TOO MANY / TO MANY

by Ron Riekki

Following a comprehensive investigation, the Justice Department announced today [December 12, 2024] that the Mount Vernon, New York, Police Department (MVPD) engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of rights secured by the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Specifically, the Justice Department finds that MVPD:

• Uses excessive force in numerous ways, including by unnecessarily escalating minor encounters and by overusing tasers and closed-fist strikes, particularly against individuals who have already been taken to the ground, are controlled by many officers or are already fully or partially restrained;
• Conducted unlawful strip searches and body cavity searches of individuals until at least 2023; and
• Makes arrests without probable cause.

Sometimes bodies kill bodies and bodies

haunt bodies and sometimes bodies taunt

bodies and sometimes bodies search bodies

and sometimes those bodies are bloody

from the hoods where they’re buried in

blindness and sometimes bodies are bottled

into incarceration-hungry systems and some-

times systems kill bodies and sometimes

bodies suffocate and sometimes bodies

aren’t bodies when they’re killed and

erased and sometimes bodies are innocent

and mostly bodies are innocent and always

bodies are innocent and sometimes systems

are guilty and sometimes systems are guilty

and sometimes systems are guilty and often

systems are guilty and this system is guilty.

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

THIS WAS NOT A NEWS STORY

by Catherine Gonick

Cold Spring, NY, October 15, 2022

 

The trees were at their red and orange height

as we drove toward our town and had to stop

for a parade. A police car parked sideways 

on the road blocked our way. At first

we thought the line of cars was a funeral

procession, until we noticed the drivers

and passengers were all boys, some standing 

to wave American flags from top-down convertibles,

open moon-roofs, the backs of 4 x 4s. They smiled

as they passed, and a few saluted like Nazis.

The next week, the editor of the local paper said it sounded

like the high school parade held the previous Friday.

But we’d seen this procession the next day. The police

said they knew nothing about it. As far as we knew,

only my husband and I had seen it. I saw just one

Hitler salute, but he saw three. Afterward

we kept driving to a birthday party for a friend,

a Holocaust survivor still going strong at 95.

He told the guests about the night the doorbell rang

and his father was taken to Dachau. We reported

the parade we’d just seen, which already felt like a dream.

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Forge, Live Encounters, Soul-Lit, and Amethyst Review, and in anthologies including Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and, forthcoming, Rumors, Secrets, Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She lives in Cold Spring, NY and works in a company that slows the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate.

BORDER/NO BORDER

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

A woman traveling alone with her infant, seeming to understand that she will be arrested, walks toward Canadian police on the far side of the border from Champlain, NY.  Photo by Kathleen Masterson/VPR via NPR, February 17, 2017

Members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police help a family from Somalia on Feb. 17, 2017 along the U.S.-Canada border near Hemmingford, Quebec. (The Canadian Press/AP) —The Washington Post, February 23, 2017

While some refugees are also crossing into Manitoba and British Columbia, according to the Canada Border Services Agency, some 452 people made refugee claims in Quebec in January alone, after being arrested for illegally crossing the border on foot with their strollers and suitcases in tow. Paradoxically, since the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the U.S. came into force in 2004, people entering from the U.S. can only claim refugee status in Canada if they cross outside the designated ports of entry—in other words, illegally. —Montreal Gazette, February 16, 2017

Trudeau: Canada will continue to accept asylum seekers from US 

—The Hill, February 21, 2017

She stands at end of Roxham Road
At the unmarked Canadian border
A Road Closed sign, then
15 feet along a well-walked path

border/ no border

The woman clutches
the handle of a rolling suitcase
Her baby wrapped
in the other arm

Across the border/ no border

Mounties in uniforms
Ma’am they say, ma’am
she does not understand
she is holding her son

border/no border

ma’am they say
we have to arrest you
if you walk across
at this here

border/no border

the men do not pull their guns
the guns gleam
in their leather holsters
car seat in a Mountie cruiser

Guns/ no guns

The woman steps into the cruiser
a border-jumper choosing not to live
in fear of what comes next
in crazy country, still she hesitates

border/no border

before she hands the baby
to a Mountie. In Canada
after 24 hours she’ll be released
or seen by a judge.


Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks.