Please   Stand   By

Please Stand By for more Desert Storm. And you do. You’re
at war. From your television set. It’s part of your weekday
morning exercise. You watch them conduct sorties. You feel
proud.

It took a war to take out your depression, your anomie. To
help you feel you’re part of something. So you’ll support
the killing, raping, maiming, burning. You like to think that
as long as it’s them, it’s not you

the Tigris
flow of shoppers
through a mall

~~~~~

Donna Fleischer is author of three poetry chapbooks, of late, Twinkle, Twinkle (Longhouse, 2010) and indra’s net (bottle rockets press, 2003). Her work in open form poetry and Japanese-derived forms appears in print and online anthologies and literary periodicals in the U.S., England, and Japan, most recently in Dreams Wander On: Contemporary Poems of Death Awareness, Fieralingue – The Poets’ Corner, Contemporary Haibun, South by Southeast, Issa’s Untidy Hut, Wang Ping’s Kinship of Rivers, Poets for Living Waters, presence, and KO. She is assistant editor at bottle rockets press and blogs daily for poetry and the earth at word pond. The New Britain Museum of American Art and Exiles Press will include her poetry in their forthcoming anthology of poems on ekphrasis. Donna is a native of Hartford, CT.