LEFTOVERS

by Daniel Romo

I’m waiting or dehydrating in this midlife loop, 

stuck between nothing and what to do, thirsty 

for a shot of life’s finest spirits and a sip of 

more than just stagnancy. Meanwhile, the 

taco man that sets up across the street from 

me everynight calls out sick on Instagram 

for fear of being caught up in the immigration 

sweep that’s devoured the Southland. One 

minute you’re slicing al pastor for a hungry 

Caucasian community, the next you’re seized 

by men hiding in masks and Americana. I 

prefer my carne asada with a slight char and 

I’m not even mad as the protesters burn the 

US flag in the Long Beach streets because the 

man who likes his meat rare and the neighbor 

who wants it well-done both bleed out when 

hurt and my city is being stabbed, which 

resurrects me as my blood boils into an 

inferno while I offer a torch to scorch every 

dirty star, to incinerate every misplaced stripe.

Daniel Romo writes, lives, and loves in Long Beach, CA.

CITY OF ANGELS

by Raymond Nat Turner

“There is no power greater than a community discovering what it  cares about.”  

—Margaret J. Wheatley, Turning to One Another

City Of Angels where

Camouflaged kidnappers; Fascist wrecking-crews rip

Seamstress, roofer, warehouse worker, dishwasher families

Apart. Apart for private prison-profiteers. Apart for a flash-

Bang-buffoon-king of chaos and cruelty. Whose strongman

Handler has him by the short-hairs— Dancing for dollars

City Of Angels where 

Folks know that masters of misdirection mix fantasy with

Fascism. Sprinkle spectacle in with torture.  And laugh

In teargas and rubber bullets—All the way to the bank—

Stealing SNAP; Medicaid; Social Security; and veterans’

Benefits 

City Of Angels ruled by devils

Reflecting fire and ICE.

City Of Angels where everyday 

Angelenos strap on resistance

Wings— And fly in solidarity

Formations through fog

City Of Angels where

Everyday Angelenos strap on mutual aid

Wings— And fly warp speed

Through blitzkrieg. Through hurricanes 

Of big lies. 

Through whirlwinds of racist rubbish

City Of Angels where

“To protect and serve” translates into sonic boom slogans

Bouncing off buildings! Ricocheting as linked arms.

Morphing shoulder-to-shoulder. Out from unlikely alliances.

Into united fronts ten toes down! Into militant movements

Organizing and building. Mastering pressure, mastering choke-points

City Of Angels where 

Everyday Angelenos know it’s no video game

On colorful screens. Know it’s soldiers on their streets

And Marines. Know “less lethal” is Pig Latin for Palestine—

On the down-low—Cookin’ slow … Know Gaza is Raza—

Writ large …

City Of Angels where 

The streets are universities of class struggle

Attended by allies, accomplices, comrades.

The streets are universities of class struggle paved with smoking tear-

Gas canisters; bloody, rubber-coated, steel bullets. And goose-steppers

Coming for Mexicans in the morning— And back for Blacks by noon 

City Of Angels where

Everyday Angelenos hate The Orange Age—

Its latest outrage of tilted table. Loaded dice.

Marked cards. Everyday Angelenos hate the

Capitalist decay—that must be swept Away

With 8.5-hour days of resistance!

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

TRAVEL ADVISORY

by Shalmi Barman

"A visa is not a right. It's a privilege," [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio said on Tuesday. Trump administration officials have said student visa and green card holders are subject to deportation over their support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel's conduct in the war on Gaza, calling their actions a threat to U.S. foreign policy and accusing them of being pro-Hamas. —Reuters, May 21, 2025

The State Department has told U.S. consulates and embassies to immediately begin reviewing the social media accounts of Harvard’s student visa applicants for antisemitism in what it called a pilot program that could be rolled out for colleges nationwide. —Politico, May 30, 2025

Counselors who work with foreign students eager to attend college in the U.S. are advising them to purge their social media accounts of posts that could attract the attention of U.S. State Department officials. —CBS News, May 39, 2025

To demonstrate that I don’t pose a threat,
I strip the stickers from my laptop case,
purge the Kindle reader, ctrl-shift-del
my browsing history as if the past
two, ten, eighty years had never been.
 
We’re experts here at inoffensiveness,
smalltalk savants, the brightest and the best
arriving on these shores to earn our keep,
inflate the GDP and pay our dues—
the price of entry to the winners’ club—
in labor, taxes, learned neutrality.
 
A privilege, not a right. In Khan Younis
the going rate for a sack of gritty rice
exceeds my weekly wage. Faucets frothing
overrun my glass. A legless child
plucks maggots from his wounds. I sink a knife
deep in the turkey, utter ritual thanks
for innocence far from the blasted plains
of Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon…
 
Purpose of visit? To become just like you,
I want to tell the agent matching my name
against a neutered profile. To shop at Target
on the Fourth of July, pledging allegiance
like a marriage vow. For this I stand in line,
bereft of fluids, jacket, shoes, and shame,
not-thinking of checkpoints a world away,
asking smilingly how much? how high?


Shalmi Barman is a South Asian national, a holder of a student visa, and a newly minted PhD. She spent several years at the University of Virginia writing a dissertation on class and labor in Victorian fiction, and doing other things that would likely be deportable offenses today. Her poetry has previously appeared in The New Verse News and also recently in Boudin, Blue Unicorn, EcoTheo Review, Gyroscope Review, and elsewhere.

I DREAMED LAST NIGHT

by Gordon Gilbert

Mile Stretch Road, Fortunes Rocks, Maine. Photo by the poet.

I Dreamed Last Night
of Mile Stretch Road and of a world to come,
perhaps only after I myself am gone,
but perhaps in my remaining years.  
 
I dreamed last night
that I was walking south
along a down-east beachside stretch
of crumbling asphalt.
 
On either side the road lay only ruins
where once stood so many houses
up and down the beach,
like all those visited behind
and not so far ahead,
what I feared I’d soon see.
 
But then I saw the colors
blue and red and white
on wooden boards covering a window
in all that still remained of a beach house,
and I walked over for a closer look
and realized why all this came to be: 
It was the end of immigration,
as the nation forgot
that it was the immigrants
who made this country great.
  
It was end of the commons,
as all had been privatized,
further enriching the already rich,
further depriving the already deprived.
 
In the end, it was the end
of all that we once had,
the end of the American dream. 


Gordon Gilbert is a writer living in the west village in NYC, who finds solace in walks along the Hudson River, even while contemplating with trepidation another new year of climate change and political mayhem.  

SANCTUARY

by Catherine Gonick

after the 1939 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame

I still hear him shout the word

see his jagged teeth and crazy eyes

 

feel his hard arms, our jarring swoop,

the arc we cut through air

 

rope-riding back from scaffold

to Cathedral of Our Lady

 

he the ugly, I the lovely

swinging through the laughing

 

crowd of high and low

that watched him pound up stairs

 

hold my outstretched body

high above his head

 

a trophy 

in a pale linen shift

 

My eyes demurely closed

on every sinner in the square

 

I was only acting

pretending to be the girl

 

Inside I was exulting

two outcasts had escaped

 

and I don’t remember what happened

after the shot

 

only the crew touching

his padded hump for luck

 

that year when as now

rescue was everything

 

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including The New Verse News, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, and The Orchards Poetry Journal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She has a book of poetry forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions and lives in the Hudson Valley where  she works in a company devoted to slowing the rate of global warming.

THE HIGH SCHOOL BAND AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

by Martha Deed

1 The Students

Tonight!
Gigantic Rally
at Madison Square Garden 

Our high school band
invited to play

Admission Free

We will march up Eighth Ave
in a ticker tape parade

President Eisenhower in person!

We will play “Hail to the Chief”
for real

Was I playing clarinet that year?

We will play in Madison Square Garden
as sure as 
as sure as the Knicks
to entertain the crowd

Or was I playing glockenspiel?

2 The School Authorities and the Parents

We’ll let them go
even with the usual field trip worries
the bus could break down
a chaperon on the sauce
a kid throws up on the bus
or starts a fight

We shall vigorously lead the way
to a review and revision
of our immigration laws

after overcoming the fear of partisanship
we will not worry about the bomb threat
phoned to the New York Daily News
an hour before the rally began
because we won’t know about it

Four years ago
we wandered wearily
in the darkness
of a drifting war

because there is no internet to scare us bloodless
yet

we wondered how long a government
could effectively lead the free world
when it no longer commanded
the pride of its own people

We have welcomed an effective attack on inflation

Even as he speaks 

I have seen the face of our land
soil, rivers and forests
their richness and power conserved

and promises

to serve our national interest
to promote understanding in the world
to give new validity
to America’s role of leadership
in this world

they won’t remember anything he said.

3 Two days later

The letter from The White House
The letter copied for each band member
The words forgotten
The letter kept

Martha Deed’s third poetry collection Haunted By Martha was released by FootHills Publishing, July 2023. She has published ten books (poetry, mixed media, non-fiction) and ten chapbooks along with inclusion in more than 20 poetry anthologies. Individual poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Earth’s Daughters, First Literary Review—East, Shampoo, Gypsy, and many others.

THE FORTRESS, MY UNCLE

by Indran Amirthanayagam

President Biden announced an executive order on Tuesday to essentially block asylum at the southern border, a major shift in how the United States has historically handled claims for protection. The move, a suspension of longtime guarantees that give anyone who steps onto U.S. soil the right to seek a safe haven, is intended to deter illegal border crossings, an issue that has weighed on Mr. Biden’s political fortunes as he heads into the November presidential election… Immigration advocates have said the changes, taken together, amount to a virtual suspension of the asylum system for people crossing the border. The Biden administration “is eliminating key protections to prevent refugees from being returned to harm through imposition of this ‘shout test,’” said Robyn Barnard, a lawyer at Human Rights First. “It will be a recipe for disaster and certainly result in refugees being sent to danger or worse death.” —The New York Times, June 4, 2024

The fortress, the wall, thou shalt

not enter these rolling hills and 

grasslands where bison and 

Natives once roamed. You will 

not drink at the rancher’s 

trough or sleep in the sanctuary 

city’s single residency hotel. You 

will not get bussed to the liberal

East where a temporary home

waits until shelter services stop 

at sixty days and you find

yourself on the proverbial street

unless you have relatives willing 

to keep you off the public books. 

This is no grand illusion, no 

welcome, but you have left 

your local gangs to find 

a safer and more fitting union, 

turned into a red and blue 

wall. Incredible failure 

of the big heart to open, 

to say we will find a way 

to allow the Dream free again 

as in the old poems and movies 

that led our fathers and mothers 

to make the trek west and east, 

north and south. Goodbye 

to all that jazz America. Goodbye.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press has just published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's 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 hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

SEND THEM BACK

by Paul Hostovsky

Yes, let’s all go back

to where we all came from—

all of us—a few hundred thousand years ago,

back to the Great Rift Valley in Africa

where Mitochondrial Eve 

first opened her skirts 

and had enough daughters in a continuous chain

for her mitochondrial DNA 

to survive. Let’s all go back, every last one of us,

by foot or by boat–whichever way we 

came—no cars, trains, airplanes—

those of us who left

reuniting with those who never left. Plenty

of room now for all of us 

in the vast network of valleys 

that stretches between the Red Sea and Mozambique

where the giant rift is slowly tearing apart–

the Nubian tectonic plate

and the Somalian tectonic plate 

ever so slowly pulling apart, and at the same time

separating from the Arabian plate in the north. 

Let’s meet in Ethiopia where the three plates meet.

And though it will take us all a long time

to get there—8 billion of us and counting—

that’s okay because it will take a long time

for the fractures in the earth’s crust

to open up completely and form

a new ocean. But when they do

we will all be there. And then let's

all line up and hold hands

and go jump in a lake

together.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.

MY DEAD FRIEND’S SON POSTS FROM A BOMB SHELTER IN TEL AVIV

by Laurie Kuntz

I can remember you and your dad strolling
the beach, crab hunting.
I was close by teaching my son
not to fear waves going over his head.
You were both four—friends and schoolmates.
 
As parents, we were only 
concerned with keeping
sons safe and sane.
 
When your family immigrated to Tel Aviv,
I admonished your dad for taking you 
from a melting pot into fire.
A mensch from Boston, 
bringing up a son by the beach
would be enough for most. 
 
Three decades later,
your dad is gone and you post
ramblings of war from a bomb shelter,
numbers of the missing, injured, and dead—
 
Today your post is shorter, the news is the same
the sirens—louder, the numbers—rising
while the world becomes immune
our gasps less forceful
as we scroll down giving a thumbs up 
to  blooming gardens, exotic recipes, and all 
that is coming soon to a theater near you.
Anything to alleviate the burden of responsibility.

Laurie Kuntz  has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), and three chapbooks (Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay Books, Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press, and Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Simple Gestures, won the Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, and Women at the Onsen won the Blue Light Press Chapbook Contest.  Her 6th poetry book, That Infinite Roar, will be published by Gyroscope Press at the end of 2023. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Prize. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila Na Gig, and many other literary journals.  She currently resides in Florida, where everyday is a political poem waiting to be written.