ANOTHER GUATEMALAN CHILD

by Jan Steckel

A 16-year-old boy died Monday at a Border Patrol station in Texas, becoming the fifth child from Guatemala to die since December after being apprehended by US border patrol agents. —Yahoo! News, May 21, 2019. Photo: People hold a vigil for migrants who have died, have been detained and deported by US authorities, near the US-Mexico border fence in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, on May 3, 2019 (AFP Photo/Guillermo Arias via Yahoo! News).

With the name, they release
a face, a family, a story,
but not a living child.

Five dead kids in five months.
Only half the migrants
are from Guatemala,

but all the dead children are.
What are the odds?
(1/2)5 or 1 out of 32.

Are they sicker?
Poorer? More fragile?
Indigenous? Dark?

Did they beg
in Mayan tongues,
so pleas were ignored?

In the hospital.
In the ICU.
Alone in his cell.

Pneumonia. Influenza.
She died of a fever,
and no one could save her.

By Stephen Miller’s bed,
small ghosts cry
for their mothers.

Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her latest poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, December 2018) is a finalist for poetry in the Bi Book Awards. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, TheNewVerse.News, November 3 Club, Assaracus and elsewhere.

2018 LAMENT

by Kathryn Almy

Spring is running 20 days early.

It’s exactly what we expect, but it’s not good.

—The Washington Post, February 27, 2018

Please deliver us from this winter of discontent, with its frigid
squint and brimstone breath. Don’t blame February, there is no
cruelest month, only this year’s hateful season with its germ
swarms and ineffective flu shot, its too-big coat and small, grabby
hands. We did not vote for these mad swings of frost and thaw,
this bomb-cyclone of caprice. Enough with the floods and plagues
and frozen buds, the constant sneers and taunts—If you don’t like
18 degrees, how about 45? Too muddy? OK, it’s 12. Loser.

We’re so tired—more tired than from the long cold blizzards
of our youth, more anxious than in those strange warm spells
that make us worry for the north. Reduced to wishing for
a singular ordeal: If it must be bitter, could the skies at least
be clear? If there must be an early melt, could we save the rain
for later? We believe we could accept some simple difficulty—
summer’s scorch, early fall—but won’t agree which hardships
we can weather. We’d promise to repent, but who are we
kidding? Don’t let it get worse. Better yet, just make it spring.


Kathryn Almy is a Michigan writer whose work has appeared in various print and on-line publications, including The 3288 Review, City of the Big Shoulders: A Chicago Poetry Anthology, and Great Lakes Review's narrative map, and is forthcoming from The Offbeat and Star 82 Review.