A GRIM FAIRY TALE

by Lynn White

Dozens of asylum-seeking children have been kidnapped by gangs from a Brighton [UK] hotel run by the Home Office in a pattern apparently being repeated across the south coast, an Observer investigation can reveal. A whistleblower, who works for Home Office contractor Mitie, and child protection sources describe children being abducted off the street outside the hotel and bundled into cars. “Children are literally being picked up from outside the building, disappearing and not being found. They’re being taken from the street by traffickers,” said the source. —The Observer, January 21, 2023 PHOTO: Hove, where unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have been abducted, according to a contractor working for the Home Office. Credit: Andy Hall/The Observer

When I was a child 

my mother told me 

that Never Never Land

Is where the lost children go,

those who can’t find their way home.

My mother told me that

they stay children for ever

and can play all day long.

It sounds like a fairy tale

and perhaps 

that’s where these children have gone,

stepped into a fairy tale

or perhaps

they’ve been taken into one

by a monster

straight out of Grimm.

And now they wait.

And there’ll be others

waiting.

Waiting,

for someone to find them.

Perhaps they’ll put up a sign

hoping someone will see.

And they’ll sit by the sign

waiting for rescue,

waiting for the fairy tale ending

that can never come.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes. 

MAD FLY THEM TO MARTHA’S VINEYARD

by Cody Walker

DeSantis move to fly migrants to Mass. stokes confusion, outrage from critics —The Washington Post, September 16, 2022

He thought he saw a Schlubby Cheetah

     Resting by the Pier:

He looked again, and found it was 

     The Holocaust. “Oh dear.

It happened in my parents’ lifetime.

     Might still happen here.”

Cody Walker is the author of three poetry collections, all from the Waywiser Press. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor.

DUCK AND COVER

by Indran Amirthanayagam

The sound of helicopters was nothing new. They often arrived to ferry out Turkish troops stationed near Ahmed’s town, a stone’s throw from Syria’s border with Turkey. But this was different. “The sound was horrible,” he said, describing the swarm of U.S. military helicopters that descended on a home less than two miles away from Ahmed’s house early Thursday, on a mission to kill ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. Ahmed, who for safety reasons spoke on the condition that he be identified by only his first name, went up to his roof, he said in a telephone interview. The thunder of the helicopters was eclipsed by a terrible clatter of gunfire “from the sky,” he said… At least a dozen people, including six children, were killed along with Qurayshi, according to local first responders. The Pentagon said that three members of his family were killed when Qurayshi detonated an explosive device on the top floor of the building, along with a child who was killed on the floor below in circumstances that remained unclear. The first responders, known as the White Helmets, said survivors of the night’s violence included a man who lived near the house and a young girl whose entire family was killed. For a time, they said, the girl was unable to speak, from the shock. The group was not sure how the other people died. “Truthfully all the bodies were largely covered in blood, sometimes it could not be discerned if it was bullets or explosions,” a spokesman said in a message. —The Washington Post, Februaryj 4, 2022. Photo: The scene after an overnight raid by US special operations forces against suspected jihadists in north-west Syria. Photograph: Aaref Watad/AFP/Getty via The Guardian, February 3, 2022.

It is hard to palaver on the verandah, or bake bread in the kitchen,

or step out for a drive while helicopters fly above preparing to strike...

One moment you, human and humane, are alive, the next pulverized,

and that evening a headline, made famous instantly until the next drone

in the neighboring country shatters, or a kid shoots into classmates

somewhere, or a young girl is slaughtered by her brother for the family's

honor in a country that ends with 'stan (or states), no country immune

from trafficking in honor, and I declare I am most certainly politically

correct. That said, let us get down to the heart of this body otherwise

split by shards scissoring from the drone that dropped out of the sky

to finish political differences by means of a battering ram, an oxen

head, a threat, then action against what remains of order and grace,

ordinary representatives debating bills, showing the family around

the hallowed halls, certifying an election in these United States.

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube.

SPEECH SCROLL #69, #70

by David Chorlton

TUCSON, AZ (AZ FAMILY) Family members on Friday identified the woman killed in a shootout between federal agents and suspected human traffickers in Ahwatukee. Her name is Theresa Juan. —April 12, 2019

Beneath the unruffled blue
of Thursday’s sky, a helicopter
circles and circles. And circles
a vehicle bleeding
from each of its doors, and the truck
that broke a wall when it turned,
avoiding crossfire. Only the speed bumps
know what happened before
an ambulance carried
the victims away. Fifty shots,
a neighbor claims, on
such a pleasant day to sit
outside and listen to the starlings
chatter. It’s impossible
to tell whether the dead woman’s spirit
became a small white butterfly
or the drone over Forty-eighth Street
come to look back on her life.

A chorus of bees
leaves the hive in a rock
with the sun singing an accompaniment
of light. The authorities have left
the scene, one lifetime and
a half hour’s walk from the arroyo
where Rock wrens fly in peace.
The official story is
that good men chased the bad
and fire was met with fire. The doves
in the desert won’t say what ensued
and the tracks in the gravel
don’t lead to any truth but
what coyotes, who never
give anything away,
know about the bullet
that chose a woman without asking
whether she was guilty.

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in My Ear, translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant. Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird is from Hoot ‘n Waddle in Phoenix.