HOW DO YOU READ THE LAW?

by Jeff Hardin

The Tennessee Senate on Thursday approved legislation that could subject churches and charitable organizations to lawsuits if they provide housing aid to immigrants without legal status who go on to commit a crime… Sen. Jeff Yarbro, a Nashville Democrat, noted the bill makes changes to a portion of Tennessee’s “Good Samaritan” statutes, which are designed to shield individuals and organizations that provide aid from lawsuits. “What we are doing here is we are literally limiting the application of the Good Samaritan law,” Yarbro said. —Tennessee Lookout, April 3, 2025

We finally got around to laws against
loving one’s neighbor. After all, feed
someone hungry, then ever afterwards
one should be accountable for any crime
he commits. Had he died instead, he
wouldn’t have crossed that yellow line!
 
There was snow on the roads, a dark night.
In another month, buttercups in the ditch.
None of us survives experiments going on
around us—a high limb nudged by wind,
a few words spoken in haste, others unvoiced.
 
A friend describes an island—secluded
but uninhabitable. Think of standing—
wind-lashed, unsteady, uncertain—on
ground knife-edged in every direction.
 
New weights are added the longer one
hesitates deciding which step to take.

Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in Image, The Laurel Review, The Inflectionist Review, and others. His eighth collection, Coming into an Inheritance, is forthcoming. He lives in Tennessee.

THE ART OF THE HANGER

by Anita Pulier

Abortion rights supporters protest outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday. Credit: Valerie Plesch for NBC News.

Momma taught us to hang up our coats

tidy our rooms

and so we became familiar with them

Now that gang of robed men

and one godsmocked woman

remind us of the skills

we honed in the 60s then

abandoned when Roe freed us

to seek health care

in hospitals or clinics

where decisions

about our bodies

our lives

our futures

were ours

and we could safely

refuse to carry a doomed fetus

refuse to sink into poverty

refuse to empower rape and incest

now

untwist the sturdy wire

from its frame

squat, push it in

deep

scrape around

bleed

remember even 

their God still loves you

but they

don't give a damn

Anita S. Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane, and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butcher's Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press. 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.

FIVE OLD WHITE MEN

by F.I. Goldhaber

Image source: Donkey Hotey at Flickr

Five old white men in their black robes sit
in Washington eviscerating
the bill of rights: an Uncle Tom and
oreo, a corporate stooge and
his clone, a lech, and racist members
of the forced pregnancy proponents.
Religious pretenders ignorant
of science, adrift in a world of
technology they still can't seem to
comprehend. Wined and dined by special
interests, embracing infectious
scourges of partisan politics
that erode the little prestige left
to the court and American faith
in the law. They surround themselves with
like-minded law clerks, consume only
media reports that reinforce
their opinions, speak exclusively
to audiences predisposed to
be sympathetic to their viewpoints.
From October through July they hand
down decisions gutting laws that once
protected rights of women, voters,
workers, and minorities. For a
monetary gain, they handed the
country to a man who did not have
the votes, sending U.S. spiraling
into recession. They made Orwell's
vision come to life by allowing
the NSA free reign, turning our
government into Big Brother. Time
after time, these millionaires decide
business privilege trump people's
freedoms allowing corporations
to buy elections, deprive us of
health care, deny us the right to sue.
Now police invent more egregious
pretexts to arrest you because those
men give them carte blanche to search
every inch of  your body inside and out.


After more than three decades, poet and storyteller  F.I. Goldhaber continues writing professionally. Her poems, short stories, novelettes, news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews appear in magazines, ezines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies. Read more of her political poetry in her forthcoming volume Subversive Verse.