DECLARATION OF A TERRORIST

by Taylor Norris

Knee on a neck, 

Match poised to strike,

With a final exhale, 

Flames did ignite. 

 

A firestorm erupted,

Fervent movement did arise, 

Suffocated by a tsunami, 

Of "All Lives Matter" cries. 

 

Abusive power wears many masks, 

Yet speaks a single tongue,

A requiem of callousness, 

Tide of lives wrung.

 

Seized, silenced, deprived of voice, 

Crushed by tempest creed, 

As the faceless gasp for breath, 

Dragged beneath waves of greed.

 

Palestinians butchered by golem rampage, 

While leaders fiddle in their gilded bubble,

Israel's broken promises rain down,

As last dregs of conscience soak into the rubble.

 

Students denouncing genocide, 

Abducted off streets like trash,

Futures and rights vanished, 

Disappeared in a Gestapo flash.

 

Ukrainians in scorched ruins stand tall, 

Courage unwavering, despite the pain,

Their sacrifice met with jealous disdain,

As an American führer bows to Putin's reign.

 

Sudanese starve on apathy alone, 

Wasting away to hollow bone, 

While the privileged eat cake, 

Glutted, glued to their phone.

 

Immigrants condemned, banished beyond aid,

Hostages snatched to a circus cage,

Mercy extinguished; identity stripped,

Erased by those with contrived rage.

 

Tiny tots seen, once heard, now lost,

Voiceless, cast out with derision,

Birthright a farce, a due process mirage,

Dispelled with coldness and precision.

 

Judges defied, jailed with contempt, 

Justice held ransom, chained to the bell, 

As cracked scales teeter on the brink, 

Ears crane for liberty's death knell.

 

If my conviction of unity, 

Is intolerable sedition, 

Call me a TERRORIST, 

I embrace the affliction.

 

Truth-teller in an age of lies, 

Empathetic when compassion dies,

Revolutionary when liberties decline,

Relentless when cruelty is the infection by design,

Outspoken when silence is the golden law,

Resilient by refusing to withdraw,

Inclusive when others build walls of divide,

Solidarity with the denigrated caste aside,

Transformative in spirit that cannot abide.

 

The most sacred amendment, first on the parchment, 

Will withstand your calculated bombardment,

If TERRORIST I must be, in your criminalized fiction, 

I'll wear your pointy yellow badge with distinction.

 

While propaganda devours, 

Truth strikes with bolt and thunder, 

Electrified, embers take flight,

Defiance echoes, never again forced under.

Taylor Norris treads the thin verse between comfortable and the disturbed that can’t be unseen. In the stone age that was pre-y2k Taylor was a film critic for a LGBTQ publication and was published in two poetry anthologies with a poem translated for a Spanish newspaper. Taylor was also produced in Best Short-Lived 2.0 in San Francisco. After a long hiatus, she is returning back to her roots.

BLOOD SIMPLE

by Julia Kantic

Hunger Strike by Glen Le Lievre

Annihilation?

The sum’s not difficult to do.

How many hostages 

Does it take to make a genocide?

How many hospitals,

houses, hearths?

Don’t tell me about 

the algebra of killing

as though it were a zero sum game.

A life is not a life

as settlers solve problems

along with soldiers

and no one asks to see

their working out—

or are shown figures by gaslight.

And if I say this?

I am villainous, nefarious, wicked,

—monstrous—for calling out

—Murder —

Terrorist is a term that has changed

to mean babies, 

and their mothers, 

and their sisters, 

and their brothers, and their fathers, and their doctors, and their nurses, and their teachers, and their others, and their shop keepers, and their road sweepers, and their anyone with a determination to exist

—Alive in Gaza —

or thinks this slaughter wrong.

Julia Kantic is a writer and editor who reads, writes and delights in words and the spaces in between. Follow her wayward ways https://linktr.ee/peculiarjulia

LETTERS TO LUIGI

by Andrew Romanelli

Luigi Mangione, suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, departs after a hearing at Blair County Courthouse on December 19 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. Mangione has received dozens of letters and emails as well as monetary support while in prison, a report by the New York Post has revealed. Photo: Gene J. Puskar-Pool/Getty Images via Newsweek, December 21,2024

are about what you’d expect Jesus to receive

if he had mail privileges 

at Mount Zion, near Holy Sepulcher or Calvary.

 

I work for a company that prints letters, 

photos, and books for inmates that people 

upload and purchase for us to send.

I fold the letters, put the photos in envelopes,

noticing the names of inmates, the patterns

of image, of word, what gets sent and said.

 

Every letter to Luigi begins with an endorsement of full support.

Some just want to connect, say where they’re from

what they do for a living. They include a phone number,

a few photos of them hiking, walking a dog at sunrise,

a post gym ab showoff shirt lift, a night out on the town.

 

Most letters contain stories about illness.

How they lost their child, father, brother, mother,

wife, sister, best friend, high school crush, how

they have lost themselves to denials

of treatment plans, medication, surgeries.

There are pictures and pictures of X-rays,

pedicle screws for spine fusion and support,

scars on backs, calves, bellies, breasts, pictures

of phantom limbs gone to the time waiting for an approval.

 

The letters often close with:

“For the first moment since my diagnosis I feel

like you understand what I’m going through.”

Or “I’d do anything to be healthy again, 

thank you for giving me hope that things will be different.”

 

These are people who:

Have stopped writing and calling their leaders.

Understand that statistics have no effect in making a point.

That murder is wrong but wonder what do you call

the death of millions in the name of profit?

 

Last week I was processing mail for Puff Daddy.

 

Now its Luigi, a man-made avatar,

expressing the ignored collective suffering of the people.

 

Jesus was a guy in jail on charges of terrorism.

 

These are days in which we are able

to reach more people than any other time before.

 

Yet look what we are doing:

To be seen.

To be heard.

To be validated.

 

We have been taught the alternatives.

Yet our fracture, 

bound by violence,

gets the attention.

 

Can you begrudge the people for cheering? 

 

 

Andrew Romanelli was born and raised in Las Vegas. His first poetry book Rotgut was published by Zeitgeist Press. You can find him @downcharleston and at andrewromanelli.com .

HAVOC

by William Aarnes

A Palestinian child stands among the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli attacks in Nuseirat refugee camp, Gaza. [Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu] —AlJazeera, December 4, 2023

                        rubble, rubble

                                    rubble, rubble, rubble

 

children exist, children exist,

cheery children exist,

chasing each other

at a wedding chosen 

as the target for the missile

that’s seconds away

 

                        rubble, rubble

                                    rubble, rubble, rubble

 

children exist, infants

napping in the daycare

in the building the terrorist

chooses to bomb

 

                        rubble, rubble

                                    rubble, rubble, rubble

 

                                          children

exist, orphaned and maimed

but maybe recovering

in a children’s ward when men

with grandchildren choose

not to worry if the hospital

might be shelled

 

                        rubble, rubble

                                    rubble, rubble, rubble

William Aarnes lives in New York. The refrain of "Havoc" might be a spell uttered by the gods  of havoc, though you might also hear an echo of "Nothing" by The Fugs.

THE TERRORIST

by George Salamon

Rahul Gandhi delivered a lecture at Cambridge University [February 28, 2023] on “Learning to Listen in the 21st Century.” Recounting how the yatra [the march he recently led through India] changed him, Gandhi said the interactions with the people who held his hand during the yatra trusting him as a brother and confided in him changed him as a politician, his perspective. As the yatra entered Kashmir, Gandhi said, "As I was walking, a guy came up and showed me a few men standing nearby. He told me they are militants. I thought I was in trouble because in that situation militants would kill me. But they did not do anything because this is the power of listening.” —Hindustan Times, March 3, 2023

Can anyone ever reach you?

Would we have to dissolve

into the white hot fire inside

of you to see you?

Would you talk with us then,

touching the rivers of fire

cooling in our own blood 

so we too become weightless

like you, no longer capable of

joy or grief, and rise for the

journey that unbinds us and

knows of no return?

Most of us remain weighed 

down, unable or unwilling to

submit to the exuberance of

terror that nothing can appease.

Terrorism is not merely an act

of terror, but also one of

nihilism

Its fire burns all—motivation,

victim and terrorist.

George Salamon recalls reading Hermann Rauschning's 1939 book TheRevolution of Nihilism meant as a warning by depicting Hitler's National Socialism as, at least in part, a "revolution of nihilism," a pact between leader and people for destruction and self-destruction. 

YELP REVIEW — MALHEUR NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

by J. Bradley

Image by Adam Rosenlund via Boise Weekly, Jan. 3, 2016.

To you, the line between your version of us
and them comes down to a quick draw,
a pithy line after the bullet finds its mark;
dehumanization is the only way
you can justify your ammosexuality.

You ignore everyone that calls you 'terrorist'.
You point out that if you were a terrorist,
you would see drones flying above you
like birds of prey. You forget how terrorism
built this country treaty by treaty
blanket by blanket, ballot by ballot,
bullet by bullet.


J. Bradley is the winner of Five [Quarterly]'s 2015 e-chapbook contest for fiction.

THE VIEW FROM SAMARIA

by Matt Quinn

On the top of the photo it says:
Would you help Jesus up?
and beneath the fallen Nazerene:
TYPE ‘YES’

and it looks like 107,000 people
have done just that,
and I think:
well, yes,

now that you know who he is,
but take away that cross
and the crown of thorns
and all you’ve got

is some middle-eastern looking guy
with a head wound –
except this one
looks rather like 

a white man
with a tan,
but let’s pretend.
He could very easily be

a terrorist
or a refugee,
or more likely
an economic migrant

faking it:
those wounds on his head
are only scratches after all

and probably self-inflicted.

And besides

he doesn't look at all
like a Christian.
Would you help him up?

Type 'yes'.

Matt Quinn lives in Brighton, England and hopes to one day have a sufficiently impressive list of poetry publications to justify a bio.

WHEN I READ ABOUT DEATH IN THE NEWS

by Tasha Graff

Social justice activist DeRay Mckesson praised Twitter on Monday after the social network suspended a conservative blogger who threatened his life —Raw Story, May 25, 2015

Since Aug. 9, 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department shot and killed Michael Brown, Mckesson and a core group of other activists have built the most formidable American protest movement of the 21st century to date. Their innovation has been to marry the strengths of social media — the swift, morally blunt consensus that can be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos — with an effort to quickly mobilize protests in each new city where a police shooting occurs. —Jay Caspian King, The NY Times Magazine, May 4, 2015

I think about my students. I’ve taught nearly 900 of them,
but when I read about death in the news I think of those lost:

to hands not old enough to vote, to hands old enough to know better,
to the lack of arms around their shoulders and the right to bear arms

automatic that did not exist when quill scratched parchment to create
a nation built on hope and blood and tears. This morning,

a tweeting troll threatened a friend’s life. This is not some ogre
from a fairy tale gone awry, stomping his foot in a cave

or under a bridge, but an open terrorist with safe, white skin.
This is not folklore, this is not a myth. This is the sad song

of America’s heart seeping the blood of black children.
Where is the pulse of justice? Where is our rallying cry?

The truths are self-evident. There is hatred in America.
But there is love, too. Oh, let there be love, too.


Tasha Graff's poetry appears in such publications as Word Riot, English Journal and From the Fishouse. She lives, writes and teaches high school English on the coast of Maine.

IF THEY SAY "JEW"

by Michael Fisher

if they say “jew,” or
if they say “muslim”

if they say “greedy,” or
if they say “dirty”

today is my birthday
I spent it watching the numbers come in from Gaza
refreshed my browser window over and over

mathematically, one number is always greater
than another

if they say “rag-head,” or
if they say “kike”

if they say “zionist,” or
if they say “jihadist”

the Gaza strip neighbors Israel and Egypt
it is home to 1.816 million or less

my own neighbor has a chocolate lab
and a gun

he hates that I can't change my oil,
build a shed, hates that I
spend my days reading books and the news

I hate that he never considered the morality of chaos theories
and loves classic rock

still, when I pull in, I look out for the lab
he waves and adjusts his baseball cap when he sees me

can it be that easy?

they say “sub-human,” “terrorist,”
“child-killer,” “fascist,” or
they say “genocide,” “genocide,” “genocide”

I shut down my computer for the night
tomorrow numbers will grow

I wish I could say I watched the fireflies
surround the bright eyes of a dog through my window


Michael Fisher is the author of Wolf Spider from Plan B Press and Libretto for the Exhausted World on Spuyten Duyvil Press.

SAND SONG OF MESOPOTAMIA

by Rob Cook

A wood thrush egg thrown out of the nest by a cowbird. (Image source: Tales From the Wild)

Today I wrote a song in which Syria moved its militia into a pregnant woman’s bed.

Today I wrote a song in which a shoe, and all the sinews enslaved to that shoe, were filled with swarms of infant IEDs.

Today I pollinated a song whose final flower with petals of butterfly warheads fled Iran.

Today I praised a song for the babies born with six mouths, six legs, six skinless stomachs, and a six-billion year half-life inside the furnace of every Iraqi sand tear.

Today, by destroying a song, I made sure there were enough beds and chairs to blunt a room’s nothingness, which means a never-ending scorpion’s thirst, its memory of the desert that doesn’t die.

Today I stole a song in which the homeless built houses and raised families and food that will continue growing inside their sunburned entrails.

Today I blamed a song in which the Midwestern snow originated from a drone’s healing circle many Pakistans away.

Today I excavated, from a plant’s groin, a song that infected the Madonna Mafia with a melodic sequence of sonar terrorism.

Today I exchanged a song for the terrorist elephants, the terrorist giraffes, the terrorist oxygen, the terrorist fern forests, the terrorist mercies of medicinal marijuana, the terrorist sunsets, the terrorist shark sleep, the terrorist carrots and celery and kale that do not leave the body, the intestinal photos of the Gaza Strip taken from the cries of a child, the war on shadows, the war on people who find enough to eat without having to plant pancreatic spores in the hells of the soil, the creek bed Lakota whose fully-subsidized drinking earns the status of enemy activity, and though I saved his name on a dollar that trusted me once, I won’t discuss the terrorist child helping a turtle find its little door in the terrorist grass.

Today I climbed to the top of a song that hid the houses inhabited by live chess pieces pillaged for money that can’t be comforted or fed or held in the hand.

Today I developed a song for the water as it died.

Today I protected a song for the water as it was ridiculed.

Today I harvested a song for the water hidden one carbon minute away in the mirages that revealed another child thriving from dehydration.

In the song I can locate the Syrian helicopter nests.

I can count all of the wind’s bodies.

I can count and remove those who’ve made it to the gas chambers of heaven.

In the song I can count the salvations taken from a child’s amputated leg and copy the Western patriotism that nourishes from far away his dirt dinners and his bomb wiring and the syringes used for drinking and for putting the rain back together.

I can abandon that song by deleting the shadows the child leaves unchecked as he crawls through the artillery-cold heroin forests of Afghanistan.

I can dismantle the song by betraying each bird when it sees the child leading his headless animals into the cruel churches of my hand.

Today I beat the last song to death with a bullet casing I stole from the rubble of all the songs that would never make anyone happy again.

Today I felt no remorse for the songs and their misplaced blessings.

Today I reported both hands for their terrorist ambitions—the one that grows its own grain and the one condemned for hiding every song inside the dust hospital where God sleeps by himself with the only feather that survived.

Today I promised I would protect his otherwise secure kingdom, safe because it remains empty except for the sins of a wood thrush weeping


Rob Cook's work has recently appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Zoland Poetry, Aufgabe, Rhino, A cappella Zoo, Caketrain, Weave, and Best American Poetry 2009. His most recent book is Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade. He lives in the East Village where he co-edits Skidrow Penthouse with Stephanie Dickinson.

MONDAY

by D. Gilson

Image source: Mahogany Airplane Models

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 gone missing
on Saturday local time. Why am I just now
hearing about this? Cue my missing credit card.
Thank you for calling Chase-Visa, this is Mike.
Cancelled, remitted fraudulent charge, lower
interest rate in less than five minutes time.
Somewhere in the Pacific, 239 people missing.
I question the preposition: “in” or “over” or “under.”
I question memory: a single teenage night,
a school project due. Father builds a one-inch
model of the atom bomb, Little Boy. Boy,
he tells me, don’t let this happen again.
We’ve no access to flight logs, how many boys
might be crying or dead. Or will die. I lied
to my father. Put off the project so Nathan
and I could play terrorist, Israel and Palestine,
in the shed behind our house. I bind Nathan.
Demand ransom. In the shed we kiss, a mistake,
and I lop off his head. I wonder when the news
switches from “missing” to “presumed dead”
as the treadmill slows down, pulls time under.


D. Gilson is the author of Crush (Punctum Books, 2014) with Will Stockton, Brit Lit (Sibling Rivalry, 2013), and Catch & Release (Seven Kitchens, 2012), winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Indiana Review, and PANK.