SAY THEIR NAMES

by Pamela Kenley-Meschino

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) on Tuesday read aloud a passage of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s memoir in which she describes shooting her pet dog, Cricket, during a committee markup on a bill related to deporting migrants who harm animals. —The Hill, November 18, 2025

She killed the dog, he said,

reading from her own words,

shot a puppy not yet grown,

its unruliness put down.

 

Fourteen months young,

he spoke the name so we could

witness her transgression,

not the puppy’s—Cricket.

 

Some snickered at the obvious,

a killer of dogs in charge,

rounding up castaways

for gravel pits unknown. 

 

It’s no joke.

 

Some countered stories

from the other side, 

of beagles left behind in labs,

abuse for an abuse.

 

What about that?

 

All agreed that dogs must

not be harmed. 

Save them all from 

cruelty’s bloody hands.

 

We vouch for Cricket’s rights

as we shout for human rights,  

to live without fear or discrimination.

We need to say all their names.

 

She killed the dog; in her own 

words, she hated the dog.

 

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, as well as the importance of shared stories.

A PRESIDENTIAL CENTO PANTOUM BY RODRIGO DUTERTE

by Melissa Alipalo

On March 11, 2025, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in the Philippines on a warrant by the International Criminal Court. The Philippine media and human rights groups estimate his war against drugs resulted in the murder of more than 30,000 people over a 6-year period.

Forget the laws on human rights. 
I am a man of many flaws and contradictions.
That is true. That is very true. 
I am not the man I am portrayed to be by some. 

I am a man of many flaws and contradictions.
If I make it to the presidential palace, 
I am not the man I am portrayed to be by some. 
I will do just what I did as mayor:  

If I make it to the presidential palace, 
You drug pushers, hold-up men, and do-nothings 
I will do just what I did as mayor
I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay and fatten all the fish there. 

You drug pushers, hold up men, and do-nothings
Do the lives of 10 of these criminals really matter?
I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay and fatten all the fish there. 
I have done this before. Why would I not do it again?

Do the lives of 10 of these criminals really matter?
If you are corrupt, I will fetch you using a helicopter, and I will throw you out. 
I have done this before. Why would I not do it again?
Whoever said I hated the media?

If you are corrupt, I will fetch you using a helicopter, and I will throw you out. 
Give me salt and vinegar, and I’ll eat his liver.
Whoever said I hated the media?
Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination

Give me salt and vinegar, and I’ll eat his liver.
Fate has many faces
Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination
If you’re a son of a bitch.

Fate has many faces
And if you hang me for all that I did, go ahead. 
If you’re a son of a bitch
Relax. God will somehow enlighten me.

And if you hang me for all that I did, go ahead. 
Many are asking what my credentials are and what I can do for the Philippines. 
Relax. God will somehow enlighten me.
I do not know. 

Many are asking what my credentials are and what I can do for the Philippines.
I really do not know how to solve the problem of the Philippines. 
I do not know. 
I cannot be the savior of this republic.

I really do not know how to solve the problem of the Philippines. 
Forget the laws on human rights.
I cannot be the savior of this republic.
That is true. That is very true. 


(Sources: Online media reporting of press conferences, campaign rallies, and interviews with Rodrigo Duterte)  

Melissa Alipalo is a writer, teacher, and international development consultant. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine and an MSc in Social Development from Ateneo de Manila University. Melissa spent nearly 20 years living in the Philippines, where she worked in journalism and development. Now based in Maine with her family, she is completing her first poetry collection, which reflects on their urgent departure from the Philippines in 2017 and the experience of resettling in the U.S.

BLINKEN IN BEIJING: DATA CALL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Antony Blinken was greeted by China’s top diplomat on Monday, and will perhaps meet its president, on the final day of a rare visit aimed at trying to resurrect relations between Washington and Beijing from historic lows. —The Guardian, June 18, 2023

Semiconductors
Formosa…Taiwan…
Uigur burial practices
Tesla
Ships passing in the South China Sea
Warships frigates destroyers
Balloon looking down on the American continent
SHOT
Spy station on the island of Cuba
Confucius Institutes everywhere
in the developing world
Plastics, christmas trees, clothes
A massive relationship, two 
superpowers yet distant neighbors  
coming together on climate 
change policies but staying apart 
on so many hot buttons 
including the rights of Man and Woman
Five and a half hours meeting
(extended by an hour)
American and Chinese teams
then strolling
before a working dinner for two hours
Foreign Minister and Secretary of State
Hard at work making   peace.
eating thousand-year-old eggs.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

LULA WINS!

by Indran Amirthanayagam

We have a chance

 

to reduce the burning and looting of the Amazon.

 

We have a chance

 

to support green technologies in one of the world's ten largest economies.

 

We have a chance

 

that the poor, the left out and the abused will have a champion again in the Alvorada Palace.

 

We have a chance

 

that a reasonable, negotiating left-of-center government will join hands with its neighbors and work towards climate justice and advancing human rights worldwide.

 

We have a chance

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

 

THIRTEEN DAYS ON “THE NRA CIVIL RIGHTS CALENDAR”

by Gilbert Allen

Blood On Their Hands _ Anti-NRA T-Shirt by Sarana Mehra

January 1

If the world seems cold

to you, perhaps

you’ve already fired.

January 6

Stop

the Magnetometers!

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Guns don’t make the world

go round. Guns make

the rounds worthwhile.

Ash Wednesday

Praise the One before whom

thou needest no silencer.

April 1

We inherit our relatives, but

we can choose

our AR-15s.

Good Friday

It is more blessed to grieve

than to reprieve.

Memorial Day

Talk not of wasted

ammunition. Talk instead of those

you’ve wasted

July 4

Believe the worst

about everybody. That way

you don’t have to aim.

Labor Day

My bullets are Teflon.

My burden is light.

Halloween

Every boy

needs a blackbird

to shoot at.

Thanksgiving

Guns don’t kill turkeys.

Turkeys kill turkeys.

December 24

I am the ghost

of Kevlar passed.

New Year’s Eve

Some of us are like cannons: we don’t

like to be pushed, and we’re only happy

when loaded.

Gilbert Allen lives and writes in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. His most recent collection of poems is Believing in Two Bodies.

BEFORE ROE V. WADE

by Marsha Owens

i knew that girl

who rode my bus,

raped by her uncle

who told us dirty jokes.

neighbor women whispered...

only twelve, gone to the home.

 

i knew the home

out of town

on the highway, for girls

who got themselves pregnant

like they caught a cold

for not wearing a jacket.

 

i didn’t know

the girl i passed downtown,

defiant chin lifted to catch

cooling air in the wrinkles

of her shiny black neck,

like road tar melting

on a hot july day, baby

in her 14-year-old belly.

 

i knew my whiter-than-white

neighborhood looked away

as i hung my white blouse 

in the closet,

coat hangers jangling

impatience like little girls

who just want to go outside

and play.

 

 

Author's Note: I came of age in the 1960s, and suddenly the world was upended... Vietnam, birth control, and in the 70s, RvW. The 1950s seemed like ancient history in many ways. I grew up in the South in a white neighborhood, but we didn’t use the word ‘segregated.’ Black people lived ‘downtown’ or ‘in the country.’ Now I feel like I’m living in a time warp as Roe v. Wade is, apparently, about to be overturned, and African Americans are once again, being lynched. 

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA, and at times, along the banks of the beautiful Chesapeake Bay. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The Sun, The Dead Mule, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Rat’s Ass Review, Rise Up Review, PoetsReadingtheNews, and The New Verse News. She is a co-editor of the poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

THE DIRECTOR'S CUTS YOU DIDN'T SEE

by Joseph Hope

The United States Country Report on Human Rights Practice in Nigeria, published on March 31, 2021, tepidly states that “On October 20, members of the security forces enforced curfew by firing shots into the air to disperse protesters, who had gathered at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos to protest abusive practices by the Nigerian Police Force’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Accurate information on fatalities resulting from the shooting was not available at year’s end. Amnesty International reported 10 persons died during the event, but the government disputed Amnesty’s report, and no other organization was able to verify the claim.” The US government report is seriously at odds with the CNN report reproduced above. 

A subsequent CNN report documents how the Nigerian government edited a key piece of video evidence. "The Lagos State government's security camera footage of the Lekki toll gate shooting did not capture everything."

We don't have evidence

but we have our truth.

We don't have evidence,

because it was ripped away from us 

with guns aimed at our heads.

People were shot and taken away to unmarked graves.

We have their faces crested on our hearts,

the nameless uncounted for.

Protesters waving their flags were shot in their heads

in their guts

in their backs

in all the places that could kill a man.

The numbers of the dead increases by enough.

A bullet goes through a youth's  

throat like hypens 

silencing the anthem in his mouth.

Mustapha is down. John too.

How many brothers do I have to bury 

to know how hard it is to dig a grave?

Peace and bullets ain't mixable, 

Don't you agree? 

Our blood is also red like the blood of Abel.

The dead are restless.

The dead  were shamed:

Their bodies were washed off the cameras, 

washed off the internet, 

washed down the filthy drains like shit

by the unremorseful ruling monsters?

But the dead have many tongues: so listen 

to me, you proprietor of death—

This is our Homeland!

It's our right to sing, 

think, and talk.

We will not yield

even if you level us like fields, 

and cut us away from our names and identity.

Turn us to organic manures 

and we will still grow trees 

whose adventurous roots will infiltrate your resorts (Aso Rock)

to strangle you 

and your ignoble generals.

We are too stubborn

to be wiped off clean.

We'll continue to speak underneath the earth 

until someone up there hears us.

Joseph Hope is writing from Nigeria, a student of Usman Danfodio University. His works are either forthcoming or already published in Reckoning Press, Evening Street Press, Praxis Magazine, Gemini Spice Magazine, Spillwords, SprinNG, Writers Space Africa, Nthanda Magazine, 5th Chinua Achebe Anthology, Ariel Chart, Best "New" African Poets 2019 Anthology, and many more. He's a young man running away from his name. How absurd!

I WISH WE COULD ZIP UP THE ELECTION BY TUESDAY

by Phyllis Klein

Trump Zipper published October 31, 2018 by R.J. Matson politicalcartoons.com

I love the zippers in my life,

on skirts, pants, purses.

I even have a dress with three

large silver ones on the diagonal 

across my chest, torso, hips.

Me, as master of my universe,

pulling the tabs open or closed,

the teeth as they fall into a chain line

like a basketball team or a ballet troupe.

Connecting me to the openings and closings

of  the day, to other zippers and zipperers

everywhere. Oh if only everyone could fall

into a compassionate line, close out the cruelties,

open up for human rights, and critical care 

for the Earth. If money wasn’t the only thing. 

If coming together could win the day.

Phyllis Klein’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a finalist in the Sweet Poetry Contest, 2017, the Carolyn Forché Humanitarian Poetry Contest, 2019, and the Fischer Prize, 2019. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2018 and again in 2020. She has a new book, The Full Moon Herald from Grayson Books. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, she sees writing as artistic dialogue between author and readers—an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels. 

POEM BURIED UNDER THE SHED

by Kelsey Bryan-Zwick 

Photo by Richard Baker, Concord Monitor, May 2, 2019

Buried under the rhododendron, left cold in a back
alley dumpster for the garbage person to deliver
to indiscriminate piles of city landfill, torn to
nothing by screaming seagulls, or tossed like so
many refugees seeking asylum, to the bottom of an
ocean more likely to be remembered as graveyard
did you think our stories would be pretty as we are?

Covered in lipstick, hair braided, words worn like
a dress, did you think our fight would be somehow
less violent than the all wars described to you in your
history books?  Well they don’t gag and bind you
with a patriarchy of rules meant to diminish your power
and your voice because they think you’ll have
nice things to say. As we shed the millions of slights
and insults meant to define us, we don’t even know
our own skin.

And when you hear us at first maybe it will just
sound like a siren, almost indiscernible from all
the white noise, but then unmistakable, an ill pitch
in the stomach, a long sickening wail, some
visceral animal, a tearing crawling shriek, clawing
our way through the silence.  After so many years in
exile, the truth is hideously real: the monster we made
our monster to love.

Kelsey Bryan-Zwick is a Spanish/English speaking SoCal poet and artist with a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in Literature/Creative Writing.  She is the author of three chapbooks, the most recent being Watermarked (Sadie Girl Press) a hand-bound edition which intermixes both her poetry and art.  Disabled with scoliosis from a young age her poems often focus on trauma, giving heart to the antiseptic language of hospital intake forms.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, Kelsey’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in Rise Up Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Incandescent Mind, petrichor, Like a Girl, Lummox, A Poet is a Poet No Matter How Tall, Eunoia Review, and Redshift.

FOR THE STANSTED 15

by Matt Broomfield

"The case of the 15 activists convicted last Monday of ‘intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome,’ an offence carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, over a non-violent protest which stopped a deportation flight from leaving Stansted airport should not only worry all those who care about the rights of those threatened with removal. It should alarm anyone who cares about the right to protest. The disproportionate charge will have a chilling effect. Amnesty has called this 'a crushing blow for human rights in the UK'; Liberty said it was a 'malicious attack' on the right to protest.” Photograph: Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Image —The Guardian, December 11, 2018

“Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease, and so the R&D Blueprint explicitly seeks to enable cross-cutting R&D preparedness that is also relevant for an unknown “Disease X” as far as possible.” —World Health Organisation


disease X represents

the flash-drives full of martyred friends
the murals whose eyes you can’t put out
the secret slideshows shown on bedsheets
to comrades hiding in the hills

disease X represents

the breath which we breathe on you
the knowledge we share

disease X represents

our refusal to answer the questions whose answering
is mandated by law, the referral to lawyers
who cannot be afforded, the good work of lawyers
regardless, the virulent brown goulash
served through iron cat-flaps in Styrofoam trays
to the rag-pickers, card-scammers and lesbian mothers
the good and bad migrants, the friendless and their friends
the guerrilla paramedics, organ-grinders and thieves
the class coalescing for want of a class

disease X represents

the willing foreclosure of futures
which do not end in grief, the return of the gaze
the huff of breath rich with pathogens unknown
the tracing of banned words in filth, the moue
the return of the paper unsigned

disease X represents

your refusal to believe we would choose to subsist on so little
your demented insistence on finding out why, as though
the way which you ask us is not itself a cause

disease X represents

the exorcism of the cop which you put in our heads
through the refusal to think ill of our friends, whom we love
through the refusal to mourn the death of those
dead only in the most trivial sense
through the banned touch of hands in the pockets
of concrete overcoats, the obvious erection
on the back of the dirt-bike
running memory cards through the demilitarised zone
the reckless proclamations of love through the encrypted app
sweet enough, we have to hope, to radicalise the judge

disease X represents

the explicit search for the necessary evil
the conscious acceptance of the status of a bomb

the incendiary touch of hands between friends
which brought down the plane from the sky

Matt Broomfield is a poet, activist and writer currently living and working in Rojava in solidarity with the socialist-feminist revolution there. His debut fiction pamphlet was published in 2018 by Dog Section Press, his poetry has been shared across London by Poetry On The Underground, and he is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year and can be found on Twitter at @hashtagbroom. 

THINKING ABOUT MANNERS

by Mary K O'Melveny

Man’s Incivility to Man by Tom Tomorrow posted July 3rd, 2018 at TheNib

Aisles that were once filled with jeans
house metal cages built from cyclone
fencing.  One can hear toddlers’ screams
filling up the air, cutting to bone.

Across the country, mothers’ keens
echo into night.  They too are prone
to constant sorrows. Who can shed such scenes?
These are sins for which we must atone.

Surely, thoughts of disappeared teens,
breast-feeding babes, disoriented, flown
by night to unknown places, unseen
by anyone who knows them, alone

in their fears, fates left to news magazines
or strangers who cannot translate each moan
and wail and are not paid to do so, means
that public outrage can be shown

to those who devised such schemes,
oblivious to their human toll, backbones
bending like prairie grasses.  Perhaps it seems
right to them, stealing children at border zones,

sending a tough message to libertines
who would welcome anyone, who drone
on about human rights while the world’s seams
unravel like some cheap suit.  Those who bemoan

these desperate stories, as cold machines
of detention and terror ramp up, are prone
to sympathy for families steeped in scenes
of unfathomable anguish and unknown

outcomes.  Some know these horrors mean
lifelong damage, not just tears caught on cell phones.
Inevitably, reactions fill up with spleen,
Commentators and politicians bemoan

a lack of civil discourse.  Fury, it seems,
is too raw for a democracy, even as we alone
return to old auction block agonies.  Between
families rendered helpless and politicians prone

to lies, how can we react as if our TV screens
are filled with Mister Rogers?  The gauntlet is thrown.
Moments for calm debate have long passed.  Ravines
divide us now.  Stolen children have set the tone.

When horrors perpetrated in our names are too extreme,
much more is required than consulting tomes
of manners.  Speaking truth to power may not be routine
but politeness won’t save the world we had known.

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 first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age will be published by Finishing Line Press in September, 2018.