DISTRACTIONS

by Mary Saracino

 

 

They want us to look away,
forget about the pedophiles
the wars,
the ICE raids,
the killing of nonviolent protesters,
the abduction and incarceration of children,
the deportation of immigrants
who are not criminals,
the grifting and the lies,
the evil that spews forth every day,
trying to silence us,
eviscerate the truth
that we see with our eyes,
bully us into abdicating our rights,
turn us against one another
so they can continue their unholy alliances
retain unwarranted power,
feed their insatiable greed,
make money off of countless atrocities.
But we are not distracted.
We are focused, lightning bright,
brave and unstoppable.
We will not look away.
We will not pretend that
war crimes are not being committed.
We see that cruelty is the law of the land.
We believe the women and children
who have been raped, silenced, forgotten.
We stand with the men with integrity who fight for justice.
We the people march to demand an end to the horrors,
to honor truth and decry genocide,
racism, misogyny, xenophobia
and all the many uncivil actions
and policies that seek to undo us
deny us our sacred humanity.
Together we shout: “No kings. No autocrats. No Oligarchs.
Never, ever again!”

 

Mary Saracino is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet. Her book of poetry Motherlines was published by Pearlsong Press (February 2026). She is the author of four novels: Heretics: A Love Story (Pearlsong Press 2014), The Singing of Swans (Pearlsong Press 2006), No Matter What (Spinsters Ink 1993), and Finding Grace (Spinsters Ink 1999), and the memoir, Voices of the Soft-bellied Warrior (Spinsters Ink 2001). She co-edited (with Mary Beth Moser) She Is Everywhere! Volume 3: An anthology of writings in womanist/feminist spirituality (iUniverse 2012), which earned the 2013 Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Women-Centered Literature from Sofia University.

COVER IT

by Ron Riekki

“Everyone keeps saying 'apocalyptic,' but that doesn’t begin to cover it.” —CNN’s Karina Tsui from Pacific Palisades, January 8, 2025

 

My sister texts me saying she is sorry

to hear about my long disease [sic] and I

think of the long history of fire, how often

our world wants to be held instead of this,

now, how it’s helled.  And in the military

they put me in the burn pits, not to help,

but for punishment, no mask given, and

 

forced to stand there with the ash now

that owns me, apical scarring, and this

is the world now, scaring me, the news

where I see fire in the Ukraine and fire

in Gaza and fire in Sudan and fire in

Myanmar and fire in Haiti and I look

online at a “current large wildfire map”

 

and it looks as if all of California is on

fire and I worked in California during

COVID, a disaster healthcare volunteer,

going to all the worst-hit cities, raged

by COVID and, always, driving in, I’d

see countless TRUMP signs [sick],

almost as if COVID went wherever his

 

supporters were, a nurse yelling one

time that the OR needed to have at

least two sets of negative pressure

respirators, and I remember a shift

where all of the staff was sick, how

nobody showed up but me, and, out-

side, the horizon was ablaze, rooms

 

packed with COVID patients, one

dying every other shift, and I could

go outside for my break, but couldn’t

take my mask off outside either, not

with the planes dropping fire retardant,

and a medic telling me that the UV

in L.A. was deadly, is deadly, and this

 

doctor screaming something about

a CT scan, and a COVID patient who

came in with no ID (we took him),

and an MP from a nearby military

base who died in his 20s, drowned

in the water of his own lungs, and

how someone came in and a nurse

 

was asking if the patient couldn’t

breathe because of COVID or be-

cause of the fires and the fires were

COVID and COVID was a fire, is

a fire, and my father is in bed and

he’s flicking through the news and

it’s orange-red on the screen and

 

red-yellow on the screen and it’s

yellow-orange, all these different

hells we create—bombings and

wildfire and a Republican’s pool

in his mansion backyard drowning

in flames and the fires in Burkina

Faso don’t make our news and

 

the fires in Cameroon don’t make

our news and the fires in Mali

don’t make our news, but fires

of the wealthy are all over our

screens and the mansions are so

quickly eaten by Hell.  My son

googles the words Who invented

 

fire? and the A.I. answers, Homo

sapiens and we invented all of

this, all of this ash and smoke

and I remember when I was

standing in the middle of my

lungs being destroyed for

the rest of my life and there

 

was fence all around me and

I thought of incarceration,

how we are getting so good

at war that we are turning our

whole entire world into a prison

and the only way out of this hole

is to stop everything we’re doing.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

THE WINTER GAMES GO ON

by Rudi E. Welec, “Abs”

Although detainees must sleep in cramped cells on cement floors,

and though they must wear shackles with their numbered uniforms,

and though repression crosses Xinjiang’s pale locked-down sky,

the corporate industrial complex won’t bat an eye.

 

Although Hong Kong was once a base of civil liberties,

and though the communists crush those who want democracy,

and though the people now are jailed, practicing free speech,

the corporate industrial complex won’t say a thing.

 

So now in Beijing, the Olympic Winter Games go on,

supported by Proctor & Gamble, Visa and Bridgestone,

Intel, Allianz, Coca Cola, and Airbnb…

The IOC states it will be still aired by NBC.

Rudi E. Welec, “Abs,” is an irregular pseudonym for a NewVerse News regular.

NOBODY SHOULD WANT INEQUALITY TO EXIST

by Shirley JonesLuke

Detail from “Answers to Your Protest Questions” by Chelsea Saunders at The Nib, June 12, 2020

Inequality is store security following
It’s the inconsistent punishment from
a teacher for breaking a class rule
it’s the number of times you were stopped
by the police, as you walked or drove home
It’s being fired & taking twice as long to find a job
It’s being an ex-con and no one wants to hire you
It’s having a name on a resume—Jaquita, Kamal, or Rayshawn then being placed in the circular file.  It’s listening to your grandmother tell stories about the marches in the sixties or your mom telling you about being called nigger when she was a freshman in college during the eighties or how even now you hold your child tightly as a police car rolls by, watching your every move. It’s being Black in America and bracing for battle every time you leave the house. Or it’s forgetting your roots & embracing the shucking & jiving that Society wants to see. You entertain & you live another day. You resist & they’ll kill you. It’s a living death versus death. A burden Black folk carry & they can’t carry it anymore.

Shirley JonesLuke is an activist, essayist, and poet living in Boston, Mass. She has an MFA from Emerson College. Her work focuses on culture, race, and society. Shirley has attended workshops at Breadloaf, Tin House, and VONA. She is working on a poetry manuscript.

THRENODY

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Detail of the Cover of I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street by Matt Taibbi.

In America now
We can watch real murders
On TV
Then wait for officials to decide
Whether officers
Were justified
In killing the black man
As he lay handcuffed and helpless
Face down on the pavement.
In America now
We can listen to news reports
About whether there might be evidence
That the unarmed black jogger
Behaved in a way
That was threatening in some fashion
To the heavily armed
Father and son
Who jumped out of their pickup truck
And gunned him down.

In America now
We can watch videos
In which white people call the cops
On black children mowing lawns
In the wrong neighborhoods,
On black professionals
Who “seem suspicious”
Entering the lobbies
Of the condominiums where they live,
On black walkers who remind them
To leash their dogs.

In COVID America now
Black people are dying of the virus
At three times the rate
Of whites,
Black people are incarcerated
At six times the rate of whites
Black people are unemployed
At twice the rate of whites.

“I can’t breathe!” cried Eric Garner
For four hundred years.
“I can’t breathe!” cried George Floyd
For four hundred years.
“I can’t breathe!” cry black children
From broken and polluted neighborhoods,
From decaying and crumbling schools.
“I can’t breathe!” cry black parents
From hospital emergency rooms
Holding sons and daughters
In their laps
Who are dangerously ill
Because mom and dad could not afford
Early and dequate health care.
“I can’t breathe!” cry young black couples
Unable to rent or buy homes
And begin family life
In neighborhoods
Where the unspoken understanding
Is “whites only.”

“I can’t breathe!”

“I can’t breathe!”

“I can’t breathe . . .”

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California. He podcasts at: thirdactpoems.podbean.com .

DISASTER TENTS

by Tricia Knoll

Getty Images via Daily Kos, June 26, 2018

Beige vinyl heaves in the wind
like a lung. Crackles. I know.
The whine of the air-conditioner
insists that you cluster on low-slung cots
to speak directly into each other’s ears
or not talk at all. Intermittent cold blasts
interrupts every dream. Forget privacy.
Forget home and bedtime stories.
Store what you have under your cot.
They pitch these tents under all-bright
overhead lights. You will not sleep well
in this compound of generators, toilet
and bath modules, chain link and guards.
You will hear others' nightmares.
Your feet will scuffle on vinyl ground.
Hold your children. Let them not be stolen.
You may despair. The tent compresses you,
an I cannot breathe of internment.

Tricia Knoll lived in one of the FEMA disaster tents going up to house immigration refugees. She was a responder to Hurricane Katrina. She understands the differences between her experiencce and those of todays' traumatized families. She knew exactly when she would go to her real home, certainty. She asked to be in this tent, free choice. She was not afraid, privileged.  She cannot forget what it felt like to live inside one of these disaster tents.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

by Rick Mullin





Here we have the world turned on its head.
It comes: The Zero Hour Inauguration.
Skies grow orange and the trees glow red.

It brings to mind the burial of the dead,
but for the living, an incarceration.

Here we have the world turned on its head!

The flower girl imparts a sense of dread,

the chessmen might despair of compensation.
Skies grow orange and the trees glow red,

we can’t remember what the thunder said

and heavy metal rallies in formation.
Here we have the world turned on its head!

The Angels’ sermon: Prismic Light instead
of Fire. Bagpipes drone in affirmation,
skies grow orange and the trees glow red,

the sentence fragments drop like molten lead
into the auric ghost holes of a nation

where we have the world turned on its head.
The sky grows orange and the trees glow red.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.

A SYSTEM

by Gary Beck

“In the United States of America there are companies that profit if you go to jail. These corporations spent over $45 million in lobbying to make sure when you get sent to jail, you go to their jails. They are so good at this that there was a 40% increase of private prison detainees between 2002-2012. They are currently outpacing state and federally funded prisons. Yet there is no evidence that there are any savings in the use of private prisons. . . . Stewart Detention Center (SDC) in Lumpkin, Georgia, is one of the largest immigration detention facilities in the United States with the capacity to jail 1,752 people. Although the facility is owned by Stewart County and is contracted as an IGSA (Intergovernmental Service Agreements), the facility is actually operated by CCA. SDC houses immigration violation detainees who are mainly Hispanic, from Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina and had the highest count of inmates partly because of its capacity. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents detain men, women and children suspected of violating civil immigration laws at these facilities. Most of those held at the 250 sites nationwide are illegal immigrants awaiting deportation, but some green card holders, asylum seekers and others are also there. A recent report on conditions in immigrant detention centers such as Stewart finds a systematic and ongoing failure by the government to adequately inspect facilities run by public and private contractors. The report entitled 'Lives in Peril: How Ineffective Inspections Make ICE Complicit in Immigration Detention Abuse,' alleges a pattern of basic human rights violations leading to deaths, suicides, violence and sexual assaults in facilities that were given a clean bill of health by federal inspectors.” —Father Jeremiah J. McCarthy, Southern Cross, March 16, 2016

While Chris Matthews grilled Trump during the most recent townhall, the GOP candidate uttered one of many outrageous statements regarding the country’s prison system that went unchallenged and largely unnoticed. “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations, and private prisons it seems to work a lot better,” said Trump when asked how he planned to reform the country’s prison system.Matthews didn’t ask Trump to elaborate or explain why he believes giving prisons a profit motive to lock people up is a good idea. But the fact of the matter is that the private prison boom in America has been so disastrous that even members of the Republican party have began speaking out against them. —Raw Story, April 3, 2016 

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group avoided a combined $113 million in federal income taxes in 2015 alone, according to an analysis of federal financial filings by the racial and economic justice group Enlace. The prison business is booming despite efforts to reduce the nation's prison population, which has exploded in recent decades and forced the government to contract with private prison companies to meet demand. Last year, CCA reported $222 million in net profits, and GEO Group reported $139 million. CCA and GEO Group have enjoyed increased profits per prisoner housed in their facilities since 2012, when both companies began converting themselves into special real estate trusts that are exempt from the federal corporate income tax, at least in the eyes of the IRS. —Truthout, April 8, 2016.

Crime, more violent,
more sophisticated
innovates new ways
to injure the helpless,
defraud the innocent.
Protection is haphazard,
except for the privileged
and punishment is futile
without rehabilitation,
meaningful alternatives.
So the penal industry thrives
as other businesses go broke,
leaving citizens abandoned
on vulnerable streets.

Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director. He has published chapbooks of poetry (Days of Destruction, Expectations, Dawn in Cities, Assault on Nature, Songs of a Clerk, Civilized Ways, Displays, Conditioned Response, and Resonance) and fiction (A Glimpse of Youth). Fault Lines, Perceptions, Tremors and Perturbations will be published by Winter Goose Publishing;  A Glimpse of Youth by Sweatshoppe Publications. His novels include Extreme Change (Cogwheel Press), Acts of Defiance (Artema Press), and Flawed Connections (Black Rose Writing). Call to Valor will be published by Gnome on Pigs Productions; Now I Accuse and Other Stories by Winter Goose Publishing. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. He currently lives in New York City.

SMACKED DOWN

by Bill Sullivan

Congress has historically treated drug abuse as a malady afflicting mostly poor, minority communities, best dealt with by locking people up for long periods of time. The epidemic of drug overdose deaths currently ravaging white populations in cities and towns across the country has altered this line of thinking, and forced lawmakers to acknowledge that addiction is a problem that knows no racial barriers and can be best addressed with treatment. —NY Times Editorial, Jan. 25, 2016. Photo: A 20-year-old heroin addict agreed to go to detox through the Gloucester [MA] Police Department Angel program in January after he overdosed. Credit: Katherine Taylor for NY Times, Jan. 24, 2016

blue nails  ashen skin
                                           pin size pupils
barely a breath
                                           another flat line looms
his savior if found
                                           a narcan syringe
white brown or black
                                           a teen or thirty something
or an aging boomer
                                           who went from prescriptions
pushed by physicians
                                           to bags of scag

he might collapse
                                           on a city street
or in a country lane
                                           be clad in a suit
or laborer's boots
                                           be an absent father
or live in lover
                                           once a dreamer
or a pragmatist
                                           now possessed
he rides a demon horse
                                           over a cliff
will it be a hospital
                                           or the morgue
for the man
                                           with the opioid eyes

for years jeered
                                           as a crackhead
or junkie
                                           he was left to die
or tossed into a cell
                                           but when the disease
infected the suburbs
                                           the country lanes
the club house
                                           and the gated estate
it was rehab for the addict
                                           progress no doubt
but too late for the poor
                                           who had no care or aid
who filled a grave
                                           or crawled around
a prison cave


Bill Sullivan is from Rhode Island where in the past five years over a thousand residents have overdosed on opioids, mainly heroin.  He is the co-author two books on twentieth century poetry, co-producer of two films and his poems have appeared in a number of on line and print publications.  His latest publication is Loon Lore in Prose and Poetry.

GAZAPPED

by Charles Frederickson




Unemployed Gaza youth unruly majority
Disheartened break out Manifesto declared
Challenging miserable conditions faced everyday
Mental incarceration suffering post-traumatic stress

Fuck Hamas fuck Israel fuck
Fatah fuck UN fuck USA
Dissatisfaction desperation frustration aggression depression
Mission Impossible leading normal lives

Sick of imposed shitty existence
Being jailed for inexcusable offenses
Mentally emotionally tortured by Hamas
Totally ignored by indifferent cowards

We want to scream breaking
Shameful wall of unjust apathy
Shedding sleepless nightmares outraged tears
Overhead F16’s breaking sound barriers

We cannot say what we
Want do what needs doing
Nowhere to run hide escape
Move No shunned hope options

We don’t want to hate
Fear being heavy-hearted victims anymore
We desperately want freedom is
Peace too much to ask

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1