BUCK KLEIN AND THE IMMIGRATION JUDGE

by Dana Yost

CNN, September 28, 2026

Where i grew up,
there was an old man
in a long black coat
and a derby hat.
He slumped, slouched
along streets and
hallways. A church warden,
but not a creep,
though, There to make
sure we kids did the right
thing—that we acted
with decency, respect,
that we cared about
the small town where
we lived. A role model,
if dressed a bit weirdly.
Now, i read about a judge
making threats against
little boys—threatening
to ruin their lives,
to split them from families,
to ship them to countries
where they know no one,
where it’s possible
they will be trafficked
or killed. It’s true.
I’ve read the courthouse
transcripts. This time,
creep is the right word.
I think about the class
I took my freshman
year in college: a study
of the Nazi regime,
the guts of it,
how men became
desensitiezed to the plight
of others, how the lives
of others became
as disposable as my
mother’s empty lighter.
Have we slid into
that sort of nation,
letting judges tell 
kids they have the power
to destroy them? 
The old man in the long
coat of my childhood
would gather
children, give them
shovels and hoes,
have them clean
a patch of weedy
sidewalk, scrape bird
shit off the side of the church.
We’d know it was the right
thing to do: to make the place
look better, because
it was our home.
He spoke gently to us,
but he’d take this judge
in Texas by the throat,
push him to his knees
and say, here,
pull the weeds from the cracks
of the sidewalk, leave
the children alone.
Is that true?
or is it what I want
to be true?
Let’s say it’s both,
Let’s say there is still
some adult who cares
about morality,
the moral high ground
in this country of fast money 
and power-grubbers,
and if that sounds
preachy, then I guess
it does. His name
was Buck Klein
it was it was
it was. Maybe I’ll
drive to Texas
and start a spray-painting
campaign on the bridges
and roads and sides
of courthouses:
Buck Klein lives,
he does, he does,
and judges who do not
know this should
lose their jobs,
should be sentenced
to 40 days on a playground,
learning to care
what becomes
of the children.

Dana Yost is a former daily newspaper editor and writer. He has had 10 books published since 2008 and is a three-time Pushcart nominee. He lives in Sioux Falls, S.D., trying to stay blue in a very red state.

LEGACY LEANS IN

by Ronna Magy

 

Touring towns along the Danube, my rough Jewish boots trample cobblestone streets. Inset in sidewalks, brass stumble stones naming townsfolk murdered during World War II. Along the waters, a somber synagogue carved with perished names, marked and unmarked moss-covered graves.

At Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp skeletal yellow-starred Jews, pink-triangled gays, Spaniards, Poles, and Russians worked until dead. Non-Aryans stacked like canned fish in barracks at winter degrees. Prisoners chiseled granite, lugged 100 lb. rocks up steep stairs. Stumblers on the “Stairs of Death,” “Parachute jumpers” flung to their deaths. Inside brick buildings, gas lines rusted concrete. Weak prisoners marched in for hot showers. Chemical death.

The camp, above town, disguised behind forested hills. Our guide reveals a letter from a neighboring farmer’s wife who objected to watching prisoners shot, then thrown off cliffs. She made this request: Could the atrocities be staged elsewhere so she wouldn’t have to see.

What happens to democracy when hatred and evil link arms? It’s not news to us what’s happening in the US.   Adelanto   Atlanta   Aurora   Bismark   Battle Creek   Brooklyn    Casper    Calexico    Chicago    Des Moines    Detroit    El Paso   Honolulu   Houston   Leavenworth   Lewisburg   Miami   New Orleans   Newark   Philadelphia  Tacoma  Youngstown. Caged migrants: 70,000  already detained.

Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres   Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz   Victor Manuel Diaz   Heber Sanchaz Domínguez.  All dead. An unmarked black SUV just screeched by tinted windows rolled down. Masked men shouldering guns.

Ronna Magy’s recent writings appear in SWWIM Every Day, Cholla Needles, Made From Midnight, Rise Up Review, Women in a Golden State, The Los Angeles Press, Persimmon Tree, Writers Resist, and Sinister Wisdom. An alumna of the Napa Valley Writers Conference, Ronna’s curated readings of seasoned queer women poets for the Outwrite and Circa Queer Histories Festivals. She’s a retired ESL instructor and textbook author. 

DIDN’T COME TO SCHOOL TODAY

by Shawn Reagan

Demonstrators hold a rally and march to protest a recent increase of activity in the area by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on February 01, 2025 in Waukegan, Illinois. Scott Olson/Getty Images via ABC News.

I don't know why Lorenzo      didn't come to school today. 

Just as he didn't       present his project yesterday.

So much unknown      so easy to lose track of days. 

So, I hold to what I know.       I remain resolute. 

I know when gesture      is really Nazi salute.

I know the smell      of new school fascista.

I know it's winter      and there's ICE on the streets. 

and 

I know Lorenzo      didn't come to school today. 

Authors note: I am a teacher with many immigrant students. After Trump’s inauguration, ICE vehicles and agents began appearing on our city streets. Many of my Hispanic students had to stay home from school at this time. They were often the only members of their family who could speak English in case of a knock at the door. While the students have now returned, the fear remains.

Shawn Reagan is a poet, teacher, and husband from Minnesota. A sleeping giant of the poetic world, his work is currently focused on life with bipolar 2 and depression. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Tadpole Press Poetry Prize.

ELEVEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN INAUGURATION

by Roberto Christiano

"I am out with lanters (sic) looking for myself."    

—Emily Dickinson

 

I am awake. I am a foreigner. Illegal. I am my 
parents. I know that I am not illegal. I feel that I 
am. I am scared.

My father was illegal. If you were stuck in 
poverty with Hitler’s trains running through you 
and countries crumbling before you, you’d be 
illegal too.

Musk gives the Hitler salute. Or is it the Roman 
salute? You know, the one you do to Mussolini.

My mother’s row house in the Italian section of 
D.C. was searched by the FBI for possible 
connections to Mussolini. Every Italian house 
was.

Male and female. Since when was that an easy 
divide?

Melania hides her face under a boater hat just as 
America hides her soul under a bushel.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

It snowed here. I can’t shovel. Uncontrolled high 
blood pressure. A man and his brother shoveled 
for me. Carlos and Zé. They won’t be here 
tomorrow.

I worked at the Library of Congress for twenty 
years. Our guards are the same as the Capitol 

guards. On January 6^th our guard was killed.
There are no degrees of separation. Separation is 
an illusion.

I am scared. I feel that I am. I know that I am not 
illegal. I am my parents. Illegal. I am a foreigner. 

I am awake.

Author’s note: Father married Mother and became a U.S. citizen. Mother was already a citizen.

Roberto Christiano won the 2010 Fiction Prize from Northern Virginia Review. He received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poem, Why I Sang at Dinner, in Prairie Schooner. His poetry is anthologized in The Gávea–Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry (Brown University). His full legnth collection, Port of Leaving, is published by Finishing Line Press. Other poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Rattle, The Washington Post, Writer.org, and The Sow's Ear.

SAME WEIRD SH*T

by Cody Walker

via Rolling Stone, January 20, 2025

In 2020 we got HBO so we could watch The Plot Against America. Now it’s almost five years later, and we still have HBO (now called Max). And we still have a plot against America! Except it’s not a plot; it’s an open invitation. You can even vote for it. We did vote for it.

Cody Walker is the author of three poetry collections, all from the Waywiser Press. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor.

VERMIN

by Nan Ottenritter

As a child I had a recurring Nazi dream.

A band of proud, uniformed Nazis 
marched down my street, brass instruments
blaring a musical tribute to the Führer
who blasted his own hatred through words.

If the Nazis stopped, turned, and faced your house,
that was it. You were done for. I was so afraid.

My bedroom was on the front of the house.
I peered out from behind the curtain, wishing
with all the fervor a child’s wish could hold,
they would not stop, turn, and face me, face us.

But they did. And there the dream stops.

And continues today.

No longer children, we watch and wait,
words like vermin and cockroach chilling our bones.
We remain childlike in our not-knowing-what-to-do.
We act, but will it be enough? 
We care, but will that make a difference?
We see, but can we change the landscape? 

Nan Ottenritter is a poet and musician who lives in Richmond, VA. Her chapbook, Eleanor, Speak, is available from Finishing Line Press. Her works have appeared in the Artemis Journals, TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Life in 10 Minutes, the Poetry Society of Virginia Anthologies, As You Were: The Military Review, and the 2023 Journal of the Virginia Writers Club. She is a 2024 poet for the Writing the Land project.

MOVING RIGHT ALONG

by Steven Kent

They’re saying now the quiet parts out loud,
These candidates and pundits. Boys are Proud,
Who bigotry and bloodshed advocate
In incoherent rage against the State.
What voices once spoke reason now are still
As zealots do the talking on the Hill.
The party on the Left moved to the Right;
The party on the Right moved out of sight.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer, musician, and Oxford comma enthusiast Kent Burnside. His work appears in Light, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, and OEDILF, among others.

WHEN ALL ROADS LEAD TO MONSTERS

In memory of Boris Romantschenko 1926-2022

by Shelly Blankman

I

When all roads lead to monsters, where do you turn?

Plucked like a stinkweed from his family farm, a young

Ukrainian is trucked like freight to Nazi camps, where he

labors for the next 12 years in four concentration camps.

Like all captives, he will be stripped of warm clothes in 

frigid weather. He will be fed a half-slice of bread and 

watered-down soup before laboring in dark and dank

tunnels and mines with only stone cots on which to rest.

In quarries, he will hoist heavy boulders up hundreds of

steps and carry down corpses of those murdered by

Nazis for their frailities. And if he falters, he dies, too.

He survives. Sick, emaciated, bearing scars of abuse

and pain, but alive. 

II

He returns to Ukraine to rebuild his life. An apartment that is 

safe and warm. Clothes, food, medical care. A wife, children

and grandchildren. Most of all, he has a voice. He travels to

speak for those who have been silenced. Conferences, events,

memorials, and schools. People must remember. This must

never happen again. But his travels have now led to a wartorn

road with a dead end. Seventy-seven years after his nightmare

at the hands of Nazis has ended, Russian troops bomb his

apartment, killing him.

III

He now lies in a roadside cemetery. A few family members clustered 

around his coffin at his funeral. A stiff, cold wind snuffed out their 

lit candles quickly. A young Orthodox priest, bundled in a parka,

led a hasty service as bombs blasted in the distance. “He was patient

and kind,” he lamented as the coffin was lowered into the damp ground.

If only the world would be the same.

Shelly Blankman lives in Columbia, Maryland, where she and her husband have filled their empty nest with three rescue cats and a foster dog. Their sons, Richard and Joshua,  now live in New York and Texas (respectively). Following careers in journalism, public relations, and copy editing, Shelly now spends time writing poetry, scrapbooking and making cards. Her poetry has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Super Highway, Praxis Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Muddy River Review, among other publications. A couple of years ago, Richard and Joshua surprised Shelly by publishing her first book of poetry, Pumpkinhead.

TRUMP OF THE WILL

by George Salamon

"That 'Triumph of the Will' is a great propaganda film, there is no doubt…”  —Roger Ebert

Watching the 'Save America' rallies

for T***p is a reminder that we cannot

do Fascism the way the Germans did

as was captured in that infamous movie

of the Nazi Party rallies back in 1934.

What we see in Washington is a drab,

rag-tag bunch of stragglers, wannabe

warriors for a stumblebum president

clinging to power, any movie made of

their antics would gather the worst of

reviews on Rotten Tomatoes for any

"Trump of the Will" version of an ism

that may come to America by the ballot

box on petit bourgeois feet instead.

George Salamon wonders if the "It can't happen here" argument about fascism is still heard in faculty lounges and Starbucks coffee houses in the blue areas of America.

I CAN'T VOTE

by Marsha Owens

“Sorted” by Pia Guerra at The Nib, August 17, 2020.

Blue mailboxes thrown onto truck beds
helter-skelter like toy soldiers tossed
onto a playroom floor, except I see
pictures—this is not make-believe—
but a real-time story much like the one
Anne told in her diary except by this point
in Germany trucks and trains carried people,
her father, other fathers, mothers, gone
to god knows where, and still Anne
believed her father would come back
someday, just stroll through the door
like coming home from work. . .but
we all know that’s not how her story ended.
So where is the mailbox graveyard?
Is someone burying
these mailboxes
next to Democracy
and the 2020 election—
they were such a fine
couple in new jersey just
a few days ago—but now
they lie close to my friend
who died from COVID-19,
just across from
Sweet Liberty
and Blind Justice
in a spot near
an eerie gravesite
that echoes
a lament into each
dark night,
i can’t breathe.


For her bio, Marsha Owens samples Nikki Giovanni: "I've been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?"

MISSION

by Wendy Hoffman

Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times, May 29, 2020.

The moon lifts its holy head like a sanctified queen.
Humans should not be there or leave bent over, backwards, reverent.
But competitive men are curious which they believe gives them the right.
This country, which turned away victims but
invited defeated Nazi scientists,
rips the untouchable veil from the bottom up
and ejects transparent astronauts,
stooges, sacrificed heroes.
A large striped boot print tattoos crevasses, crevices,
craters.

When I was four playing outside, a neighborhood boy twice my age or more

wanted to see me down there. He pointed his skinny finger. I squeezed my thighs

together but already trained never to say no, I watched my cotton undies fall to

my turned in ankles. The curious boy who rode his bicycle through hilly blocks

pretended to be a scientist. He inspected and had a good look.

They have a good photographic look while jobless people
on earth look up and remain hungry.
I watch rockets on TV,
hide my reddened face from our irreverence.


Wendy Hoffman had amnesia for most of her life. When she regained memory late in life, she wrote books about what she had forgotten. Karnac Books, London, published two of her memoirs in 2014 and 2015, as well as her first book of poetry in 2016. She co-authored a book of essays in 2018 for Routledge. Her third memoir is forthcoming from Aeon Books. Hoffman has a MFA and lives on the Olympic Peninsula with her little dog.

PREPPING FOR DOOMSDAY

by Tom Karlson

Michigan closed down its capitol in Lansing on Thursday and canceled its legislative session rather than face the possibility of an armed protest and death threats against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The gathering, meant to advocate opening the state for business despite the coronavirus pandemic, followed one April 30 that resulted in pictures of protesters clad in military-style gear and carrying long guns crowding the statehouse. They confronted police and taunted lawmakers. —Bloomberg, May 14, 2020

they are not wearing brown shirts
they can’t sing Deutschland Uber Alles
these protesters are tattooed white nationalists
cameo clad, heavily armed,
red hatted, tattooed, with confederate flag and swastika
they are dyed in the wool homegrown
Nazi  Motherfuckers

crazed defenders of the second amendment
president t***p tweets open up America,
protect the constitution
these are good people
these are his people

protected by Barr’s boys
the thugs are on the move
ordered and paid to liberate
Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky
they come to boogaloo (armed insurrection)
not native or black or brown
these pale thugs have carte blanche
from the loyal men in blue

BC (before covid)
45 and his boys knew
high stock market and
low employment equal
certain reelection

AC (after covid)
the equation is changed
and the impeached one
the quinine loving
fact fucker
does nothing for 8 weeks
for thousands a early death

and now we have
the orange domed leader
press briefing rallies
urging his doomsday prepping,
white privileged militia goons
to open up
and make america great again


Tom Karlson’s information: My poetry is political / my poetry is about stuff I can see / smell feel hear / read about / stuff from history, / natural history / my history / an outcry, protest / justice, injustice / of contradictions / and musings / sounds and goddesses / moving around objective / reality toward life / a better world is coming

LATE NIGHT IN A SMOKY BAR AN OLD SWASTIKA DRINKS WHISKEY WITH THE GODDESS ISIS

by Kit Loney

You say a terrorist stole your name? I hear you, sister. Back in the day I was easy in my skin, passed among the creatures of the earth like a fine breeze. I was whirling dervish. Pelican diving. Windmill. Showed travelers the way to Buddhist temples. Would appear on kimono sleeves in sky-blue silk brocade to gather good fortune. Faced left in Sanskrit to juggle dots and dance on pointed toes. Man, those were the days. The Navajo would invite me to kneel on woven carpets for sacred healing chants. I was earth, air, fire, and water. north, west, south, and east. Then one day I’m grabbed from behind, knocked out cold. In fog of fever dreams I’m something small and lethal, like a pistol, dread burning up red from the tail of my spine. Wake up decades later. Splitting headache. Hands covered in blood. These days the Japanese kids call me Mangi, some hashtag to hip as if that Hitler nightmare never happened. But sister, I‘m still covered in scars, still shaking. Oh God! What have I done? And this new tide of angry men with their hands clenching my every arm. No ocean on earth is deep enough. Sister, help me, please!

Kit Loney comes to poetry from a career in visual arts. Her poems have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Fall Lines, Emrys Journal, Kakalak, Yemassee, Qarrtsiluni, Waccamaw, One, and Poetry East. In 2012 she received the Carrie McCray Nickens Poetry Fellowship from the SC Academy of Authors.

THIS COUNTRY

by Judy Kronenfeld





        Anti-Semitism was something that happened in history,
        that happened in other places.
        —Sophia Levin, 15, Tree of Life congregant              


My immigrant father, born in Germany,
was “a little roughed up” after Hitler,
after the first anti-Jewish decrees,
was scared “once or twice” by a knock
on the door before he left for America
with his younger brother in 1934,
following his parents the year before.
Only his settled older sister and her
family made the mistake of staying
until they couldn’t escape.

Maybe in order to live
in this new country, to have
 a wife and child of his own,
my father chose to keep his sister’s story
mostly close within, his private
memorial flame. Maybe his heart
was so heavy it broke, but he wouldn’t let
it scar and harden against love, or let
a furrowed brow cloud every hour,
unlike a few whom evil terrorized
beyond hope.

All I know:  as a young child growing up,
here, in this country, I wasn’t compelled
or even invited to dwell, to imagine
the last years of those relatives
I could never meet:  the broken glass
on the streets, the stars shining
on their coats, the black engines
steaming in the station, the swallowing
fear in their stomachs, then the soup
of potato skins, the lice,
then their starved flesh and protruding bones
becoming smoke just about when I was born
on a golden, free street.

But eleven people exterminated in a synagogue,
on Shabbas morning, here, in this country,
in Pittsburgh—native ground
of Gerald Stern, Michael Chabon,
Gertrude Stein—by someone who says
All these Jews need to die, and as I rage and mourn,
a sliver of imagination lacerates
my heart with fear and makes my stomach quail,
and I can hear the heavy boots on the stairs,
the rap of knuckles on the door at 2 A.M.,
and I can see my aunt, my uncle,
my cousins whom I’ve never seen,
who were wrapped away from me
by my father’s love, who were herded
at gun point to their deaths—
arising out of the safely past and gone.

Judy Kronenfeld’s last three books of poetry are Bird Flying through the Banquet(FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Ghost Town,  Rattle, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other journals, and in two dozen anthologies. She also writes creative nonfiction, which has appeared frequently in Under the Sun, in Hippocampus, and in other places. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing, UC Riverside, and an Associate Editor of Poemeleon. 

NEVER CRITICIZE A NAZI

by George Held

unless you have spoken out
in church or synagogue
or demonstrated in the streets
against your own fascist regime
as it squelches one civil right
after another

I know, as long as the sheriffs
concentrate on the Muslims
and the blacks and the Latinx
we can calmly complain among ourselves
about the increasing nastiness
and aggression

as the Other is whisked off
to prison and to the camps
now being built in the pine barrens
beyond the view of the casual
observer of all the nastiness
and aggression

and besides, it’ll be more peaceful
for a while, as long as we keep
resistance to ourselves and act
the part of loyal citizens—we know
the primacy of loyalty today—in
ignoring nastiness

have you calculated like an actuary
how long it will be before they
invade your house at 2 AM
and drag you before your cousin
the magistrate for arraignment
as a traitor

anyhow, it won’t be too long
unless you keep your mouth shut
and switch from Rachel to Hannity
at 9 PM and wear a handsome
red ball cap that says Keep America
Great

Oh, yes, and never criticize a Nazi.
Achtung!


George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, writes from New York. His twentieth collection is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle, 2017).

CRYING NAZI

by David Spicer




O Crying Nazi, cry all night long
because you’re a goddamn human being,
Crying Nazi, you weep like a mourning
mother at her son’s closed casket.
You weep like a goddamn lynching victim on his nickering horse.
You weep like a maniac suffering a nervous breakdown.
Crying Nazi, I don’t feel sorry for you.
Crying Nazi, are your parents proud of you?
Does your sister call you a creep?
Do you hate yourself, deep down in the coal mine shaft of your soul?
You’re embarrassing yourself, Crying Nazi.
Will you forgive yourself for your crybaby tears, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, will you ever cry again?
It can’t go well if you do.
Have you cried many times as an adult?
Did women think you’re too sensitive to straddle you?
I don’t understand you, Crying Nazi.
Does the sun ever shine on your glossy pate when you sin?
O Crying Nazi, how many people have you stabbed,
how many Mexicans have you tarred and feathered?
Have you ever prayed in a mosque or synagogue?
I saw you blubber on tv, Crying Nazi, and I’m not empathetic.
You’re a sissy.
Were you a good little boy playing Cowboys & Indians,
always the cowboy?
O Crying Nazi, are you a misogynist, too?
Or do you love all women as long
as they’re not black, brown, yellow, red, or Semites?
Will you ever fall in love with someone?
When you cry, Nazi, do your fellow Nazis
bristle that you’re such a pussy?
Crying Nazi, is acid in your tears?
Do you chew your bile at breakfast or supper?
Do you hate yourself, Crying Nazi?
Crying Nazi, did you study a lot of Hitler books?
Did you read them in lotus position on your easy chair?
Do you idolize Sheriff Joe and David Duke?
Could you ever be your own hero, Crying Nazi?
What shade of red is your blood, Crying Nazi?
Do you bathe yourself with your tears?
Has life been easy or hard for you?
Can you look into the eclipse and see the blackness
in your fellow Nazis?
Will you immolate yourself until your skin
barbecues into blackness?
When did you learn to hate, Crying Nazi?
Did a black boxer beat the hell out of you in the ring
and then brag about it?
Do you cry yourself to sleep in your cell at night?
I wonder if you regret your twenty minutes of infamy.
I wonder if God loves you, Crying Nazi.
Do you hang out with your Nazi buddies in chow hall?
O Crying Nazi, cry for the Charleston Nine.
Cry for Trayvon Martin.
Cry for Ferguson.
Cry for Buchenwald.
Cry for the martyred saints.
Most of all, cry for your fellow Nazis.
Stop crying for yourself, Crying Nazi.
Maybe you’ll meet a girl who loves you
because you’re bald.
Maybe she’ll love you because you’re cute.
Or maybe she’ll love you because you’re a Crying Nazi.
Then you can father crying Nazi babies.
Crying Nazi, you’re an oxymoron.
Do you get high, Crying Nazi?
Do you eat a lot of beef or are you a vegan?
I know you don’t eat nails, Crying Nazi.
They’d make you bawl, Crying Nazi.
Do you jack off in your cell at night, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, I feel your hateful pain.
How many guns do you own?
I saw you wearing your zebra outfit in jail the other day, Crying Nazi.
You looked sad as a fallen cake.
You looked sadder than a Syrian orphan.
Sadder than a basset hound who’s lost his best friend.
Sadder than a starving cat.
Sadder than a melting snowman.
You didn’t look proud, Crying Nazi.
Where was your Sieg Heil! when you needed it, Crying Nazi?
Will your hate buddies protect you against the Mexican Mafia?
The Black Brotherhood?
High prices in the commissary?
I’m sorry I judge you, Crying Nazi.
So, when you get out of jail, I’ll buy you a Heineken
and a one-way ticket to Death Valley,
throw in a Bible to read on your bus trip
and leave a two-dollar bill in it, Crying Nazi,
along with a little note reading
Prove you’re a goddamn human being, Crying Nazi:
Love yourself a little more, and maybe, just maybe
you can love the rest of us, too,
because we’re all goddamn human beings,
Crying Nazi.

David Spicer has had poems in Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Easy Street, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, Santa Clara Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Midnight Lane Boutique, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. The author of Everybody Has a Story and five chapbooks, he’s the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. His latest chapbook is From the Limbs of a Pear Tree available from Flutter Press.

"HAHA, NAZI, SCHMAZI," SAYS PRESIDENT T***P

by George Salamon

"The president of the United States is now a neo-Nazi sympathiser.” 

—Richard Wolffe, The Guardian, August 15, 2017

"Haha, neo Nazi, neo Schmazi,"
Says President T***p.
"All I care about is cleaning up
Washington's putrid swamp."
T***p is a man of business,
Not given to humanist prissiness.
Don't wait for a rite of sacrament
To wipe away Fascist contaminents
He made White House inhabitants.
If you seek to rejoice in his defeat
Your resistance will have to march
To a truly heretical American beat.


George Salamon escaped the Nazis in 1938 and watches their neo rebirth from St. Louis, MO.

I HAVE HAD FRIENDS IN GREAT NUMBERS

by Judy Katz-Levine




There are barbed wire fences in my dreamless nights.
And hands caught in nets, children growing who cannot whirl.
There are torches tonight, and chants to drown saints.
And simple good people who want a steak at lunch, or hummus with a carrot.
I have had friends in great numbers, who watch with prescient eyes
of brown and green and black and gold and hazel  and azure-
The marches of hatred, the chants of those with bludgeons for
Writers, and I am one, journalists, and the films in black and white
Reeling through the avenues where magnolias should bloom,
Where souls are not crushed , because we will not permit it.
Where freedom fighters/writers are ploughed down like deer on the highway
In the nights of barbed wire fences in my dreamless dreams.
Because we will stop it, my friends.
I could tell you, my friends, who will come into my garden of ripening tomatoes, roses.
Who will give me echinacea with pink flowers, who will swim with me in sweet lake water,
And who will read my poetry for 40 years, keeping it a secret until the most crucial moment
That determines a hidden mountain behind the mist of decades.
I have had friends in great numbers, who take me to the ocean, and we have shared
The small rises and falls of our children in laughing texts.  We will not tolerate
We will not accept, these marches from a haunted hunted slaughtering, a genocide past, a genocide that echoes other genocides, and other genocides, and others
To be revived?  Forget it.  We’re here.  We know the score.
The lurid lips of nazi clowns shouting hatred slogans, the mowing down
Of friends?  We will speak/act now, we will stop this insanity.

Judy Katz-Levine is the author of these books: When The Arms Of Our Dreams Embrace, Ocarina,  and When Performers Swim, The Dice are Cast.  Her new collection The Everything Saint will be published by WordTEch  in August 2018.  Poems have appeared recently in Kritya (India), Stanzaic Stylings, Ibbetson Street, Salamander, Blue Unicorn, Springhouse Journal, Peacock Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, and many others. Also a jazz flutist, she just played a 3 hour gig at the Farmer's Market in Needham MA.

UNDER THE GOD, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, 12 AUGUST 2017

by Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.





           Watchin' their heads in the toilet bowl
           Don't see supremacist hate

           Right wing dicks in their boiler suits

           Picking out who to annihilate
               —David Bowie, “Under the God,” Tin Machine (1989)


 Forgive us our Confederate bedsheets & the flag above the headboard.
 Forgive us the need to be right.
 Forgive us the Civil War was never really about slavery.
 Forgive us Emmett Till we love our heritage.
 Forgive us a matter of pride carrying torches through your campus.
 Forgive us blood & soil.
 Forgive us fashionable alt-right haircuts & Duck Dynasty beards.
 Forgive us whatever will get us laid.
 Forgive us fuck the immigrants & Muslims what’s wrong with America.
 Forgive us Alex Jones says.
 Forgive us it’s Black Lives Matter who’s racist.
 Forgive us T***p’s sending a message.
 Forgive us whatever pisses off the liberal snowflakes.
 Forgive us George Lincoln Rockwell didn’t buy evolution either.
 Forgive us Michael Brown & Trayvon Martin were thugs.
 Forgive us it’s in our economic interest.
 Forgive us our First Amendment rights.
 Forgive us & leave the statue.
 Forgive us our white fathers never did anything wrong.


Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.'s poems have appeared most recently in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cutbank, Numero Cinq, and Verse Daily.

CHARLOTTESVILLE 8/11/17

by Jan Steckel

Several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists were met by a small group of counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson on Friday night at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. 

—The Washington Post, August 12, 2017

O my America!
What are these phosphors
borne in the hands of men
wearing polo shirts and swastikas?

The pastor flees her church.
She hasn’t seen Klan with torches
since she was five years old.
Here they stride with baseball bats,
dressed like college students
or fresh from the boardroom.
She fears for the black man walking
alone the streets of her town,
where bands of predators roam.

“Blood and soil,” they chant.
”White lives matter.”
”You will not replace us.”
”Jews will not replace us.”

Where are the streets of gold
my great-grandparents came looking for?
Now it’s blond men who brandish flambeaux
surrounding a circle of antifascist students,
hands joined around a monument,
facing outward against the slavering pack.
The Nazis throw their torches,
mace the kids. Afterward a girl
tweets that she’s safe,
but she’s not okay.
Where is the God in whom she trusted?
Out of the many, where is the one?

Charlottesville, tonight the dream
of a shining city on a hill
shatters into points of light
marching along your occupied streets.

Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who left the practice of medicine because of chronic pain. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards for LGBT writing. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.