Icy Graveyard Blues
for Renee Nicole Good
It’s cold in Minnesota
They target practice face
It’s cold in Minnesota
ICE digs another grave
It’s cold across America
Ask any glove or coat
It’s cold in Minnesota
As only George Floyd knows.
© Pam Ward
LA native, UCLA graduate, California Arts Council Literary Fellow and Pushcart Poetry nominee, Pam was nominated as a 2024 “Trailblazing Poet” from LA Cultural Affairs. Her poetry book, Between Good Men & No Man At All, was released on World Stage Press and she’s penned essays and two novels Want Some Get Some, and Bad Girls Burn Slow, Kensington and is currently working on Banter, her second poetry anthology as well as a third novel, I’ll Get You Pretty, featuring her family’s role in the Black Dahlia Murder.
******
Holding Strong
She wrote with wings
In pauses between courage,
Turning the ordinary pain
of living into what could
be held strongly,
The world is a fragile voice
When it tells the truth,
Now her poems walk above
Into the stars of the night
In the sunshine of day
On earth every word survives
In spirit and please listen
To the earths calm tides
Where an angel still glides.
© JoyAnne O'Donnell
JoyAnne O'Donnell is an author of five poetry books on Goodreads and Amazon.Writes for good causes. Her latest poems are in The Galway Review and others.
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Fermata
Renée married men twice, then a woman.
Might have called herself lesbian, or pansexual,
but for now, I’m claiming her as a Bi Poet.
Not that it mattered when bullets mashed
that beautiful brain: an end to words.
Sustained notes of details: car-door pocket
overflowing with stuffed animals. Her wife
Rebecca sobbing on the snow with the dog,
screaming for the doctor that ICE wouldn’t let
near her. Their move to Canada when Trump
was first elected, Rebecca crying that she
made Renée come back, it was her fault.
The swagger of her killer striding to the SUV
to leave the scene. The Air Force service
of the orphaned six-year-old’s dead father.
Slanders by puppy-killer and President.
Eulogies from Renée’;s mother, then her father,
dictated to reporters on the phone.
Her two older children’s voices are absent
from middle school and high school.
Rebecca doesn’t answer her cell.
Renée’s guitars strings are untouched.
© Jan Steckel
Ghosts and Oceans is Steckel’s latest book. Her The Horizontal Poet won a Lambda Literary Award. Her books Like Flesh Covers Bone, Mixing Tracks, and The Underwater Hospital also won awards.
******
Ta Da
Dedicated to Nicole Good
let's see
what else?
emigrate
to the moon
© Barbara Anna Gaiardoni
Barbara Anna Gaiardoni, Italian author and pedagogist, is widely published in Japanese-style poetry. A Basho winner and Touchstone nominee, she draws inspiration from nature. Motto: "I can, I must, I want."
******
A Very Quick Reaction
Families are being separated. We all pay more for less. Different but equal groups are being forced to hate each other and blame each other. People are being trashed and persecuted for being who they are. Medicine and science are being destroyed. Nations are being violated and exploited. People are being insulted. An innocent woman, a poet, is killed by agents of fascism. What atrocity will it take for the takedown to happen? I know it goes against karma but why can't the perpetrator of all this horror meet his deserved punishment? I refuse to say his name. He tyrannizes us by daily acts of cruel stupidity that we have to notice so that we are supposed to say his name. May he drown in a lake of his own offal.May rationality and kindness triumph over stupidity and cruelty.
© Lynne Bronstein
Lynne Bronstein is the author of Nasty Girls (Four Feathers Press) and four other books of poetry.
******
let the phoenix of hope rise again
we live in a country where
you can be shot in the face for
trying to protect your neighbors,
unarmed and driving away;
they can shoot you in the face
in front of your spouse
leaving your child without his mother—
nicole good, you deserved
so much better;
to write more poems and discover
more beauty in this tragic nightmare
of a world we live in because
there is still magic and there are still miracles—
but right now it is hard to hear the
voice of dreams,
so we must hold onto the ashes
of hope and watch until she becomes
a phoenix blazing through every nightmare again.
© linda m. crate
Linda M. Crate (she/her) is a Pennsylvanian writer. She has seventeen published chapbooks the latest being: only the future knows (Alien Buddha Press, November 2025).
******
Elegy to a Poet
Your voice. Silenced by a bullet
from the gun of a masked murderer.
You heart. Stopped by a bullet
from the gun of a masked murder.
Your love. Whisked away by a bullet
from the gun of a masked murderer.
The murderer praised by those supposed
to keep you safe.
In this upside-down world
you, poet, are smeared by lies.
You, mothers, are to be cut down.
You, lovers, to be reduced
to dry corn husks.
Wielding love and words
as dangerous weapons
will get you executed,
light snuffed out by the illiterate
in these times of cruelty and death.
© Rose Mary Boehm
A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her work has been widely published mostly by US poetry journals. A new full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
