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  "description": "Writers and artists from San Antonio to Quezon City respond to James Baldwin's historic words about 'every bombed village' being our own hometowns as we witness US-backed bombs fall on Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Venezuela, and so many other places.",
  "path": "/every-bombed-village-deceleration-creative-review-spring-2026/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-28T22:30:24.000Z",
  "site": "https://deceleration.news",
  "tags": [
    "threatening to invade Cuba",
    "nearly 200 fishers",
    "a 1968 letter to the editor",
    "here",
    "Read the full essay",
    "Vera's Will",
    "The Legacy of Lost Things",
    "All the Ways We Lied",
    "Dissonance",
    "Stories from the Stage",
    "TEDx Cabarete",
    "litigated a case",
    "@littlebummergirl",
    "odiwelter.net",
    "@o.d.i.welter",
    "@odiasinoverdose19",
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  "textContent": "Editor’s Note: _As I write, the Trump regime is_  threatening to invade Cuba_and abduct its revolutionary hero and former president, 94-year-old Raúl Castro. This after kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and murdering_ nearly 200 fishers _in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean Sea; after relentlessly bombing Iran and assassinating many of its leaders; after funding and backing the Israeli assault on Lebanon and genocide campaign in Gaza: all of it in just the first five months of 2026._\n\n_I’m 71. When I try to count how many countries the U.S. has invaded, occupied, intervened in, ravaged just during my lifetime—Korea and Vietnam, Grenada and El Salvador, Palestine and Libya and Somalia and so many more—well, I can’t. The bitter truth seems to be there’s no end in sight._\n\n_How do we respond? What can we do?_\n\n_We march. We protest. We disrupt the war machine as best we can. And, taking to heart brilliant writer James Baldwin’s impassioned_ cri de coeur _of almost sixty years ago, during the Vietnam War—“Every bombed village is my hometown”—we create art. Because while this moment calls for action, it also calls for radical empathy. Which is where artists come in, as Baldwin teaches us._\n\n_With words, sounds, and images, artists tell our fellow humans suffering under U.S. or U.S.-backed bombardment: We care. We are with you. We tell our friends, neighbors, and co-workers here at home: This is our family. Feel them. Stand with them. Don’t look away._\n\n_So when Deceleration invited me to guest edit this issue of their creative review, it felt like an important, even urgent, task. Asking writers and artists to respond to Baldwin’s call contributes toward the international solidarity we need in this moment._\n\n_We think the work presented here is just such a contribution. From Mecca Miles’ superb opener “Watching the World End from the Rower at Planet Fitness” to Aliza Haskal’s stunning Netanyahu blackout poem, Odi Welter’s “Butterfly Massacre,” Isabella Briseño’s “Power Lines,” and Daniel Bertetti ‘s powerful graphic rendering of war profiteering, this is art full of heart and fury._\n\n_Ed Johnson’s “Emanuel” and Maya Perkin's \"The War on 'Thugs'\" also reminds us—as did the original context for Baldwin’s quote, which appeared in_ a 1968 letter to the editor_at the height of both anti-war and Black Power movements—that the imperialist bombing and bulldozing of homes elsewhere is always deeply linked to the racist and willful destruction of homes and lives right here. Or as Avril Shakira Villar puts it in a powerful essay we’ve excerpted here (read the full version_ here_):_\n\n\"[V]iolence organized by empire is never entirely local. It has a return address. And the people it falls on—in Da Nang, in Fallujah, in Gaza City, in South Beirut, in the outskirts of Caracas—are someone's neighbor. They are the woman who straightened her clothes before leaving, the child doing arithmetic at the window, the nurse who will not come home.\"\n\n_We hope you are similarly moved by the artistic responses to the brutality and cruelty of this moment. Angered. Inspired. And strengthened to keep fighting for a better world._\n\n— Shelley Ettinger, Guest Editor\n\n* * *\n\n###  _Watching the World End from the Rower at Planet Fitness_\n\nMecca Miles\n\nThe Bible say we be made of dark earth—\n\nthat from the dust we came,\n\nand to the dust we shall return.\n\nAnd maybe that’s why\n\nsome mornings\n\ntaste like dirt—\n\nlike decomposition disguised as daybreak,\n\nlike an oasis\n\nthat forgot the rain.\n\nI bury headlines\n\nin anime and funny cat videos,\n\ntry to imagine\n\nthe debris in the air\n\nis not the remnants of an explosion\n\nand its victims,\n\nbut a body\n\nbeing breathed into existence—\n\nthat the plume means life,\n\nnot death.\n\nI try to imagine a softer world\n\nwhere my only worry\n\nis the wind\n\nand whether it might\n\nblow the sediment\n\noff my skin.\n\nBut the fine print\n\nat the bottom of the TV screen\n\nat my local Planet Fitness\n\nbecomes my worst enemy.\n\nOr maybe it’s the man\n\nwho put Fox News on\n\nright in front of my favorite rower.\n\nOr maybe it’s the too-expensive shoes\n\nthat don’t quite fit\n\nhow they’re supposed to.\n\nI can’t tell which is worse—\n\nthe realization that I am uncomfortable,\n\nor the understanding that I should be.\n\nWhen Adam came face to face with his sculptor,\n\nafter the realization of his nakedness,\n\nnothing about his shoulders\n\nspelled relaxation.\n\nWhen the news anchor fabricates another story,\n\nmolds the clay of truth\n\ninto something unrecognizable,\n\nthe muscles on my scapula tense.\n\nEven my tendons feel the farce\n\nas I pull the bar toward my chest—\n\nnothing about my earth\n\nfeels like fertile land.\n\nInstead,\n\nit feels like quicksand,\n\nlike each row sinks me deeper into the ground,\n\nlike my ragged breath is not the result of exertion,\n\nbut rather a mushroom cloud.\n\nIn this moment,\n\nI do not have my phone to distract me—\n\nno funny TikTok\n\nto take my mind off\n\nall the horror that transpired the previous day,\n\nthat is being reduced to dust\n\non the bottom of a screen.\n\nAnd maybe this is just an exercise in being present—\n\nnot the one I pay a membership for,\n\nbut one paid in the blood\n\nof those on foreign soil\n\n* * *\n\n###  _Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, This Evening_\n\nAliza Haskal\n\n* * *\n\n###  _Butterfly Massacre_\n\nOdi Welter\n\nThere are more butterflies in my stomach\n\nthen there are in my hometown\n\neven though flowers abound in my mother’s garden\n\nand I take pills to drown out the anxiety\n\nThere are, in my hometown,\n\npeople in red hats and no more butterflies\n\nI take pills to drown out the anxiety\n\nwhenever I come to visit\n\nPeople in red hats and no more butterflies\n\nis the path our nation is taking\n\nwhenever I come to visit\n\nI can’t forget that I’m not welcome\n\nThe path our nation is taking\n\nis one of erasure and denial\n\nI can’t forget that I’m not welcome\n\nwhen I look in the mirror\n\nIs it one of erasure and denial\n\nif we scream louder than they shoot?\n\nWhen I look in the mirror\n\ndoes it matter if they think I shouldn’t exist?\n\nIf we scream louder than they shoot\n\ncan they make us disappear like butterflies?\n\nDoes it matter if they think I shouldn’t exist\n\nif I continue to anyway?\n\nThey can make us disappear like butterflies\n\nbut it would be seasonal, a migration\n\nit matters if they think I shouldn’t exist\n\nbecause they will try to make sure I don’t\n\nIt would be seasonal, a migration\n\nanother moment in our history where\n\nthey will try to make sure we don’t\n\nexist because the colors hurt their eyes\n\nAnother moment in our history where\n\nthey build armies and call them coalitions\n\nthat exist because color hurts their eyes\n\nand they think red will wash the world gray\n\nThey build armies and call them coalitions\n\nto make hometowns unwelcome\n\nand they think red will wash the world gray\n\nas they throw bombs in neighbors’ windows\n\nMy hometown has been made unwelcome\n\nand I have more butterflies in my stomach\n\nas they throw bombs in neighbors’ windows\n\nand I take pills to drown out anxiety\n\n* * *\n\n __Daniel Bertetti, \"Chevron Station #2.\" Bertetti says: \"__ I'm 26, which means I'm old enough to remember when corporations had a certain aesthetic in their advertisements (‘Frutiger Aero,’ they called it). But now it seems minimalism has reduced this to names with transparent backgrounds, erasing the impacts of these companies while still slapping their names on every product. So I would LOVE to brandish just their names, over and over, on the things they support but oddly leave their names off of.”\n\n* * *\n\n###  _Powerlines_\n\nIsabella Briseño\n\nThey're building a concentration camp\n\nby the school, and a wall on the river.\n\nToday I saw a bird, half run-over,\n\nturning itself in a jagged arc\n\nwith its good wing\n\nlike a warplane might circle and hum in the sky.\n\nOther birds watched from the power line.\n\nI'm changing my passwords to be more secure.\n\nWhat if I forget my old dog's name?\n\nThey're building a concentration camp\n\nby the school, and a wall on the river.\n\nI think of the bird turning itself, clinging to life\n\nWhat was my old street's name?\n\nI feel myself sinking into the asphalt\n\nturning with my good wing.\n\nWhile I sink, I can see the spirits of roots\n\nunder the hot pavement they suffocate under.\n\nThey welcome and envelop me\n\nback into the land.\n\nI can see the shadow of the power line swaying over me.\n\nI've been in the street, writhing.\n\nI've been on the powerline, watching.\n\nThey're building a concentration camp\n\nby the school, and a wall on the river.\n\nThe walls and camps\n\nand broken wings.\n\nI hear they're a fracture in who we are.\n\nOur bad wing. But,\n\nWe're building a concentration camp by the school\n\nWe're building a wall along the river\n\nWe're dropping bombs\n\nWe're watching from the power lines.\n\nThe bird has passed through the asphalt, and sunk into the Earth.\n\n* * *\n\nAlena Duckworth, \"Turtle Island\" (2025). Acrylic paint on recycled cardboard. Duckworth writes: \"Turtle island is a name given to this continent by the first people to inhabit it, blooming with beauty and wisdom that she stewards from deep within. Beneath the surface, the waters are polluted by the increasingly destructive capitalist machine—and yet they continue to hold her as she swims, determined to create a better world.”\n\n* * *\n\n###  _Recess Revoked_\n\nAlexandria Lacayo\n\nNo Red Rover. No Duck-Duck-Goose. Let’s play the Blame Game.\n\nYou can say it’s the cows, their methane, greenhouse gases,\n\ndeny it’s the crude oil, and an Arabic surname.\n\nResume diligently digging graves for the masses.\n\nWhat if both were true? An ecological crisis\n\nserved with a unified pandemic of genocide.\n\nChildren begging for water, wanting to quench their thirst,\n\nwatching the most unthinkable–Mission Classified.\n\nThose poor schoolgirls, not blessed like the brave Malala,\n\nbut learning still, aspirations yet to be attained.\n\nThe mothers wept as the fathers tried to maneuver\n\nthe rubble, the embers, the remains of what remained.\n\nThousands of miles away, the sun shone high, warm, and bright,\n\nwhile nannies lathered children with Banana Boat Kids\n\nto run, play, cry, and eat woodchips. No one at this park\n\nknows the carnage across the globe, and _their_ skin won’t burn.\n\nEvery day, there is a little more death in the air.\n\nYou breathe it in, and so do I; no need to compare.\n\nShe notices it during her early morning prayer.\n\nHe’s immune to the toxicity, so he doesn’t care.\n\nLet us return to the Blame Game; I triple dog dare.\n\nWe can impersonate equals; I, the billionaire.\n\nTo get into your headspace, my speech, “I do declare;\n\nWe aren’t mindful of the earth’s or people’s welfare.”\n\nYou turned swiftly to leave, and I said, “That is not fair!\n\nImitate me!” All you gave was a blank, vapid stare.\n\nI’m sure you’re busy, with the trusty title of Chair.\n\nWhen your head hits the pillow, how’s that vivid nightmare?\n\nThe sky is blue; the clouds are white, but I don’t know where.\n\nThe rain won’t fall; dust and sandstorms swirl; what say, Voltaire?\n\nThey need bots to follow orders–not men, self-aware.\n\nRecess has been revoked; time to upgrade the spyware.\n\n* * *\n\nMaya Perkins, \"The War on 'Thugs' #1.\" Perkins says: \"This collection is rooted in reclaiming the identity of marginalized people fighting a “silent” war. The stereotypes that are associated with Black and Brown communities from birth are a form of exploitation that too often goes unchecked. By visually placing child-like figures in immediate danger, we are reminded of the harmful nature of our world. It is expected that the people who inspired these figures will become a statistic, yet the machine that curates such tragedy goes unpunished. Innocence is a luxury in both physical and psychological warfare.\"\n\n* * *\n\n###  _Hometown Poetry in My Zoom Meeting Notes: “Heeding Lebanese Voices—The Villages of Nabatieh and Bint Jbeil”_\n\nKamala Platt\n\n _“This conversation puts a human face on the Lebanese, including Americans, who are victims of Israel’s war. Arab Americans and Lebanese who have been directly impacted…share their stories, focusing on [their] southern villages.”_ —Arab American Institute\n\nPeople from Nabatieh and Bint Jbeil are displaced.\n\n“They are not refugees. They are in limbo.”\n\n“There is no village anymore.”\n\nThe residents found out on the Internet.\n\n“Their struggle goes back decades”—\n\n _From grandmother’s house,_\n\n_we had a view of Jabal Safi,_\n\n_Israel demolished the house._\n\nThe family came to the US in 1978.\n\nLater they returned, rebuilt, the house was destroyed, and rebuilt.\n\n_Now my grandmother’s repeatedly rebuilt house is demolished._\n\n_We have no more view of Mount Safi._\n\n“Israel has no history, there,\n\nso it is nothing to them to destroy a 400-year-old mosque.”\n\n“They say every air strike is a Hezbollah target, but this is not true—\n\nThey destroy even solar panels and Catholic monasteries.”\n\nMedia headlines focus on “security”\n\nPeople who lived there were beekeepers, carpenters, farmers.\n\nNabatieh’s history spans eight centuries.\n\nThere is “a massive surge to start each ceasefire.”\n\nThere has been “systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure\n\nso people can’t go back.”\n\n _I’ve a very deep connection with my village—_\n\n _I’ve memorized everything, its stores, its neighborhoods, its alleys, its roads…_\n\n _I recall the baker who would offer me a free piece,_\n\n_while I was waiting for my order—_\n\n _that’s just how the people live there._\n\nThere are many elders with stories to tell.\n\n_There was an elder man, over 90—_\n\n _when we would walk by, he would always say hi._\n\nHe would tell a joke. Everyone knew him.\n\nHe refused to leave home.\n\nIsrael killed him on their last day there,\n\nwhen that war was almost over.\n\nPre-war, between wars, it was like any other city.\n\nPeople were living well. Jewelry stores were investing there.\n\nEvery holiday was celebrated there.\n\nThe Lebanese national anthem was played.\n\n_Our village was a city, really,_\n\n_but it was like a village—everyone knew each other._\n\nNow no one is in the village.\n\nResidents are in limbo.\n\nThey are being told “the village is dead.”\n\n* * *\n\nMaya Perkins, \"The War on 'Thugs' #2\"\n\n* * *\n\n### _Black Rain_\n\nMark Wittmer\n\n _“Black rain has fallen over Tehran after oil depot strikes in the United States-Israel war on Iran filled the sky with toxic petrochemical smoke.” – Al Jazeera, March 24, 2026_\n\nHow the water cycle rewrites itself: oil\n\nlike ink spilled across a bombed out suburb.\n\nChildren dip fingers in the rooftop\n\ncistern, scrawl with darkened fingers hearts\n\nand birds, crude trees like geysers. They hold\n\nthe black creases of their palms skyward. Low clouds\n\nloom, a mass of tea leaves congealing at\n\nthe bottom of a cracked cup, prehistoric algae\n\nand phytoplankton sedimented under heat\n\nand pressure. The kettle boils dry. Its hollow body\n\ntrills a rising curl of steam, of smog, now\n\nsmoke. What sends up a plume? What arcs\n\ndarkly across the sky? A bird. A war. Augur,\n\nif eagles still ride air currents tell me when\n\nthe bodies under rubble will become liquid gold.\n\n* * *\n\n__Daniel Bertetti, \"Chevron Station #1\"__\n\n* * *\n\n### Wherever the Bomb Falls (An Excerpt)\n\nAvril Shakira Villar\n\nIn 1968, James Baldwin said of the Vietnam War: every bombed village is my hometown. He said it as a Black American who understood what it meant to be targeted by the instruments of a state that did not recognize your full humanity, who understood that the same logic that produced the napalm drop over a Vietnamese village had produced the redlining of American cities, the police precinct, the prison cell. He said it because he had spent enough time looking at the machinery of power clearly, without the softening lens of patriotism or exceptionalism, to understand that violence organized by empire is never entirely local. It has a return address. And the people it falls on—in Da Nang, in Fallujah, in Gaza City, in South Beirut, in the outskirts of Caracas—are someone's neighbor. They are the woman who straightened her clothes before leaving, the child doing arithmetic at the window, the nurse who will not come home.\n\nI think about Baldwin's words now, from the Philippines, from Quezon City, from a country that knows something about what it means to be on the receiving end of American strategic interest. I am not in Gaza. I have not stood in the rubble of a hospital in Khan Younis, or walked through what remains of a neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Beirut after the Israeli Air Force—equipped, funded, diplomatically shielded by the United States—finished with it. I have not watched the Orinoco Delta fill with the consequences of sanctions-engineered scarcity in Venezuela, or seen the particular way poverty compounds itself when a small Caribbean nation is denied access to financial systems because of decisions made in Washington for reasons that have more to do with geopolitics than with governance. I have not been there. But I know enough, and have read enough, and have listened enough to people who have survived enough, to understand that distance is a choice. And the choice to maintain it, to watch from across an ocean as the bombs fall and say this is not my war, is also a political act, also a statement about whose humanity counts and whose does not.\n\nThe bombs that fell on Gaza beginning in October 2023 had American components. This is a procurement record. The Joint Direct Attack Munition kits that guide American-made bombs to their targets—the BLU-109 bunker-busters, the 2,000-pound MK-84s that the Biden administration paused briefly and then resumed shipping—these are weapons with serial numbers and manufacturers and Congressional appropriations behind them, weapons paid for in part by a defense budget that, in fiscal year 2024, exceeded $886 billion. In the same fiscal year, the United Nations estimated that fully ending global hunger would cost approximately $40 billion annually. The math is not complicated. The United States spent more than twenty times the amount needed to end world hunger on its military budget alone, then debated whether to continue sending the bombs.\n\nLet me try to be specific about the places, because specificity is what empire works against. Empire prefers the broad stroke, the strategic framework, the security interest. It does not prefer the specific name, the specific street, the specific child who was there before the strike and was not there after. So let me try. …\n\nRead the full essay_._\n\n* * *\n\n### Emanuel\n\nEd Johnson\n\nVestiges of human light on the valley floor –\n\nthe neighbor kids are dressed up for Easter,\n\nthe men from the Portland Development Commission\n\nknock on doors, then bulldozers and rubble.\n\nMy new lilac hair in the Old Schoolhouse mirror\n\nmakes me look like I’m on the run, likely from myself.\n\nI am here, but not here. I order a Ruud Awakening\n\nbecause it opens windows, for a little while.\n\nI defenestrate to the streets of Central Albina.\n\nThe houses are long gone, the lots still inexplicably\n\nempty. You don’t have to know all the details\n\nof what happened here to commiserate with the ghosts\n\nthat haunt this land. The hospital is still unexpanded,\n\nthe community gone forever, the urbanity unrenewed.\n\nThe made-up blight, however, grows more real by the decade.\n\n* * *\n\nMaya Perkins, \"The War on 'Thugs' #3\"\n\n* * *\n\n### _Elegy for What I Cannot Write_\n\nAida Zilelian\n\nI never wrote a poem about war.\n\nAs a child every storm shook\n\nthe walls of my home.\n\nI never wrote a poem about war.\n\nIn classrooms I read the scene of Juliek\n\nplaying his violin in the Giewitz snowfall.\n\nI never wrote a poem about war.\n\nAt six, I was given thick-bound books filled with\n\npages of my decapitated poets.\n\nI never wrote a poem about war.\n\nAll my dears are toiling, fervent\n\nas they cry out the death tolls of children.\n\nI never wrote a poem about war.\n\nI haven’t the right. How can I ever know\n\nthose sorrows. I dare not try.\n\nI never wrote a poem about war.\n\nNot even today when a cellist played\n\nKatchaturian on a pile of wreckage in Beirut.\n\nI’ll never write a poem about war.\n\nWhat can I say that hasn’t been said,\n\nwhen I’m silenced into prayer for the dead\n\nand the dying.\n\n* * *\n\n###  _The children of Mariupol dream_\n\ndreams in dark bunkers: sky burdened\n\nonly by stars. Believe\n\ndreams in dark bunkers -- sky burdened\n\nnow with fire, chaos\n\nthat sound through fractured glass\n\ndreams in. Dark bunkers. Sky, burdened\n\nonly by stars. Believe.\n\n—Steve Wilson\n\n* * *\n\n### Biographies\n\n#### Shelley Ettinger, Guest Editor\n\nShelley Ettinger is the author of Vera's Will. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Gaza Verse, Mizna, Foglifter, Beyond Queer Words, Gertrude, Rabble Review and other journals. She is a Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writers' Retreat fellow and has been a queer anti-racist social justice activist for over fifty years.\n\n#### ****Aida Zilelia**** n\n\nAida Zilelian is a first-generation American-Armenian writer, educator, and public speaker. She is the author of novels The Legacy of Lost Things (winner of the Tololyan Prize) and All the Ways We Lied, and her debut poetry chapbook Dissonance won the Swan Scythe contest in 2025. Aida has told stories across the country, most recently on PBS’s televised Stories from the Stage. Her work has appeared in __West Trade Review, Midway, Phoebe, Sand Hills__ and others. She gave her first TEDx talk this April with TEDx Cabarete.\n\n#### Alena Duckworth\n\nAlena Duckworth’s career began in makeup, face painting and body painting. Using herself as her canvas and becoming interested in surreal and otherworldly themes through makeup, she transitioned into watercolor and acrylic painting. Growing up in British Columbia, Canada, Alena began creating at an early age and chose not to pursue a formal art education. Instead she practiced self-teaching methods and learned from her community and peers. Now, living in San Antonio, she has been a full-time artist for the past four years. She wields a diverse set of skills including airbrushing, mural painting, sign painting, body painting, prop fabrication and sculpting. Her work has been featured in several group exhibitions and galleries in Central Texas. Alena’s recent work and current focus cross many mediums as she continues to create pieces with surreal and fantastical elements that carry both personal and political themes.\n\n#### ****Alexandria Lacayo****\n\nAlexandria Lacayo is a writer, educator, and lifelong Clevelander. Her work has been published in __Cleveland Magazine__ ,__Northeast Ohio Parent Magazine__ , __Livinia Press__ , __pacificREVIEW__ , __Skeleton Flowers Press__ , and elsewhere. Alexandria enjoys spending time with family, reading, and watching trashy TV. She holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University and a BA in English from Baldwin Wallace University.\n\n#### ****Aliza Haskal****\n\nAliza Haskal is an emerging poet and recent graduate of Syracuse University's MFA Program in Poetry. She received a University Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and is published by Pacifica Literary Review, Club Plum, et al. She is kissing you on the cheek right now.\n\n#### ****Avril Shakira Villar****\n\nAvril Shakira Villar is a writer from the Philippines. She is the author of __I Live Because I Almost Died__ and an alumna of WriteGirl LA. She is the winner of the One Room One Hour essay competition by Jack Wieland and one of the finalists in the English Poetry category of the 2025 Maningning Miclat Art Foundation competition. Her pieces appear in Adi Magazine, Evanescent Magazine, Arcana Poetry Press, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Renard Press, and other literary magazines.\n\n#### ****Daniel Bertetti****\n\nDaniel Bertetti is a visual artist who recently returned to San Antonio to recommit to celebrating and interacting with his hometown. He believes that these unprecedented times require us to celebrate art and not shy away from the fact it has always been political.\n\n#### ****Edward Johnson****\n\nEdward Johnson is a legal aid attorney from Portland, Oregon, who has spent the past 30 years representing people living on and over the edge of homelessness. From 2020 to 2025 he litigated a case as part of a legal team that successfully sought restitution for 26 Black Portlanders whose families lost their community due to a planned hospital expansion that never happened, part of the legacy of Urban Renewal in Portland (depicted in the poem included here). He has poetry out or forthcoming in a number of literary magazines including __Eclectica Magazine, The Dissident Voice, Evergreen Review, Whisk(e)y Tit Journal__ and __Wailing & Gnashing.__\n\n#### ****Isabella Briseño****\n\nIsabella Briseño is an educator and organizer in San Antonio, Texas. They studied English at UTSA, and Library Science at UNT. In addition to teaching, Isabella has experience working in archives and special collections, tying together passions for storytelling, educating, and preserving our histories.\n\n#### ****Kamala Platt****\n\nKamala Platt is an adjunct profesora, artist, independent scholar, and author in South Texas and at The Meadowlark Center in Kansas. Publications include __Gravity Prevails__(2022) __Weedslovers__ (Finishing Line Press 2014), __On the Line__ (Wings Press 2010) and __Kinientos__ (Wordsworth 1992). She has shared her visual and performance art and poetry broadly, most often in community arts and cultural centers. Through 'green rascuache' lifeways, Kamala searches borderlands for footholds of dignity and well-being (resistance to walls, injustices, militarisms, 'isms,’ and ecological disrespect) amidst a feverish planet's crises. She holds an MFA in poetry and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.\n\n#### Maya Perkins\n\nMaya Perkins—@littlebummergirl on Instagram—is a multidisciplinary artist whose work thrives on the tension between visual harmony and emotional turbulence. Her work is not meant to comfort. It is meant to awaken by bringing forth the thoughts and feelings that are often buried. She thrives on utilizing her art to explore the chaos of everyday life.\n\n#### ****Mark Everett Wittme**** r\n\nMark Everett Wittmer is a poet and an MFA student at the University of Oregon. His work has appeared in __Plume, Apocalypse Confidential, Barnstorm, Barely South Review,__ and elsewhere.\n\n#### ****Mecca M. Miles****\n\nMecca M. Miles is a Black, queer writer and spoken word poet from San Antonio, Texas. Her work has appeared in such publications as Torch Literary Magazine, Wellspringwords Literary Anthology, The San Antonio Review, Texas Bards Anthology, When the River Speaks, Voices de la Luna, Voices Along the River, and has been featured on Button Poetry. She has competed nationwide, taking 8th in Florida at the Exit 36 Slam in 2023, and 8th in Dallas, TX at the Right to Write Slam in 2024. She has featured at a number of local venues and was the 2024/2025 Poetry Grand Slam Champion of San Antonio, TX.\n\n#### Odi Welter\n\nOdi Welter (they/she/he) is a queer neurodivergent author raised in Minnesota and living in Milwaukee. Their first publication was an obituary—which should make him way more emo than she is—and since then their creative work has been published in many journals and anthologies, most recently __Ouch! Collective__ , __Catalogue Zine__ , and __Becoming: Voices on Queerness and Gender by IHRAM Press__. Find them on Instagram @o.d.i.welter, TikTok @odiasinoverdose19, Bluesky @odiwelter, or at their website odiwelter.net.\n\n#### Steve Wilson\n\n****Steve Wilson's**** poetry has appeared in over 200 journals and some 65 anthologies. He is the author of six collections, the most recent entitled Complicity (2023). He lives in San Marcos, TX.",
  "title": "'Every Bombed Village'— Deceleration's Spring 2026 Creative Review",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-30T13:11:09.042Z"
}