Late last year, Federal agents raided six Swift & Co. meat processing plants in six states in search of illegal immigrants working there. 1,282 people were arrested in Operation Wagon Train.

This month's featured poet, Jacob Saenz, not only follows Pound's advice to "make it new," but converts this event into "news that stays news" in his poem, "Sweeping the States," from our November issue:

they move in swift on the Swift

Plants in six states & sift

through the faces to separate

the dark from the light



like meat & seat them in

the back of vans packed tight

like the product they pack

& who's to pick up the slack



the black & white can't cut it

so the beef stacks sell single

to feed the pack the flock

who block passages & clog



the cogs of the machine the process

not so swift to give & grant a wish

of a place a stake in the land

handling the steaks for the rest



to take in to sate the mouths

of  the stock who have stock

in the business of  beef & beef

with the brown who ground them

It's a strange irony that, as if proving that news really does stay news, one of the founding guarantors of this magazine in 1911 was none other than Charles H. Swift.

Kevin Young, also featured this month, invokes as well the harsh landscape in which so many work hard to earn a stake. Excerpted from a longer work, The Book of Hours, his lines may sound more lyrical, but they are equally tough, just as real. Here's a sample:

Black like an eye



bruised night brightens

by morning, yellow



then grey —

a memory.



What the light was like.



All day the heat a heavy,

colored coat. 



I want to lie

down like the lamb —



down & down

till gone —



shorn of its wool.

The cool



of setting & rising

in this valley,



the canyon between us

shoulders our echoes.



Moan, & make way.