HAIKU FOR TORY MEDLEY

by James Penha

Tory’s death declared

suicide but his hanging

reprises strange fruit

James Penha edits The New Verse News. His latest book is Queer as Folk Tales.

THE LAST JEW IN VINNITSA

 by Roselyn Kubek

Detail showing the murderer now identified as Jackobus Omnen from the photograph known as "The Last Jew in Vinnitsa" Warning: Viewers will find the original photo at the link provided disturbing.

At Last, a Name for the Murderer in a Holocaust Photo. —The New York Times, November 28, 2025

Now he has a name.

Or we have it—

Finally we know what to call the person 

whose ennui pulled a trigger in front of:

     one photographer

     two dozen standing-bored

     so many piled bodies

We learn this murderer 

was once a school teacher

who still teaches though armed 

with a different lesson

      Jackobus Omnen

How pleasant to roll that 

off history’s tongue

to store in the sepia of then

It’s a name full of roundness 

like the anonymous circle 

of witnesses

like the shallow pit where 

a man sits on the edge

perpetually anticipating 

the end

Chin raised

he watches us all

from the bottom 

of a photograph

and waits to become the last.

Roselyn Kubek is a teacher and a New England poet whose work has been featured in a number of publications and venues including, most recently, Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope series and the Maine Poets Epistolary Poetry Exchange. 

HURRAY FOR HAIRY SNAIL HUNTERS

by Jerome Betts

Search is on for the German hairy snail in London:

Conchologists and citizen scientists team up to seek

out endangered mollusc species along River Thames.

—The Guardian,November 24, 2025

  

Hush, hush, chortle who dares,

At people out looking for shells growing hairs!

They’re along by the Thames under pieces of  wood,

Only fingernail-sized, though they may have withstood

A break from old Europe worse than Boris’s Brexit

As Doggerland sank and sea rose to annex it.

So here’s to conchologists, clean-shaven or hirsute,

As they seek tiny molluscs encased in a fur suit!

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the verse quarterly Lighten Up Online.

THE LAST ARABIAN NIGHT

by Constance Stadler

Tall cedars

emanate earthen aromas

with musky incense

cinnamon and mint.

A solitary oud

plucked by

ornamented fingers

sings a sad

uncertain song

to the scarlet dying sun.

The calm opacity

of old Lebanon

burns red

with fire

as dark eyes

Cry

behind silken veils

The olive tree burns black.

Constance Stadler is the author and co-author of eight compilations of poetry and has published more than 200 poems magazines and journals. She was awarded honors in the International Erbacce Prize competition for her collection Sublunary Curse. Constance dates the beginning of her relationship with poetry to early teenage years, when she was given a volume of the Collected Works of Dylan Thomas which still sits, dog-eared, on her bookshelf.

TOM STOPPARD EXIT STAGE LEFT

by Paul Lander

Tom Stoppard is dead.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
await him in the wings.

Paul Lander has worked as a writer and/or producer for shows on ABC, NBC, Showtime, The Disney Channel, ABC Family, VH1, LOGO and Lifetime. In addition, he’s written standup material that’s been performed on ‘Fallon,’ ‘Maher,’ ‘Daily Show,’ etc. His humor pieces have been accepted at American Bystander, Light: Poetry, Weekly Humorist, McSweeney‘s, and Humor Times. He has won awards from the National Soc. of Newspaper Columnists, London’s Blogger's Bash and Univ. of Dayton’s Bombeck Workshop.

WE LIVED HAPPILY DURING THE CEASEFIRE

by Bonnie Naradzay

More than a month after a ceasefire was announced and all living Israeli hostages were released, Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, without signalling any change in   their intent, said Amnesty International today [November 27, 2025].

after Ilya Kaminsky

We were so satisfied with our stuffing recipes

and so when they bombed tent encampments

blocked entry for prosthetic limbs

for child amputees

blocked machinery for uncovering corpses

from the rubble

blocked doctors who’d earlier been given

“permission” to enter Gaza

 we (forgive us)

looked the other way again

as Israel violated the Cease Fire

over and over again with the slaughter of hundreds more,

atrocities committed with impunity

how easily we looked the other way

as Israel asked us for billions more in aid today

from our house of money

we (forgive us) lived happily during the Cease Fire.

Bonnie Naradzay has been leading weekly poetry sessions for homeless people at Street Sense and at Miriam’s Kitchen and also at a retirement community, all in Washington, DC.  While at Harvard University in the late 1960s, she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize–-a month’s stay in Northern Italy–-in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary. A 2017 graduate of the St John’s College (Annapolis) Graduate Institute, her book of poems Invited to the Feast was published by Slant Books in October 2025; three of the poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. 

RIFF ON CLIFF

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

“Jimmy Cliff, Singer Who Helped Bring Reggae to Global Audience, Dies at 81”—The New York Times, November 25, 2025

 

Eager for a splendid riff?
Feast your ears on Jimmy Cliff.
Reggae songs bring light to all;
Hard they come and hard they fall.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has around 355 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, Light Poetry Magazine, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had thirteen previous poems in The New Verse News.

FEMMINICIDIO

by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old university student was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 2023.
Graphic: Giulia Cecchettin Foundation

Italy Passes a Femicide Law, Seeking to Prevent Violence Against Women: Murders of women killed for misogynistic reasons will now be classified as femicide. Campaigners say a broader cultural shift is still needed. —The New York Times, November 26, 2025

 

Femminicidio

a word not in daily use 

Femicide 

a word that needs to be in use.

 

I am the product of violence. 

That’s a pretty word for it.

It sounds like, I dunno, parfait.

I’ll have the parfait violence per favore.

Soft sibilant whispering sounds

for being quartered and drawn emotionally.

 

Violence might as well as be my name.

The very existence of me is a scenario of violence.

My mother escaped my father several times.

The year before I was born, she lost a pregnancy, 

from getting hit or kicked or punched 

or pushed down the stairs, or maybe she fell out of fear, 

this story has been told different ways over lifetimes.

 

He wooed her, pursued her, wouldn't let her go.

Impregnated her. Whether it was romance between beatings

or violence amidst a beating, I will never know. 

She was subjugated; that’s for sure.

She was a woman enslaved in a Bronx Italian marriage.

None of her family wanted to see her pregnant again.

They wanted her to get out. 

 

Yet. Here I am.

 

Born into a violent hell

My body shakes when I hear glass breaking.

There are reasons for this.  Facts.  Episodes.  

Shattered glass around my crib.

I am sensitive to noises, beeps, neighbors’ fighting.

I wonder how it was that I was not killed.  

That my mother was not killed.

That my father had some kind of emergency brake

That my mother got the hell outta there, finally.

That we survived, I consider miraculous.

 

My father remembered being beaten as a boy 

and as a Marine, he learned to kill and to dismember.

He survived one of the more vicious battles on earth.

The very last major battle of WWII:

the American invasion of Okinawa in 1945,

eighty-two days of ferocious rabid hell 

over 241,000 people were killed

Soldiers and civilians.

 

Femminicidio

the killing of women

 

In 2018, I walked the streets of Roma and Napoli

where exterior walls of buildings

are covered with the photos of women

all who have been killed to violence

most from men they knew

brothers boyfriends husbands acquaintances

 

Femminicidio

the killing of women

 

In Italy, there's a long history of "honor killings"

killing of women—basically sanctioned

the kill

understood

 

One day in New York, I ran into an old friend.

I was feeding the meter

standing on the sidewalk

pushing a quarter into the metal slot

turning the nose of the meter

when I looked over at two women in straw sun hats

walking down the sidewalk, in my direction.

I pushed the quarter into the slot

heard it click and our eyes locked, 

me and the younger woman.

I recognized her instantly from high school.

Her eyes were the same, from years ago.

She was one of the sweetest kids I'd gone to school with.

Now we were in our fifties.

 

In that moment, we hugged and talked 

as if no time had passed at all.

I asked her, "Ya got a quarter?"

And she dug in her pocketbook and filled my meter up.

 

Her mother remembered me from when I was sixteen.

She recalled a moment I spoke with her at the high school gong show.

She said, you came up to me and said, 

“I have to tell you that your daughter 

is the sweetest kid I ever met,

and she stands up for the underdog, 

if a kid is being bullied,

she always sticks up for them.”

 

There was a street fair going on.

All flowing dresses on racks on the sidewalk.

We happened to be standing, 

right outside a new place,

where a portrait of a beautiful girl was in the window.

I read the inscription.  She had been murdered 

by a man she was dating.

The place was called "One Love,"

a non-profit for education to combat femicide.

I remember saying,

“Isn’t this wild, in between these boutiques

probably paying thirty grand a month rent,

is a foundation for domestic violence?”

 

We fell into a conversation about domestic violence

And I was open about the violence I grew up with

And how it affected me.

I’d always feared for my life 

didn't want my blood relatives knowing where I lived.

The declining health of my mother exacerbated family interactions.

Emergency room visits and holidays were tense.

Most holidays we ended up in the Emergency Room

my mother getting dangerous blood pressure spikes from tension.

 

Looking back on our reunion,

I wish I read things semiotically, spiritually. 

Paid attention to the signs:

The parking meter

My memento mori

Time expiring

The portrait of the beautiful dead girl in the store front window

 

Femminicidio

 

Not long after that, 

My friend was shot dead by her brother

in front of her mother,

on their front lawn.

They’d been bickering about emptying the dishwasher

 

No one knew he kept the old gun in the basement.

The old gun their father had many decades ago

For his own protection.

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is an American memoirist, poet, and performance-artist whose stage presence has been called riveting and volcanic.  She was born in the Bronx. Her books include Whaddyacall the Wind? (Bordighera Press); Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light and Pitch Roll Yaw (Guernica World Editions); L is for Lion: an italian bronx butch freedom memoir (SUNY Press; finalist for LAMBDA Literary Award); and  Schistsong (Bordighera Press).  Lanzillotto has been awarded grants from New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, Dancing in the Streets, Dixon Place, Franklin Furnace, Puffin Foundation, Creatives Rebuild New York, and Trickle Up NYC.  

WHILE TAPPING MY FOOT

by Mark Hendrickson

Rothko Style Art at Etsy

AI slop tops Billboard and Spotify charts as synthetic music spreads —The Guardian, November 13, 2025

MIT Invents Injectable Brain Chips —Futurism, November 16, 2025

While tapping my foot

to the AI-generated 

number one song 

on the billboard charts

that I asked Siri to play,

I abandon my Kindle book 

and switch to my iPhone 

to shop for paintings 

in the style of Rothko on Etsy,

but I become distracted 

by automated news summaries

reporting that computer chips can now 

be injected directly into our brains,

and how many jobs will be lost

to AI and automation,

and an article saying 

that one day soon 

robots will replace or kill us all.

I laugh to myself and say, 

“Never gonna happen” 

as I click the Buy Now button

because I decide 

I like the reproduction

better than the original.

Mark Hendrickson (he/him/his) is a poet and writer in the Des Moines area navigating the Sturm und Drang of daily life through wordcraft. His words appear in The Ekphrastic Review, The New Verse News, and Modern Haiku. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or at https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/mhendrickson .