A NIGHTMARE OF COLOR

by Dick Altman

 

 

As reports come out across the country of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining Native Americans, a couple dozen New Mexico lawmakers are pushing a bill that would allow tribal citizens to update their state-issued IDs to reflect their enrollment status. House Bill 20 would give people enrolled in a federally recognized tribe the option to request a “distinguishing mark” identifying them as Native American on their driver’s license or other identification cards. A similar law passed in Arizona last year went into effect in January. On a sample license posted online by that state’s Motor Vehicle Division, “Native American” is written on the bottom left side of the card. —New Mexico In Depth, February 12, 2026

Northern New Mexico

In my mind

it begins,

a Pow Wow

of dance,

chant,

drum,

lofting

my Anglo dreams

to heights

of ritual

more ancient

than Columbus.

Despite the festive air,

masked figures,

I don’t

recognize as Native,

badged and holstered,

lurk in the shadows,

beyond

the drum circle—

waiting.

*

I try to sense,

living as I do,

in Indian Country,

what you,

a Native American,

feel like

awakening now

to a face

in the mirror,

that greets

morning’s light,

not with a smile,

but fear

your complexion,

perhaps only a shade

darker than mine,

might find you

in ICE’s

angry grasp,

two steps away

from expulsion.

*

Identity docs,

once sacred sources

of pride,

and connection,

sat vaulted

in your tribal home,

rarely,

if ever,

in need

of exposure,

to the world

outside.

Now,

I’m told,

you dare not leave

the reservation,

without

your paper shields

of origin.

*

Your biggest fear—

how could I not feel

the same—

likely separation

from your children,

an old fear,

dating back

to early last

century,

when federal agents,

as if yesterday,

drag off

Native offspring

to attend

schools,

to acquire

more “whiteness”.

A curriculum

leading often

to forced labor

and early death,

as history’s

numerous

graves attest.

*

I hesitate,

these days,

to stroll

the town square,

birthed

and sustained

by Puebloans

like  yourself,

long before

the arrival

of Europeans.

I reel,

with broken heart,

as ICE grabs you

off the street,

to challenge

your sovereign right,

stretching back

a thousand years,

to call America

home.

 

 

Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, and others here and abroad.  His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, published by the New Mexico Museum Press.  Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored over 290 poems, published on four continents.

ELEVEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN INAUGURATION

by Roberto Christiano

"I am out with lanters (sic) looking for myself."    

—Emily Dickinson

 

I am awake. I am a foreigner. Illegal. I am my 
parents. I know that I am not illegal. I feel that I 
am. I am scared.

My father was illegal. If you were stuck in 
poverty with Hitler’s trains running through you 
and countries crumbling before you, you’d be 
illegal too.

Musk gives the Hitler salute. Or is it the Roman 
salute? You know, the one you do to Mussolini.

My mother’s row house in the Italian section of 
D.C. was searched by the FBI for possible 
connections to Mussolini. Every Italian house 
was.

Male and female. Since when was that an easy 
divide?

Melania hides her face under a boater hat just as 
America hides her soul under a bushel.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

It snowed here. I can’t shovel. Uncontrolled high 
blood pressure. A man and his brother shoveled 
for me. Carlos and Zé. They won’t be here 
tomorrow.

I worked at the Library of Congress for twenty 
years. Our guards are the same as the Capitol 

guards. On January 6^th our guard was killed.
There are no degrees of separation. Separation is 
an illusion.

I am scared. I feel that I am. I know that I am not 
illegal. I am my parents. Illegal. I am a foreigner. 

I am awake.

Author’s note: Father married Mother and became a U.S. citizen. Mother was already a citizen.

Roberto Christiano won the 2010 Fiction Prize from Northern Virginia Review. He received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poem, Why I Sang at Dinner, in Prairie Schooner. His poetry is anthologized in The Gávea–Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry (Brown University). His full legnth collection, Port of Leaving, is published by Finishing Line Press. Other poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Rattle, The Washington Post, Writer.org, and The Sow's Ear.

SHE SAYS IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE

by Margaret Rozga

She was once her daughter’s age and that inscrutable. I was

once her age but already a widow. In Kyiv mothers

are brought near to tears, but who can cry, who can

anticipate having a daughter the age she now is?

Who has any room in her thoughts for anything more

than the backpack, the train station, the fear

of being separated, the maybe at the other side

of the border?

So fear takes a hiding place deep

in the chest but not as deep as the dream of a calm

and secure old age. Or deeper.

 

Here the three-year-old cries for a biscuit, begs

her to play. She sends the older brother to play

with the younger. Her daughter, my granddaughter

stays in the kitchen to listen

for the sound of dreams rising above worries

about prices. There is no war here,

no fear of bombs hitting this neighborhood. The war is

not that close to us. Not yet. The war weighs

on her mind even as she serves us fried fish and denies

biscuits. She worries about money in her non-war.

She cannot imagine. She can imagine.

This is how ghosts are born.

 

The succulent fish warms our bellies, relaxes

our conversation, shrinks the ghosts, makes room

for imagining a future for her family, my family,

hope for the Kyiv mother. Mothers.

Hope is what I, you, she

cling to when good is being bombed.

 

 

Margaret Rozga’s fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021). As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, she co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). Twitter: WIPoet @RozgaMargaret

D IS FOR DELTA

by Mary K O'Melveny

In math, Delta means change.

An isosceles triangle points the way

to changes in quantity:

  more sick

  more hospital beds

  more ventilators

  more dead

  more masks

  more six foot limits:

    apart from each other

    down in the ground.

 

Changes as in differences in.

  As in:

    yesterday there was reason to hope

    last week we went to a concert

    the airport was full of tourists

  As in:

    the rate of change is significant:

    red lines rise on graphs

    there are no lines of people seeking vaccines

    there are now some lines but not enough.

Changes as in variables.

  As in:

    yesterday I met you at a party

    today I am at the doctor’s office

    tomorrow my family will hold a zoom remembrance.

In science, Delta means a sometimes triangular mass of sediment.     

  As in:

     silt and sand lodged in a river’s mouth

     spit into the sea  or a lake  or a plain

        as in Mississippi    or Okavango   or Kalahari

     tides and waves create sandbars and dendritic silt

        as in the Nile   or the Ganges

     estuaries of brackish water form at the confluence of sea and river

        as in China’s Yellow River.

   Some Deltas become abandoned  

the rivers leave   discard their channels   dry up

   that too denotes movement   change. 

  That change is called avulsion:

    As in:

      the sudden separation of mass from one place to another

      the sudden separation of reason from the brain

      the sudden movement from reality to fantasy.

 

Delta can be a girl’s name:

   books of baby names call it appealing   chic  unique

       fit for a child of grace and distinction.

 This too will change. 

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

PANGOLIN STEW

by Fran Schumer

White-bellied pangolin photo by Darren Pietersen.

My son sends a picture of a pangolin;
my husband jokes that lunch is bat soup
and pangolin stew.
My mother calls me, angry at my father
for sleeping all the time,
and leaving her to die alone.


Fran Schumer is the author of Powerplay (Simon and Schuster; NYT bestseller) and Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). Her work has appeared in various sections of The New York Times including Op Ed, Book Review and Sunday Magazine; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She is the winner of a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.

SENT HOME TO DIE: US IMMIGRATION POLICY IN 2018

by Barbara J. Clark

As a growing number of families are separated as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to control illegal immigration, some parents are being deported before recovering their children.. —Miriam Jordan, The New York Times, June 17, 2018. Photo credit Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times.

Someone has killed my husband and is trying to kill me and my children.

I run away from the killer and towards your home for many days and nights,

Because

I want to live and I want my children to live.

I know your home is a safe haven for us.

Exhausted and hungry we finally make it to your doorstep.

And knock on your door,

But you don’t answer.

We camp out on your front porch for many days and nights.

We knock on your door,

Every day.

But you don’t answer.

We are out of food and water and my baby is running a fever.

In desperation,

I enter your home through an open window.

I find you and tell you I have entered,

Whereupon

You tell me I am a criminal

Because

I entered your home through a window and not the door.

I try to tell you why,

But you won’t listen or don't understand my language.

Instead,

You put me in jail,

You kidnap my children,

You tell me I am a bad mother,

And that I should never have come,

That I should never have run from this killer.

The next day,

You stop kidnapping the children of those coming through the window.

Excitedly,

I ask you, "where are my children and when can I see them?"

You tell me you don’t know or care where they are.

That I should never have run from this killer.

And that I should never have come.

You tell me I am a bad mother,

And have lost my children.

You send me home

TO DIE.

Barbara J. Clark is a registered patent attorney with 24 years of experience drafting and prosecuting patent applications before the USPTO. She currently runs her own patent law firm in Ames, Iowa. She also enjoys writing picture books, social commentary and humorous memoirs. Last week, Ms. Clark, together with over 5000 other attorneys nationwide, signed up to volunteer through Lawyers For Good Government to help provide pro bono legal services to those seeking asylum. She will be training and working remotely on various activities, including immigration parole bond hearings and legal research and writing. She also signed up with the Dilley Project and will be going to Dilley, Texas in August, with an interpreter, to help prepare mothers (whose children are with them) for their “credible fear” interviews.

CRUELTY HAS A HUMAN HEART

by George Salamon 

Border Disorder by Jen Sorensen, TheNib, June 20, 2018

William Blake illuminated poem.

God has vanished and
Man still corrupts,
Building monuments to greed.
As he prospers, things
Die without a sigh.
Children cry, their tears
Bear witness that something
Has died without a cry.
What Phoenix can rise
Out of cold ashes
From soil planted with hate?







George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO.

IN FIFTH GRADE HOME EC

by Megan Merchant

"The Art of the Hostage Negotiation" by Pia Guerra, TheNib

“Look what you made me do has emerged as the dominant ethos of the current White House.” —Jessica Winter, “The Language of the Trump Administration is the Language of Domestic Violence,” The New Yorker, June 11, 2018


I was taught how to microwave an egg, to transform
fabric into a skirt that fell well below my knees, but also

how to mend a tear, a fractured wing, a black eye. I pricked
my finger with scissors when it came time to cut out ads from

glossy magazines & construct the female body as nest. They
said to fill it with prayer, which hums the same as obedience.

Mine held a mixing bowl, silk scarf, pearls. I learned that
the joke about broken bones ends with—next time that bitch

better listen. I learned that some laughter requires permission,
but also how to pad & hide the red they kept calling fault,

while the boys next door sawed wood into loud splits just
so they could pound them back together, and when the nail

bent from too much force, they took turns saying look what

you made me do.

Megan Merchant is an Editor at Comstock Review. Her most recent book Grief Flowers (Glass Lyre Press) will be coming into the world this summer.

NOT MY SON

by Anna M. Evans

McAllen, Texas, June 2018

Last night a woman crossed the Southern border—
heat haze and scrub, to armed men with blank faces
and rumors of a presidential order.

She had a baby with her who adored her
and sang him lullabies of safer spaces
last night. This woman crossed the Southern border

leaving her town of ruin and disorder
because she trusted others knew what grace is,
and hadn't heard the presidential order.

She didn't fear the men who came toward her,
explaining she would be one of their cases
last night. This woman crossed the Southern border

and begged asylum. First, the men ignored her,
then warned the women to stay in their places
while they enforced the presidential order.

No mi hijo! the refugee implored, her
stricken mind confused by legal phrases.
Last night a mother crossed our Southern border.
We took her son by presidential order.

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her new collection Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection Sisters & Courtesans is available from White Violet Press.

SERAFINA'S CHOICE

by Jennifer Lagier

Just released by border patrol @CBP showing the McAllen, Texas detention facility that we were allowed to tour today.  For now, we can only rely on what they give us. They will not allow us inside to film on our own. Why? “Privacy”; they don’t want faces shown. —@DavidBegnaud

"I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for His purposes." – Jeff Sessions


Vindictive politicians cloak cruelty
with misinterpreted bible quotes.
Modern-day storm troopers
rip children as young
as breast-feeding infants
away from their desperate mothers.

Private contractors reap the rewards
of warehousing innocent captives.
Predator-in-Chief and his craven enablers
use families as bargaining chips
in a cynical, racist game
of immigration bill chicken.

Jennifer Lagier has published fourteen books, co-edits the Homestead Review, helps coordinate Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium readings. Newest books: Scene of the Crime (Evening Street Press), Harbingers (Blue Light Press), Camille Abroad (FutureCycle Press), Like a B Movie (FutureCycle Press). Forthcoming: Camille Mobilizes (FutureCycle Press).

THE KNITTER OF GENTLE DARKNESS

by Sean Lause

Self Portrait Along the Boarder Line Between Mexico and the United States, 1932, by Frida Kahlo

A Mexican girl sits knitting
as the night spreads out in dreams,
and old women dream of Autumn winds.

She knits time to space,
warmth to cold, love to
alone, strength to innocence.

She knits moons to their orbits,
needles clicking with the certainty of stars,
webbing the known and unknown.

She knits sweet shadows
that breathe a calm to longing,
and drink the emerald waning of the moon.

Her darkness rounds the world with sleep,
past crouching walls of fearful lands,
with the graceful wave of parting lovers.

Sean Lause is a professor of English at Rhodes State College in Lima, Ohio, United States.  His poems have appeared in The Minnesota Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Alaska Quarterly, Atlanta Review, The Pedestal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, European Judaism, Illuminations, Sanskrit and Poetry International.  His first book of poems Bestiary of Souls was published in 2013 by FutureCycle Press.