IS TODAY ENGLAND AND CONGO OR JORDAN AND FRANCE?

by Jennifer M Phillips

The heat-dome trundles in like a tumbril

lugging 98 degrees. Men are laying asphalt

in the courthouse parking lot, smell

my drug of choice in childhood, tincture

of summer, intoxicating toxin of tar.

I want to summon the ice cream truck for them

with its salutary jingle and chill. Is it still

rumbling round on Willow Lane

in after-school hours? Or divert a mountain rill

to ripple between the marble columns

down the marble steps to cool their feet.

We share a co-misery of heat this July

that tamps our civic feuds and ardors. 

In the deep south, men in kilts stride the lobby

of the Grand Bohemian Hotel—of course they do.

This makes us unreasonably happy.

Boston is learning La Marseillaise,

dining on Fufu and practicing The Wave.

The possibility of joy backspins between us.

Even sad souls without Spanish

now know the meaning of pausa de hydratacion.

Hometowns are parade-ready,

balconies skirted in red, white, and blue.

The French assume it is for them, and why not?

World Cup is a feast for all fools and fans.

We all have sibling-skin in this game.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (Wipf & Stock).

LEARNING HER ABCs

by Madlynn Haber

A tiny girl, with sweet face, gentle features,

soft voice, recites her ABCs for me.

She learned them from an older, bolder cousin. 

The speech is hard for my aged ears to decipher. 

Mingled languages, English, Spanish, baby talk, 

an imitation of the elder cousin’s careful pronunciation. 

She smiles shyly, appreciating my attentive listening 

without noticing my lack of comprehension.

Her mother was not deported today.

 

The mother showed up at the immigration center 

with the little girl in her arms. The fearful father 

stayed home. Bail money collected by well-meaning 

neighbors filled her pockets, just in case.

Sighs of relief as she returns with a four-month reprieve. 

The little one will know her letters and some numbers, 

in English, the language of the only home 

she's ever known, by the time she escorts her mother 

to the immigration office again in July.

Madlynn Haber is the author of Seasons of Sorrow and Joy (Metaphysical Fox Press, 2025). She lives in a cohousing community in Northampton, Massachusetts.Her writing has been published in many literary journals and anthologies including, Eunoia Review, Months to Years, Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal, Bright Flash Literary Review, Sheila-Na-Gig and The Metaworker Literary Magazine.

LEGAL CLINIC, CHURCH RECTORY, MARCH 2026

by Paula Finn

AI-Generated graphic from Craiyon

Let me not forget the volunteer interpreter,

his black bangs, a curtain raised in this dim room

as if to let in any word: hambre, matanza.

His hands, sallow, unwrinkled. He offers 

the pro bono lawyer starvation, death,

what propelled the woman seated to his left

2,000 miles on foot and crammed in vans,

a path our young interpreter already knows

not in Spanish/English, but in thirst, in ditches

become a bed, saguaros lurking overhead.

Still he comes here every Monday night.

His gift, to translate horror free of charge.

Paula Finn has been nominated for a 2026 Pushcart Prize. Her poems appeared recently in Common Ground, Bicoastal Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Spoon River Review. On the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Finn spearheaded a piece of musical theater capturing that historic tragedy and the female immigrant worker organizing that arose in its wake. Featuring Finn's poetry set to music composed by the late composer Elizabeth Swados, the dramatic oratorio, Triangle: From the Fire, won the Best New Musical Theater award at the 2011 Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. 

LET'S ALL SPEAK SPANISH

by Arlene Weiner 

 

 

Let’s walk up and down
in front of ICE headquarters
speaking Spanish, let’s sing
“La Paloma” or “Guantanamera”
to ICE agents, and if
we don’t know Spanish
let’s sing “Frère Jacques”
or “O Tannenbaum”
or the “Marseillaise”
because will they know?
 
I wish I knew “Santa Lucia,”
a Neapolitan song my father,
an immigrant from Poland,
learned in the greenhorn class,
with which he sang me to sleep,
but instead I can sing “Volare”
or learn a song by Bad Bunny.
 
And if we don’t know any songs
in Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin,
Quechua, Vietnamese, Pashto,
Kreyol, let’s make up a language,
a language nobody understands
or everybody understands
and serenade them,
soothe the savage breasts.

 

 

Arlene Weiner lives in Pittsburgh, where she is active in community poetry groups. She has been a cardiology technician, a Shakespeare scholar, a den mother, and an editor. Ragged Sky Press has published three collections of her poetry, the most recent More (2022). She also writes plays.

DANCING WITH MR. BUNNY

by Alan Walowitz

 

 

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook  Exactly Like Love  comes from Osedax Press.   The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems  is available from Truth Serum Press.  From Arroyo Seco Press,  In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars.  The chapbook The Poems of the Air is from Red Wolf Editions and is free for downloading. 

SUNDAY MASS IN OUR ARCHIPELAGO

by Karlo Sevilla

On January 24, 1571, feast of St. John the Baptist, the Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legaspi founded the city of Manila . He earlier took possession of Maynilad, the native settlement of Rajah Matanda and Rajah Sulayman on May 19, 1571 and firmly established Spanish authority in the newly conquered and untrammeled turf. The historic day happened to be the feast of Santa Potenciana and to honor her, she was made patroness of the new territory. Armed with the Spanish sword and the Cross, Legaspi, in his role as conquistador, apportioned a parcel of land for the church of the new settlement under the patronage of La Purisima Inmaculada Concepcion. —History of Manila Cathedral

Nearly 500 years after papal decrees were used to rationalize Europe's colonial conquests, the Vatican repudiated those decrees on Thursday, saying the "Doctrine of Discovery" that was used to justify snuffing out Indigenous people's culture and livelihoods is not part of the Catholic faith. —NPR, March 30, 2023


Another Sunday morning
inside the cathedral;
Baroque, built centuries ago.
First reader quotes a passage
about a people’s liberation
from coerced construction work:
 
And I have promised to bring you up
out of your misery . . . into a land
flowing with milk and honey.
          —Exodus 3:17.
 
Soon, the contrite and otherwise
partake in Holy Communion.
Finally, the priest bids us,
 
Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
 
We sing along to the final hymn,
then file out of the hallowed cathedral:
a proud Spanish heritage
from The Empire’s clergy,
built by dint and dirt
of our ancestors’
forced labor.

Karlo Sevilla of Quezon City, Philippines is the author of the poetry collections Metro Manila Mammal (Soma Publishing, 2018) and Outsourced!... (Revolt Magazine, 2021). His poems appear in Philippines Graphic, Philippines Free Press, Protean, Poets Reading The News, Line Rider Press, Radius, Unlikely Stories Mark V, I am not a silent poet, and elsewhere. 

ADAM NAMING THE AMERICAN BEASTS

by Eric Fisher Stone




Adam cupped a narrowmouth toad
in hands oiled by prairie loam and named him
Narrowmouth Toad, chickadees he called
Snuggle Pandas. The Kiowa told him
not to christen bison while their scraggly clouds
hooved the booming plains. They belong
to the Creator, as does their names.

The peccary he baptized Gruntsnout
and the Gila monster, Lavatooth
before the natives banished Adam
to South America where Cortez walked
gonging in steel and helped add
Spanish words to llamas, capybaras,
comet-long arapaima fish
in the Orinoco, poison frogs like blue fire,
tapirs dancing through green chapels of ferns.

With all local words replaced, they were free
to varnish crowns from Incan gold,
blush Naples’ gardens with tomatoes, claim
man’s dominion over gulls and bitterns
and erase the world with their tongues.

Eric Fisher Stone lives in Ames, Iowa where he is a graduate student in Iowa State University’s MFA in Writing and the Environment program. His poetry has recently appeared in Poets Reading the News, Strange Poetry, The Hopper, Dime Show Review and is forthcoming in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry.

MESSI'S DANCE

by Lori Desrosiers

Lionel Messi runs, legs leading,
dances the ball down the field
hops over other players’ feet,
perfect kick makes a goooooal!

Lanky bodies in yellow sneakers
leap into air almost in flight
trying to head the ball, the Spanish
announcer shouts y la cabeza!

These lovely young men with
their lovely bodies remind me
of the young woman I was

my body lithe and strong
I leapt after my children
climbed hills with them
and rolled down together

barely thinking of the future
only hoping to get them there
to help them discover their dreams
dance like Messi towards their goals.


Lori Desrosiers’ first book of poems, The Philosopher’s Daughter is from Salmon Poetry. A second book is due out in 2016. Her poems have appeared in New Millenium Review, Contemporary American Voices, BigCityLit, Concise Delights, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene's Fountain, The New Verse News, The Mom Egg and many more. She publishes Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry.