The diplomat’s daughter can recite the 23rd Psalm in Hindi, once drank Coca-Cola with Martin Luther King, is 11 years old. I’m 14. Public school, we’re the same grade. I’m not brilliant, she says. I’m experienced. We ride the bus. She sits with me, walks with me after I rescue her once from certain ignorant assholes. In a white school she’s skinny and shy and brown. Her father sizes me […]
Rizwan Saleem | Blankets
In August 2018, a bus carrying school children in Yemen was hit by a missile mistaking them for rebels. This poem is about its aftermath. Blankets, Multicolored, used blankets That’s what they brought them in Wrapped and ensconced Almost as if they were asleep In a way, they were, weren’t they? Small bundles, medium-size bundles And some large ones too All shapes and all colors Never knew they could come in […]
War no more | Movies You Might’ve Missed
Threads This pioneering 1984 BBC film tells the fictional story of several British families before, during, and after an all-out nuclear exchange between the United States and the then-Soviet Union. Worried about the complacency with which the public seems to view nuclear war, the filmmakers intended to scare people and they were very successful. Reviewers have called it “the most disturbing film” they’ve ever seen, as they watch the slow […]
Joseph S. Pete | Lonesome days, lonesome haze
PFC Solos stared down the barrel of his M4 carbine at the barren, sand-swept Iraqi countryside. He had been stranded on this hill for weeks, months, who knew how long. His platoon had been tasked with guarding radio towers, a thankless assignment that relegated him to this most remote outpost of nowhereistan. It wasn’t what he signed up for. The sergeant in the strip mall recruitment office never brought up […]
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