TWELVE DAYS

by Shirrin Jabalameli

There was no sound.

But the walls struggled to breathe,

and flecks of plaster rained down like strands of an old woman’s hair who could no longer sleep.

 

The woman came up from the basement.

Not out of fear,

but to see a sky that could no longer be seen.

 

She was a painter.

There was no paint.

No coffee left.

A voice in her head whispered: Paint. Even with ash.

 

The calendar flipped forward,

like an endless explosion bursting through seconds.

And the clock froze 

at 3:20 AM.

 

Day One

 

A dragon leapt out of a painting.

A dome cracked open.

Silently.

With a tremor only she felt.

Something broke beneath her feet,

and she polished the shoes she hadn’t worn.

 

Day Two

 

A message arrived.

The number wasn't saved.

It read: “Are you alive?”

She didn’t reply.

She just sat there, stared at the cracked photo frame, and said:

“How did you know I should be dead?”

The city emptied.

 

Day Three

 

No smell of bread.

No scent of blood either.

Only the thud of words pounding the walls.

The tiles recorded the blast.

She wrote: “We are still words.”

Then she drew the letter “N” backwards,

added two diacritics beneath the “K.”

A man saw it,

and ran.

 

Day Four

 

A child found a seashell on the ground.

He asked his mother: “Is this the sea?”

She said nothing.

The woman picked up the shell and answered:

“No. It’s the last remnant of listening.”

An old man’s cane began to calligraph across the stones.

 

Day Five

 

The mirror cracked.

But its reflection didn’t cry.

The woman inside the mirror was no longer her.

One of them was asleep.

The other,

awake and fighting.

And in that same dawn,

a verse trembled.

 

Day Six

 

The phone rang.

No name saved.

A voice said: “Remember that mountain you climbed as a kid?”

She laughed: “You saw me?”

The voice replied: “Still stubborn. Still painting.”

 

Chopin’s notes tangled with the roar of an explosion.

 

Day Seven

 

The alleyways had fallen asleep.

In their dreams,

they swallowed the lead.

A crow asked: “Why are you still awake?”

Sejjil interpreted the dream.

  

Day Eight

 

Someone on the other side of the wall was talking to himself.

Half of his words were Persian.

The other half—screams.

She didn’t hear it through the window.

She heard it through the wall’s skin

in the precise place where sound no longer existed.

But her skin did.

 

Day Nine

 

A man shouted: “Enough!”

His voice echoed back into him.

The painter woman said:

“No. We’re not there yet. You must go all the way.”

 

Day Ten

 

Rain didn’t fall,

but the ground was wet.

The air had wept.

Someone wrote:

“You’re alive. Do it.”

 

Day Eleven

 

She painted a piece that smelled of burned coffee.

The one-legged goat said:

“I’m not the way back?”

 

She replied:

“You’re the reason I stayed, though you may never understand.”

 

Day Twelve

 

Everything was just as it had always been.

But nothing was in its place.

She looked at the word she had written on the wall.

It hadn't been erased.

Just slightly more ... upside-down.

 

The End?

No.

These were just twelve chapters

of a book not written in blood,

but in the color of resistance, 

resistance that could still be seen,

even through smoke.

Shirrin Jabalameli is an Iranian writer, painter, photographer, and storyteller. She is currently working on a poetry-photo hybrid collection reflecting on memory and witness.There was no sound.

DISPATCH FROM GAZA, JUNE 2025

by Carolyn Martin

With thanks to Yasser Abu Rida

Maria

From inside a desert tent––how I do not know––
he posts comments on my Facebook page.
“Lovely”: the Easter lilies bursting in my yard.
“Always creative”: his response to my latest poetry.
 
While I sit in the luxury of blossoms and words,
he messages me Khuza’a, his village, is gone.
What’s left: a wife, three kids, and the courage to survive.
“Endless displacements”: he calls his current address
and “Like zombies,” he says, “who don’t look 
left or right, people run toward flour trucks.”
Famine weakens hope.
 
Yet, he asks me to celebrate Maria’s birthday.
“Two,” he wrote, “and she has never seen
anything beautiful in this world.”
I ask him to give her a kiss and show her 
that Easter lilies exist somewhere 
on this tattered Earth.

 

Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired in Clackamas, OR, where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. Her poems have appeared in more than 200 publications around the world.

I SUPPORT THE CONSTITUTION

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Cartoon by Ann Telnaes

I had a community read last night. Yes, a good old 

sharing of verse and opinions about the state 

of things, society, government, the neighbor laying 

a pillow outside the Martin Luther King library 

on G Street in the capital, to spend the night 

al aire libre, in the free air, on the eve of 

the 4th of July. Hey, buddy, do you want 

a dollar? How can I get you to the shelter?

Are the shelters disappearing with the ticker tape

after the Big Bloated Butchery Bill? Oh, how 

easy to go after MAGA, just twist the words 

and support the appointments of former 

insurrectionists to the Department of Injustice, 

to the Uncivil Rights Division, to the god-forsaken 

Black House. How unfortunate colors and 

their associations. Let’s change the popular 

perception. When I from black and he from 

white cloud free. Blake said it almost 

two hundred and forty years ago, 

during  the English campaign against 

slavery then. Now we see ourselves

shackled by the police state, surveilled,

our social security numbers sold to Palantir. 

This is rotten, my friends And yet we 

bring out hot dogs and coca cola today 

to feast the 249th anniversary of 

our independence. How sweet it is. 

How bitter. To say Goodbye to All That. 

To say, hello concentration camps 

in every hamlet. To say, NO. NO. NO. 

And yes I pledged my allegiance 

to the Constitution when I naturalized 

in 1988. I did not sing God Save the King.

Indran Amirthanayagam has just published El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores). Other recent publications include his translation of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books, 2025), Seer (Hanging Loose Press), and The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil). He is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

WHILE THE ELK WERE MOVING

by Nick Allison

To my right,
Longs Peak rises jagged through pine.
To my left,
a wide meadow scattered with boulders—
bones from the old world.
Below, a stream elegies the slope,
snowmelt running fast over stone
worn smooth by thaw and thunder.
This morning, an elk herd passed through—
massive, deliberate,
moving with the grace of dancers,
as if gravity had chosen to spare them.
Not silence,
but the absence of familiar noise.
No voices. No engines.
No signal or screen.
Just the wind-clipped scratch of pen on paper,
and a stillness with weight—
the kind that settles like mist on skin,
that hushes thought.
In the fragile solitude of mountains,
one can almost forget how the edges burn.
Tomorrow I’ll hike back down, return—
to towers, to headlines,
to see what’s become of things—
to see if the center held,
or if, while the elk were moving,
the scaffolding finally collapsed.
He deployed Marines to American streets—
maybe that was the tilt.
Maybe not.
Days fold behind each other
like stage sets in the dark.
Blanket pardons.
Raids without warrants.
Agents at schools,
asking children for names.
Reporters cuffed.
A free press recast as enemy of the people.
The Justice Department, a private shield.
Federal hands bending toward one voice—
like sunflowers to heat.
He speaks of a third term
the way we speak of death:
a joke, until it isn’t.
Warnings come,
dressed in neutral tones:
constitutional crisis,
erosion of norms,
precedent dissolved.
But warnings read like museum plaques
once fire has claimed the foundation.
At some point, it stops being if—
and the only question left
is whether we’re still watching,
or simply learning to live inside the collapse.

Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, college dropout, and writer based in Austin, Texas. His poems and essays have appeared in The Shore, Eunoia Review, HuffPost, The Chaos Section, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. He recently curated and edited the free-to-read poetry anthology Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age. “While the Elk Were Moving” is adapted from the introduction to that collection. More of his work can be found at TheTruthAboutTigers.com and @nickallison80.bsky.social.

ANTHEM

by Thomas DeFreitas

America is Bible and battery acid, Krispy Kreme and Christian soldiers, MAGA hats and “good people on both sides.” Forced birth, illegal miscarriages, classrooms from which history is deleted, whitewashed. Here we lock up refugees and confiscate their rosaries only to throw them away. Here we threaten families who display the wrong yard-signs. Here we say the Lord's Prayer at the end of twelve-step meetings, “not allied with any sect.” Liberty’s arm is tired from holding up that torch for all these bloody years. A voice-over announces the death, by embarrassment, of The New Colossus.

America is Deliverance and Don’t Say Gay. Fireworks on the Esplanade, the cannonade of 1812. Senatorial thoughts, congressional prayers. Spare the machine-gun, spoil the child. Wives submitting to their husbands, who give them black-and-blue merit-badges for overcooking the lasagna. America: a hot flat ounce of cola in a patriotic can. Plastic and persimmon. Sassafras and sadism.
 
America welcomes you if you’re One Of Us.

Thomas DeFreitas was born in Boston in 1969. A graduate of the Boston Latin School, he attended the University of Massachusetts, both in Boston and in Amherst. His poems have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Plainsongs, Ibbetson Street, Pensive, and elsewhere. His latest collection is Walking Between the Raindrops (Kelsay Books, 2025).

NOW AT THE FOOD CENTER

by Deb Freedman

Our clients are gracious even though all we offer won’t get them through July.

Handicapped stickers hang on their cars’ rearview mirrors;

backseats are strewn with car seats, crumbs, and walkers.

They show us pictures of grandchildren or kittens.

Sometimes, they walk across the bridge.

Sometimes, they tell us they’re hungry.

Two skinny little boys ask if we have any books for them.

When my friend says they can help themselves to as many as they want,

they get so excited, they rock their car.

The older brother tells his little brother to take 4 only books.

The older boy sees one about wolves and growls at me, grinning with a wiggly tooth.

They chorus thank you as their dad drives away.

Anna walks over without her curly, gray-haired dog today.

She says Sadie has a lump on her belly and she’s worried.

The vet will see her sweet baby on the 14^th.

She doesn’t know what she’ll do if it’s serious.

The blonde school bus driver, the size of a 5^th grader, waves

her passport at me.

She takes it everywhere.

Born here, she is afraid to go to the store.

Now is before the “Big Beautiful Bill” passes.

Deb Freedman's poetry has been published in The New Verse News, US I/ DVP Poets Worksheets and most recently, Patterson Literary Review. The Food Center, its clients and volunteers, take up a large shelf in her heart.

AMERICA’S PRECIPICE

by Laura Boatner

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

It starts with one stone
      a chipping away, chiseling of sorts
      digging to China as my mother always         
      said                                        

In China it was pounded into sand
       and their people have known it
       for seven decades or so

Here, babbling brooks, once slick as silk
        have rough edges now etched
        into fifty pieces, maybe fifty-one

A carnival barker yelling;
        flushed face, eyebrows furrowed
        the color of honeydew, or more
        fluorescent than that
     
Stones and bricks in a road leading to Oz
        because this doesn’t feel quite real
        and the curtains are pulled back

Judges, legislators, 
           one at a time acquiescing 
           out of fear, reprisal
           is this really happening?
               to us of all people?
               right now?
               like we’re scarecrows or something?

In one-hundred days
               the rocks have become boulders
               on shoulders of complacency
 
David threw a rock at Goliath 
              hitting the target
              unlike we do at the strongman 

A mountain of stone
              penetrated upon and fissured
              and it’s on this precipice that 
              we now stand

Laura Boatner is a registered nurse by day and an aspiring writer by night.  She has been published in scholarly nursing journals, but finds it much more fun to write fiction.  She has been accepted into the MAPW program at Kennesaw State University in Fall 2025.  She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and her two rescue pups, Birdie and Pepper.

I HEAR AMERICA CRYING

by Judy Trupin

holding in their fingers the shreds of constitution
tattered perhaps beyond repair
The insurrectionists running free, absolved
I hear America crying
the carpenter and the mason being dragged away
by the chilling iceman
their families slipping on their tears
and murmuring to each other
What is this land in which we dwell?
A boatman turned pilot ferries them away to 
prisons in countries unknown
I hear America crying
as judges erase the law of the land
another pilot does not cry but grits his teeth
as he drops his bombs
preserving his president’s honor but nothing else
I hear America reeling as yes becomes no
and truth morphs into lies
I hear America whispering
too afraid to sing
to afraid to shout
huddling in their homes
uncertain what the night will bring
or when the night will end
and if they will sing 
and if they will sing
again.

Judy Trupin lives, writes, and thinks in Pittsburgh, PA. Walking, teaching and practicing yoga and singing to her plants keeps her sane.