DEATH TAX

by Mark Hendrickson

In honor of the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, President Donald J. Trump’s signature will appear on future U.S. paper currency along with the Secretary of the Treasury, marking the first time in history for a sitting president. —US Treasury Dept., March 26, 2026

According to a website calculator

what I paid in taxes last year

bought the government 

350 to 500 rounds of ammo.

 

I wonder if I bought the bullets

that killed Pretti and Good

in Minneapolis

by men in masks

 

Or perhaps I helped pay

for the tomahawk missile

that killed over 100 girls

in a school in Iran.

 

I protest policies,

but pay my taxes

the way I was taught

good Americans should.

 

In this way I’m complicit.

Every dollar I send

will be signed by the culprit,

and signed off by me.

Mark Hendrickson (he/him) is a poet and writer in the Des Moines area navigating the Sturm und Drang of daily life through wordcraft. His words appear in The Ekphrastic Review, The New Verse News, and Modern Haiku. Follow him @MarkHPoetry, https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/mhendrickson

 or on his website: www.markhendricksonpoetry.com

ART

by Cheryl Waitkevich

 

 

On Monday, February 16, Presidents’ Day, 22 professional dancers from the First Amendment Troop performed a 90-second contemporary dance, titled The ResistDance. 

Yesterday, high fog, a marine layer, so gray even the air itself
casts a pallor. This morning, though the sun shines, the weather report
forecasts snow flurries. Before sunrise I watched a video made by dancers

in front of what was once The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
dancers dressed in maroon, the color of blood after it has met air.
The choreography starts with an unassuming woman in a knit cap,

jacket, old jeans like I might have worn when dropping my kid off
at school when I thought I’d just hurry home for a second cup of coffee.
She stands as some of the dancers surround her, make the shape

of a SUV while two other dancers as masked gunman approach,
and without guns shoot her chest and head until she falls
limp against the bodies that could never protect her.

The dancers dissolve and they're dancers again, surround
a thin tall, bearded man, slight bulge in his waistband. (Is it a gun?)
Pandemonium, confusion, paper and people swirling.

He helps someone falling after being pretend beaten
for which he is also pretend beaten, then shot multiple times

his body pummeled and shuddering as bullets hit

until finally, he lies still as dancers transform into angels
dancing with a couple of souls, these new-made spirits standing
hand-in-hand to look at the Washington Monument,

their reflection in the vast pond
in front of them present
for even God to see.

 

 

Cheryl Waitkevich (she, hers) spent forty years working in healthcare. Now retired, she is enrolled in the Rainier’s Writers Workshop, the MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. She has been published in West Trestle Review, Galway Review, River Heron Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, as well as other journals and anthologies. She lives on Squaxin land, known now as Olympia, Washington with her husband Robert Jorgensen and their wildly delightful dog Ollie.  

WE CAN DO VERY LITTLE, BUT I WILL DO THIS

by Annie Stenzel

 

 

 

Starting now, I propose to use GOOD, instead

of good when I talk about a Good thing,

and to say PRETTI rather than pretty, when I am struck

by how pleasing something looks to me.

 

I want this murdered woman, that executed

man, to live on in my speech with their names

alive and visible, notwithstanding their absence from

what should be a Good world, where so much is Pretti.

 

I could do nothing to save them from the horror

of their deaths. Nor can I do anything

for their loved ones, or the people whose lives they graced

every day. Grief won’t allow me to turn back

 

the hands of time, restore someone who was Good

and someone who was Pretti to this frightening world.

 

 

Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet who was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her second full-length collection, Don’t misplace the moon, was published in 2024 by Kelsay Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., including Action, Spectacle; Gavialidae; Innisfree Poetry Journal; Pine Hills Review; Rust + Moth; Sheila-na-Gig; SoFloPoJo; SWWIM; St, Katherine’s Review; Thimble Lit Mag; and Whale Road Review. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.

JANUARY BOUQUET

by Katherine Smith

The only antidote for America 

is to go outside in the freezing cold winter

and dream of the most beautiful city on earth

or even this universe (there may not be any other). 

This city is Granada.  Inside my house 

I think only of Minneapolis, of winter.

Outside my house I dream of Grenada and spring

on the slope leading towards the white limestone caves

where the pink dusk hovers over the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada.

By day I once walked through the summer palace of the kings of Spain.

By night I listened to flamenco and the percussive shoes of dancers.

By day the stained glass of the cathedral blossomed

like the roses in the summer palace. Beauty softened the blow

of the inquisition six hundred years before

just as a memory of joy softens the blow of the shootings,

and the military on the streets of Minneapolis. Nothing 

is more consoling than the dream of a beautiful ruin,

for the ugliness happening to America. I lay memory

like a wreath on the roadside 

where Alex Pretti and Renee Good died.

Katherine Smith’s poetry publications include appearances in Southern Review, Boulevard, North American Review, Ploughshares, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, and many other journals. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. Her third book, Secret City, appeared with Madville Press in 2022. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

FOR MINNEAPOLIS

by Ruth Lehrer

They don’t tell you in the morning
you will die by noon 
driving in your car
walking on the street 
 
after you are gone
you see a picture of the gun
flesh as good as ashes
blood as good as painted pain 
 
But in that morning you just know
yesterday your neighbor was brave
so today you must be too
The boundary between trust and fear
torn open
 
We are all ash
We are all brave. 

Ruth Lehrer is a sign language interpreter and Pushcart-nominated poet living in western Massachusetts. She is the author of the young adult novel Being Fishkill. 

WHAT WORDS MEAN

by Michael T. Young

Cartoon By Nick Anderson

          For Alex Pretti, Nurse Executed by ICE Agents

 

They say “domestic terrorist.” 

We say “citizen.” 

They say “violent radical.” 

We say “peaceful protestor.” 

They say “he brandished a gun.” 

We say “he had a phone.” 

They say “absolute immunity.” 

We say “first amendment.” 

 

At the end of each sentence a life is at stake. It’s how 

words form in the mouth. Some unfold like a flower 

 

scenting the air with an aroma 

reminding you of a summer day 

when you knew your mother and father 

loved you and time seemed 

endless, full of light and warmth. 

 

But other words form like an ache 

where the bullet entered 

and a pain where it blew out 

the other side, red 

not just with the usual blood, 

but with speech and every other right.

Michael T. Young's fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, was just published by Broadstone Books. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Chiron Review, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Mid-Atlantic Review, and Vox Populi.

HOW MUCH CAN WE TAKE?

by Lynne Kemen

after viewing “Continuous Form” by Nishimura Yuko (Japan) 2020—washi paper

The paper is impossibly twisted, pleated

like skirts used to be. How is it possible

that this is paper? Nishimura Yuko's washi

folding into itself, holding a shape

it shouldn't hold.

 

On the wall behind, faces

also impossibly shaped, bearing witness,

watching.

 

Tensile strength. The word makes me think

of tension, how it translates to my own body

squirming to get comfortable, no longer able

to hold erect posture. Two total knee replacements.

Back pain. Neck pain. I'm so tired.

 

Pretti is our conscience. One of the helpers

who always shows up, who cares about others,

who refuses to look away. His phone

documenting what shouldn't be happening,

what we need to see.

 

I used to protest the Vietnam war. Kent State

terrified me—that girl kneeling, her mouth open,

screaming over the body. Some photographs

are that raw, that perfectly horrific.

Once I see them, they're in my DNA somehow,

in my body.

 

I can't stand for long periods now.

And I know I cannot look away.

So many do. They don't think it affects them—

until it does.

 

The sculpture before us, still whole.

Those circular faces, still watching.

We know fabric tears.

We just don't know when.

Lynne Kemen is the author of Shoes for Lucy (SCE Press, 2023) and More Than a Handful (Woodland Arts Editions, 2020). Her work has appeared in One Art, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, and elsewhere. She received a 2024 Pushcart Prize nomination and serves as Editor/Interviewer for The Blue Mountain Review. She is currently working on two full-length poetry volumes. Lynne lives in rural Delaware County, New York.

OUT OF SERVICE

by Jan Steckel

Ghost cars with their lights still on, 
radios blaring, windows shattered,
litter the streets. It's like the rapture, 
drivers disappeared. Alex Pretti's
beautiful baritone talks about service,
sacrifice, freedom that isn't free.
He's reciting his own epitaph,
just doesn't know it yet.
Boy Scout, choir boy, runner, biker, 
named his dog Joule after a unit of energy.
Someone needs to immortalize him
in a song, like Joe Hill. I'm tired
of snuff videos featuring our best
and brightest. Bone-weary
of tinpot dictators, bantam Nazis 
in custom greatcoats. Alex was a lover
who was loved, cared for people,
made them laugh. Now he's meat.
The pathologist will crack his chest,
weigh his heart, find it lighter 
than a feather. Joe Hill tells Joule,
"Hear that? He's coming."
All the ghost cars flash their lights
in time to the whistles and shots.

Ghosts and Oceans, Jan Steckel's latest book, is a collection of short fiction. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet won a Lambda Literary Award. Her books Like Flesh Covers Bone, Mixing Tracks, and The Underwater Hospital also won awards.

IN THE AGE OF NIXON

by Alan Catlin

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

An I.C.U. nurse shot by federal agents was an American citizen with no criminal record, the city police chief said. A New York Times video analysis shows he was holding a phone, not a gun. —The New York Times, January 24, 2026

after the shootings at Kent State
a national student strike shut down
the colleges

Led to massive protests in the streets

Everyone could see that
shooting unarmed college students
was wrong

Under Trump
shooting a mother of three
with stuffed toys in her glove compartment
and a mutt in the back seat of her SUV
was okay

They called her a domestic terrorist
as if those stuffed toys were IED’s

And now a gang of six ICE agents
beat down an ICU nurse and shot him
dead on the street

And that’s okay too

His job was to save lives
not to take them

Blood on the mother’s SUV airbag
and on the sidewalk where the nurse
died tells us all we need to know

Alan Catlin is the poetry and reviews editor of Misfitmagazine.net. His next full-length book of poetry is Still Life with Apocalypse from Shelia Na Gig Editions.

ANOTHER EXECUTION

by Cody Walker

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

“An individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm this individual, but the armed suspect reacted violently,” Noem said, despite video evidence clearly showing an unarmed Pretti being beaten. —The Guardian, January 24, 2026

This isn’t a game—

it’s not Risk, Trouble, Yahtzee.

It’s straight-up Nazi. 

Cody Walker is the author of three poetry collections, all from the Waywiser Press. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor.

WINTER WEATHER, MINNEAPOLIS, JANUARY 2026

by Kip Knott

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

US federal law enforcement officers on Saturday fatally shot an American citizen in Minneapolis for the second time in less than three weeks. Saturday morning’s killing of US citizen Alex Pretti, 37, comes after Renee Nicole Good, also a 37-year-old American citizen, was shot to death on 7 January by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis, with video showing her trying to drive away from a confrontation, sparking protests nationwide. The Guardian, January 24, 2026

At first, I thought it was

ice pellets clinking

on the frozen pavement.

When I learned what it was,

I finally realized why

they call it a hail of bullets.

Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His most recent book of poems, Rothko's Gospels, is available from Tiny Wren Publishing.