THEIR GANG

by Eric D. Goldman

 

 

The number of people deported to El Salvador from the U.S. nearly doubled in the first months of 2026, according to official figures, coming as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has positioned himself as an ally willing to help the Trump administration accelerate deportations, a central priority. —NBC, May 14, 2026

I never ran with them.
Never wore the ink, flashed the signs,
never whispered the names in the dark.

 

But here, names do not matter.
Here, I am Tren de Aragua.
I am what they say I am.

 

They came at dawn,
boots on stairs, fists on doors,
faces like chiseled ice when they took me—
no trial, no questions.

 

A plane filled with men, young and old,
some killers, thieves, rapists,
but some like me, descent hombres—

wrong place, wrong time,
wrong side of the administration’s priorities.

 

An old law book dusted off:

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798,
shoved into the asshole-mouth

that spews hate without discretion,
sees an enemy in every shadow,
hugs the flag and says,
“this is how we take our country back.”

 

The judge says, “this is not the way,”
insists laws must live in the present,

that due process and justice must

precede punishment.

The right calls the judge a traitor,
questions the authority of the courts,

defies his judgement,

calls for his robes,

his job, his head.

“Why do they love criminals?”

the foxes scream on TV,

“Why do they want Venezuelan gangs

running the streets in America?”

as though they don’t understand or care

about rights or laws.

Never a whisper for the ones like me,
the ones who swept floors, carried bricks,

worked fields, who built and provided for this country,
sent money home so a sister could eat.

 

Now I sit in a Salvadorian prison

on ice-cold stone,
back against the wall, breath slow,
my name already dissolving.

 

Tren de Aragua was born in a prison,
and here, they still reign.
They control the water, the food,
who wakes up and who does not.

They are hermandad,
but I am no brother to them.
They smell it, this fear on me,
this foreignness, this lack of appropriate ink.

 

A blade scrapes concrete—
someone sharpening the night.

Eyes flick my way.
They know I do not belong.

 

That might save me.
That might kill me.

 

 

Author’s Note: This poem is rooted in the real-world deportations of March 2025, when the United States invoked a 1798 wartime law to transfer hundreds of Venezuelan deportees directly to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Investigative news reports documented that some laborers with no demonstrated gang ties were mistakenly swept up in the raids. The speaker in “Their Gang” is a fictional composite. The poem steps away from the headlines to imagine the visceral terror of an ordinary civilian suddenly stripped of due process and left to survive in a violent foreign prison dominated by gangs.  

 

 

More than 100 of Eric D. Goldman's poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines. His poetry collection Faraway Tables (Yorkshire Publishing, 2023) was an Amazon #1 Bestseller in Poetry. In addition to poetry, hundreds of his short stories, articles, and travel stories have been published in magazines and journals, and he's the author of seven books, most of them fiction.

DELANEY HALL

by Roberta Batorsky

This is the emblem of the age

Children shivering all alone

Where ICE holds sway

Nothing at all for to atone

 

Five day’s hunger strike rallies the world

To Newark’s prison, a public shame

Justice, fairness, integrity hobbled

Throwing dirt on America’s name

 

Delaney was a leader of civil rights

His hall rejiggered as an infamous jail

By Trump and his pernicious acolytes

Holed up in their version of Versailles

 

Delaney, the emblem of this age

Should inspire international rage

Immigrants, fiber of American life

Uprise, uprise, uprise, uprise

Roberta Batorsky, a New Jersey poet, recently published her first book of poetry, Perihelion.

MASS SHOOTING #12

300 block of West Biddle Street, Jackson, MI, May 9, 2026

“Jackson Police investigate afternoon shooting that injured 4 locals.” —Mlive

by Ron Riekki

“watched his childhood;

Amid strange faces and strange forms.”

—Mary Torrans Lathrap,

“The Wanderer's Grave”

“We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood.”

—MacReady (played by Kurt Russell)

in The Thing (1982)

 

“freedom which is a crater

I keep falling in.”

—Major Jackson,

“On Disappearing”

            i: Prologue

 

Between Fourth of July 2025 and Memorial Day 2026,

there have 837 separate shooting incidents in Michigan,

In 325 days, there have been 15 mass shootings here,

about one mass shooting every 22 days.  I started going

 

to mass shootings on July 4 last year.  On my birthday,

mid-May, we reached 1,000 people shot in Michigan in

just 11 months.  Currently, 1,042 people have been shot.

I have only one more month to go.  I can’t do it anymore.

 

 

            ii: Dialogue

 

On the way to Jackson, I pass a park, and a bail bonds office.

This is my first mass shooting I’ve gone to where the mass

shooter is a female, her bond set at a quarter of a million

dollars.  A May 9 headline reads “Attempted murder charges

 

against shooting suspect dropped shortly after her arraignment.”

The victims: a 21-year-old male shot twice in the chest and

once in the arm, 28-year-old male shot in the face and arm,

25-year-old female shot in the pelvis, and 23-year-old female

 

shot in the arm.  This doesn’t feel like a poem.  I don’t feel

like writing a poem.  I don’t feel sometimes driving to these

mass shootings.  The repetition.  The petitions that do nothing.

Worse.  It seems to be spreading to all of us.  A virus.  I feel

 

disgusted.  I discuss this with a woman who lives less than

a block from the shooting.  I’m talking to a female about

a female mass shooter who just shot two females in the arm

and, of all places, the pelvis.  The symbolism.  The city bright

 

green today.  I talk to her at the foot of her garden and

there are two men nearby.  Anna and Dan and an unnamed

man who reminds me of Seasick Steve (the musician whose

name I thought was Steve Gone Wild, but is actually Steve

 

Gene Wold, half-guitarist-wizard half-pirate); his doppel-

gänger floats in and out of the discussion of danger and

anger and it’s very city focused, talk of Romulus, Detroit,

Jackson.  And the three of them seem like they’d fit in with

 

the entourage of Action Bronson (of F*ck, That's Delicious

fame).  They tell me Jackson needs more community gardens.

On the way here, I passed a bike park, another park, a b-ball

court, and then the abandoned park near their home with its

 

rusty swings and weeds and graffitied slide and need of

upkeep and another basketball court, but this with no nets.

They tell me it’s the youth, that we didn’t do mass shootings

when we were young, tells me he handled a gun at age 8,

 

has a gun now, says “the problem is the access.”  Or is it

the excess?  Its infinity.  ∞.  I ask this.  He says they need gun safety.

I ask how gun safety is going to help a mass shooter.  It seems

gun safety is an oxymoron.  We talk more on how “it’s a vicious

 

cycle,” and when change is attempted “they get roadblocked

by the government.”  Anna says the problem is the chronic

violence of TV, video games, music, movies.  We’re not far

from Mount Evergreen Cemetery.  I don’t know about

 

the mount, but there’s green everywhere today.  I feel jaded.

It feels I’ve had this discussion before.  Gun owners telling me

there’s too much access to guns.  ?  They’re nice.  They’re open.

They’re enjoying the summer day.  One heard the gunshots.

 

One didn’t.  They tell me those who were shot know who did it,

but they don’t want to speak.  News says people are afraid

to talk, worried about getting protection.  There’s apparently

40 unsolved murders in Jackson.  We chitchat.  Wide open.

 

I worry America is guns.  Guns won.  Hell, it’s confusing.

It is Hell.  Kamala Harris, a Democrat, brags about owning

a Glock.  The Republican President can’t own a gun

due to his felony conviction.  They talk about how you’re

 

safe if you keep your nose clean, if you “stay away from

trouble,” from “people congregating.”  Perhaps we’re saying

you can prevent mass shootings by simply staying away

from people.  The myth that COVID reduced mass shootings.

 

We trade one virus for another.  I’m tired.  We don’t have any

solutions.  Or maybe we have too many solutions.  There’s no

silver bullet.  The conversations are triggering.  You try to offer

up solutions but get shot down.  We need to set our sites on

 

something better.  The language is gun-drowned.  Steve

tells me I need to go, that the dog wants to come out—

Zeus, their German Shephard.  He tells me the dog’s hairs

are standing on end, that he wants to come after me, that

 

it’s best to leave.  As I’m walking away, he shouts to my

backside, “If he doesn’t know you, he’s very aggressive!”

 

 

            iii: Epilogue

 

The realization, driving home, is that this wasn’t the only

mass shooting in Michigan on May 9, another in Muskegon.

 

And, on May 9, more mass shootings in Reddick, Florida,

and in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  We’re perfecting mass

shootings.  We’re teaching the normalization of mass

shootings.  Gun purchases increase after mass shootings.

 

The beauty is the ugliness.  Gun violence and capitalism

F*ck each other.  But there’s this strange revelation that it’s

the gun owners who get killed.  It’s gun owners who have

increased suicides in their homes.  It’s gun owners who have

 

increased homicides in their homes.  It’s gun owners who have

increased accidental shootings in their homes.  Safety comes from

actual safety.  It’s a horror film.  “Don’t go in!”  Guns are the thing.

And guns are The Thing.  It.  And It.  “The horror, the horror.”

 

 

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.  

LETHAL INJECTION PROTOCOL

by Ilene Millman

An easy-to-follow recipe really, the original from 1977. Just three required ingredients,

but be sure to check you have them on hand, in case

that one you thought you had is unavailable since the manufacturer

dislikes the way you're using it.

Be sure to check your equipment: two intravenous cannulas, one a backup,

plus a line leading to an adjacent room,

saline, hypodermic needles, alcohol for sterilizing just in case

someone suddenly says the word “Stay” as happened in the case

of James Autry in 1983.

You may experiment with substituting alternative

ingredients although one is banned in some states since the botched

batch in the case

of John Marion Grant, who convulsed two dozen times and puked

although he did breathe 12 more minutes. Administer in the sequence set here:

first injection to cause unconsciousness followed by the one for paralysis and the last

cardiac arrest.

Watch for these procedural problems: needle applied in the wrong direction, drugs

injected into tissue and not vein, or inability to find a vein as in the case

this week of Tony Carruthers, or the case

two years ago, of Marcellus Williams where 

evidence is strong

that he just might have been

innocent.

Ilene Millman writes about memories, mud, music, modern times, anything her abiding and determined fascination grabs onto. Her first poetry book, Adjust Speed to Weather, was published in 2018, and A Jar of Moths, in March,2024 (Ragged Sky Press). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022 and 2024. A speech/language therapist, she published two therapy games designed to help school-aged children with language development problems.

ON THE MORNING THE CITY CHANGED ITS WALK

by Khayelihle Benghu

 

 

 

 

On the morning the march moved through Johannesburg,
shop gates came down early.


Metal shutters lowered like tired eyelids


before the day had fully spoken.
Foreign-owned stores locked their doors


before noon,


keys turning twice


as if once was no longer enough


to believe in safety.
The taxi driver changed his route again,


avoiding streets where voices


had grown sharper than traffic,


where even the robots seemed unsure


who they were guiding anymore.
No one calls it fear,


but everyone adjusts their walking speed.


Everyone becomes a little more careful


with how they look at strangers.
Somewhere, a shopkeeper counts what might be lost


stock, rent, the years built behind a counter.


Somewhere else, a protester counts what has already been taken


jobs, space, the weight of being seen.
And between them,


the city keeps breathing uneven, uncertain,


but still holding everyone inside it.
A child watches from a doorway


that is neither open nor closed.


A flag lifts, then folds back into itself


as if unsure what it is becoming.
No one says the same story.


But everyone carries the same heat


under their skin.
Later, when the streets grow quiet again,


when footsteps return to ordinary distances,


there is still this question left behind:
how do we live here together


without teaching ourselves


to fear each other's names.

Khayelihle Benghu is a South African writer and an author of The Names We Carry. She explores the themes of resilience grieve, silence and love in every day setting.

LULLABY, UPDATED

by Melissa Balmain

"[An] F-250 King Ranch model [truck] will be staying at a dealership in Kansas for a couple more days after a family of robins has taken up residence atop one of the truck’s 34-inch tires. Since the birds are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the employees at Olathe Ford Lincoln and the vehicle customer must wait until the robin’s family of hatchlings grows old enough to leave the nest, and the dealership, behind." —Paul Kampe, Ford website, May 22, 2026. Photo by Olathe Ford Lincoln

 

Hush, little birdie, don’t be alarmed,

We are gonna keep all your chicks unharmed—

 

And even if they’re slow to fledge,

That is still no reason to feel on edge,

 

For though some migrants (human ones)

Have to leave their nests thanks to men with guns,

 

Robins are protected by our word.

Aren’t you glad you were born a bird?

Melissa Balmain edits Light, North America's longest-running journal of comic verse. Her poems and/or prose have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Nimrod, Poetry Daily, and Rattle. Her latest book of poetry is Satan Talks to His Therapist (Paul Dry Books).