PEACE TO ALL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Many people who worked with Pope Leo XIV when he was Bishop Robert Prevost of Chiclayo, Peru, couldn’t hold back tears when his election was announced on May 8. For them, it was not just a sign that God answered their prayers for a new pope who would follow Francis’s path, but also the confirmation that they had been guided by an extraordinary leader. —CRUX, May 9, 2025

Peace be with you. 

We are suffering 
the pandemic. 
We are hungry 
and we need 
to breathe. 

We need 
oxygen tanks 
in Chiclayo. 
I will get you 
the tanks. 

We need food. 

We need to walk 
the empty streets
and knock on 
every door
and leave 

food and water.

We need to bring 
the sick to hospital 
and help them to breathe. 

This is pastoral work.
This is Archbishop 
Robert Prevost,
now Pope Leo 
the Fourteenth.

Indran Amirthanayagam has just published his translation of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books, 2025). Other recent publications include Seer (Hanging Loose Press) and The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil). He is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

LESSONS FROM THE PAST

by Sally Zakariya

The New York TImes, October 17, 2024

Unearthed in Peru 
signs of a female sovereign
thirteen centuries ago

In the tomb painting
she’s wearing a crown
and holding court from
a power throne

We’ve had so far a very
masculine view of this
old civilization, say
archaeologists, devoted 
diggers of the past 

Could be we’ve had 
a pretty masculine view
of this new world, too

Could be the time
has come for another 
woman leader here 
in these Americas

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 100 publications and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed the poetry anthology Joys of the Table and blogs (occasionally) at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

CLEAR DEMANDS

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Police ran an armored carrier
into the gate of San Marcos
University, then charged
by the hundreds to rouse
students from sleep and
hound them into courtyards
arresting dozens upon

dozens. For what? For
allowing peasants to sleep
on the grounds while
in the city, to express
their right to protest, to say
no to the hard and clumsy-
handed, new, unelected

leader, to ask for
the dictator Fujimori
constitution to be
discarded then rewritten,
to ask for jobs and
seeds after the ravages
of the pandemic.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

HUNGER

by Rose Mary Boehm

I just read about it again, I saw

a video. Or two, or three.

TON 618 is the largest black hole in the known

universe and estimated at 66 billion solar masses…

these figures are beginning to be incomprehensible.

It’s hungry. About to gobble up whole worlds.

Is it hungry? Or is it just doing what black

holes do. A simple question of astrophysics.

 

I remember being hungry alright,

but that was about 80 years ago.

‘There is a war on, you know…’

 

The biggest black hole on this planet is hungry.

Is Putin just hungry or is it something that comes naturally,

a sickness that can’t be cured, a greed

that knows no satisfaction.

 

It seems as though my war was only yesterday.

And there, once more, tanks are rolling, fighter planes are strafing,

buildings are being bombed, whole families perish, the stench

of dead flesh under rubble will soon fill the streets.

The numbers again incomprehensible.

 

And—as in my memories—children will be looking for potato peels

thrown-away apple cores and sorrel in the field – if they make it that far.

We eat guineapigs in Peru—they say rats are acceptable. Siege food.

 

Another promise broken, another convoy

of refugees bombed.

I see old women on canvas bags and suitcases in the back

of trucks holding small children, the parents falling towards

the border, their feet working through the loamy earth

or tripping over ripped open asphalt.

Wasn’t there Kosovo? Syria? Afghanistan?

But so far away is almost incomprehensible.

The black hole has pulled us close. Pushing back,

will we be swallowed? Starving it, will it recede?

I am hungry for peace—or is this a thought too trite?

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and four poetry collections to date, her work has been widely published, for the great part in US online and print journals.

ON THE ALTAR

by Jacqueline Jules 

                                                                             

Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas— and likely in world history—has been discovered on Peru's northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic. More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow of what was then the sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire. —Kristin Romey, National Geographic, April 26, 2018. Photograph by Gabriel Prieto.

                                                                 

The remains of children and llamas in Peru
reminds me of Abraham, how he didn’t argue
for Isaac the way he did for Sodom and Gomorrah,
how he acquiesced, traveling three days as commanded,
building an altar, binding his son.  Imagine
Isaac’s terrified eyes until an angel appears
with new instructions.

Which brings me back to the bodies in Peru,
breastbones bent to extract 140 hearts
offered to appease an angry god, demanding
what’s most precious as ultimate bribe.

Like a folktale reinvented around the globe,
sacrifice is not confined to geographic region.
From ancient times, somehow humans have believed
we have to kill to demonstrate devotion.

When the angel told Abraham to offer a ram instead,
it was more than a revelation, it was a weaning.
Spiritually, we were babies, still sucking
on our first source of sustenance.

Think of how we despaired later on,
when the Temple was destroyed and
we were told we couldn’t burn animals
anymore. What can we put on the altar now?
We cried. How do we please now?

The answer still seems to baffle us.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field Trip to the Museum, Stronger Than Cleopatra, and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including TheNewVerse.News, The Rising Phoenix Review, What Rough Beast, Public Pool, and Gargoyle.

WOMAN IN MUD

by Alejandro Escudé




She is trudging
for her own life
through sodden timber
like lice in hair,
and there are others
watching her climb out
like a thin spider
from a toilet bowl,
powerless to aid her,
no hero helicopter,
no rescue roughs
in floaty, neon gear,
only these mud people
she crawls toward,
lying exhausted
on the debris-less flats,
a fallen, mucky statue
of Liberty Leading
the People, fatigued
yet still radiant
in that silt salt, barely
moving, a thing
no more, a monument,
a figure of nothing.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

BLESSING OF THE NEWS CYCLE

by Rick Mullin

The liberals were shocked and grieved
about the tête-à-tête.
The pope and that Kentucky clerk?
...Well, some were less upset.

Conservatives rejoiced as did
the silent Christian Right.
A sit-down with il Papa lent
true credence to their plight.

But then the news about a hoax,
a photo from Peru.
That prayer-meet was a football match!?
Well, everybody knew

an explanation would arrive
to wipe the tablets clear.
A memo from the Vatican.
And, sure enough, it’s here:

It seems the pope was Shanghaied by
some bishops on the ground
gone gravely rogue in Washington
or somewheres there-around

who propped Kim Davis up amidst
a group at some event
contrived for papal blessings in
a big white floppy tent.

A PR stunt by Huckabee
and flunkies of the Huck.
No big surprise, we know these guys
and recognize their shuck.

So everything is back on track.
Godspeed the Holy See.
The Family Synod starts this week.
God save the family!


Rick Mullin's most recent volume of poetry is Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle, published by Dos Madres Press last year.