WE CAN CHANGE THE STORY

by Elizabeth P. Glixman 

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News

First there was a war

than another war
There is always a war somewhere

even if it is in your mind
against he she they them we us

who
Once there were concentration camps
mass migration from Europe
to Europe the Middle East
Once there were bombs
and ships
once a blast Hiroshima
then there were parades and applause
then there were boomers
and Vietnam
conscientious objectors
people hanging out in the country there

was Jane Fonda
and Easy Rider 
Than there was ICE
It is like a movie where
one thing happens and another

They may all seem to be out of sequence
it is hard to keep
track of of dates and time and decades and epochs

It is hard to keep track of hate
Now there is the Donald  
the world keeps shaking 
he wants to interior decorate the world
We are in a snow globe of his making
everything moving
Obliterate demolish
like you've never seen before

The globe is shaking vigorously

Some world leaders shake the globe
every day every hour
they take a nap or golf 
or write posts
on social media
They shake shake shake the globe

shake it again
Stop shaking people plead
We need kindness and Gaza needs food
The world crumbles like a stale cupcake
and there is nothing left to shake
crumbs fleeing into space

Vote November 3rd to stop the shaking

Elizabeth P. Glixman is a poet, writer and artist who like many is hoping for peace on earth.

THE CIRCUS: A MUSING

by Howard Richard Debs

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

            —common quotation widely attributed to Abraham Lincoln

 

In Florida of all places there is a circus museum, I’ve been there, many times. I don’t know why, I’ve always thought the famous “fooling some” quote was from “P. T.” Barnum, that is, Phineas Taylor “P. T.” Barnum aka “the Greatest Showman”—I’ve seen the movie by the way and highly recommend it, well worth the time, I didn’t know Barnum was a newspaper man, a publisher in fact, a politician too, who knew?! Anyway, I digress. What’s so attractive about the circus, and I don’t mean Cirque du Soleil? I know it came to be a spectacle of distain, it was dispatched became a relic of the past, a society bent on being better voted “no” but for generations “The Big Top” had appeal. Why “the big top?” I looked it up: it occurred to circus promoters they could take their show anywhere, an open field would do, and pitch a tent, and do the show and move on and be gone and as a boy I marveled as I raptly watched as workers like bees changed a barren plot into a field of dreams. Because that’s what it’s all about.

 

Author note: My 83rd “voyage” around the sun was November 1. I have witnessed a lot. I am a news junkie, my inbox is constantly overflowing with headlines like Trump Cancels Weekend Rallies, Plans to Phone in to Other Midterm Campaign Events I studied philosophy back in the day and have puzzled ever since about the good and the bad, the juxtaposition and connection of things, most often the answer depends on the question raised.

Howard Richard Debs is a recipient of the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards. His essays, fiction, and poetry appear internationally; his art and photography will be found in select publications, including Rattle online as “Ekphrastic Challenge” artist and guest editor. His book Gallery: A Collection of Pictures and Words is a 2017 Best Book Awards and 2018 Book Excellence Awards recipient. His chapbook Political is the 2021 American Writing Awards winner in poetry. He is co-editor of New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, a winner of the 2023 International Book Awards. He is listed in Poets & Writers Directory.

APOPHENIA

by Frank Conahan

We believe in Tarot cards
Because we grew up
Being told we should credit

The expertise of
Meteorologists, their
Predictions aside.

So we did as we'd been told,
Believing them when
They'd call for clear skies (despite 

The subsequent rain).
We generalized our stance 
To fortune tellers,

Horoscopes, election polls,
And clairvoyants 
Across the board, as kids would  ...

The Jesuits bragged,
Give us a kid when he's young,
And we will own the adult. 

The pundits are sure
About Tuesday's election.
They predict clear skies. 

Dr. Frank Conahan lives in reclusive retirement outside of Baltimore, Maryland. He follows current events with trepidation and copes by writing verse. He has recently published poems with "Bards of Maryland." His collection Nothing Is Coming was published in April. 

INCANTATION FOR THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS

Anti-Hex as Duplex, after Jericho Brown

by Kim Harvey

We are a murmuration of starlings.

Millions move as one, alight in a blue wave.

 

A lighted candle’s flame burns blue at its base. 

Yarrow bloom, salt, and rue to bless and protect.

 

Bless the algae bloom in the Reflecting Pool.

Hate reflecting hate becomes its own fate.

 

The Fates awake to rehearse the verse.

Reverse the curse. There’s power in words. 

 

We’ll be heard. There’s power in numbers. We will

be a herd of zebras, a motion-dazzle.

 

Dazzling and transformed. Painted prayers in motion

from house to house, barn stars in the dark. 

 

In the darkness, we will vote them out.

We are a murmuration of starlings. 

Author’s note: Halloween is hanging in the air along with the midterm elections, and we all know which one is scarier this year. The tight Senate races are leading every news story along with a notable number of Republicans accusing Democrats of being witches. Last week, the Kansas Republican gubernatorial candidate accused his Democratic opponent and her daughter of performing demonic spells on TikTok to try to win the governorship. The same week, when talking about how he's scared the polls look bad for Republicans, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz said, "Right now, if you're a left-wing transgender witch, you hate Donald Trump, and you're going to show up. You're energized." It reeks of desperation and made me want to cast my own spell of protection to repel the hateful rhetoric and keep us and our democracy safe. Honestly, I believe the world can use more magic. Witches or not, let's move together as one, like shapeshifting starlings. Let’s all cast our spells, and—most importantly—our votes.

Kim Harvey is a three-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She was Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. You can find her work in Barren Magazine, Black Bough, Cathexis Northwest Press, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, River Mouth Review, SWWIM, The Shore, and elsewhere. She is the 1st Prize winner of the Comstock Review’s 2019 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award and the 3rd Prize winner of the 2019 Barren Press Poetry Contest. She had two microchapbooks published in 2020, Facing Gladstone from Kissing Dynamite Press and They Say in Your Dreams Everyone & Everything is You from Ghost City Press. In 2026, her ekphrastic poem "Sonnet for the Night Shift" was selected for a Best of Rattle Award.

PROGRESS

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

The Arabs in the Jewish state

Turned out in force to vote.

But Israel's right is mired in hate,

So progress is remote.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has around 380 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had sixteen previous poems in The New Verse News.

AN IDIOT TURN

by Indran Amirthanayagam

I will take a few deep breaths

and look at the mirror, the ceiling.

I will look outside the window

at the stars. There are only 

two days to go before the vote.

Millions have already mailed

in ballots. I will look again 

at the article, then endorsement 

of the Republican, Rogers, 

by a Democrat, Stevens,

 

who believes that the Republican 

must win because of his fierce

support for Israel and a promise 

that he will invest in black-owned

businesses, even if his victory 

means one more block 

in the Republican wall,  

seeking to hold on to the Senate, 

deny the chance to judge 

the thieves helicoptering currently 

out of the former Rose Garden.

Meanwhile, can one really

tell the color of the owner

of business X or Y? Aren’t

there colorless banks

ready to offer development 

loans to the CEOs? I am still 

keeping calm. To each his own, 

including the right to betray 

your voters and endorse 

the AIPAC ticket. Good 

riddance I say, Ms Stevens. 

Call yourself contradiction, 

maverick, fool. 

I will not be distracted, 

nor will  the many 

on your team who 

have now resigned.

In two days the defender 

in whom we can trust

will make you a part 

of the modern yet 

ancient curse, where money 

and ideology have trumped 

you stone deaf, stone  blind.

Indran Amirthanayagam received Sri Lanka's State Literary Award for White Space Sonnets. He won the Paterson Poetry Prize for The Elephants of Reckoning. His Lettre aux residents du monde is forthcoming from L'Harmattan. Amirthanayagam edits Beltway Poetry, publishes at Beltway Editions. He writes indranmx.substack.com .

SAVING DAYLIGHT

by Howie Good

We have turned back the clocks, and now it’s dark
both when I leave for work and when I leave work
for home. Tantalizing illusions designed to keep us
toiling have dwindled to a tattered few. I see my own
disillusion reflected in other people’s somber faces
and nagging anxiety. Children choose to stay indoors 
on their screens or are forbidden to play by themselves 
outside. Grackles, a type of scavenger bird, gather in a row
on a powerline, shadows of a broken world. I google it
on my phone. A collection of grackles is called a plague.

Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was  published by Sacred Parasite this year. He co-edits the journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

BLESSINGS FOR TIMES OF CRISIS

by Sam Friedman

Shutterstock photo by Pietre Laborde

Blessed are the children of Paris

for they open doorways

so their people can dismantle

the towers of power.

 

Blessed are Pasha and Ania

for they save lives

amidst a genocidal war.

 

Blessed is Vladislav

who fought the imperial invaders

of his native Ukraine

and refused to submit

to the fascist thugs who savagely beat him

in the delusion that they were defending

the nation he defends.

 

And blessed are the cockroach archeologists

who dig up the poems we wrote

about our long-dead civilization

so our hopes can re-echo

amidst cockroach revolutionaries

so next time, we do not fail.

Author’s note: I first met Pavlo (Pasha) Smyrnov and Ania Korobchuk professionally; they have been very active in harm reduction programs and research around HIV/AIDS in Ukraine. Since the full scale invasion, they have organized medical assistance for villages near the front lines. Vladislav Starodubtsev was in the news recently. All of them are friends of mine.

Sam Friedman is a poet, activist, and public health researcher. He has published two books of poetry and poems in a variety of magazines.

HALLOWEEN IN EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

by Christine Rhein

10/31/25, for Rachel Jamison Webster

One year after Halloween incident, fear remains over immigration enforcement. —Evanston RoundTable, October 18, 2026

My friend bears witness, posts a video
from her front porch, tells of helicopters 
that flew over her town all day today,
of the white, unmarked ICE vans
that cruised the streets, circled stores 
and schools, one of the vans ramming
a car, the woman at the wheel pulled out, 
pushed down, hauled away by men in masks.
This is real, my friend says, this is happening—
parents, teachers, guarding a grade school 
for hours—the children kept inside, 
wearing their costumes. No parade this year 
through the neighborhood—princesses,
pirates, ghosts, superheroes, locked down.
 
It’s nighttime now—my friend posts again 
with her porchlight on, and she’s smiling,
eager to let everyone know how her block 
turned noisy after all, how the sidewalks
filled with laughing trick-or-treaters—
so many of them that she was worried
she’d run out of candy, but there was a boy 
who saw she was holding one last little bar, 
and said Here, I’ll give you some of my candy,
and then all of the kids in that huddled group—
a flock, she calls them, of eight- or nine-year-olds—
reached down into their bags, dropped sweetness
by fistfuls into her bowl. That way, they said, 
there will be candy for the next kids.

Christine Rhein is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Swerve (Wayne State University Press) and of Wild Flight, a winner of the Walt McDonald Poetry Prize (Texas Tech University Press). A former automotive engineer, Christine lives in Brighton, Michigan.

ALL HALLOWS’ EVE

by Devon Balwit

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

We stand

at the thin place:

crane our necks one way, and

 

we look upon the healthy faces

of our grandchildren, the other,

and an ungovernable force erases

 

all flesh. What do you think? Are the specters

phantasms or an inevitability?

Trick or Treat! shout the neighbor

 

boys. I let them be greedy—

why chide an impulse we share,

fistfuls of plenty

 

until we’re so glutted we’re

sick. After, they (we) spill 

our booty on the floor

 

and make deals. 

What isn’t gobbled up becomes landfill.

When not making art, Devon Balwit edits for Asimov Press and Works in Progress magazine.

SPIN

by Tom Cartelli

And this one says and that one says and this one says 

to the one who says this fact is fact this fact is false  

and the movers tik and the shakers tok and the spinners spin

and the liars spout and the liars claim and the listeners listen 

and listening repeat what the liars say and the saying goes on 

and the said gets said and the dead get dead and the dead

stay dead while the spinners spin and the sayers say and listeners

listen to the chatter over wires when this one says 

and that one says and this one says to the one who lies

to the listeners listening as the wireless chatter goes

in and out over time over matter and this one says 

and that one says what this one didn’t but got tangled in the matter 

and the matter is and the matter isn’t what the chatterers chatter 

all the singsong day and livelong night of the chatter 

over wires and the wireless chatter that clacks to the clatter 

that thrums to the beat of the constant patter that keeps at bay

the matter of the matter that riffs and jives and won’t say 

what’s the matter with the liars who lie and the voices that shatter

all the dingdong day and star-tossed night the dreams that come

and dreams that go like raisins in the sun that won’t explode

Tom Cartelli taught literature & film studies for many years at Muhlenberg College and lives in uneasy retirement in far western New Jersey. Recent and forthcoming publications include poems and transcriptions in The Threepenny Review, Möbius, The Antigonish Review, The Field Guide Poetry Magazine, The Avalon Literary Review, TheNewVerseNews, and the online journal Politics/Letters.