BEN SHAHN VISITS ICE DETENTION CENTERS

by Rikki Santer

ICE Detention Center in North Carolina to Be Among Largest on East Coast: The new complex near the Virginia border signals that even as ICE has retreated from its plan to buy warehouses, the agency remains determined to increase its detention capacity. —The New York Times, July 23, 2026

“Allegory” (1948) by Ben Shahn (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX)

Tomorrow’s art, if it is to be at all stirring, will no doubt be performed upon today’s forbidden territory.  —The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn  (1898-1969)

 

What will he paint to make the terror stop?  

This red kettle bell ringer whose blotted, stuttered 

lines contoured a lifetime for social justice.

In this circuit of fatelines, it is those whose lines 

of flight crossed an administration’s line

into cruelty. To make detention so bad

they’ll want to deport. So it’s not a formal

visit because they don’t know who he is

and artists are damned liars anyway.

Will his palimpsest of thrashing marks show

what’s behind locked doors and spirals 

of barbed wire? Tiny holding cells

with insects crawling, scant food, water,

medical care or contact with family or lawyers, 

sewage bubbling up from shower drains, cold 

nights that some wear socks on their arms,

other nights some in suicide surrender. With 

currency of pictorial language, will he paint 

another raging, demonic chimera with flaming

mane, refusing to suckle its children, leaving 

their lifelesss bodies beneath its udder 

in a heap of time-tested allegory?

 

 

Rikki Santer’s poetry collection, Resurrection Letter was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books. In 2023, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year and currently serves as Artist-in-Residence at the Fran Ryan Center in Columbus, Ohio and a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council. Her fifteenth poetry collection, Could Be, was published this spring by Sheila-Na-Gig Press.

2021: WHEN CICADAS COME BACK AGAIN

by Susan Terris

Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Turn of the 21st century, and 17 year cicadas had surfaced again in New Haven as I visited my girlhood friend Callie, daughter of another Callie—she: heavy, sedentary, called Big Callie but long gone by 2000. There, with the spring crocus pushing up, we crunched along the sidewalks strewn with empty shells shining in morning sun like gems of silver and gold, unable to escape still-live cicadas that sounded like water in a mad cascade. Years ago, cicadas had come just before Big Callie died of breast cancer. Then my friend—who had married a widower with two children—made him one again not very long after my visit. Yes,  my Callie died of breast cancer, too.

 

Now I worry for Callie’s daughter, her daughter’s two daughters. And then remembering her and the fragility of cicadas reminds me how my own cells had multiplied to breast cancer and 17 years later my sister’s, until I began counting off years and wondering what lay waiting for my daughter and my sister’s daughters, our clutch of granddaughters. Thousand upon thousand of empty shells and countless dangeous cells and the cascade of fears waiting out their own cycles, buried and dormant, until live and invasive

Susan Terris’ recent books are Familiar Tense (Marsh Hawk) 2019; Take Two: Film Studies (Omnidawn) 2017, Memos (Omnidawn) 2015; and Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk) 2012. She's the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and one play.  Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. A poem of hers appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXI. A poem from Memos was in Best American Poetry 2015. Her newest chapbook is Dream Fragments, which won the 2019 Swan Scythe Press Award. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal.

THREE STRIKES NO MORE

by Claire Day

On June 26, the United States Supreme Court ruled the federal Three-Strikes Law unconstitutional. In Johnson vs. United States, the Supreme Court held that the government violated Johnson’s due process by imposing an increased sentence under the Armed Career Criminal Act’s residual clause that was unconstitutionally vague, standard-less, and only enforceable arbitrarily. The ruling elaborated that two elements constitute the vagueness of the law: 1) by assessing risk of a case using fictitious crime rather than using real-world statistics, and 2) ambiguity regarding the amount of risk necessary to qualify a crime as a violent felony. In other words, assessment of risk of future violent crime by an individual is unpredictable and uncertain, and has not historically been applied consistently. Supreme Court Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court, joined by Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, while Kennedy and Thomas concurred in the judgment. Justice Alito filed the sole dissenting opinion. —National Center for Due Process, July 6, 2015

There used to be a row of firs
lined up against the fence
limbs outstretched to intertwine
and guard the narrow yard like jailers,
block access to the light

There are prisoners
who never move beyond the confines of their bars
and see the sun
they live in tiny spaces
meant to squash the soul

The trees are down now
their rule long gone

Grass sings
flowers surge in summer hues
grapes dally on the vine

And breathe the smell of freedom


Claire Day lives in western Massachusetts, in an area where writing is virtually a way of life. After writing prose for several decades and both participating in and facilitating writing workshops,she has discovered the joys of poetry. She enjoys its economy of words, its lack of distracting verbage, and most of all, its ability to enter the mind and heart.

EBOLA

by Michael Shorb

The deadly Ebola virus that’s killed more than 600 people so far in West Africa may have been smoldering there for years and has almost certainly sickened people who thought they had something else, researchers say. --NBC News, July 20, 2014

From Pointe-Noire to Mombasa
the AIDS Highway
runs through villages
hunched in smoky blue-gum
cooking fires, veers north
into unbroken rain forest
tracts, peels east at Kisangani,
where ageless women walk
its red clay shoulders.

Goes into Uganda, past
immense and turgid
Lake Victoria, past
the Isle of Plagues
where infected monkeys
shriek and gibber bearing
inner leaf storms
of microbial marauders.

Toward Mt. Elgon's
mantle of blue hills
laced with fever trees
and floods of native corn
where warning calls
of Colubus monkeys
explode from the green
crowns of podocarpus trees.

Elephant herds thundered
on this mountain once
scraped Kitum Cave with
salt-hungry
           thrusting tusks
now their
         withered gray skins
are left for roaches
now burnt huts and
blackened rubble bear
broken
Coca Cola bottle
testimony
  of human scale.

Look, you can't kill
all this life without resistance
somewhere along lines
                    of DNA and RNA leading
back in time,

back to our own
brooding progenitors
coming to in Eden,
new in the forest,
learning the art
of trapping fire
just getting their
brain cells wet.

You nailed the biggest
ones with ease
the huge in their lumbering grace
elephant clans
              thirsty water buffaloes
              bitten by fruit bats
no match for jeeps
night vision scopes automatic
rifles, even galaxies
of primal forest
are going under as
populations spawn.

Now villages in Zaire, Guinea, Sri Lanka
boil over into bloody death
first shotgun blasts
to the pineal
eyes running red
as unseen predator armies
                         open maws
sharks in feeding frenzy
multiply fission-like inside
besieged cities
               of liver lung and heart.

Man is meat to this thing
fluid a highway
AIDS a warning shot against the enemy
of human reproduction.

Somewhere earth fights back
will not go down without
clawing the faces of its destroyer.

It waits.

Inert mobility endowed with talent
for change,
         
           easy traveler, breath propelled
villagers afraid Ebola escapes from Grave

dance of microscopic sticks:
Ebola, little sisters of extermination
fire in the cells.


Michael Shorb was published in more than 100 poetry magazines and anthologies including Michigan Quarterly, The Sun, and The Kyoto Journal.  He was nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Award and won a Merit Award for the Franklin Christoph Poetry Contest. Michael succumbed to Gist, a rare form of cancer in August 2012. His book of poetry Whale Walker's Morning was published posthumously in Winter 2013, by Shabda Press.


Editor's note: Michael Shorb wrote this poem when the virus was running amuck in East Africa several years ago; his wife Judith Grogan-Shorb updated it for The New Verse News.