WISHING YOU ALL A GOOD DEATH

by Catherine Gonick

Art by Clay Bennett, July 1, 2025

Millions of low-income Americans could experience staggering financial losses under the domestic policy package that Republicans advanced through the Senate on Tuesday, which reserves its greatest benefits for the rich while threatening to strip health insurance, food stamps and other aid from the poor. —The New York Times, July 1, 2025

as the deviants' suicide hotline 

goes dead, the bad vaccines

and free food disappear

along with the women

and children, leaving

only one gender 

on the sickly green earth,

and you already too ill

to fill out new forms

are free to drop, already dust

beneath the rug of our law,

as the best deaths are dealt

out casually as cards

by we who can afford

the deep cuts

and consequent

deaths that ensure

 "they'll get over it"

before you can know it

you'll all be bleeding

too fast to know what's coming

for your common-good bodies

already installed in pre-paid

unremarked graves,

wishing you all a good night

and good death

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including The New Verse News, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, and Orchards Poetry Journal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her first full-length collection, Split Daughter of Eve, is forthcoming in June from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She lives in the Hudson Valley, where she works in a company that slows  the rate of global warming.

WE, THE DIASPORA

by Jerrice J. Baptiste

Haitian policemen stand guard on a street corner amid gang violence in Port-au-Prince on April 8,2024.

Last week, my colleagues and I facilitated healing circles for Haitians, both on the island and in the diaspora. In this virtual gathering, known as the Sawubona Healing Circle, we bore witness to the fullness and depth of our pain across different geographical locations. We held space for the fear experienced by those trapped in Port-au-Prince amidst paramilitary violence. We acknowledged the hurt felt by innocent people yearning for communal safety. We understood the confusion among a diaspora who craved to support their people but felt wholly inadequate to meet the urgency of their needs. —Evan Auguste, The Haitian Times, April 2, 2024

Haitian leaders have finalized a deal for a temporary government to steer their Caribbean nation out of gang-fueled chaos, but the details must first be approved by the outgoing authorities, Agence France Presse confirmed Monday. —VoA, April 8, 2024

We, the diaspora know
our lives to be bleak without heat of circular suns.
We, the diaspora know
our hands to be bare not plucking velvet red cherries. 
We, the diaspora know 
consequences of our silence will cause you to bleed.

Can we the diaspora pledge to
merge our voices eclipsed by a stubborn early moon?

Can we the diaspora pledge to 
baptize babies dressed in white holy silk by dusk?
Can we the diaspora pledge to
grow consciousness as yellow corn in indigo nights?

Jerrice J. Baptiste is a poet born in Haiti, the author of eight books, and a forthcoming book of poetry called Coral in The Diaspora (Abode Press, August 2024).  Her poetry has been published and forthcoming in The New Verse News, Impspired, Urthona: Buddhism & Art, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & The Arts, Artemis Journal, The Yale Review, Mantis, The Dewdrop. Poetica Review, The Banyan Review, Kosmos Journal, The Caribbean Writer, West Trestle Review among others. Jerrice was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2024 by Jerry Jazz Musician and as Best of the Net for 2022 by Blue Stem. She facilitates poetry workshops in New York where she lives.

RITUAL

by Amy Shimshon-Santo

the year crawls toward an end 
sharp knife between its teeth
& bleeding tongue

a year of vowels

displaced from their consonants,
zipped together 

by a three letter word 
that is not good for children 
& other living things

I walk to the edge of language
thin stick between my hands 
holding a makeshift flag

colorless as the memory of water
scavenged from cotton 
clothing of the departed

it is time to place the year inside 
an urn, bury it in the Earth
lie down beside the unimaginable

hear the new year drumming
& dreaming itself into being, wanting
to be born

Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a warm-blooded vertebrate with hair. She writes  poetry, essays, performs spoken word, improvisation, and choreography. Read or listen to her poetry collections: Catastrophic Molting (2020), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (2020), and look for her forthcoming book Random Experiments in Bioluminescence (2024). Teaching and facilitating trans-local community arts projects have been central to her social practice for 30+ years. She is available as a guest artist, arts educator, coach, and editor. Dr. A has been nominated for an Emmy Award and three Pushcart Prizes in poetry and creative non-fiction. She was a finalist for the Night Boat Poetry Prize, and earned a place in the U.S. Service Learning Hall of Fame. Connect with her at @shimshona / @amyshimshon

HIS ABORTION POEM

by Dick Altman

Source: “Abortion” by John Bartlow Martin from the May 20, 1961, issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

he’s the golden boy

of parent/teacher/friend

the boy wanted on everyone’s side

the scholarship boy

the grad school boy

the golden boy

who in that familiar moment

of uncontrolled/youthful rapture

watches his golden prospects

for the future turn to dross

                      *

the Viet Nam draft

breathes down his neck

he still hasn’t found a job

(too educated, he’s told)

he’s not married

(though one day he will

marry the woman

he impregnated)

they are neither ready to marry

nor ready to have/support children

abortion is illegal

Roe vs. Wade is nowhere in sight

                       *

he reaches out to his composer father

who reaches out to friends

in the music business

an address and phone number

in Harlem surfaces

no names/no receipts

the golden boy borrows

from his father enough cash

to pay for a semester of college

the young couple agree

this is their only alternative

they discuss their mutual anxiety

she—they agree—must make

the decision

                         *

they never talk about what exactly

took place on the fourth floor

of the Harlem walk-up

she’s bleeding profusely by bed time—

in the emergency room by next morning

a spontaneous abortion the doctor calls it

knowing it wasn’t

whatever made the embryo abort

likely ended her/their prospects

of ever having children

Roe vs. Wade would not be decided

for another nine years

Politico’s revelation the Supreme Court

may overturn the decision

shatters him to tears

 

Dick Altman writes from New Mexico. His work has been widely published in the United States and beyond.

ALL FALL DOWN

by j.lewis

thoughts and prayers
get in the way so often now
it's hard to know when to think
and when to pray, or think about praying
or pray about thinking
as if the mere voicing
of the thoughtless prayer
or the prayerless thought
could make anything at all
better than bleeding kids

bleeding kids, kids bleating
parkland comes to mind
as the survivors don't just think
and don't just pray
but stand and challenge aloud
the bleating politicians
who thoughtlessly offer
through hypocritical lips
a silent prayer that they will not
have to stand up, stand against
their donors, take a stand
and watch the campaign coffers bleed

bleeding coffers, coffins bearing
faces bled white against white satin pillows
as if the pain of separation from life
could be soothed by the softness
smoothed by the softly falling tears
tears that tear apart the future
the past, the present as though
thoughts and prayers were knives
hurled against a wall of inaction
politics—inaction in action

guns in action, bolt action
action figures, police reaction
but not until the blood has spilled
thoughts, prayers, blood spilling
every day, every classroom

classes, classes, we all fall down

j.lewis is a Nurse Practitioner who has seen far too much violence in his lifetime to be quiet in the face of the disgrace of unchecked gun deaths in America.

EMERGENCY ROOM, NYC

by Terese Coe

Sitting on a cot in the walkway of the ER for hours

to get up and walk the circle of disease and decay,

he is struck by the bleeding case, the festering case,

the dying woman no one tends but her daughter.

After four hours the intimidation team of interns

marches in to insist on an overnight stay. You’ll

have a bed within two hours. Another three hours on,

no bed. He cases the joint for exits. Uniformed officers

stand at every exit except one, which is locked,

and prove their seriousness when he

approaches them. Having signed himself in, he is

no longer free to quit the place. He climbs into his

clothing again, saying he’s cold, ambles to the empty

interior hall and waits. Five minutes later a nurse

enters the hall, fails to notice him in the dead

end on the other side, swipes her card on

the pad for the unguarded door and, like a

miracle, passes through the magic portal with her tray

of meds. It remains open just long enough for him to follow

her through unseen. He finds himself in the main hall

of the hospital, suddenly unconstrained across meandering

public areas and out the front door. Intact. At home,

Arlene calls to say she went to visit him in the ER

and they were looking for him: I asked them how you

could have disappeared and a nurse said “He’s not a

psychiatric patient, so we can’t force him to stay.”

He says, “If I’d been there any longer, I would have been

a psychiatric patient.” That night the swelling subsides

when he takes a shower. No one calls from the ER

to ask questions--yet.

Terese Coe's poems and translations have appeared in Threepenny Review, Poetry, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Huffington Post, Poetry Review, TLS, Agenda, New Walk Magazine, Warwick Review, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications, including anthologies. One of her poems was chosen for the 2012 London Olympics Rain of Poems and heli-dropped across London, and her latest collection of poems will be out in February 2015.

MARIA'S HELICOPTER

 by Rick Gray

When the thudding comes,
I know it's not my jumpy heart, or an attack,
but a helicopter racing the real wounded
slashed straight across an unflinching sky. 

I look down, and remember my daughter Rania's
little hands drawing a crayon version of that same
shivering war machine above me
pink and purple and baby blue.

And it almost makes me smile, how cute it was,
until I remember the other drawing,
the one from her twin sister Maria,
who drew her helicopter only red, and bleeding.


Rick Gray has work currently appearing in Salamander and has an essay forthcoming in the book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. He served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and teaches in Kabul, Afghanistan.