Dead Zone

You’re awake at 4am,

in the streets 
in another country a baby is 
screaming,

soldiers are eating bread and cheese, then
shitting in a plastic bucket.

When the schools open 
no one is there.

On the ocean, gulls weave and dive, dipping into the blue-black palm 
of expanse like expert snipers
who can see in the dark and darker,

land mines from other wars are waiting 
to open the body of a human like a clam shell

scattering

endless litter across shores of time.

Instead of looking at Instagram,
you take a walk on your street,
noticing the way winter has hesitated before 
clawing at every tree limb.

Look, a crocus in her yellow and bruised-blue skirts peers up at you,
asking you,

Why?

.

.

Lisa Naomi Konigsberg is Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

Her work has appeared in Word River Journal, Moonstone’s Poetry INK Anthology, and her work was selected for a group poetry exhibition in Philadelphia sponsored by Mellon Bank “Philadelphia’s Best Poets.”

She has two chapbooks: Invisible Histories, Spruce Alley Press, 2015 and The Golden Mean, Moonstone Press, 2019.

Her work focuses on the imposition of larger history on personal experience.