John Stanizzi
The following work is Copyright © 2022, and owned by John Stanizzi and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
No More Trouble
Cuban Missile Crisis
October 12, 1962
October 28, 1962
It must be that it was intuition
fueled by overheard conversations that
the adults around me were having, their
faces shaded by worry in their eyes,
because I wouldn’t know until later
the things they were trying to hide from me —
the 43 seconds until the end,
the uranium bullet, the vapors
of people that left shadows, the pressure,
the tsunami of smoke, the wind that raged
a thousand miles per hour, the heat of
7000 degrees, the vanishing
of tens of thousands in that instant wrath —
vague debris that razed me each night with fear.
Tiffany Shaw-Diaz
Tiffany Shaw-Diaz is a Pushcart Prize and Dwarf Stars Award nominee who also works as a professional visual artist. She was shortlisted for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for Individual Poem in 2020 and won in 2021. Her poetry has been featured in Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Bones, NHK World Haiku Masters, The Mainichi, and more than 100 other publications. Her chapbooks include: says the rose (Yavanika Press 2019), filth (Proletaria 2020), and tyranny of the familiar (Yavanika Press 2020). Visit her on the web here.
The following work is Copyright © 2022, and owned by Tiffany Shaw-Diaz and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Lazarus
i grew up on
the wrong side of radiation
a place where trains derailed
and the sky hailed Satan
you hung the paddle like a cross
and the cross became a bullet
they say chemicals were dumped
into the water the soil the air
but my blood was poisoned long before
i took my first step on this earth
mother once praised you
by saying you punched
her pregnant belly only once
praise God
apparently he was there somewhere
atomically in the crack of our carpet
when you
molested me
when i was 14 i thought it was odd
how i remembered almost nothing prior
to the age of 10
but i remember my sister almost dying
at the age of two
and that cancer was an open secret // grave
in our town
when we left
you took me and my sister back
one last hurrah in the old house
why we were naked i don’t know
but i do know
you eventually destroyed those photo negatives
you weren’t a pedophile
of course
and The Mound didn’t kill
the residents of Miamisburg, Ohio
