We can’t wait to get your application to read your work at JaxbyJax VIII. Spread the word!

We are counting down to July 1st – the day we open applications for writers to read your work in the JaxbyJax Literary Arts Festival VIII.

This year’s festival will be held on Saturday, October 16 at the Jessie Ball duPont Center, 40 East Adams Street, Jacksonville, FL 32202. Details will follow as they develop, so keep an eye out at JaxbyJax.com

We are thrilled to announce our newest sponsor, the Jacksonville Cutural Development Corporation, headed by the amazing Shawana Brooks

JaxbyJax VIII will be an exploration on the themes of Gun Violence or Civic Engagement. As always, selected writers need to have been born in Jacksonville, live in Jacksonville now, write about Jacksonville, or use Jacksonville as a setting in their work.

Spread the word!

When the tour-bus driver passed the empty parking space

for the third time, circling the lot for some superior

spot from which to dis-engorge his van, we impatient Americans

tried to help, pointing and shouting, to no avail.

*

“Nein,” he said quietly, and drove on.

*

When a slot opened up, just two spaces down

and I waited for my friends to disembark, I ambled over, curious

to see if a huge pothole or scattered thumbtacks had been the root

of his reluctance – or was he superstitious, and this space numbered thirteen?

*

Instead, I encountered a nondescript plaque embedded in the asphalt.

*

Below my sneakered feet, the words announced,

in German and English,

lay the bomb shelter-turned-bunker

where Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were married in 1945,

*

and where they committed suicide the next day.

*

From the parking lot we walked to the Memorials

to the Murdered Jews, the Persecuted Homosexuals,

the Victims of the Euthanasia killings and

the Murdered Sinti and Roma of Europe.

*

And it struck me-

*

The Germans had not “erased history.”

The atrocities of the Nazis were remembered

in museums, and on small plaques on buildings

and in parking lots that warned,

*

“This evil thing happened here.”

*

But it was the victims, not the perpetrators,

who were honored with remembrance

in memorials, buildings, gardens, and plinths,

their voices rising in ghostly chorus to sing,

*

“Never again,” as broken hearts sang along.

*

No Roma or Sinti are asked to vote

at Heinrich Himmler Community Center;

no sick or elderly Germans recuperate

at Josef Mengele Hospital;

*

No taxes are paid at courthouses named for leaders of the Third Reich.

*

No Jewish children are required to study

at Reinhard Heydrich Elementary,

Joseph Goebbels Middle School,

nor Adolph Hitler High.

*

Only in the United States, are the honored dead

*

the ones who bought and sold human beings,

the ones who wielded the cruel lash,

the ones who rebelled against and seceded from

this country we claim to love.

*

Only in Jacksonville, are the black and brown children we love

*

required to study at elementary schools

named for Joseph Finnegan and Stonewall Jackson;

middle schools named for Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, and Kirby Smith;

and high schools named for Andrew Jackson, Jean Ribault, and Robert E. Lee.

*

Change the names.

Honor our living children, not a lost cause nor our evil past.

~

Poem by Darlyn Finch Kuhn

Photo by The Post-Star