LOWNDES COUNTY

by Mariana McDonald

Source: Balls and Strikes, April 21, 2025. Pictured: Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who said, “The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens.”

       for Catherine Flowers

A low wind shifts and yet the smell

persists, erasing whiffs of sweetbrush,  

freesia, lilac. Even the gardenia,  

drowned out by the blaring stench  

of waste, raw and moving, straight-  

piped, pumped into the yards of poor   

folks in Lowndes county, Alabama,  

where Jim Crow and ramshackle join   

to spread a putrid presence onto lawns   

where children play, E. coli and danger   

in the dirt. No rains can clean it,  

clear it, make the grass a sea of   

fresh green bending in the wind,  

seed of childhood memories, scent of  

freshly-cut & gathered blades of summer.  

A memory Lowndes County children may not have.  

One brave fighter worked for years to change it,  

got a president to sign his name to fairness,  

agree to let the lilies and magnolias  

one day reign there, redolent of justice,  

until one stinking voice called it illegal, 

overturned it,  cancelling the clean-up,  

leaving stench  

to flourish

Author’s note: 

“Lowndes County” is about the poor and 72% Black county in Alabama where lack of public sewage treatment facilities forces residents to “straight-pipe” sewage into their lawns, creating a putrid public health and environmental disaster. After years of residents battling the state to have the problem addressed, and inspired by the leadership of Lowndes County native Catherine Flowers, the US Department of Justice launched an investigation which resulted in the 2023 landmark environmental justice agreement. The agreement calls for wide-ranging public health remediation and sanitation improvements. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice deemed the agreement “DEI” and therefore illegal, and overturned the agreement this month.

Mariana Mcdonald is a poet, writer, scientist, and activist. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She became a Hambidge Arts Center Fellow in 2012, and was appointed Black Earth Institute Scholar/Fellow in 2022. She lives in Atlanta. 

MY BODY DOESN’T BELONG TO ME

by Linda Laderman

The Alabama Supreme Court [pictured above in Night Country] has ruled that frozen embryos created and stored for in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children under a state law allowing parents to sue for wrongful death of their minor children… The 8-1 majority of the court found that it was a long-established precedent that "unborn children" are "children" for the purpose of the 1872 wrongful death law at issue in the case. It said that any doubt about that was removed by a 2018 amendment to the state's constitution, which declared that it was "the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children." —Reuters, February 23, 2024

I tell my husband that my body doesn’t belong to me.
Does it belong to me then, he says. He thinks he’s hilarious,
 
a comedian. That’s what he calls me when I say something 
he finds absurd or annoying. So I say, are you a comedian?
 
Then he asks me to explain. If your body doesn’t belong 
to you, who does it belong to? All sorts of entities, I say.
 
He thinks I’m overreacting after we watched the episode 
of True Detective Night Country, where we (spoiler alert)
 
find out that the frozen male bodies were not murdered
by a demon, but by a group of indigenous women who
 
were rightly pissed that their friend Annie K was brutally
beaten to death after she discovered a truth hidden from her
 
by her lover. I say, good for those women. Those men deserved
to be put out in the cold  How many times have women put
 
their hands on truth’s hot stove, in spite of its capacity to burn,
and ended up paying for it with everything that meant anything?
 
I ask, did you read the ruling from Alabama’s Supreme Court?
and wave my phone with the breaking news in front of his face.
 
Look, I say, Alabama is the spawn of Dobbs. This is not an episode on HBO.
Well, he says, what are you going to do, throw a bunch of naked law-
 
makers into sub-zero temperatures and leave them to freeze to death?
Only if I have the means and opportunity, I say. You are a comedian, he says.

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet. Her work can be found in many journals, including SWWIM, One Art, The Scapegoat Review, and Mom Egg Review. She is the 2023 recipient of Harbor Review Jewish Women’s Prize and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

SALT AND IRON

by Julia Ross

Kenneth Eugene Smith appeared to convulse and shake vigorously for about four minutes after the nitrogen gas apparently began flowing through his full-face mask in Alabama's death chamber. It was another two to three minutes before he appeared to lose consciousness, all while gasping for air to the extent that the gurney shook several times. Smith was declared dead at 8:25 p.m. Thursday, and Alabama had become the first state to use nitrogen gas to execute a human… In 2022, Smith was strapped to the gurney to be executed by lethal injection, but prison officials could not gain access to his veins for the two IV lines before the death warrant expired and the execution process was halted. —Montgomery Advertiser, January 25, 2024. Italicized lines in the poem printed below are drawn from this article by Marty Roney. Above photo: The Rev. Jeff Hood, an Arkansas-based pastor and the spiritual adviser who was in the execution chamber with Mr. Smith, challenged the idea that the execution had gone as officials anticipated. Edward D. Fountain for The New York Times.

Credit...Credit...“It was appalling,” said Deborah Denno, an expert on execution methods at Fordham University Law School. “Pain for two to four minutes, particularly when you’re talking about somebody who’s suffocating to death — that’s a really long period of time and a torturous period of time.” 

The reverend made the sign

of the cross several times

as his condemned friend writhed,

ribs escaping chest in search of breath. 

The first time they were here

there was no mask, no plastic tubing.

They could lock eyes as the best

phlebotomists in the state tried 

and tried to kill him. Imagine that:

clemency in the form of blown veins.    

Divinity school did not prepare him 

for this. Lazarus who was raised

just to die again got to slip away 

both times in the warmth of arms    

while his buddy died tethered, 

wrists and ankles to the gurney,

nose and mouth to the wall

from which the nitrogen flowed

like salt and iron through a blood-

red sea. It was enough to bring you back

to certainty. The reverend removed 

his eyeglasses and wiped away tears,

knowing this time he would walk out—

sure, with God—but profoundly alone.

Julia Ross lives in Austin, TX. She writes about parenthood and about the sociopolitical hellscape known as Texas.

FRONT LINES

by Eileen Ivey Sirota

The governor of Alabama on Friday signed into law two controversial bills: one that criminalizes healthcare providers who offer gender-affirming care to transgender youth and another that requires students to use bathrooms that match the gender on their birth certificates. Kay Ivey, a Republican, said she “believed very strongly that if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl”. The anti-gender-affirming care bill, described as the first legislation of its kind in the US, makes it a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison to provide medical care including hormone treatment and puberty blockers to minors. It also includes bans on gender-affirming surgeries for transgender youth, which are extremely rare, and compels school personnel to disclose to a parent or guardian that a “minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s sex”. —The Guardian, April 8, 2022

We will fight them on the

beaches    we will fight them in

 

the sandbox    these tiny

terrorists, the little boys

 

with nail polish, a spangly pony

and a special Barbie.

 

We have God on our side

He who surely must have sanctified

 

the hand of the doctor filling out

the birth certificate.  We have

 

George Orwell on our side to

inspire our marketing team.

 

We’ll call it de-nazification, no,

we’ll call it parental support, no,

 

wait, we’ll call it The Vulnerable Child

Compassion and Protection Act.

 

No more shelter in the demilitarized

school nurse’s office.  We’ll make It a crime

 

to slow the inexorable hands of time

bringing forth an unwanted body.

 

In this holy war

No prisoners are too small.

 

Eileen Ivey Sirota is a psychotherapist and a poet.  Her chapbook Out of Order was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.  Her poems have been published in District Lines, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Lighten Up, The New Verse News, Ekphrastic Review, The Poeming Pigeon, Calyx, and Voices:  The Art and Science of Psychotherapy. She lives in Bethesda, MD with her husband and an ever-shifting blend of rage and wonder.

PASSAGE

by Daniel Brown

in memory of victims of the

 16th Street Baptist Church bombing,
Birmingham, AL, September 15, 1963

They crossed the river of Jordan early.

They went across the water
walking down Sunday school stairs.

Adie Mae Collins
Cynthia Wesley
Carole Robertson
Carol Denise McNair

Never made the passage of age
to young womanhood or Motherhood

They are remembered this day
and will be each year.

Hate is able to merely explode
it has no other course.

Passage that is abruptly destroyed
leaves us empty

So we demand rites of passage
the grace of aging for peace and justice

To cross the water with dignity when time comes due.

Daniel Brown is a retired Special Education teacher. He began writing poetry for his own pleasure but is now interested in sharing his work. He reads regularly at CAPS (Calling All Poets) in New Paltz NY and has been published in Chronogram Magazine and TheNewVerse.News. He resides in Red Hook, NY.

SANCTIFIED

by George Held

Cartoon by Mark Taylor, The Commoner Call, May 27, 2019

“In Alabama—where lawmakers banned abortion for rape victims—rapists’ parental rights are protected: Alabama is one of two states with no statute terminating parental rights for a person found to have conceived the child by rape or incest . . .” The Washington Post, June 9, 2019


Thank God our holy sperm
has been sanctified
by Christian Alabama law.

That little wench of a niece
better see the light
and let me raise our boy,

with or without her.
So what if she conceived
after a little roll in the hay?

At first she had her way
in court—calling me “rapist”—
but now the law has stepped

in and declared me a proper
parent, confirmed my right
to father my boy,

to teach him to shoot and hunt
and how to treat the ladies
so he’ll know the law

is on his side. Thank God.
Our sperm has been sanctified
by Christian Alabama law.


George Held, a ten-time Pushcart nominee, is a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News. His new collection of poems is Second Sight (Poets Wear Prada, 2019).

REAPED

by Alfred Fournier

a harvest of unwanted
children
rustle in corn leaves
dry with Alabama dust

songless & ravaged
forced
into being     weakly lean
in blackbird wind

somewhere a bloated fish
of a man grins               his
unwelcomed
white seed swims

Alfred Fournier resides in Phoenix, Arizona. He is an entomologist and a graduate of Purdue and George Washington Universities. His work is forthcoming in Cathexis Northwest Press.

SACRED

by George Held

The governor’s statement places
the key word, “God,” in the place

of emphasis, at the end, where
it makes the most of her pious case

but most offends those who question
when a fetus has become a “life”

or even doubt there is a god,
at least one who can give sacred gifts,

and those who believe that a woman’s life
is her own to join in sex with whomever

she wants and once pregnant whether
or not to delete that tiny comma without

the intervention of the almighty state.
What sort of Handmaid’s Tale

is ‘Bama spinning here now that its Senate
and the Court are packed with Medieval

men of the Right who consign women
to the stove and the marital bed,

where all conception is authorized
by a Fundamentalist Godhead.

What country is this where theocracy
struts its stuff in public and democracy

hides under the bed to avoid
a vengeful thrashing? My count-

try, ’tis of me, I sing, sweet place
of Liberty, of thee I sing . . .


George Held, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News and other periodicals, has received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and published or edited twenty-two poetry books.

ON WATCHING THE PRESIDENT SIGN COPIES OF THE BIBLE

by Robert West

on eBay

“The devil can cite Scripture to his purpose”

—Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

We used to say to get his way
   Old Scratch himself would quote it,
but never thought we’d see the day
   he’d act as though he wrote it.

Robert West's poems have recently appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Light, Red Dirt Forum, and Asheville Poetry Review. Co-editor of Succinct: The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems (Broadstone Books, 2013), he's also the editor of both volumes of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons (W. W. Norton, 2017).

MAN WALKS 20 MILES TO FIRST DAY OF WORK, CEO GIFTS HIM CAR AS THANKS

by Liz Ahl 





The U.S. has finally completed
its transformation into a dystopian game show
with an elaborate and contradictory
and ever-changing set of rules
about what constitutes desperation
and what devotion; a thorough blurring
of what constitutes luck or pluck or
good timing on Twitter; about who deserves
the reward of money for necessary surgery,
the prize of the means to get to work,
the jackpot of work itself.

I imagine this young man, a student,
his sigh and maybe swearing and
the slump of his shoulders when his car
failed him. I imagine him deciding,
after all the back-up rides fell through,
to walk twenty miles in the dark.

I ponder the gravity of the choosing,
which to me feels like choosing
and to him maybe didn’t; I wonder
what I’d choose, and am stumped
because all I can think of are choices
I don’t have to make, all the invisible
freedoms not to choose I wear like skin,
like air; I imagine him google-mapping his route
to measure how long it will take him and then
I imagine him walking twenty miles in the dark
     
or most of it anyhow before the cops stopped him
and—miracle of miracles—bought him breakfast
instead of shooting him dead—in which case
this dead young man would be accused
instead of praised, called foolish
or noncompliant by those who contribute now
to an overflowing GoFundMe in his name;
those who tweet kudos for his devotion to labor
and its just reward would be tut-tutting
and finger-wagging because

—well he shouldn’t be out walking
like that in the middle of the night,
how dangerous     how suspicious
why was he even out there, are we sure?
why not just call in sick    why didn’t he call an Uber
like a normal person     he shouldn’t have
spoken moved looked   shouldn’t have been
silent shouldn’t have done the thing
that made him deserve death instead
of breakfast    what was wrong with him?
he should have known better—

What cruel trick of space-time explains
the difference between this young man
and Trayvon Martin, also black and walking
unarmed alone at night? A higher level of humidity,
a different hour past midnight, a hooded sweatshirt,
two different cops in the cruiser, the casual movement
of a hand to scratch a shoulder—which of these
or the infinite other unwritten and ever-shifting
variables of late-capitalism quantum mechanics
transforms this headline to the version of the story
it so easily could have become?
Has already become? Will become?

Liz Ahl lives in New Hampshire. Her book of poems Beating the Bounds was published in 2017 by Hobblebush Books. Previous collections include the chapbooks Home Economics and Talking About the Weather, published in 2016 and 2012 by Seven Kitchens Press. Her second chapbook Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010) received the New Hampshire Literary Awards "Reader's Choice" in Poetry Award in 2011, and her first chapbook A Thirst That's Partly Mine won the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Cutthroat, and other journals. She has been awarded residencies at Jentel, Playa, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center.

THERE WAS A FACE

by j.lewis

Image source: ACLU Capital Punishment Project

Former Eagle Scout set to be executed for Alabama killing

—Fox News, December 7, 2016

two and twenty years ago
one life went out
with details that are
of course, on record

the extinguisher
one score and two years later
after all appeals have failed
sits on the infamous row
while a state plays
mother may i with scotus
anxious to finally do
unto him what he did
unto another

i am not from alabama
cannot even tell you
where i was that day
when one life and some
unimportant sum of money
were taken in huntsville
video rolling, rolling

today i saw his face
where else but on facebook
an absolutely ordinary face
and when i asked google
for details, for explanation
there was the face again
over a caption from fox
that called him
a former eagle scout

and i wondered
how does one become
a former eagle scout
is there a ceremony
a court of dishonor
that strips away
all merit, all honor
as if to say
we never knew you

and would that hurt
any less than dying
or would the former scout
even care at this point
knowing how determined
a certain state can be
when they want to be sure
you remain forever unable
to reclaim that eagle

Editor’s Postscript: Ronald Smith was executed on December 8, 2016. See “Alabama's cruel and unusual execution of Ronald Smith” —Scott Martelle, Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2016

j.lewis is an internationally published poet, musician, and nurse practitioner. His poems have appeared online and in print in numerous journals from California to Nigeria to the UK. a clear day in october, his first collection of poetry and photography was published in June 2016. A chapbook is forthcoming from Praxis Magazine in early 2017.

IT SEEMS

by Kristina England

The pride flag flies at half-staff over the MB Lounge in Worcester during a vigil for the victims of the attack in Orlando Sunday. T&G Staff/Rick Cinclair. —Worcester Telegram & Gazette, June 20, 2016

there remains a bit of cockamamie in the kettle,
no matter how much we try to reshape its bitter ends.
Here, in Worcester, Mass, we lower a rainbow flag,
while, in Alabama, there is apparently a right time
and a wrong to mourn. It seems we are reading
from a very different dictionary or theirs is upside
down. Other countries look at us funny. Who could
blame them?  I drink coffee with my breakfast, enjoy
dark roast, yet I own more flavors, even a tea kettle,
to welcome visitors of any kind, because who can tell
you what beans or leaves to like?  Which one will get
you to the ultimate high?  We all have an acquired taste
and if you refuse to accept someone else's company
by way of their choice, break your kettle in angst,
perhaps I should buy two more, bright porcelain ones,
hand-made with doves, encase them in glass, dedicate
them to anyone that leaves a state that will never give
one sip of dignity a try.  Look around. See what all us
wide-eyed wakers see. There in the distance, so many
mugs that once gleamed beautifully, clinked in the early
morn, now shards of glass under a closed and brutal fist.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in several magazines, including Gargoyle, Muddy River Poetry Journal, and Pure Slush. She can be followed on Facebook.

POUND OF FLESH, PINT OF BLOOD

by Catherine McGuire

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” began Judge [Marvin] Wiggins, a circuit judge here in rural Alabama since 1999. “For your consideration, there’s a blood drive outside,” he continued, according to a recording of the hearing. “If you don’t have any money, go out there and give blood and bring in a receipt indicating you gave blood.” —NY Times, October 19, 2015. Photo of Judge Marvin Wiggins from Diverse Issue in Higher Education. It accompanied a August 5, 2014 story on Wiggins’ ouster by Gov. Robert Bentley from the Board of Trustees of Alabama State University.

So you’re broke, and cannot pay –
we’re gonna get you anyway.

The Bloodmobile awaits outside
so bare your arm and stuff your pride.

The other option’s prison for
indigence: three months or more,

where debts increase, as jail’s remittance
is layered on that once small pittance,

which balloons into a lifetime’s debt.
So pay your pound of flesh – no, wait!

I mean pint of blood, a “free will donation”
I’m not Shylock – no relation.


Catherine McGuire is a writer/artist with a deep interest in philosophy. Using nature as a mirror, she explores the way humans perceive themselves and their world. She has poems published in the US and abroad and has four chapbooks: Palimpsests, (Uttered Chaos, 2011) Glimpses of a Garden, Poetry and Chickens, and Joy Holding Stillness.

ALABAMA JUSTICE

by Wilda Morris

Anthony Ray Hinton free after nearly 30 years on Alabama Death Row —AL.com

     For Anthony Ray Hinton

“the ball of free will dropped from my hand”

~ Ishmael, in Moby Dick by Herman Melville

black male, poor
innocent, as if that matters
when the DA wants a crime solved quickly

call him a suspect
find his mother’s gun
from which the bullets were not fired
stuff him in a cell

don’t worry if his lawyer
is inadequate
don’t worry if his expert witness
is so inexpert he can hardly see
through the forensic microscope
has little experience in ballistics
is so lamentable the jury
laughs at him

ask for the death penalty
send him off to prison
to live in solitary on death row

without his family
without his friends
without his free will

fight all the way to the Supreme Court
to keep him there

until after his mother is dead
after his youth is gone
after he has almost forgotten
the feel of a loving touch
after decades of not making
significant decisions

when the court bounces
the ball of free will back to his hands
after thirty years


Wilda Morris, a past president of Illinois State Poetry Society, is workshop chair of Poets & Patrons of Chicago. She has won awards for free verse and formal poetry and haiku. She leads poetry workshops for children and for adults and has been widely published. She is retired from a career of teaching graduate student and coordinating a not-for-profit peace and justice organization. Her blog provides monthly contests for poets.

ALABAMA ATTEMPTS TO STAND STILL

by Jay Sizemore

Alabama is also on the front lines of what some see as the modern-day successor to the civil rights movement. Although a federal court threw out the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, Alabama’s Supreme Court has tried to block the issuance of marriage certificates. Mr. Obama made several references to gay rights but did not directly address the fight over marriage in Alabama. --Peter Baker and Richard Fausset, The New York Times, March 7, 2015; photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

in a hurricane of rose petals,
in a landslide, where every granule of dirt
is a body clamoring for air:
roll tide, roll.

There’s something holy about crimson,
the color of blood,
the color of a wound left open
like a gash between the ribs
where wind can be heard
whistling
through a punctured lung,
gasps of breath lost
out the knothole of a hollowed oak,
felled when the roots began to die.

Remember the F-5 that tore through Birmingham,
digging a trench a mile wide,
scrubbing houses clean of their foundations.
Remember the hopelessness of the sundogs,
shimmering in the wake
of Death’s coattails
like pearl buttons on a burial suit.
Remember the sounds of rubble
lifted from the cellar door,
the way the world smelled
like a dirty palm pressed over a mouth.

Whose hand reached down
through that rectangle of light,
that swirl of dust and dripping rain,
to pull you free of the cobwebs,
into cacophony and conflicted weather vanes?
If that hand had held
the penis of his lover
just hours before the storm,
would you have refused to be saved?
If Jesus Christ put on fishnet stockings
after the sermon on the mount,
and let Peter call him bitch,
would his words cease to inspire you?

Alabama attempts to stand still
with both feet on a fault line,
shaking its fists like gavels
to pound illumination
out of the stars,
insisting that every kiss
be given with the eyes closed,
no tongue. Leave the lamp on,
so you can see yourself
drowning in the gulf. .

Roll tide, roll.


Jay Sizemore brought the high-five out of retirement. He still sings Ryan Adams songs in the shower. Sometimes, he massages his wife's feet. His work has appeared online and in print with magazines such as Rattle, Prick of the Spindle, Revolution John, Menacing Hedge, and Still: The Journal. He's never won an award. Currently, he lives in Nashville, TN, home of the death of modern music. His chapbook Father Figures is available on Amazon.

GREETINGS FROM FORT McCLELLAN, 1944-1995

by Laura Shovan

Image source: Transition Force, US Army Garrison, Fort McClellan, Alabama

This is a really beautiful camp.
I found George in excellent health.

Love,_____

                                    Please help.

I was stationed at Fort McClellan.

I have developed a symptom of passing out.

Doctors called it "Syncope".

None of them could figure out

what caused it. 

Hi my name is: _____

I went through Basic training

in Echo 1 company. We had to go through

that building they called the Gas Chamber.

Does anybody know what type of gas

or chemical was in there?

I want to hear from you.

We were exposed to toxic substances,

big time. The McClellan Cocktail:

depleted Uranium, Sarin gas, mustard gas,

and let's not forget that old standby,

Agent Orange.

                                    I drove track vehicles

through dust and mud, unknowing the danger.

I taught troops to make the smoke

that covered the base, was told Fog Oil SGF2

was harmless. We breathed it in for hours.

I went thru the live nerve agent chamber.

They drew blood to check us but never

told us why.

                                    I was face down

in toxic-smelling stuff on the firing range.

They sprayed stuff to keep the bugs away.

They sprayed us in the "gas chamber,"

said I had "sensitive skin" when I broke out

in weeping blisters and dizzy spells.

We were "just women." It's a damn shame

they couldn't tell us what we were

crawling around in.

                                    Tell you more

when I get home.

Author’s note: This is a found poem. The italics in this poem are taken from a used postcard, cancelled in 1944. All of the stanzas not italicized are taken directly from blogs and internet postings by veterans who trained at Fort McClellan. I deleted a word here and there, but have not changed the vets’ language.

Editor of Little Patuxent Review, Laura Shovan was a finalist for the 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her chapbook, Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone, won the Harriss Poetry Prize. She edited Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems and co-edited Voices Fly: An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program, for which she teaches. In January and February, 2013, Laura is blogging 44 poems inspired by antique postcards at www.authoramok.com..