ALL MY AUNTIES WERE THIRD WORLD WOMEN

by Vinay Krishnan

 

when you fly international, one of the TSA’s 

prohibited travel items is solidarity for the world’s 

oppressed. don’t put solidarity in your luggage. you 

can’t leave with that. you definitely can’t come home with 

that. at customs, we need an itemized list of any 

new truths you have in your bags that we’ve been 

hiding from you here in America. empty your 

pockets and prove to me you’re not carrying a 

trinket that connects you to another man’s struggle. 

take off your shoes and socks and place your 

brown feet on this white floor as a reminder. a 

reminder that every border crossing is a strip 

search and a cudgel, distilling you into something 

that fits more easily into an overhead compartment 

or a cage or a grave.

but today I had to laugh at that. because all my 

aunties were third world women. and now we're 

running it back, old and new blessings. all my 

aunties were third world women. all my aunties 

were third world women.

Vinay Krishnan is a writer and community organizer. His poetry has appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, his fiction has appeared in Barren Magazine, and his non-fiction has appeared in SLAM Magazine.

WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE

by Pamela Kenley-Meschino

Story at NPR, May 31, 2025

“For heaven’s sake…”
it’s true, we are all going to die.
But how and why, under what circumstances?
Accidental death has its own brand of horror
for those left behind in the aftermath.
Diseases can ravage, destroy in torturous chronologies
of lifetimes, or swoop in all teeth and talons at birth,
suffering without boundaries or lines of defense.

We say, For heaven’s sake, let’s help! 
Let’s not walk among the dead and say
we’ve all got it coming. Let’s renounce cruelty,
callous equations by riffraff imposters
who spew bilious indifference toward the sick,
whose stone hearts will someday be erased
on the site of an unmarked grave in the canon of history.

   
 
Pamela Kenley-Meschino is originally from the UK, where she developed a love of nature, poetry, and music, thanks in part to the influence of her Irish mother. She is an educator whose classes explore the connection between writing and healing and the importance of shared stories.

AT YOUR GRAVE

by Martha Landman

Arthur Rimbaud 20 October 1854 - 10 November 1891

I’m the only visitor today,  
small cemetery, speechless graves,
Your mailbox at the gate is full of fan-letters,
as if you’re the tooth fairy or some god.
 
It is wet and cold and my shoes 
gave me hell on the walk here.
Tomorrow I’ll wear my sandals, rain or not.
There’s lots I could ask you, but not here,
not today where you lie helplessly dead
on a peaceful summer’s afternoon, 
violet eyes shrouded in eternal sleep,
in the same plot with your mother 
and seventeen-year-old Vitalie.
 
Come to the cobbled square with me tonight.
Let’s dine and dance and have a quiet beer,
no absinthe, no hashish. Afterwards we’ll walk 
along the river Meuse under chestnut trees, 
past the mill, step into the tanner’s little boat
at the quay. Let’s sail into the flimsy air, 
set the night on fire, our reflections on the water,
you melding into me, the moon our lamp. 
Let’s write formless verse about our years in Africa,
mine as a child, yours as a merchant, explorer. 
I promise I won’t ask what I know you won’t tell
           —why did you give up poetry?


Martha Landman writes in Adelaide, South Australia on unceded Kaurna land. Her first single collection like scavenger birds was published by ICOE press, June 2023. Her poem “Girl From the Underground” (for Arthur Rimbaud) was highly commended in the WA Poetry d’Amour contest in August 2024.

CALIFORNIA CYPRESS

by Blair Kilpatrick

A large tree fell on a parked car and another car with the driver in it on Haight Street between Fillmore and Webster Streets in San Francisco on Tuesday, March 21, 2023. Credit: Craig Lee/The SF Examiner

Green bedroom curtains

barely parted

frame brown cypress

backlit by morning light

my gaze passes

through narrowed slit

like an arrow 

from within a fortress

 

I follow my eyes

in search of a perch

in welcoming crook

between branch and trunk

arms raised up like a supplicant

 

I find myself wedged

in tight angled space

high above ground

look up and down

ready to fly 

or free fall

tree fall

all fall

down

 

Two years later

we rise to cold silence

water retreating 

winds now stilled 

open curtains

reveal empty space

too much sky

where tree should be

 

Our cypress slumps

across neighboring fence

head rests on rooftop

exposed roots remain

tangle of brown

new mound of green

crows and wildflowers

mark a fresh grave

Blair Kilpatrick is a psychologist and folk musician. Her poetry has appeared in ONE ART, MockingHeart Review, littledeathlit, Amethyst Review, and it is upcoming in Syncopation and Soul-Lit. She is also the author of the music memoir Accordion Dreams (U. Press Mississippi). She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband.

IN MEMORIAM DAY

by Michel Steven Krug

How do they know the real population of Minnesota, asked my daughter, as her older sister was within hours of an and-one moment. There are vital statistics kept, each birth and death are tracked to offset the changes. Deaths by IED, in schools, grocery stores, dance clubs, by gangster/zealot/misguides with ARs, by combat, depression, vengeance-disease or age. Thinking of my Aunt, with her new pacemaker, describing her day to her what’s-his-name son, because after dinner, the mind’s velocity wanes, as if a human comet falling back to earth. I visited my dad’s grave, saluting his WWII Airforce time, sure, but his greatest service as mentor to all. If he could see what the insurrectionists assert today in the name of patriotism, he’d re-enlist and ask for a D.C. assignment, thinking he could detox the paranormal hatred engendered against progressive democracy. If unsuccessful, he’d enter his “come on now” mode, demanding nothing less than reason, flinging treason into the infested sewer. It’s said we are coded.  His sense of equanimity/persuasion/reason/forceful compassion = soother of spirits. We each inherit a collection of such souls, all of the elements swirling within, like an alphabet of inclinations. With it do we promote peace, or reflexively look for sales, fitfully running from the best within? Memorial Day is indeed solemn, honoring passed down lives that survive as we ride the bear, the bull and the barrel.

Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He’s Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News (PRTN) literary magazine and litigates. His poems have appeared in Liquid Imagination, Blue Mountain Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Portside, The New Verse News, JMWW, Cagibi, Silver Blade, Crack the Spine, Dash, Mikrokosmos, North Dakota Quarterly, Eclectica, Writers Resist, Sheepshead, Mizmor Anthology, 2019, PRTN, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven's Perch, Main Street Rag, and Brooklyn Review. 

CO'VID-AS'

by L.A. Pontes

An anti-government demonstrator wearing a protective face mask holds a poster representing a coffin of a victim of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) with the message "30,000 deaths, so what?", during a protest named "Amazonas for Democracy" in Manaus, Brazil, June 2, 2020. © REUTERS/Bruno Kelly via France 24, June 2, 2020

The face of the infamous man is painted in black with red dripping fangs on the tall walls of the house on the corner.
"Fora Bolsonaro!" with the colors of the rainbow.
As the pans bang in every window—the ‘panelaco’ hour—the little girl fights with the dogs for bones tossed on the empty streets. The dogs are dying alone.
Her dark skin shows ghostly on orange lights.
She wears no mask, her face is empty.
The "little flue" had made a ghost out of her stoned mother and enemies out of friends. Mother stands tall in her grave.
Manoela climbs the tree on the corner and chews the splintered bone. She wished she had fangs like the monster.

L.A. Pontes is a Brazilian writer living with his wife and six dogs on the bushy outskirts near the city of Belo Horizonte. His writing has appeared in LITRO UK. He shares with all conscious Brazilian citizens a deep disgust with the government of Jair Bolsonaro.

IN MEMORY OF TWO HONEST MEN,ERNESTO CARDENAL AND MY FATHER

by Penelope Scambly Schott

I am taking off my hat in prayer for Nicaragua.
I don’t have a black beret like Ernesto Cardenal’s.

I have a dark blue beret like my dead father’s beret.
It is my dead father’s beret. My father was no radical:

he was shocked to learn that a government will lie.
I’m not lying to you now: I don’t have a black beret

and I am no revolutionary. Our president keeps lying
while my trusting father lies in his grave, hatless.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Recent books are House of the Cardamom Seed  and November Quilt.  Forthcoming is On Dufur Hill, a sequence of poems about a small (pop. 623) wheat-growing town in central Oregon.

THE STUMBLING STONES

by Mark Tarren

A candle and roses laid on a set of Stolpersteine in Berlin at a commemorative ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Photograph: Eliza Apperly —The Guardian, February 18, 2019

So they walk.
This invisible procession of ghosts,
a march of mist.

Hidden amongst the alleyways
and cobblestones

of forgotten footprints
in stone and snow.

A fingerless glove
caresses a patch of brass.

Here I am

His words
shadows in the air.

Kristallnacht.

His home
the face of the past.


The girl recognises him.

The Boy with the Jasper Eyes.

They used to play and sing
in the alleyways of
snow and school satchels.

She could smell the scent
of leather between them.

His musty jacket.
The fragrance of childhood.

She could only see
the back of his head
as they walked.

An innocent almond
in its collared sheath.

She remembers his gentle hands.
His careful smile.

Please turn around.

The Boy with the Jasper Eyes.

His words fell to the floor
of stone and snow
in their quiet knowing.

Three pebbles rolled
off the tongue onto

The Stumbling Stone

Here I am

Then she was alone.


The girl suddenly felt tired.
It was as if the whole of history
was buried deep behind her eyes.

A Grave for the Jews.

It was then she noticed the fire.

A window. A fireplace.
Laughter. Papa’s arms.
The smell of pine.

The taste of boiled lollies.

There was no brass plate
beneath her feet.

No Stolpersteine.

My name is Anna

and I live here.


Mark Tarren is a poet and writer based in Queensland, Australia. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary journals including TheNewVerse.News, The Blue Nib, Poets Reading The News, Street Light Press, Spillwords Press and Tuck Magazine.

THE GREAT FIRE

by Rick Mullin

Trinity Church steeple in silhouette on 9-11-2001.

Trinity Church Cemetery, Manhattan

At lunch, they ask me where to find the grave
of Alexander Hamilton. “The other
side,” I tell them, pointing to the nave
and tower-shadowed trees. “I hate to bother
you...." Don’t tell me... Hamilton. The same.
Tomorrow I should think to bring a sign:
The Other Side of Trinity [an arrow
pointing right], and sit back from the line
of tourists searching wide-eyed on the narrow
paths between the headstones for a name
that Broadway brought to light outside the oldest
steeple on a precipice and port
of no return, September at its coldest
in a New York City of another sort,
more human-scale and redolent of flame.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Transom.

ELEGY FOR MY AMERICA

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

In this day of callous indifference,
in this day of sudden summer storms,
a little girl desires heart-showers,
seeks pillowed teardrops and yearns for

her beloved mother, in
this America we once valued,
now resting on balconies
built from stone,
once built from trees
with sheltered awnings.

She seeks the endurance of thought,
now ripped and torn
from their moorings.

What America wants and wanted,
sleeps the fitful sleep of near death.
Newborn birds call in her night.
Full-blown flowers die in her sun,
and America’s child is nobody’s child
when another’s child is buried
in hardened soil,
in cages and mylar
blankets of the unnamed.

Cry my beloved America,
as you struggle to shovel the dirt
to cover yourself. Silence falls
sharply. The greed of your shovel
buries you. Rest in peace.
Thoughts and prayers
are with you.

Lucille Gang Shulklapper's poetry and fiction have been anthologized and appear in numerous literary journals as well as in five collections of poetry and a picture book Stuck in Bed Fred.  Having written since she was six, but never published until she turned sixty, more than two decades ago, she urges her six grandchildren and many of her students to read and remember Langston Hughes' poem “Dreams”.

THE WARRIOR'S GRAVE

by Alejandro Escudé

This 3,500-Year-Old Greek Tomb Upended What We Thought We Knew About the Roots of Western Civilization: The recent discovery of the grave of an ancient soldier is challenging accepted wisdom among archaeologists. In late June 2015, the scheduled end to their season came and went, and a skeleton began to emerge—a man in his early 30s, his skull flattened and broken and a silver bowl on his chest. The researchers nicknamed him the “griffin warrior” after a griffin-decorated ivory plaque they found between his legs. Stocker got used to working alongside him in that cramped space, day after day in the blazing summer sun. “I felt really close to this guy, whoever he was,” she says. “This was a person and these were his things. I talked to him: ‘Mr. Griffin, help me to be careful.’” —Smithsonian, January 2017

The mouth grows
isolation

under the olive groves
a warrior waits

gold-laden, bronze statuettes,
oh rings double-scored

and you mount the Mount
to be with her;

she who knew you best
and whom you challenged,

as far as mainland Greece,
across the lunar bay

and into the ancient palace
of words

death finally made you a poet
as it does to us all.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

MORNING IN MT. HOPE CEMETERY

Melissa Balmain lives, writes, teaches, and grieves in Rochester, NY.

THE JUNE 22nd BUS TO YUMA

by G. Louis Heath

It’s very hot this June 22nd in Yuma. The a/c is
not enough. The sizzling heat stifles my breath
as I dare outside in bathing suit, to spritz my
succulents. My cactus in bloom suffers, too. I
move it into shadow, spritz it. It is a hard, hard
day on the desert when ribs of a barrel cactus
sag in distress.

A tour bus arrived from Vermont today to this
part of the national map that’s been recording
the highest temperatures in the nation. Weather
voyeurs! High temp tourists! Sheer ennui has driven
them out of a clime fit for habitation to these unending
vistas of panting lizards and rugged rock formations.
In their blazing, loud Bermuda shorts and blazing, loud
shirts and blouses, bulging like watermelons, these
invaders photograph the liquid digits aglow on the
sign atop the S and L downtown: 114 degrees! Agape!

For this they took a bus tour? What does this say about
the human condition? Could these same tourists visit
a mass grave of massacred campesinos, a record kill
in Nicaragua or Guatemala, or the killing fields of Cambodia,
with the same gee-whiz detachment? Our common history
says it’s possible. Photograph the sign. Photograph the bones.
Post the images on Facebook. All pixel offerings are savory in
the eyes of the God Facebook.

G. Louis Heath, Ph.D., Berkeley, 1969, is Emeritus Professor, Ashford University. Clinton, Iowa. He enjoys reading his poems at open mics. He often hikes along the Mississippi River, stopping to work on a poem he pulls from his back pocket, weather permitting. His books include Mutiny Does Not Happen Lightly, Long Dark River Casino and Vandals In The Bomb Factory. His most recent poems have been published in Poppy Road Review, Writing Raw, Inkstain Press, Dead Snakes, Verse-Virtual, Silver Birch Press, Poems & Poetry, and Squawkback.

REMNANTS OF THE CRASH

by Kristina England

            Headline: "Actor Paul Walker dies in car crash,"
            the blaze making his beautiful face unidentifiable.


All I can think is "I hope he died on impact"
because that wasn't the case for you -
no seatbelt, ejected at high speeds,
thrown under your own wheels,
those once vibrant eyes dulling
under the red and white flash of disaster,
your son, stuck in the backseat,
begging for "momma" to soothe
his temporary and long-term boo-boos
as you shuddered out the last breaths
of mother, wife, friend on your graveled grave.

Maybe the driving laws were never meant for the driver.
Maybe they are there for the ones left behind
with the gut-wrenching task of identifying
a once beautiful face.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Extract(s), Gargoyle, The Story Shack, Tipton Poetry Journal.

FINDING RICHARD

by Dave Goldenberg

Richard III, Infamous English King, Found Under Parking Lot --US News headline, February 4, 2013.
Image source: University of Leicester

"March on, join bravely, let us to't pell-mell

If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell."
--Shakespeare's Richard III



To none would this cold grave as heav'n appear,

And so it seems, clod-cloister'd in cold clay,

That I did damn'd in hell these centuries lay

'Neath Vauxhalls and Renaults in second gear



Yet 'tis in heav'n I have come to stay.

The Bard hath penned perhaps no greater role--

And lions have inhabited my soul,

Such as Pacino and Olivier.


Dave Goldenberg is a New York ad guy who moved his office about 30 miles uptown. Although he's won awards as a writer and creative director, he's equally at home in his left brain. Over 20 years he's served every kind of client, from AOL and American Express and Schick to MTV and America Online. But that's just his day job. He's also a folksinger on the local circuit, a passionate skier and an unapologetic Yankees fan.

FOR THE REPOSE OF SOULS

by Carol Alexander

A Berkeley, CA vigil held to remember the victims and families of the Newtown, CT, massacre. Photo: Jeremy Pollack/Creative Commons

A pair of peafowl floats down from the trees,
the wan hen and florid cock picking their way
while the river slowly slips back in its banks.

The boy in his tall wading books creeps after,
licking rust from the muzzle of his gun.

The juddering of a turquoise fan perhaps will be
as close to flame of phoenix  as spirit will draw.
But we were born in fire, and to fire will come.

The woman with the small communion dress
rocks in her chair in her ordinary room
room with its proportions rudely skewed;
shocked feathers of the peafowls gently float down.

With their saintly calendar of woes,
country men and women walk in sober twos.

Still the shops stay open; trees blink red and green,
children dash across the street, cars swerve,
we hear the Morse code of the coming snow,
birds in starry park all the news that we can bear.

A pallid smoke in its helix twists and frays,
as if to question who to go and how to stay?
You mummers in a masquerade of death
shoot off your pop guns, begging cakes and ale.

Neither the country nor the quiet grave where we lay
our old ones down in the lightness of their years,
is this cold town where we have just begun to pray.

But unicorns and little maids remain entwined
(in sable trees an archer waits and strings his silent bow).


A writer for trade and educational publishing, Carol Alexander has authored numerous children’s books, served as a ghostwriter for radio and trade publishing, and taught at colleges around the metropolitan area. In 2011-2012, her poetry appears—or is scheduled to appear-- in literary journals and anthologies published by Avocet, Boyne Berries (UK), Chiron Review, Cave Moon Press, The Canary, Danse Macabre, Earthspeak, Eunoia Review, Fade Poetry Journal (UK), Fat Daddy’s Farm Press, Fried Chicken and Coffee, The Mad Hatter’s Review, Mobius, Numinous, OVS, Red Poppy Review, Red River Review, River Poets Journal, Sleeping Cat Books, The Whistling Fire, and Write Wing Publishing.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

by Rhiannon Thorne

"This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter, and we'll tell them that we love them, and we'll remind each other how deeply we love one another. But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight . . ."

Next year I will wrap you presents
and you will not understand the need for bows,
but will reach towards them for days
in anticipation.

I will fret my wardrobe decision: do I dress you
for photographs or in a pattern that will hide
your smudgy fingerprints?  Or maybe the floral one
your grandmother, your father's mother,
will surely buy you to match her couch.

You'll have to wear it sometime, anyways,
to appease her.

You will laugh, pressing slobbered fingers
into sticky cake, and scowl at the flash while I sing you
Happy Birthday; whisper in your ear:
it was the happiest day of my life.

In Connecticut, a former mother will spend the week crying.
She will wonder what flowers
she should order for your birthday: White roses
or something with color?

She will sink down to her knees on a fresh wound
with well established grass.

I love you, she will say; it was the worst day
of my life.


Rhiannon Thorne’s work has appeared/is forthcoming in Gr@wl!x, Surreal Grotesque, The Legendary, Ditch, The Junk Lot Review, Vox Poetica, Zygote in my Coffee, e-Fiction, and Fried Chicken and Coffee. She also co-edits the online publication cahoodaloodaling.