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.
The Dark Haired Child
Wednesday, 13 June 2012 09:50 | 
Written by Janet Phelan | 
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I am the dark- haired child doe eyed and silent and though I scrub and scrub no amount of peroxide or bleach will ever make me fair I inhabit corners and porch stoops Streetlamps and moonlight guide my passage as I glide through the margins and footnotes of life You have seen me many times though you may not have taken notice a blur in the corner of a photograph the nagging memory of a face you cannot quite place I was there when Joan burned at the stake I was there when the planes flew low over Hiroshima I was there when the first Buddhist monk barely out of his teens incinerated himself on the five 0'clock news and I was there when the towers crumbled to dust and the weight of the world shifted in balance It is a heavy burden to carry to reside in history in this manifestation the hunchback the leper the Jew the dishonorable discharge kneeling on the sixth floor of the Texas book depository but it is better me than you/ it is better me for you Look at it this way: I wash you clean without me you might be considered responsible I take the rap and you go on with your bombs and your poisons and your chemical conflagrations I take the rap and you take the press calls "The suspect has been detained The suspect is under arrest The suspect is no longer at large."