I want to begin with something you almost never hear in public: I can understand why this job may have appealed to you.

You may have been drawn by the promise of a steady paycheck and benefits, by the dignity of service, by the feeling that you’d be doing something real in a country that often feels unmoored. You may have wanted structure. You may have wanted to protect your community. You may have wanted to be the kind of person who shows up and does what needs doing.

I grew up around people like that.

I knew people who rose before dawn, who kept a thermos in the truck and a quiet code in their bones: work hard, keep your word, don’t complain, provide for your people, respect the law. They weren’t saints. But they weren’t villains either. A lot of what is decent in a society is built out of those instincts.

And yet those same instincts can be recruited by a system that is no longer asking you to protect what is right, but to participate in what is wrong.

In a neighborhood like mine, you see it in small, ordinary disruptions: a dad who always waved from the stoop stops coming to the block cookout because he’s afraid of being seen. A woman at church who used to linger after the benediction now slips out early, head down, like she’s trying not to be remembered. A kid shows up to school carrying a manila envelope of documents—papers he can’t read but has been told might save his mother if someone knocks. Curtains stay drawn. A certain kind of silence settles in, and it isn’t peace.

That’s what it looks like when state power shows up in local life as something unpredictable and unaccountable. It doesn’t only remove people. It rearranges neighborhoods. It trains children in dread. It turns ordinary bonds of community into liabilities.

There is a relevant scene in Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”. Thoreau refuses to pay his taxes because he will not finance a government waging a war he views as unjust. The tax collector who comes to see him is not a stranger sent from a distant capital. He’s local. He knows and respects Thoreau. He stands there caught between duty and conscience, and asks Thoreau what he should do.

Thoreau doesn’t offer a workaround. He doesn’t offer a clever compromise. He tells him that he must quit.

Not because the collector is inherently evil. But because the collector has become the human instrument by which an unjust act is made manifest in the world. The machine moves through him. Thoreau understood that when a system is immoral, participation is not morally neutral. He urges people to become “the friction that stops the machine.”

This letter is written in that spirit. This is not an accusation against your character, but an appeal to your conscience.

Because I do not believe most ICE agents are animated by cruelty, racism, or a lust for domination. I do not believe you joined because you woke up wanting to terrify families. I suspect many of you joined for the reasons most people take on hard jobs. You wanted stability, dignity, and a chance to serve. But unjust systems do not need people who think of themselves as evil. They need people who are willing to outsource moral responsibility upward.

So, I want to name what this letter is and is not. This is not an argument for open borders. It is not a claim that immigration laws should be meaningless. A nation can and should enforce immigration law and maintain secure borders. But a constitutional republic cannot enforce laws by hollowing out its own constitution.

There are lines a free society cannot cross without becoming something else. Probable cause, warrants, courts, judicial oversight, and access to counsel all matter. Due process is not a courtesy we extend when we’re feeling generous. Force must answer to law, and law must answer to justice.

If you are being asked to participate in actions that treat constitutional rights as obstacles to be overcome, then the moral question is already at your doorstep. You are not simply “enforcing the law.”

You will be told this is overreaction. You will be told you don’t see the big picture. You will be told that your discomfort is immaturity, and professionalism means swallowing it. The language will always be available to make conscience sound childish.

Do not doubt for a second that participation changes you.

Not all at once. It changes you in small ways first. By what you learn to laugh off and what you learn not to notice. It changes you when you start narrating your own actions in plural terms. It changes you when you begin to feel less because feeling interferes with efficiency.

This is why I’m making the appeal, not only for the sake of those you may be ordered to harm, but for your own sake as well.

There is a kind of wound that forms when your work and your conscience diverge. It doesn’t always look like guilt at first. Sometimes it looks like numbness. Irritability. A hardening. A contempt for “soft” people. Sometimes it looks like a private shame you can’t articulate to anyone who hasn’t been there. You cannot live at peace while doing what you know to be wrong.

So, what are you supposed to do?

As has been reported this week, a former ICE instructor and attorney, Ryan Schwank, resigned and then went before Congress to say, in plain language, that the training program for new recruits is now “deficient, defective, and broken.” He described recruits being pushed through with less preparation for the legal limits of their authority, and he warned that officers who do not know their constitutional duty—and do not know the limits of their role—should scare everyone. That is what friction looks like.

If the job begins to ask you for silence in exchange for belonging, refuse the bargain. If it asks you to call cruelty “policy,” refuse the language. If it asks you to stop seeing the person in front of you, refuse that, too. Name what you see. Tell the truth. Withhold your cooperation from what you know is wrong. And if the work requires you to become someone you cannot respect, leave.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a vow during his Nobel Lecture: “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” Not through my hands. Not through my mouth. Not through my silence. Not through my paycheck.

That is the appeal I am making to you now.

If you came for stability, consider what instability it will plant in you to become the face of fear for people who have rights, too—rights that do not evaporate because an agency wants results. If you came for honor, remember that honor is not mere obedience. Honor is the willingness to refuse an unjust order. If you came to serve your country, remember that your country is not identical with any single agency’s mission in any single moment. A republic survives when ordinary people refuse to let its founding promises be hollowed out in the name of expedience.

Maybe tonight, or tomorrow morning, you’ll drive home and pull into a spot you’ve parked in a hundred times. Maybe you’ll sit for a moment with the engine off, listening to the ticking of cooling metal, the quiet of the street. Maybe you’ll look at the uniform hanging in the back seat or folded on the passenger side and feel that familiar tug—pride, duty, dependability.

Hold that feeling up to a harder question. Dependable to what?

The machine can always find new hands, but it cannot force you to volunteer yours.

If you want to serve, there are other ways. There are other uniforms. There are other jobs where your discipline and courage can protect the constitutional order instead of eroding it. You can take the part of you that wanted to do something honorable and offer it to work that does not require you to numb your conscience.

If you cannot see the full path yet, then do the first necessary thing. Stop pretending you don’t know what you know. Stop laundering moral reality through bureaucratic language. Tell the truth to yourself. Then take the next step that truth requires.

And if the moment comes when the only honest step left is to hang up the uniform, do it. Quietly, if you must. Publicly, if you can. But do it.

There is a dignity in that refusal that no badge can confer.

You still have that choice.

Let evil come into the world if it must—but not through you.

With respect, and with great urgency,

Brandon McNeice

Brandon McNeice (he/him) is a Philadelphia-based writer and educator. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Commonweal, Plough, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, Hunger Mountain, Flyway, Bending Genres, and ONE ART. A two-time Best Small Fictions nominee, he writes about the daily negotiations by which people seek dignity, faith, and decency inside systems that are anything but simple.

Has it been over a decade


already since Sandra Bland’s

	death by hanging fire with

truth? Say her name, we said,


in Black Lives Matter protests,

	because: so many other black

lives lost to racism, unjustly-


administered law enforcement.

	I will light you up! Brian Encinia

said, after he dragged her out


her car, taser-armed, angry after she

	refused his order to leave that safe

vehicle (his 1,600 stops in one year


for minor or made-up moving

	violations, so say his name,

too) call him out, too, Encinia,


quietly fired from his job rather

	than charged; while Sandra

Bland never got to have her


proud first day at Prairie View U.,

	alma mater, going back to that

somewhere she always called home.


&, look, now another, white, cosplaying

	cop, caught up in war waged against

citizens in the latest ICE-age, has killed


another woman, this one white,

	nearly same age as Sandra would

have been had she lived past


false arrest, being lit up by a taser

	for one, allegedly, burnt-out

tail-light, &, we’re told, ending


her own life for it. This week, say

	another name, too, Renee Good,

killed during yet another version


of a nation-state’s oldest fake news about

	itself, something about justice, equality,

shooting-death of another unarmed woman,


murdered while being a good neighbor by a

	“federal agent” offered a 50,000 dollar bonus

for the privilege of having complete & total


immunity from laws he’s supposedly been hired

	to uphold. Now a white woman’s taught all

the rest of us what black & brown people have


known all along, that the law will not protect

	you, even if you’re white, but also, they say,

derisively, lesbian & poet, a domestic terrorist,


a fuckin’ bitch, Jonathan Ross says, just seconds

	after shooting her three times, say his name,

fearing for his life, as she turned away from him,


just one time, to avoid hurting him with her car,

	her one, relatively safe, place, left-wing lunatic,

though we all heard her say, while smiling,


I’m not mad at you. Now we all know

	the price of turning away is death,

which some of us have always known,



brothers & sisters, hearing in MLK’s

	voice the love that’s the only thing

can save us, on this day, his birthday,


a day all white supremacists hate, as

	he insisted, too, I’m not mad at you,

all the while he led the resistance


against hate. I say, maybe it’s not too late,

	even on 17th of January, 2026, even if

white supremacy’s so hateful & well-armed.


They’re vastly outnumbered, by all harmed

	people, we the people, say our names,

come out to claim the law of love


& defend thy neighbor no matter

	the cost, laying bodies down,

if we must, & we must, for these


two women’s sake,

	for, all of our own.

Rick Benjamin (he/him) lives on unceded Chumash land in Goleta, California, and walks each day on indigenous trails. He teaches courses at the University of California Santa Barbara, among them poetry and community, the wild literature of ecology, and literatures of both social and juvenile justice, while also working among elders, young people at a local Boys and Girls Club, in art museums and youth detention facilities. Among his other works are the books of poetry, Passing Love, Floating World, Endless Distances, and Some Bodies in the Grief Bed, and his next book of poetry. He served as the poet laureate of Rhode Island from 2012 – 2016.

Gaza - you are beautiful!
All of us in our pink shirts
a young girl with a beaming smile
arms around my neck
A boy on my shoulders
his friends jumping around us
unbridled energy caught in an instant
Inshirah - a piercing stare
and affection to melt the heart

Beach camp children
so curious and affectionate
spilling onto their narrow streets
cameras to their faces
a window to their world
10,000 kites in the air 
10,000 children looking to the sky
world records broken that summer

They would be in their 20’s now
Where are they? How are they?
Living a trauma of the worst design
some dying a violent death
one of the Bakr boys blown up
playing ball on the beach with his cousins

Recalling the open doors all over Gaza
insisting on feeding me
or sharing a cup of mint tea
Generosity and humanity freely given
and the only thing asked
to bear witness

Raghda - heart courageous 
filled with love for the world
Amani - told me in Gaza an educator is a prophet
she stepped through fear to teach us
Noor - in my photo forever 19
immersed in your collage for Oregon
now I watch you on TV
34, tired, crying as you report
on the carnage around you


Gaza - you are beautiful!
Generosity and humanity freely given
and the only thing asked
is to not look away
to bear witness

Emmet Whittaker (he/him) is an educator from Ireland, making Oregon his home for the past 20 years. With respect to these poems, he has worked on programs linking youth, adults, and educators in Gaza and the Pacific Northwest. He is honored to have spent time volunteering in Gaza.

For the thousands of “Wounded Children, No Surviving Family” in Gaza

I am cut short
My bloodline snipped
My life too brief
For any memories
The bomb blast wiped them clean
My legs are stumps
As stubby as this verse.

The doctors can’t tell me
My given or my family name
How many brothers I once had
How many sisters I have lost
I’ll never know
The color of my mother’s eyes
Or hear her lullabies
I’ll never hear
The timbre of my father’s voice
The prayers he might 
Have offered up for me
I am, indeed,
An only child.

But buried deep
Beneath the shrapnel scars
A vision stirs, a vision that
They can’t obliterate
It beckons me
It takes shape when I dream:
The home they drove our forebears from;
The orchards plush
With olive trees
The verdant fields our forebears used to tend
And which they occupied;
The homeland which we won’t forsake –
Our native land which nurtured us
And won’t relinquish us, no matter what –
Not even if they exile us to Mars!

No, even if they bury us
Beneath the fifty million tons of rubble mounds
Which scar this ravaged abattoir
Its name will rise again:
No drone can drown it out
No bomb can level it
No sharpshooter can mow it down
No bulldozer can bury it
No diplomat can veto it
It can’t be starved into oblivion
Or burned away
It’s inscribed in our DNA
In martyrs’ blood.

It pulses in MY blood
It will not be denied
And, inshallah,
If I survive, I’ll pass it on
To MY children someday.

Because of it
You can’t make me
Anonymous,
You can’t reduce me to
A bloodless stat.

Because of it
I cannot be dehumanized
Or demonized
Or Orientalized
Or scornfully erased

Because of it
I cannot be condensed
To a mere acronym.

Steve Babb (he/him) is a retired public health worker who has fought for social justice for his entire adult life. He has written poems on a variety of social justice struggles, including immigrant detention, the death penalty, and solidarity with Central America and Gaza. He has been inspired by the poetry of witness of Anna Akhmatova, Mahmoud Darwish, Refaat Alareer, Hiba Abu Nada, Mosab Abu Toha, Fadi Joudah, Roque Dalton, Carolyn Forché, Wilfred Owen, Clint Smith, Javier Zamora, and Nour Elassy. Steve has had poems published in The Rising Phoenix Review, IMMPRINT (A project of Freedom for Immigrants), and Mothering Magazine.

Murambi Hill Genocide Memorial, Rwanda

stench of preservation one white plaster hand raised in protest the other shields an infant so nakedly innocent of identity so plainly incapable of harm head sunken where club struck no evil is beyond our reach

classroom after room bodies cast where found struck down one after another ten thousand times daily for one hundred days equals one million bodies in ditches mass graves refuge turned trap tomb museum

genocide is never spontaneous Belgian colonizers counted cows… Tutsi own 10 or more, Hutu up to 9, Twa have no cows then punished anyone caught without identification

at the national memorial in a room comparing genocides throughout history I read Hitler’s campaign slogan as he rose to power: “Make Germany Great Again”

Belgians saw European features in Tutsi faces and named them superior. Hutu extremists later saw cockroaches worthy of murder. In both cases the evil we see in another is merely the evil we harbor in our own hearts.

no one has ever marched backwards towards halcyon past and arrive in future utopia - belonging built on exclusion means living in fear you’ll become the hunted one when you run out of others or when they rise up

walking the red clay path past grass and murmuring goats a toddler approaches wraps her plump arms around my legs for a moment there is no kindness beyond reach if we see infinite within our flesh

this is freedom no terrorist can threaten no immigrant can steal from you a machete can split ripe fruit or human skin depending on the mind wielding it

we become greater than ourselves dredging our own evil before accusing any other body step towards truth of equal worth again and again

Frederick Livingston (he/him) is a spoken word ecologist born at the southern tip of the Salish Sea. He is the author of the award-winning Trees are Bridges to the Sky and the poetry collection The Moon and Other Fruits. He writes to plant seeds for a more fruitful Earth.

Mayan rulers lived atop ornate stone pyramids in rooms smaller than many modern closets. No one in their vast empire was closer to heaven, no one else could drink sacred cacao. But when it failed to rain, a king was expected to pierce his genitals with a stingray barb, offering his most precious blood to the gods.

When Jeff Bezos returned from 4 minutes in zero gravity he said this “best day ever” fulfilled his childhood dream. He thanked Amazon’s customers and workforce, still fighting to unionize, for funding the 5-billion-dollar trip.

Middle-class Americans fill refrigerators with milk, beer, and beverages ancient kings never imagined but we still thirst because addiction isn’t drinks or pills or dollar bills. Craving only seeks itself.

Prescribed opioids after injury, a construction worker hides addiction from his family well enough for months until the day he forgets if he took his morning dose swallows more fearing its absence wakes to a stranger holding Narcan to his nostrils.

There is no paradise awaiting billionaires on Mars. They will only find a landscape barren and inhospitable as the one inside themselves. We know our kings are miserable by the way they howl at reality, chasing chaos to remain front-page one more day. Addicted to sensations of a chest swelling with praise, even the pulsing heat of hatred.

As crops withered and the divine mandate of Mayan kings grew more tenuous, children were carried deeper and deeper into caves for sacrifice. Our rulers need us to believe we need them, but the truth is we all speak for god. We all bow to uncertainty and death.

Only compassion can free us from kings. With compassion for ourselves, we stop waiting in line to become rich, powerful, and miserable like them. With compassion for our kings, we stop building their pyramids and rockets, useless for reaching the heaven of our infinite worth.

Frederick Livingston (he/him) is a spoken word ecologist born at the southern tip of the Salish Sea. He is the author of the award-winning Trees are Bridges to the Sky and the poetry collection The Moon and Other Fruits. He writes to plant seeds for a more fruitful Earth.

On the train home from
The demo, a lone drummer
In red keffiyeh;

That peculiar sense
Of being set apart from
Those you’d been one of

Just the day before.
Next time: don’t walk uptown through
Soho to the march—

The shoppers! As if 
On a separate planet,
When you expected

Crowds walking with you,
Waiting on line
For a sample sale—

It’s not until blocks
And blocks later when
The drums, the roar—then.

And now she’s alone
Too, a single stick’s beat as
The rain continues.

Jessica Greenbaum’s (she/her) most recent collection, Spilled and Gone, was chosen by the Boston Globe as a Best Book, and her previous one, The Two Yvonnes was named a Best Book by Library Journal. Poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, 2024 and Pushcart Prize, 2024. She is the co-editor of Treelines: 21st Century American Poems, and Mishkan HaSeder, the first ever poetry Haggadah. A recipient of awards from the NEA and the Poetry Society of America, she teaches inside and outside academia and, as a social worker, with communities who have experienced trauma. https://poemsincommunity.org/

They’ll say the world has never been this critically wrecked—
It’s hit a wall, it’s hit the shoals and splintered into parts.
They fear the globe’s a wooden boat we can’t protect

From sunlight, in whose oceanic orbit it’s been decked
With space-trash tossed by power-hungry lonely-hearts.
We sense the world has never been this critically wrecked

As if the captain’s cosmic course, like Ahab’s, went unchecked
Careening through Andromeda and off the charts
And now the globe’s a wooden boat we can’t protect

From any myth: a bark on violent seas without a Jonah to suspect
Except ourselves. Well, not all ourselves. Evil’s a la carte.
The world has never been this critically wrecked;

Ask any generation trying madly to collect
The shattered constitution of the hull; it’s the ignorance that smarts
And makes the globe a wooden boat we can’t protect.

If violence starts in sorrow and greed makes leaders derelict
And extra-more unmoored, can we restart this ark from start
Because really now our world has never been so critically wrecked.
The globe’s a wooden boat we can’t protect. 

Jessica Greenbaum’s (she/her) most recent collection, Spilled and Gone, was chosen by the Boston Globe as a Best Book, and her previous one, The Two Yvonnes was named a Best Book by Library Journal . Poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, 2024 and Pushcart Prize, 2024. She is the co-editor of Treelines: 21st Century American Poems, and Mishkan HaSeder, the first ever poetry Haggadah. A recipient of awards from the NEA and the Poetry Society of America, she teaches inside and outside academia and, as a social worker, with communities who have experienced trauma. https://poemsincommunity.org/

He said something about time,
The way it passes effortlessly,
Without us doing anything at all.

He said that the best way
To experience time
Is to stop and allow it to pass.

Don’t think about your future,
What needs to be done,
Or anything in the distance.

Merely sit and wait.

He said this to me
As he stepped into the street
And plodded his way to the other side.

And I heard his words,
I waited for him to cross,
His black eyes straight ahead.

He walked with a purpose,
Whatever it may have been.

The snow was falling,
And his feet made webbed footprints
In front of me.

And I waited.

On the other side were his friends,
Perhaps, or his family,
Also waiting.

He was slow, methodical,
Like the passage of time itself.

I knew that this sequence of moments
Was not one to be played out again
In the same way.

So I waited.

And he said to me,
“The world is a place of wonder,
“And you can only know this
“By taking the time.”

Laura Zurawski (she/they) is a Chicago area poet who has been writing poetry since the late 1980s. Most of Laura’s poems explore her experiences with neurodivergence and mental illness, with a sprinkling of nature, religion and relationships. Laura received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995. She credits her love of poetry and writing to her late father, Philip Zurawski, who was also a prolific poet and founder of the Arlington Poetry Project in Chicago.

Three people come to my door.

The first is always frightened, comes in crying.
I hold him, console him, “the rockets only passover,
it is not our land they’re after,
not our blood they want,
not yet.”

The second barges interrupting, angry and indignant,
Sparkling with holy rage like
A saint sent straight from the mouth of god.
She says, “all land is my land, all people my people,
and if the enemy is thirsty for blood, let it be mine to quench them,”
I tell her to be calm, there are already too many fighters,
That there is peace to be protected here, first.

Then struts in the third, steps soft like a cat, silent smirk on their lips.
They remind us that the best thing about this lonely blue dot is its sunsets.
They say the light wages endless war against itself
And is the only place of peace in this empty life.
They tell us how today, the smoke of a burning bush turns its orange hues
To mauve, lighting streams left in the wake of jets,
Hanging like a tinted rainbow.

My children are confused.
They don’t understand that the land is our body,
That death is our salvation,
That the enemy is no where but in our hearts

Elianne El-Amyouni is a Lebanese-Canadian writer, lecturer, activist, doctor of philosophy, and content creator with over 1 million subscribers across platforms (with Tiktok as main platform). Her PhD is a study of political identity expression in contemporary Palestinian hip-hop, and her content and research is focused around narratives of identity, difference, and resistance. Elianne is a columnist for two Arabic magazines, Al Nahar and Rehla, has published short stories and poetry in literary journals including The Temz Review and Litro UK, and has self-published a collection of poetry entitled Quickies.

California, 2013

in a land of abundance
California
the state of the sun
I persevere

I write of Middle Eastern characters
in my short stories
I drink shai with miramyeh
I wear headscarves made in Al-Khalil
I persevere

with black Kohl on brown eyes
in a classroom full of Americans
I speak of my homeland
Palestine
the country not recognized
the people not forgiving
I persevere

in a kitchen made of hardwood floors
designed in the United States
I make zaatar pastries
cheese-filled mojanat
eat with labaneh
as I persevere

of books about Native Americans
I think of the 1948 refugees
in Immigrant Literature
I persevere

in a house I can call my own
in a city I pay electricity for
in a university
in the cool summer nights of Anaheim
I persevere

between the silent sobs
and the loud laughs
I persevere

I wait to return
I engage to not forget

I speak to remember
the intricate vowels
the absence of silent letters
and the shadeh
I persevere

the Arabic
the culture
the brown hands clapping in weddings
wiping tears in funerals
whistling in matches
I persevere

for them
to them
I persevere

Dr. Laila Shikaki is an award-winning published poet and academic from Palestine. Laila has a Ph.D in English Literature from St. John's University in New York City, an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University in California, and a BA in English Language and Literature from Birzeit University in Palestine. Shikaki’s dissertation “Journeys Through Home and Exile: Palestinian Autobiographic Writing,” explores Palestinian autobiography, intergenerational relationships, exile, as well as her own published poems. Laila currently teaches writing and literature classes at Birzeit University in Palestine. Her poems have been featured in many literary magazines including TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Sequoya, Nazzar Look, Pomona Valley Review, Metrics Conversions Poetry of our Time, and We Chose Everything; a bilingual poetry anthology that features over 50 Arab poets published in Lebanon.

the nettle broth and tincture, the tadpole and the moon,
the swallowtail butterflies, the hope inside of june,

the rain upon the window, the carolina wren,
the stolen bra and undy drawer, the dusty goat feed bin,

the evening star called venus, the doting luna moth,
the heat behind the lighted moon, the clothesline and the cloth,

the kerosine, the clover, the lye for making soap,
the cow tongue sandwich recipe, the grass inside a rope,

the araucana chickens, the fire burning flags,
of dixie loving neighbors, their politic in rags,

a whittling and a whetstone, while as long as i sing,
will use all day to hone and find respite along the edges of all things.

Emma Loomis-Amrhein is a trans writer and naturalist who is particularly enamored of birds and moths. Her work tends towards poetry but occasionally appears as essays here and there. She primarily writes about the margins and marginalia, whether spaces or the beings and other things which inhabit them. Her debut collection of poetry, evening primroses, (April 2021) is available from Recenter Press. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, and resides in over a dozen publications. She lives in rural, southern Ohio.

Blayne Waterloo (they/she) is a horror writer and editor living in Georgia with their partner and loud dog.

I considered joining one of the demonstrations
against cannibalism
to take a stand
make my voice heard
not against cannibals against cannibalism
hate the sin love the sinner

but then I was made aware
of well documented reports from several prominent research institutes
demonstrating
the almost complete integration of cannibalism
in the greater economy
a demonstration difficult to ignore
you can’t buy a stick of gum or a car battery without
at some stage along the supply chain
ingesting
at least implicitly
some small cut of human flesh
diluted in a weak broth

turnout in any case was pitifully small
and largely made up of people of a sort one
would not wish to be identified with

instead I went to a cafe
to order the special
liver of an alcoholic
having always had a weakness
for pickled meats

Lance Le Grys is the author of the poetry collection Views from an Outbuilding (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019) and the chapbook Pilate Suite (Bottlecap Press).. His work has appeared in many publications, including America, Caveat Lector, The Naugatuck River Review, The Lullwater Review, The West Trade Review, Knock, and The Southern Humanities Review. A selection of his songwriting indiscretions can be heard at legrys.bandcamp.com. His web site is at lancelegrys.wordpress.com. He lives in Castleton, Vermont

of the fist. with its mouth,
homeward, sanctified like

the rule of three in fiction.
it’s a cop

-out, tallow in the eye, sightly
water, inverted lilies, their

pewter & casings ass
to face, in redux, in

redux. i take shots in glasses much
too large. as their analog, Qoheleth

was correct, the satisfaction is
not in the bite

from the drink, but
rather seeing it as is, unmoving,

the cup made of water. cliche of
doughnut with bullet

wounds. scantily formal, lack
of filling, Christian

cross worn like chapstick on
Chanukah. gas stove

top, anvil for branding, my hand
makes a hole where the old

skillet used to perch. parsnips
cook uneven at this

point. i’ve given up waiting
for alarms or my internal

clock. so i watch the pot.
& it boils.

Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent cripple punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone's Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Vagabond City and new words {press}, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan. Find them on Instagram/Twitter: @beanbie666. https://linktr.ee/liamstrong666

“So many fucking Jews”

But my head is down, my stomach is grumbling
All I want is a blueberry muffin
The Dunkin’ Donuts at the corner is the only place allowed open
I get just the muffin; no coffee
Blood pressure is up, always up
Walking back, I try and remember before
But I stop myself just in time
I see the Guardsman looking at me

Back inside, I have my blueberry muffin
I just chew for a while

Bio: I am a media lawyer and have been writing poetry and stories since high school. At college, I wrote a play for a course in Jacobean Literature, and at Law School, I wrote a play for a course in Jurisprudence. Returning to NYC, I write poetry and stories amidst contracts and business plans. Each area of writing enriches the other, with contracts benefiting from a bit of poetic dance. I have had poems and stories published in Ithaca Lit, West Trade Review, Oddville Press, Oberon, Foliate Oak Magazine, Illuminations, Qu, 34th Parallel, Harbinger Asylum, Trolley Journal, Narrative Northeast and October Hill Magazine.

Bans are
blindfolds
over our eyes,
bonfires
consuming our voices,
violence
engendering silence.

Sarah M. Prindle received an Associates in English from Northampton Community College. She loves reading everything from historical fiction and memoirs to poetry and mysteries. She hopes to someday publish her own novels and poetry collections and has already had her work published in several literary magazines and websites.

I
Thou shalt forever have the spirits of thy ancestors—mineral,
plant, animal, and all the Others from times before, reaching
back to the very first prokaryote who lived deep along the edge
of the hydrothermal vent at the bottom of the ancient sea—beside thou.

II
Thou hast always brought joy, from the caves of long ago
to the classrooms of now, with thy sweet graven images,
thy drawings and finger paintings of pink-necked giraffes
and a flurry of roses spouting forth from the blowhole
of a humpback whale. Please, thou, never stop making thy art.

III
Thou shalt take the Name of the Earth thy Home,
and all those who dwell upon her, in compassion.

IV
Remember the night sky, and help to uphold darkness unpolluted
by artificial light, so that bats and fireflies and sea turtle hatchlings,
buried in the sand but desperate for the tides, may find their way.

V
Honor thy mountain, meadow, and river kin and thy self,
that thy days may overflow with awe and a curiosity radiating deep
from thy Earth’s core and stretching up into the outer atmosphere
through which the sun’s warmth permeates and will shine
upon thee for another seven to eight billion years, before
she fades, as all forms eventually fade.

VI
Thou shalt hold all living beings tenderly in thy arms and be
careful where thou steps, mindful of all who art small or microscopic
or frightened by footfalls that, to they, appear those of a giant.

VII
Thou shalt enter love completely, as best thou can, though it is natural
for the earthworm, on days when her dreams prove vaster than the soil
can convey, to wonder how it might feel when a southeastern
breeze passes through feathers in flight.
Even thy Earth harbors her missteps and longings.

VIII
Thou shalt live in the truth of planetary oneness, honoring
that balance is possible when all that thou gives and takes
from thy Home is guided by devotion to reciprocity and symbiosis.

IX
Thou shalt bear true witness to death, welcoming
that that which grows must eventually give way to decay,
so that thou and all Others may forever be
returning to the body of the Earth, thy Home.

X
Thou shalt not need to covet belonging, as wherever thy roams—
whether lost among the pine forest at dawn, adrift in the rough
Atlantic under a reddening sky, or resting beneath the desert moon
where shadows of Joshua trees stand visible against the night—
thou art already and forevermore at home. Thou shalt
not need to covet relationality, as in every petal of every flower,
in every moth, mouse, sea otter, lonely cow, and child same as thou,
craving tenderness in a world spiraling beyond love or reason under
this veil of righteousness, thou art tethered gently to thy Earth.

XI
Remember always that thou art made of the very same stuff that made
the Earth, thy Home—stardust and swirling gases, dinosaur scales
and mosses, the whiskers of woolly mammoths and bones
of the doggie who never stopped licking the tears from thou’s cheeks
when thou was rebuked for having been born already
disgraceful, morally damaged ever since the slosh of the womb.
Thou shalt remember that because thou is made of stars
and scales, moss and mammoth, all Earth particles—
thou has always been
and thou will always be—
divinity in perpetual motion.

Echo Guernsey is a former animal behaviorist with a lifelong passion for conservation and environmental justice. She holds an MFA in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University. Beyond her writing life, she is a Buddhist Eco-Chaplain as well as a licensed funeral director and death midwife.

In the end, civilizations perish because they listen
to their politicians and not to their poets.
—Jonas Mekas

Toomaj Salehi sang through the square
in Tehran and was abducted and beaten,
tried and given the severest punishment
of death...on charges of corruption
in the world.

He had the audacity to criticize
the regime, defend the oppressed
and must die no matter if the world
cries out.

And so it was with Bruno,
marched through the streets,
his tongue nailed to his jaw
so that he could no longer speak,
immolated in the Campo dei Fiori
by the righteous.

And Lorca, who had done more damage
with a pen than others had done with a pistol,
was slain among the olive branches;
his words flew like brittle leaves,
soared beyond the dictator’s grasp.

Likewise, Victor Jara sang
my verse is a dove looking for a place to nest
and the “nightingale” was silenced,
guitar fingers crushed, body riddled
with lead, while Pablo, accosted
in an ambulance told the soldiers:
you will find only poetry here,
poisoned in his hospital bed.
The old general languished
beneath a monument of their texts.

And Rushdie, who survived
but lost an eye in a sacrifice for truth,
outlived the austere cleric
who had condemned him.

The list is long and distinguished
because wherever there is light
it must be extinguished by those
who flourish in darkness.

Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio of Indigenous/Mexican heritage, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His collections of poems include Meteors, Undesirable: Race and Remembrance, Somos en Escrito Foundation Press, Standing Stones, Finishing Line Press, and The Shadow of Time, Adelaide Books.

What sound does the armory make?
Knowing it holds only steel death,
only the fated ricochet of no home.
Track 1776. Deringer, Remington,
Eli Whitney with the moving parts,
no dance for this flint, it's 1836,
it’s Colt 45 and two zig-zags.

It's how a rabbit runs, knows it is prey
zig-zags threat evasion, to tire the predator.
A rabbit can run up to 30 mph,
bullets don’t get tired.
2700 miles an hour,
three times faster than an airplane.
I can't translate flying.
Don’t run in a straight line.

Track 45: A double-barrel shotgun
wasn't fast enough.
The Browning automatic rifle was in style for
Bonnie and Clyde and WW2.
Track 47: Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan,
Boston marathon, Ukraine, Gaza.
There are no small wars, no small worlds

Track 19: A school shooting isn't loud enough for anyone to hear,
how we rationalize the sound of something familiar popped plastic bag,
backpack dropping, mental illness.
Silence doesn’t do it justice.

Play the one about the NRA
go ahead, I’ll wait.
Play the one about Uvalde how they waited,
to the tune of 2700 miles an hour
to the tune of Kalashnikov
did you know an AK-47 can live for 20-40 years?
Easy to relocate and reuse.
Kalashnikov, a slave of god, of gun. He says he sleeps soundly

He’s dead now too no man’s god is a gun.
Play the one about the ...
Was it fireworks or a gun?
Listen for the cadence

Claire Campo is a poet, actor, and teaching artist whose work pushes boundaries in form and language. Co-founder of Poetic Justice, a literacy and poetry program for carceral settings, Claire’s surreal, experimental style explores identity and cultural memory. Their short film, i love you like science, received the Linklater Award for Best Dialogue at the Austin Arthouse Film Festival, and their poetry has appeared in This Land Press, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press, and Super Present Magazine. Of Mohawk, French, and Dutch descent, Claire is dedicated to revitalizing Indigenous narratives as a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River.