My Neighborhood
I step outside for a break,
shade trees and hanging moss,
metal roofs and rubbish.
A roar sounds out,
a sharp crack in the bones, close,
very close. An atom bomb?
but no flash and I can still see.
No, a warplane streaks low,
then a second, are they here for me?
but this isn’t Gaza
or the Texas border.Yet,
I hold still as a rabbit
hidden beneath the trees
till they are long gone.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
We in America
We cling to platitudes
because they’re easy
and we long to believe:
“My Nation Is Great,”
“God Is Good,”
we who count the dead
on a scoreboard.
Don Krieger is a biomedical researcher whose focus is the electric activity within the brain. His collections include: “When Danger Has Passed, Who Remembers?” from Milk and Cake Press, 2022, and “Discovery,” from Cyberwit, 2020. He was a 2020 pushcart nominee, and a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science-as-Story Fellow. His poetry has appeared in Seneca Review, Raw Art Review, the Asahi Shimbun, Entropy, Dissident Voice, Neurology, American Journal of Nursing, and others. His work has been translated into Farsi, Greek, Italian, German, Turkish and Romanian.