Poetry
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To the Game-Show Loving US President
Eileen ike West To he, who just understands the ‘dumb’At the end of free-dom,Let me tell you:Only TV cop shows start with dumb-dumb,Not real life.So please, pass seven new letters,And let’s put back on the board,The full word, F-R-E-E-D-O-M.As is, the game seems mighty riggedAgainst the main. While we’re at it, let’s wipe the slate… Continue reading
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I protest that I must protest
Carl “Papa” Palmer I protest that I must protest— That rights are bartered, not possessed That laws are bent for those best dressed That power plays the game of chess That we pawns are crushed and dispossessed I protest that I must protest— That our history facts are skewed at best That memory is repressed and distressed That… Continue reading
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An Atheist Perspective
Mark Sebring A military-style ICE raid on a Chicago apartment building arrested 37 undocumented immigrants. Innocent citizens living in the same building were brutally treated and detained for hours, for the crime of being non-white. When a woman, concerned about the children, naked and zip tied together in the street, asked, “Where is the morality?… Continue reading
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Demilitarize Your Tongue
Cam Whelr MD Choose a date. A lunar event will suffice.An equinox or solstice will do. Any moon phaseyou please. An insignificant day works best.Next Tuesday. Even today.Today. Yes. Yes. Yes.Write it down.Begin in the bone.Oust the hustle and grind of these leastbodies, exhaustion-driven, by colonialists’powers. Their classism and castes.Their urgent hustle and scurry. Shucktheir… Continue reading
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Comrades
Kerfe Roig Who, then, can we become? Our identities have been erased. We have been sorted into anonymous composites of bodies and minds—cut, rearranged, superimposed and pasted onto a predetermined transcript, that allows for no individuality, no escape from their prison boxes of perjury. Our faces have been frozen into synthetic amalgamations of alien avatars.… Continue reading
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Ice Surrounds my Car
Bartholomew Barker Left by a winter stormthick enough to block the lightand resist the plastic scraper I smash the blunt handledown on the windshieldhard enough to leave a crater like a bullet hole The ice which seemed so strongwas melting from above and belowfragile as tyrant’s lace After the first flawit comes off in sheetslike… Continue reading
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It’s Real
James Brumbley Jr. It’s never real until it happens to us.They come in the night and take strangers.Hard-working people trying to get by,in no better positions than everyone else.We don’t speak up because it’s not anyone we know.They come in the day and take our neighbors.Familiar people we borrow things from.We say nothing because it… Continue reading
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Bunny Hat
Merril D. Smith You think it will never touch you,they’ll never come, not for you, but the hate of others—brown-skinned, trans, non-English speakers—(maybe you) has bloomed like toxic mold,black spots darken everything. Just business, they say,private prisons and concentration camps, money to be made on incarcerated bodieswarehoused without medical care, beaten,raped— children grasped by careless… Continue reading
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ICE
R.M. Carlson ice creeps inslick, shroudedgrimgrindingviolence iceberg inchesplowsover the livinghard to crackits dead heartturning blinda sleeted slide waiting water reacheswith glacial tendrilsdeepinto marrowleeches outblood’s warmth depthsdraw ice inadriftbeside other bodiesin a crowded polar seaice floatsbloatedblind it’s forgottenhow to be human kind R.M. Carlson’s work has appeared in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an… Continue reading
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Caged
Steve Babb For Leqaa Kordia She’s gone so long without a glimmer of the sunOr sliver of the moon or morsel of halal cuisineWithout a face that doesn’t scowlOr voice that doesn’t drawl contemptThat she cannot recall a timeWhen her whole world was not haram She’s grown so used to shackles thatHer ankles are accustomed… Continue reading
