Poems by Lily Jarman-Reisch

On the Fall of the Great Tyranny

after “Requiem,” Anna Akhmatova

On this day of remembrance, I see you. I feel your breath:

You, mothers and children shot as you fled Baltimore,
your names, blood types sewn into your jackets.

You, the grandfather sliced by shrapnel while hugging your panicked dog.  

You, woman, crushed under concrete birthing your first-born
when a shell struck Mercy’s maternity ward.

I would like to call you all by name. 
But you are disappeared in gouged ground.

Some of our kind had left, knew what was coming:
people like us corralled in ghettos and camps, cattle-car’d to the border, 
the dead trucked to mass burial pits.  
We wailed from singed throats when they bombed our homes, 
our shrines, our city charred by a scalded sea. 

But if ever in this country they erect a monument to us,
let it not stand by the Inner Harbor where we lived:  
its docks rubbled, the bay thick with collapsed bridges, splintered ships.
Nor in the White House Rose Garden, for its bull horned orders for deportations. 

But here, where we were gulag’d on American soil, herded
into barb-rimmed yards, crammed in cinder blocked squats,
their drains clogged like all roads out,
attempts to bribe a guard, rock hammer a tunnel through a cell.

Here, stifled under a tyranny like a scourge that stole our breath.
Here among memories of air-starved brothers and sisters

where we opened our doors at last, let a breeze linger in our lungs,
where we heard on a cleansing wind

sounds from streets and schools long silent,
and emerged from this narrow place into open air.	


Note: Excerpts of this poem appear in the author’s “Exodus,” Collateral,
7.1, Fall 2022, and “We Vermin,” The Rumen, December 28, 2023.

Whole Town Gone to Hell

after “Whole House Gone to Hell,” Cynthia Huntington

Grazing animals sense it first. Sniff sulfur on a strange breeze,
fur stiffening in alert. Bolt when the ground trembles beneath their hooves. 
It’s late in the empire of America, like Pompeii rumbling

under Vesuvius’ ash-thick air. Tourists, sun-screened and Skechered, 
still come in air-conditioned buses to admire a monument.
Government buildings vacant as the ruins of the Roman Forum, 

the capital hollowed out like an abandoned factory town. In a darkened
Department of Justice, dust thickens on desks left like corn rotting in a silo. 
Crabgrass claims the lawns of fired Social Security administrators, 

their homes foreclosed. Let go from the Federal Office Building, janitors 
on Greyhounds for jobs in Newark and Baltimore. They sleep on a twin bed
in a grandchild’s room or on a buddy’s sour sofa, crusted dishes in a sink.

Horses bony and matted left in damp stalls in Rock Creek Park. 

Runnels of molten rock slither like hissing serpents whose bellies scorch 
the slope, seep under doors, sear the city.  
We should pack a bag, leave.  
We wait
to yowls of frantic dogs, 
a mare squealing from her singed throat.

Lily Jarman-Reisch’s poems appear and are forthcoming in CALYX, New York Quarterly, ONE ART, Pushcart Prize XLVIII, Rust & Moth and Slant, among many others. She is a 2024 Pushcart Prize recipient. Jarman-Reisch is a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review and a Contributing Editor for Pushcart Prize XLIX. She was a journalist in Washington, D.C., and Athens, Greece, and has held administrative and teaching positions at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland.