THE ART OF THE DEAL

by Steve Deutsch

 

 

Cartoon by José Alberto Rodríguez Avila

My cousin Bobby

tells me

the ultra rich

 

are negotiating

for more sunshine

on their compounds.

 

He reasons

that will mean

less sunshine

 

for the rest of us.

“They also want

a full moon

 

every night of the year.”

Bobby’s the nicest guy,

but thinks 2+2 is advanced math.

 

He read about the sunlight

in several feeds

on the internet

 

and now he owns it.

I ask him

who they are negotiating with

 

and he gives me

his poor dumb cousin look.

I drive home past

 

what we know as “the castle on the hill,”

and it seems to me

the hill has gotten higher.

 

The sun sets at my house

at 7:41 tonight—

it’s supposed to set at eight.

 

And I have to wonder

what else they might

be bargaining for.

Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. He has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes multiple times. He has six volumes of Poetry. One, Brooklyn won the Sinclair Poetry Prize.

A BRIDGE TOO FAR

by Karen Warinsky

A protestor entered his fourth day atop the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge. Guido Reichstadter remained on top of the bridge as of 4:35 p.m. Monday and told WUSA9 that he would spend another night there. He also indicated that he ran out of food on Saturday and water on Monday morning.

If you shout your sorrow

from a mountain top 

will the wind take your voice

throw it into empty caves

through the standing trees?

 

If you climb a high bridge

cast a symbol of that sorrow

from the crown

a black cloth 

flying in protest

saying, “not in my name”

to war

to inhumanity

to school girls obliterated at their desks

to a president’s threat to 

annihilate an ancient civilization,

to the locomotive of AI 

tearing across the land,

will anyone hear?

 

May Day.  May Day.

 

The protester speaks of conscience, soul and duty

but the MAGA reporter in her blood red dress

counters with the evils of Iran;

how they murder their own citizens

have killed Americans.

He agrees, “It’s awful,”

but she is incredulous

at his desire for peaceful change

barks questions through crimson lips

as night surrounds him

a thousand feet in the air

his answers delayed by the wind

buffeted back by her commitment 

to make him wrong

make him look crazy

her commitment to more war.

Karen Warinsky, Best of the Net Nominee and Coordinator of Poets at Large, is the author of four collections including Dining with War and Beauty & Ashes.

WISHING WARS HAD SOMETHING LIKE REGULATION TIME TO DECIDE THE OUTCOME

 by Steve Rodriguez

 

 

They’re so easy to start, plenty hard to end.

That’s why we prefer baseball’s nine inning rule. 

Hate it when bad guys bleed, but refuse to bend. 

 

Football’s fixed finite four quarters also send

the age old message for any war-like fool.

They’re so easy to start, plenty hard to end. 

 

Even a marathon contest will depend

on a set distance to score a runners’ duel.   

Hate it when bad guys bleed, but refuse to bend.  

 

Like a delicious shock and awe milkshake blend,

we now crave a shot of Desert Storm old school

form. So easy to bomb, plenty hard to end.

 

Were sudden death overtime gods to descend, 

we’d rush to strike a deal, discount enriched fuel

possession. Good guys would plead… bad guys, please bend.   

 

Narrow strait’s closure reflects a nagging trend—

warrior patience is a requisite tool 

when stuck in a stalemate that just won’t end.

Such a drag when bad guys bleed, but do not bend.  

 

 

Steve Rodriguez resides in San Diego, CA. He is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer and a retired high school English teacher.  

DRINKING GOURD

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

 

It rained hard the night of April 3rd
Memphis was under a tornado warning
thunder was heard among the congregation 
 
I looked to the sky for smoke 
for fire, the waters already had 
parted. 
 
Dr. King was in town to remind 
the world that we are all one 
how the arc of the moral universe
 
Is long. 
 
The next night: April 4th
King died on a motel balcony
blood, breath, and bullet 
 
He was about to go and break
bread, but this would not be 
his last supper 
 
When the motel clerk was told 
Call an ambulance 
he expired right there of cardiac arrest.
A clerk’s shock, our shock 
everywhere the sound of that 
fatal round  
 
Rabbi Heschel, the great teacher 
Talmudic scholar and King’s good friend 
said God searches for us 
 
What happens to thee happens to me.
 
I am thinking of this tonight 
since our High Court said 
the fight for equal rights has 
a racist intent 
 
In the sky the Drinking Gourd 
dips into the cosmos 
but whose cup runneth over—

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives among the Great Lakes of North America. His latest prose and poetry appears/will appear in Studio One, Mobius, Flash Flood Magazine, Dissident Voice, Right Hand Pointing, and Fifty Word Stories. 

CHONKERS

by Tammy Smith

Only a stellar sea lion

weighing two thousand pounds

can bark incessantly

and still gain a following.

Instagram. TikTok. Facebook.

Crowds gather

in the city by the bay

to watch Chonkers 

sprawl across K-Dock

at Pier 39,

sunbathing, grunting—

no one accusing him

of wasting his time or talent.

It isn’t fair:

a massive marine mammal

earns devotion

for taking up space,

for being louder

than his boisterous California

sea lion buddies.

When I lived in San Francisco

in my early thirties,

on the edge of poverty,

in the throes of mental illness,

no one admired

my high-pitched growls,

no one praised me

for memorizing every word

to an Otis Redding song

as I wandered

Fisherman’s Wharf,

envy smelled like
salty sea air,
regret like sourdough,
loss like fish markets—
urine.

Tammy Smith is a poet and licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. Her work appears or is forthcoming in ONE ART, Paterson Literary Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. She received honorable mention in the Journal of New Jersey 2026 Poets Prize.

AFTER THE LATEST IMMIGRATION RAIDS IN LOS ANGELES

by Carrie Farrar

 

Thousands of people rallied at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles on Friday [May 1] calling for legal protections and citizenship for immigrants and dignity for all workers. Janitors, stadium workers, car wash workers and educators stood shoulder-to-shoulder Friday with students, faith leaders and other community members for the annual May Day event, which is also celebrated around the world as International Workers’ Day. More than 125 pro-immigrant and social justice organizations mobilized their members under the banner “Solo el Pueblo Shuts it Down – No Work, No School, No Shopping,” according to a press release by the LA May Day Coalition. Photo by Martín Macías, Jr. —Los Angeles Public Press

They came as Michoacán, Jalisco, & Oaxaca,
feet tuned to rhythms of banda & norteño.
They came to roof houses in Inglewood & Watts,

to pick strawberries near Oxnard, to bus tables
on Figueroa, to fix rebar & copper in Compton,
to patch asphalt along Florence & Avalon.

They built drywall & scaffold
wedged into their place in South Central.
Decades of smog changed the skyline,

from oil pumps to cranes, & dream-footed
hard work rattled their bones.
They danced Zapateado. They lived

& died. Shrouded in flags, in unmarked graves,
in deportation vans idling at dawn again,
the headline already scrolling beneath the weather.

ICE owned them in neighborhoods of fear,
in alleys of Pico-Union where whispers
outlasted the sirens,

where this week’s footage loops
hands zip-tied outside a parking lot
no one will name twice.

Before developers arrived, bougainvillea
crept over chain-link & memory,
the scent of carne asada mixing
with jet fuel from LAX.

Did descendants & newcomers shoulder
the same dread, hauling drywall,
eyes darting at the low hum of drones?

Soon, footsteps of downtown’s marble lobbies
strutted overhead, back & forth
between old denials & new arrivals,

going from major to minor violence,
always on the go. The knock of boots,
the tap of a badge awaking the dead.

 

Carrie Farrar is a Los Angeles–based poet whose work explores labor, displacement, and the emotional architecture of survival. Her poems have appeared in several online literary journals.

MAHA GOSPEL, OUTBREAK SEASON EDITION

by David Anson Lee

 

Caricature by DonkeyHotey at Pinterest.

Make America Healthy Again, he says
as if health were a slogan, not weather.

He holds food like contested scripture:
dyes, preservatives, words too long to trust.

“Return to purity,” he says,
while measles redraws old maps
without permission or press release.

Hospitals hum in reluctant chorus.
Pharmacies speak in minor key.
A mother searches immunity
and finds ten thousand prophets.

Even vitamins argue theology now.

He calls it restoration:
as if history were a diet plan
instead of a returning headline
with better lighting each time.

David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet whose work explores intersections of medicine, memory, and public life. His poems have appeared in journals including Right Hand Pointing, Eunoia Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, and others. He is based in Texas.

8647

by Mark Danowsky

 

 

sorry no

martyrdom

let the devil

bury himself

stay vigilant

only real victors

write history

let him be

a footnote

fool's gold

let him burn

for sins

gone down

the worst

known loser

all will say

he lost

no mercy

capital punishment?

erasure

a name stripped

from collective memory

 

Mark Danowsky is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine, and curator of Stay Curious on Substack. His latest poetry collection is Take Care (Moon Tide Press).  

IMAGINAL POEM MEANT TO BE READ ON A ROOFTOP

by Richard Jackson

You begin / somewhere/ to cry the/ murmur of life

     —Parnia Abasi, d. June 13, 2025

 

This is a poem about hope despite the fact that it

begins with the death of the twenty three year old

Iranian poet, Parnia Abassi, along with her family,

among the twisted pipes and chunks of concrete,

amid the fragments of some missile that targeted

her apartment building.

                                       This is a poem about hope 

despite the presence of swarms of flies investigating 

the ruins, searching for pieces of flesh pasted to concrete, 

despite the satellite photos that hold these specifics 

at a safe distance.

                             This is a poem that makes its appeal 

to the Imaginal world of the Persian mystics, Suhrawardi 

and Hafiz, of a world where rocks become clouds, where 

cypresses dance, where graves become doorways to

the gods and angels, a world between this one and

the one we hope to rejoin.

                                           I will become the most beautiful 

poem in the world, wrote Parnia. I’ll be the extinguished 

star/in your sky/ like smoke.

                                              This is a poem that makes

its appeal with the rooftop dwellers of Tehran, and

their own imaginal world between the rubble and the

sky, chanting slogans against the regime and us,

hoping for a life without bombs, without oppression,

unable to see where the sun is in the sky on the worst days, 

one says, but knowing it is there.

                                                     This is a poem about 

hope, for it prays with Hafiz, with Suhrawardi, with Parnia

who wrote, I row into your embrace, into this poem that

cannot go on without your own fragile lines and hopes, into 

a world only our poems can make, a world where they 

dance with the cypresses, and chant from the heart’s rooftops.

Richard Jackson is the author of 18 books of poetry including, Footprints, The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems, and 16 books of translation, Interviews, criticism and anthologies, as well as 30 chapbooks from eastern and central European poets.. Translated into 17 languages, he was awarded the Order of Freedom Medal by the President of Slovenia for Humanitarian and literary work during the Balkan Wars and has received Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, NEH and Witter-Bynner, Fellowships.

TO MADISON'S DAD

by Cathy Hailey

 

 

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Monday that he will return to the upper chamber this week after taking time off for the death of his daughter, Madison. The Virginia senator wrote on the social platform X, “As we remember our incredible daughter, Maddy, my family has been deeply touched by the outpouring of support we’ve received. Thank you to everyone for your kind words.” —The Hill, April 27, 2026

You were the Northern Cardinal cheering me on, 

sending notes of congratulations in song 

as we celebrated student voices and publications 

across the Virginia Commonwealth we share.

I became the Carolina Wren of gratefulness 

as you shored up the forest of poets laureate—

my daughter among the honorees—     

supporting grants for the arts and the word. 

Now we are mourning doves together, 

clinging in a chorus of grieving parents, 

a child’s death disrupting the timeline of our lives 

and stealing future nests and dreams.                     

From Alexandra’s Mom

Cathy Hailey is a poet and educator (Prince William County Schools and Johns Hopkins University). She organizes In the Company of Laureates in Prince William County and works with youth poetry programs for The Poetry Society of Virginia and The Word Works.  Her chapbook, I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth, was published by Finishing Line Press. Publications include The New Verse News, FotoSpecchio, Little Free/Painted Pebble Lit Mag, First Frost, Making the Unseen Seen anthology and The Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poetry & others.