MYANMAR

by Maia Justine Storm 

as they waited for the UN to help,

my Burmese friends said

coop for coup

and vocalized both the b’s in bomb

 

i knew what they meant

i was too sad to correct them

 

five years later, caught 

between 

the cruelty of two dictators,

one here, one there,

they ask for legal guidance

 

yet once more, sadness gets

in the way

 

as Nurul Amin Shah Alam 

dies, not in Arakan, but here, 

not from genocide

but from cruelty of a lesser,

still homicidal, degree

Maia Justine Storm is a 78-year-old woman living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has been an immigration attorney for 25 years and has returned to her adolescent dream of being a poet.  Most recently, she has been published in Poetry Superhighway where she was a Poet of the Week, haikuniverse, Antifa Lit Journal, The Mersey Review, and in forthcoming issues of Procrastinating Writers United and Thema.

WHAT WE WANT TO HEAR

by Suzette Bishop

A former Border Patrol agent who confessed to killing four sex workers in 2018 was convicted Wednesday of capital murder, after jurors heard recordings of him telling investigators he was trying to "clean up the streets" of his South Texas hometown. —NPR, December 7, 2022

God loves you, she tells him

When he says he wants to kill himself,

And he shoots her

Along I-35,

The road I’ve taken

Countless times out of Laredo.

The woman who escapes his truck

And Border Patrol-issued gun

Leaves him grasping her shirt

At the gas station

Around the corner from me.

He lives in a nearby subdivision

In the newer, shinier part of town

Built on ranch land belonging to a Mexican family

When this was Mexico,

In litigation for years, sold for almost nothing.

She coaxes him to take her to get cigarettes

When the realization he’s the one who killed the others

Pricks her like cactus. 

San Bernardo where he picked up

Prostitutes is further south

Off I-35.

You’ll find rundown motels,

Mid-century nostalgia,

A few restaurants

Including at least one that served both food

And, unbeknownst to us, women,

Another where the waiter

Would wait until my husband went to the restroom

To meet my eyes,

Nod knowingly, even walked over once

To tell me I’m pretty,

Running after us one evening in the parking lot

With some special smoothie

He made just for me.

He was gone the next time we went there.

Spilling out of Olive Garden

At the mall across the highway

After a work luncheon,

A woman begged us for money.

I gave her my styrofoam of leftovers,

But I knew it wasn’t enough,

No shade offered from the palm trees

Cordoning off our oasis from

Heroin alley,

This road,

Bait,

This moment of telling her,

You could be my wife, now,

Live in this house she left,

Following the underpasses

And drainage ditches.

Flooring it

To a nicer road built on stolen desert.

When the woman escapes,

He drives home, arms the place,

Guns and ammo laid out on the kitchen island’s granite

And speeds out onto the highway again,

The section where you can hear teens

Drag race.

He catches two more victims

Before he’s caught,

Throwing their bodies like trash

Along the highway.

He said it was to clean up the streets.

A student wrote about one victim, a relative,

Addicted, her children were raised by her mother,

Rehab hadn’t worked,

But they still loved her,

Told the children she loved them

And would get better,

Couldn’t believe how she’d died,

Left alone in buzzing scrub brush.

On Sundays, teenagers

show off their muscle cars

Along San Bernardo,

Police having to direct traffic,

Kids calling to each other out the windows,

Sometimes saying everything we want to hear,

Probably some of these women, once.

Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and two chapbooks, including her most recent chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She lives with her husband and two cats. 

ALL-AMERICAN CANAL

by D. Seth Horton

All-American Canal seen here in Imperial County, California, January 24, 2022. Photo: Matthew Bowler to accompany “Officials doing little as more migrants drown in Imperial County canal,” KPBS, February 8, 2022.

Border Patrol

operator

spotted

All-American

Canal in Calexico

agent

23 seconds

later not

advancing

55 seconds

still struggling

sank

below

canal's current

surface

Author’s Note: This is a found poem sourced from a recent U.S. Customs and Border Patrol media release. It is part of a larger project on resisting Federal interpretations of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In terms of composition, I deleted most of the original material until I was left with the poem that had previously been hidden within the bureaucratese.  To be clear, I added no words, punctuation, or capital letters to the body of this poem, nor did I change the original word order in any way.  Instead, I simply erased what was in the way and then moved the words that remained into appropriate line breaks. In case readers are interested in comparing this poem against the original source material, they can click here.

 

A writer and scholar focused mostly on the borderlands, D. Seth Horton’s work has appeared in more than forty publications, including the Michigan Quarterly Review and Glimmer Train. Two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His latest book is a forthcoming collection of stories set throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands entitled On a NASA Flight to Heaven (TCU Press, 2024). Seth currently teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Virginia. 

ADVENT

by Rachel Mallalieu




In the end, it won’t be the red
Starbucks cups or people who

Say happy holidays instead of
Merry Christmas, not

Ubiquitous Santa and his elves,
with no manger in sight

It’s video of a caged child who
writhes on a bench

Falls facedown and vomits
blood onto the floor

Staggers towards a toilet,
slumps to the ground

And convulses
then stills

That wages the war on Christmas


Rachel Mallalieu is an Emergency Physician and mother of five. She writes poetry in her spare time. Her work has been featured in TheNewVerse.News, Blood and Thunder and is upcoming in Haunted Waters Press.

ANOTHER GUATEMALAN CHILD

by Jan Steckel

A 16-year-old boy died Monday at a Border Patrol station in Texas, becoming the fifth child from Guatemala to die since December after being apprehended by US border patrol agents. —Yahoo! News, May 21, 2019. Photo: People hold a vigil for migrants who have died, have been detained and deported by US authorities, near the US-Mexico border fence in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, on May 3, 2019 (AFP Photo/Guillermo Arias via Yahoo! News).

With the name, they release
a face, a family, a story,
but not a living child.

Five dead kids in five months.
Only half the migrants
are from Guatemala,

but all the dead children are.
What are the odds?
(1/2)5 or 1 out of 32.

Are they sicker?
Poorer? More fragile?
Indigenous? Dark?

Did they beg
in Mayan tongues,
so pleas were ignored?

In the hospital.
In the ICU.
Alone in his cell.

Pneumonia. Influenza.
She died of a fever,
and no one could save her.

By Stephen Miller’s bed,
small ghosts cry
for their mothers.

Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her latest poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, December 2018) is a finalist for poetry in the Bi Book Awards. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, TheNewVerse.News, November 3 Club, Assaracus and elsewhere.

WAKE

by Sean Murphy

An asylum seeker looks out from the trailer of a truck heading to the U.S. border with the so-called migrant caravan. Photograph by Alfredo ESTRELLA / AFP / Getty via The New Yorker illustrating "Searching for a Substantive Response to Trump’s Hateful Speech" by Masha Gessen, January 9, 2019.

This nightmare: the awful image of your scared daughter,
frantic inside a hastily assembled cage, crying for nobody.

Or to all those stone-faced and silent, heavily-armed officials,
standing around in uniformed circles: watching, and waiting

to do nothing; or rather, the one thing, the sanctioned thing:
just following their orders and etcetera, as usual, as always.

Never tempted or inclined to pause, reflect, and wonder how
He, the one whom everyone is obliged to obey, above all—

and whose sleepless armies wrathfully guard the gilded border
that serves to separate eternal darkness from light everlasting—

would fathom or abide disobedience and iniquity such as this,
an affront to what He offered as clear and sacred commission?

But then, who amongst us can claim to comprehend the evils
that might be lurking in the dark hearts of unfamiliar men or

their wives—shuttling the blessed burden all mothers carry—
in search of safety or shelter, however fleeting or uncertain?

And what follows next, when haven is granted, then imitated,
until this begets wave upon unbridled wave…finally drowning

our new world in its tired, poor, huddled, and massive wake . . .
never ceasing from the commotion it came here to accomplish?

And yet, aren’t human souls created in some unsullied image,
Bound to consecrated laws written not in books, but with fire—

According to He who judges all others in the midst of rulers:
Our Father, who enabled us to fall and, finally, be forgiven?

Who warned us to pray for lesser brethren—born to suffer—
and to remember, always: There but for the grace of God . . .

Go back to sleep, at ease with some absolution transferred
in sixty minutes every Sunday, the same day He rested and

beheld the work He’d made, finally dismayed by the shame
of us, declaring our earth too scarce for the meek to inherit.

Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. His work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, The New York Post, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha's Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of Virginia Center for Literary Arts. Twitter: @bullmurph.

UN HOMBRE

by Alejandro Escudé

Video by RAICES, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency that promotes justice by providing free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees in Texas.

Tear gas is the language of idiots.
You wore your uniform that day, and died.
I blame you. Because you couldn’t have gone elsewhere.
Been there. You have mouths to feed.
I’ve seen that too. I have mouths to feed.
They feed on meaning. You listen to this President.
You recall your history, don’t you?
Abraham Lincoln. John F. Kennedy.
You look up at the Nixon moon.
It is too soon for the gas chambers.
The suits are on hangers. You give a nice speech.
As the poor people run holding their eyes in their hands.
I was a baby once. Do you recall?
The nation is here. The nation is Mexico.
Born on an island of sacrifice.
Like Marquez, you give them ice.
They run south instead of north. The north is full of promise.
The promise is made of money. The money,
When burned, smells of mota.
I smoke the mota you son of a bitch.
I smoke the women of the United States, so quick to divorce.
Guns. Ah, if that was really your problem!
Wink. Wink. If you arrive in Cabo San Lucas,
A woman tilts your head back
And pours tequila down the American carretera.
The years will pass. The American President
will die of some disease, eighty years-old, crazy.
His wife in pictures. Pictures. His wife.
This life is the same for us all.
I drink a shot of tequila for the migrants
Who are crossing the border while being detained.
They have achieved the American Dream,
Which is not wealth, or health, or living.
The American Dream. You smell it after the shared eagle.
To become the threat. Un hombre in the hands of niños.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

SENT HOME TO DIE: US IMMIGRATION POLICY IN 2018

by Barbara J. Clark

As a growing number of families are separated as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to control illegal immigration, some parents are being deported before recovering their children.. —Miriam Jordan, The New York Times, June 17, 2018. Photo credit Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times.

Someone has killed my husband and is trying to kill me and my children.

I run away from the killer and towards your home for many days and nights,

Because

I want to live and I want my children to live.

I know your home is a safe haven for us.

Exhausted and hungry we finally make it to your doorstep.

And knock on your door,

But you don’t answer.

We camp out on your front porch for many days and nights.

We knock on your door,

Every day.

But you don’t answer.

We are out of food and water and my baby is running a fever.

In desperation,

I enter your home through an open window.

I find you and tell you I have entered,

Whereupon

You tell me I am a criminal

Because

I entered your home through a window and not the door.

I try to tell you why,

But you won’t listen or don't understand my language.

Instead,

You put me in jail,

You kidnap my children,

You tell me I am a bad mother,

And that I should never have come,

That I should never have run from this killer.

The next day,

You stop kidnapping the children of those coming through the window.

Excitedly,

I ask you, "where are my children and when can I see them?"

You tell me you don’t know or care where they are.

That I should never have run from this killer.

And that I should never have come.

You tell me I am a bad mother,

And have lost my children.

You send me home

TO DIE.

Barbara J. Clark is a registered patent attorney with 24 years of experience drafting and prosecuting patent applications before the USPTO. She currently runs her own patent law firm in Ames, Iowa. She also enjoys writing picture books, social commentary and humorous memoirs. Last week, Ms. Clark, together with over 5000 other attorneys nationwide, signed up to volunteer through Lawyers For Good Government to help provide pro bono legal services to those seeking asylum. She will be training and working remotely on various activities, including immigration parole bond hearings and legal research and writing. She also signed up with the Dilley Project and will be going to Dilley, Texas in August, with an interpreter, to help prepare mothers (whose children are with them) for their “credible fear” interviews.

BEHIND THE MASKS

by David M. Katz

AP photo via El Paso Times, June 17, 2018

Behind the masks each Halloween, there are
The kids who quiver for the candy corn.
They come out of the dark to the lights above
The lintels of doors both safe and terrifying.
There are some who are too small to knock
Even at a parent’s urging. They fear
The giant more than they want the sweets.
But most are brave enough to carry on.
For others, at the border, there are no
Such masks. For them, the shock comes suddenly
Out of the darkness, and the giants who
Lift them from their parents’ arms are too
Vast, too high, too formless to be seen.
This is a different kind of Halloween.

David M. Katz’s books of poems include Stanzas on Oz and Claims of Home, both published by Dos Madres Press. He’s also the author of The Warrior in the Forest, published by House of Keys Press. Poems of his have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, and The Cortland Review.  He is currently working on a new poetry collection, tentatively entitled Money. He lives in New York City and recently retired after a 40-year career as a business journalist and editor.

CHECKPOINT

by Alejandro Escudé

San Diego County middle school teacher Shane Parmely was detained for more than an hour by Border Patrol agents at a checkpoint in New Mexico because she refused to say whether she was a U.S. citizen. Parmely’s family helped her film the incident, which she posted Friday evening on her Facebook account in several segments that were widely shared. Parmely told Border Patrol agents that she believed she did not have to answer their questions. One agent showed her a card listing immigration law and a Supreme Court case decision that give Border Patrol agents authority to operate checkpoints within 100 miles of the border and to ask questions about citizenship without warrants. —Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2017

You can read the officer's question
On the road: "Citizens?"

It is written in moon-white
And it is perfect in its dimensions

Like a geoglyph or an alien crop circle.
It will not wear away.

The teacher's answer is also on the road,
Afloat like a raven's feather

That refuses to succumb
To the asphalt, a ragged wind-bone,

A time traveller without an end.
The tumbleweed heart of New Mexico.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

MAY IT BE NOTED

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

PHOENIX — The Border Patrol raided a humanitarian aid group’s base camp in the Southern Arizona desert on Thursday and arrested four men who had crossed into the United States illegally, officials with Customs and Border Protection said. Volunteers with the group, No More Deaths, which gives water and first-aid care to migrants, said the men were from Mexico and were receiving emergency medical care at the camp, which had been raided by agents in the past. But this was the first time border agents had used a search warrant to gain entry, the group said in a statement, suggesting a change in strategy by the Border Patrol leadership in the region at a time when temperatures are soaring. Despite a history of tense relations with No More Deaths, the agency had previously abided by an informal, Obama-era agreement allowing migrants to seek medical help at the camp without fear of arrest. In an interview on Friday, the group’s founder, John Fife, characterized the raid as “clearly a strategy by the border agents to cripple and even make moot the lifesaving mission of a medical facility they had agreed to respect.” His fear, he said, is that word would get out among migrants seeking help that the No More Deaths camp is no longer safe, because of border agents’ attention on it. Several volunteer groups leave jugs of water and canned food for migrants and provide them with medical aid, but No More Deaths is one of the largest and the only one in Arizona with a permanent base in the desert. —The New York Times, June 16, 2017. Photo by No Mas Muertes.

to the humanitarian volunteers of No Mas Muertes

When the large histories are written
Of this place and time
May it be recorded in a footnote
In some tome
That our government recently sent
Its not-so-secret police
To destroy an encampment
Of people of good will
Offering water and medical help
To parched migrants
Completing a brutal desert crossing
In order to enter our country
Seeking a better life.
May it be noted
That those migrants were escaping
Bitter poverty
Political violence
Repressive regimes
Destruction of their lands
Supported by
The political and economic policies
Of our own country
Its corporations
Its clandestine agents.
May it be noted
That 30 armed officers
Of the not-so-secret police
Protected the security of our nation
Using 15 trucks, two all-terrain vehicles
And a helicopter
To arrest four migrants receiving medical care.
And may it be noted
That the humanitarian workers present
To assist the migrants
Had been providing such aid for many years
That even as our country
Spiraled deeper and deeper into a vortex
Of racism and xenophobia
There were those among us
Who still believed in providing water
For whoever was thirsty.

Volunteers with the aid group “No More Deaths” distributed water along desert migrant paths in 2013. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesdayand others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

BORDER PATROL, ARIZONA

by Jonathan Travelstead

In-processing. Sunnyside High School, Tucson

The square-jawed sergeant snatches my orders.

Nothing that matters burns in the desert. Congratulations,

Airman First Class- You’re a medic. Shunts me

to a female private beneath the basketball hoop who,

with an IV and an orange bruised soft as skin,

instructs me with lessons on the military’s care towards aliens.

Cups my orange-clasped hand in hers. Finds the sweet spot

in four or less punctures. Suddenly it’s my lone hand

which holds the fruit. My hand puncturing its rind

with eighteen gauge holes like pinpoint windows

I imagine unlatch from the inside. Because the only beliefs

that matter in battle are attendance, minutes later

I find myself burdened beneath kevlar, a helmet

two wars old and missing its lining. Topographic maps

of dusty cattle-roads (useless after the first washout)

winged under one arm. Under the other, orders amended

with signatures validating my crude proficiency in Tex-Mex,

the Law of Armed Conflict, rules of engagement

briefings, and a crash course in medical training

to include intubation on all things American. America.

Where the line items that qualify for participation include

1) Warm Body, and 2) Able to throw a loaded die.

Just then the barefaced, double butterbar lieutenant

marches from the bivouac of a coach’s office

to a know-nothing airman planted at attention

beneath the free throw line. The way he exchanges salutes

of diplomatic importance, recites phonetically, de rigueur

from an index card as if each word were a sharp-edged stone

tumbled, slicing at the thin flesh in his mouth:

Como fway to entry nameento? It’s not me there at all,

but a boy, or a body-double who does not hesitate, says Si

just as the keys to a medic’s humvee and all its bastard

line-and-tackle plop into his outstretched hand. Tylenol.

Cases of Gatorade’s yellow electrolyte gruel

we dare not ask whose hands on what assembly line

in which Latin-speaking country have filled and capped.

A backboard projecting from the canvas window,

and he- newly-christened honorary phd in guardship,

Grand Poo-bah of Sonora’s mesas - is the one charged

with stitching together all the dotted lines.

Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will one day get him to the salt flats of Bolivia. He has published work in The Iowa Review and on Poetrydaily.com among others, and his first collection How We Bury Our Dead by Cobalt/Thumbnail Press is forthcoming in February, 2015.

NORTHWEST OF TOMBSTONE

by David Chorlton

In January, the ACLU of Arizona filed an administrative complaint with DHS regarding abuses at six different southern Arizona checkpoints . . . These interior checkpoints are in part the result of decades-old regulations giving Border Patrol authority to operate within a "reasonable distance" of the border. That distance was defined in federal regulations in the 1950's —with no public comment or debate, and at a time when the Border Patrol comprised fewer than 1,100 agents—as 100 miles from any external boundary of the U.S. That area that now encompasses roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population, nine of the ten largest cities, and the entirety of ten states. The law also gives Border Patrol authority to enter private lands within 25 miles of the border. In practice, however, Border Patrol often goes even further into the interior. In 2008, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) was stopped at a checkpoint 125 miles from the Canadian border, one of many examples of agents disregarding the geographic and legal limits on their authority. Many are also surprised to learn that Border Patrol operates checkpoints in northern states too, and that even more could be on the way: a recent ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed design plans for permanent Border Patrol checkpoints on southbound New England highways.  --ACLU.  Image source: People Helping People in the Border Zone

The Butterfield Stage doesn’t run
anymore. A six-minute drive
out of Tombstone
leads to a checkpoint
twenty-six miles from Mexico,
that shows how wide the border
has become
            and the O.K. Corral
is a hundred-and-thirty-three years
back down the road. This is where
the law turned into scrubland
and gunfire. Nothing
grows tall enough to obstruct the view
wherever you look, and Highway 80
runs straight as truth
until it touches the sky. The only reason
to slow down
                    is the Stop sign
beside the prefabricated unit
whose manufacturer left
a 1-800 number
for anyone interested to order
a model just like it, with bars
on the windows and an air conditioning unit
working hard beneath a flag
raised for wild animals to see
which country they are in.
Pull over; roll the window down,
and speak in clear English
when the officer asks
                             where you’re going
and tells you it’s just a routine
unless someone moves
in the trunk. The land all around
looks best in a Western sunset
just before it fades
                           and insects pour
into the cold light from carbon arc lamps
with nighthawks sweeping out
of the grass to catch them. Getting
this far is an easy ride
except for anyone
who needs to take another route
and move at night, perhaps
across the Huachucas,
                           or by following
the San Pedro River past
Miracle Valley (where the only miracles
are summer rains), or passing Bisbee
to find out how high and lonesome
High Lonesome Road actually is
at the crest
              where a new moon
is the claw by which hope hangs
for everyone to see.

David Chorlton came to Arizona in 1978 after living in England and Austria. He has spent more than three decades stretched between cultures and writing poetry, the pick of which has just appeared as his Selected Poems, from FutureCycle Press.