TRUMPNACHT

by Sonya Groves

Residents gathered this month on a corner in Coquille, Ore., in anticipation of rumored (nonexistent) busloads of antifa activists.—“When Anifa Hysteria Sweeps America” by Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, June 17, 2020. Photo Credit: Amy Moss Strong/The World

And when shall Kristallnacht occur and whose bodies will he pull into the street...black, brown, bilingual, dual citizen, naturalized citizen, undocumented, Democrat, liberal, atheist, poor...how shall he kill us, with the good book in his hand, with the poison on his tongue, with the chaos that follows him, snaking through our fiber pipes dumping hate, candy from a dispenser? When shall our night of terror begin or has it come and gone and we dying in our walled ghetto from tear gas, spittle from his unmasked minions, and ignorance on how to turn it off, turn it all off, walk into the light and reach for a hand out of the pit and onto the surface of compassion. Because we are dying down here, I am dying down here and the bodies are piling up, up so high he never has to see anything, anymore.

Sonya Groves is a teacher in San Antonio. She has poetry publications in over 20 journals, including  TheNewVerse.News, La Noria, The Voices Project, Aries, Carbon Culture Review, and FLARE: The Flagler Review.  Currently she is pursuing her PhD at The University of Texas San Antonio.

DIASPORA

by Risa Denenberg





I see them in nightmares, or when silent in meditation.
There, they were doctors, green-grocers, artists, stone masons.
Here, they snake around barricades like a river.

I don’t see them when I’m serving dinner to the homeless
in my home town on Christmas day, because after all,
I’m Jewish and have nowhere else to go.

I see them when I meditate, or hike a mountain trail.
There, they ate breakfast, went to jobs, read the daily, made love.
Here, they lie dead on highways like roadkill.

I don’t see them when I’m working in the clinic
offering unguents and kindness to soothe wounds,
then staying late to finish chart notes, weary and irritable.

I see them when I hike, or when I pray
(which I do sporadically and) mainly when I envisage them
streaming as a long bridge across sinister waters full

of vipers, swelling the roads to a town near you.
There, they were proud of their kids’ report cards.
Here they struggle, defenseless to save children from drowning.

I pray to see them and to not see them
because it’s so much worse than I can fathom
and I can’t imagine an act that could make it right.

I see them as my family, ghettoed in their Russian shtetel,
then, crossing the ravenous Atlantic to an unknown fate.

There, they prayed and were slaughtered.
Here, we forget to pray, and prosper.

Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She reviews poetry for the American Journal of Nursing and is an editor at Headmistress Press, a small press that publishes poetry by lesbians. She has published three chapbooks and two full length books of poetry, Mean Distance from the Sun (Aldrich Press, 2013) and Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016).

BALTIMORE CARGO

by Patricia Jakovich VanAmburg

Image source:  A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland (The Maryland State Archives, Annapolis MD and the University of Maryland College Park, MD)

Why did we not see cargo arriving
with the first slave ship whose
rotten timber roiled the harbor
leaving tobacco in our pockets…

cargo of manumission’s
low skilled “quasi-freedmen”
filling local factories for
twenty percent cheaper wages
and a city of transient pockets…

cargo of professional
“blood tub” rioters and
Know Nothing fraud
dividing a city until
free Blacks were pocketed
into segregated education…

cargo from World War II
steel Liberty Ships promising
jobs for thousands of poor
white southerners while
expanding corporate pockets…

cargo from decades
of racial blockbusting
depreciating neighborhoods
building heroin ghettos
bulging pockets of crime…

We should keep in mind
what we put in our pockets.


Patricia Jakovich VanAmburg teaches literature at Howard Community College in Columbia Maryland where she is also affiliated with The Little Patuxent Review. Her most recent chapbook is titled Watching for Birds.