We live in a time of terror.
There is no other way to say it or to see it. Some great evil has been unleashed and it seems that all we can do is keep our heads down and hope that somehow we will be safe.
My parents lived through the years of the Holocaust. Both were children and both were safely in the USA, but they were alive when it happened, and in the great reveal afterward. The sheer knowledge of what malevolent creatures we are and what we can do to each other was what they taught me. Never again.
And when I taught it to my children I went back into history, the stories from the Bible, from mythology, from history. This is why I chose Francois-Xavier Fabre’s art for this issue: his paintings depict these stories that are really the same story over and over: power, cruelty, desperation, destruction and death. Even in the blatant face of incredible beauty—the beauty of landscape, of the male form, of the human face.
Never again.
And yet, here we are. Again and again. As I have prepared these two issues for Calul, missiles have exploded over my head as I sit in my safe room. And we are privileged. So privileged. Our enemies don’t come, as we do to them, with fighter jets and precision—with no warning. We have where to run to keep our heads down and, for the most part, we are safe.
Though death still finds us. Destruction still reigns supreme.
My hope is that these special issues of Calul, containing the beauty of these poems: of language to speak to the unspeakable, will in some small part be a cry, the quietest yet most steadfast prayer for peace.
Amen v’amen.
bare feet
to hold you
brings
the water
the village
has the feeling of my family
after the war
sitting on a wall
above the sea
the love of the animal
for his father
the quietness of it
she who cared for me
who walks away under
the umbrella
it’s snowing
Does part of her exist
here always
—Hermine Meinhard
The Rhythm Chooses Me A muʿāraḍa to Mahmoud Darwish’s ghazal “The Cadence Chooses Me.” Homing pigeon launched through dawn, your rhythm alights on me, fingers, gloats, dehisces: prayer, your cadence chooses me. White flag? We hadn't time to buy one. And nothing here stays white. Brethren! We are light! Scourges thunder news to me. Amorphous tented Mama, my weary footsteps echo yours. Did I once beg for makeup? To age so young no more amuses me. On red-moist stone the thrashing dove’s heart seeks its startled head as the moon shatters her mirror. A hone-edged screeching nooses me. In gasps accursed by memory, sounds palpitate, untongued. Sheared of speech, my youngster throat: its grunted coo accuses me. They thrill to this: to snatch and strip, recast their prophet’s land where, slim as a rising blade, a martyr grooms, then bruises, me. Mama, snatch up your hem and run, for torpor now diffuses me. My spilling psyche frays. My throwaway martyr loses me. —Seree Cohen Zohar
The Last War
Hear, O Israel,
your silence is deafening.
I do not know
who last spoke, if it was you or me or my mother,
after we arose and pried apart
our curtains, revealing a dark sky
and a parking lot, and remembered
that there are too many wars
and too few children
who live without them.
Dawn crawled into our beds.
In my pajamas, I read the names aloud
that face the ground.
While you were weeping we stayed awake:
Shhh, we said. Shh.
We said that your children
are standing at the gates of redemption.
We said you will welcome them soon.
We said birthing pangs are holy, too.
We meant it
as much as we could.
—Hannah Butcher
The world trembles under war’s heavy hand,
And we search for refuge in the words we shape.
How do we keep safe when thunder cracks the earth?
By weaving courage into every whispered line.
In the furnace of conflict, hope is refined,
And poems become the shields we carry forward.
—Elsibie Van Rooy
Pietà
She held the silence to her chest,
her son folded into memory—
not yet twenty,
his heartbeat still echoing
like a trapped bird.
I met her on the train,
eyes unblinking—
no statue, no candle, no anthem
could carry his weight—
only her hands,
clenched around absence,
swaying him still.
Her hair streamed smoke,
her palms bled calendars,
each tear a streetlamp shattered.
She whispered: “My son is a star
the tanks forgot to crush—
he hovers above the square,
a lantern the bullets missed.”
I sat across from her,
the train drifting like a cradle
for a child who would not wake.
—Monica Manolachi
The Census of Gopher Wood
Oh, Noah, did you count the shadows before the rain,
or only the breathing things that could be tethered?
We are building arks of reinforced steel in Minnesota,
where the streets hum with the cold electric blue of sirens,
and the salt on the road tastes like the pillar of Lot’s wife—
a preservative for a world that refuses to look back.
Oh, Hagar, wandering the red dust of the borderlands,
where the water skin is empty and the drones have eyes like gods,
tell us how to find a well in a desert of razor wire.
The world is a sharpening blade; we feel it in the morning news,
the maps of Iran glowing like coals in a furnace.
We are preparing for a flood that is not water, but fire.
Oh, Gabriel, hold the trumpet a moment longer.
We are still trying to teach our children how to stay small,
how to be invisible when the black vans roll through the mist,
how to be silent enough to hear the wood of the ark splintering.
We are keeping safe by hiding our names in the hollows of the Word,
praying the storm remembers which doors are marked in red.
—Julia Khen
Wife of Torches Devorah, Judges 5:4-21 Beneath the palm in her front yard Devorah stands rigid. She’s not a bee, but a WASP flying transport missions. She came home to talk of victory. Instead, dreams of thousands of bloodied bodies on the killing fields; washes dishes, piles freshly ironed clothes on each child’s bed. She wakes to the buzz of saws cutting down a 45-year-old Podocarpus. The birds gone in a blaze, light streaming hot through double-paned glass. Though he could not move her, Sisera had a voice that splintered belief. He mesmerized with his lies, felled scions, tumbled the thickest walls. Then when his armies fell, ran to the wife of an ally, who gave him milk and gave him drink, then drove a tent peg through his skull. His mother, a living shofar, wailed 100 cries when he did not return. How many mothers could not cry from the ravine at Babyn Yar? How many mothers cry for their children shot down in classrooms? Devorah must face each day without crying. —Stephanie Bloom-Pressman
Ice She said its really all about ice and meant the kind we slip on, the ice we step away from to avoid the fall. She was also speaking of agents of evil, the kind that occupy cities and neighborhoods, like the one in Minneapolis where a woman died after taking her son to school, when an agent shot her in the head as she tried to drive away from a sudden crowd, a poet whose words we now share like precious relics of her soul, her gut. All about Ice. Not the slippery kind but the force that threatens those who gather on streets named after midwestern trees, where our worker arrives early with white paint whispering, buenas dias, our quiet resister who risks his life to replace tiles on the roof, window left open to climb back in quickly. It’s raining and soon it will freeze again. We say to each other, careful of the ice and let’s stay safe indoors. Those of us who can will emerge with the melting, with whistles and shouts as we find ourselves knee deep in metaphor. —Dina Elenbogen
A Quiet Dawn
I listen for the lapse—the war blares on.
Can we turn down the damn testosterone?
A blink between the guns? A quiet dawn?
I itch for inklings—seagull on a lawn,
mica’s glisten off the walkway stone…—
and listen for the pause. The war tears on
and on, until—what, a country’s gone,
its tongue lost? How it recalled its own?
I drink to lain-down guns—a quiet dawn.
A soldier’s gut gnaws—to die a pawn,
a puppet string tied through every bone.
I wish for him a lapse. The war wears on
no matter all the captains see how wrong.
So, if Mars himself gets on the phone
or stands between the guns? A quiet dawn
at last—enough to hear the valleys yawn,
that patter on the dust as men atone—
I listen for that lapse. The war blares on,
a blink between the guns my quiet dawn.
—Jed Myers
Like a volcanic eruption This story took place in 2021 in our former rental apartment in Tel Aviv. On Saturday, February 28, 2026, the building suffered an indirect hit by an Iranian missile and has been partially destroyed. A ferocious boom whips the walls. I jolt. Open eyes to molasses black. Elbow Husband. Say Boom, bang, wham; thunder, lightning, missile. All real possibilities in our little Israeli life. Most days in this country, where the sun shines more than the rain falls & the Mediterranean Sea shimmers like a gemstone, I don’t dwell on big-picture tensions between Israel & Gaza, between Israel & Iran, between Israel & Yemen. Husband rolls over. Someone farts—does it matter who?—making our flannel sheets reek like fresh dog shit. I roll the other direction. A vomit list of ifs pummel me: if we’d never come back, if we’d remained in the U.S., where I was born & raised, if we’d stayed in White Plains, where we raised kids, if we’d returned to Oakland, where two of my three kids (& I) were born & where my elderly parents grow old alone, would I have these doom-&-gloom, dark-of-night thoughts? I sneeze #1Aaaahchoo#2Aaaahchoo#3AaaahchooLoud like a volcanic eruption, like my father, like my aunt, like my Zaida, an inherited Ukrainian shrill-sounding, shoulder-shaking experience. As aggressive rain pelts our apartment building walls, I reach for my ear plugs. If only I didn’t think about our geopolitical ginormous giraffe-neck of a problem, neither now at who knows what time of night nor ever, but if I didn’t think about that then what thoughts would somersault through my mind: my father who no longer knows his name or my mother who talks to herself, my empty nest, or my inevitable mortality? Ugh. Despite my magenta-yellow, heavy-duty, foam earplugs designed for farming/chemical/ construction/manufacturing/military/mining/oil & gas/pharmaceutical/steel metal/transportation professionals, I hear Husband’s ZzZzzzzZZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZzzzzzzz & count his breaths, & count my breaths, & count my blessings. —Jennifer Lang
Caviar Laced Sex Organs That Glisten In Chiffon I want things to mean something. Like when You Can’t Hurry Love came out. The Phil Collins version. The way Phil’s music made you think things could mean something in ‘82. Like the way you kissed Bonnie on the bus going toward 72nd and Broadway And the whole world was a Tilt-A-World that went only fast enough so you didn’t fly off but the wind in your esophagus, oh God, the things it did to your heart. And the way a religious study class in college made Heyert hitch to Buffalo in January, a quarter in his pocket, an overcoat and no hat, he almost died for all of us, so we could tell the world, Hey, once, we were down and out, depraved and lost, like it might mean something to us years later in our corporate jobs when the big checks came and we could justify everything. Hey we were once the oppressed, suckas, but we were never and for a short time, it meant something, at least, to try and identify with the other. Intention was a bifurcated insistence that we cared, that things meant something outside of our Porsches and Volvos and caviar laced sex organs that glistened in chiffon. For what, I am not sure, the way Collins doing The Supremes was never as good as Ross in her shadows and light making buffoons of us all. Now, they shoot people in Minnesota and behead people is Sudan and AI is the next immigrant wave that couldn’t give a shit about language, skin color or God and, damn it, I am trying to find something that means something so I put on Face Value and listen to Droned, the organ instrumental with Phil scatting in the background, and it all just feels like nostalgia dripping inside melancholy laden with the memory of Bonnie’s lips on my lips back in ‘82 on our M10 bus, mid-winter, after midnight about to crash into a lamppost on the southeast corner of Broadway when there was so much possibility in the New York City ether you could reach and grab it like a concert ticket, nosebleed seats at The Garden, but who cared, you could hear everything up there-- the harmony, the pennywhistle, the savagery of those drums. —Matthew Lippman
We Carry the Weight after the painting Guardian Angels by Dorothea Tanning in the New Orleans Museum of Art We heard the grandmother praying in whispers, awake all night, witnessed the cries of the sleepless infant, saw the terror in the mother’s eyes, her son kept home, their house unsafe. We watched like it was a hurricane coming, the winds kicked up, restaurant workers chased down the street. One after another business shuttered –in Kenner, Metairie, Terrytown all the outlying suburbs with their immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Viet Nam – everything silenced by the sweep of those fearsome hounds sent in to do the clearing work –leaving behind torn down doors, a line of empty beds, twisted sheets, the blur of blood. Those were our neighbors, friends, the children we loved and because we felt the weight of everything that had happened here on the Mississippi – remember all who once walked in chains and were hung on trees – in the briefest second we raised our arms as wings and blew our whistles. It had to be us who carried the weight, joined hands at the detention center, captured the moment on camera, canvas, in our poetry, sent it out so no one would forget how we danced and sang and lit fires to make a path for others to follow. It had to be us who turned ourselves into underground railroads, became the safe houses. —Karen Marker
Who Sleepwalked With the Milky Way,
drunk on distance, its expanse?
I wanted to write with a torch
but ended up with a pencil
with no eraser.
Because the sky
is contagious with stars,
nighttime is best
for viewing that dust
which becomes us.
I want my ashes
to create their own planet.
One where people,
or whatever life forms exist,
live in peace.
I cannot cry for what we are.
But I am saddened
by what we are not.
—Dianna MacKinnon Henning
François-Xavier Fabre (1766 –1837) was a French painter of historical subjects.
Born in Montpellier, Fabre was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and made his name by winning the Prix de Rome in 1787. During the French Revolution, Fabre went to live in Florence, becoming a member of the Florentine Academy, where he taught painting. The friends he made in Italy included the dramatist, Vittorio Alfieri, whose widow, Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, Countess of Albany, he is said to have married. On Louise’s death in 1824, he inherited her fortune, which he used to found an art school in his home town. On his own death, he bequeathed his own art collection to the town, forming the basis of the Musée Fabre.
Amazing collection of poems. So moving and evocative, and important witnessing this moment.
moving and impressive, thank you