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Showing posts with label George Floyd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Floyd. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

UNWRITTEN POEM

by Marsha Owens




if i were a poet of great repute
i’d fashion a poem of hope,
ask it to travel with me
alongside Breanna,
next to George Floyd,
so many others since...
young victims at school
ad infinitum,
and i would ask the poem
to be gentle with us
as we climbed words,
reached for understanding
dangling like a noose
 
instead i feel the poem resist
i watch it walk into hell
because no words exist
to save lives trapped
in gunfire.


Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The New Verse News, The Sun, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Dead Mule, and Streetlight Anthology. She is co-editor of the poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning has been recently published at Finishing Line Press.

Friday, March 03, 2023

YO MUVA

by Judy Juanita




Don't know Scott  Adams or his mother, 
Dilbert's done 
Yo muva

Don't know Tyre Nichols' mother
RowVaughn Wells wearing the shroud 
in Tennessee
(this week)
But to the five little pigs in black-skinned masks 
In Tennessee 
(this week)
Yo muva

Where is George Floyd's mother?
Where is she?
My God. Where is she?
Can such a body of water be found on a map?

"Your mama’s a whore, sucker,” Eldridge shouted at University of California, Berkeley in his last demented era
Yo muva

George Floyd begged for his muva
Long gone from this bitter earth
Tyre called for his muva
Three blocks away

The muva in me can't stomach 
one more investigation 
No more chest thumping
the muva in me won't last 
one more minute
Yo muva 
Yo muva
Yo muva
Yo muva

I told my grandson
 I HATE WHITE PEOPLE 
Then I qualified it. 
NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE, NOT MY FRIENDS, NOT INDIVIDUALS, JUST THIS ROTTEN HOLLYWOOD-BASTARDIZED APPROPRIATED CULTURE THAT HAS GLORIFIED WHITE PEOPLE AND GIVEN EVERYONE PERMISSION TO EXTERMINATE US.
Permission to hold us on the ground and exterminate us like vermin

But that dresses up "the talk"
What I have to say
To the nth degree
Where karma waits like a volcano
Where the long arc of justice bends
And bends until it breaks
And gets repaired with Krazy Glue 
Where some Pope sits on a throne with a potty seat hooked up beneath his flaccid ass 
In between “the talks” about keeping his hands visible on the steering wheel
And being careful about predawn sneaky links in ritzy white neighborhoods

Is

Yo muva


Judy Juanita's semi-autobiographical novel about her youthful experience in the Black Panther Party Virgin Soul was published by Viking in 2012. In 2021, her short story collection The High Price of Freeways (Livingston Press, 2022) won the Tartt Fiction Prize. Her poetry collection Manhattan my ass, you're in Oakland won the American Book Award in 2021. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sunday, November 06, 2022

THE HEART OF IT ALL

by Bradley McIlwain




Whitman—
I hear the chains
Across N. America

At Capitol Hill
Where we’ve all become 
Capital—

Loose change
In the pockets 
Of pirate politicians

We elected 
To change—
Only to decline it; 

False prophets 
Who paid God 
To burn Sodom & Gommorah 

But they can’t kill my pride 
The way they put a bullet 
In Bonnie & Clyde.

People are still dying—
Trayvon. Floyd. Till—
Still, they shot Lewis in bed

Like Billy the Kid 
20—unarmed 
Dreams spilling out onto the sheets.

Ohio weeps in the streets.
Neil Young heard the drums;
Police are cutting us down—

What’s at the heart of it all?
You abolish slavery,
But commercialize prisons;

One shackle for another, 
Brother divided by brother
Under the foot 

Of the blood spangled banner
Still soaked in the soil
Of migrant workers

From the states to the border 
Across bus stops and shelters—
The buck doesn’t stop

At Roe v. Wade
When in a state of insanity 
Some judge decides 

In a state of supremacy
That women no longer 
Have control 

Over their bodies?
Over… my… dead… body
It’s time

To untuck injustice where it lies
Unbury the dead
And loosen their tongues

So we can unlearn
The things our fathers 
Have done—and do.

I no longer trust in God
The way I trusted in you.
The all seeing eye 

Has lost its shine 
And I see you
In tent cities

Crying out for food—
Whitman, 
Our people yearn. 

We are the choir 
Of others raging 
For freedom across the voiceless night, 

Rattling the chains for change.


Bradley McIlwain works as a Teacher-Librarian, where he strives to provide meaningful and inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and advocacy. He believes that poems and poets can be agents for social change. Bradley’s latest book, Dear Emily, was published by Roasted Poet Press in July.

Friday, November 19, 2021

DUNCAN AND BRADY

by Julian O. Long




after the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict
 

Speaking of ’lectric cars,
once at a Fort Worth stop sign
a lowrider lifted a fender
like a dog might lift his leg to piss
and flipped me the bird as he took off
laughing around the corner.
That was long ago, but he knew what
he meant—and he loved it.
 
As the uptight white boy I was
in those days, I may have deserved
his contempt. These days I’d like
to blow him a kiss on the wind he stirred,
as he spun out that souped-up Chevy.
Would it were so, amigo,
would it were so.
 
Staggerlee remembers Xmas
but King Brady, he lies dead
and the ghost of old St. Louie
flew past my naked bed
when the rage for George Floyd started
up and down my street,
and the high-tailed carriages
came and went all night
breaking in the windows
knocking down the door
startling me in bed on the second floor... 
 
Busy now, containing Russia,
smug in my alabaster pink
pragmatism, I rejoiced in my country’s
apparent arrested decline. Cop who murdered
Floyd will go to jail, I thought. We threw out
the bastards who stormed the Capitol, I said—
forgetting only too eagerly
Republicans’ settled intention
to lynch the rest of us, La Migra still
lording it up at the border, catching runaways
jury finding Rittenhouse ‘not guilty on all counts.’
 
Nothin’ for it but the blues?
James Baldwin’s Staggerlee let pent up anger, blues remade,
hiss out of him like rancid air from some hack’s
rubber tire.
 
Seem like King Brady never died,
Duncan shot him,
doctor found him dead
but he just raised his hammy fist, took that doctor by the throat
and growled, “Sumbitch, you know I cain’t be killed!”
 
We’ll not overcome this last lynch mob—they’re us;
we’ll watch polite and passive as the Good Old US steals
away down Dixie one last time; no matter clawhammer steels
 
ring out from edges of fields
to tell it again
how we’ve all of us been—
 
yeah, we’ve been on the job
too long... 


Julian O. Long is a previous contributor to The New Verse News. His poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Thursday, July 29, 2021

THE MAN AND THE IRONIC LUNG

by Ron Riekki




It’s your coffin now —Sharon Olds, from “Satan Says” 
 

My brother says there is nothing funnier than Steven Crowder 
having a collapsed lung, and I tell him I would never use 
the word “funnier” with Steven Crowder, that only “misery” 
works with that guy, how he supposedly re-created George 
Floyd’s murder by having a guy dressed as a cop lightly 
kneel on his neck and how my brother said he’d like to kneel 
on Crowder’s neck for real, & then a few months later & he has 
a collapsed lung, how fitting, how perfectly fitting, this feeling 
that God is listening, how a thirty-four-year-old doesn’t have 
a collapsed lung from nothing, how divine that intervention is, 
the irony of all the hate that came out of Rush Limbaugh’s lungs, 
how it makes sense that he’d go that way, how words can be 
cancerous, how hate speech affects the lungs, the throat, the heart. 


Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

Saturday, July 03, 2021

FOUR SONGS OF MURDER

by Richard Lawson


BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Prosecutors in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery's accused murderers filed a flurry of new motions in recent days, including 15 in just the past 24 hours. Among them, the state's District Attorney's Office is asking the judge to allow a three-hour closing argument (an hour longer than allowed) and to show jurors cell phone video of Arbery's killing during opening statements. Arbery was shot to death on Feb. 23, 2020, after three men chased him through the coastal Georgia neighborhood of Satilla Shores. Travis and Greg McMichael are charged with first-degree murder along with their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, who joined the chase and recorded the incident on his cell phone. All three have pleaded not guilty. … The state has filed previous motions seeking to keep out evidence of Arbery's diagnosed mental illness or his prior run-ins with police. The judge has not yet ruled on any of the motions. The next court date is July 22 at 10 a.m. —First Coast News, July 2, 2021


1. I Sing For Ahmaud

I sing for my sanity 
At night when I cannot sleep 
When the darkness plays an endless loop 
Of yesterday’s tragic news  

And I sing for the young black men 
Daily dying in our bleeding streets 
And I sing and pray for the mothers 
Whose tears stoke the flames of justice  

Now I sing and I pray  
Try to understand the fear the killers feel 
Why they grasp the coward’s last line of defense 
The trigger of a gun  

Yes I sing and pray that they’re something more 
Than the heartless, mindless head at the White House door 
Greeting millions marching for justice 
With tear gas and vicious dogs  

I sing for my sanity 
And pray for a savior like Dr. King 
To heal this deeply wounded world 
With wisdom, peace and love  

Yes I sing for the martyrs 
That their blood will finally cleanse this world
And slake the thirst of hate  
For now and all-time  

Now I sing and I pray  
Try to understand the fear the killers feel 
Why they grasp the coward’s last line of defense
The trigger of a gun  
 
I sing and pray that there’s something more
That the mindless, heartless head at the White House door
Greeting millions marching for justice
With tear gas and vicious dogs

Yes I sing, I sing, I sing
I sing for this country’s sanity
                                                                                  

2. Chanty For Ahmaud

The sunbeams and shadows thread through the Spanish moss
As the young men run under the live oak trees
It’s 1820 and all is well 
Cause young black men know where they should be 

At work for the master crushing shells from the beach
Making tabby all day, yes that’s their play
Hang your head low and shuffle your feet
Building master’s big house on Satilla’s white shore (and they sing)

“Ho, Ho. Scrape and pound.
Happy at work for the master
Ho. Ho. Yes scrape and pound
Crushing shells for tabby to build Master’s house.” 
 
Now it’s two thousand twenty, see what we’ve lost
Young black men forgot their place in this world
They dare to run on Satilla’s white shore
Without a white man to set their course

Sorry to say it had to be done
Lesson well-taught with an old shotgun
Soon we’ll forget and go back to our ways 
When young black men knew their place (and they’ll sing)

“Ho. Ho. Scrape and pound.
Happy at work for master
Ho. Ho. Yes I scrape and pound
Crushing shells for tabby to build Master’s house.” 


3. Black Lives Matter 

Black lives matter 
Finally a cause worth dying for 
Black lives matter 
Finally a chance to do what Jesus would do 

Do you know Jesus 
He used to run every Sunday down in southeast Georgia 
Then one day two white men shot Jesus dead in the street
Crucify! Crucify! Yes they crucified Jesus again 

Do you know Jesus 
After dying in Georgia, she moved up to Kentucky 
Asleep in her own bed the police shot her dead
Crucify! Crucify! Yes they crucified Jesus again 

Black lives matter 
Finally a cause worth dying for 
Black lives matter 
Finally a chance to do what Jesus would do

Do you know Jesus 
Dead in Kentucky, on up to Minnesota 
Policeman put a knee on his neck, he died
Crucify! Crucify! Yes they crucified Jesus again 

Black lives matter
Do you know Jesus


4. Little Jimmy’s Eatin’ Some Crow Now

Awake this morning before the cock crowed             
I worry, worry, worry bout my battered soul                       
I can’t stop seeing that black child’s blood
Puddled neath his body and his toy gun

2020 air still stings my eyes
It’s summer 21, now who will die
Don’t know why some folks continue to hate
And take delight in passing it along

It’s the damnest way to live in this world
Bowtie man telling cute jokes
“Why’d the little negro bring his toy gun to town?
To give police some target practice.”

“Whooowee,” says the bowtie man, “...that little Jimmy’s eatin some crow now.”
Why? Why? Why?... Hell, I don’t know

And he laughs and laughs into the online sky
Bowtie man with the crazy eyes
Living to spread hate as far as he can
He’s the darling of every other Christian man

“When should a black man jog down the street.”
“If he’s in south Georgia... never. “
“How do you celebrate Black History month.”
“Watermelon, breakfast, supper and lunch. Whooo Weeee.”

It’s the damnest way to live in this world
Bowtie man telling cute jokes
“Why’d the little negro bring his toy gun to town?
To give police some target practice.”

“Whooowee,” says the bowtie man, “...that little Jimmy’s eatin some crow now.”






The work of Richard Lawson of Brunswick, Georgia has been published in Fine Lines.

Monday, May 10, 2021

VERDICT

by Donna Katzin


Demonstrators march towards Boston Police Headquarters to protest the police-perpetrated killing of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant who was shot by Columbus Police on April 21, 2021. This march was initially organized to celebrate the life of George Floyd following the verdict of Derek Chauvin. Credit: ANIK RAHMAN / NURPHOTO via GETTY IMAGES via TRUTHOUT


There’s a reason why so many activists have insisted that the Derek Chauvin verdict — though it offers a measure of solace for George Floyd’s family — isn’t justice. Our current way of thinking about and doing justice does not and cannot meet the moment. If anything, the Chauvin verdict achingly demonstrates that justice as we know it is wanting. It’s time to imagine a new justice that does and can…  It’s about reckoning with and disrupting entire histories, legacies, and systems of racial terror and white supremacy that, like monsters who we think are dead but keep coming back, relentlessly replicate and reproduce themselves. —Fania E. Davis, Truthout, May 9, 2021


After a year of protests,
witnesses, testimonies, videos,
this time we see the scales balance --
a white perpetrator in blue found guilty
of squeezing the life out of a Black man.
 
For a moment the weight of planets
lifts from our backs, shoulders,
necks, and we can stand
a little straighter,
breathe again.
 
But still we hear
the ripping of the land
as more Black bodies fall, blood
oozing from crevasses
too wide to heal.
 
In the streets, the howl
of the original sin refuses to die,
roots like a relentless, toxic weed
in its shallow grave, waiting
to show its face again.


Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself. 

Thursday, April 29, 2021

SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE MOMENTS AFTER THE DEREK CHAUVIN VERDICT

a found poem
by Dick Westheimer




White folks in my feed: Thank God!
Black folks in my feed... 
White folks responding to white folks in my feed: Amen!
Black folks in my feed... 
White folks in my feed: Boom!
YES, YES, YES!!!!! Justice, sweet Justice!
A perfect trifecta...GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY.
Justice served. Black Lives Matter. Accountability today. 
A black death mattered. 
GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY ❤️❤️❤️

Black folks in my feed:
George Floyd is still gone.
God rest your soul, George Floyd.
Each day that I worry I will be next 
is another day 
without justice.
If there hadn’t been a video, 
there’d never have been a trial.
Time to organize our strength 
into power.
DO NOT forget 
the other three cops! They let it happen!

A white woman in my feed:
What a relief justice was served!

A Black woman in my feed posts a snapshot:
George Floyd holding his daughter Gianna. 

Black women in my feed: 
Thank God for Darnella Frazier. 
Keep ALL the witnesses in your prayers. 
All of them.
I exhaled...and as soon as I did, 
I started sobbing. This is what it’s like 
to be Black in America.
This! Darnella! A Black girl...now a Black Woman. 
I am thankful for you!

White folks in my feed: 
Justice. Guilty x 3!! We can all breathe!!!

Black men in my feed:  I  still  can’t  breathe.


For over 40 years, Dick Westheimer has—in the company of his wife Debbie—lived, gardened and raised five children, on their plot of land in the rural US in Clermont County, Ohio. He recently has taken up with poets and the writing of poetry to make sense of the world. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Riparian Anthology, and The New Verse News, among others.

Thursday, April 15, 2021

HE CALLED FOR HIS MAMA

by Laurie Rosen




When I gave birth to my son without the aid 
of narcotics or an epidural, pain searing, I called 
for my Mama. A grown woman, already a Mama 
and I called for mine. 

It wasn’t something I planned, the cry shot out 
my grimaced mouth, my husband sitting by my side, 
a nurse coaching me on. I shouted for my Mama 
because somewhere in my subconscious I believed 
no one else but my Mama could relieve me of my pain.  
Not even the man who loves me could do that. 

When I heard George Floyd called for his Mama,
(not his girlfriend or brother) I thought, Of course he did. 
Who else but a Mama might rescue a son from the grip
of a cop determined to strangle the life out of him?  

And when I learned Duante Wright called his Mama,
just before a cop shot him dead, I imagined him reaching
for his Mama. Who else but a Mama would lay their body 
across a son to shield him from the bullet 
they both knew was coming. 


Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poems have appeared in The London Reader, Muddy River Poetry Review, Beach Reads (an anthology from Third Street Writers), Peregrine, Oddball Magazine, and other journals. 

Saturday, April 10, 2021

HOW SUBTLY IT HAPPENED

by William Doreski




Secretly, I slip the daylight
moon into my pocket. A crowd
has formed. As I approach,
stainless things clatter. A cop
 
kneels on a neck. A sigh kites
into the trees and deflates.
The cop looks too dispassionate
for this lifetime. The man
 
on the ground no longer speaks.
The stainless things rain down
with naked blades twittering.
I ease the moon from my pocket
 
and compare it to the face
of the cop and of the man
he’s stifling. None of these three
expressions can tell me the time.


William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

Wednesday, April 07, 2021

THE CONDITIONAL CASE FOR CONVICTION

by Diana Cole


A patron of a laundromat near Cup Foods watching the Derek Chauvin trial on Monday. Credit: Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times, April 6, 2021


for George Floyd
 
 
Nothing can be true, so the dog barks all night
          missing the man who feeds him.
 
Into the fire go the stars. If the garbage is collected
          in the morning, the moon will go too.
 
Without evidence of insects, birds have nothing to eat.
          He’s talking so he’s fine.
 
Nothing but a man, a sizable guy who loves his Mama, 
          who lost his Mama.  
                                    
I kneel in case the sun will intervene in time.
          Inside the car, the back seat is a thick darkness. 
 
A black man could get lost if the air is handcuffed.
          Even if he pleads 20 times, he is under the influence,
 
under suspicion, under the knee, undertaken.
          All for 20 dollars, supposing that, even if, as long as… 


Diana Cole, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has had poems published in numerous journals including Poetry East, Spillway, the Tar River Review, the Cider Press Review, GBH Public Radio, Friends Journal, Verse Daily, and the Main Street Rag, and upcoming in Crab Creek Review. Her chapbook Songs By Heart was published in 2018 by Iris Press. She is an editor for The Crosswinds Poetry Journal and a member of Ocean State Poets whose mission is to encourage the reading, writing and sharing of poetry. 

Monday, March 29, 2021

EXPOSED IN MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

by Sandra Sidman Larson


A fist sculpture is situated at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, also known as George Floyd Square, on March 25 in Minneapolis. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)


As a spring storm begins to rumble outside, I wrap
my dog in his thunder shirt, yet I must remain calm
and unprotected from what bears down
on us, whether it is thunder, city coyotes howling,
the probable headlines of the Star Tribune—the paper flung
outside my door this morning, as every day, by a poor man,
his young children waiting in his idling car.
The fate of George Floyd’s murderer is soon to be
determined by twelve citizens in a courtroom barricaded
with barbed wire as have been the halls of Congress,
precautions against returning mobs, recently sicced
on the representatives of our frail democracy
by a crazed president who we supposedly ushered out
the door. But what to do about the cop who puts his knee
for nine minutes upon the neck of a Black man,
smothers him to death, stopping all our lives, turning us
to marching in the streets, while troublemakers—homegrown,
or blown into Minneapolis—set the city streets and stores afire,
inciting chaos among thousands of protesters, many of us
now realizing we need other gods or old gods to appear,
to stop us from killing each other, we who are filled with love,
hate, hope, and despair, stirred up by the fates—
so little to protect us?  All I can do is close the window
against the thunder, the smells of rain-damped debris;
note the snow almost gone from the ground, now newly bare.


Sandra Sidman Larson, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has three chapbooks to her credit: Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Over a Threshold of Roots (both Pudding House Press Publications), and Weekend Weather: Calendar Poems. Her chapbook Ode to Beautiful was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016 and her first full manuscript by Main Street Rag Publications in 2017. Her poetry has been published in many venues such as the Atlanta Review, Grey Sparrow, Earth’s Daughters and on-line in The New Verse News and others. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies, one being what have you lost? edited by Naomi Shihab Nye.  (Who nominated her for one Pushcart Prize). With a Masters Degree in social work and community planning, Sandra’s primary career was in social service and social justice work. Her poetry career began at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. As a poet with grandchildren and great nieces and nephews she longs for a world where all children are cherished and cared for and justice reigns for all.

Monday, February 15, 2021

RE-ACQUITTED

by Imogen Arate




Dying stars burn the brightest

Europe's birth rate is falling
Italian towns offer abandoned 
homes on the cheap

Even in a COVID year
nearly 1-0-0-0 
wo/men and children
died on the Mediterranean
in pursuit of safety

The Sonoran took its biggest gulp
in 10 years
as desiccated remains are picked
from between its gritty teeth
to stage a caravan

One in five American households
speaks a language other than English
but my people can’t get in a
Best-Pic nominee
without the label “foreign”

Be grateful that you are now 
presented with a choice between 
Black and    White

Prostrate melaniferous bodies 
weave into a shroud
covering the distance between 
George Floyd and today

Be grateful for crumbs that drop
from the high table
as we scramble
and gladiate in spectacle
for droppings

Half a million seemed like 
an impossible number
Last year   Valentine’s Day
was still lonely 
but in person

Be grateful
Why aren’t we grateful
Why are we so ungrateful
We are given a choice now
Isn’t it enough

A cloth cover is the real
hindrance to liberty
The 2020 “I voted” sticker
a high-priced memorabilia
for the lives risked
to those other than minorities
forced hyphenation 
worn as a crown
trudge past other saintly feasts
lay bare the sacrifice

Be grateful for the little things
The big ones are for the rarified
the falling birth rate
the fear of extinction
I guess they always knew

Dying stars burn the brightest
Rage
rage against the dying of the light


Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of the weekly poetry podcast Poets and Muses. She has written in four languages and published in two. Her work was most recently featured in the Global Poemic, Rigorous and The Hong Kong Review.

Saturday, January 16, 2021

BELLY OF THE BEAST

by Donna Katzin
                                             
 


The violence was barely visible to law-makers                                                 
when police squeezed out George Floyd’s last breath
with a knee to his neck, shot their way
into Breonna Taylor’s home,
left her dead on her floor, clicked off
the too-short lives of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin
with flicks of a trigger.                                        
 
They scarcely discerned it in the eyes of children     
ripped from fathers’, mothers’ arms,
caged at the border, never to see
their parents again.
 
It was not obvious to them when 350,000 souls—       
disproportionately black and brown, immigrant, indigenous—
were extinguished by the virus
the president heralded as a “hoax,”                      
as ICU’s, hearses, morgues choked on bodies
and ambulances were ordered not to stop
for “low-probability” passengers.                                    
 
It took broken glass and guns at the Capitol,
ghost-faced rioters in MAGA hats, banners, swastikas,
sporting toxic slogans spawned and spewed
by the Commander-in-Chief.
 
It took hordes single-minded as Atilla the Hun
or shock-troops of the Third Reich storming
up the marble stairs beneath idyllic landscapes,
portraits of iconic heads of state,
pushing past police who never imagined 
the possibility of a white mob
forcing their way into chambers constructed,
polished to protect the rule of law,
wielding shotguns and rifles,
wrapped in bullet-proof vests.
 
It took the legislators in lockdown
little time to detect the pattern,
crouching behind their chairs, calling
loved ones, clutching gas-masks,
as they were herded to hidden locations
while the president’s minions lounged
in their offices, read their mail,       
trashed their papers, took selfies.
In the fray below five people died.
 
It took them only hours to declare a breach,
recalibrate the rules, call for silencing,
impeaching the author of the action
to pluck out the bad seed.
 
But still, in the white wilderness of our minds,
tiptoe home-grown terrorists nurtured                  
with our blindness, lethal legacies,
assumptions of supremacy—             
the hate so deeply sown                                     
in our own hearts.


Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.  

Friday, October 30, 2020

SENDING POSTCARDS

by Julia Lisella




It’s all history now,
even my walk to the mailbox
to drop the shiny cards into the blue box
little teeth at the edge of the slot – I can hear them
grinding & scraping as I push the cards in
10 at a time. Because
Covid 19 pandemic
because Breonna and George are dead
because T***p lied his ass off
we know this is true all the time, but now?
And I think this is why
I walk to the mailbox
with 50 postcards and I worry
the people who get them won’t
understand my handwriting
when they read “Dear Friend”
they’ll know we are not friends but
Friend please vote, friend
the anxiety of thinking
you won’t vote
makes my fingers ache
the anxiety of thinking
in the quiet, the basil bloom
of evening, the petulance
of late summer, the walk now
more or less guarded
Mostly anxiety I do not think
in prose but in the murmur of fear
the stuttered life of
catch in the throat
the imbalance of what can’t be
how is it now that the shiny postcards
urging
sit at the bottom of a large blue box—
what faith I once had in the box
How I once believed anything in it
would begin its great journey
Will anyone of you 50 desperate cards
released reluctantly by my fingertips
(afraid to touch the box) the confluences
of emergencies
we have acclimated to
will any one of you reach the street
the court, the place, the road, the Tampa,
the Ft. Lauderdale, the Ft. Myers so many forts
the ranch house the apartment building the PO Box
and journey how? and when if it arrives
on your counter, thrown in your car
stuck under a welcome mat?
I press the pen into the card
to make the name and wonder
will it be you, you one soul
who will get my card and lifting it
above the garbage will see and notice
the wobble of my D or F or
the note I squeezed into the left side
of the card, the funny way I write my E’s, my V’s and M’s
you can’t tell apart
you, someone will know I walked down
the quiet Covid street
I pushed the cards through the slot
dear friend released from prison who is not
a murderer or a rapist dear friend who was
desperate and forged a check dear friend who was
naïve and dated a con artist and a drug dealer
Dear friend still alive, released they say
and living in Sunny Florida, please don’t
get sick, please find a job
please vote.


Randy Hudnell raises four fingers to represent Amendment 4, which restored the right to vote to most former felons in Florida who'd completed their sentences. Credit: ALEX PENA/CBS NEWS, October 26, 2020


Julia Lisella’s books include Always (WordTech Editions, 2014), Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007), and the chapbook Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems have most recently appeared in Ploughshares, Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Exit 7, and Ocean State Review. She writes on modernist women writers, teaches American literature at Regis College and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA) Reading Series in Boston. 

Friday, August 28, 2020

WEIGHT

by Judith Terzi


Emmett Louis Till was kidnapped, lynched and brutally murdered at age 14 on August 28, 1955.

"Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor."—John Lewis, New York Times, July 30, 2020


Emmett Till shot dead at fourteen. Two men go free.
George Floyd suffocated at forty-six. By a brutal knee.

          George ran out of breath. Suffocated at age forty-six.
          They sank Emmett, strapped him to a cotton gin fan.

No gun to sink George. No river, no machine, no tree.
Simeon Wright saw the men point the gun at Emmett.

          Saw the men point the gun, pull his cousin from bed.
          His words weightless against the two men's. No video

then. The world saw the cop's knee press into George.
Saw three more cops. Over eight minutes of complicity.

          Four cops. Eight ears sealed shut for over eight minutes.
          Sixty-five years gone by since Emmett lost his breath.

Three months passed since George no longer breathes.
Emmett Till shot dead at fourteen. Two men go free.


Author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay), as well as of five chapbooks, including Casbah and If You Spot Your Brother Floating By (Kattywompus), Judith Terzi's poems have received Pushcart and Best of the Web and Net nominations and have been read on Radio 3 of the BBC. She holds an M.A. in French Literature and taught high school French for many years as well as English and French at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

Sunday, July 05, 2020

HE GETS IT

by Wayne Scheer




My neighbor wanted his five year-old to understand
why so many people,
including himself,
were demonstrating
for George Floyd.

After explaining
what had happened,
he took his son
to a demonstration
near downtown Atlanta.

When his son saw the crowd
he said,
“All these people
think people should be kind.
Cool.”

He gets it.

Why do so many others,
including the president,
find it so hard to understand?


Wayne Scheer has been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net. He's published numerous stories, poems and essays in print and online, including Revealing Moments,  a collection of flash stories. His short story “Zen and the Art of House Painting” has been made into a short film.

DARNELLA'S DUTY

by Laurie Kuntz


Darnella Frazier is the brave young woman who filmed the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The artwork is from the official Peace and Healing for Darnella Fund at gofundme.


How does it feel to be 17,
and just want to hold your life in your
glistening palm, go to the corner
and buy a sparkling water to quench
a parched mouth that longs to sing?

How does it feel to witness
a purpose too cruel
for all your 17 rotations
around a sun you only want to bask in?

How does it feel to beg a name,
witness a life breaking,
while your opened ebony eyes,
see loss and corruption corralled
to the borderless sky?

And, how does the humid wind feel
as you watch it carry one man's life
to a crevice where only the wind can go?


Laurie Kuntz is an award-winning poet and film producer. She taught creative writing and poetry in Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. Many of her poetic themes are a result of her working with Southeast Asian refugees for over a decade after the Vietnam War years. She has published one poetry collection (Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press) and two chapbooks (Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press and Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press), as well as an ESL reader (The New Arrival, Books 1 & 2, Prentice Hall Publishers). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her chapbook Simple Gestures won the Texas Review Poetry Chapbook  Contest. She was editor in chief of Blue Muse Magazine and a guest editor of Hunger Mountain Magazine.  She has produced documentaries on the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Law and currently is producing a documentary on the peace process and reintegration of guerrilla soldiers in Colombia. She is the executive  producer of an Emmy-winning short narrative film Posthumous. Recently retired, she lives in an endless summer state of mind.

Wednesday, July 01, 2020

GEORGE FLOYD'S LEGACY

by Crowfeather


George Floyd by Sam Dunn


One life ended
by an unyielding knee
and ice-bound hearts.

One man’s private death,
ghastly and obscene,
stunning millions.

Not just another death,
but maybe a catalyst
for change.


Crowfeather is a 72-year-old woman who writes and tells stories in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

GEORGE FLOYD ELEGY

by KP Liles 


German artist Eme Freethinker has painted a portrait of George Floyd on what used to be the Berlin Wall to honour the unarmed black man killed May 25 by a white Minneapolis police officer, who knelt on his neck for almost 10 minutes.


George Floyd
George Floyd
George Floyd

And so many
buried unheard
we now cannot unhear

Nor can we ignore
revolutions’ anthem
I can’t breathe

Impossible to unsee
George Floyd
that pressing knee

Ahmaud Arbery
jogging Glynn County
Georgia George Floyd

Breonna Taylor
sleeping Kentucky
Less than a meme’s life apart

Eric Garner New York City
Michael Brown Ferguson Missouri
Nia Wilson George Floyd

Oakland California Trayvon
Martin Sanford Florida
Tamir Rice Cleveland Ohio How

many George Floyd George Floyd
until name becomes flood
spilling all the killed Black folks

into brightly lit kitchens
until the dream’s ghost
upends breakfast table

until No
No Some risks George Floyd
do not resolve in mind

So if it is not for me
to lift your body or name
let mourning

be pallbearer
to token grief
minstrel solidarity

Head bowed shouldering memory
let us at long last George Floyd
carry outrage ‘cross that bloody river

end this procession
where we face off
the uniform night


KP Liles has penned two poetry collections, Singing Back the Darkness (NYQ Books) and Spring Hunger (Plain View Press). He currently lives in the New Orleans metropolitan area.