Winter 2021-22 issue Editorial

As with climate change, capitalism is inseparable from war, a barbarous crime always inflicted on our working class. The horror in Ukraine is largely a result of 8 years of U.S. meddling and efforts to expand NATO, an aggressive, U.S.-led military bloc, to Russia's border in spite of previous agreements and warnings. Though this does not and cannot justify Russia's monstrous actions, our further involvement may quickly escalate to global nuclear annihilation. We, living at Ground Zero, hope to survive long enough to get this issue out.

Many of us are having terrifying flashbacks to the cold war. People in places like Baghdad, Panama City, Beirut, Belgrade, Afghanistan, Gaza and elsewhere are reliving the visceral terror of being bombed. Unlike Ukrainian victims ubiquitous our media, we did not see such coverage of them.

As working people, the inevitable targets of every ruling class dispute, we stand against war and the escalation of war. The horrors inflicted on Ukraine, Yemen and elsewhere make clear the barbarity of military solutions and the necessity of abolishing nuclear weapons. The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, already ratified by 86 countries, demonstrates that this is possible. Our security and survival as a species requires global cooperation and an end to corporate nation-states fighting for control of resources, especially oil and gas -- again.

The poets in this issue have had enough: enough on the job abuse, enough commercialism and the commodification and extortion of our most basic needs, enough of racism, sexism, xenophobia, militarism and of the murderous, lying hypocrisy of corrupt corporate oligarchy feeding on destruction and disaster. Poems in this issue confront cultural discrimination as well as wrestling with our unchosen places and complicity in the web of racism that defines U.S. society. This includes the struggle against cultural arrogance that seeks to oppress other languages and those who speak them. Other poems speak of the accumulated loneliness and difficulties of the pandemic and question what the "new normal" will be. Especially relevant is a long poem by Davida Kilgore titled, Normal is Just a Setting on the Dryer, which gets to the root of our deeper national disease. Also prominent are poems and prose on the poisoning of poor and Black communities for profit by fossil fuel corporations in Louisiana's "cancer ally" and their power over elected legislators.

These are the kind of poems, the kind of collection, that you will likely not find in other literary magazines and journals, though we wish that were not the case. This is a not-for-profit collective effort funded by our subscribers and supporters. Our staff subsists with difficulty on Social Security. We couldn't afford to do this on our own. This is made more difficult as our copy-editor and spouse of Al, our editor, is recovering from a recent mild but significant stroke. As the price of everything, including postal rates, continues to rise, your support is even more important. This is our fundraising issue and we more than appreciate your support as well as your writing and your input.

A hard winter bears the promise of spring. Let us work for an end to war and against the continuing destruction of our world by the profiteering gangsterism of corporate state power and the blind, murderous, bigoted nationalism they promote to justify their existence and their crimes at our expense. Let us together continue to shape a culture of sanity, of empathy and of solidarity toward the creation of a better world.