This warring government
having lost its people
and having exposed
its lies and its twists
and turns of the knife
in the back of all decency,
has only the guns left
to keep the people in line
in Iraq and here as well,
the guns that make people
afraid because they can
make people dead,
and so when an officer
like Ehren Watada
from one of the two
newest states to be
legalized as part of
the United States
realizes that the war
declared by his country
is an illegal one, and he
refuses to be deployed
to Iraq, and is illegally
court-martialed,
he has opened a crack
in the cage we all are
fearfully imprisoned in,
and the sun of truth
has streamed in radiantly,
and hopefully others
today or tomorrow will
be touched by the same
luminous courage as
Ehren Watada’s, and the
dominum effect lead to the
highest-ranking officer: Peace.
--Jack Hirschman
Jack Hirschman was appointed San Francisco's poet laureate in 2006 and released a collection of poems title The Arcanes. Some of his most recent books include Front Lines (City Lights Books, 2002); Fists on Fire (Sore Dove Press, 2003); I Was Born Murdered (Sore Dove Press, 2004).
Poppies
lull all pain and anger, bringing
forgetfulness of every sorrow.
—Homer, The Odyssey
Crossing into California
from Arizona, the border guard
asks me where I was born.
New York, I answer.
Say something in English, he says.
Something in English, I retort.
That's not what I say, staring
at his magnificent 9mm
Sig Sauer in its shiny leather holster.
Kali/fornia. Blood-orange
poppy, the state flower,
freshly built prisons and road
signs' warnings about hitchhikers.
"Easy does it," fat-free thighs—
mud slide, earthquake, car jack,
fire—in California, you'll want
to live forever.
Interstate 8 razors the Mojave
with the precision of a Hollywood
Mogul's line of coke. Sky shot
through with bars of color,
girlie pink and baby blue.
Behind us and closing
fast, an avocado-
green immigration van.
--Maggie Jaffe
Maggie Jaffe's published books include The Prisons (Cedar Hill Publishing, 2001), 7th Circle (Cedar Hill Publishing, 1998), How the West Was Won (Burning Cities Press, 1996), Continuous Performance (Burning Cities Press, 1992).
Work Ethic
When my mother falls asleep he'll rise, step
from the house, to hurl the thousand humiliations
dealt him by Smurft-Stone, by the faltering union,
into the sky, where they burn all night with the stars.
Returning to bed, he'll pass his own wedding picture,
his young eyes without shadow, his jaw against the white
of my mother's dress. He'll lie awake for hours,
cramped from the strain of this launching out,
but it is the closest he gets to dream, and therefore
worth the exertion, night after night, barefoot
on the cool patio: to imagine he should be recognized,
to imagine a hand beyond the plastic palms
of a lobby in a cosmos he has not yet found,
serving out good to the honest, forever, like bread.
--Amy Groshek
Amy Groshek's poetry has been featured in magazines like Contrary Magazine, Radical Society and the anthology Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other USA.
