BLESSINGS FOR TIMES OF CRISIS

by Sam Friedman

Shutterstock photo by Pietre Laborde

Blessed are the children of Paris

for they open doorways

so their people can dismantle

the towers of power.

 

Blessed are Pasha and Ania

for they save lives

amidst a genocidal war.

 

Blessed is Vladislav

who fought the imperial invaders

of his native Ukraine

and refused to submit

to the fascist thugs who savagely beat him

in the delusion that they were defending

the nation he defends.

 

And blessed are the cockroach archeologists

who dig up the poems we wrote

about our long-dead civilization

so our hopes can re-echo

amidst cockroach revolutionaries

so next time, we do not fail.

Author’s note: I first met Pavlo (Pasha) Smyrnov and Ania Korobchuk professionally; they have been very active in harm reduction programs and research around HIV/AIDS in Ukraine. Since the full scale invasion, they have organized medical assistance for villages near the front lines. Vladislav Starodubtsev was in the news recently. All of them are friends of mine.

Sam Friedman is a poet, activist, and public health researcher. He has published two books of poetry and poems in a variety of magazines.

HALLOWEEN IN EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

by Christine Rhein

10/31/25, for Rachel Jamison Webster

One year after Halloween incident, fear remains over immigration enforcement. —Evanston RoundTable, October 18, 2026

My friend bears witness, posts a video
from her front porch, tells of helicopters 
that flew over her town all day today,
of the white, unmarked ICE vans
that cruised the streets, circled stores 
and schools, one of the vans ramming
a car, the woman at the wheel pulled out, 
pushed down, hauled away by men in masks.
This is real, my friend says, this is happening—
parents, teachers, guarding a grade school 
for hours—the children kept inside, 
wearing their costumes. No parade this year 
through the neighborhood—princesses,
pirates, ghosts, superheroes, locked down.
 
It’s nighttime now—my friend posts again 
with her porchlight on, and she’s smiling,
eager to let everyone know how her block 
turned noisy after all, how the sidewalks
filled with laughing trick-or-treaters—
so many of them that she was worried
she’d run out of candy, but there was a boy 
who saw she was holding one last little bar, 
and said Here, I’ll give you some of my candy,
and then all of the kids in that huddled group—
a flock, she calls them, of eight- or nine-year-olds—
reached down into their bags, dropped sweetness
by fistfuls into her bowl. That way, they said, 
there will be candy for the next kids.

Christine Rhein is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Swerve (Wayne State University Press) and of Wild Flight, a winner of the Walt McDonald Poetry Prize (Texas Tech University Press). A former automotive engineer, Christine lives in Brighton, Michigan.

ALL HALLOWS’ EVE

by Devon Balwit

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

We stand

at the thin place:

crane our necks one way, and

 

we look upon the healthy faces

of our grandchildren, the other,

and an ungovernable force erases

 

all flesh. What do you think? Are the specters

phantasms or an inevitability?

Trick or Treat! shout the neighbor

 

boys. I let them be greedy—

why chide an impulse we share,

fistfuls of plenty

 

until we’re so glutted we’re

sick. After, they (we) spill 

our booty on the floor

 

and make deals. 

What isn’t gobbled up becomes landfill.

When not making art, Devon Balwit edits for Asimov Press and Works in Progress magazine.

SPIN

by Tom Cartelli

And this one says and that one says and this one says 

to the one who says this fact is fact this fact is false  

and the movers tik and the shakers tok and the spinners spin

and the liars spout and the liars claim and the listeners listen 

and listening repeat what the liars say and the saying goes on 

and the said gets said and the dead get dead and the dead

stay dead while the spinners spin and the sayers say and listeners

listen to the chatter over wires when this one says 

and that one says and this one says to the one who lies

to the listeners listening as the wireless chatter goes

in and out over time over matter and this one says 

and that one says what this one didn’t but got tangled in the matter 

and the matter is and the matter isn’t what the chatterers chatter 

all the singsong day and livelong night of the chatter 

over wires and the wireless chatter that clacks to the clatter 

that thrums to the beat of the constant patter that keeps at bay

the matter of the matter that riffs and jives and won’t say 

what’s the matter with the liars who lie and the voices that shatter

all the dingdong day and star-tossed night the dreams that come

and dreams that go like raisins in the sun that won’t explode

Tom Cartelli taught literature & film studies for many years at Muhlenberg College and lives in uneasy retirement in far western New Jersey. Recent and forthcoming publications include poems and transcriptions in The Threepenny Review, Möbius, The Antigonish Review, The Field Guide Poetry Magazine, The Avalon Literary Review, TheNewVerseNews, and the online journal Politics/Letters.

THE PEOPLE’S TREES, EAST POTOMAC GOLF LINKS

by Christine Sikorski

Instagram

As if what matters is 
polishing up the place, 
fabricating another lush, 
green display, before he 
is forced to walk away 
from the people’s house
(now half rubble), 
the president had 430
sycamores, maples, 
cherries, willows
cut down. 
 
While I pray 
that offspring 
of the murdered trees 
have flown, fallen 
into ready earth, and 
begun to heed the sun,
they will not be enough— 
if current human young 
and all that follow 
are to breathe and run 
and enjoy a world 
more whole than this one,
from which the felon
stole so much. 
 
What then?
 
Let us demand a grand 
replanting, the man who 
ordered this destruction 
down on his knees with
trowel and dirty hands,
crawling from one 
tender sapling to 
another, repenting.

Christine Sikorski’s work has appeared in The New Verse News, coastlines, Waterstone, Little Patuxent Review, Quartet, One Art, This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year, 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.

THE BOG

by Karen Marker

responding to The New Verse News poem “Daily” by Sarah Dickenson Snyder who was responding to the podcast When AI Comes for Your Purpose in Life 

also responding to what’s been happening all around the SF Bay Area:

The Guardian, October 27, 2036

It’s not really a bog but it’s spongy and weirdly 

acidic—this soil lacking oxygen, gasping  

waterlogged, quaking with layers of torn down 

trees, redone flipped houses, luxury high rise 

senior living. A whole storm’s come through 

and left my neighborhood full of debris without  

the air it needs to decay. A slew of AI billionaires 

spend their wealth jacking up real estate prices

while the unhoused veterans camp out next door 

in collapsing cars, collecting wood to cook, 

old folks sleep in ruined tents. Even the rock 

of the moon’s become something else now we know 

it’s got the gold of frozen water for data centers. 

Tonight I can’t find a ladder to climb my way out

or a solid plank under my feet to stop me 

from sinking.    I keep thinking about my father.

His whirling brain never stopped solving problems 

with numbers—the most vital part of his life—

 

but he’s been gone ten years already and I have 

no valid way to measure what’s been lost 

when the whole history of human knowledge,

including every math problem, has been eaten up 

by AI, and answers get spouted out in a second. 

On a The Daily podcast a math professor cries 

confessing his love of numbers and teaching, 

telling of a crazy old genius mathematician

and a child math prodigy come together to work

at what they do best.  Now all that’s left, Ecclesiastes.  

Even if you’re an atheist and don’t believe in

anything but the eloquence of solving problems

there’s still this turning we do in time to die—

this moment when it all clicks in place. 

 

The hole of the loss, the sorrow, my father’s death.

The Dreams.  Questions coming again 

that can’t be stolen. So much inside me 

I still haven’t uncovered—air, and somewhere 

a plank laid out like my father so I can stop, 

 and step out over the rubble.

Karen Marker writes protest poetry and prose  from Oakland,  California where she finds inspiration by  reading the news as seen through the eyes of the wonderful poets that NVN features. She is honored that her work has been included here as well as in a number of other places like The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, WordPeace, Calul, and the  Kent State University May 4 Special Collections and Archives. Her book of flash memoir and poetry Beneath the Blue Umbrella is available through Finishing Line Press and explores resilience in face of family trauma.  

PEAT MOSS AND CLOVER

by Julie Steiner

Photo credit: Julie Steiner

Some smells are Portkeys: following your nose
will take you where you wouldn't choose. The past,
as patient as a paparazzo, lies
in wait in harmless objects, poised to spring.
One soap brand’s scent assaults you. (There’s no way
you’d share that silly symptom with a doctor.)

Your mother had a friend who was a doctor —
the sort of gent who won’t look down his nose
at those beneath him. Honored by the way
they’re treated, social climbers think they’ve passed
some test that’s caused their public stock to spring
up fifty points. (We tell ourselves such lies.)

Our own redemption makes us idolize
such reputable citizens as Doctor
Snow. We’re baptized in their sacred spring.
If kissing up to them should brown your nose,
you hold them blameless. Demigods are past
reproach. Shit happens, but some other way.

So when your kid complains about the way
he shows affection, know the trouble lies
in misinterpretation. No one’s passed
the slightest ugly hint about the doctor.
He hugs a lot—that, everybody knows—
but Honi soit qui mal y pense. Don’t spring

to damaging conclusions. Irish Spring
(a bar held in her mouth) should wash away
the filth she’s said. But soon the whole town knows
about your kid’s attention-getting lies.
She starts accusing classmates, not just Doctor
Snow. The social life you loved is past.

And now these drawings! When will she get past
this stage? You hope her sex craze doesn’t spring
from something in your gene pool. Playing doctor,
miming sex acts—this could be the way
your grandpas went so wrong. Salvation lies
in moving to a place where no one knows

your problem child. There, doctor up her past.
Ignore her noes. Keep buying Irish Spring.
Don't cave to tantrums. That way madness lies.

Author's Note: The following context for the sestina "Peat Moss and Clover"—named for the scent profile of Irish Spring deodorant soap—might cast light on two recent news stories: first, the attack ad featuring Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton's mother calling her a liar, and second, the Cornell Seven situation.

The second-person narrator changes from the child's perspective to the mother's over the course of the poem, to reflect the erasure I have felt whenever I've tried to get my mom to acknowledge that I did, indeed, experience sexual abuse from ages five to seven, and that she and my father punished me for trying to report it (as well as for my attempts to come to terms with it, through drawings and playacting). She still clings to her preferred narrative—namely, that I was a deeply sinful kid, but through firm parental discipline and fervent prayer, she and my father saved me from being a pervert like the many convicted sexual predators in her family tree.

It is unsurprising that both my own mom and Amy Acton's are so deeply invested in characterizing their daughters as liars. The alternative is admitting that they made a bad situation worse for their kids, and that they continue to wrong us by being in such obstinate denial decades later. If I can't expect my mother, with whom I am otherwise on good terms, to give up the self-exonerating idea that her young daughter's claims of sexual abuse were just attention-seeking lies, I certainly wouldn't expect Acton's estranged and unstable mom to be able do so.

I had thought that the sexual abuse I experienced from other kids was an outlier, because my elementary school situation seemed unique. Many of my classmates were years older than I was, because I was put into an "open education" class—my elementary school's dumping ground for special needs kids of mixed ages. Hans Asperger was still a decade away from publishing the news that some individuals with autism have average, or even high, intelligence, but can be overwhelmed by sensory input (such as buzzing fluorescent lights, or by an entire classroom's worth of kids radiating laundry detergent and shampoo perfumes). My school didn't know what to do with me. I had entered kindergarten as a strong reader and was excellent at math, but I disrupted any classroom I was put into with my near-daily tantrums and distracting "stimming" behaviors. So they put me where I would only disrupt the almost non-existent education of the throwaway kids—those referred to in the day's lingo as "mentally retarded." These kids also happened to represent the population that is at the highest risk for being targeted by sexual predators. Some of my classmates were probably experiencing sexual contact outside of school, and were trying to make sense of it by experimenting on younger kids, like me. (I regret to say that I, in turn, did the same thing myself, when given the opportunity.)

But perhaps my victimization by, and of, other children was less unique than I'd thought. In an Oct. 20 PBS NewsHour interview, an expert on child sexual abuse said: 

"Up to 70% of contact offenses in the U.S. are caused by other kids. People are surprised that a lot of it is at the hands of other kids, and it can be every bit as harmful as adult-perpetrated abuse. But kids often do it for different reasons and under different circumstances [than adult offenders]. [...] Being cognizant of the fact that your kids are capable of causing harm, and teaching them not only about giving consent, but also about receivingconsent—this topic is coming up more and more, especially in the moment with the Cornell Seven. A lot of people are looking at the parents' involvement, and thinking about 'How did they teach their kids?' [...] It's a really good example of how we should be teaching our sons and our daughters about both sides of the [consent] equation."

I highly recommend the full interview with authors Elizabeth Letourneau and Luke Malone about their book One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis, available for free viewing on the PBS NewsHour website. It is surprisingly hopeful.

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.

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego. For her other poems in repeating forms and/or on this topic—many of them first published in The New Verse News—see her Substack, Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus.

WORLD SERIES GAME FIVE

by Phyllis Wax

Blue collar Milwaukee

cheers its team all the way

to baseball’s peak, then

can’t afford thousands to see them play

at the stadium their taxes helped pay for.

Cheaper by far to fly down to St. Pete,

buy a ticket in the other team’s park,

even stay overnight,

and they do!

At an exuberant Tropicana Field

almost a third of the seats

are filled with spirited Brewer fans,

beer cups in hand, cheering them on—Go Brewers!—

helping them compete—Yay Brew Team!—

to an easy victory! Only one more win

to bring the trophy home!

Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee, where she observes the goings-on of her city, the country and the world. Among the journals in which her work has appeared are Gyroscope Review, Writers Resist, Jerry Jazz Musician, Rise Up Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Wordpeace, The New Verse News, Naugatuck River Review, Your Daily Poem, Feral. She's not a sports fan, but tries to be aware of what's going on. Go Brewers!

REFUGEES

by Pepper Trail

On September 14, birders gathered at La Cumbre Peak, a bump at about 4,000 feet along the ridge that rises behind Santa Barbara, California. They were hoping to see nutcrackers, an alpine bird normally found above 8,000 feet many mountains away… Over a thousand flew past in two hours. It seemed as if all the nutcrackers in California were pouring out of distant mountains… This mass movement of nutcrackers has been range-wide, with many observations in places well beyond their usual range, and often in surprisingly large numbers… Is the sky falling, is this climate change? Probably. Are the mountains falling into the seas? No, but their birds are. In an act of desperation, they have chosen a self-imposed refugee status, at least temporarily. It is not known how many will make it back to their alpine homes. —Stephen Carr Hampton Substack, October 19, 2026

So many, suddenly everywhere

Not yet starving, but knowing starvation

Knowing it is coming, so they must leave

It has been too dry for too long

The crops are failing, have failed

There is no seed to fill the storehouses

There is no choice, and they cross the invisible border

Our world is a mystery, a hope

Also a danger–they feel that in their bones

But abundance, enough to share

If only sharing would be allowed

If only they knew the right words to ask

But they do not

How could they, being birds?

Strange finches, nuthatches, nutcrackers, crossbills

Creatures of wilderness and winter

Known to us only from the pages of fairy tales

Fleeing scarcity, now in our neighborhoods

Invisible to most, welcomed by a few

Threatening no one

How could they, being birds?

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

KEHLSTEINHAUS

by David Alberto Fernández

On the top of the dwarfing mountain
Looking down on a city of salt
That house was a weighted sentinel
bearing down on all of us

A high refuge
Of godlike detachment
An alpine height
for predatory birds

Four score years after they traded 
our friends for soot 
The orange glow showed
The equanimity of flame

Let the fire 
pay its homage to their dwelling
Let the the bitter wind
Receive their handiwork

For all they took from us
Let's leave them what's left there
When fools try to pay tribute
To architects of collapse
Let them taste charred wood

We can best honor them
By forgetting their names,
By giving breath
To their smoldering ruin
And preserving forever
Their monument of ashes

David Alberto Fernández is the poet laureate of the City of Takoma Park, Maryland. He is an Associate Editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, co-founder of the Beltway Café reading series at the MLK Library in Washington DC, and the pop-up poetry art project Vocal Takoma.