INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Fahredin Shehu
Elisavietta Ritchie
Uvie Gwewhegbe
Jennifer Burd
George Miller
Robert Penick
Laszlo Slomovits
Richard Gartee
Gale Acuff
Stephen Sleboda
Robert Nisbet
Chris Spitters
Silvia Scheibli
Michael Lee Johnson
Alicia Mathias
Alan Britt
Y. Przhebelskaya
Helen Gyigya
Aneek Chatterjee
Alex Ferde
Running Cub
Joanie Freeman
Shutta Crum
Fred Wolven
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2020
Francis Ferde
All rights revert back to each poet.
--editor / Southeastern Florida
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AAR history note: in print 1967 - 1980. Irregular publications 1980 - 2004. As ezine 2004 - present. Most of 55 years all together....
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staff:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Submissions via e-mail:
When folks die it's Heaven or Hell they say
in
Sunday School to us ten-year-olds but
I guess I'll only know if they're right when
I die myself or is that I myself
die and I wish I could but of course I
don't mean suicide or even killing
myself but just dying long enough to
catch a fairly decent glimpse of what's to
come, come the Afterlife--angels, demons,
harps, and pitchforks and so on--but I wish
I didn't have to die at all, just get
to hang here on Earth forever because
when I asked my Sunday School teacher if
I'll find corn dogs in Heaven she laughed but
then she started crying. Is that Maybe?
After
Sunday School today I watch my teacher
through the plastic-glass door of our trailer
-classroom, she's alone with Jesus now in
our double-wide without any wheels or
wheels within wheels which Ezekiel saw
and once in Sunday School I slipped and spoke
Zeke when I meant his Christian name--I mean
his first name, anyway--and Miss Hooker's
eyes went round like baby-moon hubcaps and
I saw myself in 'em even though I
was at the very back of the classroom
and her mouth made the kind of O that means
you gnashed a sour pickle or lemon twist
so I spoke up Ezekeiel is what
I mean and she said It's who as well. Good.
Nobody
lives forever--behind our
church
the cemetery tries to keep them
going but it's only in dust and stone
and names and dates and sometimes flowers but
sometimes they're made of plastic, they'll never
wilt, of course, but somehow that's the point,
or they just look phony and that's worse than
dead ones, if they're not removed they crumble
but it takes some time and they blow away
but where do they go, no one knows that
exactly, and my father's buried here
behind our Sunday School window, I look
--when I look--to see him, not him really
but as close as I guess I can get
until I'm buried by him. Then we'll talk
Gale Acuff, Jenin, Zababdeh, Palestine