From a Friend Now Living in Israel

I hear horrible things on the news, in movies
and call her up to ask if they’re true
what it’s like to live around such atrocities
if she doing anything about it herself.

She laughs and tells me that everyone
hates Israel, that she’s gotten used to living in a country
that outsiders just don’t understand. “It’s all lies,”
she adds, says something about anti-Semitism

and Arabs, and how people mostly just want to live with their own
but that people are welcome to live wherever they want
she doesn’t mind.

Roses
Digital Art
Miroslava Panayotova ©2022

Holly Day…

…has worked as a freelance writer for over 30 years, with over 7,000 published articles, poems, and short stories and 40 books and chapbooks—most recently, the nonfiction books, Music Theory for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Tattoo FAQ, and History Lover’s Guide to Minneapolis, and the poetry books A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing), In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press), I’m in a Place Where Reason Went Missing (Main Street Press), Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Folios of Dried Flowers and Pressed Birds (Cyberwit), and Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press). Her writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, a 49th Parallel Prize, an Isaac Asimov Award, eleven Pushcart awards, three Dzanc Book’s Best of the Web awards, a Rhysling Award, and two Best of the Net awards, and she has received two Midwest Writer’s Grants, a Plainsongs Award, a Sam Ragan Prize for Poetry, and a Dwarf Star Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association.