‘Holes in the Sky’

Michael C. Roberts is a mostly retired pediatric psychologist seeking creativity through photography. His photograph book, "Imaging the World with Plastic Cameras: Diana and Holga," is available on amazon.com. His photographs have appeared in several literary and scientific journals. His current work of minimalist images depicts the essential beauty in nature and constructed forms often passed without acknowledgement. This series of minimalist images is entitled: The Basics.

Holes in the Sky

We’re going to watch Alan Shepard punch a hole in the sky
we’re going to watch an American astronaut make history
the young nun says while wheeling a black & white TV
into her eighth-grade classroom on a May morning in 1961
and forty students stare and squint at the 12-inch screen
and at 3-2-1 blastoff! the nun makes the sign of the cross
while off to the side under a framed photo of the pope
a ghostly Galileo fails to stifle a sardonic snort
but nobody gets the joke and so they ignore him
and from the back of the room Yuri Gagarin insists
he already punched a hole in the sky a month earlier
but nobody understands Russian so they ignore him too.

Robert Eugene Rubino is a former sports columnist and adult literacy tutor old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and smart enough to solve The New York Times crossword puzzle on Mondays (other days not so much).

‘Superman Is Dead, Long Live Superman’

Kai Kim-Suzuki is a high school senior at Fieldston School in New York City. He particularly enjoys monochromatic, minimalist nature photography. His other main creative outlet is cooking a mean breakfast for himself every single morning. He hopes to pursue mechanical engineering in college.

Superman Is Dead, Long Live Superman

11 years old
Queens, New York
1959
We’re stone silent after cracking wise
about the news of George Reeves’ suicide
each joke a variation on TV’s Superman
shooting himself with a Kryptonite bullet.
We huddle in the cavern of a fallout shelter
each of us holding on dearly desperately
to the latest Superman comic book
still beguiled by this all-American alien
still keeping secret his transparent dual identity
this hero both mild-mannered and so daring
who kills something in us along with himself
yet still joins us on our fitful flights of fancy.

Robert Eugene Rubino has published prose and poetry in various online and print journals. He's old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and smart enough to solve The New York Times crossword puzzle on Mondays (other days not so much).

Being Hugh Lofting (and Conceiving the Doctor Dolittle Books of Children’s Literature)

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Being Hugh Lofting
(and Conceiving the Doctor Dolittle Books of Children’s Literature)

Desperate to distance himself from death and despair
from the stench of the trenches of the so-called Great War
the war that wouldn’t end all war after all
desperate to distance himself from depravity and destruction
the slaughter of not only humans but other animals —
horses and pigs and goats and donkeys and dogs and cats and cows ...
first in Flanders and then in France
the M.I.T.-educated British lieutenant
not a soldier by profession but a civil engineer
he escapes the poison gas the shell-shocked carnage
the shrapnel-shredded bodies
including, eventually, his own ...
he escapes via floating flying imagination-packed
pacifist letters to wife and children who wait and worry
lighthearted letters with stories and sketches
creating an innocent world of talking animals
presided over by a gentle-humored human doctor
who learns all their languages and heals all their ills.

Robert Eugene Rubino is a septuagenarian writer who has published prose and poetry in various online and print journals in addition to three collections. He's smart enough to solve the New York Times crossword puzzle on Mondays (other days not so much).