JUST LINES

by Billy Easton

The UN General Assembly has voted to replace the traditional world map with one that more accurately reflects the size of Africa… The US was the only nation to vote against it—while there were six abstentions. —BBC, September 5, 2026

My teacher would pull down the whole world—

a big map at the front of the room.

Greenland, at the top, jumped out

as big as Africa.

 

But it’s not. 14 Greenlands fit inside Africa. 

 

So now, one hundred sixty-four of the United Nations voted 

to set the lines right. 

Only one voted NO. 

Because, they said, changing the map 

was superfluous, cognitive justice, 

they want to focus on genuine problems,

take the Gulf of Mexico or Lake Ontario. 

Take Greenland. Take it. 

 

That one country of NO stood to lose 45 percent of their landmass—

on paper.  And Greenland, no longer so huge,

the size of a single African nation—not as desirable 

for groping hands, engorged ego. 

 

So much surface ceded to Africa—in pen and ink.

No reparations checks, just a reality check. 

Imaginations, cognitions unchecked.                                                 

Just lines on a page.

Just                  lines.

 Just. 

Billy Easton took up poetry after retiring to Portugal following decades of organizing for social justice in the USA. He’s published in: Made from Midnight: A Requiem, The Dissident Voice and, forthcoming, Writers Resist.

THEIR GANG

by Eric D. Goodman

 

 

The number of people deported to El Salvador from the U.S. nearly doubled in the first months of 2026, according to official figures, coming as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has positioned himself as an ally willing to help the Trump administration accelerate deportations, a central priority. —NBC, May 14, 2026

I never ran with them.
Never wore the ink, flashed the signs,
never whispered the names in the dark.

 

But here, names do not matter.
Here, I am Tren de Aragua.
I am what they say I am.

 

They came at dawn,
boots on stairs, fists on doors,
faces like chiseled ice when they took me—
no trial, no questions.

 

A plane filled with men, young and old,
some killers, thieves, rapists,
but some like me, descent hombres—

wrong place, wrong time,
wrong side of the administration’s priorities.

 

An old law book dusted off:

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798,
shoved into the asshole-mouth

that spews hate without discretion,
sees an enemy in every shadow,
hugs the flag and says,
“this is how we take our country back.”

 

The judge says, “this is not the way,”
insists laws must live in the present,

that due process and justice must

precede punishment.

The right calls the judge a traitor,
questions the authority of the courts,

defies his judgement,

calls for his robes,

his job, his head.

“Why do they love criminals?”

the foxes scream on TV,

“Why do they want Venezuelan gangs

running the streets in America?”

as though they don’t understand or care

about rights or laws.

Never a whisper for the ones like me,
the ones who swept floors, carried bricks,

worked fields, who built and provided for this country,
sent money home so a sister could eat.

 

Now I sit in a Salvadorian prison

on ice-cold stone,
back against the wall, breath slow,
my name already dissolving.

 

Tren de Aragua was born in a prison,
and here, they still reign.
They control the water, the food,
who wakes up and who does not.

They are hermandad,
but I am no brother to them.
They smell it, this fear on me,
this foreignness, this lack of appropriate ink.

 

A blade scrapes concrete—
someone sharpening the night.

Eyes flick my way.
They know I do not belong.

 

That might save me.
That might kill me.

 

 

Author’s Note: This poem is rooted in the real-world deportations of March 2025, when the United States invoked a 1798 wartime law to transfer hundreds of Venezuelan deportees directly to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Investigative news reports documented that some laborers with no demonstrated gang ties were mistakenly swept up in the raids. The speaker in “Their Gang” is a fictional composite. The poem steps away from the headlines to imagine the visceral terror of an ordinary civilian suddenly stripped of due process and left to survive in a violent foreign prison dominated by gangs.  

 

 

More than 100 of Eric D. Goodman's poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines. His poetry collection Faraway Tables (Yorkshire Publishing, 2023) was an Amazon #1 Bestseller in Poetry. In addition to poetry, hundreds of his short stories, articles, and travel stories have been published in magazines and journals, and he's the author of seven books, most of them fiction.

PLEA TO A VISITING MONARCH

by Philip Kitcher

Dear Charles,

                        I beg you to invite

the chief source of our global plague

to visit Buck House one more time.

Then set the trap, and extradite

him to stand trial at The Hague

to close his long career of crime.

Recall the Cambridge past we share—

Fulfill a fellow student's prayer!

Like King Charles III, Philip Kitcher attended Cambridge University from 1966 to 1969.

THE LEAST OF WHAT WE DO

by Pilar Saavedra-Vela

 

Vusala Yusifova and her daughter, Inji, asylum seekers from Azerbaijan, cutting a client’s hair in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Photograph by César Rodríguez.

 

Trump Deported Them. A Costa Rican Mountain Town Took Them In. —The New York Times, April 16, 2026
 

 

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. —Matthew 25:31-46
 
 

The cicadas have been silenced
by the chill of the oncoming night
 
On the highway, under a tree,
cardboard  is home  to a warm body
 
The cloud village of Monteverde
welcomes  deported families
 
from Russia and Azerbaijan who sought
asylum in America
 
One Russian witnessed  election cheating
another  man protested in Azerbaijan
 
Imagine being denied American
solidarity, shown instead a boot
 
all the way to  Costa Rican limbo
to find help among  the Quakers
 
Korean war objectors
who settled  a mountain top
 
The poet’s song has been silenced
 by the chill of the oncoming night
 
The tired, poor yearning masses
cradled by the foreigners as their own.


Pilar Saavedra-Vela is a student of poetry, painting, and acting, former editor and translator.  Born in Colombia, she grew up in the US  and now lives in Costa Rica. Pilar's poetry has been published in Passagers and The New Verse News.

UPON LEARNING THAT THE UNITED STATES VOTED AGAINST

the United Nations resolution designating the trafficking
of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity.”

 

by Cecil Morris

 

 

 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) March 25, 2026 — The U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday adopted a resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans "the gravest crime against humanity" and calling for reparations as "a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs." The resolution also urges "the prompt and unhindered restitution" of cultural items—including artworks, monuments, museum pieces, documents and national archives—to their countries of origin without charge. The vote in the 193-member world body was 123-3, with 52 abstentions. Argentina, Israel and the United States were the three members voting against the resolution. The United Kingdom and all 27 members of the European Union were among those that abstained.

 

 

I think of Macbeth fresh from murdering his king,
his hands still badged with royal blood
and Macbeth asking why he could not say Amen,
could not call God’s blessing to himself.
Of course, even my least interested student knew
that answer: guilt. Guilt for what he’d done.
I think of my teenage daughter denying evidence
of some minor transgression, thinking, I guess,
that if she herself did not say it then it could not
be true. I think of her at 2 when we played peek-a-boo
or at 3 when we played hide-and-seek
and she thought she became invisible behind
a curtain even though it didn’t cover her shoes.
Even now, a 160 years after the 13th,
are we still Macbeth, tongue-tied by an inherited,
collective guilt? Or are we the teen who thinks
well, we didn’t know, it wasn’t even illegal then,
and what about the Holocaust or the genocide
in Armenia or litany of other horrific things?
Why can’t we just say Amen, just say yes
it was a grave crime? Oh, there’s the statement
about reparations, how they’d be right,
a remedy, if you will, for historic wrongs.
There’s the rub. Who’d volunteer to pay a fine
for great-great-great-great-grand-country’s mistake?
Wipe the evidence from your face and books,
and never admit what can be denied.

 

 

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025. He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California. 

ASSYMETRICAL WAR

by Paul Burgess

 

Cartoon by NICK ANDERSON @andertoon.bsky.social

They’re hoping schools won’t rain as rubble showers
resulting from an errant missile strike. 
I can’t afford the drive to see the flowers 
around the gorge I’d waited months to hike. 
They fear they’ll find their children split in half 
or buried under shrapnel, dust, and rocks. 
I’m scared the jagged line upon a graph 
will show decreasing values of my stocks. 
Their sky’s become an endless sea of threats 
erupting with the sights and sounds of war,
but over here, we’re making mobile bets 
on every prop the market’s apps can score. 
There’s something vaguely troubling, sad, and dark 
about an age of gulfs so deep and stark.


Paul Burgess is the sole proprietor of a business in Lexington, Kentucky that offers ESL classes in addition to English, Japanese, and Spanish-language translation and interpretation services. He has recently contributed work to The Road Not Taken, Blue Unicorn, Light, The Orchards, Snakeskin, The Ekphrastic Review, and several other publications. 

TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, I’M NOT SO SURE ABOUT THE VENT

by Eric Oak

A government handout photograph showed weapon remnants displayed on a table near the ruins of the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, where a precision strike reportedly killed 175 people, mostly children, on Feb. 28. The remnants have been identified by The Times as components of a modern, U.S.-made Tomahawk missile. Credit...IRIB, via Telegram

It was not the Israelis, after all,

who triple tapped the school in Minab.

It was US, according to the Times—

our bombs 

that blasted babies into doll parts, 

scattered them among the concrete-

silica dust of their classrooms.

But it was always our bombs, really–

Arab Salim and Jabalia, Biden’s

red line to Rafah. Bombs with

our names on them. Cruz and 

Haley chickenhawked in Sharpie, 

mine and yours scratched san-serif 

onto the shells in bolder relief with 

each paycheck deposited.

I read the article about Minab 

during my planning period, and

it lingers with me now around

this crater-quiet classroom.

The kids are taking a test, but I 

don’t care whether they pass it. 

I just want to talk to them.

I just want to believe that it's 

not too late to talk, that it’s 

not too late to believe.

Something about the way the 

big vent grumbles when 

the air kicks on reminds me:

the surprise lockdown drill

has to be this week or next. 

They’re quiet, like now,

the drills at least. 

The kids are used to them.

Winder and Uvalde, Gaza and Minab.

Maybe bullets stop when bombs do.

I remember now why that vent rattles—  

I took out most the screws that hold

it to the wall, and a few more outside. 

The maintenance guy showed me how

to kick and climb our way out there

in case we ever need to flee, to run

outside, unafraid as we are of a 

brush smoke sky.

Eric Oak is the pseudonym of a teacher of social studies at a middle school near Chattanooga, TN. He sometimes asks people to read the things he writes so that they may exist.

AGAINST PURIM

by Barbara Ungar

ID 67399384 © Olga Kuevda | Dreamstime.com

Parading as Queen Esther in kindergarten

at my first carnival, in her long blue dress, 

I tripped and tumbled off the low stage.

Yet I teach my son the fairy tale:

Queen Esther was a secret Jew, raised 

by cousin Mordecai, who refuses 

to bow down to Haman, who’s convinced the king 

to kill all the Jews, so Esther risks her life 

to reveal herself and plead. The king relents, 

asks what to do to Haman. Mordecai says, 

whatever Haman says to do to me. Haman says 

hang Mordecai, so the king hangs Haman instead. 

We rejoice: They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat 

hamantaschen, tarts shaped like Haman’s hat.

Bored at my son’s Purim carnival 

while his class intones Hebrew verses 

no one understands, and the teachers mug 

their way through the tale in drag, I read 

the whole Megilla, realize this was Persia

(Iran), Esther was in a harem, and Haman

wasn’t hanged, but impaled on a fifty-foot stake.

As the kids trip, one by one, to the front

to chant if they can, or just read the Hebrew

with no vowels, or blush and break down

in tears, I read, yes, Haman did plan

to impale Mordecai (so it’s a grisly take 

on the golden rule), but then they impale 

all ten of Haman’s sons. At every mention 

of Haman, everyone goes wild, twirling their noise-

making groggers and shrieking with laughter.

The besotted king gives Mordecai power so, 

the text crows, our hero slaughters 75,000 

of his foes in the city, and who knows

how many more in the countryside? This

we are enjoined to celebrate as Purim.

Party on. A vendetta thousands of years old.

Today, on Purim, I see photos of rows 

and rows of graves dug side by side for  

160 schoolgirls, and a video of an Iranian 

man in tears, holding the hand of a six- or 

seven-year-old girl, just the hand, all that’s left

of her. Of course we’ll pay in kind.

While the US vows vengeance for its seven 

(so far) dead, Jew-hatred blooms across the world-

wide web, and for every murdered child, 

how many will avenge? 

Barbara Ungar is the author of six books, most recently After Naming the Animals. Honors include the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, Gival Poetry Prize, and being named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2015 and 2019. She has published poems in Scientific American, Rattle, Southern Indiana Review, and many other journals. 

LEGACY LEANS IN

by Ronna Magy

 

Touring towns along the Danube, my rough Jewish boots trample cobblestone streets. Inset in sidewalks, brass stumble stones naming townsfolk murdered during World War II. Along the waters, a somber synagogue carved with perished names, marked and unmarked moss-covered graves.

At Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp skeletal yellow-starred Jews, pink-triangled gays, Spaniards, Poles, and Russians worked until dead. Non-Aryans stacked like canned fish in barracks at winter degrees. Prisoners chiseled granite, lugged 100 lb. rocks up steep stairs. Stumblers on the “Stairs of Death,” “Parachute jumpers” flung to their deaths. Inside brick buildings, gas lines rusted concrete. Weak prisoners marched in for hot showers. Chemical death.

The camp, above town, disguised behind forested hills. Our guide reveals a letter from a neighboring farmer’s wife who objected to watching prisoners shot, then thrown off cliffs. She made this request: Could the atrocities be staged elsewhere so she wouldn’t have to see.

What happens to democracy when hatred and evil link arms? It’s not news to us what’s happening in the US.   Adelanto   Atlanta   Aurora   Bismark   Battle Creek   Brooklyn    Casper    Calexico    Chicago    Des Moines    Detroit    El Paso   Honolulu   Houston   Leavenworth   Lewisburg   Miami   New Orleans   Newark   Philadelphia  Tacoma  Youngstown. Caged migrants: 70,000  already detained.

Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres   Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz   Victor Manuel Diaz   Heber Sanchaz Domínguez.  All dead. An unmarked black SUV just screeched by tinted windows rolled down. Masked men shouldering guns.

Ronna Magy’s recent writings appear in SWWIM Every Day, Cholla Needles, Made From Midnight, Rise Up Review, Women in a Golden State, The Los Angeles Press, Persimmon Tree, Writers Resist, and Sinister Wisdom. An alumna of the Napa Valley Writers Conference, Ronna’s curated readings of seasoned queer women poets for the Outwrite and Circa Queer Histories Festivals. She’s a retired ESL instructor and textbook author. 

MY AMAZING INVESTMENT

by Pat Davis

I think they are sheep at first
but they’re corpses
wrapped and tied in white shrouds.

I wish they were low clouds
laid out in a row

but they’re my purchases,
femur, tibia, wrist
tied up for delivery.

I bought the rubble,
the bulldozers, too.

Israel lets in chips 
and Coke.

Children are dying of hunger.
Children are dying of cold.

Our papers blame the wind.
Blame the rain. 
Aid is blocked, the doctors

forced out.
By the toe-end of a corpse 
as long as my forearm 

is a puddle of muddy water in which a star
was lost

Patricia Davis’ poems appear in Smartish Pace, Image, Southern Humanities Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals. Also a playwright, she earned her MFA from American University. She is translations editor for the literary journal Poet Lore and lives in the Washington, DC area, where she works in human rights advocacy.

SURVIVOR’S GUILT II

by Julie Weiss

Photo by Seema Miah at Unsplash

It snowed last night, an unusual

enough flurry in our part of Spain

to make the news. Downstairs,

my children pelt each other

with snowballs, their voices

all sparkle and windchime.

The sky, though gray, has no

reason to grieve. I stack dishes

in the sink, sweep up crumbs,

grumble, because who doesn´t

grumble about housework?

If a bang knocks a flock of birds

off course, I assume it´s a car

backfiring, no need to scramble

outside in pajamas, search

the snow for blood. It´s easy

to chide your children for tracking

mud inside when a government

thug isn´t kicking down your door.

Easy to indulge in a cup of hot cocoa,

extra marshmallows please, when

your neck isn´t crushed under

a state-sponsored knee. Tomorrow,

they´ll shove another child into

an unmarked van. Another child´s

mother will vanish, or die. Here,

far from my homeland, the sidewalks

will have frozen over. We´ll glide

to school, graceful as skaters,

hoping not to break any bones

on the hard, hard ice.

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in February, 2025. "Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children" was a finalist for Best of the Net, she won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for "Cumbre Vieja," and she was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Recent work appears in ONE ART, Stone Circle Review, Gyroscope Review, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review and MER. She lives with her wife and children in Spain.

TONIGHT WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 1939

by Steven Kent

UPenn faculty condemn Trump administration's demand for “lists of Jews” —The Guardian, January 13, 2026

At U of Penn, who's in the Tribe?

The whole thing has a 30s vibe:

Demand a list, some names get crossed—

Say, how much does a Holocaust?

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, The Dirigible Balloon, Light, Lighten Up Online, The Lyric, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, The Pierian, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collections I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) (2023) and Home at Last (2025) are published by Kelsay Books.p

THE AMERICAN DREAM

by Sheridan Walter

by Mike Crema at Microcosm Publishing

"If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America". —Nelson Mandela

Eddie Spott            

heritage stolen                  lost

Trayvon Martin        

hoodie stalked                  dead
Freddie Tyson         

cure withheld                    deceased
Margaret Schwartz   

door locked                      perished
Fumiko Hayashida   

citizen caged                    departed
Emmett Till             

boy lynched                      inanimate

Jeffrey Miller           

campus shot                     lifeless
Dr. A.C. Jackson      

dream torched                   gone
Ryan White             

plague ignored                  passed 
Zong Captives         

cargo drowned                  spiritless
Chief Big Foot        

tribe frozen                       unanimated
Brandon Teena       

truth violated                     bereft of life
Karen Silkwood      

secrets radiated                 checked out
The Rosenbergs      

voltage applied                  passed on
Addie Mae Collins   

church bombed                 resting in peace
Medgar Evers        

driveway ambushed           late
Louis Tikas         

miners gunned                  fallen
Fred Hampton        

bedroom raided                 asleep
Nicola Sacco        

anarchist executed             demised
Eric Garner         

chokehold tight                  breathless
Quatie Ross         

forced march                    cold
Kalief Browder      

justice failed                     defunct
John Africa         

city bombed                     at peace
Branch Davidians    

siege burned                    with God

The Bison           

plains emptied                  near-extinct

George Stinney Jr.  

child fried                              dead as a doornail
Hiroshima           

city vaporized                        extinguished
The Addict            

drug war caged                     institutionalized
The Gazan           

commerce maimed               shattered
Marsha P. Johnson   

river claimed                         disputed
Renee Nicole Good  

mother killed by ICE              Poet

Sheridan Walter (he/they) is a queer writer and doctor living in South Africa. He holds a master's degree in philosophy, and his work is forthcoming in Rogue Agent and Fruit Journal.