LETTERS TO LUIGI

by Andrew Romanelli

Luigi Mangione, suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, departs after a hearing at Blair County Courthouse on December 19 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. Mangione has received dozens of letters and emails as well as monetary support while in prison, a report by the New York Post has revealed. Photo: Gene J. Puskar-Pool/Getty Images via Newsweek, December 21,2024

are about what you’d expect Jesus to receive

if he had mail privileges 

at Mount Zion, near Holy Sepulcher or Calvary.

 

I work for a company that prints letters, 

photos, and books for inmates that people 

upload and purchase for us to send.

I fold the letters, put the photos in envelopes,

noticing the names of inmates, the patterns

of image, of word, what gets sent and said.

 

Every letter to Luigi begins with an endorsement of full support.

Some just want to connect, say where they’re from

what they do for a living. They include a phone number,

a few photos of them hiking, walking a dog at sunrise,

a post gym ab showoff shirt lift, a night out on the town.

 

Most letters contain stories about illness.

How they lost their child, father, brother, mother,

wife, sister, best friend, high school crush, how

they have lost themselves to denials

of treatment plans, medication, surgeries.

There are pictures and pictures of X-rays,

pedicle screws for spine fusion and support,

scars on backs, calves, bellies, breasts, pictures

of phantom limbs gone to the time waiting for an approval.

 

The letters often close with:

“For the first moment since my diagnosis I feel

like you understand what I’m going through.”

Or “I’d do anything to be healthy again, 

thank you for giving me hope that things will be different.”

 

These are people who:

Have stopped writing and calling their leaders.

Understand that statistics have no effect in making a point.

That murder is wrong but wonder what do you call

the death of millions in the name of profit?

 

Last week I was processing mail for Puff Daddy.

 

Now its Luigi, a man-made avatar,

expressing the ignored collective suffering of the people.

 

Jesus was a guy in jail on charges of terrorism.

 

These are days in which we are able

to reach more people than any other time before.

 

Yet look what we are doing:

To be seen.

To be heard.

To be validated.

 

We have been taught the alternatives.

Yet our fracture, 

bound by violence,

gets the attention.

 

Can you begrudge the people for cheering? 

 

 

Andrew Romanelli was born and raised in Las Vegas. His first poetry book Rotgut was published by Zeitgeist Press. You can find him @downcharleston and at andrewromanelli.com .

HOW DO YOU DEFINE AN ENDING?

by Mark Danowsky

“Never-Ending Road” painting by Elizabeth Kenney

After three years, The New York Times announces that close coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic is coming to an end.

What has ended, I wonder,
And what has not?
 
So many with prolonged illness
Know the battle rages on 
 
And those soon to fall ill
And those who will fall ill
 
I count myself 
Among the lucky 
 
Recall my sureness
That I would not survive
 
Of course, few foresee
The deft hand of death 
 
His scythe, at times, the edge
Of visible—a bullet 
 
Stops the heart 
Without just cause
 
The needle droops 
In a useless arm 
 
Tires spin on ice
And metal crushes metal
 
A cloud opens up 
For tears to flood

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is author of the poetry collections As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press), JAWN (Moonstone Press), Violet Flame (tiny wren lit), and Meatless (Plan B Press). Recent poems in Red Ogre Review, Green Ink Review, The Broadkill Review, anti-heroin chic, Harpy Hybrid Review, Otoliths, and elsewhere.

REBOUND

by Devon Balwit

A mind in a body, we want

the body not to suffer,

but bodies must learn

 

what illness is. To avoid

unpleasantness is to leave them

vulnerable to reinfection.

 

How tempting are blister-packed

nostrums when better

is to roll in our fever sweat

 

and full inflammation, each cell

a diligent student

of never again.

Devon Balwit is trying to put her final days of isolation to good use and is crossing her fingers against her own rebound.

AMAZON

by Donna Katzin

On Friday [April 1, Christian Smalls] won the first successful unionization effort at any Amazon warehouse in the United States, one of the most significant labor victories in a generation. The company’s response to his tiny initial protest may haunt it for years to come. —The New York Times, April 2, 2022. Photo: Members of the new union celebrated in Brooklyn on Friday night. Credit: Eduardo Munoz Avarez/Associated Press

At the fulfillment center in Staten Island,      

every day a marathon, she logs 30 miles

in 12 hours on the warehouse floor,

wearing worn-out shoes she cannot afford to replace,

picking, packing boxes on dollies and hand trucks

before she clocks out.

Jeff Bezos, back from outer space,

could not finish one of her shifts.

 

Beneath fluorescent lights that never sleep,

during precious seconds between packages,

when her mind fights to focus,

she thinks of little ones

she left before breakfast,

not knowing whether she would

make it home to feed them dinner

or kiss them goodnight.

 

Computers track how fast she picks and packs

on the human conveyor belt,                               

evaluate her by algorithm,

feed back seconds per task,

pieces per minute, numbers to hit,           

speed up without notice or reason,

threaten to dismiss her                    

for missing her target rates.

 

Knees buckle, back rebels,                       

wrists and elbows numb, cramp.          

Stress takes its inner toll,   

presses veins and arteries,                                        

hangs heavy on her heart.

She reports to Amcare,                                  

is given an aspirin,                                           

sent back to the floor.                                       

 

But quietly, between shifts, 

as summer sweats and winter gnaws her weary bones,

she joins coworkers, shares indignities and injuries

by telephone and text, Twitter and Instagram,

in parking lots, food pantries and pews,

dares to tiptoe to a meeting,

whispers the word

union.

 

Donna Katzin is the founding and previous executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

POEM IN AUGUST

by Julian O. Long

“August Painting” by Ivan Kolisnyk

First day of my eighty fourth

year to heaven, I got up

turned off the O2 machine, hung

its canula over the arm of the walker

beside my bed, intimate with

these acts as I am with my hand

on my thigh the last thing before

throwing off the covers,

                                       intimate too

with comorbidities (only recently

learned that word) my troubled heart

remembered from recent echoes, aftermaths

of strokes that stopped parts of my brain

and legs (maybe other things

as well—hard to tell with all

the medicines.

                        Still, one more stick

and I’m boosted, at least in a qualified

sense; I’ll continue intimacy

with covid fully vaccinated, as I

was those childhood summers with series

of asthma shots, but this birthday

I am choosing as well to quarantine

myself—better that than bronchial

spasms, since this virus kills.

Writ large does the covid pandemic shed

light on die ups such as the great

reptilian? Chances are it will run

its course and become endemic among us

like the flu. But what if it doesn’t?

And what if unlike plagues of past ages

this is the one big one? Will it

usher in new times of dearth,

strife, and loss driven by vicious

death-demanding ideologies?

Will we humans learn care for one

another in such new times, or will we

follow the worst among us and in

ourselves? Chances are we’ll do

the latter.

                        Cogito ergo sum,

unassailable formulation, works

both ways, Latin doesn’t care

it’s the perfect sum of being, balking

at prospect of its own quitclaim

consciousness cannot fail to name

itself, but no heuristic can

afford me knowledge of my death;

I am intimate with that absence.

Conversely, no perception affords

me knowledge of another’s. In these

times it’s a forced option to choose

intimacy as well

                           —with that absence.

Julian O. Long’s poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

COVID ABATTOIR

by Philip C. Kolin

Above: Family members of JBS USA meat packing plant employee Saul Sanchez watch as his casket is lowered during his funeral after he died of Covid-19 in Greeley, Colo., on April 15, 2020.Jim Urquhart / Reuters via NBC

“Meatpackers deny workers benefits for virus-related deaths, illnesses.” 

—NBC, September 29, 2020

Upton Sinclair is roiling in his grave.

Things have not changed in Packingtowns

across America. Covid has just made them worse.

The virus works well in these damp, cold, sun-

blocked meat processing plants where droplets can settle 

and slay much longer. Gigantic fans whirl and spread 

saturated foul air as workers breathe each other's

infected coughs and sneezes.  Loud machinery demands

they must talk louder and farther to announce Covid's arrival.

All in cramped spaces.

Packed shoulder to shoulder, workers have to

butcher in non-stop 10-12 hour shifts, no plexiglass

or strip curtains between them. Processing lines

move at race car speeds, leaving workers even  more

vulnerable thanks to exhausted breath, great Covid hosts. 

It's a lung-breaking job. And sharing knives

and hammers means shaking hands with coworker Covid.

Like the animals they eviscerate and de-hide,

these meat processing workers leave the plant

with slaughtered lives, their lungs and hearts offal.

It's a jungle in these plants.

Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English (Emeritus) and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published more than 40 books on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, African American playwrights as well as ten collections of poems. His most recent books are Reaching Forever: Poems in the Poiema Series of Cascade Books and, forthcoming from Main Street Rag, Delta Tears.

CORONA

by Dale Wisely

Daffodil corona by Nick Harris

                           1

Crown of stars

Corona

The rarefied gaseous envelope
          of stars, our sun

Unfathomable halo,
           obscured by the relentless
           blaze of plasma, hydrogen, and helium

Only a perfect eclipse—
          miracle of astronomic alignment—
          permits us a glimpse
          of the pearly glow
          flaring out from the black disk
          of the superimposed moon

                          2

Crown of thorns

We take care not to confuse
          illness with death,
          or melancholy with mourning

Now our sickness and our death
          seem inseparable and
          we are blind to the distinction

And in these days
          depression and grief
          run along parallel lines
          and converge on the horizon

          under a crown of flames
          under a crown of glory


                   3

Crown of flowers

Corona

Shaped like a cup or a trumpet,
     the flared center of the common daffodil

amaryllis     paperwhite    triandrus      narcissus  

a perennial: it flowers, dies—

but the gardener does not say it dies,
          she says it “dies back”

It is time to sort our sickness from our death

Die back and grow again another year

Author’s Note: Some of the language in part 1 is from the Google dictionary entry for “corona.” Howie Good contributed the “crown of …” phrases.

Dale Wisely runs Ambidextrous Bloodhound which publishes four journals: Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unbroken, and Unlost.  His chapbook Seven Stars is out in April 2020.

LET OBAMACARE FAIL

by Jeremy Thelbert Bryant

“Let Obamacare fail,” he says
like “Let them eat cake”
like privilege is universal
like old folks don’t get older, sicker
like men don’t have prostates
like women don’t have breasts
like cancer is fake news
like kids don’t break
like everyone stays in a tower
like all inherit their daddies’ money
like no lives matter
like the leader of a country doesn’t care

Jeremy Thelbert Bryant is a poet and a writer of creative nonfiction. He is a graduate of the low residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. When he is not teaching English, he is burning incense, listening to music, drinking coffee, and writing. His work may be found in Pikeville Review and Prism. He finds inspiration in the red of cardinals, in the honesty of Frida Kahlo’s artwork, and in the frankness of Tori Amos’ lyrics.

FRIDAY NIGHT ON EAST VAN BUREN

by Roxanne Lynn Doty

"Weeping Woman" by Pablo Picasso

It was the end of the line on Van Buren, a Friday night in April, a section of this gritty street where it leaves the city behind, disappears into east valley sprawl, and forgets the history that rumbles beneath its concrete and asphalt, the ghosts of old Phoenix that breathe the night air. The woman stood under the 202 overpass, moving from fence post to fence post, lightly touching each as if in a child’s game or dance, her long hair flying in wind that rushed through the valley that night, blew dead palm fronds across the 4 lanes, debris into the air to flutter gracefully in the haze of dull streetlights and she walked into the oncoming traffic, stood with arms spread—a welcome or a plea or an effort simply to breathe and the cars stopped and watched and some blew their horns and waited as she got onto her knees and folded her hands in prayer in the glare of terrified headlights. And I wanted to say, leave her alone, give her space, don’t call anyone, she has probably been fucked over time and again and beauty has a strangeness and sadness a glow and I looked around for red lights, for an official vehicle that might have been summoned.  But the night remained still and free from authority and we waited and the woman finally rose, and walked to the other side of the street and climbed the incline toward the highway and the traffic began to move again.

Roxanne Lynn Doty lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She has poetry in I70 Review and short stories in Four Chambers, Forge, Soundings Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature and Lascaux Review. Two of her  stories were nominated for the New Letters Alexander Patterson Capon Prize for Fiction.

LAND OF THE LIVING

by Laura Rodley

Image source: Pinterest

It is late April and night peepers sleep;
it is too warm right now for them to weep.

They want a cool night, to turn on spring’s lathe,
awaking in the pond where wood ducks bathe.

Too warm for them and too cold for my Dad
resting in his pond of electric bed, glad

to close his eyes and breathe, oxygen on,
waiting for Rachel Maddow, nighttime fawn

who only speaks through airways, her hollow
full of lights, as though the sun she swallows;

as soon as the lights are dim, she retreats
back into the deep woods on sneakered feet,

a fawn who speaks English, siphons the news,
that now is keeping my Dad living, glued.

Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

THE LAST SURVIVOR

by Lisa Suhair Majaj

A tent in Idomeni Camp. Image source: Cyprus Refugee Solidarity, March 16, 2016

                                    “Hope is a tough bitch to kill.” —Faye Karavasili, Cyprus Refugee Solidarity

They trudge through rain and mud, their wrecked shoes
and sodden clothes a testament to everything broken,
lives reduced to rubble like the shattered hulls
of homes they left behind. Ahead lie footsore roads,
barbed wire,grim officials thrusting the press of bodies back
and back, floodwater rising on all sides, relentless
as the memories that pursue them no matter how far
they walk, heads bent beneath the rain, children clinging
to a parent’s back or borne on a weary shoulder,
a small hand in a larger hand, a long column of people
trekking weary, undeterred, from bone-chilled morn
to damp, cold dusk, snatching sleep in cramped tents
or open fields where they wait for dawn, for refuge,
for a border opening. But dawn comes each morning
with its orange refusal: rain, closed borders, stolen dreams.

The desperate do not give up. They escape to illegal crossings,
wade into swiftly-flowing rivers, pass babies and toddlers
hand to hand in a human chain, threading the cloth of desolation
with a thin gleam of hope, even as muddy currents sweep away
the unlucky, the overly-weary. Their goal?
The future, the other bank, a chance to keep on walking.

In Idomeni camp, illness and despair permeate
everything: the sucking mud, the weighted sky,
the grim and cheerless air. A Yazidi child
peers out from a torn and tiny tent,
her face a bright beacon amid the gloom and muck.
She begs for a balloon, but there are no balloons
to be had here, only sodden rags that hang
from trees and tent poles – limp flags
that have long ago given up the dream of flying.
Yet at her plea something bright and colorful
rises wisp-like in the dank, cold air,
floating improbably above the tent-city
pitched on the razor-edge between despair and hope.

The mother smiles as she gently strokes
her daughter’s hair. “How can you smile?”
an aide worker asks, "amid all this?"
The mother pauses, then replies.  “They wanted
to chop her hand off for offending the faith.
Here, no one wants to chop off our hands or heads.
We can be free.” She speaks calmly, her eyes seeking
the gray horizon. Behind her, ghosts murmur,
their soft keening an echoing whisper
in the darkening sky, rising above this graveyard of dreams
where hope is the last survivor.


Lisa Suhair Majaj is the author of Geographies of Light, winner of the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. She lives in Cyprus. This poem responds to the refugee crisis in Greece, particularly at Idomeni camp.

STRANGE CHORDS

by Rick Mullin



Mar 31, 2015: UPDATE 9:57pm PDT
Joni was found unconscious in her home this afternoon. She regained consciousness on the ambulance ride to an L.A. area hospital. She is currently in intensive care undergoing tests and is awake and in good spirits. More updates to come as we hear them. Light a candle and sing a song, let's all send good wishes her way. --jonimitchell.com


I love the way she winged it on Hejira.
Crow, not seagulls, sounded right to me.
She got away with Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,
Don Alias on the date, and spoke
of Mingus where she used to sing. And Jaco.
It was kinda Blue-to-Kind of Blue.

A kind of transformation of the blue
horizon on a field of that high era
shot in black and white, a season chock-a-
block with ice on lipstick black. To me
she seemed the more divine. She spoke
to me from someplace new, the daughter

of a snowbound country, not the daughter
Woodstock might have wished for. But what blew
me out was anecdotal, the bespoke
position of her fingers, the Hejira
of the coffee house and Do Re Me
tautology. The maundering with Jaco

on the frozen tide, a sliding ride with Jaco
holding down the line. Abandoned daughter
of the Blues, insurgent, blond and white like me,
she bartered for the flatted fifth, a blue
note on the top. Eponymous “Hejira”
spread harmonics, spinning hub and spoke

along the endless highway Dylan spoke
of on the stage at Newport. Him, the jack of
anything he got his hands on. Oh, Hejira
to the new Medina. But Mohammad’s daughter
left behind the radio of blue
oblivion and came across to me

on carbon leather skates. She came to me
exhaling lacy signals where she spoke
into the weather and the grayscale blue.
I caught a glimpse of something like a Jack-o-
Lantern smiling in the clouds, a daughter
lost and laughing on the moon’s Hejira,

longing for Hejira, calling me,
a daughter dancing on the ice. She spoke
of Miles and swung for Jaco in the blue.


Rick Mullin's poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies. His most recent book, Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle, was published in December by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, Ohio.