WE'RE SITTING AROUND A TABLE NOT FAR FROM THE RUSSIAN BORDER

by Ron Riekki

A Chinese artist, a Russian musician, and American poet,

and we talk about surveillance, sharing how dangerous it is

to be an artist, after speaking with a local who told us about

the tensions with Russia, how they're like a choking fog,

and the musician from Russia says it's all propaganda there,

says she doesn't care, that her voice will never be voiceless,

tells us about being taken in by the Russian police and how

she brutalized them with truth, was let go, and then let go

of her country, emigrating, immigrating, Euro-ricocheting around,

and hanging out with Pussy Riot, doing anti-war campaigns,

and we speak of the ten percent of the Russian population

being tortured, and she speaks of physical torture and

emotional torture and the torture of propaganda, and

the Chinese artist talks about holding up signs in Hong

Kong that were all white, not allowed to have signs with

actual words, so this haunting image, this effective image

of hundreds of artists and writers and protestors and students

holding up these white signs, ghost signs meant to haunt

politicians, and the American poet talks about being hunted

by the Trump administration for a pro-Islamic, pro-immigrant

tweet, how the administration administered paperwork to his

home, pages and pages and pages of warning, how watched

we are everywhere, he says, he thinks, he feels, and we are

near the Russian border, except it's shut down, too dangerous,

and here we are, doing art that is too dangerous, and having

this conversation that is too dangerous, so dangerous that

we turn off our phones to make sure we are not being listened

to, because we want to create the form of our words, rush

home and turn our conversations into lyrics and artwork

and this poem you are reading now, written near a border

that is rotting with worry, a border that lacks moonlight tonight.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

THE WINTER GAMES GO ON

by Rudi E. Welec, “Abs”

Although detainees must sleep in cramped cells on cement floors,

and though they must wear shackles with their numbered uniforms,

and though repression crosses Xinjiang’s pale locked-down sky,

the corporate industrial complex won’t bat an eye.

 

Although Hong Kong was once a base of civil liberties,

and though the communists crush those who want democracy,

and though the people now are jailed, practicing free speech,

the corporate industrial complex won’t say a thing.

 

So now in Beijing, the Olympic Winter Games go on,

supported by Proctor & Gamble, Visa and Bridgestone,

Intel, Allianz, Coca Cola, and Airbnb…

The IOC states it will be still aired by NBC.

Rudi E. Welec, “Abs,” is an irregular pseudonym for a NewVerse News regular.

WHITE BIRD

by Marilyn Mathis

in memory of Wong Ching Ping

HONG KONG — Under the cover of darkness early Thursday, authorities in Hong Kong tore down a public sculpture dedicated to the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre, accelerating a campaign to erase the crackdown from public recollection and stamp out dissent in a city that until recently was one of Asia’s freest. The 26-foot-tall artwork, known as the “Pillar of Shame,” had stood at the University of Hong Kong for nearly a quarter-century and honored the hundreds, if not thousands, of students and others killed on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese military crushed pro-democracy protests. —The Washington Post, December 23, 2021

You send the kite skyward,

Unknowing

If it will fly or fall.

You speak

In Hong Kong

Unknowing if you will last the day.

But the kite,

Saying only a single word,

Is still an opinion,

A dangerous breath.

See, already winter branches have stopped it.

Fragile, 

Wind-shredded,

Fluttering desperately.

Silk and paper? Or a living bird?

It is of no matter.

The State will remove it.

 

 

Marilyn Mathis’ poem “On Turning Seventy” was published in 2021 by Sylvia Literary Magazine, U.K. She is the winner of the 2020 Ageless Authors Poetry Prize, third place, for “White Bird” which remained unpublished until now. She received international awards in writing, magazines and promotional projects throughout her career in corporate communications. Marilyn has edited a nonfiction book, Thriving Beyond Survival by Martha Germann. She has authored local and national magazine and newspaper features. She is currently at work on a mystery novel, several short stories and more poetry.

THE BALL'S IN CHINA'S COURT

Original cartoon by  Steve Breen, The San Diego Union-Tribune, October 15, 2019

James Hamby is the Associate Director of the Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University. He has been a finalist for the XJ Kennedy Parody Award and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize.

BREATHING LESSONS

by Mary K O'Melveny

“Can’t breathe” by Hong Kong artist Benson Koo at society6.

I CAN’T BREATHE

said Eric Garner, his loosies scattered
like toothpicks on the street, his chest
and neck compressed, his body battered,
then prone, as Daniel Pantaleo pressed
down harder until nothing mattered,
leaving questions for some later inquest.

WE CAN’T BREATHE

said Hong Kong protesters whose lungs
filled with tear gas as police fired
more cannisters and aimed their guns
toward their hearts, hoping they would grow tired
of trying to imagine worlds of other suns
where democracy was still admired.

THEY CAN’T BREATHE

said medics in hospital rooms, as patients
arrived in great numbers, gasping for air
while tobacco CEOs made deals in spacious
office suites for vaping products, aware
that regulations are slim and use contagious,
betting as usual that not enough would care.

SHE CAN’T BREATHE

said the driver who found a woman walking
alone on the roadway as Paradise fires raged,
her car abandoned long before, tires melting.
From his pickup, too hot to touch, he gauged
the odds of rescue and the dangers of stalking
cinders, then leapt out—one catastrophe assuaged.

THEY CAN’T BREATHE

said migrants still floating on choppy seas
about fellow travelers catapulted overboard
flailing, then sinking, while they watched with unease.
They had prayed to gods when they climbed aboard
these flimsy rafts and trembling skiffs. Those pleas
have thinned to terror as they continue seaward.

HE CAN’T BREATHE

said the mother whose wheezing child
struggled for each breath in and out,
while methane gas levels went wild
and fossil fuel fumes expanded throughout
their Appalachian hills. Even with their air defiled.
some still said there’s nothing to worry about.

WE CAN’T BREATHE

said Southeast Asian villagers choking in heat
and smog. Their farmlands cleared for palm oil,
nothing remains to be burned except the peat
which smolders like angry words beneath soil
while carbon fills the air with coppery sleet
and once lush jungles are forever spoiled.

I CAN’T BREATHE

said Mother Earth as Amazonian flames
joined those in Africa and Alaska to devour
her greenest places. As thick forests turned to arid plains
and savannahs, what once were leafy bowers
degraded to dieback deserts. Scientists maintain
some hope but she’s fast losing respiratory powers

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses will be published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

SEIZURE

by Laura Rodley

Officials in Hong Kong said on Friday that they had intercepted a shipment of nine tons of scales from pangolins, the largest seizure the city has ever made of products from one of the most frequently trafficked mammals in the world. A thousand elephant tusks were in the same shipment, officials said. The scales and tusks were seized on Jan. 16, said the customs authorities, who displayed the contraband for reporters. They were found hidden under slabs of frozen meat on a cargo ship that had stopped in Hong Kong on its way to Vietnam from Nigeria, said officials, who estimated the shipment’s value at nearly $8 million. —The New York Times, February 1, 2019

Minding their own business
pangolins slurp up termites
drawing squirming bugs into their stomach
with their tongues that begin in their stomach,
not the back of their mouths.

Minding their own business,
they do not smell the poachers or the poachers’ dogs,
poachers that cover their boots with pangolin musk
and the murky water they trudge through
to reach the pangolins emerged from their burrows at night.

Not even completely dead, poachers scrape away
pangolin scales, layered like pine cone fingernails on their backs
with sharp triangle blades that could but do not
cut the poachers’ hands, as they wear thick gloves,
poachers who consume the pulverized scales themselves

to combat pain of arthritis, asthma or rheumatism
that they have gained carrying baskets of scales out of the woods.
They have no awe of the stretched out beauty
of the pangolin’s body, peacock length with no feathers,
no awe of the babies that ride on their tails,

no fear of the way pangolins fight back—by rolling into a ball
around their young who just finished drinking their milk, easy to capture,
dismantle their scales, maybe carry some back alive to raise more.
They only think of their business, harvesting
the bounty, nine tons of scales seized mid January

in a Hong Kong port, amassed from nearly 14,000
rolled up balls expired, gasping, left behind,
so the razor edge of their scales can strengthen
someone’s bones, ease their pain. What about their conscience,
Does the eight million price tag cancel that?

Laura Rodley was a Pushcart Prize winner for her New Verse News poem "Resurrection." Finishing Line Press nominated her books Your Left Front Wheel Is Coming Loose and Rappelling Blue Light for the Mass Book Award. Former co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, Rodley teaches the As You Write It memoir class and has edited and published As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology volumes I-VI. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point by Prolific Press. 

GOLDEN ARCHES

by Gil Hoy

A woman sleeping at a McDonald’s restaurant in Hong Kong in October. Across East Asia, 24-hour McDonald's have become a sanctuary for the downtrodden, providing a warm, dry place to sleep. Credit Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2015

After birthday candle whites
 are blown out,
Kids all snug tucked
 in their beds,

Once Invisible down-and-outs
 retire to a corporate
Cash-cow Behemoth

For a good night's restless sleep,
 To stay warm for a while.

No other shelters available,
 No families of their own to turn to,

“McRefugees" of East Asia,
   With no other place to go.

On a good night: Feed on
  half-eaten Big Macs,
Chew on salty stale fries,

Lie down in a padded
 booth for comfort,

'Til just before dawn,
  the dominion call comes:

“Put on your shoes,
this is not your home.”

 Then just enough time
  to comb your black hair,

With a disposable fork--
and vanish.


Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer, writer and poet. He studied poetry at Boston University, while receiving a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Gil received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. His poetry has appeared most recently in Third Wednesday, The Write Room, The Eclectic Muse, Clark Street Review and TheNewVerse.News.

CHINA REIGN

by David Feela

Protesters in Hong Kong continued to demand a fully free vote in elections due in 2017 for the post of chief executive - Hong Kong's leader. Numbers were, however, far lower than the previous week. China has said that, under Hong Kong law, voters will be able to vote freely but from an approved list. --Photo by Philippe Lopez/AFP via BBC Week in Pictures

As shelter from Beijing weather,

the hand that holds the umbrella knows

repression shreds all hope

but in Hong Kong each umbrella blossoms

like a flower, shields the blindsided from mace, 

transforms the protester into a shadow 

under Xi Jinping’s glare.  How the years 

of bad luck for opening an umbrella 

must be weighed against the threat 

of living where truth never shines.

Remember this season of umbrellas,

this garden of good intentions.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.