UPON LEARNING THAT THE UNITED STATES VOTED AGAINST

the United Nations resolution designating the trafficking
of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity.”

 

by Cecil Morris

 

 

 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) March 25, 2026 — The U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday adopted a resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans "the gravest crime against humanity" and calling for reparations as "a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs." The resolution also urges "the prompt and unhindered restitution" of cultural items—including artworks, monuments, museum pieces, documents and national archives—to their countries of origin without charge. The vote in the 193-member world body was 123-3, with 52 abstentions. Argentina, Israel and the United States were the three members voting against the resolution. The United Kingdom and all 27 members of the European Union were among those that abstained.

 

 

I think of Macbeth fresh from murdering his king,
his hands still badged with royal blood
and Macbeth asking why he could not say Amen,
could not call God’s blessing to himself.
Of course, even my least interested student knew
that answer: guilt. Guilt for what he’d done.
I think of my teenage daughter denying evidence
of some minor transgression, thinking, I guess,
that if she herself did not say it then it could not
be true. I think of her at 2 when we played peek-a-boo
or at 3 when we played hide-and-seek
and she thought she became invisible behind
a curtain even though it didn’t cover her shoes.
Even now, a 160 years after the 13th,
are we still Macbeth, tongue-tied by an inherited,
collective guilt? Or are we the teen who thinks
well, we didn’t know, it wasn’t even illegal then,
and what about the Holocaust or the genocide
in Armenia or litany of other horrific things?
Why can’t we just say Amen, just say yes
it was a grave crime? Oh, there’s the statement
about reparations, how they’d be right,
a remedy, if you will, for historic wrongs.
There’s the rub. Who’d volunteer to pay a fine
for great-great-great-great-grand-country’s mistake?
Wipe the evidence from your face and books,
and never admit what can be denied.

 

 

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025. He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California. 

TOXIC HYPERMADNESS

by Ron Riekki

“Hazing investigation into Mt. Ararat hockey team found pattern of ‘sexually inappropriate conduct’”

—Portland Press Herald, April 29, 2025

 

“Onondaga DA to Westhill Lax Players Involved in Alleged Hazing: Turn Yourself In”

—Finger Lakes Daily News, April 30, 2025

 

 

If you ask how long the effects of hazing lasts,

it’s till the end of poems.  No, longer.  As long

as the sleep of death.  It’s the length of a billion

leaves.  It’s the memory of dark in the middle

of your noon.  It’s fear ingrained in your home.

 

It’s moon in your chest.  It’s Macbeth debted

in the desks of my amygdala.  It’s absence of

absence when you just want peace.  It’s shaking

all night like an earthquake’s in your skin.  It’s

stronger.  Sin.  A hazmat at the door.  It’s a core

 

of pure Hell.  I know.  I was there, enlisted,

military, duct-taped mouths, ensuring futures

of gloom in your best days.  It’s essays I write

in the nightmares of night where I replay all

the replays of the fence and the ice in our eyes

 

when they gathered like witches, no, much

worse, more male, and more morbid, murmurs

of curse words and curses of teens carrying

canteens with jock-minds and abusive dads

recreating wrecks that had us calling suicide

 

hotlines for years with the gore of agoraphobia

from the memories of fence, but the problem

of your problem is forgetting our resilience,

all of those who have been hazed and are

battling the battles of the past—all the bullies

 

of the world can kiss my goddamn ass.  No!

On second thought, don’t touch us.  Just get

help, because you know what you did, and

who died—just one when I was in, one who

never got out; and I was more afraid of our

 

side than the enemy, but now that I’m free,

I turn to poets and poetry, which the bullies

don’t read.  But the resilient do.  And if you

were hazed, all poems are for you.  And this

world’s for you.  We inherit the earth by voice.

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

BLOODBATH

 by Ron Riekki

 

                                               “If you expect nothing

from somebody

                                                you are never disappointed.”

                                                            —Sylvia Plath

 

If I don’t get elected,

it’s going to be a bloodbath…

 

It’s going to be a bloodbath

for the country.

 

Bloodbath—coined in 1867.

1867—the transatlantic slave trade

 

“ends.” Blood red state said,

“The candidate is candid,” but did

 

you realize he’s inciting another

insurrection, an opposite of Resurrection

 

with Easter coming up, playing possum,

a country in toxic immobility, a wrath,

 

a hoodwink, a flood path we walked,

knee-deep, after the storm, the sewage,

 

age 18, me and a friend, Boston, cars

drowned. “It already is a bloodbath,”

 

she says. Adds, “And we’ve already lost.”

There’s a birdbath outside my window,

 

Dearborn, no birds, no deer, no births,

a friend having a miscarriage. There’s

 

a smell outside like hell outside, the factories

in the not-so-distant distance greying the sky

 

violently, no insight, no sun in sight, buried

by clouds, or smoke, or both. “It’s going to be

 

a bloodbath,” my ex- says, choked on the words,

mocks. The clock ticks in the other room, or

 

is that water dripping in the shower? A madness.

Blathering on and on on the TV. We listen. Scared.

 

“He looks like a Star Wars villain.” “Children

are watching this.” “I hope not.” “He has cash

 

in his blood.” Bloodbath dumbass scumbags

aftermath sociopath car-crash collapse. “I always

 

imagine him with a Hitler mustache.” Fat naps.

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.”—Plath.

 

Gasps. Gaps. I read a story about Roman Polanski

walking onto the set of Macbeth that he was directing.

 

the set designer supposed to be filling the room with blood, but

Polanski looked, said, “It’s not enough.” They added more.

 

“It’s not enough.” They added more blood. He said it wasn’t

enough. He said he was there, had seen it; it wasn’t enough

 

blood. Manson murderers targeted Polanski’s home. He’d seen.

“More blood,” he said, “It’s not enough.” My ex-: “How is he

 

even running again? How is this happening?” It’s a repetition.

I was in Macbeth once. We’d say the name of the play, didn’t

 

care about the curse. The boy who played The Boy in the play

killed himself, the week of previews. Macduff’s son. The egg.

 

He jumped off a bluff. Landed in a field. Not found for a week.

I was Macduff. I was bad. I was young. I was not ready for

 

the role. I feel like that now. The bad reviews, of me, at least.

My family, slaughtered. The Boy, a friend of mine. The fall.

 

At the end, the decapitated head. The death. The wooden stage.

The poor attendance. The bad politics, even back then. Poverty

 

in my mining hometown. My boyhood. How I stood on stage

after it was done, the place empty, and from the back of our

 

theater, I saw The Boy, my friend, emerge from the shadows,

and I swear to God, how he appeared, dead, but still there, stepping

 

out, of the silence, the madness of that role, the method acting

I tried to do, failed, succeeded, both, a good attempt, a good

 

failure, and then him, here, there, in front of me, in the dark-

light, this friend, ended, how he stood there, looking at me,

 

and I froze, flecks of blood on his face—no, his face only

blood, and his mouth opened, and he stepped back, and he

 

was gone. And my ex- leaves the room. And I turn off

the volume on the television. And the Presidential candid-

 

ate stood there, stands there, his teeth like ghosts, ghost-like teeth,

his hat like hate, his arterial cap, the horror of this country,

 

the terror of this moment, the repetition of it all, how I’ve

seen this same snippet, comment, from him, already thirteen

 

times today, and the room is silent, and I turn my head and

look to the right, a room that we didn’t know until we’d

 

already paid the rent, signed the lease, but we’d found on-

line that someone had killed himself in this apartment, our

 

apartment, where we lived; of course, it happens, they don’t tell you,

you move in, find out, stumble on it. And I looked into the room.

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

INNOCENT

by Ron Riekki

“The United States teamed up with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to challenge language that would have welcomed the findings of the landmark report, which said that the world has barely 10 years to cut carbon emissions by nearly half to avoid catastrophic warming.” —The Washington Post, December 9, 2018


“What’s been a rotten investment for me? . . . We bought a whole series of birds for the suites in the Plaza Hotel. These are real, live birds—all sorts of little birds flying around in the suites. Some people walk in, they don’t believe what they’re seeing. Usually they’re just little artificial birds. These are real birds. And we have to be very careful, David, with who we let go into the suites. Sometimes a high roller wants to come to New York, and they want to go into the Plaza Hotel, and I’ll never let a high roller from Atlantic City go into the suite in The Plaza where we have these live birds because the birds won’t be alive very long.” —Donald T***p to David Letterman, November 10, 1988 quoted in The Atlantic.
         

Each day we go out of business.
I meant to say that we should mind our own business.
I mean to say that we shouldn’t,
that we’re too busy with banishing,
I mean,
vanishing.
I mean to say that you’re a mean one, Mr. T.,
the bad T.,
the one with truckloads of money
where he trumpets his everything,
the one who’s trying to truncate us,
the U.S.,
the U. S.O.S.—
by this I mean that we might be adding humans
to the list of
the African elephant
            whooping crane
            Puerto Rican parrot
and the rest predicted to go extinct,
the rest that’ll rest for eternity,
restless,
from trick-or-treat voting,
a true-lies presidency.
I write this while listening to a neighbor’s coughing
next door,
a coughing that sounds, strangely, a bit like whooping cough,
a coffin type of coughing,
whopping,
his lungs taken
by the recent forest fires
that weren’t forest fires
but everything fires—
Tule elk fires
and California clapper rail fires
and golden trout fires
            and San Francisco garter snake fires
            and California newt fires
(all of which only live in California)
and, of course, Californian fires


88 killed in the recent fires


climate change
vs.
change = coins = money
meaning
there is a lot of money to be made
from deregulation,
from rampant pollution,
from prioritizing coal overall
over all
rational
thinking,
how a friend
who said his coworkers working on the electric car
are worried they’ll end up in the electric chair,
meaning there is sabotage in this age,
extinction tied to someone ExxonMobil-loyal,
that our President’s hands are covered in oil
the way that Macbeth’s were covered in blood.
The innocent sleep.  The innocent sleep.  The innocent slept.

Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and the upcoming Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).