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This writing was accepted for publication in the
108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book

the New World
cc&d, v271 (the May 2017 issue)

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the New World

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in the issue book
Nothing
Lasts

the cc&d
May-August 2017
collection book
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May-August 2017
cc&d magazine
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On a Rainy Day
(the 2017 poetry, longer prose
& art collection anthology)
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The War Next Door

John Grey

Sitting in your chair by the kitchen window,
you can’t help but hear your neighbors brawl,
in words mostly but sometimes even in deed.
You choke on your coffee. You put hands over ears.
One time you even called the cops.

You know these people courtesy of chats over fences.
But you also know them stripped of everything
but their hardness, their selfishness, their cruelty.
A man beats his wife. A woman thrashes a son.
The boy screams the bluest of murders at his sister.
The daughter smashes things against her bedroom wall.
Their house rocks with how it is with some people.
Rage blasts off and leaves its host in the wake.
Love is trampled. Family implodes.
What’s left is a fury embroiled in grime and smoke.

You never imagined there were such unforgiving souls.
You live alone in loneliness.
Their solitude is anger -
self-induced with loud voice or fists flying,
jerking themselves free of these others,
even in closeness, keeping a distance
to shrink their enemy into something less than human.

You figure rage is where they get free of themselves,
escape from the ordinary, the drab, even the world.
They can’t merely sob like you.
Bodies fill their immediate vicinity.
Their wrath insists something must be done about it.

It all quiets down eventually.
For all their expanding, exploding heads and hearts,
it somehow makes them smaller.
You almost envy their shame, their regret,
filling them up to former size,
reshaping their faces into sorry symbols
of where it all went wrong.

You’re unsure how their battles make you feel.
Should you pity them? Forgive them?
Strange how their garden blooms more beautifully than yours
how the red of their roses spills the deepest blood extant.



Scars Publications


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