A BLOT UPON THEE

by Zumwalt

 

 

 

 

"One prominent House Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, said Monday afternoon that he had reviewed the unredacted documents [of the Epstein files] and saw  'tons of completely unnecessary redactions... I saw the names of lots of people who were redacted for mysterious or baffling or inscrutable reasons,' Raskin said." —CNN, February 10, 2026

 

 

What Blindness now doth mark this stream of text,
Where Blame falls dark, and we are left perplexed.
The blurred distinction between right and wrong—
The weak are blistered by the brazen strong.
The blundered records, bleached of wealthy name
Won't bear the Guilt, now blotted free from shame,
While those who bled a trail of broken trust
Are bluntly bared, the others cloaked with dust.
What blatant gall to hide the rich man's Sin,
To shield in blacked-out lines the wolves within,
Now battered, those who bear no Stain at all—
What Blight is bred in this corrupted hall?
There is no Justice, just the shattered teen,
Her blank Betrayal b-l-i-n-k-i-n-g on our screen. 

 

 

Zumwalt's poetry feeds on alienation, shifting reality, and forced adaptation. Zumwalt is a proud repeat contributor to The New Verse News, and was recently nominated for Ink Sweat & Tears "Pick of the Month." 

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.

HAIL, MARY

by Maria Lisella

Buon giorno, buen dia Maria

Full of grace and wisdom and power

The Lord may be with thee, and you

May be Blessed among women but

 

What about the children? Not the one

In the womb that has been consecrated

As the son of God, but God, your god,

My god has many sons, daughters all

 

Around the world. They are not all blessed

Some are cursed and lost and under a pile

Of rubble in Ukraine, Yemen, Israel, Palestine, Gaza;

Others live in the darkness of the blind, are

 

Plagued by hallucinations, cursed with spasms

Of a mind that plays tricks on them all day, all

Night. Imagine a predator behind you, in your

Shadow, silent, stealthy, looking over your shoulder

 

Or under your bed. You cannot see but you know

They are there and they mean you harm for no

Other reason than you are where you find yourself

Not for an act you perpetrated on someone else,

 

Just for being who you are. The luck of the draw?

And Holy Mary, Mother of God, do you pray for

The innocent as well as the sinners? The pilots,

The soldiers firing artillery rockets, are they too

 

Prayed for? Rockets with ranges of 30-50 miles, fired

In barrages for the most effect, the most damage.

Are they too in your prayers to god and which god

Might that be? What does that God look like, what

 

Does that god think, plan, why does that god never

intervene? Humans shooting hate and rockets blindly

into Ashkelon, Beersheba, under the eyes of Israeli 

drones … range is crucial for rockets, for prayers too.

 

Pray for us sinners and for the innocent, for my own son

Living in a world plagued with demons he cannot see

or touch or hear but knows they are there, so music

and words come to him as if a shaft of light in day

 

Or night, raises his voice above the din in his brain, to

Feel the lift above the iron dome of paranoia, the upsurge

Of spirits that haunt, and fly, and invade his small cot in an

Institution with cinder block walls, netted windows he can’t

 

See but knows they are there: the limitations, the lack

Of liberty, the outside in; the other sons and daughters

in Gaza, or Yemen or Ukraine are bombarded with a panoply

of air power used in a steadily escalating series of attacks.

 

What I wish for my own son is comfort, warmth, knowing

There is a meal, a roof over his head, a dog at his feet, a

Sun he can feel but not see… Mother of God, what do you

Wish for your sons, your daughters now and at the hour

 

Of their deaths? When will your god hear your pleas or

Have the mothers and daughters been silenced to the

Tunnels, the basements, the streets, have they lost their

Voices, their powers to heal, now and at the hour of now?

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate and an American Academy Fellow; her work includes Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She is a member of the Thursday Morning Poets, Brevitas and co-curates the Italian American Writers Assoc. literary readings.

POEM FOR THE REST OF US

by Judy Juanita

“Last Saturday, a neighbor in Fort Worth called the city’s non-emergency line because he was concerned about his neighbors, 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson and her 8-year-old nephew. It was the middle of the night, but her front door was open. The dispatcher sent police officers, who appear to have treated the call as a reported burglary. While searching the perimeter of the house, Officer Aaron Dean saw a figure in the window. Without announcing himself, he yelled ‘Put your hands up! Show me your hands!’ Two seconds later, he fired his gun, killing Jefferson in her own home.” —Radley Balko, The Washington Post, October 15, 2019. Photo: A makeshift memorial outside the home of Atatiana Jefferson on Monday. Jefferson was fatally shot by a Fort Worth police officer early Saturday morning. (Jake Bleiberg/AP via The Washington Post, October 15, 2019

We wear a masque called freedom
But Atatiana was shot like a fugitive slave.
We masquerade as upright citizens
Brave this deadly force every goddam day
Masquerade as independent thinkers
While our thoughts get shot down in the streets.

We believe, like true believers, in the rule of law
The gangs in blue shoot through that too.
Our red, white and blue masques say VOTER
But our ballots keep disappearing.
When the ancestors greet Atatiana
They shake her alive. The masquerade is over.

Faith leaders wear the masque of concern
But their brand-new bibles are warped and cracking.
Atatiana’s neighbor, in masque, cries out
They had no reason to come with guns drawn.
The ancestors ask: Are all the players numb?
Some, not all, though in costume, torn and dirtied, know.

The great pantomime and our long drawn out performance
Cracks and peels with every gun drawn and each bullet fired.

Judy Juanita's poetry has appeared in Obsidian II, 13th Moon, Painted Bride Quarterly, Croton Review, The Passaic Review, Lips, TheNewVerse.News, Poetry Monthly and Drumrevue 2000.  Her short stories and essays appear widely. Juanita's semi-autobiographical novel Virgin Soul chronicled a black female coming of age in the 60s who joins the Black Panther Party. Her collection of essays, DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland was a distinguished finalist in OSU's 2016 Non/Fiction Collection Prize.

ANKARA 19 DECEMBER 2016

by Tad Gruchalla-Wesierski

When the hammer came down
The room had been cleared
Russian head pressed to the floor
He could not bolt for the door.

The room had been cleared
The innocent were safe
Russian could not bolt for the door
The sentence had been executed.

The innocent were safe
The reasons were reported
The sentence had been executed
The screaming was recorded

The reasons were reported
“Do not forget Syria”
The screaming was recorded
“Allahu akbar. Do not forget Aleppo”

Do not forget Syria
Where Russian government had no jurisdiction
“Allahu akbar. Do not forget Aleppo”
The city the Russian government cluster bombed

Where Russian government had no jurisdiction
The innocent were collateral damage
The city the Russian government cluster bombed
It was easy to execute the Russian sentence.

The innocent were collateral damage
Though they breathed, ate rats and screamed
It was easy to execute the Russian sentence.
They did not have Russian mothers.

Though they breathed, ate rats and screamed
Their last words “Don’t forget Aleppo!”
They did not have Russian mothers.
The city needed to be cleared.

Their last words “Don’t forget Aleppo!”
Perhaps made the Russian think “But,
the city needed to be cleared.”
When the hammer came down.

Tad Gruchalla-Wesierski is a Canadian and writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Canmore, Alberta, Canada or wherever else he may happen to be.  He was drawn to this vocation after a 30-year career as a corporate and international lawyer.  “The practice of law was a tourniquet on the flow of words,” he said “but now that it’s removed, my words can pulse down unused canals to where they should pool”.

NOT READY TO BE SILENT

for James Baldwin

by Carolyn Gregory

“The week started with scenes from a cellphone video of an African-American man lying on the ground being fatally shot by a Louisiana police officer, and an astonishing Facebook Live feed of a woman in Minnesota narrating after her African-American boyfriend was killed by an officer during a traffic stop. It ended with horrific live television coverage of police officers’ being gunned down by at least one sniper at what had been a peaceful march protesting the police shootings.” —The New York Times, July 8, 2016 Photo: A spray-painted mural on a building on Foster Drive in Baton Rouge, La., on Thursday, where Alton Sterling was shot to death by a police officer two days earlier. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times.

No, I do not want to be integrated
into a burning house
where the roof collapses
and firemen die in the rubble,

forced to stay silent when
the sirens fly by in the dark
and guns shoot the innocent.

I do not want to live
in a field of burning red poppies,
shocking in their color
against fallen gray homes
bombed down to bedrock.

My life means more than this.
I am not ready to walk silent
into a cemetery to lie down
with all the unnamed dead.

Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Main Street Rag, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ygdrasil, Seattle Review. Her first and second books were published by Windmill Editions in Florida.

POTLUCK WARS

by Saknarin Chinayote & Charles Frederickson

There are no innocent victims

Pure humble simple childhood wonderment

Started off believing everything’s possible

Borrowed time eventually catching up

Church basement abuse sinful shame

Masking guilty evil lurking within

Everyone bringing favorite trademark dish

Leftover peace scrambling for crumbs

Vulnerable decalcified bone marrow transplants

Refusing to betray innermost voices

Illegal immoral hollow echo challenges

Courage to resist declaring NO

Perilous potluck newfound old world

Starved slaughtered terrorized tortured traumatized

Conscientious objectors demoralized degraded dehumanized

Shrieking demons disquieted switching sides

Blessed meek claiming pristine inheritance

Greedily squandered by sexploitive adulterers

Natural habitat sabotaged suffering neglect

Conservation eco-environmental awareness recycling past

There are no innocent dead

Passing from presence to absence

In-limbo dissonant heartbeats throbbing oblivion

Willing to look behind beyond

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