DEAR JUDY

a duplex poem

by Trish Hopkinson

Today, a successful assassination

happened near where you last lived.

     In Utah, where I once lived with you

     a right-wing activist was shot dead.

In Evergreen, a school shooter was shot dead

on the same Wednesday in Colorado.

     It’s Wednesday in Utah and Colorado

     where I now live, 200 miles from the dead

no longer living: two men, shot dead,

two schoolchildren fatally wounded.

     This year, four kids dead, thirty-five wounded.

     They were not soldiers; they were students.

Murder on campus, witnessed by students,

no ear grazed: successful assassination.

Trish Hopkinson is a poet and advocate for the literary arts. You can find her online at SelfishPoet.com. Her poetry has been published in several literary magazines and journals; and her most recent book A Godless Ascends was published by Lithic Press in March 2024. Hopkinson happily answers to labels such as atheist, feminist, and empty nester; and enjoys traveling, live music, and craft beer.

THE ART OF WHAT’S LEFT

by Matthew Murrey

 

Banksy confirmed he was responsible for the work with a post on Instagram, showing the graffiti before it was covered over. It has been interpreted by some as a comment on the arrest of hundreds of people for supporting Palestine Action by holding up placards at protests. Palestine Action was banned by the government as a terrorist group in July after activists damaged RAF planes. --BBC, September 10, 2025

What was just one raging judge 

bludgeoning one poor bloke 
lying helpless on his back 
has now been scrubbed 
into anyone, anywhere where 
faceless power hammers 
the harmless: families asleep 
in wrecked schools and sad tents, 
thousands on foot, on donkey carts, 
and in cars fleeing their flattened 
neighborhoods, starving hundreds 
shot while crowding for food, 
the badly wounded and bleeding
on their backs begging for mercy.
A gray afterimage of the mural 
remains on the courthouse wall 
like a blast shadow in Hiroshima, 
like a black-gray pall of smoke 
above human beings being burned, 
like some relentless nightmare ghost 
that ought to haunt us night and day.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection, Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026). Recent poems are in Dissident Voice, Escape Into Life, Tiny Wren Lit, and elsewhere. He was a public school librarian for more than 20 years and lives in Urbana, IL with his partner. He can be found on Bluesky and Instagram under the handle @mytwords.

NO MERCY

by Steven Kent

“Groyper” meme, the namesake of the group.

Nick Fuentes has denied speculation circulating on social media his followers, known as “Groypers,” were responsible for conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s death, after messages on unfired casings written by Kirk’s alleged shooter Tyler Robinson appeared to be linked to the far-right movement. —Forbes, February 13, 2025

A revolution always eats its young,

Devouring true believers in its urge

To prove itself more faithful to the cause.

With cries of heresy on every tongue,

There has to come a fateful final purge,

And then the end. Same as it ever was.

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

WE GET TO CHOOSE

by Cecil Morris

Art by Luis Ricardo

Many people, of course, feel America is broken. You can hear about the country’s many troubles—its ideological divides, its anger, its lack of civility—from conservatives and liberals, from socialist firebrands and evangelical preachers, from Democrats and Republicans. It is, perhaps, one of the few beliefs that unites Americans right now. So many seem to genuinely want those divides to be mended, for the country to be knitted back together. But the question of why America is broken, and who is to blame, and how to repair it? That’s where things get complicated. —Tim Sullivan, AP, September 13, 2025

In the choose-your-own-adventure America, 
you get to choose which expert to believe, 
which news source delivers the truth to eyes and ears, 
which problem needs solution and which solution 
you like best and think will work and ought, therefore, 
be funded beyond your wildest ability 
to count the cents one by one in your little life. 
So close your eyes and jump to page 47, 
the just say no, the walls and cages, the answer 
that puts ever more troops and officers and masks 
on your streets, the security of surveillance, 
of armed patrols—here, there, and everywhere. Or jump 
to page 76 and guns for everyone 
and self-defense in every hand and every home. 
Or turn to page 2021: the moment 
we decide which police we must obey 
and which we must overrun to guarantee our rights. 
Or, maybe, see what happens when we choose that page 
where we realize that schools and social services 
are less expensive than prisons or where we build 
villages of tiny homes for our veterans 
unhoused and struggling instead of casting them, 
so much chaff, to streets and parks, to make-shift tents, 
where they like dandelions can sprout in the cracks. 
Which America will we choose for our families?

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025.  He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

CHICAGO AND THE SWINE

by Ralph La Rosa

After and with Carl Sandburg

 

Trump Swine A Porky Parody Framed Print by Ingo Klotz

“Each day, it seems like the president is deciding maybe he read something in the newspaper and he’ll send troops to Portland or perhaps to New Orleans or perhaps to Chicago, so I’m always glad to know he’s not sending them to Chicago. We don’t need them. There’s not an emergency in Chicago,” [Illinois Gov. JB] Pritzker said. —WGN-TV, September 11,2025

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a man in the Chicago area who drove his car into ICE officers, a representative for the agency said on Friday, adding that the man had been resisting arrest during a vehicle stop. The man, who the authorities said was not legally in the country, dragged the officer as he fled in his vehicle, the agency representative said. The officer was severely injured and was in stable condition. —The New York Times, September 12, 2025

Hog butcher for the world
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
 
Euphoric, I recall Chicago and my strenuous birth in Mercy hospital eighty-seven years ago, 
as shaggy as an ape, they said, big shouldered like our city, and soon to be mentored
by its churning and creating twin energies of increasing good and encroaching evil—
but never like the present and deadly evil of the lurking and hulking Super Swine.
He intends to break your will with his weaponized and endlessly destructive lies. 
 
Carl, like you, I have seen the gunmen kill and then set free to kill 
again, when he, the Swine, forgave his armed and loyal mob
of treasonous thugs he ordered to overthrow democracy.
But I know Chicago is brutal: brutal enough to resist his folly, expose 
that he’s no better than another hog to butcher for the world.
 
As you chanted, Carl: Show me another city with lifted head singing so proud 
to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. 
It needs to be; for if the Swine slogs through our city, destroying lives and laws,
unmet by brutal resistance, he will make moves to widen his war throughout our land.
 
 
Ralph La Rosa has published prose on major American writers, including Emerson and Thoreau, and has placed short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film scripts. These days, he mostly writes poetry, appearing on the Internet, in print journals and anthologies. His books include the chapbook Sonnet Stanzas and full-length Ghost Trees and My Miscellaneous Muse. And he loves The New Verse News!

DEBATE RESTS

by Chad Parenteau

Gang violence?

Missile drills 

by buzzwords.

 

Hard evidence.

Fingers fumble

to investigate. 

 

Cannot say

Now show me

another one.

 

body already

set in place

as latest step 

 

next armchair

commander 

strides over. 

 

 

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston’s long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Crossroads, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and The Ugly Monster. He has also been published in anthologies such as French Connections, Sounds of Wind, Reimagine America, and The Vagabond Lunar Collection. His newest collections are All's Well Isn't You and Cant Republic: Erasures and Blackouts. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine and co-organizer of the annual Boston Poetry Marathon. He lives and works in Boston.

BULLY PULPIT

by Mark Danowsky

was not intended to mean 
what any of us think 
but language changes 
& we change with it 
& you know a bully 
when you see one— 
some preaching leviathan 
who offers a shaky 
social contract
insisting life is
not worth living 
unless we have 
a kind of freedom
from each other— 
say six feet 
or the Grand Canyon 
where your views
stop mattering
unless my views
comfortably overlap
which happens
less & less 
in a crumbling Democracy
while the old guard 
hammers home 
the same tired tales
of Middle Class bliss
with fenced neighbors 
who deep down
share our core 
values & beliefs 
which fall flat  
in the face 
value of daily reminders
hammering home
who we care
enough to protect 

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry and Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine. He is the author of several short poetry books. His latest poetry collection is Take Care (Moon Tide Press, 2025). He writes and curates Stay Curious on Substack.

COMFORT FOOD

by Daniel Romo

Today I finally noticed the furniture store 

on the corner has been going out of business 

for three years according to their chipped

 

window paint advertising consequential 

rock-bottom prices, and forgive me, Father, 

but the Christian radio station that keeps 

 

asking for money to stay on the air keeps 

claiming to just fall short of their need 

while staying on the air asking for money. 

 

Noah spent seventy-five years building 

the ark and I applaud the persistence of 

obedience and woodwork, but how do 

 

you determine the caloric intake between 

feeding and milking, grace and gluttony? 

And today the president ordered all U.S.

 

flags to be flown at half-mast due to the 

assassination of the political influencer, 

but he seems to like the way they always 

 

wave like taunting after each school 

shooting. Tonight ended with a movie for 

me as I burrowed my hand into the tub of 

 

popcorn because the top is always too buttery, 

and it’s like that sometimes—we show how 

much we’re willing to dig to uncover what 

 

satisfies us vs. settling for what we’re being 

fed as we forgo napkins and lick our fingers 

in satisfaction and defiance.

Daniel Romo's latest book is American Manscape (Moon Tide Press 2026). 

DEPARTMENT OF WAR: WHAT’S NEW IS SO OLD

by Raymond Nat Turner

“The Pacifist, a cartoon by Ramón Díaz Yanes.

“War is only a cowardly escape 

from the problems of peace.” 

—Thomas Mann

“War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only

one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

 —Major General Smedley D. Butler

Slaughtering Seneca, Seminole;

Slaughtering Creek, Choctaw, Mohawk, 

Cayuga, Blackfeet—like some demonic

Department Of War. It was always Department of War.

Slaughtering Sioux, Shawnee, Chickasaw; 

Slaughtering Chippewa, Lakota, Ohlone—

Like some demonic Department Of War. It was

Always Department of War.

Capturing bodies; and looting labor of Ashanti,

Fulani, Huasa, Wolof, Yoruba, Ibo, Kongo,

Mongo, Hutu, Zulu… Like some demonic

Department Of War. It was always Department of War.

Great oceans east and west.

Friendly neighbors north and 

South—Department of Defense 

Never made sense. It was always Department of War.

It was always Department Of War. Always 

Class war with Offal Office in War House!

Class war with Capitalist Hill! Class war with

White Supreme Courtesans in revealing black robes!

Does dull thud of boot heels goose-stepping down

D.C. streets to “Dixie” surprise you? Have you been

Attaching Fox-box electrodes to skull; stuffing pizza 

Hole; self-lobotomizing for decades on the La-Z-Boy?

It was always Department Of Cooked Books. Department Of Can’t

Pass An Audit. Department Of Greasy-Thumbed Grifters. Always

Department Of $500 hammers and $10 pencils billed as “impact

Fasteners,” and “portable hand-held transcribing devices” on our dime!

It was always ‘Luftwaffe’ dropping 2,000 lb. bombs on

Hospitals and homes. Making pools of blood bloom from babies’ heads—

And rechristening children, ‘Civilian Casualty,’ and ‘Collateral Damage’ 

With lethal lies.

It was always ‘Wehrmacht’ with nightmarish music of moans—

Hair-raising, heart-pounding shrieks. With unlimited capacity for

Cruelty and savagery—like cutting off fingers of fallen fighters 

For souvenirs… and urinating on their bodies …

It was always confederacy—champion of chains and whips. Blood-

Thirsty warfare state—unleashed on neighbor, inhabitant alike. It

Is also glorious, technicolor, dream! Will we rise, realizing it? Or,

Will we fall, presenting ‘Nobel War Prize’ to traitor-pedophile-Führer?

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.