INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Richard Kostelanetz
Karyn M. Bruce
Duane Locke
Lyn Lifshin
Rich Ives
Chris Lord
Anton Gojcaj
Donal Mahoney
Laszlo Slomovits
Alan Britt
A. J. Huffman
Bhisma Upreti
Ali Znaidi
Paul B. Roth
Joan Colby
Rexhep Shahu
Catherine McGuire
Michelle Bailat-Jones
April Salzano
Kufre Udeme
Jane Butler
Jennifer Burd
Peycho Kanev
Joanie Freeman
Jennifer Burd &
Laszlo Slomovits
Frederick Pollack
Fahredin Shehu
Holly Day
Serena Wilcox
Ndue Ukaj
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Allison Grayhurst
Rose Mary Boehm
Michael D. Long
Jim Davis
Christopher Dungey
Bobbi Sinha-Morey
Jason Ryberg
Douglas Polk
Janine Canan
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2013
Silver Grey Fox
All rights revert back to each poet.
--editor / Southeastern Florida
------------------------------------------------
staff:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Submissions via e-mail:
I built my bomb shelter because
I want to see what will happen
to my garden after The Bomb.
I fully intend to go in
when the first sirens go off, plan
to shut myself up tight and live
through however many blasts of
intense radiation we all
get hit with. After a month or
so, I'm going to come back up, pop
my head outside, take a look at
the back yard to see how the plants
are doing. It's not so much that
I've seen a number of horror
movies featuring man-eating
plants, poisonous plants, angry plants,
brought to mobile life by a blast
of radiation. It's more that
I just want to see how far this
whole gardening thing can go, to
see what's beyond watering
and basic fertilizing. I
desperately want to see some
beautiful, drastic mutant change
in my garden, to see snaky
tendrils waving threateningly
at me from beneath the birch tree,
tiny green heads snapping at my
feet through the grass, the tree itself
taking a good, hard swing in my
direction. I think that'd be
really cool.
LEGACY
My mother used to say our family could trace
our roots back to the first English settlers, never specifying
what ship we came over on, or the specific names of any
ancestors,
or where we were supposed to have first settled.
She'd rumor about our legacy of being here longer
than any of our neighbors, as though we had more of a reason
to live in this country because some refugee from England
that came here four hundred years before was more valid
than an indentured servant from Sweden that landed
two hundred years later. She's say
we had ancestors who were burned
at the stake by religious fanatics, brilliant
women who were possibly scientists, or philosophers,
or even real magicians, and that she and I
were probably as smart as those women, and that
we would have been burned at the stake back then, too.
She's say there was some sort of
power in our blood, something denied to us
by men, something lost. She'd read books
to me about elves and fairies, witches and warlocks,
demons in the butter churn. She said
they were probably real, but no
one knew how to look for them
anymore, but she thought she could see
things moving, sometimes, out of the corner
of her eye. My mother was terrified of
spiders and The Bomb, but not of rapists
or murderers. She'd tell me she was strong
enough to fight
off any human being, but that spiders
gave her the creeps, and nuclear power was
just wrong. I used to worry about
her living all alone on
the farm after my father died,
but I don't have to anymore.
Holly Day, Minneapolis, Minnesota