24/7 PRECARITY

by Mark Danowsky

“The Awakening,” 1941, painting by Colonel Louis Keene, Canadian War Museum

I fear

going to sleep

and waking up

to war

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

REMINDERS

by Phyllis Wax

Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian man in the occupied West Bank, stripped him naked, tied his arms and legs and then zip-tied his penis, he, his family members and another witness said on Wednesday. “I thought I was going to die,” the man, Suhaib Abualkebash (above), a 29-year-old shepherd, told The New York Times. “I thought this was the end.” Photo by Afif Amireh.

Even as ghosts their bones

are visible: ribs, backbones,

sticks of arms and legs.

But the occupiers in the West Bank,

the army in Gaza,

do not see the ghosts

of their ancestors,

do not hear their rattling bones

or their ghostly admonishments

not to duplicate the cruelty done to them,

seem deaf to the idea that never again

means not to anyone.

Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee, where she observes the goings-on of the country and the world and is being cured of her delusions. She has read in coffee houses, bars, libraries and on the radio, and has participated in poet/fiber artist collaborations. Among the journals in which her work has appeared are Gyroscope Review, Writers Resist, Jerry Jazz Musician, Rise Up Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Wordpeace, The New Verse News, Naugatuck River Review, Your Daily Poem, Feral.

HOW DO YOU SURVIVE A WAR?

by Bruce Black

 

 

GIF by Glen Le Lievre

It’s the stories that you don’t read 

in the news that break your heart.

The old dog who can’t make it to the safe room

in the one minute you have to get downstairs.

The young children who blow out the candles on their

birthday cakes in the darkness of bomb shelters.

The couples whose weddings are held as missiles explode 

overhead, bride and groom weeping in joy and sadness.

Life, I’m told, goes on in wartime but the war

changes the way you live your life.

Love still exists but hides in the bomb shelter

with you in order to survive.

Kindness still exists but stays out of sight

while the missiles are falling.

Hope huddles under an overpass or in the shelter of underground 

stations where it can breathe and show itself again.

How do you survive a war without losing the ability to love,

to show others kindness, to safeguard and preserve one’s humanity?

Even when you live miles away from the war zone

and can’t hear the bombs exploding.

Even when you can only read about them or watch them fall

on the news or in your Facebook feed.

How do you hold onto faith 

in the goodness of people?

How do you trust in kindness and love

to prevail?

How do you hope and believe—in spite of the bleakness

of the present moment—in a better future?

In a future without war? In a future of peace?

How do you survive a war?

Bruce Black received his MFA from Vermont College. He is the author of Writing Yoga (Shambhala) and editorial director of The Jewish Writing Project. His poetry, personal essays, and stories have appeared in numerous publications, including The MidAtlantic Review, The Amethyst Review, Write-Haus, Bearings, Super Poetry Highway, Poetica, The Lehrhaus, Soul-Lit, and elsewhere. He lives in Highland Park, IL. 

EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH TURNS TO RUBBLE

by Raymond Nat Turner

Tiny backpacks, bloody body parts litter pulverized apartment and charred-

car-streets. Stolen lives litter flattened hospitals and schools. Litter crimson

coffee shop floors. Litter blackened fields of vaporized crops.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Over and over Earth’s saddest symphony plays. Harrowing screams, wails, moans.

Same timbre, same tones. Same saline Palestine tears in Sudan. Same in Ukraine, 

Lebanon, Venezuela, Iran. The same 1% is at war with workers of the world—and

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They bomb, they strut. They prance and ‘dance,’ and bomb and bomb again.

They bomb abroad shouting, “stay sheltered!” Lucrative explosions silence

music of whining saw, pounding hammer raising roofs, housing the unhoused.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Hubris high off homeland invasion, hostile takeovers weeks before, they dream

of easy money. Quick work of weekend war. But weekend morphs into weeks. 

And weeks into months. And months into long and lean years.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They send holy warriors striking Saturdays, Sundays, holidays ‘round Epstein news

cycles like pyrite wrecking balls revolving around orange planet, Pedophilia. ‘Round

its death smell. ‘Round sulphur scent and white phosphorus fragrance anointing them.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They strike when Essential Workers catch fleeting winks on speeding trains roaring

beneath snoring cities. When countrymen and women dreaming of better worlds are

not yet woke. Over and over again Cruel Reich Cult strikes under cover of darkness and

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Cruel Reich Cult strikes when working ones are doubled over panting, catching

blitzkrieg breaths. Or, when they meditate, chant, or pray protecting souls, spirits,

minds from repeated trauma of sadistic Psy-Ops on our damn dime.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

One Big Beautiful Bank Job body count equals wreckage in the wake of DOGE:

Department Of Grifter Enrichment. And drowned, frozen, burned bodies pile up 

at feet of climate deniers battling Mengele Medicine Men for roadkill recognition.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Ugly omen, J6 white supremacists storming Capitalist Hill, ransacking offices, shitting in

halls, foreshadowed shredded social safety net. Scuttled science and education. Heralded 

War House-Offal Office golden grift; Kennedy Center shuttered; redacted Bill Of Rights.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

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.

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.