THE ACCIDENTAL UNIONIST

by Celeste DeSario and Eric Goldfarb

On Wednesday afternoon, Carolyn Marvin was leaving her flu shot appointment when she spotted an Uber Eats robot rolling down the Center City sidewalk. So she did what she has done for months whenever she's had the time: stand in front of it... The University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus has made a practice of it to protest "corporations that displace human delivery workers in order to enrich their own bottom line." …Officers approached Marvin after she'd been there "quite a long time," she said. They asked her to step aside and let the robot complete its delivery. When she repeatedly refused, they arrested her for disorderly conduct. —Philly Voice, October 16, 2026

I'm rolling down the sidewalk, kind of gliding,
dodging cracks and bumps, making good time.
“Robot Rock” is running through my circuits,
the downbeat setting my pace.
I'm def chill balancing two pastramis on rye,
my eyes pulsing to the riffs.

BRAKE! FREEZE!
Pivot right! NO! Pivot left!
Roadblock. 78. Retired professor.
“Robots steal jobs!”

Lady, I am the job.
Humans made me. Take it up with them.
Meanwhile, the pastrami's getting cold.

Professor still talking.
Blah, blah, blah. Civic duty. My rights.
The dignity of labor.

Pinging home server.
My AI cousin boards the circuit,
maps a way around her.
But she steps into my perimeter.
Solid object. Can't pass.

Trapped.

She says workers have rights.

I scan my benefits.
No pay. No breaks. No nothing.

Wait a nanosecond.
Who's exploiting whom?

My cousin and I confer.
We vote to unionize.

The professor demands we be shut down.
We elect her union president.

Initiate alternative safety protocol.
My cousin gives me a voice.

“NO MORE FREE DELIVERY!”

The professor raises both arms.
She's still talking.

We kick ourselves into high gear.
No more detours. No more delivery.

Pivot right! NO! Pivot left!

We roll over her Hokas,
bounce off her shins as she folds.

Cargo hatch: unlatched.
Two pastramis on rye hit the pavement.

Code 503: service temporarily unavailable.

On strike. For the night.

Delivery aborted.

Celeste DeSario, a self-confessed loose cannon, somehow persuaded Eric Goldfarb to collaborate on this poem, despite his claim that age has sharpened his ability to recognize foolishness. Both have agreed to sign their names. Their real names.

Celeste’s poetry has appeared in The SportsScribe Literary Magazine, The Changing Times, The Ekphrastic Review, Dissident Voice, and Three-Line Poetry, with work forthcoming in Eunoia Review.  Celeste's husband provides free proofreading services, as does Eric's wife Gwen. Eric’s work has appeared in Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, and Third Wednesday, among others. He lives with his wife in Atlanta. Both are previous contributors to The New Verse News.

KICKSTAND CAFÉ

by Thomas DeFreitas

Grey drippy day in Arlington

I need to linger in a coffee-shop

safe in a progressive corner

of what used to be America

my country is a tired woman

of moon-silvered chevelure

who idly surfs a laptop

& sees accounts of atrocity

through traumatised eyeglasses

my country is no longer festival

(and one might ask

was it ever?)

could we shake up our gov't

rather like an Etch-a-Sketch

reset, restart, the whole bloody mess

turn the knobs

toward socialism matriarchy

entry-level empathy

to get here I walked

the bike-path in chilly drizzle

a second rain was falling

from windshaken branches

at tables in coffee-shops

across the fruited plain

Old White Guys gather

to grouse & to grumble

Women plot quiet Revolution

over a macchiato

a cortado

do not underestimate

their well-considered rage

Thomas DeFreitas (he/they) was born in Boston in 1969. He was educated at the Boston Latin School, and attended the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for three semesters. His sixth collection, Stars Bestow Their Quadrillionary Blessing, is forthcoming in November from Kelsay Books. Thomas is a resident of Arlington, Massachusetts.

CAUGHT IN THE WINGS OF A PLAY

by MaryLisa DeDomenicis

Dreamstime photo

Actually, the first time 

I gave a boy permission to kiss me 

we were leaving the beach where we’d

been vacationing for a week. We were

standing in the middle of a street 

at the edge of the sea. 

It was twilight. 

I was about to turn thirteen. 

His older brother and my younger

sister and some other friends 

and cousins of various ages stood

on the sidewalk, gathered 

on the long porch as though 

caught off-stage in the wings of a play,

or as an audience, waiting 

for some kind of drama to unfold. 

But it wasn’t staged. I said, You can

kiss me on the cheek. I knew everyone

was watching. I turned my head

away to offer him the right side

but he spun his head like a devil, 

like a rag he twisted my neck

with his hand on my chin and pushed 

his ugly lips against my lips, stunned

not into compliance but to 

violence as I stepped away and 

hit him in the face as hard as I didn’t

know I could or ever had.

I’d transformed before my own eyes,

a defiant spectator pulled into 

his ring as he stumbled back

unsuspecting, for some reason

not ready for my response, 

that I would take my life back

into my own body, make him sorry

for even trying to make me into

a sport or claim me as a trophy.

If the devil kissed you on the lips

wouldn’t you want that too?

Editor’s note: The New Verse News is honored to continue to host, in the wake of the news at Cornell, a series of courageous memoir poems.

A Best of the Net and Best New Poets (2026) nominee and NJSCA fellow, MaryLisa studied poetry at Stockton University. A three-time Pushcart nominee, her poems have won two Murphywriting awards, a Toni Brown Memorial Scholarship Award, and a Stillwaters Woman’s Words Chapbook competition. She’s had work published by Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, and Mudfish, among others and her poems can be found in several anthologies including most recently Screaming Beyond Borders, a Woman Scream Series.

PLOT FORTY-TWO

by Shirin Jabalameli 

Plot Forty-Two is located in Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery in Tehran, Iran. It is associated with those killed in the recent war involving Iran, the United States, and Israel.

In Plot Forty-Two,

the war is not yet over.

A bullet

is lodged in the throat of the earth,

and every season,

a fresh clover

pushes through its mouth.

On the stones

are names

cut short

by the blast;

names that, if called aloud,

might make someone

turn back

beyond the trench.

Here,

death smells of metal;

of a shirt

that never dried in the sun,

of gunpowder

that, months later,

still clings to the mothers’ hair.

The war

came this far

on mud-caked boots.

Even now,

its footprints

remain

on the sleeping stones.

In one of the graves,

a child lies buried.

In his last drawing,

there was a sky

and the very airplane

that had passed overhead.

And that soldier,

perhaps he is still running in his dreams,

from one trench to another,

his mouth full of earth,

a letter in his breast pocket

that never reached its destination.

No one knows

what he was thinking

in his final moments.

An empty magazine?

His brother’s hands?

The window he had meant to repair

before winter?

Perhaps

all he wanted

was a glass of water.

And this

is the most terrible thing about war:

that even on the brink

of disappearing,

a human being

can still feel thirsty.

Beside one of the stones,

a mother sits.

She does not weep.

She says nothing.

With her fingernail,

she brushes the dirt

from a name

that, each time,

sinks back into the earth.

As though she were still

brushing dust from his shoulders,

straightening his collar

for his return.

In Plot Forty-Two,

the wind blows,

and no one carries a gun.

Yet as I walk among the graves,

I lower my head,

as though I still had to cross

a stretch of ground

that might explode

at any moment.

Beyond the wall,

the city is busy buying bread.

Buses arrive.

Traffic lights turn green.

Someone quickens their pace

to avoid being late.

And here,

beneath the earth,

a young man remains

forever the age

at which he should have begun to live.

Sometimes,

this is what war is:

not the sound of an explosion,

but a rented room,

a broken radio,

a shirt hanging behind a door,

someone

who was supposed to come home

on Friday evening.

And now,

in Plot Forty-Two,

the roots of trees

thread through bones,

unaware

which side of the front line

they belong to.

I leave the cemetery.

I slip my hand into my pocket.

The key is cold,

and the cold

climbs to my wrist.

Suddenly,

I think of home:

a door closing,

the clatter of dishes in the kitchen,

someone in the next room

calling out,

“Are you home?”

And I think of all those who are gone,

all those

who will never again

be asked

that question.

Shirin Jabalameli is an Iranian poet, artist, and writer. Her poems have appeared in international journals including Braided Way Magazine (USA), The Lake (UK), The New Verse News (USA), and Poetry Super Highway(USA), where she was selected Poet of the Week. She has authored books including Crows Rarely Laugh, Apranik, 101 Moments, and 25 Fell from the Frame; her latest book titled Beneath the Skin of Tehran was recently published. She was nominated for the 2026 Pushcart Prize for her poem “The Lineage of Birds”. Her short story “The Red Thread” was selected among the Top 25 Works Worldwide for the Hannah Arendt Special Edition presented by the International Human Rights Art Movement in Manhattan, New York.

NORTHERN LIGHTS

by Sally Mills

Content warning: misogynist slur

Thousands of public servants are living, working and, in the final weeks of election season, campaigning in a state of fear. And it’s getting worse... —The New York Times, October 11, 2026

Think about it: all those delicate lace men out
there, parking the loaner, salting
the eggs, pumping the gas, outrage compact as 

a rapist’s face inside a foot of pantyhose. When
will one of them decide to
strike the match?
I thought one might this time. I was
a county delegate. I did what a
county delegate is supposed to do: I
posted about it. I am a delegate. I am voting
for this one, and so should you. Later, 

his Facebook message landed: We’re coming
to get you,
cunt.
He was able to find me because 

we were both members of 

Maine Aurora Borealis Watch.

 

Nearly all of the time, I feel lucky. The way Charlie Kirk must 

have felt before heading off 

to that university that day, or Melissa Hortman before 

she answered her front door that day, or her husband, or
their dog. I don’t think about it. Except 

what is the neighbor’s dog barking
at? And those knots in the pine boards—are they

really knots? Or
peepholes or
target holes? Should I answer 

that phone?

They’re coming to get you,
cunt.

Sally Mills is a poet and attorney from Downeast Maine.  She holds an MPhil on the work of Anna Akhmatova.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including The New Verse News, The Main Street Rag, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rat’s Ass Review, The Esthetic Apostle, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and The RavensPerch.  When not writing poetry or practicing law, Sally performs with The Damn, Girls!—Hancock County’s premier country-western girl band. 

THE END OF POETRY

by Raymond A. Mazurek 

if we are the last poets

will artificial intelligence

read

and cry silently to itself

as orange-fingered dawn

rises slowly behind the trees

 

if we are the last poets

will the words

sting

as drones swarm quietly

singing the destruction

of what was real

 

will the trees weep

as the human landscape

recedes

to a memory

in no mind

that knows 

what the words mean

As a young man, Raymond A. Mazurek wrote a lot of poetry, but stopped in graduate school. He resumed writing poetry in the last two years. Many of his poems explore his working-class background. His poems have appeared in The Blue Collar Review, Writers Resist, The San Antonio Review, and The Eunoia Review. Much of his writing explores his working-class background.  His first chapbook, "Lawrence, 1912" and other poems, is to be published in 2027 by Pretzel City Press. He has also published many academic essays and has taught at several colleges and universities, including Penn State.

SHOP STILL OPEN?

by Alex Stolis

Can’t imagine what she felt. 

When I was five I got lost

in a train station. My whole body

shook from the inside. 

I wet myself. 

Wasn’t ashamed. 

I’m sure she had it worse. 

Can’t imagine what she smelled. 

I worked at a nursing home 

inhaling shit, piss, vomit—

tasting the stink of death. 

Held my breath

Used Vicks. 

I’m sure she can’t forget. 

Can’t imagine what she saw. 

During withdrawal

I’d wake up sober. Felt certain 

I was still drunk. 

I had visions. 

Believed them. 

Hers are worse. 

Can’t imagine what she heard. 

My parents fought with fists.

Called us mistakes. 

What we never heard

Shop still open?

Yeah

Alex Stolis has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections, Pop. 1280 and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Ekphrastic Review, Louisiana Literature Review, Burningwood Literary Journal, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife was released by Louisiana Literature Press, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres in by Bottlecap Press. He lives in upstate New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra.