BORDERS

by Howie Good

Nature abhors borders. A smoky haze from Canadian wildfires blots out the sun in Columbus, Ohio. An earthquake under the Sea of Japan shakes skyscrapers in LA. The Earth shares one skin. Borders are human constructs, a kind of illusion, lines that appear on maps without appearing on corresponding landscapes. Governments speak of the sanctity of borders. The smoke from far up north has turned daylight where I live a ghostly amber. There are no borders, really, only fences and patrols and checkpoints as if there were. Men have died by the millions defending what doesn’t exist.

Howie Good's latest poetry collection True Crime was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

21 GRAMS

by Alan Catlin

“Mountains are hard to climb

thus walls are your friends.

Learn your walls.”

            —Bukowski

“We laugh at your walls.”
Drug cartel tunnel rats.
Digging from one safe house
to another safe house.
Under border fences, razor wire
enclaves, ICE patrol car roads.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Tunnels for shrink wrapped
pure. White death by the pound.
Powdered snow by the kilo.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Tunnels under prison walls.
Two and half miles of digging.
No problema.  Cell to freedom
service. “Viva El Chapo!”
Viva Empire of the Opiates,
Reign of terror Take Two.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Steel stanchion impediments
where concrete is called for.
Easily breeched by purchased
at Wal-Mart, Home Depot,
Lowe’s, metal cutting tool department.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Tunnels for coyote caravans,
pay the tolls, travel the underground
railway. “Refugees show us the green,
hombre and we deliver the goods.”

“We laugh at your walls.”
US Army supplied terror cells
of the night.  Drug enforcers,
Zeta killers, Sinaloa lackeys,
CIA trained Torquemada’s.
Slipping under barriers, walls.
Mescal high, take-no-prisoners
instructed, rape and pillage experts,
mercenaries for moola, hostile
and loathsome, heartless as
the street criminals they once were,
laughing at walls.

Find a tunnel and fill it, ten more
are dug. Once you are in The Life,
The Life is in you, there is no looking
back, no escape possible: one foot in
Sodom, the other in Gomorrah.
Not point in last wills and testaments:
no one will bury you when you are killed
unless the tunnel you are in collapses.


Alan Catlin has published dozens of chapbooks and full length books, most recently the chapbook Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance (Presa Press), a series of ekphrastic poems responding to the work of German photographer August Sander who did portraits of Germans before, during, and after both World Wars.

WIRE CUTTERS

by Bill Sullivan

"Cutting Barbed Wire" by Toyo Miyatake (circa 1944/1945).

Somehow Mr. Miyatake was able to smuggle in his lenses,
build a makeshift box camera out of what scraps were available
in the Manzanar Internment Camp. Confinement could not
constrain his ingenuity, his spirit, his need to document injustice.
So we have a black and white record of this shameful action
as well as photos of a resilient, proud people to absorb and remember.

               I am looking at his image of a raised arm, a hand
clutches a wire cutter, as if it were a lifeline, its blades open,
ready, eager, one senses, to sever a strand of razor sharp barbed wire.
In the top left-hand corner, we see the guard tower looming
over the scene. Yes, a given time and place. A dark piece
of our past, but it could have been taken at one of the Nazi
concentration camps, a Siberian gulag, any one of too many
political prisons. Clashing symbols; the desire to be free
and the drive to imprison.

               I am thinking of the suspicion, fear and greed
that led to the confinement of Japanese Americans decades ago
but also, the recent images of Central American children separated
from parents, crammed into cages, lying there on concrete
or thin pads, alone, sobbing, some silently, Brown children, vermin
to some, quarantined, held as hostages to convince their parents
to return to their countries and to deter other asylum seekers
from crossing the border. All that cruelty to assure the whiteness
of America prevails.

Has a photographer pressed his shutter, captured
the indifference and abuse in this house of horrors?
Has a filmmaker documented the bewilderment
and innocence of children, the anguish of parents?
So that after the wires are severed and they are free
and united, we and our children's children can see,
know shame and anger, reap love from the ashes
of our history.

Shoes and toys left at a port of entry to the U.S. in Tornillo, Texas. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images accompanying “Toddlers fend for themselves in immigration court thanks to Trump,” an op-ed by Sen. Richard Durbin, Chicago Sun-Times, August 17, 2018. "The policy began in secret. The Trump administration denied such a policy existed. And when it finally acknowledged that migrant children were being separated from their parents at the border, chaos ensued. Only now is the full picture of what happened and why becoming clear." —The Daily podcast presents "Divided."

Bill Sullivan taught English and American studies at Keene State College, co-authored books on Twentieth century American poetry, co-produced two documentary films, and most recently published Loon Lore: In Poetry and Prose.

ON THE EDGE

by Laura Rodley

Abenaki Indian Pictures. Abenaki Children. Image source: Indians Pictures.

In the back edge of the forest

are stones piled up one on top the other

in a horseshoe shape facing

the quartz vein outcropping

perhaps built by Abenaki Indians

before colonial men sent their servants

to take stones from Indian burial mounds

to build their stone fences,

unknowingly disturbing the peace,

and here my husband and another

man named Jim lift beds of moss

off the stone structure, reveal it

to be as tall as a horse, facing the sky,

the midnight sky when the Big Dipper

hangs low and this is what my eyes

feasted on before the election,

how it is time for the Indian spirits

to walk our land, to look

to the Big Dipper and the old spirits

caught in her cup

for our answers, for forgiveness.

Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” has won a Pushcart Prize and appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.