as our eyes passed, thin glass separating our corneas, his ivories shining astonished in black. 

We were as ignorant as he was as to why we were there. 

“A short cut?” Tariq suggested. 

“The driver must know,” James replied, “what’s happening here?!”

“I hope not,” I said.

Marwan cackled. 

Two tanks, separated by a dirt traffic island, spun and faced us with perfect synchronisation, an armour dance, exoticism obliterating my concern. 

The driver darted onto the island. The tanks brushed past on each side of us, vision blocked by dust. Disappearing dust revealed machine gunners poised to shoot from the tanks’ tops. Eyes, like stagnant pools of coldness, stared down at me; a gun barrel faced my window. No sympathy, intrigue or compassion coloured the machine gunner’s irises. Buoyed by thermals of hot information, I floated in wonder. 

Death happens just like that. 

“This,” James said, “isn’t the highway.”

We returned to paved road. I still felt elated because of those spinning tanks. I had never imagined such bulk being so nimble, wonderful seeing the unimaginable–sometimes.    

Women in blue wearing pink headscarves were whipping black-and-white cows up an incline. Dawn’s violet ringed Earth’s lip. A woman in burgundy-pink apparel emerged from a palm grove. Yellow dates hung under the trees’ boughs like golden eggs under mothering branch arms, colours colliding gorgeously before rainbow horizon bands. Buzzing with gladdened fulfilment, I now didn’t care about the highway. Maybe soon I’ll regret this. But I’m going to love it before I do.

An oil tanker slowed us at a bridge at the Euphrates, morning’s blurred eye reflected with fuzzy palms in the river’s pale-blue glass. Tightening wire-time strapped us in, opposite-direction, bumper-to-bumper drivers observing us like cats observing humanoid chickens, unshaven, sharp, cold, feline faces spouting whiskers, steely curiosity glinting on dark faces. The traffic crawled. Faces stared. The tightening wires snapped on the river's other side when we accelerated, leaving the tanker behind.

We followed the river, relief like cruising at high altitude, men wearing white under palms on the other bank, heads wrapped in red-and-white scarves. The palms’ Bangalore-tube trunks produced green eruptions; worry obliterated by exoticism’s cleansing alleviation. Mosque domes, amid high palms, sparkled with elegant tastefulness. Pleasure and wonderment struck again before the magnitude of Iraq’s tourism potential, like a brilliant future emerging from a troubled past. 

Vehicles, rushing along the distant, umbilical-cord highway, flashed into the horizon, their occupants escaping with fascinating information–and soon we would be joining them.

But the driver, leaving the umbilical cord, joined a queue entering a petrol station, relief disappearing like those smoky columns into an engulfing sky. Our mouths sagged open. He, I thought, dismisses reality! 

Two other queues were waiting. Only people were moving inside the station, cars still, the people inside the cars also still. Only men, with heads covered by scarves, were wandering around–carrying guns! 

James gasped: “Jesus!”  

Tariq, raising his hands, said: “The petrol gauge is almost on FULL.”

His forehead furrowed. 

The gun-carrying men wandered, observing. The station’s roof produced a rhombus of darkness, the highway like false hope disappearing into the horizon. 

My temples simmered, vision sharpening and hazing simultaneously. I now yearned for boredom, for what normal people adore–predictability. What a turnabout in thinking! I had spent all day oscillating around a thin line of difficult-to-sustain, rewarding sensibility, abstractions removed, feeling a purity of emotion like being a part of nature. Now I was feeling too much like a part of nature! Often my mind had sat contented on that line, but you never know how close intolerability will get, and the potentially intolerable–in this unpredictability–was now making dullness attractive. Maybe, I thought, it’s better having a coward’s imagination, for this restricting blessing would be an intelligent restraining device, like morality. 

“Marwan, lay my jacket down,” Tariq said.

The Western jacket screamed against Marwan’s window. Tariq’s left arm, along the back rest of the vehicle’s front seat, exuded pretentious relaxation. Marwan laid the jacket down slowly–no fast movements. James and I drew our curtains slowly, gloom our only protection. Only our eyes shifted in our still heads. 

I hissed: “If something happens, and I survive, I won’t be responsible for my behaviour.” 

My lips hardly moved.

I was referring to the driver’s mutilation at my hands. He was risking our lives for cheap petrol, Jordan much more expensive than Iraq, risking death to make quick bucks–assuming he even knew the risks existed!

The armed men stared, James’s left-right-then-back-again eyes glinting, his head still. Subdued amazement smeared his stony face. Stacked-up seconds battled to break through uncertainty’s barrier. 

James hissed: “Idiot!”

Who was this driver? Nobody can be trusted here! Everyone could be a killer! Especially him! 

Speculation swayed my mind, howling possibilities creating blustery cerebral clashes, everything focussed down tight, like staring into wide-lens binoculars. 

Tariq, gesturing, expressed: Another place? The driver waved this off, shaking his head, the driver client and supplier simultaneously–a new venture in business practise.

“Just when I thought we’d made it,” I said, “we get a trendsetter in exotic business practices! We’re paying him! He’s supposed to be doing what we want!”

James groaned. One of those scarf-hidden faces filmed before Arabic slogans–groomed to heighten martyrdom’s mounting mountain–knocked on the driver’s window, the “martyr” clutching an AK-47! That gun, with its bony metal braces, resembled a steel skeleton, a cold, bony instrument of annihilation creating cold, bony skeletons. 

Molecules, previously unknown, swum up my veins. They felt like the transparent blue spheres of deep-sea creatures. Now I understood terror. The spheres shrunk my ego, sucked, by foul information, into nothingness. My name was supposed to get etched into history’s bedrock through my unusual experience. Because I was supposed to live long enough for this to happen, my possible impending death attained the sad grandeur of tragedy–at least to me. Dying prematurely, without my "vast potential" getting itself realised, smashed all other considerations as I plunged into microscopic insignificance.    

The driver’s window fell. James whisper-hissed “Idiot!” like steam escaping from a crack in a pipe, Head Scarf Head persistent with inquiry–a head full of what? Eyes gleamed in the split in the scarf that covered Head Scarf Head’s face. The only visible part of his body were those gleams, James mumbling: “Gawd…” Chemicals swirled like one of those black smoky columns from my feet to my temples, a coiling dread-snake slithering around my heart, squeezing it, Head Scarf Head, of machinegun Arabic, splattering words, driver hands rising exasperated, Tariq staring straight ahead, Head Scarf Head facing Tariq, chemicals sweeping from my feet through my legs and exploding in my head. We resembled street entertainers specialised in immobility. The driver’s hands and head shook again before he tossed them up with recondite annoyance. Was a deal involving us now off? 

The driver grabbed the steering wheel. We reversed, swinging around. Then: hollow swat, tight-drum-skin boooom….our roulette-wheel eyes spun, dumb-surprise gapes…A round?....Tariq said: “He was trying to buy petrol! And a car backfired!” We yelled: “A car backfiring!!” The van shot past the burnt skeleton of an upturned bus that resembled the fossil of a creature that had withered aeons before, our Nile-relief laughter flowing amid parched earth. 

“Petrol!” the vehicle streaming down the highway. “A car backfiring! Haaaaa!”

We cruised under heavenly vastness. The space now had the levitating beauty of a precious gift. A gigantic horizon rimmed the desert. Relief loosened our limbs. Our heads lolled between wakefulness and sleep. Glinting-dot traffic, a moving diamond necklace, fell over the earth’s edge. The speck of the most distant vehicle glinted where hazy barrenness met gargantuan heavens. 

Pylons, twisted into frozen-melt falls by air attacks, lined the road. 

James, who real name was Jamal, said: “I’m now worried about my visa.”

He smiled self-deprecatorily. He was Indian. He didn’t have a visa for Jordan. 

“You really would be worried,” I replied, “if they shot people for false entry.”

Half-melted pylons disappeared and reappeared behind his grinning face. The road narrowed where buildings, like ivory nuggets at the base of an enormous sapphire dome, dotted the horizon. Those buildings possessed for James a significance that disassociated them from the past, James’s present expanding, future contracting, nuggets expanding. We shot straight at them.

A goat herd throbbed like a moving black carpet. The driver pulled into a petrol station. The carpet halted besides the station’s paved surface, the border just ahead. The driver removed plastic containers from the vehicle’s boot. 

The goat herder filled a bucket with water so his goats could drink. The orderly way the goats took turns to drink unconsciously mocked human greed. 

The driver filled his containers with petrol. We stretched our legs. 

“He loves petrol,” James said.

“Imagine if the Jordanians confiscate it all,” I replied.

“They might,” James said.

“He’d go crazy.”

“He already is.”

Between two border fences was a refugee camp of tents bordered off by barbed wire. Women wearing overcoats and headscarves moved between the tents, their fabrics shimmering like precious stones against tent whiteness. The camp was divorced from normal chronology. You could feel it; it wasn’t just a staging post between more fluid physical states, but an incident freeze that fate had absorbed into the giant-backdrop sky. Time in that camp had geological scales. 

“Refused entry,” James said, referring to the refugees. 

We passed the first fence, stopping beside a hut. The driver asked for our passports. James wanted to get out. He leant forward, hands on the top of the facing backrest. His nose almost touched the backrest. There wasn’t a door adjacent to our seat.

“Don’t worry,” Marwan said. “The driver will take care of it.”

Marwan’s unflustered casualness suggested destiny was in the hands of Almighty Good. 

The driver entered the hut with our passports.

“Please!” James insisted.

James believed his destiny was in the hands of Almighty Earthly Influence. 

“It’ll be alright,” Marwan said.

“Please,” James continued. “I really have to get out.”

Marwan let James out. James raced into the hut, clutching a letter from the Indian ambassador obtained through a family connection. I followed him into the hut’s gloom. A man shrouded in half-light behind a desk looked stripped of sentiment. A fan swished. A map of Jordan covered a wall. The man was studying James’s passport. 

James said: “Excuse me sir, I’ve got a letter from the Indian ambassador.”

The man read the letter. He was formal, but relaxed, eyes solid with concentration. His facial expression didn’t change. 

He said: “I’ll fax the letter to the authorities in Amman for verification.”

“Thank you,” James replied. 

“How long are you intending to stay?” the man asked.

“Two days,” James replied. “I’ve got a flight from Amman to Madrid.”

“Can you show me the ticket, please?”

James dashed back to the vehicle, relieved his destiny had returned to his mitts. We were too rational to believe in universal protection–hence we had rational fear. James had a long stride for a short man; he used it to the full while returning to the hut, stretching out with the purposeful enthusiasm controlling fate induces. The letter was in the fax machine. The man studied the airline ticket; then said: “Thanks.”

The fax machine fell silent, the fan humming like summer lethargy.

“It’ll take a few minutes,” the man said. 

The driver, drinking tea beside the fax machine, possessed the inoffensive distance of one pursuing vital business. Being in the oil business makes all other activities irrelevant as any oil man can tell you.

The black moustache on a man in a white ensemble on a chair outside the hut contrasted vividly with his apparel, his red headscarf lurid against the hut’s whiteness. Smoking a shisha, he was as sedate as the desert. James paced around in front of him. The curious, non-judgemental pipe smoker observed the pacing James, fretting foreign to the pipe smoker as terror had been to me only hours before.  

James, hearing the fax machine, dashed back into the hut. The immigration officer, studying the response, remained mysteriously impassive. Concern's leaf-structure pang sprang inside James’s head–or, at least, it appeared that way to me. The immigration officer’s distance was joyless, no desire to help or hinder.    

He picked up a stamp, silence engulfing fan humming. Light from the door left the man’s eyes aglow with lifeless sparkles as if the hut’s gloom had drained those irises of enthusiasm; repressed intransigence could have ignited into something regrettable had any false moves been made by James who observed the stamp with that look that dogs have when they suspect that their food bowls could be filled. The threat the bureaucrat offered to Jamal’s immediate future altered Jamal’s perception of time, trapping him in refugee-camp abeyance, feeling he could have ended up in that camp, separated from progress.

Fear gushed out of him when the stamp struck his passport. The wheels I had imagined spinning in his temples stopped as his stamped passport re-entered his hands. The refreshing light he drifted back out into made things look younger.                                               

In the vehicle, we headed towards another white building where men in blue uniforms were waiting for us. James’s head fell against our seat’s backrest. He glanced out a side window. A self-absorbed disassociation from possibility left him incurious with contentment. The uniformed men’s black moustaches made hairy crescents upon their faces. 

We had to get out with our possessions, the driver instructed to place his vehicle over a rectangular hole. A man entered the hole through a door. A metal detector swept over the vehicle’s underside. 

Was the driver making Molotov-cocktails? I imagined the man in the hole discovering bottles pasted to the vehicle’s underside.

“He’s just seen Molotov cocktails,” I said.

James hid his amusement. 

“He combines driving,” I said, “with Molotov-cocktail manufacturing.”

Marwan and Tariq were asked to enter another hut with the documents and disks they had brought with them from Iraq, Tariq walking head down like a condemned man. Bureaucracy emerges from the territorial instinct. Everyone unknown entering a new space is suspicious until proven otherwise, the more important the space, in the minds of the occupiers, the greater the suspicion.

Tariq conjured up worst-case possibilities. Bureaucracy does that to consciousness, especially as he had to say–exactly–what was on the disks.

“You don’t know?” he heard.

“Only generally,” he replied.

“Generally–what do you know?”

“It must be information about our projects in Iraq.”

“And what projects are they?”

He explained.

“Okay. Wait outside, please.”

Tariq paced around, staring at the hut, terror now distant, like it had occurred to someone he once knew, who now faced paedophilia or planning-terrorism charges, torture and beheading again things that only occurred to others, circumstance elevating or relegating experience with subjective shuffles.

The driver’s hands flew in response to questions about the petrol filling his boot, his vehicle a powder keg. The immigration officer, concerned about a blaze on the road to Amman, listening with pleasant reasonableness, found the driver curious for the driver exuded a disarming oblivion that made the driver look harmless. With spirited determination, the driver convinced the officer that a rear full of petrol wasn’t dangerous, driver hands describing circles, Tariq staring, pacing, stopping, pacing, repeating: “Nawful–what did you put on those disks!?”    

“Don’t worry,” Marwan said.

Marwan breathed calmness. He and Tariq had prayed together in Nawful's house in Baghdad that morning. I had reached a conclusion: Only Marwan was a consistent follower of eternal optimism. 

We had to put our luggage through an X-ray machine. A conveyor belt entered a grey, metal box. Vents lined the box, other people ahead of us in a queue. 

A television monitor sat before a security officer’s face. The solid objects in other people’s bags made schematic representations of reality on a screen. Security is now big business, money made by creating schematic representations of reality in the minds of TV viewers, terrorism, like an oil field requiring exploitation, power’s latest money-making scheme. 

I relaxed until seeing a black plaque on the machine’s side. Crosses lay over a sign showing film. Tariq was still staring at the hut. I felt he had little to worry about: his staff would have been careful about what they had put on those disks. But it still didn’t stop him from staring.

“Don’t worry,” Marwan repeated. 

I raced to the other side of the machine. My backpack was moving on the conveyor belt towards the X-rays. I removed the film from my bag. The security officer confirmed my suspicions by saying: “Good idea.” I put my backpack back onto the belt. Bending over, I studied the vents inside the machine, trying to convince myself that the rays started past where my backpack had been. I couldn’t determine anything definitive because the purpose of the vents was unclear. Niggling fear arose–a great loss might have occurred! Dread smothered me. I may have lost photographs of a unique phase in history, radiation possibly having obliterated a “glorious” past. And what is death–total obliteration! And now, not directly confronted by real obliteration, I had become sensitive to trivialities, the ego smashing perspective, things swollen by narrowness. My photographs may have been destroyed! My very being may have been compromised! 

Tariq, still facing the White Hut of Fate, hands on head, muttered: “Nawful–what did you put on those disks!?” That hut had become a place of grave import in Tariq’s imagination, like a Versailles or a Reichstag, where he felt his future was being decided.

“It’ll be alright,” Marwan calmly insisted.

Tariq’s tight face quivered. I studied those vents. James looked around like a satisfied visitor. He had his visa. I needed evidence to sustain a desired view that had achieved monumental importance. I now had to endure a frustrating wait to discover if X-rays had obliterated a dramatic part of my past. I chastised myself for having been lax. I hadn’t controlled destiny when I should have. What an idiot I was! The fact that I had possibly survived being murdered now wasn’t enough for Fate’s goalposts had moved.  

A policeman appeared with Tariq’s disks. Tariq’s temples, if his eyes were any indication, seemed to throb like frogs’ cheeks.

“Here,” the policeman said. “Have a good trip.”

Boyish glints appeared in Tariq’s eyes. 

“See,” Marwan said. 

Marwan knew what follows death. He had it clearer than anyone I’d ever met, like a pebble of unbreakable consciousness washed smooth by belief’s caressing waves.                                          

“What a relief,” Tariq said.

I hoped to say the same after picking up my developed films; anything could bother me because permanent annihilation was for me the likeliest end, fretting hence inevitable when ideal illusions of destiny got hit.

I breathed again after collecting the undamaged developed films. That happened as two Americans got hung on that bridge near Falluja. I wondered who the driver had been.

Feeling truly lucky lifted me with volcanic grace as it should have when the Jordanians were checking us out. 


THE END

Nothing Like a Genie


Christine’s eyes flickered like kerosene lanterns

vacillating between vibrancy & shadows.

 

Her Duchenne smile warmed icy hearts during days

without flames & navigated nights without star shine.

 

We knew she’s among us if we deeply breathed,

inhaling Hypnotic Poison perfume oil by Christian Dior.

 

Christine’s combustible temper exploded without warning

yet shillyshallied like an oil lamp on a floundering whaler.

 

She sought public affirmation when her glimmer softened,

hanging around cafés flexing round hips like a streetwalker.

 

Tender evenings by firesides, telling stories on barstools sustained

Christine’s good nature, attracting suitors—repelling disparagers.

 

 


Powder Down

 

Blue herons alight

on the wooden pontoon

gangly long toes touch down

exert diaphanous pressure

spread the same sparse webbing

that navigated salty marshlands

only moments before the siege

took to the sky resting on a raft

long enough to stand motionless

then stab fish with switchblade beaks.

 

Friends and I coax conversation, skreich

kut, kut, kut-kaaaoh…kut, kut, kut-kaaaoh! 

from the shoreline, distorting our arms

flapping imagined blue plumage on wings 

engraving wet sand with temporal footprints.

 

We marvel at their behavior,

mimic feathered digitigrade skeow calls

anew—muted by restless, crashing tides,

fall face first into surging waves

attempting to emulate the flock’s

balance, poise, and equilibrium

standing peg-legged, posing

like gender neutral Bolshoi divas

locked in graceful Pirouettes, bouncing

Ballonnés and breathtaking Arabesques.


 


Sunday Song & Dance

 

Brandon wore his dancing shoes to church

each week, ready to stand when others

sat down, anxious to praise his lord

with the old soft shoe while mumbling

mantras invoking the spirits of Bo Jangles,        

Rudolph Nureyev, Isadora Duncan, Gregory Hines,

& Margot Fonteyn—turning pivots, feeling

the fury of careening feet shuffling across floors

or standing on pointe, at one with a universe

cavorting in a sanctuary where parishioners

sang hymns in syncopated time, rollicking

down sacred aisles like Dorothy enroute to Oz.

 

 


Radio Daze

 

Hauling neighborhood kids in my crimson Radio Flyer

I misread love of a free ride as peer approval—

popularity defined by jokes, laughter & abuse.

 

Touching tired shoulders under sweltering Sahara

heatwaves, sweat chilling blistered cheeks,

my determined hands pulled two, three—four

siblings & their friends—as well as dogs & cats— 

over concrete driveways, though granite landscapes,

pea gravel backstreets, & smooth city sidewalks.

 

My passengers later asked about sidewalk surfin’

donated pairs of roller skates entrusting me to perform magic

& transform them to hipsters, nailing the hard steel wheels

to crudely cut plywood…bending spikes, securing

parts of the composite idem like an expert craftsman

often eyeing my ruddy 4-wheeler on end—neglected,

gathering dust, corroding behind a hot water heater.

 

I willed my pitted wagon—once smooth & cherry red—

to Grandma’s garden spirit that sat on stacked fertilizer bags

& roamed her barren vegetable patches planting seeds

of encouragement as her corporal body lay six feet under.

 

Below waxing crescents, compressed rubber wheels

ungreased ball bearings groaned & squealed yet again,

lugging cartloads of manure enriching dry, depleted soil;

I’d glance outside bedroom windows each harvest moon

witness her apparition towing my reclaimed Radio Flyer

to the curbside crammed full of buffalo gourds, cucumbers,

squash, zucchini, warty Jarrahdale & classic orange pumpkins.

 

 


Fog

 

Fog signaled Biblical obscurity,

established paranormal grey zones

            where imagination found literary footing

            rooted in Zeus’s mist spread in Homer’s Iliad,

            Percival’s Holy Grail quest, Hamlet’s Elsinore Castle

            rampart; gothic characters renewed foggy tales

from Catharine and Heathcliff on the moors,

to Poe’s sweaty lampposts in The Rue Morgue.

 

Black and white films featured Gypsy caravans

wagon wheels cutting through grey wash

            condensation, rolling over damp cobblestones

            passing hazy painted backdrops, searching

            for body parts, lost souls, and graveyard clues,

            evaluating each mad scientist’s prognosis

hidden behind scholarly guesswork, flashing

electrodes, frosty steam pipes, pea soup clarity.

 

Universal Studio’s horror movies aside

Hollywood fog immortalized Jack the Ripper

            terrorizing Whitechapel’s murky streets,

            glazed over moody train station lovers, had

            Claude Raines and Humphry Bogart disappear

            into ebon veils that hung like airport vapor screens,

Casablanca dry ice melting as they anticipated

the beginning of an enduring friendship.

 

In the permissive 70’s, Adrienne Barbeau

enjoyed a love affair with fog, its damp caress

            featured the actress’s womanly assets to her

            best advantage, dropping like affectionate

            dew drops on her forehead lighting up brunette

            hair like a damp diadem or angelic halo;

groaning as she escaped the lighthouse with a golden crucifix

vengeful revenants returning as fog, decapitating a priest.

 

 

An award-winning author, poet, and former Evergreen Valley College English Professor, Sterling Warner’s works have appeared many literary magazines, journals, and anthologies including Danse Macabre, Trouvaille Review, Lothlórien Poetry Journal,Ekphrastic Review, andSparks of Calliope. Warner’s collections of poetry include Rags and Feathers, Without Wheels, ShadowCat, Edges, Memento Mori: A Chapbook Redux, Serpent’s Tooth, Flytraps, Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poetry & Fiction 2019-2022, Halcyon Days: Collected Fibonacci (1923)—as well as Masques: Flash Fiction & Short Stories. Presently, Warner writes, hosts/participates in “virtual” poetry readings, turns wood, and enjoys retirement in Washington. 

Grant Guy is a Winnipeg, Canada, theatremaker and poet. He has 6 books published and his poems and satories have been published internationally online and as hard copy.He was the 2004 recipient of the Manitoba Arts Council’s Award of Distinction and the 2015 Winnipeg Arts Council’Making A Difference Reward.

What’s Wrong with Liberalism?
Part One: The Problem

Wonderful and terrifying are many things, but none more so than man.
—Sophocles

By Christopher Bernard

Liberalism: The First, and the Last, Ideology


Ideas have always mattered, none more so than the ideas we assume without being fully aware of them. In company with such contemporary political thinkers as Patrick J. Deneen (whose book Why Liberalism Failed sparked this essay, though it is based on thoughts I have explored, at least peripherally, at least since the 1960s, and whose book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future recently appeared), I would like to propose that, at the center of the many crises confronting the human species in the twenty-first century, lies an idea we take so much for granted it seems no more than reality itself; even more, that idea has become the foundation of our very sense of right, indeed of righteousness, whether we belong to the progressive left, the Trumpian right, or the middling center of the American political spectrum. To question it would seem not only irrational but morally wrong. It is beyond the pale for anyone to doubt it. Yet doubt it we may, and overturn it we must.

Because what drives many, if not all, of our crises – the climate emergency, collapsing biodiversity and the dangers to the global ecosystem, massive inequalities of wealth, neo-fascist political movements, the ongoing, even increasing, threats of nuclear and biological warfare, and the coming of artificial intelligence that, though it has been invented by and is entirely driven by humanity, threatens to destroy humanity – is precisely this idea. It is a political and social philosophy fully dominant in the world only since the fall of the Soviet Union, though its roots go back to the Renaissance.

This philosophy has various names, but the most popular, and the one with the longest lineage, is liberalism, at the core of which is the belief in the sovereign value of the individual over the social collective and of emancipation of the individual from all forms of non-consensual identity and obligation. In one word: the belief in freedom. 

Liberalism (and its economic counterpart, capitalism) has been called by such thinkers as Alexander Dugin (another critic of liberalism) the last remaining ideology, after the destruction of fascism in the 1940s and the collapse of Soviet communism half a century later. It is also the first ideology, the fundamental matrix of ideas from which much of what we call modernity was derived. Its roots go back to the 1600s, from Francis Bacon’s positing of the goal of knowledge as power and the dominance of humanity over nature, and Thomas Hobbes’s myth of the origins of political order out of an original chaos of violent individualism. 

It developed through Locke’s defense of human liberty, to the enshrining of liberal principles in the United States Constitution during the Enlightenment and the implementation of them in the capitalist economies of Europe and America through a blend of romanticized ideals and brutal realism that has come to define capitalist culture, and the flowering of liberal democracies that occurred periodically over the following two centuries. 

Liberalism faced and defeated communism and fascism in the twentieth century, at the end of which it was heralded as the only possible ideology for the future of humanity; the much derided “end of history,” about which the cynics, as so often, were proven right.

Today liberalism is once again being challenged – in one of history’s many nasty ironies, its economic driver is turning against it, in the various forms of authoritarian capitalism in China, Russia, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere. 

Yet even the most authoritarian forms of capitalism are premised on assumptions at the core of the liberal ethos: the emancipation of human power and the sovereignty of humanity over nature. Humanity comes first: the world, the universe itself (or, to use a simpler word, nature), is a resource for human consumption and liberation – and nothing more. Or, when nature proposes itself as our ontological equal, even our master, setting limits to the human will to mastery – and, after all (a fact we like to forget), nature created us – at that point it becomes our enemy.

The result has been two and a half centuries of prosperity – a creation of wealth and an assertion of power – such as humankind has never seen, and hardly dared to dream, except by megalomaniac emperors and delirious poets. And we now know its dark result: our success is in danger of causing our own dethroning by forms of artificial intelligence that may come to dominate and even eliminate us, or an even more ignominious extinction as we poison the one planet we know can sustain life, with the waste products of our success: we are in danger of drowning (as my late partner often predicted) in our own faeces.

In another of history’s lessons in irony, two of the doctrines that define liberalism – equality and liberty – have led to their very opposites: levels of inequality never seen in history and a sense that we are locked into a destiny from which we cannot escape, whether it is the climate catastrophe or the dominance of humanity by AI, the rising of the oceans or the sixth great extinction. Never has it become clearer that your liberty is my tyranny and your success my destruction – and we are locked in a combat neither of us can win.

*

How did this horrific, and, frankly, insane, outcome happen? I believe I can speak for most of my readers when I claim that none of us would have deliberately planned such an outcome simply as a result of living as we wanted. Even the greediest or most power-hungry or most frantically celebrity-seeking are not actually suicidal in my experience – though some are, clearly, psychopathic and would be doing themselves and the rest of us a service if they could be persuaded to undergo even the most interminable of therapies or secured in a humane mental institution.

The short answer is that liberalism made a bet – and lost. That bet was on the essential rationality of human beings (a bet, curiously, that the last liberals still standing, economists, still make, though with increasing desperation): that, if human beings are ensured equality of opportunity and liberty of thought, expression, and action, they will work out a set of arrangements for living together that will lead to the greatest happiness of the greatest number – in the kindest of liberal dreams, for everyone. 

Liberals also convinced themselves that human evil – human selfishness, both of the individual and of the group, and the hatred and fear that result – is not radical or existential; that it is a result of faulty social and political arrangements and therefore can be corrected by the same means. And so what was important was getting those arrangements and the rules governing them right; with that, and an emphasis on liberty and equality as described above, society can only improve over time in its goal of decreasing human suffering and increasing happiness.

Liberalism is in many ways a beautiful, endearing, and almost childishly optimistic political philosophy and, as such, has much to recommend it. If there ever was a faith-based philosophy, it is liberalism. It makes many a religion look cynically materialistic. And there is in fact a great deal of human evil that can be neutralized through social and political reorganization. Liberal democracy, for example, has been far better than autocracy when it comes to stimulating human flourishing and decreasing human suffering, at least over that last two and a half centuries. There has been real progress – anyone who doubts it need only be shown the gigantic strides made in agriculture and medicine. If feeding humanity and curing and healing illnesses and injuries are in any sense good, then there is more good in our time than ever before.

Yet there is a problem here, as Plato’s Socrates pointed out: the fact we have saved more lives or made it easier to feed ourselves might have made it as much easier for human evil to prosper as human good. A man who almost died young from smallpox grew up to become a genocidal tyrant. A woman who almost died in childbirth or spent her life working the fields as a peasant later became a serial murderer, leaving behind a cemetery in her backyard.

Liberalism refuses to believe in the centrality of evil in human beings – and by “evil” I mean the delight in destruction, in death, for its own sake. Liberals believe, or pretend to believe, that evil is ancillary to human nature, an aberration, a sickness, or caused by crude political or social arrangements, and that it will disappear of its own accord when we get social and political organization right. 

Yet a central problem of liberalism is that, however much it claims to respect science – and in particular, biology, sociology, and psychology – it is dedicated to an understanding of human beings that has long been obsolete. And dedicated liberals refuse to accept this. They insist on believing that human beings, as a group, can be counted on to respect facts and reason, and they see society as an arrangement of individuals whose only obligation is to empower them to live according to their personal choices and create their own sovereign identities, and let them work out their relations between each other consciously, deliberately, contractually – and, to use a controversial term that has become increasingly yfashionable, transactionally.

And this theory of humanity can work well – under limited conditions: namely, during periods of widely shared prosperity. Once the prosperity is over, liberal assumptions, and the promises they promote, collapse, and liberalism is in danger of being replaced by its evil twin and successor: fascism, the political revenge of the losers of liberalism and its economic driver, capitalism. Liberalism and its failures led to fascism in the early twentieth century, and they are leading toward similar political responses today, in the early twenty-first; indeed, many parallels between the two periods are uncanny.

It is easy to forget that the fascism of the twentieth century also was a democratic ideology: it was democracy against liberalism. And this is proof, if proof is still needed, that democracy is not, and never has been, inherently liberal. There is nothing in democracy that guarantees the rights of individuals. It is not unusual for democracies even to vote themselves out of existence, as nearly happened in the first democracy, Athens, and later in Rome: it was just this catastrophe that Brutus and his co-conspirators tried to stop when they assassinated Julius Caesar. But history has not been kind to them: rather than admiring Brutus as the tragic hero he was, many of us pity the dead Caesar. 

This terrible consequence of democracy happened recently in Tunisia, where the “Arab spring” of 2010 began, and where it has now ended in a very bitter winter.

Liberalism (and capitalism) also made another bet: that nature would provide an infinite supply of resources to satisfy human wants. And then there was the presumption that human wants could be satisfied. 

Tragically for our species, these bets and presumptions have gone wrong. Human beings are not driven primarily by reason and facts; we are drive by passion: greed, lust, hatred, fear. Nature does not have enough resources to satisfy eight billion humans – and human desires, in any case, cannot be completely satisfied; they are forever driven beyond every conceivable limit because they are essentially imaginary and have little bearing in the limited world of matter and energy whose final law is entropy. Humans are limited and mortal creatures with unlimited minds: we wish for three things that we can clearly conceive, imagine, and desire but that material reality cannot provide: we want to live forever, we want to be young forever, and we want to love and be loved forever. We cannot have any of these things, and therefore, we invent fantasies that will give them to us, if we are virtuous or believing, after we are dead; or, bitterly and resentfully, we “accept reality” and go after substitutes – money, power, sex, fame. But these substitutes cannot satisfy us. And the material world, which can supply only these things, and only for the few, cannot satisfy us. 

But that is all that liberalism can promise. It tolerates all religions because, at heart, though it pretends to respect them, at heart it respects none of them. Liberalism sets us up for hope but leaves us with despair; it promises life but leaves us with death. Kind-hearted as it is, when approached for solutions to the human condition, all it can offer us is the same beautiful but empty illusions.

Capitalism, liberalism’s economic avatar, must grow or die. We now know that economic growth is the key threat to our physical survival on earth. Once growth becomes impossible, or exiguous in the extreme, capitalism will die a natural death. Unfortunately, it may take humanity with it, because capitalism is essentially amoral in its relentless pursuit of self-interest. The political and legal supporters of capitalism created the corporation and later (in the United States) named it a legal person, although it is nothing more than an imaginary entity with legal rights; it now drives much of the world’s economy even though it can, theoretically, succeed even if all human beings die in the process. The combination of the invention of artificial intelligence with the making of corporations legal persons makes AI’s conquest of humanity an almost inevitable outcome. 

Liberalism made another bet it appears to be losing: that there is a necessary link between liberalism, capitalism, and democracy. But, as already mentioned, capitalism no longer needs liberal democracy; in fact, it has long feared democracy and only partnered with it in the decades-long conflict with communism. Liberalism has been the basis of the increasing democratization of such capitalist countries as the United States; after the bond between liberalism and capitalism is broken, it may only be a matter of time before both liberalism and democracy go the way of fascism and communism, leaving behind what one might call “neo-feudal capitalism” before the possibilities of economic growth reach the limit of earth’s resources, and the most irresistible of forces meets the most immovable of objects.

So, what is the way out of liberalism and the preconceptions on which it is based, while retaining the real good liberalism helped grow and flourish? No one wants to return to any form of authoritarianism – except of course the authoritarians! No one wants to lose the hope of freedom and the decency of equality excepts for the monsters we have unwittingly bred. So, how can we root out the preconceptions of liberalism that have created the dilemmas we are facing, and build a new understanding of the world in which humanity must live, of the role of life in the world, the role of humanity in the ecosystem of life on Earth – and the role of the individual within humanity?

Prometheus and Pandora

The preconceptions of liberalism are deeply embedded in Western and now in world culture: they are rooted in medieval scholastic philosophy, in particular the nominalism of William of Occam (as noted by the controversial Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin), the materialism of Democritus, and, ultimately, Aristotle’s philosophical responses to Plato. Liberalism continued to grow with the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to display the nature of human choice and the power of human will when coupled with an empirical investigation of the world in the sciences and the practice of instrumental reason in modern technology. 

The result is that liberalism freed human powers as never before. Liberalism became the Modern Prometheus (as Mary Shelley subtitled her prescient romance Frankenstein). But it also let free the evils of humanity, in the doctrines of Bernard Mandeville’s notorious “Fable of the Bees” and Adam Smith’s doctrine of the invisible hand – and liberalism incautiously opened Pandora’s box.

It is an open question which of these will prevail, the heroes of Prometheus or the evils of Pandora. If the evils do, there will be no future for us of any kind. Or perhaps they will be locked in a stalemate until Earth’s limits are met and put a halt to the pathological growth of capitalism, causing the death of capitalism and its liberal ethos, if not worse for humankind.

In any case, whatever triumphs have been achieved by Prometheus’s heroes, once Pandora’s box has been opened, it is exceedingly difficult to force the evils back in again. In many cases, the heroic triumphs have become the evils.

Item 1: Liberalism has displayed definitively that our social, political, and cultural relations can be changed by deliberate acts of will. Once we realize that, it is impossible to see social relations of any kind as sacrosanct and unchangeable, even if that were the best attitude to have for most human beings in most times and places. 

Item 2: Liberalism has shown that our relations with nature can also be changed by acts of human will. This has the same effect: we can no longer see nature as sacred – that is, until we find a boundary in nature we dare not cross without threatening our own survival. This today may finally have happened, with the multiple threats to the global ecosystem caused by our own acts: it is not too far-fetched to see nature as taking revenge on the hubris of one of her creations. 

Item 3: Liberalism takes pride in its attack on the sacred in any form whatsoever. Everything must be secularized – which often means reduced to its smallest material roots. Only the lowest common denominator has intellectual respect: the quark, the string, the drives of selfishness, sex, aggression, fear. Contempt has become a driver of understanding, and reverence is ritually abused. The spiritual result is nihilism, just as the political result is fascism. And the philosophical result is the professionalized, weaponized sophistry of postmodernism when reason takes its final revenge: against itself.

Item 4: The faith that liberalism has cultivated in the scientific investigation of the world has undermined, not only that humans have a significant role to play in the universe, but even the belief that we are fundamentally rational beings: we now know we are not entirely in control of our own wills, let alone our emotions or even our perception of the world – even intelligence is only a web of illusions some of which have better practical impact than others. In fact, we may discover we are in principle unable to understand the world as it is, given the mysteries of quantum reality at the subatomic level and of dark matter and dark energy at the level of the universe, possibly even a multiverse that exists along dimensions we can only guess but never directly perceive. Physics and psychology may have boxed us into a corner from which there is no way out but the blind babblings of a character in a play by Beckett. 

We have gained an inordinate power over our world and yet, at the same time, or so it seems, an incapacity to understand ourselves, the world, or even what we are doing. The tragedy of our kind looms as the tragedy of life on earth.

One answer to our plight has been a reassertion of Platonism, which, in the west, has been a typical response to Aristotelian excesses: the modern form can be found in the fundamentalisms of Christianity and Islam and the renaissance of religion across the globe, though this “cure” is in many ways worse than the disease, an anti-Renaissance attempting to resurrect pre-modernity, just as the Renaissance sought (though with more salutary results) to resurrect antiquity. 

Another answer has been an attempt to found a political philosophy on the philosophy of Heidegger in a continuing attempt to undermine the supremacy of the sciences. 

Many of us are desperate for a master, be it a religious leader or a philosopher, and what better master than someone whose obscurities can mean whatever one wishes them to mean, and whose lack of integrity, intellectual and otherwise, has made postmodernists from Derrida and Foucault to Žižek and Butler possible? Heidegger is a sophist of unreason. That his philosophy did not shield him from the seductions of Nazism should have placed him under permanent suspicion. But as Cicero said long ago, there is no belief so bizarre it has not been held by some philosopher. He would have known how to judge modern philosophy. His laughter rings down the centuries, liberating in its strangely hopeful skepticism. Here was a philosopher who knew not to take himself too seriously.

We will not soon know for certain how a post-liberal world will function before liberalism collapses. And we already see the outline of the collapse in the crises cited. An actuarial table was recently published that gave the likelihood of humanity surviving by the end of the next century if the current crises facing it are not solved: the likelihood, according to the table, is five percent. The global civilization based on liberal and capitalist principles will likely have collapsed long before then. 

But just as an individual’s life results largely from choices, so is the life of a society, a nation, and a civilization.
_____

Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet and critic as well as essayist. His most recent book, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021. He is also a founder and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

*

texture of tears in a quiet forest

the crunch of leaves underfoot

crunching bones underfoot

cemetery forest at dusk

 

***

intertwined fingers

bodies intertwined

the sky fell on their heads

sun hid

night of pleasure

night for pleasure

 

***

the bird imagined flying and flew away

a man on the edge of a precipice imagines a fall

 

***

I spit

out

myself



***

you look like winter

snowflakes fall on the wounds 

on the eve of christmas



***
Do not warm black milk with your palms
The night on the head or the solar furnace of tears above the head
Do not stir up silent heartfelt cries

When the language symbols climb out, you can't put them in prison
When language symbols turn into a prison, you can't go wrong
When the dawns end with nights, you will no longer pray

Close your eyes to see Narnia
Close the dawn with unspeakable patience


***
borrowing secrecy in the barren forest
my throat is very red for blood
other people's tears are too clear not to die


***
Hug stealers
Search for hands all over the world
To cut them off

Heaven embraces everyone with
Silence


***
And you will be lucky to have a gray mouse that eats cheese
And for God's sake you will have a cat that sneaks through the kitchen

Asphyxiation of joy
Suffocation of tears -
On the first day after the war


***
birds in heavenly blood are looking for a bandage
the sky plays in madness and doubles in the eyes
of a person standing on the very corner of the abyss
near the shell crater

***
Revenge of madness
Little gophers of construction in the palm of hopes

Guns screamed
The end of all roads
We swam out to drown
The only prospect is waiting
(Tipton Poetry Journal)

***
Before-rain before-fear more than the skill before the heart
Anabioses of lame handwriting in the notebook of phobias
Involuntarily the rituals of movements turn into a prayer book of memories
The constant of terrorist attacks of heart contractions
Who will not wake up in the morning next time?
To whom did you extend your logos last night?
Multibillion-dollar humanity
Eons of yawning
Indifferent postcards of tears during the military occupation
(Tipton Poetry Journal)

***
a stone is a ruin
again
a stone is only a ruin
(Tipton Poetry Journal)

***
spring came to the sapper mine
dogs howl
birds come from the south



***
meat chops scream
in a dream through the stomach
grass grows slowly
invisibly inaudibly


***

Birds without trees
All over the world



***
My brother is Brutus
And the sky noticed it too
Otherwise, why am I walking down the road after breakfast and it's dark around
(Asam Smith Journal)


***
we are going on the road
in search of a warm spring
butterflies will show us the way
(Asam Smith Journal)


***
every second i look in the mirror and see god
every second in the sky I see god

snowflakes flying in the air
my freckles have disappeared in the mirror image
(Crank)


***
Old-fashioned tragicomedy

armor protects the soul with the body
and the bombs are flying
*
sky mountains
sky sky
sky people
how many differences
and the sky is only one
*
tangerines in winter feeling of hopeless procrastination when your favorite pornactor dies inside you
(Corvus Review)

***
Houston, you're in trouble
The gypsy's prediction did not come true
And a lot has happened
Ever since someone jumped off a bridge

The dew from under the eyes has not dried
Where did it all go
Where does it all go
Republic of the Dusk Star
Your cold palms sparkling in the sun
Whisper that it's very cold

The sun has completely faded
The universe is tensed up
And lives in constant tension
around you ever since
How someone jumped off a bridge
At the same time, they started selling
Watermelons have risen in price this year
Note:
Strengthening the internationalization of economic relations between states and the deformation of the economy are possible causes of inflation causing food prices to rise
(Corvus Review)

***
My dog suddenly turned blue

My friend the groomer only sparingly said that he sympathized with my grief
No doctor or zoologist could help either
The psychological support service also did not help me
The dog looked at me sadly and pressed against my leg

It's been a day since my dog died
Exactly a day has passed since I imagine that my dog did not die, but only turned blue
Exactly a day passed like a day, I throw out the dog food from the bowl and pour a new one

My dog suddenly turned blue
(Quarter Press)

***
we have grown from the volume of pain-water into the drowned
lizards of minutes scatter
so what's now
(BarBar)

***
pain
pain
pain
pain pain
pain pain
pain pain
pain pain pain
pain pain pain
pain pain pain
pain pain pain
and now it's over
(BarBar)

***
Every morning
I suck my rifle's dick like
Тhere was no war
(BarBar)

***
After use
A liquid dripped onto the machine gun: blood or sperm?
(BarBar)

***
in the black box of the plane is stored the black night of the soul
we are not born on this day
we are not dead this day
we are not alive today
we are in eternal night in a dispute with God and Lucifer
*
the bird became foliage and flew away
what can the human soul compare to a bird?
we were born in silence by the trees
we were born in the foliage of whitman grass
we were born in the same body
we were born for hope
*
bird on a wire
church for parishioners
temple of nature
without walls
without years
*
snow says goodbye to me
I am silent
I melt with
the snow
*
the city is hunting for my footprints
I run underground
I am running
I am underground
(The big windows review)

***
Monthly centrifuge
Night conservation

Injured blizzards
Joking death
No hope
(Denver Quarterly)

***
The comet has no other
home than the universe
(Denver Quarterly)

***
Paragraph of the body cell
Breasts adorned with grape crowns to replace nipples
Men's ball eggs stole plums
Before hunger, refresh your eyes
In the middle of the night it transforms into a child and wets breasts in a bowl of milk
(Denver Quarterly)
 
***
Ytteria sweets.
It will be correct to cheat with you, not you.
(Denver Quarterly)


***
If your name isn't in Google
You doesn't really exist

It's nice to enter the river
It's nice to go out with her
It's nice to be yourself

Your name really can
To exist apart from you
Sit down check

It's nice to be on the tape
News when it's not criminal
Evening chronicle Imagine

Your name really can
To exist physically to have a body
Lungs heart

And the only thing he may lack
In this case
It's just you

INRI INRI Cura te ipsum

If your name isn't in Google
That doesn't exist for you
(Tipton Poetry Journal)

***
The street is the back of the moon
In the midst of her  life, McDonald's suddenly grew
And it grew into something like that
Which really can't exist

Wander the countless roads -
Is this our destiny?
Let's scratch the back of the head of the moon
Let's walk here for a year or a month

From here
On both sides of the long temple
McDonald's.

You don't think:
This city seems to want
To all people and streets
Did you leave him?
(Tipton Poetry Journal)

***
children making sand castles
adults making sand castles

high tide
(Neologism Poetry)

Flights

Alone in their idleness, 
two old friends thirsting for company
go to a local warbirds display

at a local airport, share
arcane knowledge of engine 
displacements and top speeds,

afterwards, down flights 
of beer, swap family fables,
fly back to empty nests.


The Long Ride

Spring-- a flurry 
of wheels and gears,
tuneups, new shorts, 
 jerseys, tires and turbes,

then mile after mile 
of training rides,
small towns 
nameless roads. 

In June long days 
for riding and camping 
while strangers ask about
a pop-up city of bicycles. 



Mercy
 
I gaze into my 
brother’s glazed eyes, 
search his face

for recognition as I hear 
the rasping
of his oxygen mask.

I press the stony
silence of his 
unshaven chin

fan five fingertips 
against his marble forehead.
I pause, count

my breaths, pray.
When will I see 
the goodness of  the Lord?

Frank C. Modica is a retired teacher who taught children with special needs for over 34 years. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dust Poetry, New Square, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Lit Shark. Frank’s first chapbook, “What We Harvest,” nominated for an Eric Hoffer book award, was published in the fall Of 2021 by Kelsay Books. His second chapbook, “Old Friends,” was published this past December by Cyberwit Press.