THE WARTIME ISSUE Virginia Bell   NO POPE Standing in line for food one day (the belly of my purse comfortably warm and full), I listen to two professors in front of  me say they know the reason for all the Muslim Fundamentalist terrorism flowing through the earth these days: ........................no Pope. Yes, Islam has no Pope – an otherwise acceptable religion, irremediably flawed by the absence of a clear hierarchical structure, a clear chain of authority that descends from one point and ensures productive and humane practices all the way down the line. My 6 year old son tells me    that there are pockets of magma deep in the earth and, see Mommy, the magma is hot and when the pressure builds up, and builds up, and builds up, the magma shoots up through these vents – that’s the volcano erupting, the magma turns to lava, it flows down the side of the mountain, building a new layer – you see, making the mountain taller – and sometimes the magma comes out in a GIANT EXPLOSION that includes bits and chunks of rock, igneous rock, you know, the stuff from eruptions that happened before. He draws me a picture, then, with lines coming out to the right and to the left, each line representing an eruption in time. I learn that the lava doesn’t always flow in the same place; he draws criss-crossy lines, showing the messy and aleatory pattern of volcanic history. Standing in line for food that day (the men in front of me carry their savory packages away to a table), I close my eyes, try to picture the lines I am not in, what the women and men carry with them as they stand and wait, what they receive and carry away with them, where they go, what they do with it, what exactly it tastes like on their tongues, what it feels like as it moves down and into their bodies, how it rests or does not rest there.     Virginia Bell has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Maryland. She has published critical articles on Leslie Marmon Silko, Eduardo Galeano, and Rosario Castellanos. She has taught as an adjunct professor in the English Department at Georgetown University and the Women's Studies Department at the University of Maryland. She lives in Takoma Park and also works as a stay-at-home-parent of two children. Published in Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2006.