DATA AIN’T WISDOM

 by Anita S Pulier

Project 538, July 10, 2024

Even a perfect census will not put out the fire
burning in the Nationalist heart.

Nooses, confederate flags,
swastikas

stoke a malicious wind,
tease stray embers ablaze,

decency, fairness torched,
the dead mourned in time

to welcome
the next batch of flatliners,

school children hiding from bullets,
dead folk in synagogues, movies or concerts,

and caravans of the desperate who
wonder how close to an embryo

must one be to claim the right to life?
America, dear,

our once noble experiment
is choking on the foul air

in the autocratic wastebin of
greed and bigotry.

Sure, we will count heads,
tally up racial ancestry,

count votes,
count the dead, but will we learn

why, oh why, are so many
sucking the poison

from the orange beast’s burning breast
while Momma’s milk curdles and dries up?

Anita S Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butchers Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press.  Paradise Reexamined came out in 2023 (Kelsay Books). Her new book Leaving Brooklyn is due in Jan '25 from Kelsay Books  Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.

THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE OF 2024

by Cecil Morris

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

In the other room the Presidents debate

or speak in sound bites, trade accusations,

paint themselves in camouflage of words

and I can’t listen, sickened by them both,

these two awful ghosts of elections past,

one a self-aggrandizing victim stew,

one the merest shadow of glory gone.

I hear myself and my sister in single digits:

I know you are but what am I, I am rubber

you are glue, bounces off me sticks to you.

This format guaranteed failure. It makes

my heart shrivel, my stomach ache and cry.

Have we learned nothing? I think of my kid’s

guinea pig Harry on his squeaking wheel.

He learned the sound of the vegetable bin

being opened and knew it was time to scream

for cilantro, for parsley, for something

that fed him. I think of Peggy Lee’s voice,

weary, worn, singing “Is that all there is?”

and wonder if we can save ourselves

from self destruction, from bombast and hate,

if we can learn to recognize what’s best

for us, for our children, and work for that.

I want to request asylum without

having to wait for years in a crowded line

in a country foreign to my dreams.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere. He and his patient partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between the cool Oregon coast and California’s relatively dry Central Valley.

NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU

by Umang Dhingra

do not be too loud on the streets; do not play music; 

this is how you hide if there is a bombing, this is how you hide if there is noise, this is how you hide if there is a knock on the door, this is how you hide if the shadows outside your room change shape; 

this is how you cover yourself up 

but i thought we did not have to do that anymore– 

this is how you cover yourself up; 

this is how you read books you stole from school, this is how you read books from your father’s shelves, this is how you read books when you are not supposed to; 

this is how you cry for help; 

do not wear bright colours; 

do not look anyone in the eyes; 

do not go outside until I tell you to; 

this is how you beg for asylum you thought was guaranteed; 

this is how you live with no electricity; this is how you live with no food; 

this is how you live with no dignity; 

this is how you live with constant fear 24/7 on 365;

this is how you pray and beg and hope that someone is coming to save you,

knowing

no one is coming to save you.

Umang Dhingra is a 17-year old writer from India. Her work can be found in numerous publications, scraps of paper around the house, and her family's WhatsApp group. She usually writes about being a brown girl from India, about her family, and what her mother calls, 'little explosions of sadness.’

ZERO SUM HUMANITY

by Tricia L. Somers

“All the People—Oppressed by Black Cloud,” 1982, by Evelyn Williams

Under the rubble

Our loved ones, homes, and any kind of hope

We’ve been robbed

by a criminal we cannot see

Our loved ones killed and already buried

We are victims of this Climate Crime Catastrophe

Under a bridge

Huddled with our scared children

Our faith has been shaken

and our babies are still...shaking

Invite the world to witness your humanity

Anxious and jittery awaiting a fleeting glimpse

Like an endangered species or already extinct

Under hooves and cracking whip

We find ourselves in seeking but a mere chance

Have us to walk over your bridges

Only in shame do you chase us away

You don’t necessarily need an earthquake

for your country to crumble away

Tricia L. Somers can be found at Outlaw Poetry, Milk Carton Blog, and the upcoming Rat’s Ass Review for Winter 2021. Also the semi-annual print journal The American Dissident includes poetry, essays and debates with the editor, who is known to be somewhat testy. Issues 41 and upcoming 42.

I SHOULD BE ABLE TO WRITE A PROTEST POEM

by Margaret Rozga

Cartoon by Steve Sack, Star Tribune, July 7, 2021

I should be able to write a poem

about Afghani interpreters being given asylum

or rather not being given asylum, being dangled

the delicate hope of asylum for whatever that is worth.

 

Asylum acquired narrow connotations

as in insane asylum, not a refuge

but a silencing, an abandoning.

 

I should be able to write

with the insistent beat of a heart on fire,

the passion of Whitman’s barbaric yelp,

the precision of an accountant

totaling the debt to be repaid.

 

Airlift Afghani allies to the Field Station

where I write of black-eyed susans

counting their thirteen brilliant petals

flower after flower, utterly dependable.

 

We should. I should. What is power for?

What are words for?

 

If they do not set deeds in motion,

if they do not celebrate good,

if they do not open up space,

if they allow moral failure

if they do not uncover names

of the unnamed who throw up

obstacles to justice,

        then

be forever silent.

 

As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Margaret Rozga co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). Her fifth book of poems is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021).

REQUIEM FOR CIVILITY

by Janet Leahy





And now it has come to pass—at a time when we most need him
—Civility has died. We are not sure how we can go on without him.
He tried to quiet the storm of ridicule, the spitefulness of debate
that swirls around us. He could not abide the absence of truth
in the public square. The Civility family has known several recent losses,
a younger brother Justice, worked at the border, tried to stop the separation
of families. After two years Justice came home, exhausted by the inhumanity
he witnessed, the callous treatment of little children, who need a mother,
a father, to hold them close. Justice died one year ago. And his sister
Compassion, protested when the electric company turned off heat to
families in arrears of payment. Last January she fell into a winter
of discontent, illness took her vitality and her life. His only surviving
sibling is Charity, a poet. She chronicles lives lost at the border, lives lost
fleeing homelands not safe to return to. Lives lost seeking asylum
in the land of liberty, the land of plenty. We remember bodies washed
ashore on the banks of the Rio Grande—Oscar, his arms wrapped around
his 22-month-old daughter Valeria, he carried her under his shirt
as they were swept up by raging river currents. We cannot erase
that picture, of father and daughter, it is locked forever in our memory.
Charity will read this poem at the memorial for her brother . . . we are not
sure how we can go on without him.

Janet Leahy is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poetry and works with critique groups in the Milwaukee-Waukesha area.  Her poems have appeared in Bards Against Hunger, the 5th Anniversary Edition and the Wisconsin Edition,  in Soundings, Ariel Anthology, Bramble, The Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, and others. Online her work has can be found at TheNewVerse.News, Your Daily Poem, and Blue Heron.

UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE: ASYLUM IS OUT OF STOCK

by Joanne Godley

The United Nations refugee convention of 1951 provides the basis for American asylum laws. Unlike the Trump plan, it does not prevent refugees from traveling through several countries before landing in the United States and seeking asylum. But it does ban signatories to the convention, like the United States, from deporting asylum seekers to countries where their safety is at risk, a process formally known as “refoulement.” —The New York Times, September 14, 2019. Photo: Members of a migrant caravan made up mostly of Hondurans and Cubans resting in the town plaza of Escuintla, Chiapas, Mexico, in April.Credit: Brett Gundlock for The New York Times.

put the word out  on the street    we’re out of asylum         finished      weʻre not stocking asylum this season    there’ll be no safe harbor here    if you were looking for justice / equality / a listening hand / freedom from persecution     we used to carry all those things but no more
asylum was way too popular!     everybody wanted it!   we couldn’t keep it on the shelves    it got out of hand     anyway we won’t be offering asylum under this current management
you ask—is there anywhere  you can go to  get some asylum these days? under the table? you’d pay above market price?  you say  you just want a whiff?  well   you might try our neighbor to the  north—they may have a small amount of vintage asylum  left         i wouldn’t advise trying our southern neighbor    they’re liable to tell you “si, como no    asylum”  then try and  interest you in  some AR-15s smuggled from here to there

Joanne Godley is a practicing physician and poet whose work has appeared in the anthology 50/50: Poems and Translations by Women over Fifty and the Kenyon Review blog. She lives in Maine.

AT THE TEXAS BORDER CROSSING

by Wendy Hoffman





Justice is a pebble under the rug you trip over,
a slipped stitch on embroidery,
mail that fails to be delivered.

I want to give my kids life
so the gangs won’t rape
or kill them,
so we can buy food, not steal.

Does that make me a criminal?
It makes me unwanted.
I didn’t think we’d make it to the border
but we did, thirsty, filthy.

I thought the children would faint,
I carried the youngest.
Asylum: that was for the old days.

The stiff legged officers pace like dictators.
Some enjoy, some hate, their job.
All my children severed from my spine,

its sound like a building demolished.
Our pleading cries carry no weight,
our filled lungs don’t matter.

Will I hug empty air for the rest of my life?
I don’t know where they took my children,
I may never feel or smell them again.
The space between us is deeper than a grave.

How can people in uniforms rip out my soul?
This theft will be engraved in my children’s minds forever.
First starvation, then murder of our bond.
They send me home alone.

What will they do with my children,
who cares about them?
Asylum: a dream from the past,
democracy doesn’t exist.

The gangs are restless,
they know I am here,
they prowl.

Wendy Hoffman is a retired social worker. Karnac Books, London, published her memoirs in 2014 and 2015, and a co-authored book of essays, in 2017. Her books are now with Aeon Publishers in England and Routlege in New York. Her first book of poetry was published in 2016. A new memoir is forthcoming. She has a MFA in creative writing and lives on the Olympic Peninsula with her dog.

TELL ME THE AMERICA WE WANTED NEVER EXISTED

by Dwain Wilder

Tell me about Jim Crow and I will read you chapters from "Huckleberry Finn."

Tell me about slavery and I will tell you about Harriet Tubman, John Fairfield, Levi Coffin and a host of hidden hands, and the Underground Railroad.

Tell me about overweening power and I will tell you about the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Seneca Falls Convention, and Frederick Douglas.

Tell me about the worst of racism and I will tell you about a white man, John Brown, losing his life to spark a slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry.

Tell me about oppression and I will ring the rafters with Wendell Phillips,
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!
—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…"

Tell me the America we always wanted has never existed,
that people the world over, desperate for refuge
and yearning for it here
are but glamoured and I will show you a gift.

I will show you a present from another people’s dream of liberty,
a lady standing at a harbor raising a torch,
Holding a tablet inscribed with the day we called ourselves free;
at her feet, a few lines from a poem

and point out to you an endless procession of people who rely on her,
the gift of her,
rely on the torch,
rely on the tablet’s date, rely
on the fragment of the poem
and weep bitter gladness at first sight of the harbor.

The public anguish as our President and his henchmen
treat destitute people and their children like criminals,
little more than so much dirt,
for seeking asylum at our borders
—the existence of the America the humble of the world need
is proven by that anguish, its mass, its inevitability.

Your anguish. All it takes is yours. All of it.

Dwain Wilder is a Buddhist activist, editor of The Banner, an online weekly newsletter for grass roots activists working to get our country to acknowledge and respond to the current climate emergency. Dwain has taught meditation at Attica Prison, New York. He is a member of the Rochester poetry community, and builds stringed musical instruments for a living. He lives with his wife, their dog and cat, and a large rowdy macaw, in a quaint cottage beside a large dark forest.

POEM BURIED UNDER THE SHED

by Kelsey Bryan-Zwick 

Photo by Richard Baker, Concord Monitor, May 2, 2019

Buried under the rhododendron, left cold in a back
alley dumpster for the garbage person to deliver
to indiscriminate piles of city landfill, torn to
nothing by screaming seagulls, or tossed like so
many refugees seeking asylum, to the bottom of an
ocean more likely to be remembered as graveyard
did you think our stories would be pretty as we are?

Covered in lipstick, hair braided, words worn like
a dress, did you think our fight would be somehow
less violent than the all wars described to you in your
history books?  Well they don’t gag and bind you
with a patriarchy of rules meant to diminish your power
and your voice because they think you’ll have
nice things to say. As we shed the millions of slights
and insults meant to define us, we don’t even know
our own skin.

And when you hear us at first maybe it will just
sound like a siren, almost indiscernible from all
the white noise, but then unmistakable, an ill pitch
in the stomach, a long sickening wail, some
visceral animal, a tearing crawling shriek, clawing
our way through the silence.  After so many years in
exile, the truth is hideously real: the monster we made
our monster to love.

Kelsey Bryan-Zwick is a Spanish/English speaking SoCal poet and artist with a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in Literature/Creative Writing.  She is the author of three chapbooks, the most recent being Watermarked (Sadie Girl Press) a hand-bound edition which intermixes both her poetry and art.  Disabled with scoliosis from a young age her poems often focus on trauma, giving heart to the antiseptic language of hospital intake forms.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, Kelsey’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in Rise Up Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Incandescent Mind, petrichor, Like a Girl, Lummox, A Poet is a Poet No Matter How Tall, Eunoia Review, and Redshift.

WAKE

by Sean Murphy

An asylum seeker looks out from the trailer of a truck heading to the U.S. border with the so-called migrant caravan. Photograph by Alfredo ESTRELLA / AFP / Getty via The New Yorker illustrating "Searching for a Substantive Response to Trump’s Hateful Speech" by Masha Gessen, January 9, 2019.

This nightmare: the awful image of your scared daughter,
frantic inside a hastily assembled cage, crying for nobody.

Or to all those stone-faced and silent, heavily-armed officials,
standing around in uniformed circles: watching, and waiting

to do nothing; or rather, the one thing, the sanctioned thing:
just following their orders and etcetera, as usual, as always.

Never tempted or inclined to pause, reflect, and wonder how
He, the one whom everyone is obliged to obey, above all—

and whose sleepless armies wrathfully guard the gilded border
that serves to separate eternal darkness from light everlasting—

would fathom or abide disobedience and iniquity such as this,
an affront to what He offered as clear and sacred commission?

But then, who amongst us can claim to comprehend the evils
that might be lurking in the dark hearts of unfamiliar men or

their wives—shuttling the blessed burden all mothers carry—
in search of safety or shelter, however fleeting or uncertain?

And what follows next, when haven is granted, then imitated,
until this begets wave upon unbridled wave…finally drowning

our new world in its tired, poor, huddled, and massive wake . . .
never ceasing from the commotion it came here to accomplish?

And yet, aren’t human souls created in some unsullied image,
Bound to consecrated laws written not in books, but with fire—

According to He who judges all others in the midst of rulers:
Our Father, who enabled us to fall and, finally, be forgiven?

Who warned us to pray for lesser brethren—born to suffer—
and to remember, always: There but for the grace of God . . .

Go back to sleep, at ease with some absolution transferred
in sixty minutes every Sunday, the same day He rested and

beheld the work He’d made, finally dismayed by the shame
of us, declaring our earth too scarce for the meek to inherit.

Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. His work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, The New York Post, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha's Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of Virginia Center for Literary Arts. Twitter: @bullmurph.

OH, SAY CAN YOU SEE

by Janet Leahy

Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast

the line at the border
families with little children.
They do not look like terrorists,
do not look like thugs,
they do not look like really bad people.
They do look tired
and hungry
and worried.
They wrap the baby
in a blanket of hope,
rock the toddler
in a loving embrace.
After long days and dark nights
they are here on the bridge
of promise.
Can you see the young boy
on his father’s shoulders,
the child holding tight
to her mother’s hand?
Can you see . . .
Can you . . .

Janet Leahy is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her work has been published in the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, Midwest Prairie Review, and online at My Daily Poem, TheNewVerse.News, and Blue Heron. She has published two collections of poetry. She enjoys working with a host of poets in the Milwaukee-Waukesha area.

CASAS SEGURAS: A MESSAGE FROM THE CARAVAN

by Sarah Edwards

Elvira Choc, 59, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal's grandmother, rests her head on her hand in front of her house in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday 15 December 2018.) Jakelin was the first of two Guatemalan children detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection who died in government custody this month. Felipe Alonzo Gomez died in custody on Christmas Eve. (AP Photo/Oliver de Ros via The Independent [UK])

You live in safe houses,
get mail in a box outside your door.
You walk on streets, paved and lit.
Your homes have walls and roofs,
bedrooms to wrap babies in blankets,
kitchens that smell like clean.

We live in no houses.
Our address is the same for all,
Pueblo San Fronteras
Village Without Borders.
Streets are numbered by how far
we can push them ahead each day,
by what work we find
for money to eat,
buy space to sleep.

We travel on paths worn down
as thin as our sandals,
carry barefoot children on our backs.
We make a caravan together
because it is fearful to walk alone,
speak and not be heard.
We seek what you call asylum.
To us, it is asilo, a home safer
than we have ever known.

Step after step, day after day,
hope of welcome paves our way.
Then we will get mail,
build walls and roofs,
bedrooms to wrap babies in blankets,
kitchens that smell like clean.

Sarah Edwards is a retired pastor in the United Church of Christ with many publication credits, including two books of poetry, Pandora, Let's Talk and the newly-released What the Sun Sees. She is outraged at the treatment and disregard for people who want to find safety and make a life in the United States. The so-called freedoms that we espouse are only figments of our egocentric imagination unless we understand them to belong to everyone.

FOR THE STANSTED 15

by Matt Broomfield

"The case of the 15 activists convicted last Monday of ‘intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome,’ an offence carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, over a non-violent protest which stopped a deportation flight from leaving Stansted airport should not only worry all those who care about the rights of those threatened with removal. It should alarm anyone who cares about the right to protest. The disproportionate charge will have a chilling effect. Amnesty has called this 'a crushing blow for human rights in the UK'; Liberty said it was a 'malicious attack' on the right to protest.” Photograph: Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Image —The Guardian, December 11, 2018

“Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease, and so the R&D Blueprint explicitly seeks to enable cross-cutting R&D preparedness that is also relevant for an unknown “Disease X” as far as possible.” —World Health Organisation


disease X represents

the flash-drives full of martyred friends
the murals whose eyes you can’t put out
the secret slideshows shown on bedsheets
to comrades hiding in the hills

disease X represents

the breath which we breathe on you
the knowledge we share

disease X represents

our refusal to answer the questions whose answering
is mandated by law, the referral to lawyers
who cannot be afforded, the good work of lawyers
regardless, the virulent brown goulash
served through iron cat-flaps in Styrofoam trays
to the rag-pickers, card-scammers and lesbian mothers
the good and bad migrants, the friendless and their friends
the guerrilla paramedics, organ-grinders and thieves
the class coalescing for want of a class

disease X represents

the willing foreclosure of futures
which do not end in grief, the return of the gaze
the huff of breath rich with pathogens unknown
the tracing of banned words in filth, the moue
the return of the paper unsigned

disease X represents

your refusal to believe we would choose to subsist on so little
your demented insistence on finding out why, as though
the way which you ask us is not itself a cause

disease X represents

the exorcism of the cop which you put in our heads
through the refusal to think ill of our friends, whom we love
through the refusal to mourn the death of those
dead only in the most trivial sense
through the banned touch of hands in the pockets
of concrete overcoats, the obvious erection
on the back of the dirt-bike
running memory cards through the demilitarised zone
the reckless proclamations of love through the encrypted app
sweet enough, we have to hope, to radicalise the judge

disease X represents

the explicit search for the necessary evil
the conscious acceptance of the status of a bomb

the incendiary touch of hands between friends
which brought down the plane from the sky

Matt Broomfield is a poet, activist and writer currently living and working in Rojava in solidarity with the socialist-feminist revolution there. His debut fiction pamphlet was published in 2018 by Dog Section Press, his poetry has been shared across London by Poetry On The Underground, and he is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year and can be found on Twitter at @hashtagbroom. 

UN HOMBRE

by Alejandro Escudé

Video by RAICES, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency that promotes justice by providing free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees in Texas.

Tear gas is the language of idiots.
You wore your uniform that day, and died.
I blame you. Because you couldn’t have gone elsewhere.
Been there. You have mouths to feed.
I’ve seen that too. I have mouths to feed.
They feed on meaning. You listen to this President.
You recall your history, don’t you?
Abraham Lincoln. John F. Kennedy.
You look up at the Nixon moon.
It is too soon for the gas chambers.
The suits are on hangers. You give a nice speech.
As the poor people run holding their eyes in their hands.
I was a baby once. Do you recall?
The nation is here. The nation is Mexico.
Born on an island of sacrifice.
Like Marquez, you give them ice.
They run south instead of north. The north is full of promise.
The promise is made of money. The money,
When burned, smells of mota.
I smoke the mota you son of a bitch.
I smoke the women of the United States, so quick to divorce.
Guns. Ah, if that was really your problem!
Wink. Wink. If you arrive in Cabo San Lucas,
A woman tilts your head back
And pours tequila down the American carretera.
The years will pass. The American President
will die of some disease, eighty years-old, crazy.
His wife in pictures. Pictures. His wife.
This life is the same for us all.
I drink a shot of tequila for the migrants
Who are crossing the border while being detained.
They have achieved the American Dream,
Which is not wealth, or health, or living.
The American Dream. You smell it after the shared eagle.
To become the threat. Un hombre in the hands of niños.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

THIS COUNTRY

by Judy Kronenfeld





        Anti-Semitism was something that happened in history,
        that happened in other places.
        —Sophia Levin, 15, Tree of Life congregant              


My immigrant father, born in Germany,
was “a little roughed up” after Hitler,
after the first anti-Jewish decrees,
was scared “once or twice” by a knock
on the door before he left for America
with his younger brother in 1934,
following his parents the year before.
Only his settled older sister and her
family made the mistake of staying
until they couldn’t escape.

Maybe in order to live
in this new country, to have
 a wife and child of his own,
my father chose to keep his sister’s story
mostly close within, his private
memorial flame. Maybe his heart
was so heavy it broke, but he wouldn’t let
it scar and harden against love, or let
a furrowed brow cloud every hour,
unlike a few whom evil terrorized
beyond hope.

All I know:  as a young child growing up,
here, in this country, I wasn’t compelled
or even invited to dwell, to imagine
the last years of those relatives
I could never meet:  the broken glass
on the streets, the stars shining
on their coats, the black engines
steaming in the station, the swallowing
fear in their stomachs, then the soup
of potato skins, the lice,
then their starved flesh and protruding bones
becoming smoke just about when I was born
on a golden, free street.

But eleven people exterminated in a synagogue,
on Shabbas morning, here, in this country,
in Pittsburgh—native ground
of Gerald Stern, Michael Chabon,
Gertrude Stein—by someone who says
All these Jews need to die, and as I rage and mourn,
a sliver of imagination lacerates
my heart with fear and makes my stomach quail,
and I can hear the heavy boots on the stairs,
the rap of knuckles on the door at 2 A.M.,
and I can see my aunt, my uncle,
my cousins whom I’ve never seen,
who were wrapped away from me
by my father’s love, who were herded
at gun point to their deaths—
arising out of the safely past and gone.

Judy Kronenfeld’s last three books of poetry are Bird Flying through the Banquet(FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Ghost Town,  Rattle, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other journals, and in two dozen anthologies. She also writes creative nonfiction, which has appeared frequently in Under the Sun, in Hippocampus, and in other places. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing, UC Riverside, and an Associate Editor of Poemeleon. 

PALELY AND FLAMILY

by Devon Balwit

after Plath’s “Poppies in October”

Palely and flamily,

we ignite beneath the skins 

we were bagged in at birth.

Waxen and bathetic

we are St. Sebastians

of pointing fingers.

We wring our hands,

familiar

with the posture of martyrs.

No god watches 

at a distance

as we load magazines

into chambers.

What an endless rat-tat-tat.

What a shrill keening.

The funeral corteges

snake for blocks.

Candles gutter in clusters.

The comfort 

we hunger for

sizzles like tiny wings.

Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Rattle, Rise-Up Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

SENT HOME TO DIE: US IMMIGRATION POLICY IN 2018

by Barbara J. Clark

As a growing number of families are separated as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to control illegal immigration, some parents are being deported before recovering their children.. —Miriam Jordan, The New York Times, June 17, 2018. Photo credit Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times.

Someone has killed my husband and is trying to kill me and my children.

I run away from the killer and towards your home for many days and nights,

Because

I want to live and I want my children to live.

I know your home is a safe haven for us.

Exhausted and hungry we finally make it to your doorstep.

And knock on your door,

But you don’t answer.

We camp out on your front porch for many days and nights.

We knock on your door,

Every day.

But you don’t answer.

We are out of food and water and my baby is running a fever.

In desperation,

I enter your home through an open window.

I find you and tell you I have entered,

Whereupon

You tell me I am a criminal

Because

I entered your home through a window and not the door.

I try to tell you why,

But you won’t listen or don't understand my language.

Instead,

You put me in jail,

You kidnap my children,

You tell me I am a bad mother,

And that I should never have come,

That I should never have run from this killer.

The next day,

You stop kidnapping the children of those coming through the window.

Excitedly,

I ask you, "where are my children and when can I see them?"

You tell me you don’t know or care where they are.

That I should never have run from this killer.

And that I should never have come.

You tell me I am a bad mother,

And have lost my children.

You send me home

TO DIE.

Barbara J. Clark is a registered patent attorney with 24 years of experience drafting and prosecuting patent applications before the USPTO. She currently runs her own patent law firm in Ames, Iowa. She also enjoys writing picture books, social commentary and humorous memoirs. Last week, Ms. Clark, together with over 5000 other attorneys nationwide, signed up to volunteer through Lawyers For Good Government to help provide pro bono legal services to those seeking asylum. She will be training and working remotely on various activities, including immigration parole bond hearings and legal research and writing. She also signed up with the Dilley Project and will be going to Dilley, Texas in August, with an interpreter, to help prepare mothers (whose children are with them) for their “credible fear” interviews.

IMMIGRATION HAIKU

by Patricia Carragon


@JanzforCongress

sunshine
becomes rain
tears flood borders

shame
works overtime
kids in cages

chain-links
can’t restrain
cries from within

Patricia Carragon’s latest books are The Cupcake Chronicles (Poets Wear Prada, 2017) and Innocence (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Patricia hosts the Brooklyn-based Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is an executive editor for Home Planet News Online.

THE LULLABIES FALL SILENT

by Janet Leahy

'Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, The Associated Press has learned. Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis.' —The Guardian, June 20, 2018

In the detention center
there are no lullabies for the eight-month-old infant,
for the two-year-old  girl, for the young boy
calling out for his Papa, his Mama,
for the child who has memorized
his auntie’s phone number, and pleads
to call her, so she can come and take him home.
No one sings behind the chain-link fence,   
no one reads “Good Night Moon,”
or hugs a child as darkness settles,
but in detention, darkness never settles,
lights stay on all night . . .
No one cradles a crying infant.
No one recites “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”
still they wonder where . . . the lost parents are.
There are no groups singing rounds
of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,”
children remember crossing the Rio Grande
in a boat too crowded, too cold, too wet.
No one intones “Are You Sleeping, Are You Sleeping”
because all one can hear is children weeping.
No one sings “Hush Little Baby,” yet little babies
do not hush, without a mother or father near.
All the while the king is in his counting house
counting out his money, the queen is in the parlour
eating bread and honey.
And the lullabies
fall silent.



Janet Leahy is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her ekphrastic poems have appeared in several art exhibits throughout the state. Her work has been published in the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, Midwest Prairie Review, in many anthologies, literary journals and online at My Daily Poem, TheNewVerse.News, and Blue Heron. She has published two collections of poetry. She enjoys working with a host of poets in the  Milwaukee-Waukesha area.