BORN AND BREAD

by Adele Evershed

A center-left Welsh nationalist candidate defeated the governing Labour Party and Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform U.K. in a Welsh Parliament special election on Thursday that has been closely watched as a potential bellwether of major upheaval in wider elections next year. Plaid Cymru, a party that supports Welsh independence from Britain, had been vying with Reform U.K…. in Caerphilly—for decades a Labour Party stronghold—amid poor approval ratings for both Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government and its main opposition, the center-right Conservatives. —The New York Times, October 24, 2025

Welsh is lilting all over the airwaves, with no definite article and plenty of soft mutations. Plaid Cymru won in Caerphilly against the odds, beating that odious little Reform Party—fashioned in the image of MAGAdom, with red hats, pitchforks, and teal (I ask you, teal?) rosettes.

Now, in Wales, we love a bit of scarlet. Jemima Nicholas beat the French back in the day with a pitchfork and a tall black hat, so we don’t mind a prop or two. And although we wouldn’t know teal from turquoise, we’re not colour-biased.

And there you have it—the nub of the thing. I listened to a woman describe herself as born and bred in the cradle of Labour’s heartland—think Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan—but now, because of Reform’s rhetoric, she fears for her sons in the town she grew up in, because her children are biracial.

We all know Farage might talk about the cost of living—how he’ll bring down the price of eggs—but all he cares about is buttering our daily bread with fear. This time he was told to go back to where he came from (and I’m not talking Clacton), but next year he’ll slide out of his gutter again, forked tongue slick with Eton-mess promises. And I’m not sure a Welsh hat will be enough.

full English breakfast—
I ask to swap the beans
for laverbread

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Modern Haiku, Flashflood, Free Flash Fiction, Atrium and Literary Mama. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Her third collection, In the Belly of the Wail, is forthcoming with Querencia Press. She has published two novellas-in flash, Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and has a third called, A History of Hand Thrown Walls, (Unsolicited Press). Her short story collection, Suffer/Rage, was recently released by Dark Myth Publications.

POLITICS AND PICASSO

by Ed Werstein

A Facebook friend posts: Any blue
will do! and I comment: What if
Picasso had had that attitude?
We may be entering another of our
periodic blue periods. I want to scream
across the internet, No! Not any blue will do!
According to the founders, we are
the architects, the artists, of our own
future. (If we have one).
We mustn’t just dip blindly at the blue
palette we’re offered to cover the orange
we’ve been putting up with lately.

Some blues bend toward green, while
others appear blue, but quickly turn
yellow when applied to the canvas.

Artists! Let’s amaze our many critics around the world.
Let’s choose a new revolutionary blue
(or at least a reformist one), a blue
we haven’t dabbled in in decades.

Ed Werstein is a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In 2018 he received the Lorine Niedecker Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. His latesT chapbook is Benediction & Baseball.

PARTIAL CLEARING

by Judith Terzi

Oscar Alfaro embraces his wife Enriquta Juarez and his daughter Gelin Alfaro after Obama’s televised immigration speech. Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP via The Guardian

after President Obama's speech of 11/20/14

and Woody Guthrie's "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos"

Jesús and María,
step out of the shadows,
look up at the mountain,
the cedar, the pine.
Refresh in the streams
that line your palm,
your brow. Don't stoop
in the furrows, the rows.
Rise up in the orchards,
the vineyards, the fields.
The fruit, it is sweet,
the lettuce not rotting.
Crawl out of the caverns
that nurture tristeza,
despair. The skies
are clearing, relinquish
your fear at least for now.
Gather carnations
from earth that you've
plowed, from gardens
in cities you've loved
then left. The laughter
of children, it scatters
like petals, like leaves.
Oh Jesús y María,
Rosalita and Juan,
you are not deportees.


Judith Terzi is the author of Sharing Tabouli and Ghazal for a Chambermaid (Finishing Line). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BorderSenses, The Raintown Review, Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s & 70s (She Writes), TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque), and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Web. 

COST ANALYSIS

by Ed Bennett

When the Senate passed an expensive border-security measure two weeks ago, the fate of immigration reform in that chamber was all but sealed. The amendment made the overhaul easier to swallow for some Senate Republicans, paving the way for its passage last week. But the added measures also mean the government won't be saving as much money as first thought, according to a new Congressional Budget Office estimate. --Niraj Chokshi, National Journal, July 3, 2013

It’s all over, as they say,
except for the shouting.

Sixty votes obtained
on the contrails of the last election, the promise of presidents to come;

but shout they will
with every word and sentiment
aimed at brown skins and accents, that brave new world of inclusion.

Lets do the math:
six billion to open the door,
forty five thousand per head
to keep out the rest,
twelve million votes, give or take,
new to this canvas of electoral politics.

If you cannot stop the rush of history
or the perfidy of the Upper House,
do the math,
run the numbers,
call the count until the figures
roll up against a frail economy
to ask the question:
“Can we afford?”
“Dare we spend?”

Then we will digitize them,
distill their humanity into dollars and cents,
(they will be easier to ignore that way)
and our knock about faith
will be justified with numbers
as smooth as the cash count
at a teller’s window,

as empty as a hypocrite heaven
on an unexpected judgement day.


Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.