SUDANESE LAMENT

by Maia Justine Storm 

Escaping Darfur: Mothers face starvation under trees in Chad —Al Jazeera, June 26, 2026

i give her a breast

that is empty

 

a bowl 

that is broken

 

a cracked cup

 

i offer my daughter

weeds and leaves

 

crushed and boiled

 

but she 

is too hungry to eat them

and i am too sad 

to cry

Maia Justine Storm is a 78-year-old woman living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has been an immigration attorney for 25 years and has returned to her adolescent dream of being a poet. Most recently, she has been published in the Poetry Superhighway where she was a Poet of the Week, haikuniverse, Antifa Lit Journal, The Mersey Review, Shot Glass Journal, and forthcoming issues of several more journals.

THE 7TH DAY

by Adam J. Scarborough

The day

misplaces the sun.
Somewhere
a sky still burns blue
but not here.
Here—
a black noon.

The maps keep shedding people.
Five hundred thousand
coats and shoes—missing from their hallways;
names folded into cars, trucks, 
onto motorcycles and buses,
heading north from Lebanon.
 
A child carries a key
to a pile of ash.
—
Missiles write their brief alphabets
over Abu Dhabi—
two hundred thirty-eight
steel sentences
falling through prayer. 
Most of them
erased mid-air.
Even the sky now
has editors.
—
Control of the air,
they say.
The sky is a throat
they have learned
to close.
Jets move there
like indifferent saints.
—
Smoke remembers the night.
Tehran wakes
with black in its mouth.
Balconies gather soot
like winter birds.
Cars wear the same dark coat.
The street
a long finger,
dragged through ash.
—
Oil depots
burn through the hours
when sleep should hold the city.
Ten million lungs
turn quietly
in their beds.
Above them
the sky writes in smoke—
language without vowels.
—
Morning arrives
as rain.
Not mercy.
A rain that stings the eyes,
touches the throat
with a thin metal hand.
Acid falling softly
on bread
on figs left in bowls
on the open skin
of the city.
—
The doctors speak
from distant rooms.
Particles,
they say.
Invisible dust
entering the small, naked doors of the body.
Asthma remembers.
The heart
tightens its fist.
Even the air
now carries
a slow instruction.
—
Do not open the window.
Do not turn the fan.
Cover the food.
Wait.
As if waiting
could rinse the sky.
—
A special relationship
spits across red neckties 
tied like telephone wires,
fizzing with foreign cries.
 
Night keeps arriving early.
Lebanon counts its dead
in the hundreds—
three hundred ninety-four
and still the number
breathes.  
 
Dust enters the lungs
of the city.
Beirut
a broken bell.
—
Elsewhere the world practices
this same dark grammar:
Sudan
South Sudan
Ukraine—
where the ground
remembers fire
longer than people do.
—
And somewhere a man
with a borrowed crown
waits in a golden room
for the door
to open.
 
Another country
dragged forward
by the nose of a name.
—
Still
someone lights a stove.
Someone boils water.
 
Someone somewhere
opens a window
to see
 
if the sun
has been returned.

Adam J. Scarborough is a Scottish writer and social practice artist based in Minnesota. His work has been presented across Europe and New York. His poetry has appeared in Gutter Magazine.

MOURNING PILLOW

by Matthew Ellis

 

 

Woke early // couldn’t sleep

Lie there awhile // felt rested

so rose // as bombs fell

to strikes // war on Iran

again // They promised

what he wanted // He lied

Regional hegemony // & Israeli

ascension // Palestinian genocide

& in Sudan too // disregard for life

continues // as Cuba falls

Imperialism thrives // we all suffer

Matthew Ellis (he/him) is a queer poet living in Columbus, Ohio. His first collection Little Heresies is due out in September 2026 from Wayfarer Books. With a background in chemistry, he spends his time teaching yoga and following creative pursuits in music and writing. To keep up with his work, you can follow him on Instagram (@matthewellismusic3) or visit his website (www.MatthewEllisContemplation.com).

AL-FASHER BELONGS TO GOD

by Seth R. Merritt 

An analysis revealed in a recent report has shown that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed mass killings in Sudan's Al Fasher amid rising violence in the region. The report published by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health provided satellite imagery of the atrocities committed by the RSF following their capture of the violence-hit region. "The Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) finds evidence consistent with Rapid Support Forces (RSF) conducting mass killings after capturing El-Fasher, North Darfur," the report said. —TRT World, October 29, 2025

The UN Human Rights Office is receiving multiple, alarming reports that the Rapid Support Forces are carrying out atrocities, including summary executions, after seizing control of large parts of the besieged city of El Fasher, North Darfur and of Bara city in North Kordofan state in recent days... The Office has received reports of the summary execution of civilians trying to flee, with indications of ethnic motivations for killings, and of persons no longer participating in hostilities (hors de combat). Multiple distressing videos received by UN Human Rights show dozens of unarmed men being shot or lying dead, surrounded by RSF fighters who accuse them of being SAF fighters. —UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, October 27, 2025

It is Al-Fasher and midday.
A mother ties a strip of paradise’s garden around Omer’s wrist.
His wrist shimmers in the sun and Daa smiles.
She tells him to hold his hand out when they flee, to show the soldiers he belongs to God.
He nods as children nod when they cannot imagine the cost.
He tucks his hand behind his back.
They move.

Another time. A white church on a dirt road.
A preacher says God keeps perfect track.
Blessings fall on those who walk straight.
No one imagines a bullet at the end.

Al-Fasher’s morning shines. Dust moves like sifted flour.
A fighter calls his brothers through a loudspeaker.
A safe corridor. Promises.
Bodies clamber. Mothers pass infants forward like water.

Later-than-now but earlier-than-later:
The Hague. Microphones. Translation headsets.
A man asks for numbers.
How many bodies. Which villages. Which dates.
Procedure speaks the language of care.

Elsewhere: screens glow in London and New York.
Conference rooms. Someone with clean hands pauses the footage.
They circle the cloth around Omer’s wrist.
They label his skin.
They label the men with rifles.
Cursor blinks where innocence should be.
A reporter whispers sectarian violence over B-roll.
A senator tries ancient hatreds into a podcast mic.
A professor types failed state in an article.
Each word drags the thing further away.

Warm and full and afternoon.
Daa lifts Omer’s hand to the soldier for inspection.
The cloth glistens. Catches light.
Young and tired. A face a mother once loved.
The soldier sees.
He holds the rifle.
The muzzle stares into Omer’s eyes.
Soot. Metal. Heat.

Omer’s hand shakes. His eyes tear.
Habibi, I have done nothing wrong.
As-salamu alaykum.

The soldier glances at the mother. Nods.
Habibi. There is nowhere to go.
As-salamu alaykum.

Skin and bone and muscle and tendon do not speak loudly when they sever.
Daa is another mother crying.

Once, promises were guarantees.
No one said God speaks every language used in an execution.

It is Al-Fasher and midday.
A mother gathers Omer’s body.
The cloth shimmers emerald in the dust.

Author’s note: This poem fictionalizes one mother and child in Al-Fasher, Sudan. The events depicted are not a single documented case, but a composite drawn from ongoing reports of civilian killings and the forced sorting of bodies under the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) offensive.

Seth R. Merritt is a writer from the Ozarks living in Mexico City. His work has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine and Hard Crackers, with work forthcoming in Scalawag. This is his first work of poetry.

COVER IT

by Ron Riekki

“Everyone keeps saying 'apocalyptic,' but that doesn’t begin to cover it.” —CNN’s Karina Tsui from Pacific Palisades, January 8, 2025

 

My sister texts me saying she is sorry

to hear about my long disease [sic] and I

think of the long history of fire, how often

our world wants to be held instead of this,

now, how it’s helled.  And in the military

they put me in the burn pits, not to help,

but for punishment, no mask given, and

 

forced to stand there with the ash now

that owns me, apical scarring, and this

is the world now, scaring me, the news

where I see fire in the Ukraine and fire

in Gaza and fire in Sudan and fire in

Myanmar and fire in Haiti and I look

online at a “current large wildfire map”

 

and it looks as if all of California is on

fire and I worked in California during

COVID, a disaster healthcare volunteer,

going to all the worst-hit cities, raged

by COVID and, always, driving in, I’d

see countless TRUMP signs [sick],

almost as if COVID went wherever his

 

supporters were, a nurse yelling one

time that the OR needed to have at

least two sets of negative pressure

respirators, and I remember a shift

where all of the staff was sick, how

nobody showed up but me, and, out-

side, the horizon was ablaze, rooms

 

packed with COVID patients, one

dying every other shift, and I could

go outside for my break, but couldn’t

take my mask off outside either, not

with the planes dropping fire retardant,

and a medic telling me that the UV

in L.A. was deadly, is deadly, and this

 

doctor screaming something about

a CT scan, and a COVID patient who

came in with no ID (we took him),

and an MP from a nearby military

base who died in his 20s, drowned

in the water of his own lungs, and

how someone came in and a nurse

 

was asking if the patient couldn’t

breathe because of COVID or be-

cause of the fires and the fires were

COVID and COVID was a fire, is

a fire, and my father is in bed and

he’s flicking through the news and

it’s orange-red on the screen and

 

red-yellow on the screen and it’s

yellow-orange, all these different

hells we create—bombings and

wildfire and a Republican’s pool

in his mansion backyard drowning

in flames and the fires in Burkina

Faso don’t make our news and

 

the fires in Cameroon don’t make

our news and the fires in Mali

don’t make our news, but fires

of the wealthy are all over our

screens and the mansions are so

quickly eaten by Hell.  My son

googles the words Who invented

 

fire? and the A.I. answers, Homo

sapiens and we invented all of

this, all of this ash and smoke

and I remember when I was

standing in the middle of my

lungs being destroyed for

the rest of my life and there

 

was fence all around me and

I thought of incarceration,

how we are getting so good

at war that we are turning our

whole entire world into a prison

and the only way out of this hole

is to stop everything we’re doing.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).