By: JK Miller

Solving the World’s Problems

Hunger is a nuclear reaction,
playing in the pit of a Gaza girl’s belly.
It is a Ukrainian boy lost in the woods.

Mutant wolves run up and down their spines,
tinkling xylophone vertebrae with a bloody bone.

Chin up brother.
Sit up sister.
Shiplap mother,

take one lump of bituminous coal
every night at bedtime. It will cure
those sun-drenching, wind-sweeping
blues.

No more chronic
diseases of the soul.

Old body gone.
In with the new.

Behold,

the sovereign wealth crypto king
orders a $6 million banana
at Sotheby’s.

Russia Bombards Kyiv

Thursday night Kyiv was bombed.
Black-winged drones koza-choked the town.

The morning-after light shook out
the blood-stained sheets and pulled the corners tight.

Like a sad smile,
on a roof line still intact, an even number of rock pigeons assembled

while below, empty sockets in cracked open jawbones
lined the streets.

The birds, like chrysanthemums, arrived quickly, mercifully,
the air thick with invitation.

Architecton

Freeze and thaw
happen all the time.

Voids and pores
in the concrete walls
that hold us,
or put us off,
that elevate
or transport us

expand and contract,
as if they were living
and breathing
but in a very low-key,
controlled
Billie Eilish-ish way.

We abide our zen-
sim structures, layering
on ivy and gardens
and power washing.

And sure, over eighty years
you might get a crack —
some scale or flake,

but nothing that can’t be repaired
with a little Maybelinne.

Bombs and bulldozers
happen all the time.

New gray statues rise
every day in Zeitoun,
slabs of wall
and ceiling dangling
on cement posts,
with rebar antennae

like amputee fingers
waving in the air, Medusa
freezing sea monsters,
left and right,
feeling for the leaves
of the old olive tree.

Crack, scale and flake,
the crystalline silica
penetrate deep
into the lungs

It would take more
than eighty years
to rebuild Gaza,

less for silicosis to kill
the rest of the children.

###

JK Miller is a late bloomer. Since he retired from teaching (third grade dual language) he’s dived into submitting poetry. In the summer of 2025  he completed a solo 1,335-mile bike ride from his house to his son’s house to see his newborn baby grandson. His poems can be seen in shoegaze literary, Midsummer Dream House, Harrow House, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Rat’s Ass Review, and 50-Word Stories.