BLACK ICE

by Lavinia Kumar

In Edison [NJ], thousands of immigrant workers toil in hundreds of warehouses, sorting millions of boxes arriving from nearby ports before being sent by trucks across the United States. But this summer has delivered something else. Immigration raids a few weeks apart at two warehouses have unsettled the daily rhythms of this busy corridor, where Amazon, FedEx and UPS have a large presence. The second raid happened Wednesday, [August 20] and resulted in the arrests of 29 workers, among the largest sweeps in the region since President Trump took office. Warehouses have been left short-staffed and behind schedule as detained workers were sent to immigration jails and others stopped showing up. —The New York Times, August 22, 2025

Oh, those winter mornings,

that fresh brisk air,

you go for a walk, spot a deer,

forget to look at the path,

and down you go—black ice.

Yes, black ice, its face invisible,

not like real ice, like white ice, 

in sweet slushies soothing a hot day,

or like crackling ice dropped

into an evening cocktail.

Yes, black ice, its every feature

disguised so you cannot not see danger.

 

Like tinted car windows to hide

the dark man in handcuffs taken by

Black ICE, this working man

taken from his family, from his work.

Black ICE seizing this man,

counting on a bonus award,

adding to the number 

for the White House 

Black ICE tally.

 

Black ICE in black masks,

Black ICE with tinted windows

Black ICE in unmarked vans

Black ICE with no warrants

Black ICE taking husbands,

mothers, fiancés, wives,

Black ICE taking dark men

who pay taxes, who love,

who have children

to Black ICE cages,

to who knows where

to crowded Black ICE jails.

 

And yes that young deer you saw

before you slipped on black ice

danced on its ballet hoofs

into bushes, into hiding,

hiding from you,

like a neighbor, like a friend,

hiding from Black ICE.

See Lavinia Kumar’s three food stories in Issue Five of Ruby Literary Press, The Monsoon Rain winning a 2024 Pushcart nomination.

WHILE THE ELK WERE MOVING

by Nick Allison

To my right,
Longs Peak rises jagged through pine.
To my left,
a wide meadow scattered with boulders—
bones from the old world.
Below, a stream elegies the slope,
snowmelt running fast over stone
worn smooth by thaw and thunder.
This morning, an elk herd passed through—
massive, deliberate,
moving with the grace of dancers,
as if gravity had chosen to spare them.
Not silence,
but the absence of familiar noise.
No voices. No engines.
No signal or screen.
Just the wind-clipped scratch of pen on paper,
and a stillness with weight—
the kind that settles like mist on skin,
that hushes thought.
In the fragile solitude of mountains,
one can almost forget how the edges burn.
Tomorrow I’ll hike back down, return—
to towers, to headlines,
to see what’s become of things—
to see if the center held,
or if, while the elk were moving,
the scaffolding finally collapsed.
He deployed Marines to American streets—
maybe that was the tilt.
Maybe not.
Days fold behind each other
like stage sets in the dark.
Blanket pardons.
Raids without warrants.
Agents at schools,
asking children for names.
Reporters cuffed.
A free press recast as enemy of the people.
The Justice Department, a private shield.
Federal hands bending toward one voice—
like sunflowers to heat.
He speaks of a third term
the way we speak of death:
a joke, until it isn’t.
Warnings come,
dressed in neutral tones:
constitutional crisis,
erosion of norms,
precedent dissolved.
But warnings read like museum plaques
once fire has claimed the foundation.
At some point, it stops being if—
and the only question left
is whether we’re still watching,
or simply learning to live inside the collapse.

Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, college dropout, and writer based in Austin, Texas. His poems and essays have appeared in The Shore, Eunoia Review, HuffPost, The Chaos Section, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. He recently curated and edited the free-to-read poetry anthology Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age. “While the Elk Were Moving” is adapted from the introduction to that collection. More of his work can be found at TheTruthAboutTigers.com and @nickallison80.bsky.social.