INCIDENTAL CAPTURE

by Celeste DeSario

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

 

META DATA

Timestamp: 2026-08-28 2:15 EST

Geographical Coordinates: 40.8458° N, 72.8972° W

Direction of Travel: Northbound

Vehicle Make: Ford Escape

Primary Color: American Flag Blue?

License Plate reads: TRACK THIS

 

Driving to Walmart

for a two-dollar pack of sticky notes.

Placing them over the T’s or the K on the plate—

My best defense.

 

And just like that,

The million-dollar system fails.

And I vanish.

 

Or better yet,

I take an alternative route

where no Flocks have yet taken root.

The safer option to being watched,

Photographed.

 

Can I duck a camera

while walking to grab a burger and root beer?

Maybe.

 

If the shutter clicks

and I’m in the background,

I’m an unwilling celebrity,

now in the database

Filed Under:

“Incidental Capture.”

 

You’re not their target

unless you’re an exclusive story.

 

Undocumented.

Dark-skinned.

A headline—

 

 If you’re from Norway.

Or Sweden.

Relax.

 But every tabloid needs an editor.

Who is that sitting at the stationhouse keyboard?

Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through the candid shots?

A chorus of Troopers.

 

Officer Pacheco in Massachusetts,

typing a plate number into the void.

Tracking her

ex-girlfriend.

 

Officer Zahir in Kentucky,

searching for those unposed shots—

The ones that let us glimpse behind the curtain.

Running her fingers through her hair before

turning onto a street

whose name he doesn’t recognize.

 

Officer Klein in Texas

 looking for that Money Shot—

The one where she leans in for a kiss,

The one where she opens his front door with her own key.

       

Click.

Main Street.

 

Click.

Medical Center.

 

Click.

The new lover’s driveway.

 

Do the Troopers have his plate, as well?

 

Or are they tracking Hector?

Our undocumented farm worker?

The one who helps me pick out ripe melons,

carries my bags to my car,

asks about my day.

 

Pinpointing where he lives.

Where he works.

Where he can be apprehended.

Intercepted.

Arrested.

 

Those apples aren’t going to pick themselves, you know.

 

Remember the days

when we could go out into the world

and no one wanted to film us?

 Now Flock is the 21st-century paparazzi,

always watching

Recording

Cataloguing.

 

Once you step outside your door,

Your movements are saved to a hard drive.

A web woven tightly—

no escaping the fingerprint

the timeline of your movement—

one you never asked for and yet…

 

Uploading…

 

           That quick drive to the store—

           A sighting. A hit.

           That walk down the block—

           A capture.

 

            Flock.

      Eliminating crime

      In your neighborhood.

      In your life.

 

     The right to move unhampered,

     the right to exist undetected?

     No longer a given.

     For any of us.

     For all of us.

   Achievement Unlocked: Full Equality

Celeste DeSario writes poetry to process and make sense of life’s events. Her work is featured in The New Verse News, The SportsScribe, The Changing Times, The Ekphrastic Review, The Dissident Voice, and Three-Line Poetry. She lives in Shoreham Village, NY—a town where no Flock cameras have been sighted… yet.

HEIDEGGER'S STOPWATCH

by Zumwalt

AI-generated video created by Nightcafé for The New Verse News

The chief executive of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. —The New York Times, September 12, 2026 Sunday dinner in Billings, Montana—
Mr. Smith set fire to four generations
just one day after a quintuple homicide bonfire
in Forest Grove, Oregon
incinerated three generations
and a few terrified pets.

No AI assistance required.

In Lebanon, under de-escalation,
27 dead, 69 wounded in 70 hours.
In Iran, an errant missile
crashed a wedding,
wiping out two children,
destroying and injuring many more.

No AI assistance required.

Iranians compiled open-source data
to create effective targeting handbooks
against American naval positions
while Yemen-based Houthi cells
developed software for
ballistic missiles and guided rockets.

AI assistance required
and provided effectively by Claude AI.

We do our best to teach little Lucas
right and wrong, and how to cross the street.
We put in the hours at jobs that
fray our nerves, and when we feel like
arguing, one of us takes a walk outside
to ensure Lucas never hears us fight.

No AI assistance required.

I read that Jacob Coxon
(previously employed by competitor OpenAI)
left Anthropic and upcoming IPO riches
to tell us that he and colleagues
believe that AI could kill us all
by the end of the decade.

I asked Grok, this Saturday morning,
to fill me in: it tried to reassure me,
telling me such rumors have circulated for years.
"No AI system has wiped out
(or is currently wiping out) humanity."
My shoulders and neck tensed and shuddered.

I scrolled the news on my smartphone.
Anthropic's CEO published 3800 words,
one paragraph about AI curing disease,
the next several dozen paragraphs detailing
some of AI's destructive skills and the CEO's proposals—
steps to slow down AI and apply theoretical safeguards.

Some AI assistance may be required.
Assistance from corporations and world leaders required.

I prayed and remembered my grandmother's words

that God always answers prayers: "yes" or "no" or "maybe."

Sounded like this was a maybe.

Zumwalt’s poetry examines the intersection of identity, instability, and the mechanics of perception. Recent work has appeared or will appear in The New Verse News, Heavy Feather, San Diego Poetry Annual, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Society of Classical Poets, Light, and additional journals.

AT HIGH FALLS, MINNESOTA

by Maxine Susman

 

I look across the gorge to Ontario—

same wilderness on the other side.

The great Falls plunge, three separate chutes,

over the bowl of ragged basalt cliffs

into the river flowing to Lake Superior.

Pounding roar, wall of spray, impassible—

here the voyageurs, bearing on their backs

more than their weight in beaver pelts,

slung their birch canoes onto their shoulders

and made le grand portage.

 

Wilderness ranges along the gorge

farther than the eye can travel.

United States / Canada / Gichi Onigamiig,

The narrow bed of Pigeon River

now the border between nations

that share the same terrain:

Falls, thick forest, gray cliffs of diabase.

I could almost hurl a rock across—

it would reach another country,

shared bedrock of Laurentian Shield.

 

Wilderness joins both sides together.

My father / myself,

his native land / and mine,

his parents' native land / and his,

our family river flowing over borders

from Belarus to Montreal,

from Ontario to New York.

I won't cross through Customs this time,

I'm close enough to know my father's laugh

inside the space inside the water

same on both sides of the Falls

my father's homeland a stone's throw away.

Maxine Susman, Highland Park, NJ, has published six chapbooks and two full-length books of poetry, most recently Northern Swim (Ragged Sky Press, 2024). Her work concerns the environment and natural world, history, art, people and other creatures. She has been leading poetry workshops for many years and she teaches poetry-writing at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Rutgers University, earning the Distinguished Teaching Award. A Ginsberg Award finalist and multiple Pushcart nominee, her work has appeared in dozens of publications including Paterson Literary Review, Fourth River, Canary, Blueline, Slant, Earth’s Daughters, and Crab Orchard Review.

A RESOUNDING SILENCE

by Valentina Gnup

For those who lost their lives in the Nepal flood of August, 2026.

The faithful believe Mount Kailash 

is the center of the world—
the most sacred peak, the ultimate abode of Lord Shiva.
 —Hindol Sengupta, religious historian


   Over rocky ground and icy rivers, believers walk 
to honor whichever God they trust to answer their prayers.

   We still don’t know how many of the faithful lost
their lives in flash floods on their final pilgrimage. 

   Some called them foolish, though don’t we all hope
for glimpses of wonder, a spare house key to heaven?

   Early this morning, I lay in bed listening to the rain 
ticking in the drainpipe and wondering if I’ll ever 

   kiss anyone again. No need to tell me, my spinster 
sorrow has no place in this elegy for the drowned.

   Sengupta said, Gods walk among men in these mountains,
but the pilgrims circling Mount Kailash are forbidden 

   to climb its sacred slopes. Perhaps God craves privacy, 
or maybe he’s as hungry for kisses as I am.

   Although these gray clouds look more like November,
it’s still August, the world on fire. I won’t lament

   our frightening climate, I won’t condemn pretend kings. 
I’ll ask you to consider the grass—it’s already greener 

   than it was last night. If I ever visit the holy mountain, 
I'll pray, God, let the world recover quickly as grass.

Valentina Gnup's poetry collection Ruined Music was published by Grayson Books in 2024. She has won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry, the Lascaux Prize in Poetry, the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award, and the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including Palette Poetry, December, Brooklyn Review, Nimrod, and The New Guard. She has chapbooks published by Mille Grazie Press and the North Carolina Writers' Network. She lives in Mill Valley, CA.

SURVIVOR’S GUILT

by Sarah Fitzpatrick

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

8:47 a.m., the world is a siren. The train folds down its newspapers in unison. A thousand dominos clack to impossible silence. Playbills flutter into ash. Billboards tie themselves into prayer flags screaming past a capsule sealed against the miasma of falling towers. A new infant surfaces to gasp blue light. Mother’s breasts engorge with the fair-weather clouds beyond the cesarean drape. Someone is screaming down the hall. The willows of Central Park shudder the sign language of calamity. The molten core of Earth constricts. The trees understand it as music. 

Saved by a teacher conference, your feet give way. You’ve stayed an enormous golden pendulum, its wire dusted with powdered glass. Enraged muscles conspire to squeeze until your tender hand is empty of blood. It runs to colorize the sidewalks of a ghastly silent movie screened only in Manhattan. The city as monolith, a scientist’s constant. The pendulum is a false prophet. You become the fixed point. Transfuse time back into the veins of every paramedic, every finance worker, every new mother, every suicide bomber. Steal back all that is magnetized by the core. Give back the seasons to the trees.

Sara Fitzpatrick works in animal welfare in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her poetry and fiction have been published in places like Merion West, Jet Fuel Review, X-R-A-Y, and Tampa Review. A collection, Bury me in the Sky, was published in 2020 by Nixes Mate Books.

COME HOME!

by Ana Doina

“Come home, my love, come home!” I beg

on the phone. “Where are the kids?” you ask 

hurriedly. “Phil is at school, Al was 

late for class again, and is now stuck

in traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel

on the Jersey side.”

“Thank God for that,” you sigh. 

 

On William Street, your office’s windows 

three blocks from the Towers, allow you 

a full view of the conflagration. “I see them,”

you whisper mournfully, “burning 

like two Roman Candles. Last year this time,” 

you say, “I was there, on the ninetieth floor, 

meeting with a client.” I grip my cell phone 

and try to keep my wits, but tears are streaming 

on my face, and my mind is racing to find

a way to get you home. 

 

“The South Tower is struggling,” you say.

“I don’t think it can stand much longer.” 

The certainty in your voice makes me realize

yours is not a guess but the professional opinion

of an engineer. “Lord, there could be over 

fifty thousand people there. I can see flames 

going floor by floor, charring everything. 

 

The building trembles; glass is busting out, 

concrete, pulverized, cascades from it, 

and fragments float away like flakes. It sputters 

smoke and sparks. It’s going to pancake.”

 

“Come home! Get out of there,” I sob. 

All of a sudden, there is a tremendous boom, 

and the phone line goes dead. 

Author’s note: The phone lines in that part of Manhattan were destroyed at that exact time. My husband made it home that day. It took him many hours walking through the singed streets, the clouds of soot, and falling debris, frightened and angry like the rest of us. The poem’s dialogue is almost word by word the conversation I had with my husband at the time the towers were burning.

Ana Doina’s work has appeared in numerous national and international print and online magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. Her chapbook, The Later Generation, published by Kelsay Books, and her full-length book of poems, Legend of Bread, published by Legacy Press Books, were released in 2024. Her book Coming to America: Stories and Essays, to be published by Histria Books, is scheduled for release in October 2026. 

NO SOAP

by Thomas R. Smith

There is nothing in nature comparable to soap. —Francis Ponge, “Soap” trans. Lane Dunlop 

What a filthy Presidentiad! —Walt Whitman, “To the States”

In August 2026 several sailors aboard the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, despondent over deteriorating conditions of hygiene on the ship after nearly nine months deployed without relief in the Arabian Sea in President Trump’s war on Iran, were reported to have attempted suicide.

1.

In 1943 France, during

the Nazi occupation, the poet

Francis Ponge began his book-length poem

in praise of soap.  Awakening to the beauty,

not to mention necessity, of that

familiar cleansing agent by wartime

shortages he and his fellow resistance

fighters experienced at their rural

hideouts, Ponge hailed the humble bar of soap

as “Magic stone” and thoroughly, lovingly

detailed its dissolution through use

down to its voluble finish.  Thus he made

his little book a shrine to the gift of

cleanliness we tend to take for granted.

2.

We may ask ourselves, what if there was a poet, 

a Ponge on board the USS Abraham

Lincoln likewise honoring the objects

of that crew’s deprivations over months without

leave stationed in the Arabian Sea?  

Running out of soap, deodorant, toothpaste, 

enduring moldy showers and backed-up toilets

among the miseries that pushed a handful 

of the five-thousand-plus men jammed into

that floating prison to literally jump ship

to end it, having also reached Ponge’s

conviction that there is nothing in nature

comparable to soap, would he have turned in

despair to the unsuds’d water of the sea?

3.

Ponge’s soap shortage came as a sacrifice

in the fight against German fascism, while

the sailors of the Abraham Lincoln suffered

only for a war of choice the president

engineered to distract from his other

crimes.  In this he was surely following

the playbook of the fascists Ponge’s

generation paid so dearly to defeat,

of waging war against one’s own people.  

No doubt the real injury to the men of

the Abraham Lincoln was the shortage of meaning

in their ordeal.  Ship of shame left in neglect

by a president so filthy there’s not

enough soap on earth to scrub clean his name.

Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.