Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 23 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 78 times by 35 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.
“Evgeny and Evgeniia faced an excruciating choice. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers told the couple they could leave the United States with their child and return to their native Russia, which they had fled seeking political asylum. Or they could remain in immigration detention in the United States — but their 8-year-old son, Maksim, would be taken away and sent to a shelter for unaccompanied children. In the end, they chose the agony of limbo in the United States over a return to a place where they saw no prospect for freedom or any future for their family… The last time Evgeny and Evgeniia saw Maksim was on May 15” —The New York Times, August 5, 2025. New York Times photo of Evgeny, Evgeniia, and Maksim.
Sophie’s Choice seemed light-years from our time, a fading tragedy that made us weep for Streep.
But now with tactics changing on a dime in brutal ways we thought could not repeat, sick heat
pervades my belly and begins to climb: how can we keep denying what it means when scenes
unspool of parents, guilty of no crime, compelled to choose the thing that they most fear, right here?
*****
Melissa Balmain writes: “As the poet Barbara Loots recently put it, what we need right now is a tsunami of truth. I contribute a few drops when I can.”
‘Evgeny and Evgeniia’s Choice‘ first appeared in New Verse News.
Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is available from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of comic verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010.
Photo: New York Times photo of Evgeny, Evgeniia, and Maksim.
The day I left for Canada my mother and father quelled their tears. We held and hugged. He said, “We three may never see each other alive again.” That leaving hooked my gut and tugged.
We never did. He died and left her widowed so next time we three met was at his tomb. Our parting afterwards had been foreshadowed– the breakage of the cord that fed me from her womb.
We rode on gondolas to summits she had never dreamed of. Mountains could not buy her heart from where they’d raised the family– we shared reunions linked by contrails in the sky.
II.
Hi, Mum. It’s me, from Canada, your John. Och, John! You’ve caught me in an awful state! I know. I’m sad to hear that Henry’s gone. The one that was my brother? My memory’s not great.
He’s back now, from the War. Oh dear, they’re here. Who? They’re all against me. Who? The clique. They’ve done such nasty things. They think I’m queer. I think I’ll kill myself. So how’s the house this week?
Och this one’s grand. I moved two days ago. And Johnny helped. I think he’s at the door. I’ll have to run now, Henry. Cheerio. Don’t go. The phone is dead. The cord exists no more.
III.
A winter storm comes sweeping down the hills and, gusting, blasts umbrellas inside-out. They ring the grave like blighted daffodils and rain-black mourners hold, like buffeted peat-burn trout.
I take the tasselled pall rope, let it slide, and with my brothers ease the coffin down; it slips across the lip of a great divide and sinks what was my mother– a shuck, a wrinkled gown.
Gales carry off the prayer as it is spoken. I cast the rope adrift. The rains of Skye slap my back. Again, a cord has broken– this time my lungs won’t fill. I try but cannot cry.
*****
John Beaton writes: ” This one is autobiographical. Using the metaphor of an umbilical cord, it tells how emigration stretches and breaks family connections. The title refers to the old practice alluded to in the last stanza of holding the newborn upside down and slapping it on the back till a cry indicates its lungs have started to work and it is breathing on its own. At the end of the poem, grief prevents such a cry. The dementia dialog is taken pretty much verbatim from an international phone call to my mother. That’s the part that crystallized the abacb rhyme scheme and 55533 meter. The dialog fell into place with that pattern and I felt it worked for the rest of the poem too. I think the last two lines of each stanza, with the first being unrhymed and the second linking through masculine rhyme with line two, act like an alexandrine and combine to give a closure effect. The three-part structure represents three stages of escalating disconnection.”
John Beaton’s metrical poetry has been widely published and has won numerous awards. He recites from memory as a spoken word performer and is author of Leaving Camustianavaig published by Word Galaxy Press, which includes this poem. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, John lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. https://www.john-beaton.com/
On those days when, because you felt attacked, you just won’t speak, it’s like a dress rehearsal for one of us being dead. (So, a prehearsal?) Can’t speak for you, how you’d react, but for myself, if you die, I know only: I’d be lonely.
After the slow dispersal of the acquisitions of the years from yard sales, impulses, unfinished plans– after the children’s and grandchildren’s tears, (their own mortality foretold in Gran’s) there’d be an emptiness.
Routine unravels: I’d need an act of will to even shave– the dogs don’t care how I behave. All I need’s here in cupboards, shelves, on line. I’d be just fine… apart from growing restlessness.
I guess I’d restart travels. Meanwhile I’ve learned how it will be to live without you, just your memory, a silent apparition in this room and that, the ghost of one who used to laugh and chat.
Think of this as a melancholy love poem, written in a temporary (thank goodness) state of being that can occur in any relationship.
This poem was published this month in Snakeskin No. (or #) 276. I feel proud to be in the issue, as I rate it as one of the best ever in the 20+ years that George Simmers has been putting the magazine out. Though much of the poetry is formless (but still worth reading!), there is some truly impressive work by Tom Vaughan and Scott Woodland, with well-structured work by Robert West, Nick Browne and Jerome Betts, and with interesting innovations in form by Marjorie Sadin, Claudia Gary and George himself–in this last, the character of the verse becomes more lively as the character in the verse becomes more alive.
Technically the form of the poem–uneven lengths of iambics, all lines rhyming but not in a structured way–is one that allows the line breaks to echo your intact chunks of thought as well as the rhythms of speech. It is the form of Eliot’s Prufrock and, earlier, of Arnold’s A Summer Night:
And the rest, a few, Escape their prison and depart On the wide ocean of life anew. There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart Listeth will sail;
It is a casual form, but it retains enough of the hooks of more formal verse to make it easy to memorise and recite.
Form in Formless Times 