DOES THE SUN RISE (FOR ME)?

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Does the Sun rise 

for me? Or if not 

for me, does it rise

for my brother,  

for my sister?

What about

the sun rising

over Tehran

or Gaza,

London,

or Doha?.

Does the sun

rise for me?

Who is 

my brother?

Who is 

my sister,

the mother

wailing beside

the rubble

of the school,

her girls

bombed

to bits?

Does the Sun 

rise anyway

over killing fields?

Does it rise

over our bodies

thrashing 

in the dark?

Does it rise

exposing

the open 

grave?

Does it rise

helping plants 

to bloom?

Does it rise

whether

we live 

or die?

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

THE 7TH DAY

by Adam J. Scarborough

The day

misplaces the sun.
Somewhere
a sky still burns blue
but not here.
Here—
a black noon.

The maps keep shedding people.
Five hundred thousand
coats and shoes—missing from their hallways;
names folded into cars, trucks, 
onto motorcycles and buses,
heading north from Lebanon.
 
A child carries a key
to a pile of ash.
—
Missiles write their brief alphabets
over Abu Dhabi—
two hundred thirty-eight
steel sentences
falling through prayer. 
Most of them
erased mid-air.
Even the sky now
has editors.
—
Control of the air,
they say.
The sky is a throat
they have learned
to close.
Jets move there
like indifferent saints.
—
Smoke remembers the night.
Tehran wakes
with black in its mouth.
Balconies gather soot
like winter birds.
Cars wear the same dark coat.
The street
a long finger,
dragged through ash.
—
Oil depots
burn through the hours
when sleep should hold the city.
Ten million lungs
turn quietly
in their beds.
Above them
the sky writes in smoke—
language without vowels.
—
Morning arrives
as rain.
Not mercy.
A rain that stings the eyes,
touches the throat
with a thin metal hand.
Acid falling softly
on bread
on figs left in bowls
on the open skin
of the city.
—
The doctors speak
from distant rooms.
Particles,
they say.
Invisible dust
entering the small, naked doors of the body.
Asthma remembers.
The heart
tightens its fist.
Even the air
now carries
a slow instruction.
—
Do not open the window.
Do not turn the fan.
Cover the food.
Wait.
As if waiting
could rinse the sky.
—
A special relationship
spits across red neckties 
tied like telephone wires,
fizzing with foreign cries.
 
Night keeps arriving early.
Lebanon counts its dead
in the hundreds—
three hundred ninety-four
and still the number
breathes.  
 
Dust enters the lungs
of the city.
Beirut
a broken bell.
—
Elsewhere the world practices
this same dark grammar:
Sudan
South Sudan
Ukraine—
where the ground
remembers fire
longer than people do.
—
And somewhere a man
with a borrowed crown
waits in a golden room
for the door
to open.
 
Another country
dragged forward
by the nose of a name.
—
Still
someone lights a stove.
Someone boils water.
 
Someone somewhere
opens a window
to see
 
if the sun
has been returned.

Adam J. Scarborough is a Scottish writer and social practice artist based in Minnesota. His work has been presented across Europe and New York. His poetry has appeared in Gutter Magazine.

A RISING TIDE

by Gordon Gilbert

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

At high tide the king comes to the shore

and stands upon the sands at water’s edge 

He commands the sea to leave his kingdom

as followers break into loud applause 

TRiUMPhantly he gloats as it recedes 

But alas he tarries far too long 

The tide has ebbed and soon relentlessly

the waters now make their advance

and still the king refuses to retreat

unheeding warnings from his own soothsayers 

He does not, cannot, won’t acknowledge

the inherent truth that laps now at his feet 

All shall soon be swept away

by the waters of the rising tide

just like the foolish pharaoh and his legions

in pursuit of Moses and his people

who when the waters parted chose to follow 

only to be drowned in the Red Sea 

Gordon Gilbert is a New York City west villager. In these trying times, he finds some solace taking long walks along the Hudson River. He keeps hoping things will turn around, waiting on that elusive inflection point, but it keeps receding. Maybe next time… 

Still waiting.

MIDDLE AGES CONTEMPORANEITY

by Judith Skillman

Herr Drumpf fastened by the feet

to a wooden panel, drawn behind a horse

as illustrated in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora,

hanged almost to the point

of death. Watch as Drumpf’s emasculated,

disemboweled, beheaded, quartered.

 

See his remains on display (as depicted in the execution

of Hugh Dispenser the Younger),

where a crowd of brightly dressed 13th century men

gather to view a ladder. A fire

blazes on the ground,

logs crisscrossed like bound limbs.

 

Another ladder holds green capped executioner

with his short sharp knife. I watch 

Mr. President’s flesh gape, pulled apart 

at collarbone and genitalia.

At the base of these Elizabethan ladders

placed in perspective by the painter, Froissart of Louise of Gruthuse,

 

a group of top-hatted gentlemen gesture.

Bulldozers sit where the ballroom

would have been, heaps of dirt piled. A group of giant moles

unearthed the newest labyrinth a la Hamas. 

And here we are, dressed to the nines,

wearing ballet-like slippers,

 

talking in low tones, holding not iPhones but harmonicas.

Let this be an example

for any would be high treasonist’s,

as well as Matthew Lambert,

the Irishman who suffered this punishment

as little ago as 1581. 

 

If he’d been a woman

he’d have been burned at the stake 

for reasons of public decency.

Judith Skillman is the author of twenty collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in Commonweal, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Zyzzyva, and numerous other literary journals. She has received funding from The Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust, among other organizations. Her new book is Oppression, Shanti Arts, 2026.

JERUSALEM EVEN NOW

by Esther Cohen

Two sirens before 8 AM woke Ibtisam, a Palestinian,

and her Jewish neighbor Melila. They’ve lived

in the same Jerusalem building for decades.

In their pajamas, sleepless after the loud attack

the night before, they decided they’d clean

the building together, as something positive they

could do. And when they finished

removing spider webs and dust, they celebrated

the new cleanliness with mint tea

and homemade butter cookies.

Esther Cohen’s new book is All of Us.

LEGAL CLINIC, CHURCH RECTORY, MARCH 2026

by Paula Finn

AI-Generated graphic from Craiyon

Let me not forget the volunteer interpreter,

his black bangs, a curtain raised in this dim room

as if to let in any word: hambre, matanza.

His hands, sallow, unwrinkled. He offers 

the pro bono lawyer starvation, death,

what propelled the woman seated to his left

2,000 miles on foot and crammed in vans,

a path our young interpreter already knows

not in Spanish/English, but in thirst, in ditches

become a bed, saguaros lurking overhead.

Still he comes here every Monday night.

His gift, to translate horror free of charge.

Paula Finn has been nominated for a 2026 Pushcart Prize. Her poems appeared recently in Common Ground, Bicoastal Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Spoon River Review. On the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Finn spearheaded a piece of musical theater capturing that historic tragedy and the female immigrant worker organizing that arose in its wake. Featuring Finn's poetry set to music composed by the late composer Elizabeth Swados, the dramatic oratorio, Triangle: From the Fire, won the Best New Musical Theater award at the 2011 Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. 

ODE TO BLAZING INFERNO

by Clara Altfeld 

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

O America, I too fear my own demise.

I thought nothing was so permanent 

that it could never be undone, 

but in you, constants shift 

and movement stills.

I swore before God in a city you promised to love

that I would honestly demean myself

that I would support the Constitution 

of the United States—that sickened poem

written in praise to itself.

Attorney comes from an Old French word

meaning to turn to. And if I had not sworn myself

to your wretched service, America, I would turn 

away and away and away.

And in the turn: a shift, a settling, and the past, 

silky and surreal, would come rewinding back. 

The hearing, unheard. No judge, no gavel,

no order of removal for the mother and daughter

I had promised to protect. 

We walk backwards out from the courtroom,

Wrinkle our suits and hang them in the closet

Unwrite, undemand, unmove the pleasure of the court.

Become strangers again, part ways.

I, reversed to my little luxuries, spinning in place. 

Mother and daughter, to unend their journey,

undo footprints in the desert, the jungle.

Leave the sand unmarked, the Darien Gap uncrossed.

Let the boat rise from the waters

like the dawning sun. Water will expel 

from lungs. Eyes will unclose.

Husband and four children will unsleep 

their watery sleep. Shelter from demons

as a family. Oh, America, 

haven’t you always been this way?

Under the shine and sparkle, 

hollow and hostile and unholy?

Buried beneath the bones and rot

of bodies once loved?

Oh, America, let me write you 

a beating heart.

Bring yourself back to life so I can see you

in the firelight.

Clara Altfeld is a lawyer in Houston, Texas. She hopes to own a cat one day. This poem was written in workshop with KT Herr.

POSEUR

by Devon Balwit

The New York Times

Today, I’m much struck by a phrase in the news

and try it out—“I demand your unconditional surrender!”—

my finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse.

 

Like magic, it aligns differing views.

(Backed by troops and gelignite, no wonder!) 

I’m much struck by this phrase from the news.

 

“Bring me tribute,” I add, “your children, booze!”

and suddenly, my house dazzles with gilt-y splendor.

My finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse,

 

my cup runneth over with oily ooze.

I down glass after glass, a drunk on a bender,

spurred on by this phrase I pulled from the news.

 

Outside, the sky purples to the shade of a bruise.

Let lesser men hide. I now live for thunder,

my finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse.

 

As if on a pulpit staring down at the pews,

I fulminate, my creed’s best defender,

completely transformed by this phrase from the news,

my finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse.

When not making art, Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.