America

“America” is translated from its original Serbian by author Dr. Ljiljana Bibović (1937-1986). Granted a Fulbright scholarship to study in America, Dr. Bibović was a member of the Berkeley Poets Cooperative in the early 1980s (“A&W Sutter Street” was published in issue #19, p. 60) and a student at the University of California, Berkeley. “America” is from a recently published legacy collection, Stopped Moments. Although the majority of poems are in Serbian, there are also verses in English.

America,
well carpeted.
America silent with no smile.
I am walking along the cold corridors
from one sign to another.
It is silent.
It does not welcome you.
The customs officer weary of questions
is letting you into the new world.
In the nightmare of pieces of luggage,
all of a sudden a human voice,
the voice of a man in uniform beside me.
America has smiled at last.

Change CHānj/noun

the act or instance of making or becoming different.

Change: what is normal and what is not?

Climate and extreme weather. Sea levels. Melting polar ice caps. Disappearing species and jungles and islands. The planet is changing at an accelerating pace. And those changes are driving a divisiveness of social convention unlike anything we have seen in the United States and around the world. We are in a period of great change across the globe affecting economies and social order. Widening income inequality. Brexit. The wild stock market. Gender relations. Race and culture. Standards of truth and behavior. The second Women’s March protesting this not-normal presidency came and went, as well as #MeToo, and March for our Lives, our children challenging our status quo. Each day, people check social media to see if the next change will be worse than the last. Change is natural and inevitable. But there has been a paradigm shift in this 242-year-old democracy. The past year, it seems like there is an alarm bell going off somewhere to which we should be paying attention.

But people are educating themselves about issues, creating grassroots movements of resistance, and being aware about environmental policies because we recognize that we have to stand up so that we have a future.

For this issue, we sought poetry, stories, and essays that recognize and respond to how change—personal, societal, environmental, global—is affecting our perceptions and worldview. We sought writing that starts a conversation about this new world order as we are coming to know it.

There is a love letter to America from an angry patriot, a philosophical treatise that challenges us to reach back into the long dim past of the Roman Empire to address a new societal paradigm, poetry that entices the reader to introspection, short fiction that inspires intimate evaluation, and essays that test boundaries, both literally and figuratively. The authors appreciate your comments, so create a free Sisyphus User ID and keep the conversation going.