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Essentially Stateless looks at human rights violation and what it's like to be stateless within Australia's immigration detention system. The voice of asylum-seeker, Said Imasi, has been diminished, trampled on, and ignored for eight years.

Beyond Bravery remembers the life of Witold Pilecki
⁠--the only person to volunteer to enter a German concentration camp. He was a soldier of the Second Polish Republic and was tortured and executed in 1948. His story was suppressed by the Soviets for over 40 years. His extraordinary bravery was largely forgotten until recently.
 
Telling the Stories highlights the intentional and politically motivated systematic disenfranchisement of African American voters in Georgia, USA, during the 2018 mid-term elections.

No Exaggeration is about the struggle transgender people face in claiming their identity at a time when politicians seek to erase that very identity.

~ K.V. Martins

Essentially Stateless

A man without a past: a man without a future.
 
He believes
 
                                   but cannot prove
 
he was born in Spain’s Canary Islands,
to a mother from Western Sahara.
 
He knows nothing about his father
 
he was trafficked
 
He has lived a life on the peripheries
an existence sometimes outside the law
 
Imasi arrived in Australia – intending to pass through
But he has been detained –
 
without allegation, charge, or trial –
 
for nearly eight years
 
there is no country on earth
that accepts him as their citizen
 
He speaks fluent English, his “ninth or 10th language”
and one learned in detention
 
I have no words to explain to you
 
Every day I am crushed, every day is another life sentence.
And there is nothing I can do. They told me I had
 
                    no choices.

This is a found poem.
Source: Doherty, Ben. “'Every Day I Am Crushed': the Stateless Man Held without Trial by Australia for Eight Years.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Jan. 2018.

Beyond Bravery

The man volunteered - a cavalryman
 
he thought his days of military service
were over.
 
Let himself be caught, became prisoner 4859.
Hard to imagine how hard to stay alive in the camps.
 
After the war, his final report. It appeared clear
the Soviets didn’t intend to leave.
 
Marked as an enemy of the state,
any hope                      melted away.
 
He didn’t reveal any names -
told his wife these words:
 
I cannot live. They killed me.
Because compared to them
 
Auschwitz
 
was just a trifle.
 
The sentence was obvious –
 
            Death
 
                        Executed
 
                                                Shot
 
                                                                            in the back
 
                                                                           
                          of the head.
 
He was 47.
 
They tried to erase him
 
no one knows where his body is now.

This is a found poem.
Source: Lucjan, Damian. “Witold Pilecki - The Incredible Story of The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz.” WAR HISTORY ONLINE, 5 June 2017.

Telling the Stories

           of people purged
 
to be sure, an eye-popping number — as with all statistics,
            the abstract number can obscure
 
                                      the human toll.
 
92 years old, dressed to the nines.
Except
           they didn’t let her vote. Purged, erased
 
her cousin, Martin Luther King Jr., murdered.
Her granddaughter,      crying inconsolable tears.
 
Miss Christine (that’s how they speak in Georgia)
Never talked politics, just church gossip and family.
 
And she sang
 
                         We shall overcome
 
but her name remained missing
 
It would not be counted.
God bless America.
 
If there is any hope here, it is the                       long process
of restoring democracy.
 
Sometimes
 
investigative reporting accomplishes more
than lining bird cages
 
It’s looking more like 1963 than 2018.
 
It's strange
 
we are still talking
 
about whether
                                 votes should be counted.

This is a found poem.
Source: Rozsa, Matthew. “Disenfranchised in Georgia: Telling the Stories of People Purged by Brian Kemp.” Salon, Salon.com, 16 Nov. 2018.

No Exaggeration

Trump wants to / erase transgender people / under the law
to define sex as either / male or female

                                  unchangeable

determined by the genitals / subject to genetic testing
 
it’s entirely unclear how intersex people would fit into this / federal registry of genitals
 
                                  Transphobia
                                  No exaggeration

This is a found poem.
Source: “No Exaggeration: Trump Wants to Erase Transgender People.” ThinkProgress.

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K.V. Martins is a poet and short story writer from New Zealand. Her work has appeared in The Copperfield Review, Flash Frontier, Flash Flood Journal, Furtive Dalliance Literary Review, Barren Magazine, The Drabble, Plum Tree Tavern, Café Lit and "a fine line'. She stays awake at night worrying about the current state of politics and whether we will survive climate change.
COPYRIGHT © MOONCHILD MAGAZINE 2021.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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