THE HEART OF IT ALL

by Bradley McIlwain

Whitman—

I hear the chains

Across N. America

At Capitol Hill

Where we’ve all become 

Capital—

Loose change

In the pockets 

Of pirate politicians

We elected 

To change—

Only to decline it; 

False prophets 

Who paid God 

To burn Sodom & Gommorah 

But they can’t kill my pride 

The way they put a bullet 

In Bonnie & Clyde.

People are still dying—

Trayvon. Floyd. Till—

Still, they shot Lewis in bed

Like Billy the Kid 

20—unarmed 

Dreams spilling out onto the sheets.

Ohio weeps in the streets.

Neil Young heard the drums;

Police are cutting us down—

What’s at the heart of it all?

You abolish slavery,

But commercialize prisons;

One shackle for another, 

Brother divided by brother

Under the foot 

Of the blood spangled banner

Still soaked in the soil

Of migrant workers

From the states to the border 

Across bus stops and shelters—

The buck doesn’t stop

At Roe v. Wade

When in a state of insanity 

Some judge decides 

In a state of supremacy

That women no longer 

Have control 

Over their bodies?

Over… my… dead… body

It’s time

To untuck injustice where it lies

Unbury the dead

And loosen their tongues

So we can unlearn

The things our fathers 

Have done—and do.

I no longer trust in God

The way I trusted in you.

The all seeing eye 

Has lost its shine 

And I see you

In tent cities

Crying out for food—

Whitman, 

Our people yearn. 

We are the choir 

Of others raging 

For freedom across the voiceless night, 

Rattling the chains for change.

Bradley McIlwain works as a Teacher-Librarian, where he strives to provide meaningful and inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and advocacy. He believes that poems and poets can be agents for social change. Bradley’s latest book, Dear Emily, was published by Roasted Poet Press in July.

BELLY OF THE BEAST

by Donna Katzin

                                             

 

The violence was barely visible to law-makers                                                 

when police squeezed out George Floyd’s last breath

with a knee to his neck, shot their way

into Breonna Taylor’s home,

left her dead on her floor, clicked off

the too-short lives of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin

with flicks of a trigger.                                        

 

They scarcely discerned it in the eyes of children     

ripped from fathers’, mothers’ arms,

caged at the border, never to see

their parents again.

 

It was not obvious to them when 350,000 souls—       

disproportionately black and brown, immigrant, indigenous—

were extinguished by the virus

the president heralded as a “hoax,”                      

as ICU’s, hearses, morgues choked on bodies

and ambulances were ordered not to stop

for “low-probability” passengers.                                    

 

It took broken glass and guns at the Capitol,

ghost-faced rioters in MAGA hats, banners, swastikas,

sporting toxic slogans spawned and spewed

by the Commander-in-Chief.

 

It took hordes single-minded as Atilla the Hun

or shock-troops of the Third Reich storming

up the marble stairs beneath idyllic landscapes,

portraits of iconic heads of state,

pushing past police who never imagined 

the possibility of a white mob

forcing their way into chambers constructed,

polished to protect the rule of law,

wielding shotguns and rifles,

wrapped in bullet-proof vests.

 

It took the legislators in lockdown

little time to detect the pattern,

crouching behind their chairs, calling

loved ones, clutching gas-masks,

as they were herded to hidden locations

while the president’s minions lounged

in their offices, read their mail,       

trashed their papers, took selfies.

In the fray below five people died.

 

It took them only hours to declare a breach,

recalibrate the rules, call for silencing,

impeaching the author of the action

to pluck out the bad seed.

 

But still, in the white wilderness of our minds,

tiptoe home-grown terrorists nurtured                  

with our blindness, lethal legacies,

assumptions of supremacy—             

the hate so deeply sown                                     

in our own hearts.

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 The New Verse 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.  

GEORGE FLOYD ELEGY

by KP Liles 

German artist Eme Freethinker has painted a portrait of George Floyd on what used to be the Berlin Wall to honour the unarmed black man killed May 25 by a white Minneapolis police officer, who knelt on his neck for almost 10 minutes.

George Floyd
George Floyd
George Floyd

And so many
buried unheard
we now cannot unhear

Nor can we ignore
revolutions’ anthem
I can’t breathe

Impossible to unsee
George Floyd
that pressing knee

Ahmaud Arbery
jogging Glynn County
Georgia George Floyd

Breonna Taylor
sleeping Kentucky
Less than a meme’s life apart

Eric Garner New York City
Michael Brown Ferguson Missouri
Nia Wilson George Floyd

Oakland California Trayvon
Martin Sanford Florida
Tamir Rice Cleveland Ohio How

many George Floyd George Floyd
until name becomes flood
spilling all the killed Black folks

into brightly lit kitchens
until the dream’s ghost
upends breakfast table

until No
No Some risks George Floyd
do not resolve in mind

So if it is not for me
to lift your body or name
let mourning

be pallbearer
to token grief
minstrel solidarity

Head bowed shouldering memory
let us at long last George Floyd
carry outrage ‘cross that bloody river

end this procession
where we face off
the uniform night

KP Liles has penned two poetry collections, Singing Back the Darkness (NYQ Books) and Spring Hunger (Plain View Press). He currently lives in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I SPOKE LIKE A CHILD . . .

by Marsha Owens

When did he have an epiphany? she asked
unclear about how one is racist and then is not.

I know how life meanders, doesn’t march
in straight lines like VMI cadets stepping
around Stonewall Jackson’s horse, its body
stained with white and black blood before it
was stuffed and saluted, forever revered.

Her name was LaVinia, her body stout,
her words few, her work for my Mama—
clean toilets and stiffly pressed sheets,
her days long, two bus rides from Richmond
to the freshly coifed suburbs, all-white.

I didn’t know why LaVinia fixed sandwiches
for my brother and me but none for herself.

His name was Pete, lanky and dark, head bowed
to say, Mornin’ Ma’am to my Mama, Mornin’ Missy
to me, a five-year-old. His work for my Daddy—
boards nailed, shingles hauled up the ladder, laid
out just so—a few dollars at day’s end.

I didn’t know why Pete sat outside on the stoop
at lunchtime, eating his hot dog on a paper plate.

I swam in the culture into which I was born,
1950s, somewhere between slavery’s end
and the Act called Civil Rights.

I stumbled with other white people away
from horrible injustices and strode towards
desegregated neighborhoods, integrated schools,
JFK, MLK, Trayvon Martin, President Obama.

I listened and learned, read and reflected,
laughed and cried with new friends whose
memories were not mine, nor mine theirs.
No epiphany, just life. And I voted

“for the person who cares about all people,”
Daddy said in his old age, simplistic political
advice that had evolved over a lifetime
and became the politics I chose to follow.

Marsha Owens is a retired educator who still lives and writes in Richmond, VA. She voted for Ralph Northam and Mark Herring, not because they are perfect, but because their policies support "all people."

NEVER FORGET

by Scott C. Kaestner

Never forget 9/11.
Never forget Trayvon Martin.
Never forget climate change.
Never forget to tell someone you love "I love you."
Never forget Emmet Till.
Never forget the Holocaust.
Never forget Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
Never forget not all cops are good cops.
Never forget not all cops are bad cops.
Never forget to be kind.
Never forget to say thank you.
Never forget it's an athlete's constitutional right to sit during the national anthem.
Never forget to fight against fascists.
Never forget to seek shelter during a hurricane.
Never forget the United States is a country founded by and for immigrants.
Never forget the lives of soldiers lost fighting for our country.
Never forget a homeless vet.
Never forget our children are watching.
Never forget we're all in this together.
Never forget, never forget, never forget.

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, dad, husband, son, and dream weaver. Google 'scott kaestner poetry' to peruse his musings and doings.

CRYING NAZI

by David Spicer




O Crying Nazi, cry all night long
because you’re a goddamn human being,
Crying Nazi, you weep like a mourning
mother at her son’s closed casket.
You weep like a goddamn lynching victim on his nickering horse.
You weep like a maniac suffering a nervous breakdown.
Crying Nazi, I don’t feel sorry for you.
Crying Nazi, are your parents proud of you?
Does your sister call you a creep?
Do you hate yourself, deep down in the coal mine shaft of your soul?
You’re embarrassing yourself, Crying Nazi.
Will you forgive yourself for your crybaby tears, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, will you ever cry again?
It can’t go well if you do.
Have you cried many times as an adult?
Did women think you’re too sensitive to straddle you?
I don’t understand you, Crying Nazi.
Does the sun ever shine on your glossy pate when you sin?
O Crying Nazi, how many people have you stabbed,
how many Mexicans have you tarred and feathered?
Have you ever prayed in a mosque or synagogue?
I saw you blubber on tv, Crying Nazi, and I’m not empathetic.
You’re a sissy.
Were you a good little boy playing Cowboys & Indians,
always the cowboy?
O Crying Nazi, are you a misogynist, too?
Or do you love all women as long
as they’re not black, brown, yellow, red, or Semites?
Will you ever fall in love with someone?
When you cry, Nazi, do your fellow Nazis
bristle that you’re such a pussy?
Crying Nazi, is acid in your tears?
Do you chew your bile at breakfast or supper?
Do you hate yourself, Crying Nazi?
Crying Nazi, did you study a lot of Hitler books?
Did you read them in lotus position on your easy chair?
Do you idolize Sheriff Joe and David Duke?
Could you ever be your own hero, Crying Nazi?
What shade of red is your blood, Crying Nazi?
Do you bathe yourself with your tears?
Has life been easy or hard for you?
Can you look into the eclipse and see the blackness
in your fellow Nazis?
Will you immolate yourself until your skin
barbecues into blackness?
When did you learn to hate, Crying Nazi?
Did a black boxer beat the hell out of you in the ring
and then brag about it?
Do you cry yourself to sleep in your cell at night?
I wonder if you regret your twenty minutes of infamy.
I wonder if God loves you, Crying Nazi.
Do you hang out with your Nazi buddies in chow hall?
O Crying Nazi, cry for the Charleston Nine.
Cry for Trayvon Martin.
Cry for Ferguson.
Cry for Buchenwald.
Cry for the martyred saints.
Most of all, cry for your fellow Nazis.
Stop crying for yourself, Crying Nazi.
Maybe you’ll meet a girl who loves you
because you’re bald.
Maybe she’ll love you because you’re cute.
Or maybe she’ll love you because you’re a Crying Nazi.
Then you can father crying Nazi babies.
Crying Nazi, you’re an oxymoron.
Do you get high, Crying Nazi?
Do you eat a lot of beef or are you a vegan?
I know you don’t eat nails, Crying Nazi.
They’d make you bawl, Crying Nazi.
Do you jack off in your cell at night, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, I feel your hateful pain.
How many guns do you own?
I saw you wearing your zebra outfit in jail the other day, Crying Nazi.
You looked sad as a fallen cake.
You looked sadder than a Syrian orphan.
Sadder than a basset hound who’s lost his best friend.
Sadder than a starving cat.
Sadder than a melting snowman.
You didn’t look proud, Crying Nazi.
Where was your Sieg Heil! when you needed it, Crying Nazi?
Will your hate buddies protect you against the Mexican Mafia?
The Black Brotherhood?
High prices in the commissary?
I’m sorry I judge you, Crying Nazi.
So, when you get out of jail, I’ll buy you a Heineken
and a one-way ticket to Death Valley,
throw in a Bible to read on your bus trip
and leave a two-dollar bill in it, Crying Nazi,
along with a little note reading
Prove you’re a goddamn human being, Crying Nazi:
Love yourself a little more, and maybe, just maybe
you can love the rest of us, too,
because we’re all goddamn human beings,
Crying Nazi.

David Spicer has had poems in Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Easy Street, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, Santa Clara Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Midnight Lane Boutique, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. The author of Everybody Has a Story and five chapbooks, he’s the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. His latest chapbook is From the Limbs of a Pear Tree available from Flutter Press.

UNDER THE GOD, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, 12 AUGUST 2017

by Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.





           Watchin' their heads in the toilet bowl
           Don't see supremacist hate

           Right wing dicks in their boiler suits

           Picking out who to annihilate
               —David Bowie, “Under the God,” Tin Machine (1989)


 Forgive us our Confederate bedsheets & the flag above the headboard.
 Forgive us the need to be right.
 Forgive us the Civil War was never really about slavery.
 Forgive us Emmett Till we love our heritage.
 Forgive us a matter of pride carrying torches through your campus.
 Forgive us blood & soil.
 Forgive us fashionable alt-right haircuts & Duck Dynasty beards.
 Forgive us whatever will get us laid.
 Forgive us fuck the immigrants & Muslims what’s wrong with America.
 Forgive us Alex Jones says.
 Forgive us it’s Black Lives Matter who’s racist.
 Forgive us T***p’s sending a message.
 Forgive us whatever pisses off the liberal snowflakes.
 Forgive us George Lincoln Rockwell didn’t buy evolution either.
 Forgive us Michael Brown & Trayvon Martin were thugs.
 Forgive us it’s in our economic interest.
 Forgive us our First Amendment rights.
 Forgive us & leave the statue.
 Forgive us our white fathers never did anything wrong.


Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.'s poems have appeared most recently in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cutbank, Numero Cinq, and Verse Daily.

MOTHERS OF THE MOVEMENT#DemConvention 7/26/16

by Janet Leahy




Strong women
grieving the loss of a son or daughter
speaking with love
trying to correct what needs
to be corrected
remembering
            Trayvon
            Michael
            Eric
            Sandra
            Jordan
            Dontre
            Hadiya
            Blair
            Oscar
                        and all the others
                        who have gone missing
                        from the table of family.

Janet Leahy‘s poems have been published in print and online journals.  Most recently her poems have won second place and honorable mention in the 2016 People and Ideas Poetry Contest.  She has published two collections of poetry, The Storm, Poems of War, Iraq, and Not My Mother’s Classroom. 

AMERICAN HISTORY

by George Held

Photograph: Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/EPA via The Guardian.

              "I am honored and humbled to announce

the sale of an American firearm icon…"

--George Zimmerman

When George Zimmerman advertised
an auction for “a piece of American history,”
the gun he murdered Trayvon Martin with,
it didn’t take long for the bidding to soar
to 65 million dollars, since withdrawn.

The money, George said, would go to two
worthy causes: protecting peace officers
from the violence of Black Lives Matter
protestors and fighting Hillary Clinton’s
“anti-gun rhetoric.”

Like a magician’s wand, this gun will
“Open presto” not just the wallets
of fatuous rich collectors but also
the deep Pandora’s box of bigotry
and racial discrimination.

Poets have no tropes for dopes who
uphold the Second Amendment in order
to justify the right to shoot to kill
any “other” in a hoodie on a dark
Florida night

And they have no tropes for hope that when
President Obama flies the White House
coop he’ll leave the legacy of a post-racial
society, for America is more racialist
than ever.

It turns out that George Zimmerman,
who’s been unemployable since his
acquittal, has accepted a bid of $138,000
for his piece, enough to keep him in beer
and skittles for a few years.

George Held, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News, has a new poetry collection Bleak Splendor (Muddy River Books, 2016).

3/5 OF ALL OTHER BEATS AND RHYTHMS: 2006 TO 2015

by Elbert Tavon Briggs

Black Line-Carved Djembe Drum

The beats make me think

The drums keep beating

That same Ole beat again

moved Mrs. Mamie Till-Mobley’s

14-year-old son to the Tallahatchie River

Rhythms moved the strange fruit

Rhythms bruised the strange fruit

We have to find some space on dry land

from sea to not so shiny

Those beats moved

Derrion Albert from Fenger High School

in blood all over cyberspace

Medgar was removed from earth forever

Malcolm X was killed teaching

Dr. King met the same fate preaching

Fred Hampton was shot in a room while sleeping

The beats make me think

The drums keep beating

Those beats moved Addie Mae, Denise, Carole, and Cynthia from

Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church

into heavenly spaces, and I had to face this

they were children just like me

Rhythms moved the strange fruit.

Rhythms bruised the strange fruit.

The drums were beating on March 1, 2012,

same ole view

the rhythms were not new

that moved 17-year-old Chris Wormely out of high school

into thin air

while talking to the principled

The drums were beating

Spring and Summer of 2006

The drums were beating for

Siretha “Nugget: White – 10-years old

Tsarina Powel – 12-years old

Starkesia Reed – 14-years old

Latasha Harlins – 15 – years old

Ryann Brown – 18-years old

The beats make me think

The drums keep beating

2007, 16-year-old Blair Holt

became the teacher of us all

made his friend fall

his young body was the lifesaving shield

Rhythms moved the strange fruit

Rhythms bruised the strange fruit

drums were beating on Sunday August 7, 2011

when 6 year-old Arianna Gibson

missed church and went straight to heaven

One year later

Spring gets leaped by Chicago’s coldest winter ever

March 17, 2012

around 3:40 p.m.

6 year-old Aliyah Shell was gun down

in Little Village not Wounded Knee

Little Aliyah was killed in urban combat

in a war she did not enlist to fight

Oh say can you see the last weekend of Winter

Yaw don’t know the Seasons

that’s the reason at least 10 died

at least 40 were wounded

yes there were some knees

The beats make me think

The drums keep beating

Sunday February 26, 2012

a mother and father’s lives became twisted hells

when their son, Trayvon Martin’s heart stopped beating

The beats make me think

The drums keep beating

Winter 2013

fifteen year-old   marched

D.C Presidential Inauguration Celebration

Then Hadiya and college prep high school classmates

sought sanctuary from rain, test-ings

and career future prepping

unaware that they were stepping

into the undeclared war

rattled and ran

but Hadiya fell from shots fired

her hopes and future expired

Rhythms moved the strange fruit

Rhythms bruised the strange fruit

February 9, 2013

I heard Mothers cry

drowned in tears

as my eyes saw her young years

like Mrs. Mamie Till-Mobley’s son Emmett

her presence in that casket

represented too many lost young lives and dreams

The beats make me think

the drums keep beating

Winter of 2013

got even colder

as the streets became bolder

and took six Sons from two Mothers

The beats make me think

the drums keep beating

Rhythms moved the strange fruit

Rhythms bruised the strange fruit

Winter 2014

the drums were beating in Omaha, Nebraska

for 5 year –old Peyton Benson

snatched from the planet while eating cereal

No this is not a movie serial

and this it not a  dream sequel

5 year-old Peyton was my childhood friend’s Granddaughter

The beats make me think

the drums keep beating

Chicago September 2015

can't  escape

this un-dream

almost my birthday

shots fired

shots fired

shots fired

Grandmother

Daughter

Child in Mother’s womb

erased and human lives expired

11 months young baby

escaped with a gunshot wound

We have to find some space on dry land

from sea to not so shiny

The beats make me think

the drums keep beating

The beats make me think

the drums keep beating

That same Ole beat again

moved Mrs. Mamie Till-Mobley’s

14-year-old son to the Tallahatchie River

Rhythms moved the strange fruit

Rhythms bruised the strange fruit

BEAT THE DRUMS FOR ALL OF THEM!!!

Elbert Tavon Briggs was born 1952 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, raised in Omaha, Nebraska. Elbert studied at Northeastern Illinois University and currently resides in Chicago, Illinois.. Currently creating with the Randolph Street Poets @ the Chicago Cultural Center and workshopping with Poets & Patrons. This poem reflects his lifelong commitment to incorporate poetry, music, art, dance, and drama, to give voice to the voiceless. Elbert graduated from Arizona State University and served two years in AmeriCorps fighting the war on poverty in the Lower Delta.

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.

MEN OF COLOR

by Phyllis Wax

Image source: The Sentencing Project

Prison has replaced the plantation                

Pick him up for loitering                              
Handcuff him for a driving offense              
Jail him when he can’t pay his fine              
Harass, kick ass so he knows his place        

Young men rant in solitary
Molder for penny-ante crimes        
Or felonies they didn’t commit
In private prisons
Profitable enterprises
The public chooses not to see
                                                     
The bullet has replaced the rope      

New York, Saginaw                        
North Charleston, Cleveland
Sanford, Milwaukee

Amidou Diallo, Trayvon Martin
Walter Scott, Dontre Hamilton
Tamir Rice, Milton Hall

Black bodies in their own foyers
Chalked on sidewalks
Slumped in stairwells            
Bodies sprawled in city streets

Cheap lives, death at a discount


Phyllis Wax writes on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI.  Her work has appeared in many anthologies and literary journals, both online and print, among them Out of Line, New Verse News, Verse Wisconsin, Ars Medica, Naugatuck River Review, Your Daily Poem. When she’s not writing you might find her escorting at a local abortion clinic.

CONFESSIONS OF A POLITICAL POET

by Israel Wasserstein

“...artists who use their media of choice to advocate specific political agendas should always warrant our suspicion...” --Sam Lasman

I will confess I have little patience

for pastorals, for experiments, for post-

modern explorations, for poetry written

in circles to subvert patriarchy,

for lyrics that earnestly explore

how communication is impossible.

I confess such things seem a luxury,

and so I embrace unpoeticism,

and admit that I sometimes think

about those bankers who destroyed

millions’ pensions, profiting

on the misery of the soon-to-be

homeless, fantasize about lining up those bastards

and putting two bullets in their heads. I am not

a violent man, and I would rather write

about occult patterns the rain

creates, mixing with oil and garbage

on city streets. How can I write

of the squirrels in my backyard

who antagonize my dog

while Colorado burns, crops wither,

ice caps melt? These are ugly sentiments

for a poet. I can’t write small poems

about autumn with Trayvon Martin dead,

about subverting the paradigm of I

while the people of Syria are murdered,

while politicians label anyone killed by drones

enemy combatants, while polio and T.B.

return, while women die in back-alley

abortions and churches preach stay

with your abuser. While football coaches,

Archbishops, politicians cover for rapists,

while the children of the powerful

become the powerful, while wealth

piles in the hands of the rich

and the poor go without jobs, without

healthcare, without hope. I confess

if I knew how, I would rather be a poet

of revolution, to bend my words

against injustice. I confess

I am not that poet--too middle-

class, too white, too straight,

too soft-spoken. In my defense,

I can say only this: I

reject the sin of silence.

Israel Wasserstein, a Lecturer in English at Washburn University, was born and raised on the Great Plains. His first poetry collection, This Ecstasy They Call Damnation, is a 2013 Kansas Notable Book. His poetry and prose have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blue Mesa Review, Flint Hills Review, and elsewhere.

YOUNG BROTHER AMERICA

by Tony Rivera

Timothy Stansbury, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis

Being a big brother is exhausting.
Timothy wants me to pick him up
hold him up high. I oblige, to see him
alive . . . as much as his laughter is painful.

After a game of catch, Sean begs me
to bring him back to the jungle gym his
friends play at . . . be that as it may, be fatal.

Then there's Oscar and I on our way to
a celebration. Taking in his knees on the bench,
face at the window . . . we depart Fruitvale Station.

"RaMarley", "Charley", "Marley Charley" echos
a chorus of joy from the bathroom.  My knock
for the boys to lower their voices . . . is gentle, safe.

There is something peaceful about watching
Trayvon assemble planes, after a football game
. . . I just cant help but turn away, every time he runs.

And I am beat, trying to keep Jordan in one place;
his jokes wear me down to a smile  . . . boy is it loud! 
but boy, am I too tired, to turn the music down.

Being with young brother America, is exhausting.


Tony Rivera is an activist/educator from Brooklyn, New York.  His poetry has appeared in several print and online publications, including: Caper Literary Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Verse Wisconsin, and 5x5 Literary Magazine.

AMERICA'S GOD (A LULLABY)

by David Breeden

“It was all God’s plan.” --George Zimmerman

In the United States, God
loves white and violent, it
seems; loves what’s inhuman,
it looks. Look at His plan

working as it does. In the
US, God loves those laws
that fill the jails, that fill
the pockets of the rich,

it appears. Just look. He--
yes, must be a He--gives
a vindictive wink and nod
to the violent, as long as

it’s Christian.

In the United States, God
likes the way Florida does it.
Loves the way Texas does
people in. Likes his women
on a short leash; his people

poor; likes violence and guns
a lot. In the United States, God
loves his guys white. Just look.
See how things are in the plan.

In the United States, God likes
many of his children murdered.
Some in prison. Most poor. Just
look at the justice. It’s some

God’s plan.


Rev. Dr. David Breeden has a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, with additional study in writing and Buddhism at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He also has a Master of Divinity degree from Meadville Lombard Theological School. Rev. David is Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society, Minneapolis. The author of many books, tweets at @dbreeden.

MUSCLE FAILURE

an unrhymed blues, an unformed villanelle

by Sadie Ducet

Image source: Black Agenda Report

Somewhere between his death and the time it took

for outrage to find my community we lost

an hour in the morning, gained an hour in the afternoon

so the sun hangs, belting a disbelieving blues.

I join the suburban ballet shuttling kids

between activities and lessons, between his death

and the time it took a young writer

to ask me How do you write about violence?

I don’t, I say. Not violence per se. Not about it.

If there’s violence seeping up out of the poem,

like night coming on, that’s called losing an hour

in the morning, gaining an hour after noon

in the slow descent. What I mean is,

let me tell you about the workouts at my gym:

between his death and the time it took,

it’s all resistance. We push and lift against ourselves

until we can’t go further, holding the pose,

suspended for an hour in the afternoon.

Teeth gritted til the count is done,

that’s where I’m at, sidled up

somewhere between his death and the time it takes.

Between his death and the time it takes.

Sadie Ducet's poems appear here and there, curated by Sarah Busse, who is one of two current Poets Laureate of Madison, Wisconsin, and the co-editor of Verse Wisconsin.

UNAFRAID

by Caroline Harvey



On tour in Ireland, Bruce Springsteen dedicates "American Skin (41 Shots)," his song protesting the death of Amadou Diallo, to Trayvon Martin.


                Boston. 2:05pm, April 19th 2013.

my father, an attorney,
represented the new york state police bureau in the 80's.
when I was a child we had police stickers on our cars
and police license plates sat smug on our bumpers.
the officers and captains knew him by first name,
which meant we were waved through all the
barricades, the checkpoints, the
I’m sorry I was speeding, how's it going Jim, tickets.
I grew up imagining that
I was something remarkable,
that the cops had my back, especially.

I did not know
what my body meant.

I did not understand, not really
until Amadou Diallo
not until I lived in Oakland
not until I watched old women get beat down
for their purses
watched innocent black boys get cuffed and kidney punched
saw three year olds of every color huddle next to crack addicted moms
not until I learned to dance the orisha prayers in LA
got god-drunk with Maria, who was brown and Cuban
and her husband Alex, who was white and from Chicago
not until I traveled alone in Thailand, in Guatemala,
got spit on and kicked and attacked for my ignorance

not until I lived as an adult did I know
what it meant to be a child
white
and female

and to come from enough privilege
enough money
enough education
to grow up unafraid
of the police.


While the Boston Police, The FBI, and The National Guard hunted the Boston Marathon Bombing suspects, poet and educator Caroline Harvey endured the terrifying and mandated "Shelter In" by writing three poems every 90 minutes. Caroline has been featured on Season Five of HBO’s Def Poetry, and has shared stages with Melissa Ferrick, Livingston Taylor and Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), among others. Most recently, she was featured at the US Embassy in Serbia where she performed original work and led workshops about free speech for the first generation of youth to grow up post-Milosevic. Her work has been published in national and academic literary journals, including the National Poetry Slam Anthology “High Desert Voices,” Gertrude Press, Radius, The Legendary and The Lowestoft Chronicle, and she was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. Currently Caroline lives in Boston and teaches at Berklee College of Music.

AFTER THE VERDICT

by David Radavich

Howard University Medical Students (Image source: Carmar Descamento-Park)

There’s no end
to the battles.

My heart
can’t take
so much fighting,

yet it goes on
spinning
and spinning

like silk
of a forgotten
tapestry.

I am not alone.
You are not alone.

The ramparts
are worth climbing.

The ramparts
are life,

the moat death,
slow and inexorable.

We must
carry our swords

as if we
were masters,

cross the
infested waters,

call out
justice
to the wind,

sing our
blood home

in unison
climbing high

into
the fortress.


David Radavich’s recent collections include America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Canonicals: Love’s Hours (2009), and Middle-East Mezze (2011).  His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe.  His new collection, The Countries We Live In, will come out later this year.

PIED AUTHORITY

by Ralph La Rosa





           after Hopkins

Glory be, he is by God a dappled being—
His house now couple-coloured as a brindled cow;
For faces all a-stipple standing by him;
For words he says for burnt-brown Trayvon’s dying;

Statescapes gutted,pieced—white, black, & now
A verbal fight in which Floridians mock him.
All things countered, North & South estranged;
Wars un-civil embers; inscaped Jim Crow.

With words puzzled, clear, sweet , sour, bright, dim
My president insists this will be changed:

Praise him.


Ralph La Rosa is widely published in print and online journals.

STAND YOUR GROUND

by Emily Pittman Newberry

Cartoon by Mike Lukovich

There is a 9 mm gun
that cracked the door open
to no tomorrow.

There is a story
of two young men
with only one voice
left standing.

There is blood
on the ground
and tears flowing
from the heavens.

There is a state
that loses justice,
raises safety
on a pedestal
and gets death
in the mail.

There is a community
that puts its frustration
at past crimes
into the holster
of a man.

There is a teenager
eating skittles,
and the news says
too much sugar
can kill you.

There is a trial
and the rule of law rules
that 9 millimeters
of assumptions
and 300 years
of black history
are not admissible
as evidence.

There is a twitterverse
where dueling assumptions
give voice
to well intended fears
and the hopes
of competing histories
have no ending.



Emily Pittman Newberry is a performance poet and writer living in Portland Oregon.