HAZED AND DIFFUSED

by Rémy Dambron

As the sound of our neighbor’s lawn 

mower pierces the silence of the hellish 
landscape forming just past our bedroom 
window my wife and I exchange mirroring 
glances of hostile befuddlement 
maddened by this man’s unfathomable 
indifference to the bewilderment of 
smoke flowing freely into his eyes 
and down deep into his lungs despite 
wearing a confident smile as he strolls 
absentmindedly through his yard 
pushing that obnoxious gas powered 
machine to shorten the small strip of 
parched grass that faces our still baffled 
faces now visibly posing the inevitable question 
what in the actual fuck is happening? 
We continue to watch in shock as I frantically 
google the news desperate to confirm that 
yes in fact there are wildfires blazing at 
our city’s doorstep in addition to riots and 
shootings and protests and looting and tagging 
and militias immersed in science refuting and 
that this conundrum of a man tending to his plot 
amidst the infiltrating remains floating in from 
burning homes incinerated cars perished 
businesses lost livelihoods vanishing forests 
and melted memories isn’t just symptomatic 
of some feverish dream or drug-induced vision 
or mystical illusion or some grave delusion but 
that our mutual astonishment is actual credible 
physical proof of the resilience of our little remaining 
sanity.

Rémy Dambron is an activist, environmentalist, and author based out of Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in What Rough Beast, Writer's Resist, Poets Reading the News, and TheNewVerse.News, focusing largely on denouncing political corruption and advocating for social justice. Without the love and support of his wife Susan, he would not be the writer he is today.  

SUBURBAN SMOKE

by Alejandro Escudé

Sometimes I visit the suburb of LA
I grew up in. There was a park
a block away from the house we rented.
I played little league baseball there.
It was a park, like a park with swings
and a pool. Now it’s a homeless encampment
and the little leagues are gone.
Maybe baseball is gone too—I can’t tell.
I mean I watch it. I root for the Mets
because that’s the team I was on
when I was a scrawny lefty outfielder
because there was no way
the coach was playing me on first base
or shortstop. I was lucky if I got to bat.
The coach was a winner; if you’re American,
you know what I mean by that.
I was lucky if I got to bat.
I remember hearing the LA riots looming
in the east; a hornets nest of helicopters,
the smell of smoke, a cacophony of sirens.
My father talked of Reginald Denny
he said: “I just crossed that intersection.”
His face pale. “I had so many tools
in my truck too.” Maybe that’s what
a suburb is, a place where one just
barely avoids the tragedy of America.
Oh there were lawns, basketball hoops
above garage doors. On Sundays,
it was very quiet, and I don’t remember
talking about the President.
He wasn’t a big fat face in the sky.
There weren’t goose-stepping posters
lining every citizen’s mind, a fear-bomb
exploding each half hour. In every suburb,
there’s a Beirut, a Moscow, a Jerusalem,
a Kenosha, a T***p bent over in his driveway,
cutting up a freshly caught rattlesnake.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

C0LDER (S0NNET 0) AND C0LDER, BERKELEY

by Ron Riekki

“Arrests made as hundreds protest Ann Coulter speech” 

—Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2019

Walking to the grocery store, I turn a corner to see
dozens of cops in riot gear, them loading vans
with weapons, the militarization of the police
where I see more of them in this minute—as I walk
nervously through their bulletproof everything—
than I had seen in a decade of small-town life,
but this is the time of riots and gear, of fire and fear,
and I remember walking to the same store just after
the last riot where the ground held footprints in blood
where I could see the exact path where someone had run
for their life, and my neighbor told me, "I bet today
was the hottest day it’s ever been here,” and there’s
a streetlight gone, the post yanked out of the ground.


Ron Riekki’s most recent book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

DC APRIL '68

by Sally Zakariya

Front pages of The Washington Post, April 5 (left) and April 6, 1968, during the riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. (The Washington Post)

I was there when the city burned
smug-safe in white girl invulnerability
watching the angry smoke rise
over 14th St., hearing the sirens blare.
Mother wanted me to leave but
D.C. was my city too. Evenings
I’d walk home up 18th St.
with my black boyfriend
in time to meet the curfew
the acrid smell of tear gas
clutching at our throats.
And then we’d stop and kiss
good-night as soldiers watched.
It felt like a small victory
proof that it would all come right
but in my heart I knew
some dark veil had been lifted
some page turned and we
could never close our eyes
again to the cold facts
of what my people
had done to his.

Sally Zakariya’s Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry has appeared in some 70 print and online journals. She is the author, most recently, of When You Escape (Five Oaks Press, 2016), as well as Insectomania (2013) and Arithmetic and other verses (2011), and the editor of Joys of the Table (2015). Her chapbook Personal Astronomy is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

MY COLOR

by Eaton Jackson

“Implicit bias is the mind’s way of making uncontrolled and automatic associations between two concepts very quickly. In many forms, implicit bias is a healthy human adaptation — it’s among the mental tools that help you mindlessly navigate your commute each morning. It crops up in contexts far beyond policing and race (if you make the rote assumption that fruit stands have fresher produce, that’s implicit bias). But the same process can also take the form of unconsciously associating certain identities, like African-American, with undesirable attributes, like violence.” —Emily Badger, The New York Times,  October 5, 2016. Photo: Late last month in El Cajon, Calif., demonstrators protested the fatal shooting of a black man by a police officer. Credit Gregory Bull/Associated Press via The New York Times

my color
forces you to
close your eyes in fear and squeeze the  trigger
one  two  three  four  five  six times
until my color falls to the ground  until
my color jerks spasmodically no more
one  two  three more salvos into
the inanimate object of my color to make sure
that my color is dead
explosions that
the kids playing ball in the park dismissed as firecrackers
until the shooter’s chest heaves no more with primal fear
Until the frozen aim thaws
lowers slowly its nozzle
at the ground where
the six footer
threat to your life
is now  prostrate at a skewed angled lifeless colorless
unseeing, open-eyed stare at your partners
also gun-drawn
applying CPR.
RIOTING THROUGH THE NIGHT

primordial anger as combustible as the overturned car
seething like molten asphalt       running people
running    people  running stumbling falling stumbling back up
towards a recently renovated convenience store
towards the innocent, pretty store

running   running  right  through shuttered  windows
busted open  by thrown missiles        running    running  
and  more  town-folks   and more homies  join in
ripping at the innards of the  convenience store
whose high visibility quotient      no fault of its own

but merely a child of town’s  exaggerated soaring architecture
no fault of its own,
now raped of everything inside
defiled virgin in tatters among the smoldering ruins    
and the riot runs on

the burning building  breaks into half
falling
into its own leaping inferno.

Eaton Jackson is an aspiring Jamaican writer. He has been a permanent green card resident in the United States for the past four years. Writing has been an attempt at fulfilling an artistic yearning and a source of therapy for him, when life’s aches, pains and depressions rain down.