AMERICA BREAKS

a modified abecedarian by Susan Vespoli

"Javiar" 8 yrs old from Honduras. Detained since Feb. Still in custody in a Texas Detention center. Drawing by Billy Burgos on Facebook, July 11, 2018.

America                                               

breaks

babies from                                         

crying mothers we

call criminals,                                      

drags them

down to                                               

encampments for

early agers:                                          

frightened,

forsaken, sobbing behind                    

gates.

Guards, ordered not to                        

hug them,

hold them till their turn                       

in immigration court. Pleas of

“I want to go home” entered to          

judges. Justice?

Juveniles,                                            

kindergartners, toddlers

kind of                                                 

like your kid and mine who we

love, kiss,                                            

nestle, protect from

nightmares of                                      

ogres who steal

offspring from                                     

parents who tried to become

part of a nation that                             

quietly se-

questers children,                                

rounds them up

right outside our doors as we             

sip our coffee, read

stories to our own. Let’s                     

take a look at ourselves and

try to                                                   

understand our part in this:

“us” in the U.S.                                   

vexed and perplexed that a

village of children                               

were locked up. Let us unite into a

wall of votes to                                   

X out the reign of this

x-reality star who                                

yammers piss, twitters

yuk. Let us join together to                 

zip him up.

Susan Vespoli lives in Arizona, has an MFA from Antioch University, and has published poetry and prose in a number of online and print journals.

THE BORDER FAR AWAY

by Jennifer Davis Michael





My son is white like me, the border far away.
According to his papers and my scar
where forceps dragged him earthward, he is mine.
We don’t discuss what’s happening down there
—I mean, down at the border. He’s just six.
He’s learning how to swim. A patient guard
shapes his flailing dog-paddle to a stroke
that might cross rivers. She lightly pins his feet
to bend his body to a diving arc.

“Far away from home, it looks like darkness”:
his random comment on the vegetation
we speed past on the way back from the pool.
He sleeps that night, surfacing only once
from nightmares of the house crumbling around us.
I guard the borders of his innocence,
my trigger-finger on the remote control.

Jennifer Davis Michael is Professor and Chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Her poems have appeared previously in TheNewVerse.News and also in Mezzo Cammin, Literary Mama, Cumberland River Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among others. 

CAGED

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Empty holding cells are seen in the East Block for condemned prisoners during a tour of California's Death Row at San Quentin State Prison. Credit: Stephen Lam/Reuters via The Boston Globe.

When we visit San Quentin's death row
We sit with a prisoner
On plastic chairs
Inside a small cage,
Conversing and eating greasy snacks
For a couple of hours.
It's a tight space for three adults
And it doesn't take long
For claustrophobia to creep in.
But that same area
Would be ample
For a single small child.
You could put a nice ball in there,
Maybe a stuffed animal.
The children who aren't walking yet
Could crawl around on the floor
And pull themselves up
On the bars.
The walkers would be safe
From running too far
And into harm's way.
The climate inside is controlled
So the children would be warm in winter
Cool in summer.
The guards would come by regularly
And slide food through the slot
In the door
So the kids wouldn't go hungry.
And when they crave social interactions
They could call to each other
In their cute little voices
Through the bars up and down the line.
Initially, some might miss their parents
And cry themselves to sleep,
But children, as we know,
Are supremely adaptable
And after a while would surely become used
To their new surroundings,
Might begin to think of their cages
As a kind of home,
Might before long
Forget their law-breaking, border-crashing parents,
Might even bond with the uniformed upholders
Of American values
Who rescued them
From lives of international crime.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has been published in many print and online journals including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesday, Watershed Review. He has written several books of poems, including When Compasses Grow Old, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World, and Cancer Cantata. He was the producer of the Courage to Resist Audio Project and editor of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War based on his Audio Project interviews. In addition, he co-produced two documentary films, Outside In and Por Que Venimos. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

CROSSING THE LINE

by Donna Katzin

She only knows one number by heart—
ten numerals imprinted in her brain—
all that remains of family
for a six-year old girl. 

Ten numerals imprinted in her brain,
she cries for help to call her aunt.         
For a six-year old girl,       
an angry sea of grey men rises.

She cries for help to call her aunt
as strangers swirl around her. 
An angry sea of grey men rises, 
washes her from her mother.

As strangers swirl around her,
she is swept up in a wave that 
washes her from her mother
caged behind a chain-link fence.

She is swept up in a wave that
she cannot comprehend,
caged behind a chain link fence,
charged with no crime.

She cannot comprehend
this place without a name—
charged with no crime,
hums herself a lullaby.

In this place without a name
she only knows one number by heart,
hums herself a lullaby—
all that remains of family.

Donna Katzin is Executive Director of Shared Interest, social investment fund that promotes equitable development in Southern Africa.  She also coordinates Tipitapa Partners, which works with communities of organized women in Nicaragua. She is the author of With These Hands, a collection of her poems and photographs that focuses on South Africans on the front lines of their country’s struggle for economic and racial justice.

DISASTER TENTS

by Tricia Knoll

Getty Images via Daily Kos, June 26, 2018

Beige vinyl heaves in the wind
like a lung. Crackles. I know.
The whine of the air-conditioner
insists that you cluster on low-slung cots
to speak directly into each other’s ears
or not talk at all. Intermittent cold blasts
interrupts every dream. Forget privacy.
Forget home and bedtime stories.
Store what you have under your cot.
They pitch these tents under all-bright
overhead lights. You will not sleep well
in this compound of generators, toilet
and bath modules, chain link and guards.
You will hear others' nightmares.
Your feet will scuffle on vinyl ground.
Hold your children. Let them not be stolen.
You may despair. The tent compresses you,
an I cannot breathe of internment.

Tricia Knoll lived in one of the FEMA disaster tents going up to house immigration refugees. She was a responder to Hurricane Katrina. She understands the differences between her experiencce and those of todays' traumatized families. She knew exactly when she would go to her real home, certainty. She asked to be in this tent, free choice. She was not afraid, privileged.  She cannot forget what it felt like to live inside one of these disaster tents.

INTOLERANCE DEGREE ZERO: A LETTER FROM HOMELAND SECURITY, THE US ATTORNEY GENERAL, AND THE POTUS

by Roxanne Lynn Doty

As the White House faces court orders to reunite families separated at the border, immigrant children as young as three years old are being ordered into court for their own deportation proceedings, according to attorneys in Texas, California and Washington, D.C. —The Texas Tribune, June 27, 2018

Dear Migrants and Asylum Seekers,

     We are implementing policies to keep our homeland
safe from your scattered bones and disobedient
dreams that traverse la linea between our air and yours.
We have executive orders, vacant Walmarts
and Bible verses on our side.  In the name of sovereignty,
we will send vultures to swoop heavy over the hearts
of your children, seal loopholes in arid scratches of earth
with blood from blisters on your feet. We will erase
your name and bury your destiny in an open grave
on the migrant trail as we watch the sky rain dust
from skeletons of all the crossers we have funneled
into the killing fields of the Sonoran, Mohave
and Chihuahuan Deserts. And if you emerge
from these wastelands, we will warehouse your sons
and daughters behind the stripes of our flag,
as sludge spills from the sewers of our mouths.
God bless America, we are not a sanctuary,
we do not do body counts, and we do not keep track
of where we send your babies.

Roxanne Lynn Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, TheNewVerse.News, Ocotillo Review, and are forthcoming in Saranac Review, Gateway Review, and Reunion—The Dallas Review. Two of her short stories were finalists in the 2012 and 2014 New Letters Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize for Fiction, and the editor of Lascaux Review nominated one of her stories for the 2015 Million Writers Award.

KOKO AND THE BEAST

by Neil Creighton

This week, two stories.
One beautiful, sad, heart-rending.
The other?
Make up your own mind.

In one story an inflated emptiness
struts and preens in hollow vanity,
boasting of wealth and power
as his mirror audience
claps and cheers and chants

whilst the world fills with tears
from children of the poor,
hiding under space blankets,
their crying for their mothers

rising high above the clamour,
the lies and self-justifications,
the heartless mis-use of law and Bible,
the faux “I’m a mother and a catholic” outrage.

In the other story Koko,
the western lowland gorilla,
dies peacefully,
aged forty six.

Intelligent Koko,
who could sign 1000 words
and understand 2000.

Gentle Koko,
who, tired and near the end,
signed to her friend
“I’m getting old”.

Loving Koko,
who, though childless,
raised two kittens
and thought of them as hers.

Mourned Koko,
missed by Ndume,
who, arranging blankets around her body,
signed  “I know” and “Cry”.

Koko,
let me also mourn for you.
Let me praise you too.
Strange consolation
to know of life such as yours,
intelligent, simple and pure,
utterly without vanity,
a light in the darkness
of all the coiffed, self-serving horror
now strutting the stage of the world
and beating at the hollow chest
of its own vast emptiness.

Neil Creighton is an Australian poet whose work as a teacher of English and Drama has brought him into close contact with thousands of young lives, most happy and triumphant but too many tragically filled with neglect. It also made him intensely aware of how opportunity is so unequally proportioned and his work reflects strong interest in social justice and the tragedies involved in colonisation. His poetry has appeared in various places, both online and in hard-copy. He is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual.