Issue 209

Robert L. Giron
May 1
13 min read

This issue features

photograph by Katrin Primak,

review by Robert L. Giron of Q&A For the End of the World,

photograph by Dmitry,

poetry by Steven Ostrowki,

poetry by Daniel Picker, and

poetry by John Surowiecki

Katrin Primak

Alien Invasion of Earth, UFO Over City

Review by Robert L. Giron of Q&A For the End of the World

by Kim Roberts & Michael Gushue (WordTech Editions, 2025)

To say that this collection of poetry is not your usual book of poetry would not do it justice. It’s an intriguing, if not a unique dialogue between two poets, Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue, who are enthralled / fascinated by the power of the screen, seen as child, in the case of Gushue, and seen as an adult, in the case of Roberts. Roberts and Gushue create a dialogue to try to unravel the mysteries of the creative minds of film script writers and directors who through their media try to explain the unknown of life and its travesties.

Opening the dialogue as an overview, Gushue begins with a hypothetical poem The End of the World, in which he sees Earthly citizens contemplating a flying saucer that dares to make its presence known. Stunned yet surprised, they say:

we’ve been waiting for the end of the world,

….

….But it slipped past us,

Then the screen changes to Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964, directed by Ishirō Honda) and Roberts makes the connection between the horrors of WWII in Japan, stating

we failed to learn from Hiroshima, lessons

about manipulating the environment…

Roberts, referring to Godzilla, known as “Gojra” in Japanese, posits:

Why not kill him with the bombs?

But Mothra or “Mosura,” in Japanese, known as the protector of Earth fights whatever threatens humankind comes to the rescue:

The enormous moth larvae paralyze Godzilla by shooting nets

or some kind of cocoon from their jagged maws ….

In reply, Gushue states

In Mothra vs Godzilla a giant egg

floats into a bay and is hauled ashore

….

…But

what is the point of this enormous egg?

It is not a surprise that throughout the poetic dialogue spirituality pops in as referring to Mothra, Gushue states:

… Because his is a holy fool.

Because Mothra dies and after death comes

transfiguration.

Dmitry

A Beam from a UFO Snatches a Group of People

Next up is Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, directed by Don Siegel), so it is not a shock that Roberts point out:

Why does it take root only in Santa Mira,

a small, insignificant California town?

What is relevant is that Santa Mira means “Holy Vision” in Spanish and that pods are falling upon the Earth:

…The pods, harvested by the hundreds,

form a resemblance to any humans they come near.

The pods open, foaming maliciously, to reveal near-

Doubles, who replace the real people.

Here I cannot avoid making the comparison between bodies being taken over by a strange outer space entity to the contagion of fascism that spreads and can consume multitudes of peoples of Earth, much like fascism took over many parts of Europe during WWII and then spread to South America in the 1930s-1940s. And like the ocean whose waves come and go, the connection between the circular sphere of life and the universe becomes clear to me while reading this unique dialogue. As a writer myself, I cannot overlook that script writers and directors of films speak in metaphors and similes and often send us messages embedded in their work.

In reply Gushue focuses on the nature of the transformed bodies:

…You pull back in horror

from a beautiful woman, from the dark

cabobons of her eyes, her cold skin.

Something inside her has gone away.

Here the taken-over bodies are transformed or almost possessed humans with cabobons (flat reflective) eyes that reflect light as if to transfix or magically render others impossible to think critically after they look into their eyes. Again, think of the power of Mussolini or Hitler during the middle of European fascism. Can you find any parallels with our current leaders? Do families see the same person in the transformed person?

As Gushue points out:

Before long you’re the only person left.

The town’s after you, perfect simulacra

sans qualia—there’s no “them” inside them.

The transformed creatures while looking like their original bodies are different but seem to be missing something.

…: What’s missing? Nothing.

But perhaps what is really missing is the lack of free will or strength to fight the power of the entity that has taken them over, bodily, in mind and spirit, to such a point that those who are not overtaken see these “others” as no longer themselves. So, yes, I see the parallels between this and the power of an ideology, a cult, or a state of infatuation that makes one no longer able to think straight nor wishes to eat or drink, almost moon struck.

Next, we have The Thing from Another World (1951, directed by Christian Nyby), where Roberts opens with:

There are no enemies in science,

says the doctor, only phenomena to study.

Gushue emphasizes:

…Keep watching the skies!

That sleight-of-hand of nothing up the sleeve:

another way of saying: pay no attention

to the little man behind the curtain.

Here we are reminded to be vigilant and watch because there might be something out there. Something that can control those on Earth. Think politically and the sky is the limit.

The time and stage are ready for The Day The Earth Stood Sill (1951, directed by Robert Wise).

Roberts points out that:

The alien, soft spoken and polite, meets

Every expectation of a superior being,

especially his command of math…

And the alien has powers:

…The alien stops everything electrical

as well as non-electrical machines, such as cars and tractors. But the alien informs a lead character played by Patricia Neal to memorize the magical phrase:

…Klaatu barada nikto

Because saying this to Gort, the robot, prevents Gort from destroying Earth.

Gushue pitches in with:

What does it mean for us to have free will

when everything is at stake? The earth

stands still, we are terrified of moving.

Are we nearing the point of complete destruction or could it be a repeat of eons of history on the Planet Earth as astrophysicist / scientists have posited that the Earth has seen nuclear destruction before as documented in the sacred Hindu Sanskrit text Mahabharata. If these connections do not make you think, then perhaps the Body Snatchers have snatched you.

As we come to the end of the poetic dialogue, we are faced with The War of the Worlds (1953, directed by Byron Haskin). Here after we are shaken to the core, we begin to look inward and outward as Roberts points out:

…Why is every

major city except Washington leveled? Every

time we face our worst fears, we always fall back on

religion. We have so little to fall back on

Is there any true escape?

Roberts echoes what humanity, regardless of spiritual identity, does when at a loss to explain things or after we have tried all that one can when faced with adversity or the horrors of outer space, we turn to that which we cannot fathom completely: The Great Power of the Unknown.

Gushue says it distinctly:

Only God can kill the Martian.

Reflecting upon When Worlds Collide (1951, directed by Rudolph Maté), Roberts states:

… How well do you know

yourself? Until Earth’s demise is imminent, can you truly know

how you would spend your final days?

because when we are faced with life and death situation only then do we reveal our true selves.

Then we move into the 1960s with the film La Jetté (1962, directed by Chris Marker), where Roberts reminds us of war:

… Just before the outbreak

of World War II, the destruction of Paris? Broken

church spires, half an Arc de Triomphe, all is ruin

and rubble….

It’s as if the film implies that the universe is spherical: as it was in the beginning so shall it be in the end as brought out in the film:

… That haunting moment:

was his own death foretold? Just as the moment,

a delicate woman, windblown, raises a hand to her mouth.

The horrors of any war are enough to leave scares in our memory, but when we witness the past coming back to us, we cannot fathom the mystery of the universes. So, the woman seeing her lover again is dumbfounded.

Gushue tries to ascertain what this all means.

… In memory’s army,

we are all foot soldiers of misfortune.

Our weapons are forgetting and fiction.

trying to assess our lives. But Gushue laments:

… I don’t know what it means.

This in fact is where we find all of ourselves: We simply don’t know what it all really means.

And so, Roberts pulls the rabbit out of the hat:

—even if there’s no time

to eat before the world ends.

Sometimes there’s prayers. But only love ties up the loose ends.

That’s what I’ve learned.

Both Roberts and Gushue have jointly created a dialogue that all of us can become part of upon reading this fabulous and unique collection of poetry.

About the Author

Michael Gushue has been published in journals such as the Indiana Review, Third Coast, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, and American Letters and Commentary. His books of poetry are: Sympathy for the Monster (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), Gather Down Women: Poems and Translations (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2023), Pachinko Mouth (Plan B Press, 2013), Conrad (Souvenir Spoon, 2010), and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey (Pretzelcoatl Books, 2017), The Judy Poems (Ghoti Press, 2021), and Palace of Depression (Pretzelcoatl Books, 2025). He co-founded Poetry Mutual Press with Dan Vera and co-ran a poetry reading series in Brookland and on Capitol Hill, and the series Poetry at the Watergate. He and CL Bledsoe run a column of very bad advice on Medium.com called How To Even. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington DC.

About the Author

Kim Roberts is the author of two guidebooks, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018), and Buried Stories: Walking Tours of Washington, DC-Area Cemeteries (Rivanna Books, 2025), and she edited two anthologies, By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020, selected by the DC Public Library and East Coast Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program), and Full Moon On K Street: Poems About Washington DC (Plan B Press, 2010). She is the author of seven books of poems, including, most recently, another collaboration: Corona/Crown, a cross-disciplinary chapbook created with photographer Robert Revere (WordTech Editions, 2023). Kim co-curates DC Pride Poem-a-Day and coordinates the annual Pride Poets-in Residence program at the Arts Club of Washington.

About the Reviewer

Robert L. Giron, founder of Gival Press, the Editor-in-Chief of ArLiJo, and an associate editor for Potomac Review, recently released Songs for the Spirit / Canciones para el Espíritu.

Steven Ostrowki

Natural Disaster

Some poor soul

drove the highway

in the ordinary numb

of an ordinary day

when sudden ice

spilled from a white sky

and her northbound car

spun southbound

and her whole life ran

helpless on rewind

into the thick trunk

of an indifferent tree

& now a handmade cross

marks the doomsday spot

that we drive right past,

almost blind in thought,

and fast.

About the Author

Steven Ostrowski is a widely-published poet, fiction writer, painter and songwriter. His novel, The Highway of Spirit and Bone, was published in 2023 by Lefora Publications and has been called “…a literary road trip for the ages.” His poetry chapbook, Persons of Interest, won the 2021 Wolfson Chapbook Prize and was published in 2022. Steven and his son Ben coauthored a full-length collaboration called Penultimate Human Constellation, published in 2018 by Tolsun Books. Steven’s newest book of poems, Life Field, was published in early 2024. His paintings have been published in Lily Poetry Review, William and Mary Review, Stone Boat, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other literary journals. He is Professor Emeritus at Central Connecticut State University. Visit: www.stevenostrowski.org.

Daniel Picker

The Rhythm of Summer

for the Beautiful Flower Maiden

für das schöne Blumenmädchen

The rhythm of early summer

upon us after classes back atop

the mountain, that green plateau

stretching to a knoll with clapboard

house above, then more forest

beyond, and at the fringes of our

fields surrounding the tall golden

barn, for learning now instead of

cows, hay; now hours after class,

reading, but hours before meeting

for dinner, we descended in your

old Vermont Green Mountain Volvo

wagon, windows down, wind wending

in, cerulean blue light and bright

sun above and in the tree tops of

pines and maples reaching up to sky

as usual as heaven here, on our way

to some near inn for convivial life,

conversation, imbibing with friends,

classmates, who knows? Girls free

from class, beers and cool indoor

light years back now, those lives,

those eyes familiar still, the rhythm

of early summer others must enjoy

back there still, or this summer

past, or “next summer again?”

Welcome like an old letter extends

from there again, wishing there could

be a “next year?” But now all I remember

is her bright smile, I wish I could see there

again, she like a fresh, green-stemmed flower,

her face familiar, but then the old thorn near,

some Bardolph, a classmate from last year,

and I turned away before we walked away.

Now, I try to recall only that drive after:

the sunlight filtering through the conifers

back outside, beyond the wooden steps,

porch you drove us to and from, then off

you drove for somewhere far beyond our

mountain in this old Vermont, your home

state, mine once too, you the New Englander,

I just looking back and out to trees in

wind, sky still light blue above the old flat

mountain, not thinking of anything profound,

not poetry, nor literature, except maybe something

lingering inchoate inside, like cool air, light sky

in leaves over fields outside, then on the drive

you slowed above the grey, dried mud-splotched,

road, earth-splattered grey, packed, as I looked

out through wide open side window to the lit

pasture stretching in distance, but then I looked

straight ahead and much closer that late day

still light with sun not quite setting above Holsteins,

black and white, ambling in with full lowing

udders so overfull we smiled, those udders

near dragging the ground, mud-splotched path,

this road, they crossing over from field back

to once-painted barn, slowly shuffling, as we

not believing those low, full udders by spindly-

legged, slow-moving cows making their

way, crossing and in, with long tails swishing,

slowly teaching us the rhythm of summer.

About the Author

Daniel Picker won The Dudley Review Poetry Prize at Harvard University where he had previously studied with Seamus Heaney. He is the author of a book of poems, "Steep Stony Road" (Viral Cat Press, San Francisco). Daniel Picker received a fellowship from The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and The FAWC. His work has appeared in Fusion at Berklee College of Music, A New Ulster in Northern Ireland, Plough: a journal of faith, Ireland of the Welcomes magazine, Sequoia: The Stanford Literary Magazine, Soundings East, Folio, Vermont Literary Review, and many more. His prose work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Sewanee Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Poetry magazine (Chicago), The East Hampton Star, The Irish Journal of American Studies, The Oxonian Review of Oxford University, The Princeton Packet, The Stanford Daily, Middlebury magazine, Harvard magazine (online), The Abington Review, The Kelsey Review, The 67th Street Scribe, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Porter Gulch Review, Scribe, and many more.

John Surowiecki

Movies with Nazis in Them

They never really die, you know.

Somewhere in Paraguay or Chile

they're listening to Mozart with blood

on their boots, confessing their

weakness for alpine scenes and dogs

named Fritz or Mitzi: and they think

that, by transference, we do, too.

They think we're them and they're us,

the real us: our secret us. They think

we think we believe their every word

and won't turn away when they shoot

someone in the head just like that.

They think they think what

we would never dare to think.

They wear prosthetic scars

and prosthetic smiles and when

they're near death the entire world

helps out in their demise, but,

you know, they never really die.

Two Soliloquies

We first met in the darkness of a movie theater;

he called me his bringer of light:

everything else, he said, was ash, already spent.

He wasn't much older than the boys

throwing popcorn at the screen

and when we left the moon was waiting

for us behind the drug store,

a half dollar of pure light.

We were eager to touch one another

and offered no resistance: there was no need.

In the war a bullet shattered his shin

and when he came home he learned how to walk

and how to cook; he grew herbs and tomatoes

and daffodils to keep away the deer.

When we're alone and it's late we usually end up

talking about love,

making an altar of it,

placing it at the heart of things, the hub of dominion.

We're like flying ants who end their lives

in airborne sex, heroic drops to Earth

and formic splashes:

but we have no plans to live in Death's house.

Death is nothing to us. Death is vacancy.

Death is shit.

When we die we die for love

or from love or while we're in love.

We'll die with love and during a time of love

and maybe one day as love.

About the Author

John Surowiecki is the author of fifteen poetry books of various sizes and shapes. Last year, The Place of the Solitaires: Poems from Titles by Wallace Stevens, was published by Wolfson Press. His Chez Pétrouchka, a long poem that gives the Stravinsky's puppet a voice—albeit crude and nasty—recently came out from Bass Clef Books. He is a former poetry instructor at Manchester Community College and serves as an editor of the Connecticut River Review. He is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award for his verse-play My Nose and Me (A TragedyLite or TragiDelight in 33 Scenes) which was presented by the Foundation at the Shakespeare Theater in Chicago as part of the Poetry on Stage series. Other prizes include: the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, the Washington Prize, the White Pine Prize, a Connecticut Poetry Fellowship, and a silver medal in the Sunken Garden National Competition. Also: his Pie Man won the 2017 Nilson Prize for a First Novel. His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, AMP, Carolina Quarterly, Folio, Gargoyle, Margie, Oyez Review, Mississippi Review, Nimrod International Journal, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Rhino, The Florida Review, The Southern Review, Tupelo Quarterly, West Branch and Yemassee.