NVN Sunday: Police State Stories
"To All the Imprisoned Children" by Julie Weiss, "A Nightmare of Color" by Dick Altman, "Cataloguing Our Names" by Karen Marker
TO ALL THE IMPRISONED CHILDREN
by Julie Weiss
Hold on. You´re a rabbit, clever and bold, galloping free through tomorrow´s boundless grasslands. Hold on. You´re the most extraordinary lotus, blooming through cracks in your country´s polar ice caps. Hold on. They may have grounded your body, but your mind can fly a thousand glorious kites in the rising winds of resistance. Your will, sharp enough to slice a prison guard´s insults into fluff. Hold on. Right now, you may feel more like a beetle climbing a mountain under a crush of boots than anything human, but you´re not alone. You´re the song we sing when the notes in our throat have lumped impossibly together. You´re the rainbow colors we use to airbrush our hope across the sky. You’re the poem we bellow at every demonstration. Imagine! Your beauty flowing in epic proportions. You´re our brightest star, the one that anchors us to our place in the universe. Hold on. Without you, we´d all be hurled deep into space.
*
Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection Rooming with Elephants was published in February, 2025. She was a finalist for Best of the Net, won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award, and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Recent work appears in ONE ART, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Gyroscope Review, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, MER, and SWWIM. She lives with her wife and children in Spain.
*
A NIGHTMARE OF COLOR
by Dick Altman
As reports come out across the country of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining Native Americans, a couple dozen New Mexico lawmakers are pushing a bill that would allow tribal citizens to update their state-issued IDs to reflect their enrollment status. House Bill 20 would give people enrolled in a federally recognized tribe the option to request a “distinguishing mark” identifying them as Native American on their driver’s license or other identification cards. A similar law passed in Arizona last year went into effect in January. On a sample license posted online by that state’s Motor Vehicle Division, “Native American” is written on the bottom left side of the card. —New Mexico In Depth, February 12, 2026
*
Northern New Mexico
In my mind
it begins,
a Pow Wow
of dance,
chant,
drum,
lofting
my Anglo dreams
to heights
of ritual
more ancient
than Columbus.
Despite the festive air,
masked figures,
I don’t
recognize as Native,
badged and holstered,
lurk in the shadows,
beyond
the drum circle—
waiting.
*
I try to sense,
living as I do,
in Indian Country,
what you,
a Native American,
feel like
awakening now
to a face
in the mirror,
that greets
morning’s light,
not with a smile,
but fear
your complexion,
perhaps only a shade
darker than mine,
might find you
in ICE’s
angry grasp,
two steps away
from expulsion.
*
Identity docs,
once sacred sources
of pride,
and connection,
sat vaulted
in your tribal home,
rarely,
if ever,
in need
of exposure,
to the world
outside.
Now,
I’m told,
you dare not leave
the reservation,
without
your paper shields
of origin.
*
Your biggest fear—
how could I not feel
the same—
likely separation
from your children,
an old fear,
dating back
to early last
century,
when federal agents,
as if yesterday,
drag off
Native offspring
to attend
schools,
to acquire
more “whiteness”.
A curriculum
leading often
to forced labor
and early death,
as history’s
numerous
graves attest.
*
I hesitate,
these days,
to stroll
the town square,
birthed
and sustained
by Puebloans
like yourself,
long before
the arrival
of Europeans.
I reel,
with broken heart,
as ICE grabs you
off the street,
to challenge
your sovereign right,
stretching back
a thousand years,
to call America
home.*
Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, and others here and abroad. His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored over 290 poems, published on four continents.
*
CATALOGUING OUR NAMES
by Karen Marker
*
Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts. —The New York Times, February 13, 2026
*
Still in the down of the dream world a text comes from Mona that says you are so brave which means she must have seen my Facebook post about ICE and knows of the threats made about collecting names. I also named the commandment from Exodus about how we should treat the stranger. Such a long list of us, once strangers ourselves. Will they record our names, imprison all of us, including the thirteen-year-old who read the torah portion and the rabbi who said all who want to take a stand rise and come up for the blessings? No one was left in their seats. We were packed so tight together, all of us touching someone who was touching the parchment, another name for light holding the words like a mother. Like the mother who stood beside me holding her child with deep brown eyes staring straight into my eyes. She didn’t look away from my tearing up like I can’t look away from what keeps me awake at night thinking of the children in the prison camps, the names I need to speak so I won’t forget. Receiving blessings, touching light, we were one breathing body. What can I text Mona that will soothe her fear for the dark skin she got from her Indian Hindu father, her Mizrachi Jewish mother? Even with her credentials that made her a top doctor specialist, gave her a beautiful suburban life, she’s still afraid for her son and tells me she couldn’t survive without her medicines, not one day in that prison camp and I admit I’m just as scared of being sent away. It’s all that’s unhealed that makes us even more afraid. It is the cage, the chains, the clanging doors of our brains, how the past climbs back up and casts us out. But now Mona is calling, telling me how everyone’s been working so hard in Ohio, like one family. At least for today there’s a stay by the judge, the Haitians in Springfield are safe.
*
Karen Marker is an Oakland, CA. poet activist and retired school psychologist whose poetry of protest and hope in response to the news will be coming out as a book in the coming year. Her poetry has appeared in NVN and various other journals including The MacGuffin, The Monterey Poetry Review, the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Slant, and WordPeace. Her book of flash memoir and poetry Beneath the Blue Umbrella is available through Finishing Line Press and explores resilience in face of family trauma.
Thank you, poets.