PATRIOT

 by A.M. Silvestri

“They could take out a city,” he said. “Let them take—Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” 

Graphic generated by AI; words generated by DJT.

There was a time

I knew what the word meant.

A flag on a porch.

A hand over the heart.

A uniform folded away

after the wearing was done.

Patriot.

It was not a threat.

It did not need to be shouted.

It did not belong

to one man.

Now the word comes dressed

in red hats and anger,

printed across shirts

beside the face of a politician,

as though love of country

required love of him.

And the flag follows.

From truck beds,

from rally stages,

from poles crowded

with the name of a man

above the name of a nation.

Until sometimes

I hesitate to raise mine.

Imagine that.

An American

made uncertain of his own flag

because someone else

has wrapped himself in it.

Then I heard a president say,

Let them take out Los Angeles.

Let them take out San Diego.

I heard those words

and looked at my flag.

Fifty stars.

Not red states.

Not blue states.

States.

Los Angeles is ours.

San Diego is ours.

Detroit is ours.

The small town.

The crowded city.

The farmhouse at the end of the road.

The apartment window

six floors above the street.

The people who agree with me

and the people who do not.

All of them.

Patriot.

I keep turning the word over,

trying to find the thing

I remember.

Not obedience.

Not a red hat.

Not loving a president

more than the country

he was elected to serve.

And not the accusation

hurled at anyone

who refuses to follow.

You do not get to tell me

that dissent is disloyalty.

You do not get to measure

my love of country

by my love of you.

Maybe patriotism

was never the shouting.

Maybe it was always

the quieter thing.

The hand over the heart.

The uniform folded away.

The flag on the porch

moving in the morning wind

with no man’s name beneath it.

There.

That is my flag too.

It belongs to the protester

as surely as the parade,

to the one who questions

as surely as the one who salutes,

to every American

unwilling to confuse

a man with a country.

Maybe the flag does not belong

to the loudest man

who wraps himself in it.

Maybe it belongs

to whoever refuses

to surrender a single star.

So I will keep flying mine.

Not because of him.

In spite of him.

Because he does not

get to have it.

Patriot.

A.M. Silvestri is a Michigan writer and retired professional firefighter whose poetry often draws upon nature, place, memory, public life, and the ordinary moments that reveal something larger. His current work includes ROOTED: A Year of Haiku.

TO SAVE A LIFE

by Chen-ou Liu

The finale of the Israeli award-winning documentary NAZA, a Hebrew acronym for "collateral damage," captures a father trapped in a furnace of grief. Heat radiates from the tangled grid of collapsed iron and melted plastic. Coughing through blinding smoke, he drags broken blocks of drywall away, his cries echoing off the smoldering rubble that traps his children.

calm between fireballs

an armless girl gazing 

heavenward, yet…

Chen-ou Liu is the author of five books, including Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize, 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and A Life in Transition and Translation (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial Haiku Chapbook Competition). His tanka and haiku have been honored with many awards.

THE NAME ON THE LIST

by Rajat Chandra Sarmah 

India Cut 130 Million From Voter Roll, Fueling Protests Against Modi: Public anger is growing over an exercise that critics say undermines the world’s largest democracy, particularly disenfranchising Muslims under the Hindu nationalist government. —The New York Times, October 6, 2026

Someone went looking for his name.

It had been there before—
among thousands of other names,
quietly printed,
waiting for a finger
to find it.

This time,
the finger moved down the page
and stopped.

Nothing.

He looked again,
then once more,
as if another reading
might put the name back.

Outside, something was changing
across the country.

Young people had begun
to gather in the streets.

What had been spoken quietly
inside drawing rooms
was now moving towards the road.

People who had watched in silence
were finding one another,
coming together in numbers
that could no longer be ignored.

Questions that once stayed indoors
were now being carried outside.

Who decides
whose name remains?

Who checks the list
before the list becomes
the truth?

In some places,
victory and defeat
stood closer than expected,
while the list
had grown shorter.

Numbers that once fitted
quietly into a column
now carried the weight
of people.

Petitions reached the court.
Dates were fixed,
then moved.

An election waited
for an answer
that had not yet arrived.

The anger spread.

People who had stood apart
were now filling the streets,
thousands upon thousands,
no longer willing
to remain apart.

Barricades went up.
Roads were closed.
Notices appeared.

The crowd was asked
to turn back.

But the streets kept filling.

Not everyone agreed
on what had happened.

Still, too many people
had begun to ask
whether the institutions
they had trusted
were still listening.

For years,
trust needed no proof.

You entered a polling booth,
pressed a button,
and went home.

Now people were looking
more closely at what happened
before a vote became a number,
and who was responsible
for what came after.

Something once taken for granted
was becoming visible:

the distance between
a citizen's faith
and the institution
that asks for it.

He folded the paper.

His name was still missing.

There was no way to know
who had taken it away.

For the first time,
he understood
that finding it again
might require more
than going to the polling booth.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah is a writer from Assam, India, and the author of eight books. His poetry and prose have appeared in literary journals and publications in India and internationally. He is a previously published contributor to The New Verse News and has received several literary awards and recognitions.

OCTOBER 7

by Tammy Smith

Three years
since the massacre—
short but long
enough to remember
the horrors of captivity,
being stripped of safety
at home and abroad,
in our houses of worship,
on stinky subway platforms,
afraid to wear a yarmulke,
hang a mezuzah,
slipping a Jewish star
on a gold chain
beneath a business suit.

Hope is harder to find
standing among crowds
of hostile strangers
blocking the closing doors.

Tammy Smith is a licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Thimble, ONE ART, Bending Genres, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. She received honorable mentions in the Journal of New Jersey Poets 2026 Poets Prize and the 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.

AUBADE BEFORE THE ELECTION

by Cheryl Martone

One crow swoops down from his solo perch,

beholds a lifeless body of another. His sudden

voice nudges indifferent dawn, grates the air.

Sky stretches and shifts, grows rich with color,

streaked with wings. This is no Van Gogh sky,

though. No wheatfields here. And yet, a sweep

of nature’s gestures,

 

                                 menace on the horizon,

a certain madness in the air, and now—in my

own backyard—a community moved by and

within a murder of its own. Crows pace, scan,

echo each other. Somehow, they must know

how mythologies persist about them: trickster,

thief. Something to dread. But when I look

below my own window,

 

                                        I don’t see anything

worse than small creatures born with intent

to survive. Everywhere, it seems, some kind

of danger, another funeral. Old lamentations,

new ones not yet imagined. Eventually, each

bird lifts away, leaves one soul behind. They,

and I, begin this day acknowledging another

passing, another unease

 

                                beyond Equinox. Soon,

All Souls Day. And days later, the millions

of votes cast. Dies cast. But now, it’s still

October, the shorter days, human silhouettes

moving within the windows of their lives –

within a daily exorbitance of

 

                                               whatever’s next.

Is it this ticking brightness? Some take it all in.

Some resist. Others look down and away. Sky

anchors in cobalt, erases this dawn reflection

of our autumn world riddled with fire.

Cheryl Martone lives in Rhode Island, where she works as a grant writer for a food rescue and hunger relief nonprofit. Her work has been published in Still Point Arts Quarterly, River Heron Review, Gyroscope Review, Drifting Sands Haibun, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Unlost, among other publications. 

HERSTORY

by MaryLisa DeDomenicis

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

I was only sixteen
when my best friend’s 
father stuck his hands up
my shirt and his tongue 
down my throat.

I was terrified to tell her
yet somehow she knew 
so I didn’t have to.

After my best friend’s father 
I never went braless.
Never mind I was donned 
in a thick crewneck sweatshirt—

He saw something
He wanted.

You don’t even have to be 
beautiful.
You only have to be
a girl.

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. 

UNCONFIRMED

by Eric Goldfarb

The Guardian, October 5, 2026

A tiny grain with teeth.
Yet too small
to cast a shadow.

Then a lung.
A room.
A locked door.

Someone says
nothing is confirmed.

No one moves.

Morning slips beneath the door
in one thin blade,
bright enough to touch every shoe.

For a moment,
that is enough.

We turn uncertainty
into innocence.

Eric Goldfarb's work has appeared in The New Verse News, Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Atlanta.