Art: "Some Kind of WonderFULL" by Rosa Silver
Poetry: "Phases of the moon" by Scott McLean
Saddam’s streetlights were long gone, the steel tubes tapered in ditches,
the bulbs blasted before we arrived and found long rows of crates opened with pry bars
and bayonets.
Inside, well-packed and pristine engine parts,
French turbines for jets for projectiles for power for the way of the world.
Why not weep?
Midst the decay of those colossal and steely avionic nests of fins
and entwined wires, red and blue and waving the flags of profit,
surprise – – fields of cardboards decorated with camouflage and mimicry,
shaped like fuselage and wing,
cowling and stabilizer, strut and tail,
flap, well-intentioned to fool the adversary. Us. Me.
Though I need no fooling.
We sat in these sandscapes of rough detritus, ruins of hope and fear,
like dishwashers, new hires, introduced to stacks of heavy and chipped platters
encrusted with desiccated gravy, last week’s escargot and pate,
careful to despair and consider how to clear a space
for the first well-scrubbed and rinsed and glistening dish,
a nice plate for the dust and mud
scraped from boots that walked here
one heel and toe at a time, one step starboard and two to port
as the day settles into dusk and the moon rises, another surprise,
just a quarter moon on the waxing end of the eastern sky,
another day unexpected, breath and despair welcome but not expected
with the certainty we used to have.
This is the saddest time of day, though not the worst of the long night,
but sad for the clarity of the sky and the still air
and the notion that we are far far far far away
from the loves we took for granted.
No fooling. None.
Sad is as big a word as it needs to be.
I look at the moon again and in it see your face.
Ah. This is a moment.
I take a breath that is not my own,
an inhalation of some vague hope
that you now are looking at me
through the crescent light.
Something we share.
That is enough. No fooling.
Published April 2nd 2026
Scott McLean is a writer based in San Antonio and will begin a low-residency MFA in fiction at Fairfield University in July 2025. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps for 26 years, retiring in 2008, and worked as a clinical geneticist with Baylor College of Medicine until January 2024. His poetry has been published in Red Weather and medmic. Scott McLean and his wife, Paula, spend much of the year exploring the United States and Canada in their campervan, “Milton,” who has become self-aware and can be found on Instagram at MiltonTTrail.
Rosa Silver is a multidisciplinary artist and activist working at the intersection of environmental repair and the human condition. After twenty-two years running a permaculture farm in Hawaii, the Manhattan-born artist returned to her studio practice to create “symbolic repairs” for damaged landscapes and spirits. Her featured work, Some Kind of WonderFULL, emerged from a state of questioning: how could someone do that to another? Drawing a parallel to how the destruction of the Temple necessitated the birth of Kabbalah, Silver investigates the transformative processes that unfold during times of struggle. Guided by her studies in Jewish mysticism and her work as a facilitator of “The Work of Byron Katie,” she utilizes watercolor and sculpture to explore the resonance between ecological restoration and the healing of inherited trauma.