THE THEOLOGY OF ICE

by Stuart Broughton

A protester carries a US flag through teargas launched to clear protesters outside the Broadview immigration processing centre in Chicago. —The Guardian, October 3, 2025

NBC Chicago's investigative team reports at least 3,000 jailed immigrants have vanished from federal records, according to human rights attorneys and organizations. 

All across America
people are 
disappearing.
One minute
they're here
and the next
they're gone. 
Disappeared,
dissolved,
dematerialised.
Deported.
Detained.

It's an American
Rapture. 
The Rapture,
but only in
America.

Those of us
brought up
on such theological
dogmas
know that this 
expulsion of the
saints will
usher in
a tribulation.
As if things
could get
worse.

The thing we got wrong
was that instead of the angels
doing the Lord’s work,
it’s the agents 
doing the Devil’s.

As my old pastor
used to say,
“Fuck”.

Stuart Broughton. Gen-something. Library-adjacent. Tangata Tiriti. Libra. From  Aotearoa | New Zealand. Trying to work it out.

DAYS OF ABSENCE

by Royal Rhodes

Trump’s promise of mass deportation throws undocumented Texans into fear, uncertainty. —Texas Public Radio, December 19, 2024

Was I asleep and missed the sudden Rapture

that took the nameless with familiar faces?

Where did they go, with all the little ones?

The guy who cut the hair of homeless Vets,

the smiling pizza boy, and couriers?

Our well-trimmed gardens are now overgrown.

Produce at the market costs much more—

no strawberries for even ready money.

And who will take our dogs for daily walks?

These days of absence seem so rude at best.

Are we supposed to give Grandma a bath?

She knew the helper more than she knows us.

Are they on retreat deep in the desert

in prayer and fasting from all food and water?

In church they took with us the bread and wine,

but sat apart or stood beside the door.

Have angels raised them up to Paradise?

Was it the Rapture or some plotted rupture?

Royal Rhodes is a poet whose poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including several times in The New Verse News.

OLD GUY AWAITS VACCINE

by Earl J. Wilcox

 "Time waits for no man,” watercolor by SuayaArt.

So far I have outlived whooping cough, measles, mumps, shingles,

strokes, dementia, the Apocalypse, the Rapture, three years eleven

months of the T***P madness, perhaps one Kardashian, zombie

uprisings, my dear mate of six decades, three siblings, one child, eviction,

twenty-four Marvel Universe movies, hundreds of episodes of Friends

and Big Bang Theory, dear Alex Trebek, bankruptcy, cancer, plus

millions of maladies and diseases about which I am totally ignorant.

If I live another few days or weeks, perhaps the vaccine will find me

and my generation still optimistic we can add Covid-19 to the lists

of days and hours of this world we miss.

Earl Wilcox in his late 80s awaits the vaccine in South Carolina.

RAPTURE: A SORT OF SONNET

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Oregon wildfire, September 6, 2017. Photo source: NBC4i

I often think of immolation when the wind
gets up to no good as is does here
in the mountains and reminds me how wildfires
take California, the gulf rains take Houston,

how puffery takes over Washington with
no particular purpose. I have a gracious
plenty of canned goods set by in case
Al Gore is right when he shows me pictures

of what can only be the End of Days—
fires and drought enough to raise a hallelujah.
I’m glad for the heads up and good on Al.
It’s eschatology no matter what you suppose.

The end will come, if you pick science or religion—
either the Rapture or the god dammed secular flame.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle live in the Ozarks where she #Resists Arkansas politics and politicians. She is the author of two books and five chapbooks.