HAIKU FOR TORY MEDLEY

by James Penha

Tory’s death declared

suicide but his hanging

reprises strange fruit

James Penha edits The New Verse News. His latest book is Queer as Folk Tales.

MASS SHOOTING #2

E Pasadena Ave and Industrial Ave, Flint, MI, July 27, 2025

by Ron Riekki

“Dandelions bare art of

endurance”

—Semaj Brown, 

First Poet Laureate of Flint, Michigan,

“Black Dandelion” 

            i

 

4 injured, 1 killed, across from a church surrounded by endless fence and on the other side of the fence    concrete           and on the other side of the church more concrete  with piles of rubble fenced off and empty parking spots overgrown with crushed weeds and church windows you can’t see into and           120 air quality Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups        and a NOTICE WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR VEHICLES OR PERSONAL ITEMS on the wall of the building that’s painted pure black jet black onyx black charcoal black the entire building black    and the white-silver moon in the sky cut in half   in the smog sky           and crickets crickets crickets mixed with distant traffic and  the losing wind            and the wall is black every bit of it black with black wall and black garbage can with a full black plastic bag and a big black bucket near the painted black front door with thick white-silver locks thick locks and a gated door and no one to ask questions to nobody no bodies nothing just crickets and clouds and lights of the church and distant loud-soft traffic and a train warns its arrival somewhere on the horizon green overtaking the white-silver concrete and a telephone wire swings in the wind lazily and someone was killed here right here  a long thin orange construction cone leans against the fence like it’s having a smoke            and the wind and the crickets and there is no one anywhere and you feel the sin of corporate decay and the sick concrete clouds and the desperate crickets

 

 

            ii

 

down the street an absolutely massive sign for LEGACY FUNERAL CHAPEL

 

 

            iii

 

and before leaving

 

a security guard

alone

in a white car

on the other side

 

of a fence

 

and I pull over

and I walk up

to the fence

and he gets out

 

and walks up

 

to the fence

and we talk

through the fence

and he’s in white-

 

silver uniform

 

and he’s white

and it’s a black

neighborhood

and he’s white

 

and I ask him

 

if he knows

about the mass

shooting

and he says,

 

“I can’t speak

 

to any journalists

or lawyers”

and I tell him

I’m not trying

 

to solve a murder.

 

I’m trying to

solve Murder.

I don’t say that.

I think that.

 

I’m trying to

 

understand

why there’s so

much violence.

I say that.

 

I tell him

 

he doesn’t have

to talk about

the murder,

but can just talk

 

about how we

 

lessen the violence,

as a human,

how do we lessen

the violence

 

and he says,

 

“I’m not allowed

to comment”

and he’s robotic

and white and

 

I tell him how

 

when I’ve talked

with white people

in the black neighbor-

hoods where

 

the shootings

 

are taking place,

the white people

are corporate

and tell me

 

they’re corporate

 

and tell me

they can’t speak,

that I need to speak

to the police,

 

and I tell him

 

that the black people

I talk with

talk

because

 

they’re invested

 

in helping their

community

and I ask him

if the white people

 

who are corporate

 

aren’t invested

in black communities

and so that’s why

they have nothing

 

to say

 

and he walks away

silently

and gets in his

white security

 

vehicle

 

and drives away

and he is protecting—

seriously?—

what looks like

 

a thousand white

 

vans

all in rows

in a fenced in

parking lot,

 

all of these

 

white white white

vans, a comical

amount of white

vans

 

that he’s protecting,

 

and he fades away

into the night

and I look at him

fading

 

through the fence

 

that seems to be

everywhere

and how it protects

nothing

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

LOWNDES COUNTY

by Mariana McDonald

Source: Balls and Strikes, April 21, 2025. Pictured: Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who said, “The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens.”

       for Catherine Flowers

A low wind shifts and yet the smell

persists, erasing whiffs of sweetbrush,  

freesia, lilac. Even the gardenia,  

drowned out by the blaring stench  

of waste, raw and moving, straight-  

piped, pumped into the yards of poor   

folks in Lowndes county, Alabama,  

where Jim Crow and ramshackle join   

to spread a putrid presence onto lawns   

where children play, E. coli and danger   

in the dirt. No rains can clean it,  

clear it, make the grass a sea of   

fresh green bending in the wind,  

seed of childhood memories, scent of  

freshly-cut & gathered blades of summer.  

A memory Lowndes County children may not have.  

One brave fighter worked for years to change it,  

got a president to sign his name to fairness,  

agree to let the lilies and magnolias  

one day reign there, redolent of justice,  

until one stinking voice called it illegal, 

overturned it,  cancelling the clean-up,  

leaving stench  

to flourish

Author’s note: 

“Lowndes County” is about the poor and 72% Black county in Alabama where lack of public sewage treatment facilities forces residents to “straight-pipe” sewage into their lawns, creating a putrid public health and environmental disaster. After years of residents battling the state to have the problem addressed, and inspired by the leadership of Lowndes County native Catherine Flowers, the US Department of Justice launched an investigation which resulted in the 2023 landmark environmental justice agreement. The agreement calls for wide-ranging public health remediation and sanitation improvements. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice deemed the agreement “DEI” and therefore illegal, and overturned the agreement this month.

Mariana Mcdonald is a poet, writer, scientist, and activist. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She became a Hambidge Arts Center Fellow in 2012, and was appointed Black Earth Institute Scholar/Fellow in 2022. She lives in Atlanta. 

SHE KNOWS HOW TO MAKE A U-TURN

by Beth Fox

Photo by Kevin Bermingham at Dreamstime.

She’s black, she’s white—
she’s a white-throated swift
moving so quickly I barely see
the male on her back as 
she barrels toward earth
in a courtship spin—
swerving at the point 
of impact, then 
hurtling upward 
again to become 
a speck in the sky.
(Black and white,
           dark and light—)
The nest—
a cup of moss and twigs
glued to the side of a sheer cliff
with saliva.
 
(I was once convinced
    that dark news 
          was really light—)
Fifty trips a day to care for chicks, 
feeding them balls of insects… instincts
as true as their flight.
 
Before dark times, I could tell
black from white… I will again, when
I can see through these reddened eyes…
    Will I/will we turn back in time   
          to see
     the brilliant blue sky?


A lover of the outdoors, Beth Fox was a finalist in four New England poetry contests and is widely published in New England. She helped seniors publish their work in an anthology, Other Voices, Other Lives. Her chapbook Reaching for the Nightingale is available at Finishing Line Press. Beth lives in Wolfeboro, NH.

TO PRESIDENT TRUMP WHO IS THROWING HIS WEIGHT BEHIND THE DEATH PENALTY

by CaLokie

Text of the diktus.

Why

do we kill people 

who kill people

to show 

that killing people

is wrong

and why,

if we kill people 

who kill people

to show

that killing people 

is wrong

are we four times more likely 

to kill people 

who kill white people

to show 

that killing white people

is wrong

than we are people 

who kill black people 

to show

that killing black people

is wrong

and why,

if killing people who kill people

deter people 

from killing people

do countries

who kill people who kill people

to show 

that killing people is wrong

have more 

people who kill people

than countries who imprison 

people who kill people

to show that 

killing people is wrong

and why,

if we spend six times more 

to kill people 

who kill people

than we do when we 

imprison without parole people 

who kill people

and why,

if killing people who kill people

deter people 

from killing people

do countries

who kill people who kill people

to show 

that killing is wrong

have more 

people who kill people

than countries who imprison 

people who kill people

to show that 

killing is wrong

and why,

if our country has so many 

people who believe in God

and so glories in the cross 

on which 

Jesus was tortured

and killed 

but that cross was how  

Roman people tortured

and killed people 

who they believed had done 

something wrong 

and why,

if you can’t fight fire

with fire

and two wrongs

don’t make

a right

and though 

sometimes subsequent 

evidence shows 

the people executed 

for killing people 

did not kill the people 

for which they 

had been convicted 

and since we are 

not GOD

but people,

why

do we kill people 

who kill people

to show 

that killing people

is wrong?

Author’s note: This poem is not based on an old Barbra Streisand song but from a bumper sticker asking the question, “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?”

Editor’s note: The bumper sticker our poet recalls quotes a lyric from Holly Near’s 1980 song “Foolish Notion.”

 

Carl Stilwell (aka CaLokie) is a retired teacher who taught for over 30 years in the Los Angeles Unified school District and participated in UTLA’s teachers’ strikes in 1970 and 1989. He was born during the depression in Oklahoma and came to California in 1959 and has lived there ever since. His pen name was inspired by the Joads struggle for survival in The Grapes of Wrath and the songs and life of Woody Guthrie. He has poems published in Altadena Poetry Review, Blue Collar Review, Four Feather’s Press, Lummox, Pearl, Prism, Revolutionary Poets Brigade--Los Angeles, Rise Up, Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, The Sparring Artists.