These poems depict a journey through a dark landscape, where the political and personal are fused into a geography of disinformation, sex, betrayal and deadly technology. Phelan has produced verbal "snapshots" of a subterranean war-- with fronts in Los Angeles as well as Fallujah-- where the only defense is one's integrity and the stakes may be life itself.
Love has not been outlawed
Thursday, 03 May 2012 11:59 | 
Written by Janet Phelan | 
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For my Mother, murdered by the State
Amalie Phelan, b. September 18, 1915, d. May 4, 2004
There you are again
waving from the sidewalk
as my car pulls up
your smile the most beautiful light
in a world all lit up
from inside
We spend these hours
in a parenthesis
no one else can occupy
The rules are different here
Love has not been outlawed
The event has already occured
We are the only memories
of the only survivors
beached with our innocence
I fix you a cup of tea
My fingertips brush
against your arm
I do not know
that this is an act of war/
that this is an act of salvation
and then I am crashing through
the plate glass window again
into the waking world
bruised/ stunned/ lacerated
by this awakening
And once again
You are gone
I careen through the alien sunlight
blind and disobedient
holding in my heart the absolute knowledge
that tonight
again
in the world as it was
I will once more
pull into your driveway
Maybe tonight we will bake brownies
Or maybe we will simply kneel in the garden
and dig up weeds
it hardly matters what we do/
what matters is that there is still a place left
away from the cameras
away from the satellites
Where the blood that courses through your heart
also reigns
in mine