LEFT TO PERISH

by Tricia L. Somers

This is a screenshot from the [WARNING!] sensitive video described in the poem.

This is the beginning

of the end of humanity 

At 11:30pm I logged 

onto my Instagram feed 

First clip 

from Motaz Azaiza 

They removed 

but he replaced it

Over one million likes 

"Fully engulfed tents"

means people burn alive 

I didn't cheat this time

I turned on the audio 

Someone yelling 

A man on the ground

kept raising his hand 

into the air 

Once, twice, again

slower each time 

No one to save him 

Innocence is not enough 

Just like all the teachers

and their students in 

over 500 bombed schools 

The end of all humanity 

begins with the end 

of humanity

Trish is out of L. A. Ca. where she lives with her Significant Other and some crazy cat or two. She debates and provides some kind of opposite viewpoint, to that of the cantankerous editor's, in the semi- annual print journal The American Dissident. Online poetry can be found at Rat's Ass Review, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. For a different perspective on current topics, please visit Bitch n Complain on Substack.

AT YOUR GRAVE

by Martha Landman

Arthur Rimbaud 20 October 1854 - 10 November 1891

I’m the only visitor today,  
small cemetery, speechless graves,
Your mailbox at the gate is full of fan-letters,
as if you’re the tooth fairy or some god.
 
It is wet and cold and my shoes 
gave me hell on the walk here.
Tomorrow I’ll wear my sandals, rain or not.
There’s lots I could ask you, but not here,
not today where you lie helplessly dead
on a peaceful summer’s afternoon, 
violet eyes shrouded in eternal sleep,
in the same plot with your mother 
and seventeen-year-old Vitalie.
 
Come to the cobbled square with me tonight.
Let’s dine and dance and have a quiet beer,
no absinthe, no hashish. Afterwards we’ll walk 
along the river Meuse under chestnut trees, 
past the mill, step into the tanner’s little boat
at the quay. Let’s sail into the flimsy air, 
set the night on fire, our reflections on the water,
you melding into me, the moon our lamp. 
Let’s write formless verse about our years in Africa,
mine as a child, yours as a merchant, explorer. 
I promise I won’t ask what I know you won’t tell
           —why did you give up poetry?


Martha Landman writes in Adelaide, South Australia on unceded Kaurna land. Her first single collection like scavenger birds was published by ICOE press, June 2023. Her poem “Girl From the Underground” (for Arthur Rimbaud) was highly commended in the WA Poetry d’Amour contest in August 2024.

FEMA AND MY DEAD PARENTS

by William Aarnes

FEMA was authorized in 1979

 

Lately, it seems raging storms have gotten worse

and the news about people hunting FEMA agents

has me thinking of my parents, my father

dead six years before FEMA got funded,

my mother dead ten years after FEMA

began helping clean up Love Canal.

My mother voted Republican.

My father voted Democrat.

                        

When our house blew away in 1957,

FEMA didn’t exist, so my parents

                              

had no thought of receiving $750

to help them recover from our loss.

The window wells filled in a millisecond.

Lifted out of the garage, the Bel Air landed in the front yard.

Somehow the piano stood alone in the living room.

Only my bedroom retained all its walls.

                              

Neighbors we barely knew and lived

—their home untouched—a block away

offered a place to sleep (as if my parents slept).

The day after a volunteer van arrived, women

dressed as nurses offering to sell

egg-salad sandwiches. I was ten

and now don’t recall how long

it took my parents to contact

their insurance agent. The tornado

left us little. Picking through debris

my parents laughed empty laughs.

They could do nothing else but rent

an apartment while having our home rebuilt.

They could have used $750

(or whatever the equivalent

might have been back then). My mother

would have hated taking a “handout”

but would have claimed a little extra

as “rightfully” ours. My father

would have diligently filled out the forms

to apply for any additional funds

a federal agency might grant

to help cover some of any shortfall.

My mother, worried about her brothers’ farms,

continued to vote Republican. My father, in favor

of teachers’ unions, kept on voting Democrat.

If alive now, my mother wouldn’t understand

the telling and repeating of hateful lies.  

If alive, my father wouldn’t mind, too much,

being told he tends to condescend.

My mother would now vote for candidates

who support tax breaks for small businesses.

My father would vote for candidates

who support improving ventilation in every school.

They’d agree to give something to Planned Parenthood.

There’s rubble and there’s rubble; they’d agree

to contribute to the children in the Ukraine and Gaza.

They’d worry about where best to donate hurricane relief.

My parents would have welcomed FEMA’s help.

But lately, it seems, raging storms have gotten worse.

William Aarnes lived in Fargo, North Dakota in 1957. He now lives in Manhattan.

A WHACK FOR THE AGES

by Peter Witt

Just once I want to stand at home plate in the bottom of the ninth,
game tied, bat in my hand, staring at the pitcher, waiting,
breath still, for a 95 MPH fastball, hung out over the plate—
like a lion waiting for its prey to make a move.

Pitcher would wind up, just beating the 20 second clock,
as I uncoil and smash the ball off the barrel of my bat—
thunder cracking from the heavens--take two steps forward,
flip the bat, as the ball soars, a comet slicing through the sky—
as I begin a slow dance down the first base line, hands over head
like a conquering hero, as the thankful fans stand and cheer.

Rounding third I'd low-five the coach, then trot home
where after jumping on the plate I'd be engulfed in the joy
and comradery of my teammates, who'd slap my helmet,
my butt, my back, while our catcher sprayed a bottle
of water over my head.

The mob of players would whisk me away, like a gust of wind,
to the dugout where the cape of honor would be bestowed
around my shoulders, more slaps to the helmet administered,
as our first baseman pushes me back up the steps
to take a curtain call from the grateful fans.

I'd wink at my wife in the stands, like a conquering hero,
wipe the mist from my eyes, pause a minute, survey
the entire stadium, the weight of the moment settling in,
knowing that this was a lifetime dream made real.

Peter Witt is a Texas poet, a frequent contributor to The New Verse News and other online poetry web-based publications.

LEGACY

by Jim Hanson

He finally was voted away
but left with the flick of a match
a wildfire burning across the land
turning once fertile fields of green
barren and black under a cloud,
as institutions smoldered from
forces of heated hate and malcontent
leaving behind for generations ahead
the remains of a republic uncertain
to rise in an unforeseeable future.

Jim Hanson is a retired university researcher and sociologist who lives in the St. Louis area. He has published three poetry collections titled Endless Journey, Ruminations of Living and Dying, and Perspectives, also some thirty single poems, and is a member of the St. Louis Poetry Center and Illinois State Poetry Society Southern Chapter.

EYE OF MILTON

by Jennifer Davis Michael

O Hell, hello, an O of grief:

the eye of Hurricane Milton 

spends its wide wrath,

darkening the world.

Climatology a talent

useless against false shepherds

swollen with profane wind.

 

Once the blind poet

rose from the pool of Styx,

invoking holy light

to flood his song. “Blind mouths,” 

he called those sham prophets

while he still had sight.

The contrary: the muteness of an eye.

Jennifer Davis Michael is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of two chapbooks, both from Finishing Line Press: Let Me Let Go (2020) and Dubious Breath (2022). Her poem "Forty Trochees" was selected by Rachel Hadas for the Frost Farm Prize in Metrical Poetry (2020). She has published several poems previously in The New Verse News.

AMERICAN RUSH HOUR

by Peg Quinn

AI-generated at Night Café

Traffic so heavy I sit, idle, on a freeway overpass 

watching four lanes stalled below me.

I listen to the radio.

Then notice someone, bent over, 

head pressed against a fence.

Maybe a hood, or corner of a blanket

covering their face, draping down their back

leg’s sunbaked, bare feet.

I wait for them to shift their weight

rise up, blink into the day.

They stay locked in place.

I worry. 

No one bends, frozen, immobile 

at a freeway exit unless in serious trouble

—or lost in prayer—

I shouldn’t make assumptions,

so grab my phone as my lane rolls forward.

The Sheriffs Department will send someone over,

though I’m haunted by this random gathering,

thoughts intent on work, 

appointments, deadlines, lovers,

merely glancing as we pass one of us,

a fellow traveler, struggling in silence. 

Bent.

Head pressed against a fence.

Peg Quinn’s poetry and non-fiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and four times nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection Mother Lode was published by Gunpowder Press in 2021.

MY SYMPTOMS APPROACHING ELECTION DAY

by Paul Hostovsky

I’m shaking my head all the time

and it looks like a tremor, it looks like

Parkinson’s. But in fact it’s negation.

It’s: No, no, no, no, no, no, no!

It’s disbelief and disapproval,

refusal to accept what’s unacceptable,

what’s so unspeakable I can only

cover my mouth and wonder how such people

can think such things. It’s unthinkable,

yet we who think it’s unthinkable

could very well be in the minority. I shake

my head and cover my mouth

and groan. Are you sick? a man asks me

at the post office. Here, take this.

And he hands me a red tote bag 

with MAGA emblazoned on both sides. No 

thank you! I say, and vomit directly into it,

cover my mouth, and shake my head

and leave him there holding the bag.

AI-generated graphic from Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.

WAKING UP COLD

by Thomas R. Smith

Watercolor painting by Judys Art

October 2024

Change of the seasons, woke up cold.

Time to pile on extra blankets.

Thought of the people living in rubble,

huddling under whatever scrap of comfort

they can pull around their bones—sick,

hungry, broken, families blown away,

entire bloodlines erased.  With no plan

to rebuild, it could take generations.

How to face such a dawn knowing children,

grandchildren, great-grandchildren pre-condemned?

Nor to forget among the tens or hundreds

of thousands dead those double hostages

of Hamas and Bibi.  God help us all.

Woke this morning, cold from a year of war.

Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.

LIVE-STREAMING GENOCIDE

by Bonnie Naradzay

On the one hand,
A 19-year-old journalist, Hassan Hamad, 
was assassinated by Israel’s army;
they’d warned him on WhatsApp to stop 
filming the killing of Gazans by the IDF, 
the most moral army in the world.  
That they’d come after him. 
This is your last warning, they said. 
And they did, with a drone strike
on his home in Jabaliya, 
a refugee camp in northern Gaza. 
You can see on this video
a few journalists collecting 
what remained of his body in a shoebox 
for burial.The inscrutable grief.  
On the other hand, Israel’s army
freely shares videos of their massacres
of unarmed Gazans, on Israeli dating apps, 
for clicks, with mocking songs:
“We’re launching Operation 8th Candle
of Hanukkah, the burning of Shuja’iyya
neighborhood. Let our enemies learn 
and be deterred. This is what we’ll do 
to all our enemies, and not a memory 
will be left of them for we will annihilate 
them all to dust.”  With impunity.

Bonnie Naradzay's manuscript will be published in 2025 by Slant Books. For years she has lef weekly poetry sessions at day shelters for homeless people and at a retirement center, all in Washington DC. Three times nominated for a Pushcart, her poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review Online, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, Cumberland River Review, New Verse News, and other places.. In 2010 she won the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize—a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary; there, she had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read Pound’s early poems.

RHAPSODY FOR RAFA

by Dick Altman

A lefty,

with bulging muscles

of terror,

for those unfortunate

enough to be playing

on the other side

of the net.

So strong,

it is said,

his top spin was

clocked at three

thousand revolutions

a minute.

No one else

in the pro game

came close.

 

I once ranked high

in the amateurs.

With his speed of ball,

playing him

would have been

less play,

than chasing

after a sphere

expelled

from a tornado.

 

So fast did the ball

come at you,

you hardly had time

to swing.

So fast,

you spent

most of the time

running deep

into corners,

that left you

breathless

after each point.

And he hardly

taking a breath.

 

Against Federer’s

eternal calm,

his face

was a study

in rictus,

every point,

so it seemed,

a matter of life

and tennis death—

a lost point

he should never

have lost.

 

Only late

in his career

did a smile grace

his face.

Was he letting up

a little,

I wanted to ask.

He had reached,

as I saw it,

another plain

of happiness,

where few

tennis angels

perched.

 

Rafa,

I might have

hated to play you,

but damned

if I didn’t love

your game.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Wingless Dreamer, Blueline, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad.  His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 250 poems, published on four continents.