LIFE IN THE SUBURBS

by Alan Walowitz

I head off to pick up my meds,  

how I stay steady these uneasy days: 

Children going without. 

The Court implies he can shoot at will  

on the seas—and maybe where I walk?  

In time, he’ll get around to us. 

It’s warm enough these mid-Autumn days, 

but the early dark reminds the cold to come.  

 

When she sees my sunken countenance, 

the second time this week,  

the clerk says, beneath her breath, as is her way,  

A Higher Power will make it better soon. 

I suppose she means God, or the pharmacist, her boss, 

who doesn’t care or hear so much. 

Listen, she says to make herself clear,  

her forefinger waggling like a broken metronome:  

A bullet doesn’t graze someone’s ear 

not to make this world a better place.  

 

I tell her, gently, he’s still a crook, 

while she packs my pills.   

Everybody steals, she says,  

as if she gets the inside dope, 

dispensing meds to old guys like me. 

She reminds me, You live another day,  

it’s pretty much the same as stealing. 

Then, hands me my change and says, 

See you soon. Dismissal as wisdom.   

but I hope, this time, exactly what she means.  

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook  Exactly Like Love  comes from Osedax Press.   The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems  is available from Truth Serum Press.  From Arroyo Seco Press,  In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars.  The chapbook The Poems of the Air is from Red Wolf Editions and is free for downloading. 

WE WERE, WE ARE, AWAKE

by Jennifer M Phillips

The papyrus PHerc. 1018. Credit: Biblioteca Nazionale “Vittorio Emanuele III,” Napoli–Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale

We’re finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum’s lost library: A whole library’s worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Nearly 2000 years later, we can at last read these lost treasures. —New Scientist, October 14, 2025

We were here. We saw. We remember.

Some of us even write down what unfolds

and teach our children unerasable stories.

We are awake enough to discern

canes and walkers supporting grandmothers

from flagpoles used as battering rams and spears;

to tell rioters from tourists. Our hearing is keen

enough to hear death-chants, curses and threats

not mistaking them for cheers or exclamations of joy.

We know when a phony rendition

is substituted for fact and blared out to the world.

We recognized a gallows set up on the stairway,

a guard being crushed, from a simple push-and-shove.

We can tell sexual assault from a too-forward pass,

and incitement to violence from a rousing speech,

and even recorded these things on our thousand screens

and continue to share them, and store them for history.

Nothing can be covered up for ever. In an X-ray lab, 

in a particle collider, means has been found

to decipher carbonized scrolls in Herculaneum's

two-thousand-year-old library, roasted by heat

of Vesuvius's eruption, philosophy

not quite incinerated. Do not think

that you can now obliterate the past

you deem inconvenient. Great-grand-children will know

what has happened in our time and who has wrought it,

and sort true from fake and good from evil.

January 6, 2021 and what has come after—

the war on our values and democracy—

we will remember, and keep telling the story.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (Wipf & Stock).

THE THEOLOGY OF ICE

by Stuart Broughton

A protester carries a US flag through teargas launched to clear protesters outside the Broadview immigration processing centre in Chicago. —The Guardian, October 3, 2025

NBC Chicago's investigative team reports at least 3,000 jailed immigrants have vanished from federal records, according to human rights attorneys and organizations. 

All across America
people are 
disappearing.
One minute
they're here
and the next
they're gone. 
Disappeared,
dissolved,
dematerialised.
Deported.
Detained.

It's an American
Rapture. 
The Rapture,
but only in
America.

Those of us
brought up
on such theological
dogmas
know that this 
expulsion of the
saints will
usher in
a tribulation.
As if things
could get
worse.

The thing we got wrong
was that instead of the angels
doing the Lord’s work,
it’s the agents 
doing the Devil’s.

As my old pastor
used to say,
“Fuck”.

Stuart Broughton. Gen-something. Library-adjacent. Tangata Tiriti. Libra. From  Aotearoa | New Zealand. Trying to work it out.

LOGIC DOWN THE DRAIN

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

Burcu Yesilyurt said enforcement officers told her it was illegal to dispose of the remnants of her coffee in a road gully. —BBC, October 22, 2025

The morning joe

That you don't drink,

At home, will flow

Down through your sink

To later meet

The coffee poured

Straight down a street-

Drain when you board

Your bus. Their slime

Pollutes the same,

But one's a crime,

One gets no blame...

The law's designs

Are out of bounds—

For coffee fines,

There are no grounds!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His poems have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, WestWard Quarterly, and other journals.

AL-FASHER BELONGS TO GOD

by Seth R. Merritt 

An analysis revealed in a recent report has shown that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed mass killings in Sudan's Al Fasher amid rising violence in the region. The report published by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health provided satellite imagery of the atrocities committed by the RSF following their capture of the violence-hit region. "The Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) finds evidence consistent with Rapid Support Forces (RSF) conducting mass killings after capturing El-Fasher, North Darfur," the report said. —TRT World, October 29, 2025

The UN Human Rights Office is receiving multiple, alarming reports that the Rapid Support Forces are carrying out atrocities, including summary executions, after seizing control of large parts of the besieged city of El Fasher, North Darfur and of Bara city in North Kordofan state in recent days... The Office has received reports of the summary execution of civilians trying to flee, with indications of ethnic motivations for killings, and of persons no longer participating in hostilities (hors de combat). Multiple distressing videos received by UN Human Rights show dozens of unarmed men being shot or lying dead, surrounded by RSF fighters who accuse them of being SAF fighters. —UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, October 27, 2025

It is Al-Fasher and midday.
A mother ties a strip of paradise’s garden around Omer’s wrist.
His wrist shimmers in the sun and Daa smiles.
She tells him to hold his hand out when they flee, to show the soldiers he belongs to God.
He nods as children nod when they cannot imagine the cost.
He tucks his hand behind his back.
They move.

Another time. A white church on a dirt road.
A preacher says God keeps perfect track.
Blessings fall on those who walk straight.
No one imagines a bullet at the end.

Al-Fasher’s morning shines. Dust moves like sifted flour.
A fighter calls his brothers through a loudspeaker.
A safe corridor. Promises.
Bodies clamber. Mothers pass infants forward like water.

Later-than-now but earlier-than-later:
The Hague. Microphones. Translation headsets.
A man asks for numbers.
How many bodies. Which villages. Which dates.
Procedure speaks the language of care.

Elsewhere: screens glow in London and New York.
Conference rooms. Someone with clean hands pauses the footage.
They circle the cloth around Omer’s wrist.
They label his skin.
They label the men with rifles.
Cursor blinks where innocence should be.
A reporter whispers sectarian violence over B-roll.
A senator tries ancient hatreds into a podcast mic.
A professor types failed state in an article.
Each word drags the thing further away.

Warm and full and afternoon.
Daa lifts Omer’s hand to the soldier for inspection.
The cloth glistens. Catches light.
Young and tired. A face a mother once loved.
The soldier sees.
He holds the rifle.
The muzzle stares into Omer’s eyes.
Soot. Metal. Heat.

Omer’s hand shakes. His eyes tear.
Habibi, I have done nothing wrong.
As-salamu alaykum.

The soldier glances at the mother. Nods.
Habibi. There is nowhere to go.
As-salamu alaykum.

Skin and bone and muscle and tendon do not speak loudly when they sever.
Daa is another mother crying.

Once, promises were guarantees.
No one said God speaks every language used in an execution.

It is Al-Fasher and midday.
A mother gathers Omer’s body.
The cloth shimmers emerald in the dust.

Author’s note: This poem fictionalizes one mother and child in Al-Fasher, Sudan. The events depicted are not a single documented case, but a composite drawn from ongoing reports of civilian killings and the forced sorting of bodies under the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) offensive.

Seth R. Merritt is a writer from the Ozarks living in Mexico City. His work has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine and Hard Crackers, with work forthcoming in Scalawag. This is his first work of poetry.