RUNAWAY TRAIN

by Lavinia Kumar

The first parents convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison Tuesday as a Michigan judge lamented missed opportunities that could have prevented their teenage son from possessing a gun and killing four students in 2021. —AP, April 10, 2024

The judge says, 

These convictions confirm 

repeated acts, or lack of acts, 

that could have halted 

an oncoming runaway train—

the parents who’d purchased

the weapon, 

the unstable son who had killed

with the weapon,

 

the genocide in Gaza

the US and UK giving

the weapons

repeatedly,

the unstable Israel which kills

with weapons,

repeatedly,

a runaway train

that could have been halted.

 

Will anyone be convicted?

Lavinia Kumar’s latest book is Spirited American Women: Early Writers, Artists, & Activists—very short prose of near 90 amazing women writers, poets, publishers, painters, artists, abolitionists, early suffragettes, and activists.

LIFESAVER

by Mark Ward

“Former nurse Niels Högel—who has admitted to giving potentially lethal drugs to patients so he could try to resuscitate them—has been sentenced by a German court to life in prison for murdering 85 people.” —NPR, June 6, 2019. Photo: Högel in court, awaiting his verdict in Oldenburg, Germany. Credit: Hauke-Christian Dittrich/AFP/Getty Images via NPR.

Their bodies ailing,
they flail, fitting,

disrupting the night’s
boredom. I’m there,

knuckles cracked, ready.

They say to compress
to 120

BPM pop songs:
Staying Alive,

Another One Bites

The Dust. The syringe
makes them erupt,

their hearts needing me,
my steady hands.

Most of them come back.

Sometimes the nights push
the plunger down

and their bodies make
one last complaint.

I watch. Do nothing.

Mark Ward is the author of Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Cordite, Assaracus, Softblow, and many more. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. He is currently working on his first full-length collection, Nightlight.

MANAFORT DESTINY

by Edmund Conti

Of course there was heartbreak and strife

     As he travelled through valleys and peaks

But he “lived an otherwise blameless life”

     Which he managed in two or three weeks.

Edmund Conti's life is best left unexamined.

THE SENTENCING OF DR. LARRY NASSAR

by Alan Walowitz

Circuit Court Judge Rosemarie Aquilina addresses Larry Nassar, (R) a former team USA Gymnastics doctor, who pleaded guilty in November 2017 to sexual assault charges, during his sentencing hearing. (Reuters via Yahoo! Sports)

Me, I’m just one of the run-of-the-mill, everyday sinners of this world,
but how could I not shake, with some small tremor of recognition,
leavened with that familiar there-but-for-fortune feeling,
as Judge Rosemarie Aquilina dragged Larry Nassar
over the white-hot coals of his own making?
At the same time, the thrill of punishment deserved
tingled down my spine,
and I could just hear my mother saying,
I hope he’s not Jewish.
No, Mom, I'd surely reply. Nassar—gotta be Egyptian with a name like that.
True or not, she’d be quite relieved,
at the same time a hundred different kinds of moms
Italian, and Irish, and even those who've snuck in from Guadalajara
maybe with calves the size of cantaloupes
are saying and thinking exactly the same.
Meanwhile, the Rev. Franklin Graham,
Billy's son—by some accounts a good man—
has forgiven our president all his trespasses
with busty Stormy Daniels,
who's probably a very nice woman,
though my mother would hope, also, she isn’t one of us.
The younger Rev. Graham offers with great compassion,
Who am I to pass judgment on the Pres?
I've got sins of my own. 
I only wish Judge Rosemarie Aquilina would get a hold of
the good Rev. Graham and shake him for an hour or two—
and while she’s at it, anyone he’s peddled such cheap forgiveness to.

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. He teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in Queens. Alan’s poetry chapbook Exactly Like Love is in its second printing available from Osedax Press.

SAMIZDAT

by Tracey Gratch

A Russian court has convicted poet and teacher Alexander Byvshev of ‘inciting enmity’ and sentenced him to 300 hours of community service, confiscated his computer and prohibited him from working as a school teacher for two years.  His ‘crime’ – the poem ‘To Ukrainian Patriots’ in which he expresses his opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and suggests Ukrainians should ensure that not one inch of Crimea is handed “to Putin’s chekists”.  —Human Rights in Ukraine (KHPG), July 14, 2015

The storefront windows dim with filth and soot.
Cyrillic, signs hold sway and hang above
the wooden-blocks paving the streets in rot.

In nineteen-twenty-one the husband's shot –
The committee puts its strangle-hold on nearly
everything the others wrote, and thought.

Damp fire-wood and famine, typhus rages
in darkened spaces – their words, to memory,
then burned.  An apartment bare, but for the language,

whispered in the cold rail cars which pass
beneath the towers. Outside a prison's gate,
in the crowd she waits to see her son, for hours.

Here, a crimson-history is wrought:
"Can you describe this?"  She said, "I can."  She thought.


Author’s note: Alexander Byvshev’s situation is reminiscent of the plight of other Russian poets, including Anna Achmatova, (whom the poem is about) in post-revolutionary Russia, when Achmatova's work was officially stifled, though it continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work hidden passed and read in the gulags. With the conviction of Alexander Byvshev it seems that Russia is returning to the practice of censoring  and persecuting its writers for their political views. 

Tracey Gratch lives in Quincy, MA with her husband and their four children. Her poems have appeared in  publications including Mezzo Cammin,  The Literary Bohemian, The Flea, Annals of Internal Medicine, Boston Literary Magazine,  The New Verse News and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Her poem, "Strong Woman" is included in the American College of Physicians, On Being A Doctor, Volume 4.

MEN OF COLOR

by Phyllis Wax

Image source: The Sentencing Project

Prison has replaced the plantation                

Pick him up for loitering                              
Handcuff him for a driving offense              
Jail him when he can’t pay his fine              
Harass, kick ass so he knows his place        

Young men rant in solitary
Molder for penny-ante crimes        
Or felonies they didn’t commit
In private prisons
Profitable enterprises
The public chooses not to see
                                                     
The bullet has replaced the rope      

New York, Saginaw                        
North Charleston, Cleveland
Sanford, Milwaukee

Amidou Diallo, Trayvon Martin
Walter Scott, Dontre Hamilton
Tamir Rice, Milton Hall

Black bodies in their own foyers
Chalked on sidewalks
Slumped in stairwells            
Bodies sprawled in city streets

Cheap lives, death at a discount


Phyllis Wax writes on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI.  Her work has appeared in many anthologies and literary journals, both online and print, among them Out of Line, New Verse News, Verse Wisconsin, Ars Medica, Naugatuck River Review, Your Daily Poem. When she’s not writing you might find her escorting at a local abortion clinic.