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| Cartoonist Michael de Adder was let go from his job drawing editorial cartoons for all the major New Brunswick newspapers, a job he held for 17 years, 24 hours after this Donald T***p cartoon went viral on social media. Twitter: @deAdder |
The policies we say make this okay
cover crimes of custom, duty
to the miles of fence, the wells poisoned
with the snakes of extra-judicial killings
not the little mountain of a child
vomiting a fever,
not “I come to own a toy”
“a pair of shoes” or “I am fleeing
violence,”
not long-term investigation
they wash up on the news—a father, a daughter
—in the river near the bootheel
where the railroad came and went
border protection only protecting
this desert spiked with crucifixions
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Hellen has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review, as well as awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts.