THE SCRUBLAND

by Sezin Devi Koehler

for Rob Reiner

the humid air streams off the slash pine barks

     the breath of a ghost lover against my neck

the tinnitus buzzing of insects, some vampires some not

     the goth butterfly that lands on my sweaty shoulder

     for a drink—I become nectar

gopher turtles scurry into their burrows at my footsteps

     grumpy Harry before Sally

sugar sand yields under my pink sandals

     when it rains, hungry quicksand 

     isn’t just a threat to Westley and Princess Buttercup

this oak tree is 265 years old, the banyan dripping limbs at least 300

these willows extend a fairy circle in the air

rodents of usual size rut below sawgrass thrones

the path into the forest has been worn by hundreds of feet

the train runs parallel, its mournsome whalesong

     I’m the fifth friend in Stand By Me

     looking for my own dead body in the moist brush

     a phoenix in progress

I didn’t forget my comb here by the tracks

     but I did forget myself in the junkyard of a marriage

     that did not bring us together today

I walk through the woods of your memory

as I wish

     come back to us soon

     come back soon

     come back

Sezin Devi Koehler is a multiracial Sri Lankan/Lithuanian American and author of Much Ado About Keanu: A Critical Reeves Theory (April 2025, Chicago Review Press), a sociocultural deep dive into what makes Keanu Reeves so extraordinary as a performer and artist. Pop-culture writer, entertainment journalist, and Rotten Tomatoes-certified film and TV critic for Black Girl Nerds, Sezin's bylines also include Entertainment Weekly, The Daily Beast, Scalawag Magazine, Tasteful Rude, Teen Vogue, and many more. Her poetry has appeared in Tension Literary. Sezin is a board member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto and wordsmiths from an East Oakland historic landmark that looks uncannily like the house from Practical Magic, where she can see the San Francisco Bay from her own window.  

DROPPING OFF THE NATIVITY

by Tricia Knoll

For the community of Winooski [Vermont], the week following Thanksgiving began with a disturbing absence: a second-grade student’s desk was empty. What followed was a rapid-fire sequence of press releases, emotional pleas, and contradictory reports that have left many Vermonters confused about how a seven-year-old boy went from a holiday road trip to a federal detention center in Texas. —Compass Vermont, December 7, 2025

Handmade of painted paper mâché, the figures of the old nativity scene rest in the tattered box I pick up at the church bazaar for $2. Baby Jesus. A goat. Two men with lambs on their shoulders. Mary. Joseph. Five wise men bearing gifts. Two identical angels hinting this might be a combination from two original sets. A blue angel who cannot stand up. A flimsy barn and dry grass. I leave it on the doorstep where my favorite children live, hoping someone might tell the children the story of outcasts, love and humble housing. How Christmas got its name. Even if they use pagan filters. A text arrives: their house doesn’t do nativity. It’s going to Goodwill. I ask for it back. The news: ICE pulled over a seven-year-old and his mother in Illinois. Originally from Ecuador, they live in the town just upriver from me. The child’s school was the first declared sanctuary school in Vermont. The mother and child are now in detention in Texas. The superintendent of schools works to raise money for legal aid, to help the father contact them. Inside me sounds like sanctuary, mercy, peace, star of hope and love reverberate like the striking of a distant temple bell. 

Tricia Knoll's hometown of Williston, Vermont is the center of ICE's national data collection and the place scouring social media to find evidence of immigrants without citizenship. She is a poet currently writing in prose. Her chapbook The Unknown Daughter was recently a finalist in the New England Poetry Club chapbook contest.

OBITUARY FOR WOMEN WHO STOP TRAFFIC

by Mary K O'Melveny

Cora Weiss, who was active for more than half a century in support of gender equality, international peace, the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and who helped organize some of the most important mass demonstrations of the 1960s, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 91. —The New York Times, December 8, 2025

          For Cora Rubin Weiss (1934-2025)

 

Women Strike For Peace detected

Strontium 90 in newborn’s teeth,

food, air, water. Filled Central Park

with a million activists for 

nuclear disarmament.

Pedestrian gridlock stilled horns,

thrilled peace advocates everywhere.

Atomic tests were later banned.

 

Later, Cora chaired justice protests,

led the New Mobilization 

Committee to end the American 

War in Vietnam. She carried signs:

Not Our Sons. Not Your Sons as she

pursued Pentagon bigwigs, garbed in

pearls, high heels, demanding war’s end. 

Hundreds of thousands followed her there.

 

Traffic came to a stop when she 

lay down on Park Avenue with 

her resistance sisters, each one

bearing names of  Vietnamese 

dead by US guns, bombs, napalm. 

She ferried letters from Hanoi

POWs to home and back.

Carried hopes, parried criticism.

 

Mentored by Eleanor Roosevelt

as a girl. In college, she met,

married Peter, a civil rights 

lawyer activist. Together, 

they fought against bigotry – from

McCarthy to Trump. Cora knew

the key role that women play in

teaching about love, unity.

 

Throughout her life, she stopped traffic-

king of hate. Fought for global peace

education. Fought for humanity.

She never gave up. Never walked 

away from a righteous cause. Never

stayed silent when protest was called

for. Never got up from a roadway

if something remained to fight for.

Editor's note: Peter Weiss died in November 2025 at the age of 99.

Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.

MASS SHOOTING #8

600 block of Jackson Ave., Muskegon, MI, Dec 6, 2025

“2 people dead, three others, including child, injured in Muskegon shooting”

by Ron Riekki

“Sure, this world is full of trouble

I ain't said it ain't.”

—Douglas Malloch, “It’s Fine Today”

They say there are 200 different words for snow

in the Sámi language, like the northern Sámi

 

vahtsa, which is new snow on old snow, which

now is the case, driving a rented car on plowed

road, but then turning onto the street of our latest

 

mass shooting in Michigan and instantly it’s

unplowed, so thick with snow that it scrapes

 

the bottom of the vehicle, yet ice on the tires

so that the car swerves back and forth, with

a realization that I can’t stop, so I drive by

 

a house with caution tape lying in snow, but

it doesn’t look like the photos or videos online

 

of where the shooting happened and I wonder

if it’s another incident, especially since this city—

Muskegon, Michigan—has been plagued with

 

a dozen shootings: 9mm and Glock and “AR-

style rifle” and “stolen pistol” and “handguns”

 

and another shooting on the 1400 block of

Gyrock and a “19-year-old has been arraigned”

and nine killed and eleven injured in Muskegon

 

this year alone, a population of 38,000, and it’s

26 degrees with the wind chill, two months since

 

the last mass shooting; and a Democrat online

tells me it’s due to the cold, and someone else

online says it’s due to astrology, wants to know

 

the alignment of the stars, and I stare at the home

I think where the shooting happened, but I can’t

 

stop, the street empty, absolutely nobody outside,

and the house where it happened looks dead, no

lights on inside, but, later, down the street, I see

 

a window with bright white Christmas decorations,

a snow-colored fake tree elegant in the window,

 

and I swing the car around once there’s plowed

road and go down it again, still not able to stop,

still swerving, windows down, the cold frowning

 

into the car, a church nearby unplowed as well

as if no human has been down this street since

 

the shooting, the feel of abandonment, how that

tends to be the feeling of so many of these sites

of shooting, and I stop at a shop, a garage, closed

 

for the night, a large sign saying BLOOD’S all

in red, all in caps, such an odd name for a “front

 

end clinic,” the address 13-something, and

the building bone-colored; getting my bearings,

I drive, looking for anyone to talk to, but all

 

is winter-quiet, a worker stepping out of a back

exit of a restaurant, wiping sweat off his fore-

 

head with his sleeve, his breath visible, and

then, amidst all these closed stores: a liquor

store, how so many of these mass shootings

 

are near liquor stores and churches, parks

and cannabis dispensaries. A 4-year-old

 

was shot at this mass shooting. A 22-year-

old woman and 25-year-old man killed.

A worker throws out piles of cardboard

 

into a dumpster—no recycling—massive

letters of SAM’S DRINK ALL on the store,

 

such a bizarre name, like a command, and

the worker tells me he has no thoughts on

the shooting, doesn’t want to talk about

 

the shooting, doesn’t want me going into

the store, calls and confirms that I am not

 

allowed into the store, but then teenagers

walk into the liquor store and there seems

to be no problem with this. Seeing two

 

children alone in a car, the mother later

emerging from inside. I talk with a 14-

 

year-old who wanders up, says that his

birthday is tomorrow. He’s with a friend.

I ask how we stop gun violence, if they

 

heard about the shooting. They tell me

they know there’ve been shootings. How

 

do we stop them? One of them walks

away, into the store.  The 14-year-old

remains, saying it’s “parenting” and

 

"finances," that “it gets harder every year,”

that people sell drugs to survive. I ask

 

how he’s avoided it: “work and school

and sports.” Football.  Behind him,

the words liquor – beer – wine – lotto.

 

These liquor stores near mass shootings,

always so busy. The 14-year-old goes inside.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

THE PRICE OF KNOWLEDGE

by Steven Kent

"American Academy of Pediatrics loses government funding after criticizing RFK Jr" —The Guardian, December 17, 2025

Though docs at large

Can prove success,

They're not in charge

At HHS,

Where Bob is firm

And don't play nice--

You diss The Worm,

You pay the price.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, The Dirigible Balloon, Light, Lighten Up Online, The Lyric, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, The Pierian, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collections I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) (2023) and Home at Last (2025) are published by Kelsay Books.

LIGHT

by Chris Reed

Flakes of snow glow orange like fireflies

over a winter field of bare and capped heads,

candles held high in the snow swept vigil.

Light gathers itself to the campus lamp,

lone glow behind a policeman’s head, 

his face like ours in shadow.

 

We connect light to morning and sight,

to warmth and touch, to seasons

of planting and harvest,

and in our winters, to what still returns

after the night, the storm, and the losses.

 

But light doesn’t care for our veneration.

Indifferent, it turns the glow back on us.

Red radiates off the side of a face at a window.

reflects the ambulance light in the night,

red hands holding back the drapes.

 

Flashes of gunfire on Bondi Beach

found celebrants honoring a festival

of light, light as healing and possibility,

as the connection and love that endures,

telling the story of an ancient flame.

 

I look up from my screen of news and photos

as light sends the shadow of a bird outside

my window, flying across my pale nubby rug. 

Sunlight paints the many leaves of the jade tree

and stretches along the floor to my feet.

 

Light remembers that in the beginning

it took on the job of radiance and promise,

and we took on the job of repairing

the vessels that we are, 

so that we might hold the light. 

 

In recent news photos, light is reserved,

embarrassed for us, 

embarrassed to have been the gold on snow,

the red glare on the cheek at the window,

the sun setting over a bloody beach,

— and asks — Can’t you do better than this?

Chris Reed has been writing poetry for five years. As a writer and a retired Unitarian minister she values the work of social justice and witnessing that is done through poetry. But admits she has sometimes had a difficult time reading news stories during this last year. And this is not a comment on her eyesight. Her first chapbook Two Years and Two Months was published last month by Finishing Line Press.

ALMA MATER / SOUL MOTHER

by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

a womb
a place we encourage our youth to strive to go 

to hope to go, 

to set their sites on,
Thayer Street where we promenade our thoughts, 
The SciLi where we fill ourselves with knowledge, 

thousands of hours reading reading everything we can get our hands on,
Soul Mother my heart aches for you
Soul Mother we send our young for your warm embrace,
Soul Mother we fail you, 
Youth we fail you,
Youth full of promise we fail you, 
Fail to protect you from the excesses of rage that is both a byproduct of our society, 
and rage that wells up from within, Rage that is armed.

Oh if it could only be a fair fight again, if only a raging man could have just fists and wits
Oh if only 

But that era is gone
And only one such as Gandhi could put out a meaningful call for all to lay down weapons,
and in the end, 
it was a bullet that got him too
a bullet kills a peacemaker

cursed bullets
cursed designers of bullets
cursed rage that had no better way to explode
cursed testosterone gunpowder rage
cursed whoever politicizes this killing of youth of brilliance of hard-working teenagers striving to carve of this world a better place 
Soul Mother, Alma Mater I ache for you

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto, class of 1986, Brown.

EUGENICS

 by Willam Cullen Jr.

British Eugenics Society poster from the 1930s. 
© Wellcome Collection. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

eugenics

the non-renewal

of health care subsidies

William Cullen Jr. is a veteran and works at a social services non-profit in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Poetry, Gulf Stream, I-70 Review, Lake Effect, Pirene's Fountain, Poetry South, and Spillway.

ONE FLY TO ANOTHER

by Melissa Balmain

Caitlyn Johnstone / Chesapeake Bay Program via Flickr under CC BY-NC 2.0

Invasive lanternflies have been spreading across the United States for over a decade, leaving behind poop that bees are transforming into a less sweet, sometimes savory, honey. —Smithsonian Magazine, December 12, 2025

Humans are eating our poop—
and they’re buying the stuff with good money—
even though they admit it tastes funny
and we’re far from their favorite group.

My intel? It’s straight from a bee:
they’re the ones turning lanternfly doody
into something befitting a foodie.
Our crap’s the new triple-cream brie!

You’re acting surprised—what’s the reason?
This is hardly the first bit of buzz
that we’ve heard about people this season—

can’t you tell, from the wackos they follow,
and the bull they believe “just because,”
there isn’t a thing they won’t swallow?

Melissa Balmain edits Light, North America's longest-running journal of comic verse. Her latest book of poetry is Satan Talks to His Therapist (Paul Dry Books).

HOLES

by Christine Sikorski

Federal immigration agents tackled and arrested a Somali American man in Minneapolis on Tuesday and detained him for about two hours for no apparent reason other than his ethnicity… Mubashir declined to share his last name out of fear for his and his family’s safety, but he gave a detailed account of the incident to reporters, who also viewed video that city officials shared recorded on a business’ security camera and a bystander’s mobile phone. Mubashir, who moved to the United States as a small boy and became a naturalized American citizen, said that he stepped onto a sidewalk near 4th Street and Cedar Avenue during his lunch break when two masked men approached him. The Cedar-Riverside neighborhood is the heart of the city’s Somali American community. Sensing trouble, he ducked into a restaurant. They followed him inside, dragged him out and forcibly arrested him. The agents handcuffed Mubashir, took him across 4th Street and pushed him onto his knees in the snow. One put him in a choke hold. —Minneapolis Public Radio, December 12, 2025

After the mayoral forum, a candidate and I remain at the table. 

He apologizes for not being “on” today, for not realizing 

his back had been turned to me. He’s tired. New baby. His first. 

Would you like to see a picture? he asks, showing me his phone, 

the stunning infant. I would lose sleep for him always, he says.

 

My husband kneels on the library floor to better survey 

a shelf of jazz CDs, as a group of preschoolers scuttle around him. 

A small boy approaches, holds out a box of chess pieces, asks

something in Somali. It appears he wants to put the box away 

but doesn’t know where it belongs. A teacher comes to help.

The phlebotomist greets us, speaks to my daughter in a quiet voice, 

assures she is comfortable in the reclining chair. After the blood draw, 

he tells me some people say he should speak more loudly. 

My daughter has been told that all her life, I say, and we talk about 

communicating across cultures, about what signifies humility.

Our US representative leaves a phone message, inviting us to a town hall. 

She wants to hear all of her constituents’ voices. The president calls her

garbage, dreams of throwing her away, along with the candidate, 

the little boy, the phlebotomist. He laughs about shitholes and hellholes— 

his heart, an empty hole.

Christine Sikorski’s work has appeared in Waterstone, Little Patuxent Review, Quartet, One Art, This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant and Academy of American Poets Prizes. She has taught at two universities, the Loft Literary Center, a homeless shelter, a community center, and other venues. She lives with her family in Minneapolis.