THERE ARE LIGHTER DAYS AHEAD

by Marc Swan

Cartoon by Clay Jones

a wise philosopher said

to the man in the white coat

who nodded his head

as the wind began to howl

and small creatures skittered

into their holes 

thunder roared

rain fell

The river current

shifted its flow

from coursing into a chasm 

of uncertainty and dread 

as all of us

who care about this world

laid smooth hands

on a thoughtless bickering 

destructive old man

Marc Swan lives in coastal Maine. Poems recently published in Ropes, Chiron Review, Sandy River Review, Crannóg, among others. His fifth collection all it would take was published in 2020 by tall-lighthouse (UK).

THIS YEAR, WE MARCH ON MY BIRTHDAY

by Ann E. Wallace

I was born in a springtime blizzard. 

     I know to expect storms that run roughshod 

over delicate crocuses poking their stubby 

 

buds from the hard, freeze-weary earth. 

     I read the news each day—of men trafficking 

in children with bluster and impunity,

 

of blue butterfly girls detained in cells, 

    out of sight, where they learn to withstand 

the cold sting of humanity’s turned back 

 

and our leaders’ smug shrugged shoulders. 

    This is the way winter is, they say. 

But seasons change. And I know, 

 

in my small, weathered body, we are built 

   to stand up to gales and thunder, to the old 

guard of winter’s flailing bravado.

These storms, we will ride them out. We stretch 

   and yawn, gather force under hostile conditions. 

Today, we call forth a new season.

Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey and the author of Keeping Room(Nixes Mate, 2026), Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID's Long Haul (Kelsay Books, 2024) and Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019). You can follow her on Instagram @annwallace409.

SYMPHONY OF THOUSANDS

by Barbara H. Williams

 

 

         

 

   after No Kings Day 2, October 18, 2025

 

Each played a part 

and played it well

just by being there––

good-natured fellow humans 

there for all that binds us

 

who face a common threat 

and care about our neighbors––

don’t we all need safety 

shelter, air and water

peace and equal possibility

a government which functions

for the good of all?

 

And we wore yellow, primal

bright and jovial yellow

listened, clapped

and raised our voices––

at least five thousand 

stood together 

in our little town

five thousand of us

 

and it felt intimate 

and neighborly–– 

skins all shades 

a rich array of ancestries 

and mother tongues––

 

carrying the red, white and blue 

in concert, jubilant

with twenty-seven hundred 

other towns and cities, communities

in every state across the land

 

more than seven million 

citizens together––in agreement.

 

Barbara H. Williams is Managing Editor of US 1 Worksheets. Based in Princeton, New Jersey,  she was for many years a professional flutist and music teacher. She began writing poetry in 2013, with poems appearing in The Raven’s Perch, US 1 Worksheets, The Paterson Review, and The New Verse News. A member of the DVP/US1 Poets Collective, and a Pushcart Prize nominee, her first collection of poems, Continuo, was published in 2024 (Cool Women Press). 

VENGEANCE BELONGS TO WHOM?

by Anne Reiner

Cartoon by Ann Telnaes

 

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, prayed during a religious service at the Pentagon that there be “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. —The Guardian, March 26, 2026

 

 

Unlock the doors to Church of Pete.
We baptize you in gasoline,
shove beggars out onto the street,
bless with a gesture that’s obscene.
 
We humbly pray for arrogance,
demand your silence with our shouts.
Abuse is our benevolence.
Grant certainty upon your doubts.
 
We kneel to praise him at the helm,
ignoring scripture’s holy facts.
And as he asked, we overwhelm
with violence as we give the axe.
 
 
Anne Reiner is a writer and biostatistician based in NYC. 

WARM AND CUDDLY BELONGING FOR ALL

by Lynne Barnes

 

 

A hospital patient who managed to talk a man out of detonating a bomb in a maternity wing said the would-be attacker “asked for a cuddle” before standing down. Nathan Newby, who stopped an atrocity through an act of kindness, spoke publicly for the first time about his encounter with Mohammad Farooq before receiving the George Medal [from King Charles, above] for bravery. Farooq, a clinical support worker who took a viable pressure cooker bomb into St James’s hospital in Leeds intending to “kill as many nurses as possible” was jailed for at least 37 years last year. After asking for a cuddle, Farooq told Newby to “phone the police before I change my mind.’ —The Guardian, March 24, 2026

 

 

Oh, the layers of life right now—
sweet family visit with my
thirty-something god-nephew
and our goddess-niece, his wife.
Calming, evocation of
belonging, togetherness, as we
commune deeply with them.
They are artists, teachers, such
loving creatures, here with their
stray-rescued-as-a-puppy-ten-years-ago,
Navajo, to spend the night with us.
 
Bearing down on that layer is
a dangerous one above it,
malignant, narcissistic,
Machiavellian, sadistic,
hanging by a thread—
a heavy concrete cloud,
just above our heads,
visible, threatening,
seeded with stress and dread.
I fly above into
the stratosphere of compassion,
look down through the conflicting,
complex layers of our
human race in this era.
 
Kindness, not war and hate, 
rescues minds from harmful ideas.
Will we learn to weave empathic ropes
to throw, not just to those we love,
but to those who other us as well?
 
Can humanity, we, reel away from our
constant collapse into competing cultiness,
a tendency in all of us?
 
Broader belonging, expansive,
Transcendent Human Tribe is now
our mental moon shot challenge.
 
How will it come? I wonder as I land
back on earth from my imaginary
skyward travel. Perhaps
 
Eroding Othering
should be a sibling category
to the Nobel Prize for Peace.
 
All this I think as anxious rescue Navajo
finally stops pacing, settles out of her
traumatic memories of her early life
on the reservation, on the streets—
packless, othered, bitten, diseased.
 
At last, she welcomes our acceptance,
lets us pet her, relaxes on her
fluffy, gray, perfect circle of bed.

Lynne Barnes' poetry memoir Falling into Flowers won the 2017 Goodreads Rainbow Award for Best Gay and Lesbian Poetry, was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and received Honorable Mention in both the Gay and Poetry categories for the 2018 San Francisco Book Festival Awards. 

DISTRACTIONS

by Mary Saracino

 

 

They want us to look away,
forget about the pedophiles
the wars,
the ICE raids,
the killing of nonviolent protesters,
the abduction and incarceration of children,
the deportation of immigrants
who are not criminals,
the grifting and the lies,
the evil that spews forth every day,
trying to silence us,
eviscerate the truth
that we see with our eyes,
bully us into abdicating our rights,
turn us against one another
so they can continue their unholy alliances
retain unwarranted power,
feed their insatiable greed,
make money off of countless atrocities.
But we are not distracted.
We are focused, lightning bright,
brave and unstoppable.
We will not look away.
We will not pretend that
war crimes are not being committed.
We see that cruelty is the law of the land.
We believe the women and children
who have been raped, silenced, forgotten.
We stand with the men with integrity who fight for justice.
We the people march to demand an end to the horrors,
to honor truth and decry genocide,
racism, misogyny, xenophobia
and all the many uncivil actions
and policies that seek to undo us
deny us our sacred humanity.
Together we shout: “No kings. No autocrats. No Oligarchs.
Never, ever again!”

 

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.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF KOSHER

by Todd Friedman

Dirt under your fingernails, backbone straight,

you would be the New Jew.

 

Clearing the swamp, rifle ready,

no more lambs to the slaughter.

 

The world was with you, Israel,

Buchenwald’s emaciated ghosts still searing.

 

My grandmother shouted through tears for you

in a jam-packed Madison Square Garden.

 

You were our Samson fighting

the entire Philistine army.

 

When you captured Jerusalem, shofars blowing,

it was the Red Sea parting anew.

 

Who can forget that photo of your “crying paratroopers”

standing in front of the Wailing Wall?

 

But now every day your settlers descend the hills masked:

smashing cars, bashing heads, burning villages.

 

And like Joshua’s sun your army stands still—

or even aids in the slaughter.

 

This is what my grandfather fled from in Russia—

only there it was called a pogrom.

 

So here you are, the New Jew,

with ancient real estate “deed” and a different kind of kosher.

 

We now know that Samson

was blind to begin with—

 

and so were we.

 

 

 

Todd Friedman is a retired  NYC high school English teacher who now revels in having time to write.  His poems have been published in Tikkun, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Blue Collar Review, and Vox Populi.

WHEN YOUR EYES DON'T WORK ANYMORE

by Kyle Hunter

 

 

 

 

I keep adjusting my glasses.

My blurry eyes feel older than me,

like I’ve been lending them out

and they’ve come back all used up.

There’s no way of telling how many bodies

will decompose enough to float up

and how many will stay on the bottom of the sea

or be carried by currents out to the Atlantic.

I shouldn’t be surprised, the loose

and languid skin around my eyes is not taut

anymore, it slouches against my sockets

waiting to hear it’s time to go.

As the bodies fill with gases

and distend sometimes layers

of skin will detach and float away

like a second ghost leaving the body.

I have known for many months

that I should set up an appointment

and talk to an expert.

There are solutions to this.

The governments involved refuse to talk

about the more than 655 migrants that died

in two months, the deadliest start ever

to any year in the Mediterranean.

But it’s easy to get distracted,

and sometimes it’s easier

not to see.

Kyle Hunter is a poet and managing editor of the 50. His poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, DASH Literary Journal, So It Goes, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rat's Ass Review, and elsewhere.

THERE IS NOT ENOUGH SNOW

by David A. Goodrum

by Daryl Woods at Dreamstime

To cover the battlefields.

To soften the blows.

To fill the caskets with snowmen.

No blizzard to interfere

with news transmission, offer

the comfort of momentary quiet.

 

The country drifts

into one war then another.

There will never be enough snow 

to blanket the lies of politicians,

which seep out like the blood

of eviscerated rabbits.

Whichever way the wind blows

there is never enough snow

to level-fill the trenches.

There is always a hollow

a depression that shows

where the civilians are buried.

David A. Goodrum is the author of Abrupt Edges (Bass Clef Books, 2025), Vitals and Other Signs of Life (The Poetry Box, 2024) and Sparse Poetica (Audience Askew, 2023). Recent journal publications have appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal (which awarded his poem “Winter Inquisition” a Pushcart Nomination), Cirque, and Triggerfish Critical Review, among others. David lives in Corvallis, Oregon. 

HOMELESS

by John Valentine

Dharmik Vibes

What is madness but nobility of soul
at odds with circumstance?
—Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” 


At home once in the universe,
the old physicist
used to weave theories of everything
in the cat’s cradle
of his mind. How orderly the atoms
danced, how fleeting the
half-life of years. Wrapped now in rags,
his words spoken
only to the wind, he signs the language
of loss, hands tangled
in mudras, like a manic Buddhist, or an
operator at the
switchboard of chaos, pulling wires,
answering calls,
frantically making connections on the
streets
of the fallen.

John Valentine is a retired philosophy teacher living in Savannah, Georgia.

#INMOURNING

by Britt Fairchild

When Democracy dies 

I’ll arrive 

Graveside 

Plum plumped lips 

Dramatic smoky eyes 

Crystal tear adhered 

To my right cheek 

It’s giving despondent chic

  

Vintage veil  

Black velvet dress 

Pinterest-curated and 

Shipped fast with Prime 

Second-hand combat boots  

Purchased for the rallies 

Followed online 

I’ll walk slowly  

In the procession 

Place a red rose  

On the coffin 

Shawl falls solemnly 

Around my shoulders 

Rest in peace 

Democracy 

(Takes a selfie)

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

Britt Fairchild is a technical writer and editor based in Paso Robles, California. She is the author of The Work (2025), a debut poetry collection tracing her breast cancer journey through themes of patience, perseverance, gratitude, and grace. Her poems have appeared in Wildfire magazine. A proud theater mom, she can often be found cheering her sons on from the front row.

CONVERSATIONS

by Liam Boyle

 

in memoriam Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026)  

 

In his later years, Jürgen Habermas was sometimes described as “the last European” – a reference to his passionate commitment to the ideals of the European Union (although not always its modern reality). The great German philosopher was also the last surviving exemplar of a generation of postwar intellectuals formed by the experience of the second world war. Like Jean-Paul Sartre in France, Habermas was as at home in the public square as the seminar room, debating the future of a continent that needed to be rebuilt ethically as well as physically. In the new age of unreason, where brute exercise of power is explicitly prized above the force of moral argument, the loss of any such figure is to be mourned. But Habermas’s death at the age of 96, as the US and Israel wage an illegal war of choice, and the far right is in the ascendant in France and Germany, feels particularly poignant. A member of the Hitler Youth as a boy, Habermas then made it his life’s work to philosophically ground the democratic values which are now under threat again. A renewed focus on the great insight that drove his thinking would be an appropriate legacy. The Theory of Communicative Action, his 1980s magnum opus, was not (to put it mildly) as accessible as some of his newspaper opinion pieces. But its central idea – that our nature as linguistic beings puts reason and the search for consensus at the core of who we are – remains an antidote both to intellectual relativism and Trumpian “realism”, which elevates national or individual self-interest above all other sources of human motivation. —The Guardian, March 18, 2026

 

I have to think that it matters
my own small contribution 
to the project of democracy
going door to door at evening time
arguing the merits of my candidate. 
 
And I know there isn’t time enough
to trace each reason back to source
and I know, between my tired feet
and families readying meals,
this is not the ideal public sphere 
that you described.
 
In your obituary the familiar gripes –  
too much Enlightenment,
too out of its time,
too emphatically rational. 
But that’s what I liked, the ambition of it all, 
the long conversations 
step by step to consensus.
 
The horror of holocaust formed you.
You saw the mirage of Nazism
and its brutal reality. 
Your “never again” meant reckoning 
with the whole story of modernity. 
You sought to rescue its promise
from the twisted wreckage around you. 
 
And with the recent turn from talk,
all the strong men who do because they can, 
might is right, and all that gab, 
the giddy march of atavistic nativism, 
it can be said that you failed. 
 
But I thank you for the ideal you sketched 
of undistorted conversation
of reasons advanced and scrutinised
in the slow careful business 
of building understanding and agreement. 

 

Liam Boyle lives in Galway, Ireland. He was a featured reader in the New Writing Showcase at Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2025. Many of his poems deal with memory and heritage. He enjoys spending time with his grandchildren.