WALKING THE DOG IN OCTOBER WITH POLICE SIRENS

by Al Ortolani

AI-generated video by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

See how the past is not finished

here in the present

                             —WS Merwin

 

Dog, it is not a good time to run off leash.

There is an air of crises behind the wind.

 

Masked agents rip a former student from her children.

She disappears into phone calls from Guatemala. 

 

The President dumps imaginary shit from a jet fighter

and calls it humor. Tonight, 

 

there are more questions than answers.

We listen to the sirens beyond the rooftops, 

 

behind the strip malls and blinking stop lights.

The oaks gasp in the change of seasons.

 

Some nights I imagine the leaves wailing

as they lose their grip and fall.

Al Ortolani, a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, has been featured in the Writer’s Almanac, the American Life in Poetry, and Poetry Town. He’s a contributing editor to the Chiron Review. Recently, his poems have appeared in Rattle, The Midwest Quarterly, One Art, and the Pithead Chapel.

STREETS OF BOUGAINVILLEA

by Elizabeth Rose

Since we started collecting data in 2012, 1,335 defenders across Latin America have lost their lives…. Yet very few families have seen justice for these killings. —Global Witness, September 2023

You must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
           —Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”

 

I have my own Indian story.

Fausto, my friend, was also dead

 

by the roadside, macheted

in a waterless gully.

 

Stripped naked,

hanged, and cut through,

 

on a Sabbath.

His daughters asleep in cribs.

 

Fausto could have been

my child had I been born

 

on another continent

with another skin color.

 

We were both bent

toward social justice,

 

for me a conceptual brick

tossed through a window,

 

for him a sink

with running water.

 

His mother’s cavity eyes

his father’s taut mouth

stretched toward inevitability.

 

A cold case upon death.

A national miscarriage of laws.

 

Is this the sadness that kindles kindness?

Allows us to go out each day

 

into the streets of bougainvillea,

and ride the Tuk Tuk,

 

bodies next to baskets

overflowing with avocados

and mangoes.

Photo courtesy of the Otzin family.

Author’s note: This is the story of my friend Fausto Otzin. He was a lawyer in Guatemala. He worked on land rights cases representing indigenous people. He was an indigenous Katchakel himself. He worked in Guatemala City during the week and traveled back to Comalapa on the weekends where his wife and two baby girls lived with his parents, his younger sister and her son, and another brother, sister-in-law, and their three children. I was involved in building a school from rubbish in Comalapa for eighteen years and I became friends with the Otzin family during that time. In October 2009 he went out on a Friday night and didn't return. He was found in a gully hanged and stabbed thirteen times on the following Sunday. There was no investigation and now 14 years later there have been no arrests or even people of interest brought forward.

Elizabeth Rose is a poet and psychotherapist living in Massachusetts. She has previously published poetry in BarBar and Verdad. Her personal essays have appeared in the New Mexico Review, The Boston Globe, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She published a chapter in Escape, a memoir collection published in 2023 by the Pathfinders Collective. She received an MFA from Lesley University in 2019. 

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.

HOSPITALS

by Marilyn Peretti

Several medical facilities, including a children’s hospital and the largest general hospital in the area, have been hit or destroyed since airstrikes on besieged East Aleppo resumed on November 15, said the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières Saturday. —Medecins Sans Frontieres, November 19, 2016

I'm in a good hospital
my visitor recalls
the small dark
shack-of-a-hospital she saw
once in Guatemala
I recall recent news
second bombing
of the largest functioning
hospital in Aleppo
the great horror and puzzlement
of terror from the air
air meant for breathing
viewing stars and flying
but now constant terror
threats from dropped submunitions
of sharp metal fragments
striking child after child

Marilyn Peretti from near Chicago continues to feel bombarded with the infractions of our human interactions, heightened by the war in Syria, the invasive Dakota Access Pipline, and this Presidential election result. Recently in rehab following surgery she spent long hours writing. Her poems are published in Kyoto Journal, Journal of Modern Poetry, TheNewVerse.News and others.