DO THE MATH

 

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

Roberta Beach Jacobson is a writer whose latest book is Demitasse Fiction: One-Minute Reads for Busy People. She edits Five Fleas Itchy Poetry and smols poetry journal. She lives in Iowa with her husband and three cats.

CULTURE (AND OTHER) WARS

by Adele Evershed

"God is nonbinary": GOP activates over Talarico’s past comments characterizing him as too radical for Texas —Texas Tribune, March 12, 2026

 

A fresh-faced politician insisted—

God is non-binary
like a snail, like a worm
maybe a gynandromorph—
half-female, half-sod,
like a Hebrew Character moth,
a real name that asks you to suspend disbelief
in other words—have faith

 

I imagine God—
the clownfish of the skies,
slipping behind enemy lines
a double agent
in the gender wars—
it almost makes me smile

 

But I can’t be bothered with any of this—
if God exists at all
their gender is the least of it

The real question,
as men, women, and children
are obliterated, is simple—

Are you even there?

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. A Pushcart-nominated poet, her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Comstock Review, Literary Mama and Modern Haiku, amongst others. Her poetry includes the collection, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and a forthcoming collection, In the Belly of the Wail (Querencia Press). Her flash fiction includes the three novellas-in-flash Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press) and A History of Hand Thrown Walls (Unsolicited Press).

COMMON-TATER COMMENTATOR

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

A book-keeper whose boss repeatedly shouted the word "potato" at her "in a strong Irish accent" has been awarded more than £23,000 by an employment tribunal after it found she had been racially harassed. —BBC, March 11,2026

Potato is

The racial slur

An Irish Ms

Got hurled at her

Repeatedly:

Her spud-brained boss

Turned out to be

An albatross.

But Bernadette,

Though sore abashed,

Refused to let

Her worth get mashed

And went to court.

Now judgment's sealed.

Long story short:

His spud got peeled!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His poems have appeared in Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, WestWard Quarterly, and several other journals. In 2025 he won the Children's Unpublished category of the Eyelands Book Awards with Flora’s Flock and Other Stories to Read Aloud.

NO. NO.

by Nan Meneely

 

 

This protest was regional, the work of dedicated leadership in several small Connecticut towns. A group of somewhere between 20 and 30 or 40 people of all stripes, races and ages (and signs) gathered outside a café where three local roads collide, every single Saturday morning from the one directly following Trump's first election for more than four years. Nan's sign read "Honk Against Hatred;" the vigil was supposed to be silent, but she was unable to restrain her shouted thanks for every honk. This is a picture of one of the first meetings, with the central sign that was reproduced after the first and larger one was defaced.

2016
We hold a protest silently with signs 
that welcome all who worship other gods.
A pickup ploughs the shoulder 
where we stand, kicks gravel as it stops.
We back up quiet, listening. A man in camo, 
raging, crying, leans across his passenger 
to scream his epithets: ignorant fuckers,  
we don't know shit of the animals we invite.
Who of us has watched a friend
disintegrate, arms and legs no more
than shrapnel in a blazing Afghan sky?
His mind is full of massacre.
He loved. He hates.

I want to climb in next to him,
hold him in my Nana arms until he stills.
I've heard his wounds before.
My husband keened in nightmare
when he found again among the vines
of Vietnam his comrade's boots
with nothing of his comrade but his feet.
 
I know my luck that I don’t know.
Even as the soldier curses me
in his convulsive bitterness,
I want to love him back 
from where he lives. 

2026
Ignorant fuckers, haven't you learned 
you kill the ones who survive ?

 
Nan Meneely’s first book Letter from Italy, 1944 (Antrim House) was noted by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books by Connecticut writers in 2013. It provided the libretto for an oratorio of the same name, composed by Sarah Meneely-Kyder and performed twice by Connecticut choruses and symphony orchestras. Her second book Simple Absence (Antrim House) was nominated for The National Book Award and placed as a grand prize finalist in The Next Generation Indie Awards and the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award. She has been published and rejected by The New Verse News.

PINS ON THE MAP

by J. Alan Nelson

 

After spending some of his prime years aiding German concentration camp survivors and guarding Nazi leaders tried for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, a US second world war veteran is now believed to have become his country’s oldest known organ donor. The story of 100-year-old Dale Steele (above), who died in February after a head injury led to his being placed on life support, demonstrates how donors’ health is a more important consideration than how old they are, according to Live On Nebraska, an organ-procurement organization in his home state. “Mr Steele … is a powerful reminder that generosity has no age limit,” Live On Nebraska’s president and CEO, Kyle Herber, said in a statement. —The Guardian, March 13, 2026

Whenever I swear I don’t care anymore,
I open the phone, that glowing atlas,
and touch the red pins I dropped like blood drops
across the skin of the world.

One for the women I fucked in borrowed rooms,
their breath hot against my neck, thighs parting
like pages in a book I never finished reading.
One where Father left the dog behind,
old mutt howling at the empty driveway,
a childhood door slammed shut forever.

One where I straddled a pine like Frost’s secret rider,
sap sticky on my palms, wind laughing through needles.
One where I held the knife above an evil man’s throat,
his wife asleep beside him, innocent as milk,
and mercy rose up, sour and sudden,
and I walked away empty-handed.

One for the half-mile district win,
lungs burning, crowd a blur of small-town faces.
One for the bear in the Rockies,
black eyes meeting mine, both of us startled
into stillness, two animals deciding not to fight.

One where I sank into Icelandic snowdrift,
white world swallowing me whole,
cold like a lover who won’t let go.
One for the switchblade in Mexico,
cold steel kissing my throat,
I tasted metal and my own pulse.

One where I crashed Clinton’s party,
slipped past Secret Service like a dream,
shook the president’s hand, felt history
warm and ordinary in my grip.

I pin these moments still,
geography of scars and small triumphs.

Late nights when the step counter mocks me,
a few thousand short of ten,
I walk the empty streets at ten p.m.,
beer can sweating in my fist,
streetlights buzzing like tired blues.

On my pointer fingers, tattoos: RS and LP,
right starboard, left port,
so even drunk I know which way the ship turns.

And somewhere in Nebraska,
a hundred-year-old veteran, Dale Steele,
WWII quiet in his bones,
gives his liver after death,
organ young as three, they say,
regenerating cells like a river keeps running,
old body gifting what still lives.

I think of him when I pin another dot:
a man who outlasted war, depression, time,
then handed over the soft machine inside him
so someone else could keep breathing.

The map glows.
I zoom in, zoom out.
Infinity folds in on itself,
tessellations, impossible stairs,
hyperbolic curves bending away forever.

Yet here I am,
walking home under stars,
beer almost gone,
still pinning,
still caring,
one small step at a time.

J. Alan Nelson, a poet, actor, lawyer and journalist, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net and Best Microfiction. He played the lead in the viral video Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay, the verbose “Silent Al” in HBO’s Emmy-winning SXSWestworld, and narrated New York Times videos on AIDS programs in Africa.  

WATCHING THE 2026 ACADEMY AWARDS

by Nan Ottenritter

 

 

We treat our bald friend to the movies.
She’s three chemos down, three to go.

1.
A security officer at a women’s health clinic 
arrives in the morning dark, organizes to assure
guests’ safety as Christian abortion protestors 
take to the bull horn, scream at the sinners. 
This childless guard wonders if, by aborting 
her first child, she doomed the next to stillbirth. 

2.
In 2022, photojournalist Brent Renauld was killed in Ukraine.
He said his autism helped him remain calm in war zones. 
We see his war photos as well as videos of his brother with the 
friend who desperately tried to save him. In tears, I secretly 
wondered why we exposed our suffering friend to this.

3.
Journalist dad of a young girl reports on vacant bedrooms
of children murdered in school shootings. They remain as they were 
when the child was gunned down. SpongeBob pillows, hair ties,
trophies testify to a child’s life well-lived. Dad returns home and 
his daughter paints his fingernails green. 

The world’s pain surrounds us. No amount of candy or popcorn 
can keep it out of our movie theatres, health clinics, wars, or schools. 
We walk out, stunned, and apologize to our friend.


Nan Ottenritter has published chapbooks Eleanor, Speak (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and My Year 2023 (2024).  She co-edited Discovery, Recovery: A Journey with Veterans (2023) and has been published in Artemis, Still Points Quarterly, Poetry Society of Virginia Anthologies, Dissent: an anthology to end war and capitalism (2023), and Writing the Land: Virginia (NatureCulture LLC, 2024). Her concern about American democracy has prompted her to read and understand the books of contemporary historians and host informal Citizens' Salons with friends, neighbors, and strangers in informal settings. 

CALLING MY PERSIAN SISTER-IN-LAW THE DAY THE U.S. BOMBS IRAN

by Carol Boutard

 

 

We’re not close, the thicket

between us hard to cross after years

of my snide asides about her aloof Persian polish 

and her opinions about my sloppy American life. 

We chat about the weather in Santa Barbara, 

my brother’s iffy health, her worry for the citrus trees 

she had to leave behind when they moved. 

 

I remember stories about her childhood—

the neighborhood where she lived,

its tree-lined quiet and shaded gardens

far from crowded downtown Tehran,

skyscrapers like gravestones in the smog.

Finally getting her wish to enroll at Berkeley,

alone at 17, with little English and no friends,

Stranded in the states the day of the revolution,

her father was lost without his factory. Her mother, 

who had never held a job, taking in beadwork 

to earn enough for them to live.

 

She isn’t sleeping these days.

Her older brother, still in Iran, joked to her last week 

that traffic is light in Tehran now that so many people have left.

She mentions the trees she had to abandon 

as if they aren’t the only ones 

without protection in a world turned away

from the possibility of grace.

We’re not close. For now, we wait

within our separate lives for whatever comes 

as if nothing has changed,

now that everything has changed overnight.  

                                               

For nearly 30 years, Carol Boutard farmed a small piece of the Tualatin Valley with her husband, Anthony.  A farming partnership and the animal life migrating through their land were the focus of her book, Each Leaf Singing, published by MoonPath Press in 2021. Carol and Anthony now live in Penn Yan near Upstate New York’s Keuka Lake. Tucked into hardwood forest, their land is often occupied by deer, fox, turkeys and magnificent native marmots.

BREADCRUMBS IN A NATION OF LOAVES

by Jazmine Crandall 

 

 

The economic fallout of the US-Israeli assault and Tehran’s retaliation is spreading fast, and pushing the most vulnerable towards disaster. —The Guardian, March 12, 2026 

 

In the marble halls where voices echo  
like coins dropped into deep, indifferent wells, 
they debate the price of labor 
as though it were a frivolous shadow; 
weightless, distant, theoretical. 

Outside, the morning opens its weary eyes. 

A banker straightens his Hermes tie 
that costs more than a week of someone's rent. 
His salary is quite the dome; 
built stone by stone, pension and bonus, 
arches of security rising 
towards stained-glass futures. 

A manager clocks in, 
midway up the ladder of breathing space. 
Her wages are a narrow bridge—
not golden, not broken,  
but sturdy enough to cross the river of bills 
if the current stays calm. 

And then there is the worker 
whose hands smell of fryer oil and sanitizer, 
whose chapped palms hold the ghosts  
of a thousand barcodes, 
and ears fatigue of a million complaints. 

Their meager wage is a candle in winter. 

Each hour they feed the flame, 
yet the room refuses to grow warm. 

And no one says the quiet truth aloud: 
this fire was never meant to heat the house. 

It was meant to prove endurance. 

So the worker learns the mathematics of survival—
how many hours equal a gallon of milk  
and a carton of eggs, 
how many aching hours on torn soles 
and blistered toes equal rent, 
how many meals must disappear 
so the light bill does not. 


Jazmine Crandall is a Colombian-Cuban poet in Atlanta, Georgia. She's beginning her journey of sharing her poetry and strives to make a difference. Her work explores feminism, inequality, and the struggles of immigrants and the working class, using her writing to advocate for marginalized voices.

BAI TASHCHIT (DO NOT DESTROY)

by Lenore Weiss

Israeli settlers and soldiers killed three Palestinians in their village near Ramallah on Saturday night, the third deadly attack in a week of surging Israeli violence across the occupied West Bank. Israeli settlers have shot dead five civilians during invasions of Palestinian olive groves, villages and grazing land, in the brief period since Israel and the US launched a new war on Iran at the end of February. —The Guardian, March 8, 2026. Photo: WAFA archive.

Deer bite off the heads of my coreopsis, yellow sunbursts of blossoms I was hoping to see every morning outside my window, but now only sad stumps are left leaning against the pavement. Every day, I go outside to encourage the plant, hoping it might grow back, sprout a few new leaves. The way olive trees are being cut, burned and poisoned, and the olive, which is more than a fruit, a symbol of resistance, buckets picked and pressed with a wooden beam, sometimes with a stone to produce golden flowing oil. Every tree which is not being harvested, is lost to the occupation. Deuteronomy 20:19-20 prohibits cutting down fruit-bearing trees during a war as they provide life-sustaining food. Isn’t this an ongoing war? Olive trees growing in the West Bank are the first to go, surrounded by settlements built high on ridges that strangle villages, and even when armed renegades desist, they return with more venom. Concentration camps and the multitude of prisons throughout the United States produce men and women who understand how physical space can be controlled, minds never. Villagers living in Burin say their olive oil is spicier because it is laced with tear gas.

Lenore Weiss’s novel Pulp into Paper and a poetry collection, Video Game Pointers were both published in 2024. Prior poetry collections form a trilogy about love, loss, and being mortal: Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island (West End Press, 2012), Two Places (Kelsay Books, 2014), and The Golem (Hakodesh Word Press, 2017). Alexandria Quarterly Press published her prize-winning flash fiction chapbook Holding on to the Fringes of Love. Lenore edited a poetry and prose anthology for Kehilla Community Synagogue entitled From the Well of Living Waters: Voices of the 21st Century. She is a member the Writers Grotto and serves as the Associate Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Editor for the Mud Season Review.

WAR SECRETARY

by Lisa Fogarty

Pete Hegseth by Ian Baker

RE: WARY WAR 

WRY WAR WAYS 

ROTE WAR STORY 

RAW SCORE 

SORROW 

WORST RAT YET

Lisa Fogarty is a journalist and creative writer from New York. She is a mother of two whose work has appeared in several magazines, newspapers, and journals. 

I WEEP FOR THE WORLD

by Mary Saracino

“Weeping World” print by Marinka Bendova at Saatchi Art

I weep for the world,

for women and girls

for boys and men,

living and dying at the mercy

of those without mercy,

the merciless misers,

the autocrats who have sold

their empathy for power,

their compassion for money,

who have sacrificed their souls

for privileges they did not earn—or deserve.

The world they manifest burns

with injustice, oppression, war.

I weep for the planet,

Her essence assaulted,

decimated by greed,

and insatiable lust

for all that is unholy.

I weep for our non-human kin,

all creatures, great and small

all vegetation, too,

that seeks to live and thrive

under the sunlit sky,

bathed in the moonlit darkness,

moving through the seasons

with grace, grit, and gratitude.

We humans have lost our way.

The path is strewn with

obstacles to peace and prosperity,

the carnage of millennia,

the debris of lost memories

of how it should be,

how it could be

if we joined forces and

reclaimed our roots,

celebrated our ancient origins,

honored our connections

to all that is, and ever will be.

Mary Saracino is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet. Her book of poetry, Motherlines, was published by Pearlsong Press (February 2026). She is the author of four novels: Heretics: A Love Story (Pearlsong Press 2014), The Singing of Swans (Pearlsong Press 2006), No Matter What (Spinsters Ink 1993), and Finding Grace (Spinsters Ink 1999), and the memoir, Voices of the Soft-bellied Warrior (Spinsters Ink 2001). She co-edited (with Mary Beth Moser) She Is Everywhere! Volume 3: An anthology of writings in womanist/feminist spirituality (iUniverse 2012), which earned the 2013 Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Women-Centered Literature from Sofia University.

LIMERICK TO HELP FORGET THE WAR FOR A MOMENT

by Zumwalt

Cartoon by Kevin KAL Kallaugher

With a face like a serial killer,
He belongs in a cheap horror thriller;
Some call him a bum
Or the worst of the scum,
But to me he's just Stephen Miller.

Zumwalt's poetry feeds on alienation, shifting reality, and forced adaptation. Zumwalt is a proud repeat contributor to The New Verse News.

TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, I’M NOT SO SURE ABOUT THE VENT

by Eric Oak

A government handout photograph showed weapon remnants displayed on a table near the ruins of the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, where a precision strike reportedly killed 175 people, mostly children, on Feb. 28. The remnants have been identified by The Times as components of a modern, U.S.-made Tomahawk missile. Credit...IRIB, via Telegram

It was not the Israelis, after all,

who triple tapped the school in Minab.

It was US, according to the Times—

our bombs 

that blasted babies into doll parts, 

scattered them among the concrete-

silica dust of their classrooms.

But it was always our bombs, really–

Arab Salim and Jabalia, Biden’s

red line to Rafah. Bombs with

our names on them. Cruz and 

Haley chickenhawked in Sharpie, 

mine and yours scratched san-serif 

onto the shells in bolder relief with 

each paycheck deposited.

I read the article about Minab 

during my planning period, and

it lingers with me now around

this crater-quiet classroom.

The kids are taking a test, but I 

don’t care whether they pass it. 

I just want to talk to them.

I just want to believe that it's 

not too late to talk, that it’s 

not too late to believe.

Something about the way the 

big vent grumbles when 

the air kicks on reminds me:

the surprise lockdown drill

has to be this week or next. 

They’re quiet, like now,

the drills at least. 

The kids are used to them.

Winder and Uvalde, Gaza and Minab.

Maybe bullets stop when bombs do.

I remember now why that vent rattles—  

I took out most the screws that hold

it to the wall, and a few more outside. 

The maintenance guy showed me how

to kick and climb our way out there

in case we ever need to flee, to run

outside, unafraid as we are of a 

brush smoke sky.

Eric Oak is the pseudonym of a teacher of social studies at a middle school near Chattanooga, TN. He sometimes asks people to read the things he writes so that they may exist.

TO 165 EXPENDABLES, SHAJERAH TAYYEBEH GIRLS’ ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, MINAB, IRAN

by Kent Reichert

It’s a shame you had to die
but hey,
that’s war, right?
Leave it to the smoke 
in your father’s eyes to mourn your passing,
let rubble be your obituary
caught up as you were in other's dreams of power
and fear.
They say 
your death is the path to peace. They say
it is going well. They say
all according to plan. They say
their children are safer now.
When their school bells ring,
the screams at recess are joyful abandon.
But your screams rain down upon your
mother's heart
and will for the eternity she lives each
moment
without you.
At least you were not alone at your passing.
Holding your hand 
were your ideas and hopes and wishes and dreams;
your children and grandchildren;
your silly laughter;
your joy;
your love of chickpea cookies;
your bedtime stories;
your heart a flutter when that boy said he liked you
and you couldn’t run fast enough to tell your friends.
They were there, right there with you when
your world evaporated instantly.
They feared you or was it where you were born? Or they feared
your school’s location. Or they feared
who you worshipped. Or they feared 
the words your leaders spoke. Or they feared
what they might do. Or they feared…so…
“I got him before he got me.” 
Nothing personal, just collateral damage.

Those in power far away
hugged power above all else. They smiled in their safety
and their children and grand children’s safety, for…

They say it is going well. They say
all according to plan. They say
the world is safer now.
After all it was them or you, wasn’t it?
That's what they said and 
It’s a shame you had to die
But hey
that’s war, right?


Kent Reichert spends autumn beside Becky’s Creek on the Intracoastal Waterway across from North Carolina's Topsail Island. He passes the time walking his dogs, practicing digital photography and writing. His poetry has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies.