Tattoo by Shug Lescault from issue 2 of Hole In The Head Review.
http://www.holeintheheadreview.com
Look for Issue 3 on 08.01.2020 with wonderful work by Betsy Sholl, Charles Simic, Linda Aldrich, Alice B. Fogel, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Sara Pirkle, Meghan Vigeant, Janet Powers, Greg Clary, Russell Barajas, Michael Hettich interviews Denise Duhamel, and much, much more.
Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst.
Charles Simic, from “The Necessity of Poetry”
The marching music of the next century will undoubtedly be religion and nationalism. The choir practice has already started. Children of light and children of darkness are already being sorted out everywhere. Brutality, violence, and inhumanity, as Simone Weil knew, have always had an immense and secret prestige. We now only require a new superior morality to justify them.
– Charles Simic, writing in a 1995 essay “Orphan Factory,” from his collection of essays, The Life of Images
Edge of Atlantic 