THE LARGE ONES HAVE JOINED I.C.E.

by Michelle DeRose

My grade school had no gymnasium.

The auditorium hosted PE class

on rain-darkened days or those slick 

with ice, the low stage across the front

shrouded in its thick brown curtain.

Sometimes a tumbling mat and low-

mounted 2 x 4 meant gymnastics,

balance practice as we dip-stepped

across the board, arms in airplane wings,

or body control while we somersaulted.

But when upcoming plays or assemblies

required a clear floor, rain meant dodgeball.

The largest classmates hurled soccer

and volley balls at the tiny and slow.

Me with two friends, hidden in folds.

Even across the room, a direct hit

could bruise, slap, jangle teeth. The large

ones were praised for their power,

their aim, the swiftness with which

one by one they took us out.

We just hoped to be unnoticed behind the brown,

that our quiet retreat to art’s cloaked stage

would enable us to endure the long hour,

return to our desk where Stuart Little

waited in its belly for us.

Michelle DeRose is Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is writing a poem a day in her retirement. It might not be enough for sanity under the current administration in the US. She invites all who yearn for a holy heart attack to meditate on it at 10 a.m. EST every day.

WHAT THE LIVING HAVE SEEN

by Lynne Rappaport

Donate here.

How many days has it been now, since 10/7,

that those Israelis held captive in tunnels in Gaza

have been without their freedom,

separated from all of life?

 

Their faces are plastered onto giant posters

for passersby in Tel Aviv to see,

burning these hostages’ plight into memory,

their country longing for it to end.

 

What can the prisoners know of the crisis above the tunnels?

The violence, devastation, rubble, blocked aid trucks, hunger,

children’s lives cut short.

Failed attempts at a lasting ceasefire.

Instead, more retaliations, an eye for an eye,

an endless war.

 

Bring them safely home.

Let them begin healing.

 

The Palestinian family I’m sending money to in Gaza—

Home destroyed, living in a tent,

subsisting on lentils and hot salt water—

Had a moment of joy welcoming a baby boy,

Husband venturing out to buy overpriced flour

for his wife and 2-year-old son. 

She needed medication to prevent blood clots,

needs nourishment to sustain their newborn child. 

They all need superhuman strength.

 

Almost 500 online donors, sending funds for a year,

trying to keep this family going, give them some hope. 

Will they rebuild their home in Gaza someday? How will they manage until then?

Will Gaza even still exist for them? Will they be displaced again?

Will these two children who’ve survived ever know a free Palestine?

What can the Gazans know of the air raid sirens, during the night,

Families hurrying to bomb shelters and safe rooms

In Tel Aviv apartment buildings?

 

Bring all safely home. 

End the occupation,

The unholy bloodshed.

 

The ghosts of the lost ones permeate the ashen air. 

Restless dreams, nightmares, 

and oh,

what the living have seen,

have seen,

have endured.

Author’s note: This poem came out of a freewrite session to the poem “Beannacht” by John O’Donahue, in Kathryn Santana Goldman’s Your Write to Resilience OLLI class, summer 2025.

Lynne Rappaport is a 72-year-old woman originally from New York who has lived in San Francisco for over 50 years. Retired from teaching ESL to immigrant adults, she enjoys poetry, nature, music, and Tai Chi. She dedicates this poem to her late cousin, Canadian poet Bobbie Ogletree, and to our late grandfather Jacob B. Sacks, born in Palestine (Jerusalem) in 1888. He immigrated to New York in 1912. 

THE SOUND OF THE WELL

by Shirin Jabalameli

Beneath a cracked and ancient dome,

the wind slips through fissures,

circling the hull of a stranded ship.

Coffee grows cold upon the table,

and the Sufi, in quiet prayer,

speaks to the blackness of a crow.

From the dragon’s mouth

a rope of light leaps forth

onto masks that melt, one by one,

their cracking faces ringing

like a forgotten church bell

through the air of poverty’s hell.

The city,

a fractured mirror,

sees its own face in a thousand shattered pieces

and screams.

The broken tick-tock of a clock

scratches the latch of time’s doors,

and from a silent well

the voice of a child rises,

still remembering the name of their mother.

The crow spreads its wings,

and the wind carries the scent of stale bread.

The Sufi stirs the coffee in a whirlpool

and with a sip drinks the world anew.

Shirin Jabalameli is a multifaceted Iranian artist, poet, painter, photographer, and writer. She has authored books including Crows Rarely Laugh, Apranik, and 101 Moments. Her latest work, an illustrated poetry collection titled 25 Fell from the Frame was recently published. Her poems have appeared in international journals such as Braided Way Magazine (USA), The Lake (UK), and The New Verse News (USA).

Shirin’s poem in its original Persian follows:

صدای چاه

زیر گنبدی ترک‌خورده

باد از شکاف‌ها عبور می‌کند

و بر شانه‌ی کشتی به گل‌نشسته می‌چرخد.

قهوه روی میز سرد شده است

و صوفی در سکوت

با سیاهی یک کلاغ مناجات می‌کند.

از دهان اژدها

ریسمان نور می‌جهد

بر ماسک‌هایی که یکی‌یکی

ذوب می‌شوند،

و صدای ترک‌خوردن چهره‌ها

چون ناقوس کلیسای فراموش‌شده

در هوای جهنم می‌پیچد.

شهر،

چون آینه‌ای ترک‌خورده،

چهره‌اش را در هزار پاره‌ی مخدوش می‌بیند

و جیغ می‌کشد.

تیک‌تاکِ از کارافتاده‌ی ساعت

کلون درهای زمان را می‌خراشد

و در چاهی خاموش،

صدای کودکی می‌پیچد

که هنوز نام مادرش را از یاد نبرده است.

کلاغ بال‌هایش را باز می‌کند

و باد بوی نمِ نانِ کهنه را می‌برد.

صوفی قهوه را در گرداب می‌چرخاند

و با جرعه‌ای جهان را دوباره می‌نوشد.

I WANT TO LOVE WAKING UP

by Lynne Schilling

after “I Want to Love the World” by Christine Potter

I want to love waking up again, but for months

I’ve been waking up to thoughts of being a day 

closer to death, to images of the bony ribcages 

 

of starving children, to the blankness of hope. 

I want to be light as birdsong at dawn, but instead, 

I am the heavy keening of families of deportees. 

 

I want to love waking up, but joy evades my grip,

drips off my fingers and evaporates, like drops 

of water on a hot pan. I want to wake up happy, 

but doom is leaning on her horn under my window, 

making thoughts of anything else impossible. I force

myself to get up, and only then, when I feel my feet 

 

on the floor, do I remember poetry—a few lines

I want to revise, a poem I want to reread & that 

is enough to get me down the stairs to my coffee.

While Lynne Schilling has been writing poetry on and off for forty years, she began writing it seriously four years ago at age 75. Her day job was as an academic in an entirely different field. She has published poems in Quartet, The Alchemy Spoon, Rue Scribe, The New Verse News and others. She has poems forthcoming in Lucky Jefferson and MacQueen’s Quinterly.

A TIME TO PLANT, A TIME TO MOW

a DJT “Four Seasons Landscaping” moment

by John Stickney

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

“You know, grass has a lifetime 

like people have a lifetime, 

and the lifetime of this grass 

has long been gone. 

When you look at the parks 

where the grass is all tired, 

exhausted. 

We're going to redo the grass 

with the finest grasses. 

I know a lot about grass.

I own a lot of golf courses. 

If you don't have good grass, 

you aren't in business 

very long.”

So sayeth the Lord.

Amen.

Author’s note: This is a DJT verbatim poem from remarks made August 13.

John Stickney is a poet and writer originally from Cleveland, Ohio, currently living outside Charlotte, NC.

THE SANDWICH MAKER

by Pamela Kenley-Meschino

“It’s rare to see a government so eager to prove its critics right in real time. But here we are, watching the Trump administration fire a Justice Department employee, slap him with a felony, and publicly humiliate him—for the crime of calling them “fascists.” That the accusation came seconds before he allegedly threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent is almost beside the point. The symbolism is too perfect: in today’s Washington, labeling the regime “fascist” is more scandalous than acting like one...” Nick Anderson, Pen Strokes, August 14, 2025

It probably wasn’t vegan.
Hopefully, it had some heft.
Not like a baton or a stick
or the base of a flagpole,
the smell of onion sneaking
through waxed paper,
maybe a dollop of mayo leaking
out in flight made contact with a thud
of audacity, outrage. Why are you here?!
Why the f—k are you here?!
The sandwich maker who cut the bread,
arranged condiments, while the man (felon?)
waited by the counter, had no idea.
Maybe he felt the weight of anger,
spread yellow mustard thick,
added extra pepper,
a wedge of heavy cheddar,
imagined his throwing arm gathering
a day’s worth of ham and cheese
he could sail over the heads of invaders
to reach those starving children
on the other side of insanity.

Pamela Kenley-Meschino is originally from the UK, where she developed a love of nature, poetry, and music, thanks in part to the influence of her Irish mother. She is an educator whose classes explore the connection between writing and healing and the importance of shared stories.

DEMOCRACY WITH SCISSORS AND LOOPHOLES

by David Lee

Original cartoon of "The Gerry-Mander.” This is the political cartoon that led to the coining of the term “gerrymander.” The district depicted in the cartoon was created to favor the incumbent Democratic-Republican party candidates of Governor Elbridge Gerry over the Federalists in 1812. Public Domain. —Wikipedia

They call it redistricting,
like moving furniture for better feng shui.
But the map on the table
looks like it’s been drawn by a toddler with a sugar high
and an eraser for a conscience.

The district snakes down one block
just to loop around a donor’s backyard.
Three neighborhoods vanish into
a comma-shaped voting island
where ballots get counted
only if the tide’s out.

Meanwhile, in the Capitol,
the same lawmakers who swear
the system is “by the people”
are day-trading defense stocks
before breakfast,
and exempting themselves
from every law they praise in speeches.

When asked why the rules don’t apply to them,
one Congressman grins like a cat on a warm hood
and says,
“Well, the pen is mightier than the ballot box,
especially if you own the pen.”

David Lee is a physician, poet, and occasional troublemaker who moonlights as a satirical commentator on the absurdities of modern politics and culture. His poems have been called “provocative, playful, and just unsettling enough to make you think twice before laughing a third time.”

THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN

A Prose Poem

by Howie Good

President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia concluded their summit in Alaska on Friday without declaring agreement on any issue, much less the one Mr. Trump said was at the top of his agenda, ending the war in Ukraine. —The New York Times, August 15. 2025

The other day I saw a bald eagle for only the second time in my life. It soared over the treeline on the far side of the marsh. Almost in the same instant that I recognized it from its distinctive silhouette, it was gone, our national bird, symbol of strength and freedom. We are entering the last days of summer. Some of the plants I planted in the spring never grew, and the plants that did grow have begun dying. I dread the coming winter, a hulking, red-eyed monster roving streets of blackened ruins.

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose poetry collections include The Dark and Akimbo, available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. 

INDIVISIBLE, WE STAND

by Darrell Petska

Have you noticed how crowded
America’s thin air has become?

Now it’s homeless humans
joining immigrant humans,
LGBTQIA humans,
Black humans—assorted humans
of every persuasion, more
and more each day, into thin air.

Or so would hearts shriveled by hate
and power lusts have us believe:
think Hitler and Pol Pot, Pinochet
in Chile, Netanyahu in Gaza, and
America’s Trump disappearing souls
who don’t fit white, regressive ideals.

But the disappeared, the disparaged,
do not go away, whether the living
to whom we owe their dignity as they
pursue universally human needs
and aspirations, or the dead
to whom we owe life’s memory.

To our own selves, as well, we owe
the essential humaneness we ask
of all other humans. There can be
no invisibility, only indivisibility.
We are one body. That which divides
we must call out: inhuman!

Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Father of five and grandfather of seven, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin with his wife of more than 50 years.