Bill Nevins

“Belief in Winter’s iron music turns the lands of home to Spring.” Kenneth Patchen, “Nocturne for the Heirs of Light”

Even your blood
seems cold slush
so
we come, bearing
scientific warmth
and clean blades

Of faith and all
such crude early things
we moderns strive to sharpen,
your mystic heart alone
beats most desperate
beneath our lazer aim:
true tempered love
at gunship point
thrusts in you
bleeding you clear
in sha'Allah

by dread hand of
surgeon- drone,
bootkick- blessing,
your shabby portal
opens

upon us

we ash-cross your brow:

Quique Cruz sums up the story of his long life journey towards the creation of an extraordinary work of art and human testimony called Archaeology of Memory: “The day after my nineteenth birthday, I was detained by Pinochet’s secret police and spent one month as a desaparecido in the Villa Grimaldi torture centre.

Push Comes to Shove

Music by John Hammond

Only Blues Music, 2007

12 tracks, $23.99

(For Specialist Mike Moriarty, Rahim Al Haj and all the Joes and Jills and all the Hadjis. This poem is inspired in part by the documentary film The War Tapes, which everyone should see.)

I Pledge Allegiance to Myself

Lizzie West

Appleseed Recordings <http://www.appleseedrec.com>