INAUGURATION IN NEW ORLEANS

by Elizabeth Larose

They are taking our roofers

our window washers

our builders

our preschool teachers.

They are killing white women

our poets 

our mothers 

our neighbors.

In my intestines the knots

have knots.

But last night was the Inauguration

Mass for the new mayor of Nola

beautiful Latina

Helena

and the new City Council:

a white woman

a black woman and 

five black men.

In the Cathedral-Basilica of 

St. Louis, King of France,

the queen, Irma Thomas sang

How Great Thou Art—I felt it.

We still have street lights 

that don’t work, so many,

potholes the size of small lakes

and tremendous inequality

still the knots have let go a bit

and my chest feels a little bigger

to hold my heart.

I heard Kamala Harris and Steve Scalise

were at the inauguration. 

And the lion lay down with the lamb.

Peace be with us

and with our Spirit.

Inaugurate that!

Elizabeth Larose is a visual artist from New Orleans with shows worldwide, including in NYC, The San Francisco Bay Area, Istanbul and Cartagena. She has also worked in education, from teaching to administration at international schools in Columbia, India, Turkey, and the U.S. Her poetry has been published in Leas Lit, Resilience in Writing, A Poetry Anthology, and The Ekphrastic Review (as of Jan. 22)

ELECTING THE SHADOW KING: A SPECULATIVE TALE

by Fred Demien

A study that evaluated medical records from 156 [St. Louis] child victims of firearms found that most did not know who shot them or why. —St. Louis Public Radio, May 9, 2023. Graphic by Susannah Lohr.

Americans under the age of eighteen are eight times more likely to be killed in St. Louis than in the rest of the country...[As of] March, eight St. Louis children have already been killed in 2021. —St. Louis Riverfront Times, March 10, 2021 

 

·      In 2021, twenty-three children were killed in gunfire in the St. Louis metropolitan area. 

·      In 2022, twenty-six children were killed in gunfire in the St. Louis metropolitan area. 

·      As of 13 June 2023, ten children have been killed in gunfire in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

There is no known original name, only what it became.  
The city that drips with the Shadow’s pitch.  
 
It wasn’t planned— 
the architects didn’t plot it in their original drawings;  
the sewer district had no recourse for its removal;  
the contractor did not budget it in her original bid.  
Only the asphalt worker knew, driving his roller,  
slow in the stick and heat of summer. But no one listened  
when he said he saw it swallow a child whole.  
Except that child’s mother, and another, another,  
as child after child disappeared. 
 
News reached the mayor too late  
after his election to campaign, so he ignored it.  
But one day the Shadow towered at the city’s gateway  
and opened like a mouth, with thousands of cries  
of young girls and boys screaming out.  
 
The mayor declared it a threat, but  
the money was already allotted, he said.  
They never fully calculated the damage, but a generation  
of future voters—gone. Everyone else evacuated.  
Even mothers left, their sons and daughters all 
drawn down the unending gullet of the Shadow. 
 
Still the mayor stays in the swallowed city,  
sitting at his darkened desk, writing 
—in what he thinks is ink— 
the songs he hears carried in children’s voices  
seeping from the walls. 
 
 He sends what he can to their mothers. 

Fred Demien is a queer, itinerant minister. In 2016, her work was longlisted for the Lascaux Prize in Poetry. Her writing will be published by The Forge Literary Magazine in July of 2023. An admirer of trees, bees, and human beings, she is currently writing and building community in the greater St. Louis area. 

DEATH OF A CHILD

by George Salamon

Xavier Usanga was about 15 hours away from a new school year as a second grader at Clay Elementary when he was fatally shot Monday, August 12, 2019, while standing near an 18-year-old who was also shot but survived. The 7-year-old’s death makes him the 11th area child killed in a shooting since June. About half of them attended St. Louis Public Schools, said Kelvin Adams, superintendent of the St. Louis Public School District. In the above photo,  provided by Alderman Brandon Bosley to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Xavier Usanga is pictured during a LINKS St. Louis Neighborhood event in Hyde Park in July 2019.

A child smiling,
A child so new.
He came out to play,
Not ready for death.
Not "in the confines
Of his home, or "on
A street not known
For violence." How
Is it we don't choke
Speaking these words?
How is it a part of us
No longer dies at
The death of a child?
We dare not ask.

George Salamon lives in St. Louis and has most recently published in Dissident Voice, Proletaria, The Asses of Parnassus, and TheNewVerse.News.

SONG OF THE SEA: MEXICO 2018

by Donna Katzin

"Mexico town devastated by earthquake welcomes thousands from migrant caravan. Migrants from Central America are fleeing poverty and violence and are still weeks away from reaching the US." —The Guardian, October 30, 2018. Photo: Central Americans fill their water bottles with juice while waiting in line to receive donated food in Niltepec, Oaxaca. Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP via The Guardian.

In your unfailing love you will lead

    the people you have redeemed.

In your strength you will guide them

    to your holy dwelling.

—Exodus, 15.1

A human river,
they come in shirts and sandals,                           
children holding their hands, 
mochilas bearing their only belongings.                                           

They come in shirts and sandals,                           
hunger in their hearts,
mochilas bearing their only belongings,                                             
turn their backs on beatings, gunshots in the night.

Hunger in their hearts,
they trudge through wilderness,
turn their backs on beatings, gunshots in the night --
leave the land that gave them life.                     

They trudge through wilderness,         
envisioning a Promised Land,
leave the land that gave them life.
Together they cry out to their god.                                       

Envisioning a Promised Land
like passengers of the St. Louis,
together they cry out to their god
when the border slams shut.                                                 

Like passengers of the St. Louis,           
refusing to turn back                   
when the border slams shut,
they surge in search of a miracle.                                                                         

Refusing to turn back,
a human river,
they surge in search of a miracle,
children holding their hands.

                                                                                             

Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including TheNewVerse.News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

SUNDAY MORNING IN ST. LOUIS

by George Salamon

Police arrested at least 22 people in a protest at the St. Louis Galleria on Saturday, September 23 amid the continuing reaction to the acquittal Sept. 15 of a white police officer in the shooting death of Jason Stockley.  —Photo tweeted by Derk Brown

Water on the stove is boiling,
I slice a loaf of bread.
Restless, I press the power button
On my small kitchen radio.

"North Korean crisis heats up,
Washes whiter than ever,
Military option is on the table,
Big tech stocks are on the rise."

I don't pound the radio to smithereens,
Its voice of terror soothes me,
Its familiarity calms me,
Confirming most of us are still alive.

In St. Louis, protesters are marching and shouting again. Then those not arrested go home.


George Salamon lives in St. Louis, MO.

HOMO NON SAPIENS

by George Salamon

A 2008 cartoon by Simon Farr (The Guardian)

Seventy-five years ago,
in a dive on Fifty-Second Street,
on the day Hitler's Panzers rolled into Poland
W.H. Auden lamented the end of
"a low and dishonest decade,"
with "waves of anger and fear"
rolling over the earth's "darkened lands."
And here, in the middle of another low and dishonest decade,
I sit at my computer desk in St. Louis, Missouri,
sniffing the same "unmentionable odour of death"
as Auden did, this time rising from the sandy dunes
of Iraq and the glutted bloodlands of Ukraine.
I endure the same "negation and despair,"
as blood flows instead of milk and honey
promised us by psychopathic gods we worship.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO and contributes to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News.