A POEM

by Pulkita Anand
 

Write a poem using the rhyming of the hollering peacock and deer.

Use metaphor to describe their running helter-skelter. Do mention the arrest of the vulnerable students. Include the numbers: forest areas, trees cut, displaced birds, temperature rise, dead animals. Add a phrase about how some animals were buried before dying. 

Typographically present the stubs and remains after devastation. Use rhetorical questions: Where will they go? Why are they destroying forests? What crime? What punishment? Should development be at the cost of dead sentient beings? Use all your senses to describe the joy in a forest. Compare then and now. Use other poetic devices to draw readers’ attention towards their heated future. End with a bird song or end with a couplet about global warming or a burning planet or nothing. 

Consider titling the poem Green vs Greed.

Pulkita Anand is an avid reader of poetry. She has translated one short story collection, Tribal Tales fromp Jhabua. Author of two children’s e-books, pher eco-poetry collection is we were not born to be erased. Her creative works have been widely published in journals.

EL SALVADOR

by Margaret Rozga

A name the conquistadores imposed

as if Christian, as if a name said it all.

There is not a single savior anywhere

anymore, if ever there was. Now

there in the name of the Savior, they

twist, strip meaning, bend backs,

shackle, shave heads, imprison,

no hope of return.

What angel, angels, to roll back this stone?

Arise, arise as one. Be one, good people.

Margaret Rozga, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee at Waukesha Professor of English Emerita, served as the 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate and the 2021 inaugural artist/scholar in residence at the UW Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station. She has published six books, most recently Restoring Prairie (2024) and Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems (2021).

HOW DO YOU READ THE LAW?

by Jeff Hardin

The Tennessee Senate on Thursday approved legislation that could subject churches and charitable organizations to lawsuits if they provide housing aid to immigrants without legal status who go on to commit a crime… Sen. Jeff Yarbro, a Nashville Democrat, noted the bill makes changes to a portion of Tennessee’s “Good Samaritan” statutes, which are designed to shield individuals and organizations that provide aid from lawsuits. “What we are doing here is we are literally limiting the application of the Good Samaritan law,” Yarbro said. —Tennessee Lookout, April 3, 2025

We finally got around to laws against
loving one’s neighbor. After all, feed
someone hungry, then ever afterwards
one should be accountable for any crime
he commits. Had he died instead, he
wouldn’t have crossed that yellow line!
 
There was snow on the roads, a dark night.
In another month, buttercups in the ditch.
None of us survives experiments going on
around us—a high limb nudged by wind,
a few words spoken in haste, others unvoiced.
 
A friend describes an island—secluded
but uninhabitable. Think of standing—
wind-lashed, unsteady, uncertain—on
ground knife-edged in every direction.
 
New weights are added the longer one
hesitates deciding which step to take.

Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in Image, The Laurel Review, The Inflectionist Review, and others. His eighth collection, Coming into an Inheritance, is forthcoming. He lives in Tennessee.

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN TRUMPMERICA… IS IT JUST ME?

by Robin Stevens Payes

Art by Adam Bissonnette at Michael Moore Substack

Tired, headachy, lethargic. Is it just me? Perhaps it’s the weather—80 degrees and sunny one day; 50 and foggy the next. The air is close, closing in. Maybe it’s not the weather. The world is closing in. Tariffs, abductions, mass firings. Check your feed. War, threats of war, trading wars. I’m stunned it’s only taken 73 days to destroy US, America the Beautiful. 250 years to build a never-perfect, ever-striving union. Less than a quarter of one to tear it down. Is it just me? Everything looks the same; people keep saying so. I must see for myself. I’m sitting in Panera over a chai tea latte. Frivolous purchase, I know. We are a beautiful hodgepodge of America here: women, men white, black, immigrant, young, old. People smiling and holding open doors for each other. Pleases and thank yous. Chess game in the corner. Regular kaffeeklatsch arguing over who knows what. Friends schmoozing. Babies cooing. Liberation Day. Is it just me? Liberating US from prosperity. Trade wars with friends. Who needs friends? Or lumber, paper, car parts. Semiconductors stranded. Champagne uncorked. Hurray, it’s Liberation Day, who’s rallying? Is it just me?  Domestic pain. Prices rise. Kentucky bourbon for US alone. Chickens no longer laying. Check your feed! Factory cows bellowing in pain for wont of milking. Grain rotting across the fruited plain. What’s a rally in reverse? Markets tumbling. Panicked 401k holders. Is it just me? Temporary, they say. The trumpists trumpet prosperity. Our full faith and credit: In Who We Trust? We have met the gangster and it is US. Oops, roped up the wrong bad guy. Tattoos—you know; they all look alike. All deportations final: no returns. Sorry, not sorry. This is the plan, they keep saying. Breaking news. Breaking US. Check our feed. A blizzard of factless, faceless counterfactuals blowing, billowing, burying US in unreason. Ah, but yes, there are faces. Starring Trump, Musk. Musk, Trump. Bit parts for SecDef, HHS, ICE. IRS, Treasury, because, billionaires. State, misstated. Walk-offs for WWE, monkeys in the GOP. Have you memorized your lines? Get your cues down! NEVER disagree.  Enemies gain. Deus ex machina Putin putting in appearances. Begin bombing. Erdogan saving Syria for Russia. China selling TikTok; keeping the algorithms. Keeping US in its cheap Big Data net. Digitize US. Creators creating AI fear it’s surpassed us. Why would Nero fiddle when AI’s mastered music from every composer ever? Better, cheaper, quicker. They’ve lost control. Just another day in Trumpmerica. We are a beautiful hodgepodge of America here: women, men white, black, immigrant, young, old. US. We the People must not loose our reign. Tired, headachy, lethargic. Rally on! I won’t lose control. Is it just me?

 

Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. She is author of the YA-time travel adventure book series, Edge of Yesterday. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack https://remembertheworld.substack.com/

ON THE AFTERMATH OF A CONSEQUENTIAL ELECTION

by Peter Nohrnberg

Art by Soybeing at Michael Moore Substack

Outraged and exhausted, we make our choice
guided by billions that masquerade as voice.
Like good consumers, we were well apprised; 
knew the cost of eggs, if not of lies.
Fever dreams of unruly immigration 
return to T---p the frayed reigns of the nation.
Sworn in under the Capitol’s Rotunda—
a cold snap turns DC to arctic tundra—
the colossus takes his oath on Lincoln’s Bible.
(Who but Abe or Jesus can claim libel?) 
Fearing his dark promise of retribution 
Silicon Valley makes a contribution. 
Bureaucrats begin to take their leave 
as Musk and DOGE descend like drones on Kyiv.
Among those given the algorithmic axe:
employees who fend off nuclear attacks. 
Less government reform than “shock and awe,” 
cutting of red tape, and rule of law. 
T---p wields his blunt Sharpie like a machete,
shreds the Constitution to confetti.
Vital public info goes up in smoke,
sacrificed on the altar of “anti-woke.”
An able four-star general gets the sack,
replaced by one with three-stars who’s not black.  
POTUS’s pen claims there’s but two genders;
and those born intersex? return to sender!
Like King David who forgave his half-brother, 
Trump pardons both rioter and traitor. 
The Senate coddles his menagerie of weasels 
while unvaxed kids in Texas contract measles.  
The keys to New York City pass to ICE
while Don Junior cavorts on Greenland’s ice.
Deported “illegals” are dealt a dismal fate:
and on the return flight? The brothers Tate. 
Statecraft becomes T---p’s Art of the Self-Deal,
while folks in Gaza scavenge for a meal. 
(One day they’ll all be served a ten-course feast 
at the “Riviera of the Middle East”;
but first they must go on a long vacation 
while Gaza undergoes renovation). 
Back in the Oval Office on his knees 
Zelenskyy begs, but stops at “pretty please”:
desperately in need of guns and tanks,  
dressed down for not dressing up, not saying “thanks.” 
 
Does the arc of history bend toward justice;
Or does history simply bend and break us? 
Does democracy die in darkness, or blinding light? 
How should we view this spectacle, our plight? 
Will art and culture help us ride out the storm,
or did they bring about this new abnorm?  
Did treating blue collar folks as ignore-ables 
help gather MAGA’s “basket of deplorables”?
Or were their grievances, self-pity
what drove them to become so proudly sh---y? 
Perhaps there’s something deep within us all 
that answers to the con man’s siren call.   
Devotion to another’s certainty 
distracts us from the world’s contingency.  
How easy to blame DEI, the border;
easier still to make disorder out of order.
 
When power controls the future and the past, 
can even the written word persist, outlast?  
Yet words, like insects tend to stick around;
gone for years, they emerge from underground:
can sting or float, be bee or butterfly,
little strong things to pinch an ugly lie.   

A poet, cultural critic, and a scholar of literary modernism, Peter Nohrnberg has had his poetry published by Southwest Review, Notre Dame Review, The Wisconsin Review, and Oxford Poetry, among other journals. His poem “Pantoum After a School Shooting” was awarded second place in the 2020 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. 

THE NEW DHARMA BUMS

by Bradley McIlwain 

When I could not sing

Drunk on disillusionment
And pain 

Shiva drank the poison

From my throat 
To free my spirit 

From city lights

That burned too bright 
My past cremated in ashes and bottle caps

Too much bar puja

Midweek between pints 
And poetry 

Searching for Kerouac’s

Drunken Dharma Bums
Looking for enlightenment 

In the Desolation Peaks

And the road is a ghost 
Holding out my thumb 

Like old Dean Moriarty 

The highway line a rehab
Of breakthroughs and breakdowns.

Enlightenment 

A bridge that burns 
At both ends 

And the only way out

Is in;
The only way to the universe… within

Hopping freight trains 

In early morning fog
The lakes and forests 

Of America 

On fire with desire 
Boxcar wine and scrawl 

Of poet pirates 

Prophesying on 
The great railway lines 

Swallowing the landscape 

Like a serpent 
Of what might have been…

Vasuki

Coiled in the winds 
Of immortality 

Carries me to the desert 

Of mirage and reality 
Of starlight and self doubt 

A new Mahabharata

Through doorways 
Of non Euclidean dreams

Where the chaos 

Of freedom is born 
In the dust of factory floors;

Discarded verses 

Rediscovered in dust 
Swept up and drank 

From voices with dry tongues 

As a tonic for the cause.
The well spring of hope 

Lies just beyond the sun,

My rucksack as heavy 
As the heart of the mountain’s back.

Bradley McIlwain works as a Teacher-Librarian, where he strives to provide meaningful and inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and advocacy. He believes that poems and poets can be agents for social change. Bradley’s latest book Dear Emily was published by Roasted Poet Press last year.

LAST WORDS

by Shalmi Barman

He didn’t die cursing the tanks
or the turrets or swarming drones 
or the hillsides laid for ambush
or the cratered country road
harboring executioners.
 
I hear him through the static,
the shatter of windshield and bone,
chanting between gunshots
a prayer for the fleeing soul
            o god accept my repentance
            o mother forgive my choice
pleading against the darkness
with blood and breath and voice.
 
Let him be saved, if there’s saving,
while we damned in his stead
scream unresting curses 
to make the heavens deaf.

Shalmi Barman, originally from Calcutta, India, is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia where she is writing a dissertation on class and labor in Victorian fiction. Her poetry has been featured in Gyroscope Review, Rat's Ass Review, Snakeskin, The Crank, and elsewhere.

STANDING UP, POURING OUT

by L. Lois

Vancouverites rallied at the U.S. Consulate [last month] to protest the imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports. —City News, March 4, 2025

runways paved through city
blocks for us to walk
places to put our protest
cars stopped
by the coupling of bodies
massing to chant
the poison must be choked
 
texting the message
email chains binding keyboard wrists
worn raw by tyranny
feet shuffling out the door
marching down
cement plazas giving way
to anger echoing between the buildings
 
hubris weights its own downfall
compassion and arrogance
feel the same in a cold heart
the court jester turns to inform
sacred trust scattered across ballots
gathered by the greedy
presumes civility requires passivity
 
voices lift
to swing their signs
feet pound
freedom's patience
taxed and thin
hydrants knock open
spewing cleansing

Author’s note: As a Canadian, I will be joining the April 5th mass movement by gathering with other concerned global citizens outside the US Consulate in Vancouver, British Columbia.

L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting through her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Breakfast, Open JA&L, Fictional Cafe, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Washington Square Review, Sparks of Calliope, and other literary publications.

VENN DIAGRAM

by Karen Warinsky

Intersected by a hundred forces

we stand, affected energy 

over laps of spirit, sport, seduction,

a hundred tugs

and we try to

integrate

pull what’s useful to us,

cling to what might matter

as matter pummels 

our very bones

and signs tell us:

 

You Are Here.

 

You Are Here

where spirit meets 

grace meets love,

where democracy

collides with fascism

where the Earth sits

in its designated spot

amid endless planets and moons

stardust and expanding space,

where interesting cultures

mingle with manufactured conflicts,

where real conflicts clash

with solutions and greed

where apathy aligns with sorrow

where rage rests against response,

reaction, resolution.

 

You Are Here.

What will you decide to do?

Karen Warinsky has published poetry in numerous anthologies, journals and online sites since 2011. She is the author of three collections: Gold in Autumn (2020), Sunrise Ruby (2022), and Dining with War (2023). She is a 2023 Best of the Net nominee and a former finalist of the Montreal International Poetry Contest. Warinsky coordinates Poets at Large, a group that performs spoken word in MA and CT. Her new book Beauty and Ashes will be released later this year from Kelsay Books.

DO NOT

by Devon Balwit

after Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Cartoon by Custodio.

Do not
 
check the box saying I agree when you haven’t
read the terms, nor put an I believe sign in the front
yard while the yardless are being hauled out the back,
nor assume threat ugly rather than urbane and slick,
nor think one must sloganize to fight (for a lone wag
can be sufficiently ironical to shake the dog),
wor forget the power of art to move unfettered
by a common style, nor worry you must do it better
even to begin, nor avert from sure embarrassment—
for nothing embarrasses more than the human predicament—
our minds in compostable bodies, seeking the light
in the brief blip between birth and night.
Do not obey evil in advance, die
before you’re dead, or—worst of all—refuse to try.

 

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

HE COULDN’T CARE LESS

No eggs I can afford!

     Couldn’t care less

No job with government

    Couldn’t care less

Can’t pay for room and board

    Couldn’t care less

Can’t afford a car.

    Couldn’t care less

Can’t keep health insurance

    Couldn’t care less

My children have measles

    Couldn’t care less

But cod liver oil’s sold out!

    Couldn’t care less

Campaigning again

    Dems should care more

Because He Couldn’t care less

By Joe Blow who couldn’t care more

Ralph La Rosa invented this Joe Blow.

AUTO PARTS

by Jeremy Nathan Marks 

Trump indicated consumers could avoid tariffs by buying vehicles built entirely in the U.S., but industry experts say there’s not a single one with all-domestic parts and assembly. —NBC News, April 1, 2025

It’s a game called telephone.

 

I say fuel pump

and you say pump assembly

to the next guy who utters

maquiladora 

before his partner says

Juarez City

 

Juarez City sends me

an assembly pump and I say

Que? No entiendo.  

then I call you about a fuel

filter and you get on the horn

to your buddy in Alabama

who hears Pressure Regulator

calling up Jane in Windsor,

Ontario who phones Carlota in Sonora

 

Hola? Hola. ¿Cómo está usted?

Carlota replies

regulador de presión

Jane murmurs 

momento

and picks up from Gilles

in Trois-Rivières 

 

Ouais. Unité d’envoi de carburant?

Ouais, says Gilles.

D’accord, Gilles Jane replies

before flipping a linguistic switch

in her mind, telling

Carlota

 

Gracias, mi amiga

so that by the time she gets home

and her junior kindergartener

asks how your day was mom

she thinks he says carburetor

which is what I said to my partner

when she asked me what’s for dinner.  

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the auto-producing region of Canada. His latest book is Captain's Kismet (Alien Buddha Press, 2025).