 |
| Cartoon by Clay Jones |
Stop Killer Robots is urging all states to adopt, at the 7th Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) (16–20 November,Geneva), a mandate for negotiations on a new legally binding Protocol to the CCW on autonomous weapons systems, which must be negotiated within one year—by the end of 2027.
You know, set-it-and-forget-it weapons?
Killer robots, blind moles
sniffing out pre-programmed targets,
unsupervised scavenger
hunt for heat signature.
Unblinking camera eyes trained
on code over creed,
with unflagging stamina, vulturing
skies without feeling
the sun, and the finger
that will pull the trigger
has never held a human hand.
One hundred twenty-eight UN member states
looked into those cosmic voids
and softened
their language, not their swords:
Meaningful human control,
and predictability chopped
on the cutting board of consensus.
But we've seen the sci-fi:
unmanned devices
unmanning too many,
mangled massacres.
And when some hotshot missile breaks
the boundary of a non-binding text,
who will open the curtain
of curling smoke to stare
at blood-stained faces?
Who will look suffering
in its leaking eyes and say yes—
I stand by my call?
Anne Ramallo is a writer, editor, and performer living in Los Angeles, CA. Her poetry has been featured in journals and anthologies, including Sky Island, Low Hanging Fruit, Elysium Review, Cosmic Daffodil, Radical Catalyst, and The Poetry Lighthouse. She is a co-founder of indie press Poets in the Pines, publishing the Made From Midnight anthology series. Keep up with her on Instagram @AnneRamallo.
We voted like a scold of jays to raucously drive off
the hungry red-tailed hawk
who tries its best to claw us where we nest
and now it’s on us to prevent more humankind
from being grabbed, shoved
to the ground face down and led away, cuffed
by amateur predators for whom they’re prey.
It hurts to imagine people
in the moment before they’re lifted out
of their lives, hunted but not yet caught
still free to move
as birds in our graying, spangled sky
as the paperless geese flying overhead.
Catherine Gonick published her debut collection of poetry, Split Daughter of Eve, with Sheila-Na-Gig editions. Her poetry has appeared in many journals including The New Verse News, Vox Populi, and One Art. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, where they work to repair and restore the environment.
by Eric Goldfarb and Celeste DeSario
 |
| The New York Times, November 10, 2026 |
If she says she loves your mind,
Ask what else she hopes to find.
If she says your chips are hot,
She may want the ones you’ve got.
If she tells you you’re a ten,
Ask for the numbers. Check again.
When you’re a billionaire,
You’ll hear nice things about your hair.
He taught machines to spot a lie,
To ask for proof and wonder why.
She slipped past firewalls with a wink,
He liked her far too much to think.
She said, “Your wife must be so proud.”
He said, “Could we not talk so loud?”
He paid for penetration tests.
She offered one. He said, “Be my guest.”
A high-tech mogul in a low-tech trap,
Blinded by a dance in his lap.
She praised his hard drive, stroked his pride,
Then asked what else he kept inside.
He’d made a fortune spotting flaws;
He dropped his pants without a pause.
She laughed at jokes that weren’t much good.
He thought, At last, I’m understood.
She didn’t need a Trojan horse.
He held the door for her, of course.
A billion dollars makes the news.
The same old mess wears cheaper shoes.
One person gets a private thrill.
Another gets the cleanup bill.
Eric Goldfarb and Celeste DeSario collaborated on this poem despite a minor disagreement over acceptable levels of indecency. Celeste insisted she’d read Chaucer. Eric reminded her that his 92-year-old mother reads everything he publishes. He also suggested they aim for The New Verse News rather than Letters to the Penthouse Forum. Celeste threatened to submit the unexpurgated version to The New Yorker under his name alone. Negotiations continue.
Ann Tweedy grew up in Southeastern Massachusetts but has spent most of her adult life in various parts of the West Coast, the Midwest, and now the South. In addition to being a poet and essayist, she is also a law professor and Tribal judge. Her full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet won a Bisexual Book Award and was a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and a Golden Crown Literary Award. Her chapbooks include Beleaguered Oases, White Out, A Registry of Survival, and Wind Through a Beak-Drilled Branch, which won the 2026 South Dakota State Poetry Society Annual Chapbook Contest. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Hamline University. She currently divides her time between South Dakota and Mississippi.
My father’s eyes last stung with smoke in the Driftless
thirty-five years ago—
flames swarming up limestone bluffs
and leapfrogging through the open oak groves.
Ugly old firebreaks stretching thirty feet wide
demanded weeding. But we needed to school at home,
milk the sheep, and fix our barns, so we watched
thistle take those bared county ditches, inch across ridges,
then choke wild grasses that sponged up rain.
Like others I planted the firebreak
where it ran by my house—
a patch of green beans and corn.
I let pink thistle creep through the rest.
During the harvest, white-spotted mouths
and red-dotted faces flared up again,
spreading through coulees, through children.
Our children, who could have been anything,
other than dead.
We’ve watched thistle take root and rain turn to flood.
Beyond the Driftless, more safeguards have fallen.
Restoring them may be like uprooting a garden,or like trying to claw a child from the ground.
Dawn Perry is a writer who lives and works in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA in English Literature from Princeton University.
by Phyllis Frakt
The sky is bluer than before.
In the blink of an eye,
faded gray-green grass
brightens as if it’s spring.
I can make twilight linger,
gain extra daylight
without changing the clock.
But only with my left eye.
No magic yet on the right.
It preserves a murky universe
for now, until the surgeon
drives away the shadows.
While I wait—wink, wink—
I imagine I control light
like raising a window shade
to enlighten a weary world.
With the flutter of an eyelid,
I would restore rule of law,
expel autocrats and sycophants,
hit them right between the eyes.
Phyllis Frakt says if you live long enough, you will need cataract surgery and might as well make the most of its metaphorical potential. She has published previous poems in New Verse News, US 1 Worksheets, The Ravens Perch, and Second Coming. She lives in New Jersey..
