A TEXAS HAIKU

A Republican-led committee of the Texas House voted on Saturday to advance a new congressional map drawn to flip five Democratic House districts in favor of Republican candidates, setting up a showdown over redistricting next week… Several Democratic members of Congress came to Austin to testify, arguing that the proposed map would diminish the power of Black and Hispanic communities across Texas and violate the federal Voting Rights Act. Al Green, a congressman from Houston, said the map was “racist.” —The New York Times, August 2, 2025

William Cullen Jr. is a veteran and works at a social services non-profit in Brooklyn, NY. His poetry has appeared in Canary, Farming Magazine, Spillway, The American Journal of Poetry, Turtle Island Quarterly, and Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics.

 

UNWRITTEN POEM

by Marsha Owens

if i were a poet of great repute

i’d fashion a poem of hope,

ask it to travel with me

alongside Breanna,

next to George Floyd,

so many others since...

young victims at school

ad infinitum,

and i would ask the poem

to be gentle with us

as we climbed words,

reached for understanding

dangling like a noose

 

instead i feel the poem resist

i watch it walk into hell

because no words exist

to save lives trapped

in gunfire.

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The New Verse News, The Sun, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Dead Mule, and Streetlight Anthology. She is co-editor of the poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning has been recently published at Finishing Line Press.

WE ARE UKRAINIANS TOO

by Jonel Abellanosa

"What love is greater than the wholesome and heroic love of your own country? What other love? Nothing else." In this detail from a painting by Carlos "Botong" Francisco are the words of Andres Bonifacio, one of the founders of Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galangan Katipunan ng Anak ng Bayan (KKK or Katipunan), a secret society organized in 1892 to gain independence from Spain through a revolution. Source: travels withcharie

Our ancestors knew subjugation forced

into throats where no words break, silence

sharp as bayonet, glass shards shimmered.

The noose gripping the tongue, expressions

of words deprived of sounds, fall and thud

turning choked air into death’s white light.

 

The garrote spells our history’s strangulation

in the hands of war criminals. Our heroes

and martyrs tell us we, with our rich lands

and seas, have to keep vigil how the heroic

unfolds where sunflowers are eternal as their

land. Our flag has their yellow and blue,

 

our dreams vast as their barley and wheat fields.

Ukrainians show, by their love for freedom,

they are Filipinos, too, their rights and reasons

to be free seven thousand as our islands.

They are our countrymen. Across our archipelago

bordered by disputed waters, we are also Ukrainians.    

Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, The Philippines. His works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Dwarf Stars and Best of the Net Awards. His poetry and fiction have appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies, including The New Verse News, The Cape Rock, Muddy River Poetry Review, Chiron Review, Invisible City, The Lyric, The McNeese Review, and The Anglican Theological Review. His poetry collections include Songs from My Mind’s Tree and Multiverse (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York), 50 Acrostic Poems, (Cyberwit, India), In the Donald’s Time (Poetic Justice Books and Art, Florida), and Pan’s Saxophone (Weasel Press, Texas). He is a nature lover, with three companion dogs—Yves, Donna and their lovechild Daisy.

DRESSING UP THE TRADITION

by Margaret Rozga

It’s still raw there, there at the lunch counters
of our minds, our souls. Closing Woolworth’s
could not erase it, not given its firmly-fixed seat,
nor could putting sheets back on beds,
snarling dogs back in kennels.  Patronizing
faces in high places, crosses still
burn, codes still smolder, singe
those too young to know what a noose is.
Suit and tie it, it’s still a night rider.


Margaret Rozga has published three books: Two Hundred Nights and One Day, Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad, and her latest   Justice   Freedom   Herbs.

THE STRANGENESS OF PARTS WE DID NOT SEE

by Tricia Knoll

What did we not see when
he bought a simple rope,
at very large box store
   testing hemp for stretch, for breaking point?

and when he took it home and wound it
   around the brass bedpost, then around the newel
   on his stairway and leaned
   back as if water skiing on carpet

or when he showed it to his neighbor
   bragging about what a good rope
   it would be for all kinds of purposes
   at a fair price

and when he scolded the dog for chewing
  the end of it before he wrapped
  that end in duct tape to preserve integrity

then when he climbed the stairs
  to the dusty attic and shook his
  head at the wicker bird cage and
  the gray luggage his mother carried
  for thirty years,  filled with yellow
  linens and birth certificates

and he pushed that all aside,
  and took out the maple stool
  his sister had used for milking
  or said she once used for milking
  he wasn’t sure

and then he hung the noose
   from the debt ceiling, bragging to the dog
   that he could hang him too
   if the mutt didn’t stop nipping heels
   and scratching at the door

and how was it that the first responders
   arrived seconds before he kicked
   that stool out from below his noose?


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet.