TOO MANY / TO MANY

by Ron Riekki

Following a comprehensive investigation, the Justice Department announced today [December 12, 2024] that the Mount Vernon, New York, Police Department (MVPD) engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of rights secured by the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Specifically, the Justice Department finds that MVPD:

• Uses excessive force in numerous ways, including by unnecessarily escalating minor encounters and by overusing tasers and closed-fist strikes, particularly against individuals who have already been taken to the ground, are controlled by many officers or are already fully or partially restrained;
• Conducted unlawful strip searches and body cavity searches of individuals until at least 2023; and
• Makes arrests without probable cause.

Sometimes bodies kill bodies and bodies

haunt bodies and sometimes bodies taunt

bodies and sometimes bodies search bodies

and sometimes those bodies are bloody

from the hoods where they’re buried in

blindness and sometimes bodies are bottled

into incarceration-hungry systems and some-

times systems kill bodies and sometimes

bodies suffocate and sometimes bodies

aren’t bodies when they’re killed and

erased and sometimes bodies are innocent

and mostly bodies are innocent and always

bodies are innocent and sometimes systems

are guilty and sometimes systems are guilty

and sometimes systems are guilty and often

systems are guilty and this system is guilty.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

NOW, MEN HERE

by Dana Yost

SAN ANTONIO — Militia groups along the Texas-Mexico border have grown to more than 10 active "teams" from El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley, despite warnings from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and state lawmakers. More than 30 photos obtained by the San Antonio Express-News show dozens of members carrying semi-automatic rifles and wearing masks, camouflage and tactical gear, providing a first glimpse of the militias. --San Antonio Express-News, August 1, 2014

Now, men here
Mask their faces
With bandannas,
Raise black hoods over their
Heads, and stand beside
One another in the desert,
Semiautomatic rifles
Held at 45-degree angles
Across their chests.
Sentinels, they say,

Now, men here pose
Beside convoys of civilian cars,
Chase down school buses of day campers,
And they look no different
Than the cave rats of Tora Bora,
The festering sores that preen
In little fiefs of Mogadishu,
Or the drug-gang death squads
Of Juarez and Nuevo Laredo.

Now, men here
Mask their faces,
As little girls sleep
In handed-down jeans
On the other side of a wall
In the desert, sing themselves
To sleep with American songs
Learned while hiding
Under floor boards
Or manacled to bed posts
Under rain forest heat.

The good are dying.
The men in masks
And black hoods want to keep me safe,
They say. I'd rather they'd been
In Baghdad, catching shrapnel
Before it split the face
Of my nephew's best friend,
I do not fear
Little children
Who want to sing songs
From our radios.
I do not fear
Little men
Who hide their faces
When they kill.


Dana Yost ended his 29-year career as an award-winning daily newspaper editor in 2008. Since then, he has authored four books. His poems have appeared in several literary journals, and he is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He has lived in Forest City, Iowa, since 2010.