NO. NO.

by Nan Meneely

 

 

This protest was regional, the work of dedicated leadership in several small Connecticut towns. A group of somewhere between 20 and 30 or 40 people of all stripes, races and ages (and signs) gathered outside a café where three local roads collide, every single Saturday morning from the one directly following Trump's first election for more than four years. Nan's sign read "Honk Against Hatred;" the vigil was supposed to be silent, but she was unable to restrain her shouted thanks for every honk. This is a picture of one of the first meetings, with the central sign that was reproduced after the first and larger one was defaced.

2016
We hold a protest silently with signs 
that welcome all who worship other gods.
A pickup ploughs the shoulder 
where we stand, kicks gravel as it stops.
We back up quiet, listening. A man in camo, 
raging, crying, leans across his passenger 
to scream his epithets: ignorant fuckers,  
we don't know shit of the animals we invite.
Who of us has watched a friend
disintegrate, arms and legs no more
than shrapnel in a blazing Afghan sky?
His mind is full of massacre.
He loved. He hates.

I want to climb in next to him,
hold him in my Nana arms until he stills.
I've heard his wounds before.
My husband keened in nightmare
when he found again among the vines
of Vietnam his comrade's boots
with nothing of his comrade but his feet.
 
I know my luck that I don’t know.
Even as the soldier curses me
in his convulsive bitterness,
I want to love him back 
from where he lives. 

2026
Ignorant fuckers, haven't you learned 
you kill the ones who survive ?

 
Nan Meneely’s first book Letter from Italy, 1944 (Antrim House) was noted by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books by Connecticut writers in 2013. It provided the libretto for an oratorio of the same name, composed by Sarah Meneely-Kyder and performed twice by Connecticut choruses and symphony orchestras. Her second book Simple Absence (Antrim House) was nominated for The National Book Award and placed as a grand prize finalist in The Next Generation Indie Awards and the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award. She has been published and rejected by The New Verse News.

OILING THE WHEELS

by Lynn White

Art by Shields

The days of saving

Vietnam from Vietnamese

or Afghanistan from Afghanis,

are here again.

‘We’ will run things

especially

in countries of long words

like Palestine and Venezuela.

Democracy is another of them.

short words like ‘we’, ‘US’ and ‘oil’

will save Venezuela from Venezuelans.

An unelected foreign government

will save Venezuela from elections. 

Oh, the words are getting bigger again,

Venezuela and democracy are very big words

so we must run things there,

to oil the wheels of democracy,

or something like that,

and, with nice short words,

save Venezuela from Venezuelans.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

THE INHERITANCE

by Jim Bellanca

Gainesville, Georgia, 2020 (Shutterstock)

Jim Crow’s obituary read,

“After a lengthy illness, Jim has passed away,

His Crow name now just history.” 

I thought “maybe not, maybe so.”

(You cannot trust the news these days.)

 

I knew Jim’s sister Jane had moved to Toronto

with her DACA son Juan

a surprise, a ten-year caboose

behind three sisters college gone,

had joined the family late.

Juan Crow was the most interesting one,

a son who’d volunteered for war, 

three tours in Afghanistan’s battle fields,

a Silver Cross and long times spent from love.

Back home, a hero named, he learned again, 

(most definitely not his first experience),

the curse of Jim Crow’s name, 

with his life separated by skin

in school,

        —at water fountains

        —on school bus ride

        —in restaurants

        —in restrooms

        —in voting booths

        —in marriage beds

the profile depicting all brown men

as one no matter where or who or when

ICE labeled shady caricatures,  

        —“beaner”

        —“wetback”

        —“gringo”​

        —“spic”

who tequila too much, siesta too long, 

just “don’t belong” on our turf;

accused of job stealing, rape, and more, 

tattooed as M-13,

by Presidential decree,

      —“the worst of hombres”

      —“the most detestable of human beings”

      —“the lowest despicable animal beast”

      —“a greaser druggy poisoning our lands”

any excuse the man can name

while hooded fiends from ICE 

day-quota-sized kidnapping any brown man

      —in church or school  

      —in hospital bed

      —in shopping mall

      —in strawberry fields 

      —in pizza huts

all blared and shared in local tv news, 

dread images bent with bowed shaved heads, 

arms tattoed with criminal marks

slow marched to caged jail cells,

(no one knows where)

—to scare the most innocent

—to leave their family love 

—to end their journey to freedom’s land

—to prove the power of the President

            by breaking what laws, he wished.

 

Juan Crow’s red blood

once given to save the land, the nation he loved,

no longer flows free. Juan sits in Alcatraz,

in his separate unequal cell

all son and martyr and hero dream

of Jim Crow newborn, a cosmic transfer,

a heritage inherited without recourse

Jim’s curse transferred to Juan, 

a lifetime injustice to bare, 

all ball and chain and prison wrack, 

all Sisyphus rock on his back.

Jim Bellanca, former English teacher, publisher and gadfly, now a late blooming poet, favors paining memory images about nature, family, peace, social justice and wry comments about senior life. He fervently assumes a “No Prufrock I” position when he writes about social injustice. More than two dozen poetry journals including Witcraft, Write City zine, Aerial Journey. Down In the Dirt, Sparks of Caliope, Westwood Quarterly, The Lyric, and East on Central have published his poems.

GHAZAL FOR THE WOMEN OF AFGHANISTAN

by Jackie Fox

The bearded old men stop at nothing to stifle the women.

Keeping them hidden will solve the temptation of women.

Oh, they talked through their turbans like nothing would change

for lives that had blossomed like lilies—the women. 

The women knew better. The cascade of workplace and school

slammed tight against the menace of girls and danger of women.

Vanished from work, school and public movement without a male—

this would seem sufficient erasure of women.

But nothing is ever enough for the old zealots, who want only

to keep their coarse sandals planted on the necks of women.

So now—of course and at last—the beauty salons, 

last refuge for most and livelihood for some of the women.

Not enough to endure the hijab or burka and forego makeup in public.

Even the most private pleasures must be denied to women.

And to those of us in the West with our patented knee-jerk shock—

We tried to warn you, whisper the women.

Jackie Fox lives and writes in Nebraska. Her work has appeared in Rattle, The Bellevue Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, and numerous other journals and anthologies

CRT MEETS THE LITTLE ROCK NINE

by Margaret Rozga

Sarah Huckabee Sanders appears in the center

of my television screen. Her head and shoulders

in sharp focus, that camera angle fixed as if

to convey steadfastness. As if.

In the background a stretch of hazy space as if

she appears out of nowhere. On either side of her

jewel blue, likely furniture, maybe facing couches,

though placed at such a distance from each other

as if to constrain conversation. The camera angle

cuts off a complete view, so they appear flat

surfaces as if they were beds.

She continues to talk, about surviving cancer,

about leaving her children at Christmas to fly

in the dark to Afghanistan in the entourage

of he who she lets remain unnamed. As if.

She moves on.

Little Rock’s Central High School, her school,

she says. Art on the State Capitol grounds now

celebrates the Little Rock Nine, African American

students unwelcomed, demeaned, threatened,

abused when they integrated the school. As if

to erase sixty-six years, she claims in this way

civil rights history is with her, as if her sneer

at CRT were not erasure.

Her service in the administration of the

president she traveled with in the dark

another as if.

Editor’s note: A proposed bill that would have prohibited the use of public school funds to teach the 1619 Project curriculum has failed to make it out of an Arkansas House committee. —THV11, February 9, 2023

 

 

Margaret Rozga served as a voting rights volunteer in rural Alabama in 1965 and was a participant in Milwaukee’s 1967-68 fair housing marches. Her fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press 2021).

UNIVERSITY WOMAN

by Tamam Kahn 

Female students are stopped by Taliban security at a university in Kabul, on 21 December 2022 (AFP via Middle East Eye)

We the Taliban 

will make you 
go quiet. 
We want 
an empty blackboard.
We the Taliban
are erasing the rights 
of each one 
with breasts 
and a vagina 
and a clitoris.
 
Each girl-student and
female professor 
splashes silenced outrage 
into a ruptured world,
zig-zags suspense 
back and forth 
across her mind,
hides a spaded heart 
raw with hiccups.
Each one cracks open
a brain-leak 
of stories and poems,
stashed backpacks 
of notebooks filled with 
foundational work,
knowledge, science—
 
all soon to be 
academic ditch-litter.

Tamam Kahn is the author two books on women of early Islam. Untold, A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad, (Monkfish Books, 2010), and Fatima’s Touch, (Ruhaniat Press, 2016). Both won International Book Awards. Tamam believes that sharing the lives of women, famous or in difficulty, helps bring awareness and change into today’s difficult times. She lives near San Francisco, California.

ASSANGED

by Lisa Seidenberg

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has signed an order to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (above) to the United States, where he faces espionage charges, in a decision his organization said marked a "dark day for press freedom." —CNN, June 17, 2022

For publishing classified documents

Of military strikes on innocents

Hits on civilians and wartime blunders

In Iraq and Afghanistan, in shocking numbers

It was not a surprise they took him down

Debating if he is journalist

Assange was a one man wanted list

Sheltered for years in the Embassy of Equador

Until they booted him out the door

His mental state, on view, alarming

But, even so, could still be quite charming

Befriended Pamela Lee, a Hollywood alum

Then fathered two babies and married their mum

While passing the hours awaiting a decision

By London magistrates on his extradition

Why does one choose a life so perilous

When most of us risk so much less?

Or did Julian not know what fate would hold

For one who opted to be so bold

To defy the FBI 

And the CIA

To imagine they would look the other way?

In a more principled world - but not today.

Present day martyrs like Assange and Navalny

Join those in history who took a stand

And paid a high price with stern reprimand

For the crime of speaking truth to power 

And not run away—or cower

I would not do so but let us pause to admire

Those who step out of line and into the fire.

Lisa Seidenberg is a writer and filmmaker residing in Connecticut. Twitter: @Leeside33

NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU

by Umang Dhingra

do not be too loud on the streets; do not play music; 

this is how you hide if there is a bombing, this is how you hide if there is noise, this is how you hide if there is a knock on the door, this is how you hide if the shadows outside your room change shape; 

this is how you cover yourself up 

but i thought we did not have to do that anymore– 

this is how you cover yourself up; 

this is how you read books you stole from school, this is how you read books from your father’s shelves, this is how you read books when you are not supposed to; 

this is how you cry for help; 

do not wear bright colours; 

do not look anyone in the eyes; 

do not go outside until I tell you to; 

this is how you beg for asylum you thought was guaranteed; 

this is how you live with no electricity; this is how you live with no food; 

this is how you live with no dignity; 

this is how you live with constant fear 24/7 on 365;

this is how you pray and beg and hope that someone is coming to save you,

knowing

no one is coming to save you.

Umang Dhingra is a 17-year old writer from India. Her work can be found in numerous publications, scraps of paper around the house, and her family's WhatsApp group. She usually writes about being a brown girl from India, about her family, and what her mother calls, 'little explosions of sadness.’

HUNGER

by Rose Mary Boehm

I just read about it again, I saw

a video. Or two, or three.

TON 618 is the largest black hole in the known

universe and estimated at 66 billion solar masses…

these figures are beginning to be incomprehensible.

It’s hungry. About to gobble up whole worlds.

Is it hungry? Or is it just doing what black

holes do. A simple question of astrophysics.

 

I remember being hungry alright,

but that was about 80 years ago.

‘There is a war on, you know…’

 

The biggest black hole on this planet is hungry.

Is Putin just hungry or is it something that comes naturally,

a sickness that can’t be cured, a greed

that knows no satisfaction.

 

It seems as though my war was only yesterday.

And there, once more, tanks are rolling, fighter planes are strafing,

buildings are being bombed, whole families perish, the stench

of dead flesh under rubble will soon fill the streets.

The numbers again incomprehensible.

 

And—as in my memories—children will be looking for potato peels

thrown-away apple cores and sorrel in the field – if they make it that far.

We eat guineapigs in Peru—they say rats are acceptable. Siege food.

 

Another promise broken, another convoy

of refugees bombed.

I see old women on canvas bags and suitcases in the back

of trucks holding small children, the parents falling towards

the border, their feet working through the loamy earth

or tripping over ripped open asphalt.

Wasn’t there Kosovo? Syria? Afghanistan?

But so far away is almost incomprehensible.

The black hole has pulled us close. Pushing back,

will we be swallowed? Starving it, will it recede?

I am hungry for peace—or is this a thought too trite?

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and four poetry collections to date, her work has been widely published, for the great part in US online and print journals.

WOMEN OF GHŌR

by Steven Croft

In twilight we stare into our deaths

like we are the coming darkness

Our harrowed babies cry

but we dare not sing to them

The flour is gone in days

even tea is scarce

Our colorful dresses long hidden

or already burned for warmth

A bird calls a melody from a snowy tree

like joy trapped by the coming darkness

Warlords with stern faces walk the streets

with whips, rifles,

Whip-march a head-bent man with hands

bound behind by thick layers of rope

They tell us we have now what the hands

of the people have earned

And there is nowhere else to go, just

a cold valley, hill passes snowed for winter

If allowed to sing, we would moan a dirge

now even the night-bird is quiet

Nowhere is even a seed of relief

markets, kiosks, shops, silent and empty

They say our sins haunt us now—

girls wanting work and education

In the cold schools boys recite the Quran

Ameen

But how many times, O Knower of the Unseen,

until all our sins are erased

In our dreams of spring we see green trees

goat's milk and markets full of vegetables

In our dreams of spring we dance and sing

in our colorful dresses

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

ACCOUNTABILITY

by Michaela Mayer

See also yesterday’s New York Times report: “The Civilian Casualty Files.”

if you slip through the thin curtain between 

this world and another, you will see him:

Ahmadi lifting jugs of clean water to the lips

of children gulping thirstily in the Afghan

heat. not standard procedure, but then,

these things are allowed those blown to bits

by American payload. or so I like to imagine.

the real Ahmadi is red mist and sharp shards

of bone on the tarmac in Kabul, and the children

too. all we get of them are a few dark pixels

on our news sites. meanwhile, the men

whose game condemned them lean back,

hands behind heads, and acquit themselves:

a righteous strike. pay the families a few 

dollars for their grief. slaps on the back,

handshakes. America, our carnivorous country, 

feeds on remains—flesh hanging from

its ghastly mouth, and us behind our screens,

gaping at scraps wedged in its teeth—our minds

slipping back and forth between the two worlds.

Michaela Mayer (she/her) is a 26-year-old elementary school teacher and poet from Virginia. Her works have been previously published in Feral, Barren Magazine, Perhappened, Claw & Blossom, and others. She has forthcoming poems with Olit, Monstering Mag, MAYDAY, and The Lickety~Split, and can be found on Twitter@mswannmayer5.

INITIAL PROMISES

by Stephen House

there were initial promises

from the Taliban

to form an inclusive government

 

there will be no women

in government

 

women playing sport

is not appropriate

 

women will be killed

if they commit adultery

 

LGBTQ people’s mere existence

means an automatic death sentence

 

LGBTQ Afghans are on the run

fearing they will be stoned to death

under Taliban law

 

Ahmadullah says

the Taliban beheaded his boyfriend

on the day they entered Kabul

Ahmadullah is in hiding

 

UN and US warn the Taliban

we are watching you

 

what will watching do?

 

there were initial promises

from the Taliban

to form an inclusive government

Stephen House has won many awards and nominations as a poet, playwright and actor. He’s received several international literature residencies from The Australia Council for the Arts and an Asia-link India residency. His chapbook real and unreal was published by ICOE Press. He’s published often and performs his acclaimed monologues widely.

KĀKOLŪKĪYAM

by Nicholas Katsanis

An Afghan soldier pops up from his tank to signal a U.S. warplane bombing Al Qaeda fighters in the White Mountains of Tora Bora in Afghanistan on Dec. 10, 2001.(David Guttenfelder / Associated Press via the Los Angeles Times)

The owls and the crows are at war

Embroiled in bitter struggle for control of their dominion

Ill-defined by borders and perceived advantages

The owls are old and therefore wise

Or so they tell themselves to make-belief

Convince their childrens’ children of their superiority

Supremacy of poise and purpose, they persist

Until foibles morph into fact,

Poorly begotten truth whose tangled roots are lost—conveniently—in antiquity

The crows are young, confident, energetic

The skies’ embrace belong to them, they preach

For they are fast and nimble

Intimidating in their murder, or so they teach their children

Schooling them in the virtue of their virility, their singularity of purpose

The owls and crows are at war

Bickering over holes in trees

Despite the endless forest that surrounds them

Beak on beak and claw on claw

They decimate each other’s numbers

Each pointless victory and defeat

Treated by triumphalism and defiance in equal measure

The owls’ corpses are offered eternal absolution

The crows’ mangled bodies heavenly promise of peace and honey

Both declaring divine providence over the Final Rights

Both bereft of true wisdom

The owls and the crows were at war

Embroiled in bitter struggle for control of their dominion

Until the lightning in the forest burned

And the rain fell upon the smoldering stumps

And there was nothing left to war over

Author’s Note: Inspired by the Panchatantra collection of classic Indian fables, this adaptation examines the current/perpetual secular and religious tension in Afghanistan post-collapse.

Nicholas Katsanis is an author and poet of magical realism. You can find some of his micro fiction (50-word stories, stories in 100 words) as well upcoming pieces in Literary Stories and elsewhere (including magazines that do not have the word ‘Story’ in their titles). He lives and works in southern Florida. Follow him on Twitter @nicholaskatsan1

THAT MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH

by Ying Wu

The Taliban fired shots into the air to disperse crowds who had gathered for a rally in the capital, the latest protest since the Taliban swept to power last month. Photo: EPA via Aljazeera, September 8, 2021

Smoke burns our throats in Sacramento.

California is on fire.

Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban.

I stare into the ashen sun,

and think about the ones who fled—

songs and stories ripped asunder,

flames howling at their doorsteps—

and the ones who couldn’t get out in time—

how beneath this very sun,

some tried to flee, but did not escape—

and the dreams of a generation

annihilated before our eyes—

and the dreamers in hiding,

and the women sent home.

 

I want to revel in the splendor of the Siskiyous,

but everywhere is haze, shrouding

the sugar pines and ponderosas—

Mt. Shasta erased completely—

and the sun the color of pink lemonade.

 

Near Ashland, we hike a quarter mile

across dusty, red lakebed

overgrown with cocklebur.

I want to camp beneath the shady oaks,

but the campground’s closed,

and the spigots, shut off.

I want to play guitar

in my folding paisley camp chair,

but a suicide bomb in Kabul has ripped

through the crowds at the airport gates.

I want to swim and shiver and splash

even here in this shrunken reservoir,

but the mud is too thick,

and the water, stagnant—

and the airlifts are ending,

and the bathrooms are locked,

and the treasury is bankrupt,

and the paddleboats, beached—

and thousands have fled,

but millions can’t leave.

A hot, dry wind rustles

the golden grass of August.

What awaits the women and girls

Of Afghanistan?

 

Women have their own rights,

the Andar district governor tries to reassure,

but his words burn in my ears

like the smoke in my lungs from

the massive infernos

engulfing our mountains.

It has rained at the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet

for the first time in recorded history.

Wells have run dry in central Texas.

 

The UN “highlights the urgency of climate change,”

a Louisiana senator tries to reassure. 

“But we must avoid policies that rely on…increased regulation.”

How much Islam has given rights to women,

the Taliban tries to reassure,

we will give them that much.

 

That much.

They’ll give women that much.

While our leaders avoid policies

that rely on increased regulation.

They will give us that much.

While the fires are raging.

 

Ying Wu is a cognitive scientist at UC San Diego and executive editor of the Kids! San Diego Poetry Annual.  More examples of her work can be found online at Poetry & Art SanDiego, Serving House Journal, Writers Resist, and Poetry Pacific.  Her work is also featured in a permanent installation at the  San Diego Airport.  She leads research on insight, problem solving, and aesthetic experience and lives with her husband and daughter on a sailboat in the San Diego Bay.