WHITEWASH

by Kay White Drew

“President Donald Trump ordered his administration Friday to install signs in front of the Smithsonian Institution’s U.S. History museum telling visitors that some of the exhibits are inaccurate, his latest move to reshape how the story of the United States is told.” —AP, July 24, 2026

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” —James Baldwin

 

To paint over all our contradictions and ambiguities,

   pain and suffering, with a topcoat of “patriotism.”

To leave an entire people ignorant

   of the truth of our origins.

To erase whole populations whose very existence

   seems to offend him.

To pretend that all the theft and rape and slaughter

   was in self-defense/for a good cause/never happened.

To feed us fractured fairy tales that dismiss and distort,

   turn our history into a children’s recess war game.

To ignore our differences, discount the ways

   we treated each other in the past and to this day.

To rob us of our adulthood: our ability to apologize

   and forgive, to extend compassion and mercy.

To trim the corners, smooth the rough edges,

   obliterate the grain of the wood is no less than

To utterly destroy its character.

Kay White Drew is a retired physician whose poems appear in various anthologies and print & internet outlets including Gargoyle, The New Verse News, and Second Coming. She’s also published short stories and several essays, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a memoir, Stress Test. She lives in Rockville, MD with her husband. Reading and spending time in nature keep her sane(ish) in these difficult times.

UNNATURAL HISTORY

by James Penha

Revealing the Smithsonian’s ‘racial brain collection’ - Washington Post

Smithsonian swiped

brains from people of color—

what were they thinking?

Note: The Secretary of the Smithsonian wrote the following in a piece for the August 20 Washington Post: “The Post’s recent coverage regarding the human remains still housed in our collections is certainly illustrative of the Smithsonian’s darkest history. This is our inheritance, and we accept the responsibility to address these wrongs to the fullest extent possible.”

James Penha edits The New Verse News.

PENCIL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

for Sara Cahill Marron

There is a time to mourn and a time
to review the cards and cast them
again on the table trusting God
to guide your hand, to say this pencil
you left with roses, chrysanthemums,
lilies, in a riot of passionate flowers
before the Supreme Court, will be
picked up by a girl after the period
of mourning, not to be conserved
in the Smithsonian's Museum
of American History, but to write
the story of a young lawyer come
to Washington to interpret laws
with grace, acuity and impartiality,
to the best of her ability, until
such time as their articulation
becomes almost unnecessary,
so ingrained they would become
in the social conscience of
Americans walking then freely. 

Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020) and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.

EMMETT TILL'S CORPSE TURNS SIXTY

by Philip C. Kolin

from Jet Magazine, September 15, 1955 via JetCityOrange.

Sixty years ago today
I started my life as a corpse,
the corpus indelicti of
America the Mournful.
I am sure you have caught me
on the tv, in newspapers,  or over the net.
Ten presidents since Generalissimo Ike
have taken my Jet photo
out of their Oval Office drawers
every time America has a nightmare
about whether black lives matter
and prayed  it would never come to this.
You may have caught me
in the  faces of black boys
whose smiles have turned to pus
because of police  clubs or stray
gangland bullets .
You could have seen  me, too,
in crowds demanding  justice
for Rodney King, Trayvon Martin
or Eric Garner. Did you hear me
in a  recent poetry slam on YouTube
protesting the death of a black man
or boy every 28 hours in a Second
Amendment America where violence
has gone through the roof?
You may have also  picked me out
weeping on CNN or Fox
when the Mother Emanuel Six
were laid to rest and
the state  flag came down
in South Carolina
and all the peckerwoods
could do about it  was whistle Dixie.
I plan to be at the Smithsonian
next year when they unveil my coffin.
Hope it does not debut on August 28th.
I am not sure America has enough tears left
for me and the ravages of Katrina.


Philip Kolin is the  University Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi where he also edits  the  Southern Quarterly. He has published more than 40 books on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, African American playwrights as well as  seven collections of poems. His most recent book  is Emmett Till in Different States: A Collection of Poems forthcoming in November from Third World Press.