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.

THE BLUE ENVELOPE PROGRAM

by Matthew E. Henry

State police in Massachusetts have begun implementing a program to improve interactions with people on the autism spectrum, building upon legislation that won Senate approval in January and remains before a House committee. —WBUR, April 10, 2024

the purpose: to support drivers with autism spectrum disorders 

during traffic stops. to ensure more sensitive communication

by law enforcement, drivers with ASD will hand a blue-backed 

envelope containing their license, registration, and a checklist 

of tips for the officer(s) on scene.

 

as a teacher, I wonder how this new social skill is scaffolded—

who reviews and instructs in advance of the practical exam. 

being Black, I wonder if this effort to reduce anxiety and 

enhance understanding, gave any thought to differentiating 

for ASD motorists of color. who carefully cautions them on

 

 

how to avoid and maintain eye contact 

and knowing the inherent dangers of both

 

how to calmly comply with contradicting orders

 

how to remain silent while being screamed at 

 

how to contend with the confusion of sarcasm 

or being called “boy” when over the age of 12 

 

how to hold hands at 10 and 2 until told otherwise

 

how and where to store their blue envelope

 

how and where to store their blue envelope for safe retrieval 

 

how to retrieve their blue envelope safely

 

how to remain safe while retrieving their blue envelope

 

how to make no sudden movements while retrieving their blue envelope

 

how to retrieve their blue envelope while making no sudden movements

 

how to forget Steven Washington, Stephon Watts, 

Dainell Simmons, Troy Canales, Osaze Osagie, 

Matthew Rushin, Ryan Gainer, and…

Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of six collections, including the Colored page and The Third Renunciation. He is editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal and an associate poetry editor at Pidgeonholes and Rise Up Review. The 2023 winner of the Solstice Literary Magazine Stephen Dunn Prize, MEH is an educator who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. You can find him at www.MEHPoeting.com writing about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground.

WHERE NO ONE COUNTS

by Lynn White

Source: The Guardian

When will we count the dead in Gaza?
Those buried in named graves we know, 
all the tens of thousands of them,
those buried in the rubble,
the disappeared 
with no one left to name them,
are still unknown
uncounted.

Then the other Disappeared,
prisoners of war
if it were a war,
but with only the rights
of terrorists
who have no rights at all
in this unequal conflict
that some call ‘war’.

And how can we count the injured in Gaza
when there are no hospitals left
and its people don’t count
so no one can count those numbers.
and perhaps no one will
in a country where people don’t count.

Now the starved and starving 
have joined them,
the bags of baby bones
the unaccounted numbers
of intentional famine
in Gaza where still
no one counts.

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.

WAR SONGS AND OTHER LAMENTS

by Adele Evershed

In the quiet of a collective breath-holding / Ladies Night / accidentally played on the radio / so an Israeli spokesman / delivered words / about exacting a price from Iran / to the throb of a disco beat 

I listened to the ballistic bass / and retorting trumpets / cut with words of war / as if this was a movie / the music an ironic middle finger / to the inevitability / of the end of the world / and it seemed like another sign / in a week of medieval omen 

After / the BBC made no mention of their mistake / Johnnie Walker just played the song / so we could all ignore / our electric slide / toward a bigger conflict / since Kool & The Gang / insisted everything would be alright 

And if it really was 'ladies night,' that might be true / if women were in charge / drones would be used / to make sure daughters got home safely / and sons would be iron-domed / so they didn't lay down precious lives / because they belonged to one tribe / or another

Instead all we can do is watch the sky unnaturally darken and try to remember how to breathe

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who now lives in America. Her poems and flash fictions have appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Anti Heroin Chic, Gyroscope, Janus Lit, and many other places. Adele has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize for poetry and short fiction. She has published two poetry chapbooks, Turbulence in Small Places (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Adele has published a novella-in-flash, Wannabe (Alien Buddha Press), and a short story collection Suffer/Rage (Dark Myth Publisher).

TRUMP'S ABORTION CONTORTION

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

“Trump’s abortion position” by Dave Whamond

Days after saying that abortion policies should be left to the states, former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday criticized an Arizona court ruling for upholding an 1864 law that banned nearly all abortions...Yet even as he suggested his disapproval...Mr. Trump defended the position he took in a video statement on Monday, when he said that states should weigh in on abortion through legislation. —The New York Times, April 10, 2024, Updated April 13, 2024.

 

Trump varies his stand on abortion.

If only his prospects were dim.

This country could ward off distortion

By taking a stand against him.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 280 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, The Galway Review, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had three previous poems in The New Verse News.

PICKING UP THE SETTLEMENT CHECK FROM MY SON’S WRONGFUL-DEATH CASE DURING THE ECLIPSE

by Susan Vespoli

My dead son was in the car 

with me as I drove to the lawyer’s

office to pick up my net-settlement check

and we drove past a laughing-Buddha chihuahua 

running against traffic down the center of Dunlap

 

and we drove through a split of mountain crags 

and we drove past a guy twirling and tossing a red-arrow 

sign at an intersection and my heart and gut felt on fire 

with raw grief and I said, “Well, here we are, Adam,” 

 

meaning the end of the lawsuit 

and even as I wanted to sob and flail

I could feel him smiling beside me, 

saying, there, there, like a benevolent cloud. 

 

When the paralegal handed me the check, 

she beamed as if we should don party hats, throw confetti 

and I wanted to pop every balloon in the place, 

wave the rectangular piece of paper in the air 

and say, this represents my son’s life.

 

Outside, humans were wearing tiny plastic glasses 

and looking up at the sun and the sky 

over the parking lot glowed fluorescent 

and this check felt like me saying it was okay the cop shot my son 

 

but I have fallen into a sort of love

with a man who is ironically a lawyer 

who has helped me interpret the mind-fuck 

of the legal system, understand that money the City 

of Phoenix had to pay caused them pain to spark change

 

and it is springtime on the planet 

where my son’s physical body is only a memory 

and there is a throng of 5’ tall sunflowers 

standing outside my bedroom window 

and the ocotillo in my front yard, mere sticks and thorns 

a month ago, is now covered with soft green and topped with flame-

colored flowers the wind flutters into candles on a cake.

Susan Vespoli lives in Phoenix, AZ, where citizens are still waiting for the release of the DOJ report regarding the Phoenix Police Department's excessive use of force. Her son, Adam, was killed by a police officer on March 12, 2022.

HEMORRHAGE BOP

by Cindy Veach

I watch three old white men on the news talking

about abortion how it’s no big deal for a woman

to get a bus ticket and travel to another state.

It’s trending on X, these old men in their suits and ties

with their limp cocks tucked away under the table

their small hands gesturing or resting on the table.

 

I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.

 

And now Arizona has upheld a draconian Civil War-era

abortion law proving that the past does come back

to haunt. I almost bled out after my daughter’s birth.

I’ve never written about this. It took a helicopter

and two D&C’s to save me. A hundred years ago

I would have died of childbirth. I marched for the right

to choose in my 20’s only to lose it in my 60’s

 

I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.

 

In the middle of yesterday the moon eclipsed the sun.

People were brought to tears as they watched

in their special protective glasses. People on both sides

of the aisle equally moved by the night of day.

The darkness I speak of is different. It digests everything

good and fattens the libidos of men.

 

I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.

Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.

NEWS OF THE WORLD THROUGH ECLIPSE GLASSES

by Bonnie Naradzay

A man detained by the Israeli military in northern Gaza shows injuries on his wrists at al-Najjar hospital in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on 24 December 2023 (AFP/Said Khatib)

Israeli doctor says detained Palestinians are undergoing ‘routine’ amputations for handcuff injuries. —CNN, April 6, 2024

On my listserve, someone posts her fears 

that the pairs of eclipse glasses she ordered 

will not arrive in time. A neighbor shares a link

from NASA on how to make a pinhole camera.

In the news, I read about Palestinians detained 

outside an Israeli military base. They were given

numbers and lost their names. A doctor said

the men are chained day and night, blindfolded

at all times, hands bound behind their backs,

fed through straws. Forced to wear diapers,

dehumanized. Bound to a fence for prolonged 

times, consecutive days. Because of the injuries

caused by the shackles, the doctor performs 

“routine amputations” of their legs. At church 

this morning, after our group’s discussion 

of the Sunday readings, a woman talks about 

how good God is to her family and he knows 

what’s best for us. How can she say this,

I think, remembering Ivan Karamazov, 

“The Grand Inquisitor.” Why would God 

permit such suffering in the world?   

The Israeli Defense Force official replied

that every procedure is within the framework

of the Law and is done with “extreme care

for the human dignity of the detainees.”

All day, the wind’s unrest builds and disperses 

clouds as I try to make sense of such cruelty.

Bonnie Naradzay's manuscript will be published by Slant Books this year.  She leads weekly poetry sessions at day shelters for homeless people and at a retirement center, all in Washington DC.  Three times nominated for a Pushcart, her poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Split This Rock, Dappled Things, and other sites. In 2010 she won the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize—a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary; there, she had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read Pound’s early poems.

THE FOOLS ON THE HILL

by Steven Kent

"'You have imprisoned our democracy': Inside Republicans' domination of Tennessee"

—The Guardian, April 5, 2024

Despite what y'all were taught in school,

Democracy is not that cool;

We merely use it as a tool

To institute one-party rule.

Folks come to Nashville, see our sights,

While up the hill we're locked in fights*

With Tennesseans claiming rights

They don't deserve now, by our lights.

Theocracy's the goal we've set,

And though we haven't reached it yet

The hour is coming, never fret.

Can't happen here? You wanna bet?

*The state capitol sits four blocks up from Lower Broadway, Nashville's busy tourist district.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer, musician, and resident of Nashville, Tennessee Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Journal of Formal Poetry, Light, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and Snakeskin. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.