LIKE CAPTURING AN IDEA

by Mary Janicke

 

abandoned
no longer important
 
a lone fence
facing south bars nothing
 
a symbol of folly
a symbol of power turned powerless
 
barriers can’t staunch the tide of humanity
that oozes around them like water
 
the migrants find their way
around the man made obstacles
 
in their search, in their dream 
of a better life

Mary Janicke is a gardener, poet, and writer. Her work has appeared in numerous journals.

HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON

by Suzette Bishop

Go ahead and come on down to Alamo, Texas

To admire me, the wall at the border,

Go ahead and come on down to brag

About building me to keep the country safe,

Go ahead and come on down to praise me

And yourself,

How strong we are,

How big and beautiful we are,

How much we cost taxpayers,

How no one can scale us,

How we keep out criminals,

How we cage children but keep them warm

With foil blankets.

Let me help you have a photo op

Before you leave office,

A mic, a platform,

Since you were walled out

After breaking down the doors

And smashing the windows of the Capitol.

As you know, I may be incomplete,

But I’m great,

So great that at night under the stars

This section of me coils

Into a circle,

Tighter and tighter

Around you and your golf cart,

The ocelots staring at you

As they run from one border to the next,

Walling you in,

Keeping the country safe again.

Suzette Bishop teaches at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. Her books include Horse-Minded, She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes, Hive-Mind, Cold Knife Surgery, and most recently, a chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead.  Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Poems about living on the border, animals, and endangered species are highlighted in her most recent poems and books while her favorite way to enjoy the borderlands is by horseback. 

OZYMANDIAS REDUX

by Darrell Petska

A section of Donald Trump’s much-vaunted border wall between the United States and Mexico has blown over in high winds, US border patrol officers have been reported as saying. The steel panels, more than nine metres (30ft) high, began to lean at a sharp angle on the border between the Californian town of Calexico and Mexicali in Mexico amid gusts on Wednesday. Photograph: STR/AFP via Getty Images via The Guardian, January 30, 2020

In the desert
a shattered visage lies
and these words:
My name is T***p, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains
of that colossal Wreck.

Darrell Petska, a Middleton, Wisconsin poet, thanks Percy Bysshe Shelley for his prescient poem.

PERSPECTIVE

by Janice D. Soderling





We are each but a minuscule dust mote
adrift for better or worse.
This earth is our bobbing lifeboat
in an alien universe.

So if T***p builds a Southern Wall
is of no consequence at all,
except for those on history's pages
who have their babies locked in cages.

Janice D. Soderling is widely published in print and online journals. Her work is included in the anthologies Nasty Women Poets and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry.

I PLAY INTO WHAT THEY FEAR MOST

by Guillermo Filice Castro

I have crossed you, taken your job. I am
a non-divine force, succubus to wholesome
American households. Here to clean you out,
me, a spick-and-span spic. May your ears
fester with my yips and squeals after you latch
the cage. Ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay. But ah,
what an angel Earth once was to all creatures,
prey and non-prey. And your prayer is open carry
and semiautomatic. Build a wall, build a fire.
In your man cave we can safely un-selfie
one another. Mira, mister, I’m hungry,
a rude corpse. The zombie Uber you never called.
I will rise from wherever you toxic-dump me.
Darling, I’ve come to oxycontin you.

Guillermo Filice Castro is a queer immigrant from Argentina. His most recent chapbook is Mixtape for a War from Seven Kitchens Press. He lives in New Jersey.

ATTEMPTED OVERTHROW

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Empty Vessel Stomping on the US Constitution
Trump Sculpture Series #4 by Judith Peck

Maybe you held the moon in your hands
and watched it morph
into a spiked border wall
in high-definition.

Maybe you saw your shaggy body
perfected
in a mirror of hashtags
believing the world wanted you.

Maybe you were soulless and filled
with explosives timed
to go off at just
the wrong time. Or not.

A king, you see, is a window
into the house. Into the heart. I meant
to say such a man is a door
into what we dream, what we think.
Not all doors open. Meanwhile
you let the rest of us
dissolve on your tongue like nitro.

Don't you know everything
you ever said or did
will be used against you
in the court of public opinion?

Maybe we can rearrange
your disorder to some kind
of warped metal sculpture
that reflects us, no longer
a bad reflection on us.

Moon or no moon
hands contain veins,
old blood. When you leave
the gilt throne you erected
in your own image
please take your fake weather
with you.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan lives in South Florida and writes noir with a dark humor. Books have been released by publishers in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Poetry chapbooks include The Art of Bars (Finishing Line Press, 2016), Days' End (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2017), and Final Arrangements (Prolific Pres, 2019). Project XX, a novel about a school shooting, was published in 2017 by Salt Publishing in the UK.

STATE OF EMERGENCY

by Donna Katzin

The House on Tuesday passed a resolution to overturn President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border, as majority Democrats painted an apocalyptic portrait of a lawless chief executive out to gut the Constitution. —The Washington Post, February 26, 2019

An emergency                                                              
sleeping in our subways, Sal
knows no other home.                                                              

Her belly a beast,
Alma picks through the trash when
no one is looking.

Pedro camps between
boards that used to be his house
in Puerto Rico.

Santa Rosa Ruth
sifts through rubble where wildfires
devoured her mother.
                             
With bare feet we map
our way through the wilderness,
build bridges—not walls.

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 TheNewVerse.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. 

DEFINITIONS

by Ben Prostine

Laura Contreras protests in Cincinnati, Ohio against President Trump's declaration of national emergency. ALBERT CESARE, The Cincinnati Enquirer via USA TODAY Network

A state of emergency is not the same thing as a
catastrophe, or a disaster. The key is in the first word.
It is the state in emergency. And it means certain things

emerge: off shore drills and coast guard ships,
the strip mine and the strip search and digital fingerprints –
an administrative task force on ad hoc prisons

and job destruction in the public sphere: more
security guards, more border patrols, customs and police
forces in-vested in military garb while a new design

for a portable bullet proof wall is engineered
and investments rise in razor wire stock. The day ends
with the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq looking up.

But disaster – that’s something different, older, astral.
It’s written in the stars, in fate, in sense: burning up
the bowels of the earth means bringing in a rising tide.

And catastrophe just takes us downward. The drama
of the state comes to its off-script denouement as
the choir desires to enter the theater once more.

The propped walls come down. Speech turns from
the ten thousand screens and returns to the streets, the fields,
something common: a world to be turned upside down

and rooted: this one round burning earth to be made green
again. A solidarity in the ruins, a power in the light –
out of disaster and catastrophe, emerging sprouts.

Ben Prostine lives near Soldiers Grove in southwest Wisconsin where he works as a herdsman, farm hand, and writer. He is the host of Poems Aloud!, a forthcoming radio program airing on WDRT (Viroqua, WI).

SPEAK

by Lisa Vihos

In the land of fake plenty
there’s a road paved with money.
If you’re something enough,
you can get on this road
but mostly you cannot.
Unless you can pull yourself up
on the straps of those boots
they stole from you.

Listen when the robot drones speak
from two sides of their mouth.
Do what you can to learn that language.

          Try our six-week, no money back
          guaranteed language
          immersion experience
          Time is running out. Send
          your first-born child.
          Or give us your planet.
          We can work with you on this.
          Payment plans are available,
          but you must act now.

Each day is an equivocation
of that which they said
they did not say the day before.
Who can imagine?
Look here, look there, look away, they say,
And do not do what I would not do.
          Or do it, at your own risk.

Advice is cheap. Money
is expensive. Walls are being built
as we speak.

The poems of Lisa Vihos have appeared in numerous journals, both print and online. Her fourth chapbook Fan Mail from Some Flounder was published by Main Street Rag Publishing in 2018. She is the poetry and arts editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal and the Sheboygan organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change.

MEANWHILE IN MIDDLE EARTH

by Matt Quinn

"Going Medieval" by Matt Bors at TheNib

Down in the valley’s toxic murk
wild gangs of rapey goblins lurk.
All shifty-eyed with evil smirks
and unbesmirched by honest work,

they lust for trinkets they don’t need,
like fifty-inch plasma TVs,
and get mashed up on meth-laced mead,
and spread diseases when they breed.

Not one can read or use a quill,
they have no useful trades or skills
and never ever pay their bills,
but peer with envy up the hill

to where the air is pure and clean
and sparkles with a silver sheen,
where no one does a thing that’s mean,
and all are blond and tall and lean

and bathe in crystal waterfalls
as lute-strings fill the shopping malls
with songs of liberty for all.
And so we built this great steel wall

(which also helps keep out the smell)
to shield our sacred citadel
from those who do not mean us well,
inscribed it with this ancient spell:

Don’t fuck with us, for we are elves.
We want to keep this for ourselves.

Matt Quinn lives in Brighton, England in a hobbit hole a short walk from the sea. His poems can be found online in Rattle, The Morning Star, The Deaf Poets Society, TheNewVerse.News and various other places.

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.

THE GREAT WALL OF AMERICA

by Martin Elster

A family of javelinas encounters the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border near the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona. (Image credit: Matt Clark / Defenders of Wildlife via Stanford Earth)

On a planet in a cosmos far away
there’s a USA that’s not the USA,
edged by a wall so ugly, Cooper’s hawks
and vultures will not perch atop it. Flocks
of bats and buntings ram it, while the turtle
and turkey blink and boggle at that hurdle
whose stainless teeth impale the stratosphere,
whose reach makes creatures prisoners all year.
Poets and meditators often wake
with hearts and kidneys missing. A mistake?
or just a program glitch inside a dream
hammered into heads by the regime
which built that barrier? Not the fiercest gale
nor hurricane nor earthquake can upset it.
Even the butterflies, bees, and beetles dread it.
Jumbo jet or Zeppelin or kite—
none dare traverse it. With the appetite
of a thousand whales, it gulps them in a bite.
When master mountaineers attempt to scale
the wall, they fall, or languish in a jail
with all the rest who waste away inside
a country or a cooler and abide
by the common rules in a cosmos far away
where the USA is not the USA.

Martin Elster, a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, has poems in numerous journals and anthologies. Honors include co-winner of Rhymezone’s 2016 poetry contest, winner of the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition 2014, third place in the SFPA’s 2015 poetry contest, and three Pushcart nominations.

AMERICA FIRST

by Gil Hoy

He proudly said
“my name is Francisco”

As he served me
my 3rd glass
of crystal clear water

At my 5 star restaurant
below the border.

And he proudly
proclaimed, and I
agreed

That his country
would never pay

For America’s
border wall.

But he stumbled
against the back
of a chair

As he walked away
in cheap shoes.

I sat long and still
in my chair

Thinking about
how he became he
and I became I.

The holiest way I knew.
And I felt ashamed.



Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and semi-retired trial lawyer who studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy is a regular contributor to TheNewVerse.News. His poetry also has appeared (or will be appearing) most recently in Chiron Review, The Penmen Review, Ariel Chart, Social Justice Poetry, Poetry24, Right Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, I am not a silent poet, The Potomac, and Clark Street Review.

MY BORDER WALL

by Kathy Dahms Roger

I fully understand the need
for an occasional well-built wall
but when its intent is cruel
and its purpose ludicrous,
I'm incensed and inspired
to submit my own designs.

First, for an easy climb, existing walls
will have ladders installed.
Shorter ones will be made shorter
to allow a quick step-over. Others
will receive functional stiles.

In the desert, each wall will have
a water fountain for cooling off,
drinking, and bathing. There will be
sheltering roofs with signs that read
Welcome! in rainbow colors.
Where there are rivers, there will now
be free ferries to provide safe passage.

My new-style walls, of such artful
materials as stone, brick, or wood
will curve with the earth and have
sturdy foundations. Any studs will be
widely spaced but with no crossbars.
This will allow effortless entry and give
the structures the appearance of open
gates. Some walls will simply be a series
of doors, all unlocked, of course,
that swing in either direction. And some
will be quirky curtains - of shiny beads or
canvas or even tissue for quick disintegration.

All new arrivals will be given
a handshake and a hamburger.


Kathy Dahms Rogers lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.