ELEVEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN INAUGURATION

by Roberto Christiano

"I am out with lanters (sic) looking for myself."    

—Emily Dickinson

 

I am awake. I am a foreigner. Illegal. I am my 
parents. I know that I am not illegal. I feel that I 
am. I am scared.

My father was illegal. If you were stuck in 
poverty with Hitler’s trains running through you 
and countries crumbling before you, you’d be 
illegal too.

Musk gives the Hitler salute. Or is it the Roman 
salute? You know, the one you do to Mussolini.

My mother’s row house in the Italian section of 
D.C. was searched by the FBI for possible 
connections to Mussolini. Every Italian house 
was.

Male and female. Since when was that an easy 
divide?

Melania hides her face under a boater hat just as 
America hides her soul under a bushel.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

It snowed here. I can’t shovel. Uncontrolled high 
blood pressure. A man and his brother shoveled 
for me. Carlos and Zé. They won’t be here 
tomorrow.

I worked at the Library of Congress for twenty 
years. Our guards are the same as the Capitol 

guards. On January 6^th our guard was killed.
There are no degrees of separation. Separation is 
an illusion.

I am scared. I feel that I am. I know that I am not 
illegal. I am my parents. Illegal. I am a foreigner. 

I am awake.

Author’s note: Father married Mother and became a U.S. citizen. Mother was already a citizen.

Roberto Christiano won the 2010 Fiction Prize from Northern Virginia Review. He received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poem, Why I Sang at Dinner, in Prairie Schooner. His poetry is anthologized in The Gávea–Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry (Brown University). His full legnth collection, Port of Leaving, is published by Finishing Line Press. Other poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Rattle, The Washington Post, Writer.org, and The Sow's Ear.

GUARDS AT THE BORDER

by Wendy Hoffman

A Mexican court issued arrest orders Thursday for six people in relation to the fire that killed 39 migrants at a detention facility this week in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, according to the federal prosecutor leading the investigation. Sara Irene Herrerías said they include three officials from the National Immigration Institute, two private security guards contracted by the agency and the detained migrant accused of starting the fire. She said five of the six had already been arrested and would face charges of homicide and causing injuries. At least 39 migrants died after apparently starting a fire inside a holding cell at the facility Monday night. More than two dozen others were injured. —AP, March 31, 2023

Keys dangled from belts

shone on nearby hooks

jangled next to coins in their pockets

Guards turned away, heads bent

as if in prayer, slithering into escape

escape for themselves, their moist

skin, escape from screaming mattresses

horrified lives who stepped upon

this land of freedom to meet souls

that judged who deserved to die

and those with burnt alive 

consciences

Wendy Hoffman has published three memoirs: The Enslaved Queen, White Witch in a Black Robe, and A Brain of My Own. The Enslaved Queen has been translated and published in Germany (Asanger-Verlag, 2021). Her book of poetry Forceps was published along with a book of essays From the Trenches written with Dr. Alison Miller. Her fourth memoir After Amnesia is published on the SmartNews and Survivorship websites. It also has been translated into German. Her poetry book Belonging is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.

A SOLITARY MAN

by Mary K O'Melveny

For the past 27 years, Dennis Wayne Hope (above) has been in a Texas prison cell that is somewhere between the size of an elevator and a compact parking space. For one hour, seven days per week, or two hours, five days per week, he is let out to exercise—alone—in another small enclosure. The only people he comes into contact with are the guards who strip search and handcuff him. The last personal phone call he had was in 2013 when his mother died. More than a quarter-century in isolation has led him to hallucinations, chronic pain and thoughts of suicide. Solitary confinement is a sanitized term for torture. Mr. Hope, 53, whose plight was described by the New York Times, has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case on the grounds that his prolonged isolation is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s bar against cruel and unusual punishment. Lower courts denied Mr. Hope’s petition and court observers are skeptical the Supreme Court will take up his case. So sure are Texas officials that the court, with its conservative majority, won’t agree to hear the case that they waived their right to respond to Mr. Hope’s petition for a writ of certiorari. —The Washington Post, February 16, 2022

For twenty-seven years,

I have not seen a bird’s shadow.

Nor felt a droplet of rain.

No one has touched me

save the guards who strip-search

me to take me to an indoor

cubicle for solitary weekly

exercise. They do hold my hands,

to fix them to steel handcuffs

required for our walks down

cement block hallways of a

Texas prison. In 2013, I received

my only telephone call.

My mother was dead.

 

Last month, my lawyers asked

the Supreme Court to weigh

the parameters of punishment,

to tell me if unusualness or

cruelty come to their minds

in circumstances such as mine.

Some say prison focuses one’s

viewpoint. If it tends toward

the myopic, there is good reason.

I would ask them to focus

their eyes on distant objects –

a task I can no longer perform

because my narrowed world

affords no view of light or distance.

A compact car would be too large

to park in my 6x9 foot cell.

 

Next, I would ask them to consider

how vocal cords can atrophy,

as muscle, ligament, mucosal

tissue diminish from lack of use.

I did not take a vow of silence

when I entered this place

but my voice has hollowed

as its volume faded and its pitch

turned to a thin reed-like whisper.

At first, I talked to myself. Even

sang. But soon enough, I was

not enough. Words failed me.

Now, my head aches constantly.

My heart pounds, my pulse races

as if I was running up a mountainside.

But all I do is sit on my metal slab

or stand and watch walls wave, shift

as though a fan was moving them

like air. Sometimes, demon spirits peek

through wearing pinpricks of light.

 

Some say if you do the crime,

you can’t complain about the time.

But duration and despair should not be one.

I do not sleep. I have no sense of space

or stage. My brain must work overtime

to construct reality from scant available

signals. I read about a 1950’s experiment

on rhesus macaque monkeys. After thirty

days of isolation, they turned away from

social interaction, became disconsolate.

Each day I remember less.    Less.

I hope the Justices will answer me

while I still know my name. While I can

still name most things I have lost.  

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

WE THE FAMILIES

by Lao Rubert

Photo: GORDON PARKS / GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION accompanying “Becoming a Parent in the Age of Black Lives Matter,” The Atlantic, June 2, 2020.

Today, I join the tribe that lives in fear
of a son traveling the wrong neighborhood,
knowing he will be watched,
viewed with suspicion
his powerful body seen
as threat only, object for capture.

I join the tribe of families
whose sons, husbands, nephews
have been swept up, swept in,
by the machine turning its massive rollers
over their muscular frames.
                                                                     
I join the families saying,
“Take care where
and how you drive your car,
your body
might be too beautiful.
It may frighten them.”                                      

I join families advising, “Think
where to put your hands if stopped.
Though you are quick, make no movements;
though you carry no weapon,
do not open your glove box.
These are things you must know.”

We, the families,                                                          
wait on the courtroom’s hard benches
as officials toss sentences into the air like confetti          
watching as the crane they call justice
swings its giant arm, its heavy bucket        
over the heads of young men forever standing
in the wrong place.

We listen to guards tell our lovely ones    
Where to stand, to sit
when to speak
how their jump suits must be worn,
their pant legs rolled.

We listen to prosecutors
who have no words written
or whispered
about hope
that hummingbird that keeps a young man alive
when trouble comes clanging in over the rooftops.
Where have they hidden it
and why?              

Lao Rubert is a poet and advocate for criminal justice reform living in Durham, North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in the N.C. Independent, the Davidson Miscellany, the Duke University Archive, the News & Observer and are scheduled to appear in Barzakh in May, 2020.

CAGED

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Empty holding cells are seen in the East Block for condemned prisoners during a tour of California's Death Row at San Quentin State Prison. Credit: Stephen Lam/Reuters via The Boston Globe.

When we visit San Quentin's death row
We sit with a prisoner
On plastic chairs
Inside a small cage,
Conversing and eating greasy snacks
For a couple of hours.
It's a tight space for three adults
And it doesn't take long
For claustrophobia to creep in.
But that same area
Would be ample
For a single small child.
You could put a nice ball in there,
Maybe a stuffed animal.
The children who aren't walking yet
Could crawl around on the floor
And pull themselves up
On the bars.
The walkers would be safe
From running too far
And into harm's way.
The climate inside is controlled
So the children would be warm in winter
Cool in summer.
The guards would come by regularly
And slide food through the slot
In the door
So the kids wouldn't go hungry.
And when they crave social interactions
They could call to each other
In their cute little voices
Through the bars up and down the line.
Initially, some might miss their parents
And cry themselves to sleep,
But children, as we know,
Are supremely adaptable
And after a while would surely become used
To their new surroundings,
Might begin to think of their cages
As a kind of home,
Might before long
Forget their law-breaking, border-crashing parents,
Might even bond with the uniformed upholders
Of American values
Who rescued them
From lives of international crime.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has been published in many print and online journals including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesday, Watershed Review. He has written several books of poems, including When Compasses Grow Old, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World, and Cancer Cantata. He was the producer of the Courage to Resist Audio Project and editor of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War based on his Audio Project interviews. In addition, he co-produced two documentary films, Outside In and Por Que Venimos. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

AWOL

by Rick Gray

Kabul sunrise. Image source: Panoramio

In a locked-down house of disconnection,
this is the hidden room of yellow exclamation.
Outside its mirrored windows dawn explodes the targeted capital
And strikes a starving boy on the corner waving a smoking tin can
Begging for a fragment of fresh luck.

Deserting an endless war of circling thought
I walk away from the blue face of my frozen screen
and step AWOL passed dreaming guards cuddling Kalashnikovs.
Digging down into the animal heat of my thigh
I grip metal jangling against a shriveled coma on antidepressants.

Oh, it’s so nice to stroll in the Kabul Sunrise!
“Give me muddy!” the boy on the corner orders me,
his English broken as my abandoned laptop.
I release my fist and watch Afghan coins drop 
Flaming into the yellow cracks of a hungry human hand.


Rick Gray teaches in Kabul. He has work forthcoming in Salamander and the book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock.