EL SALVADOR

by Margaret Rozga

A name the conquistadores imposed

as if Christian, as if a name said it all.

There is not a single savior anywhere

anymore, if ever there was. Now

there in the name of the Savior, they

twist, strip meaning, bend backs,

shackle, shave heads, imprison,

no hope of return.

What angel, angels, to roll back this stone?

Arise, arise as one. Be one, good people.

Margaret Rozga, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee at Waukesha Professor of English Emerita, served as the 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate and the 2021 inaugural artist/scholar in residence at the UW Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station. She has published six books, most recently Restoring Prairie (2024) and Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems (2021).

WINNING THE WORLD CUP

by Margaret Rozga

Hooray Spain!

Hooray soft kick,

hooray edge into the goal,

hooray England so close.

Hooray women!

 

I want to believe in my health,

the health of the sport, the health

of the word, the health of the world

at play on the field for all of us.

 

See the women cross field pass,

see the women head goalward,

see the women strong legs.

 

I play the we, play into the we.

If we can win, the win is for the we.     

If we lose, the loss swept into the win.

Spain is not my country, nor England.

 

What in the world, a win—

what for the world, a win—rejoice!

Here, where, how, and why for the world,

for the game, for women, whoever,

wherever, this world moment, believe.

Margaret Rozga served as the 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate and the 2021 inaugural artist/scholar in residence at the UW Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station. Her fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press 2021). Cornerstone Press will also publish her 2024 forthcoming book, Restoring Prairie.

CRT MEETS THE LITTLE ROCK NINE

by Margaret Rozga

Sarah Huckabee Sanders appears in the center

of my television screen. Her head and shoulders

in sharp focus, that camera angle fixed as if

to convey steadfastness. As if.

In the background a stretch of hazy space as if

she appears out of nowhere. On either side of her

jewel blue, likely furniture, maybe facing couches,

though placed at such a distance from each other

as if to constrain conversation. The camera angle

cuts off a complete view, so they appear flat

surfaces as if they were beds.

She continues to talk, about surviving cancer,

about leaving her children at Christmas to fly

in the dark to Afghanistan in the entourage

of he who she lets remain unnamed. As if.

She moves on.

Little Rock’s Central High School, her school,

she says. Art on the State Capitol grounds now

celebrates the Little Rock Nine, African American

students unwelcomed, demeaned, threatened,

abused when they integrated the school. As if

to erase sixty-six years, she claims in this way

civil rights history is with her, as if her sneer

at CRT were not erasure.

Her service in the administration of the

president she traveled with in the dark

another as if.

Editor’s note: A proposed bill that would have prohibited the use of public school funds to teach the 1619 Project curriculum has failed to make it out of an Arkansas House committee. —THV11, February 9, 2023

 

 

Margaret Rozga served as a voting rights volunteer in rural Alabama in 1965 and was a participant in Milwaukee’s 1967-68 fair housing marches. Her fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press 2021).

SHE SAYS IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE

by Margaret Rozga

She was once her daughter’s age and that inscrutable. I was

once her age but already a widow. In Kyiv mothers

are brought near to tears, but who can cry, who can

anticipate having a daughter the age she now is?

Who has any room in her thoughts for anything more

than the backpack, the train station, the fear

of being separated, the maybe at the other side

of the border?

So fear takes a hiding place deep

in the chest but not as deep as the dream of a calm

and secure old age. Or deeper.

 

Here the three-year-old cries for a biscuit, begs

her to play. She sends the older brother to play

with the younger. Her daughter, my granddaughter

stays in the kitchen to listen

for the sound of dreams rising above worries

about prices. There is no war here,

no fear of bombs hitting this neighborhood. The war is

not that close to us. Not yet. The war weighs

on her mind even as she serves us fried fish and denies

biscuits. She worries about money in her non-war.

She cannot imagine. She can imagine.

This is how ghosts are born.

 

The succulent fish warms our bellies, relaxes

our conversation, shrinks the ghosts, makes room

for imagining a future for her family, my family,

hope for the Kyiv mother. Mothers.

Hope is what I, you, she

cling to when good is being bombed.

 

 

Margaret Rozga’s fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021). As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, she co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). Twitter: WIPoet @RozgaMargaret

I SHOULD BE ABLE TO WRITE A PROTEST POEM

by Margaret Rozga

Cartoon by Steve Sack, Star Tribune, July 7, 2021

I should be able to write a poem

about Afghani interpreters being given asylum

or rather not being given asylum, being dangled

the delicate hope of asylum for whatever that is worth.

 

Asylum acquired narrow connotations

as in insane asylum, not a refuge

but a silencing, an abandoning.

 

I should be able to write

with the insistent beat of a heart on fire,

the passion of Whitman’s barbaric yelp,

the precision of an accountant

totaling the debt to be repaid.

 

Airlift Afghani allies to the Field Station

where I write of black-eyed susans

counting their thirteen brilliant petals

flower after flower, utterly dependable.

 

We should. I should. What is power for?

What are words for?

 

If they do not set deeds in motion,

if they do not celebrate good,

if they do not open up space,

if they allow moral failure

if they do not uncover names

of the unnamed who throw up

obstacles to justice,

        then

be forever silent.

 

As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Margaret Rozga co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). Her fifth book of poems is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021).

GOVERNMENT DIS-SERVICE ADMINISTRATION

by Margaret Rozga

Cartoon by Ann Telnaes, The Washington Post, November 20, 2020.

There once was a sycophant named Murphy

who claimed more than was her turf-y.

She refused to sign that the winner had won

and let the loser know his term was near done,

forsaking duty to go topsy turvy

Margaret Rozga’s latest work was to co-edit a newly released poetry anthology, Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems.

FOR JACOB BLAKE

SHOT BY A COP, PARALYZED, AND SHACKLED TO A HOSPITAL BED


by Margaret Rozga

As Jacob Blake was freed from handcuffs in the hospital, the Kenosha police union said Friday that Blake put an officer in a headlock moments before being shot in the back. Since Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot seven times in the back by a White officer, local officials have not discussed many details citing the ongoing investigation led by state investigators.

On Friday, the Kenosha Professional Police Association took issue with the public narrative, saying that he confronted officers, put an officer in a headlock and carried a knife that he refused to drop when ordered to by police, the union said. For Blake's attorneys, the police union's narrative is merely a tactic to justify the officers' actions. "I think it's the common strategy that police departments use in these type of circumstances. It's always trying to justify murder for misdemeanors," attorney B'Ivory LaMarr told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Friday. —CNN, August 29, 2020

Who made the decision to shackle him?
Who shackled him?
Who is the nurse who cares for him shackled?
Who is the doctor who does the surgery? Surgeries?
Was he shackled during surgery?

They did not say shackle. They said restrained.

What words minimize, hide, disguise, mask:
who uses words like this?
What words for this?

His father said handcuffed, handcuffed to the bed.
His father’s words leave the bedside, leave
the hospital, hit the air, hit the air waves,
hit the heart, cry out for release, cry for justice,
words that restrain other words, words that free.

Still to be told:
the nurse’s story, the nurses’ stories
the doctor’s,  the doctors’.

The decider, the deciders, hold a press conference,
are pressed. Pressed, they leave. They leave questions
opening like unacknowledged wounds,
lingering like ghosts of the dead they cannot shackle.

Margaret Rozga is the current Wisconsin Poet Laureate.  She writes poems from her ongoing concern for social justice.

NOMINATING HIGH RISK

by Margaret Rozga 

“Top of the Ticket” cartoon by David Horsey / Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2016.

Imagine a rabbit, running, late.
Imagine a rabbit no earlier
on the ground than under.

Alice locked out of the garden
too big, too small, never right
as much on the ground as under,

uncertain of direction,
advised only to take the road
that gets her where she wants to go,
as if she knew, either on the ground or under.

Even at tea, her place changes,
is changed, exchanged, until
she’s displaced, no rhyme nor reason
either on the ground or under.

At the queen’s command an unruly hand
of insubstantial and un-gamely subjects.
At risk anyone, everyone’s head,
no less on these grounds than under.

What time is this, what times are these,
rude, rough, incomprehensible
how a rabbit’s world surfaced,
and calm picnic grounds went under.

Alice, you just dreamed you fell and didn’t
know when, how, or where you’d stop.
Now that dream is playing out
on our ground,
not under.

Margaret Rozga is a poet, essayist, and author of a play, March On Milwaukee: A Memoir of the Open Housing Protests.  Her new manuscript of poems focuses on Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902), who actively campaigned in 1856 for her husband  John Charles Frémont, the first Republican candidate for president on an anti-slavery platform.

DRESSING UP THE TRADITION

by Margaret Rozga

It’s still raw there, there at the lunch counters
of our minds, our souls. Closing Woolworth’s
could not erase it, not given its firmly-fixed seat,
nor could putting sheets back on beds,
snarling dogs back in kennels.  Patronizing
faces in high places, crosses still
burn, codes still smolder, singe
those too young to know what a noose is.
Suit and tie it, it’s still a night rider.


Margaret Rozga has published three books: Two Hundred Nights and One Day, Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad, and her latest   Justice   Freedom   Herbs.

MEMO: IN MEXICO'S DEFENSE

by Margaret Rozga

Mexico Finds Itself Knee-Deep in Victory -- NY Times, June 23, 2014

The ball touches his fingertips
ricochets left of the goal.

The ball against his body
for another save, and in the 69th minute
he saves again with the upper part
of his left thigh.

“There are nights” he says
“when the ball seems to hit you even
If you close your eyes.”

Mexico’s Coach Miguel Herrera
chose at the last minute to go with the calm
of goalie Guillermo Ochoa.

The ball is in his hands,
his calm and saving hands.


Margaret Rozga has published two books: Two Hundred Nights and One Day and Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad.  Her new book  Justice   Freedom   Herbs   is scheduled for January 2015 publication.

THE KNOWN UNKNOWN

by Margaret Rozga



He squints through his narrow glasses, looking
above the shoulder and beyond the ear
of the journalist.

He takes the numerical part
of the question, ruminates,
Two, three.  Not so many.

He draws his lip in an upward
arch flat against his face.  His teeth edge
into the opening of what passes for a smile.

Death falls from the sky
Death marches on the capitol.
Truck bombs, IEDs, rocket propelled grenade launchers.
Death strikes back.

Put death in prison.  Abu Ghraib.  Guantanamo.
A black hole at Bagram.  Secret centers of interrogation.
Enhanced death.

Waterboard until the interrogated wish they were dead.
Construct your smile out of this vacuum.


Margaret Rozga has published two books, Two Hundred Nights and One Day and Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad.  Her most recent poems and book reviews appear in the Spring 2014 issue of Verse Wisconsin online.

THE STATE OF WISCONSIN

by Margaret Rozga





Capitol Police Captain Lonergan speaks into his shoulder.

 During a game when he speaks,
Packers’ Head Coach Mike McCarthy
props up his nose with a stiff sheet of paper.

Two stiff-eyed officers, watch the center, slow-walk
the circumference counter-clockwise.

Guards on the circumference of the perhaps
mine in the Penokee Hills scarf their faces.

Judge Conley finds sections of the permit requirement
unconstitutional in ways that raise “the question of whether
the rest of the Access Policy can be salvaged.”
Perhaps he thinks this clear.

They nod and cut a clear line toward the center.

The center of attention, Senate President
Mike Ellis screws up his face, busts a gavel.

We saw you, your face, your mouth moving.
We have clear evidence. You were singing.

No one saw the Governor pick up the phone.
Just imagine his face as he answers the prank call.

Justices of the Supreme Court hear arguments
and take them into their own hands.

Teachers take pay cuts.

He’s busted. He’s held in
a basement room, plastic cuffs cutting into
his wrists.

In the still green of the Penokee Hills,
the Ojibwe set up a harvest camp.

Packer backers, happy to have tickets,
paint their faces and chests green and gold.

Another $200 ticket.  What’s up, Captain
Lonergan? What do you call down there?
And who calls it in to you?


Margaret Rozga has published two books: Two Hundred Nights and One Day and Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad. Her poems have appeared recently in The Kerf, Nimrod and as a Split This Rock Poem of the Week.  Her essay “Community Inclusive: A Poetics to Move Us Forward,” published in Verse Wisconsin, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Milwaukee and blogs about poetry and social justice.