LOVE OF THE COMMON MAN (HONEST!)

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Netanyahu and Trump, the peacemakers of our time... Cartoon by Tjeerd Royaards

All we have done

Is take off our fedoras

And baseball caps,

But under our space-age flight helmets.

We’re the same good-hearted

Ordinary Joes

We’ve always been.

 

We were remarkably restrained,

Weren’t we?

We said we’d wait and see

And we did,

For hours and hours.

We gave them the opportunity

To cease and desist

Their opposition

To the war being waged against them

By our little brother

(With, admittedly, a little big-brother supporrt).

They did not stop.

 

We know they have nuclear weapons

With which to destroy us. 

Even though “experts” in the CIA

And other suspect organizations

Tell us this enemy

Has no nuclear WMDs.

We know the “experts”

Are wrong. 

We know 

They are going to use those bombs

Against us.

Honest.

If we do not attack them 

They will attack us.

Honest.

So we have taken

A pre-emptive step.

(Pre-emptive is such 

A multifaceted and useful adjective.)

 

We are sorry most people

And most nations

Misunderstand us,

Accuse us of over-weaning ambiton,

Of wanting to rule the entire planet.

We are merely seeking

To take our rightful place

In the hierarchy 

Atop the world order

Where we will reign with

Wisdom and generrosity

And love of the common man

As long as the common man

Doesn’t get too big for his britches

And think he can fight back.

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s latest book is A Friendly Little Tavern Somewhere Near the Pleiades. He podcasts at thirdactpoems.podbean.com .

BETWEEN HERE AND THERE

by Cindy Ellen Hill 

A baby receives treatment for malnutrition at Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat on May 31, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of Nader Garghon/Al-Awda Hospital via The Intercept, June 19, 2025

I wish I could explain, but I can’t. 

The starvation is beyond anything normal.

It feels like our bodies have started eating themselves.

            --Sara, age 20, engineering college student, Gaza, text, June 21, 2025

 

The distance from my eyes to my Samsung

telephone screen is just about the same

as the distance from my plate to my tongue.

 

Text messages appear below a name

that could be the name of a close neighbor

across a picket fence as tall as shame.

 

I tap the cell phone screen, thin as paper.

I hear my old refrigerator hum.

My garden is a few steps from my door,

 

its pea pods swelling as thick as my thumb,

green peas inside, still tender, sweet and young,

packed in as close as can be. Everyone

 

is born out of the closeness of the womb,

then drifts through hate into a separate tomb.

Author's note: Behind the headlines about the Israel-Iran conflict and the US joining in the fray are daily reports of Gazans being shot while attempting to get food and water at aid stations. I am a poetry mentor for We Are Not Numbers an organization and online literary magazine publishing the work of Gazan writers. I stay in touch with my assigned poets after their work is published. Last night, I received the text which forms the epigraph of this poem. 

Cindy Ellen Hill is author of Wild Earth and Other Sonnets (Antrim Press 2021), Elegy for the Trees (Kelsay Books 2022), Mosaic: Poems from Travels in Italy (Wild Dog Press 2024), and Love in a Time of Climate Change(Finishing Line Press 2025). Her novel in sonnet verse, Leeds Point, will be released in 2026 from Selkie Songs Press. Her poetry has been included in Open Door Review, Flint Hills Review, Anacapa Review, and The Lyric. Her essays on sonnet elements have recently appeared in American Poetry Review and Unlikely Stories. She holds an MFA in fiction and poetry, and lives in Vermont.

DOWNTOWN L.A.

by Katie Kemple

A woman asks me how 

to find Hope Street. 

I'm not sure, I say. Maybe 

around the corner? The rest 

of the week Hope Street 

startles me. Finds me 

when I least expect it. 

On the walk to the library. 

After dinner with college 

roommates. At the end 

of my volunteer shift. 

The sign towers over me. 

You have to look up to 

see it. The font confident 

we will find our way.  

Katie Kemple is the author of Big Man (Chestnut Review Chapbooks, 2025). Her work has been curated by Frontier, Plougharers, and Rattle (Poets Respond). 

LEFTOVERS

by Daniel Romo

I’m waiting or dehydrating in this midlife loop, 

stuck between nothing and what to do, thirsty 

for a shot of life’s finest spirits and a sip of 

more than just stagnancy. Meanwhile, the 

taco man that sets up across the street from 

me everynight calls out sick on Instagram 

for fear of being caught up in the immigration 

sweep that’s devoured the Southland. One 

minute you’re slicing al pastor for a hungry 

Caucasian community, the next you’re seized 

by men hiding in masks and Americana. I 

prefer my carne asada with a slight char and 

I’m not even mad as the protesters burn the 

US flag in the Long Beach streets because the 

man who likes his meat rare and the neighbor 

who wants it well-done both bleed out when 

hurt and my city is being stabbed, which 

resurrects me as my blood boils into an 

inferno while I offer a torch to scorch every 

dirty star, to incinerate every misplaced stripe.

Daniel Romo writes, lives, and loves in Long Beach, CA.

CITY OF ANGELS

by Raymond Nat Turner

“There is no power greater than a community discovering what it  cares about.”  

—Margaret J. Wheatley, Turning to One Another

City Of Angels where

Camouflaged kidnappers; Fascist wrecking-crews rip

Seamstress, roofer, warehouse worker, dishwasher families

Apart. Apart for private prison-profiteers. Apart for a flash-

Bang-buffoon-king of chaos and cruelty. Whose strongman

Handler has him by the short-hairs— Dancing for dollars

City Of Angels where 

Folks know that masters of misdirection mix fantasy with

Fascism. Sprinkle spectacle in with torture.  And laugh

In teargas and rubber bullets—All the way to the bank—

Stealing SNAP; Medicaid; Social Security; and veterans’

Benefits 

City Of Angels ruled by devils

Reflecting fire and ICE.

City Of Angels where everyday 

Angelenos strap on resistance

Wings— And fly in solidarity

Formations through fog

City Of Angels where

Everyday Angelenos strap on mutual aid

Wings— And fly warp speed

Through blitzkrieg. Through hurricanes 

Of big lies. 

Through whirlwinds of racist rubbish

City Of Angels where

“To protect and serve” translates into sonic boom slogans

Bouncing off buildings! Ricocheting as linked arms.

Morphing shoulder-to-shoulder. Out from unlikely alliances.

Into united fronts ten toes down! Into militant movements

Organizing and building. Mastering pressure, mastering choke-points

City Of Angels where 

Everyday Angelenos know it’s no video game

On colorful screens. Know it’s soldiers on their streets

And Marines. Know “less lethal” is Pig Latin for Palestine—

On the down-low—Cookin’ slow … Know Gaza is Raza—

Writ large …

City Of Angels where 

The streets are universities of class struggle

Attended by allies, accomplices, comrades.

The streets are universities of class struggle paved with smoking tear-

Gas canisters; bloody, rubber-coated, steel bullets. And goose-steppers

Coming for Mexicans in the morning— And back for Blacks by noon 

City Of Angels where

Everyday Angelenos hate The Orange Age—

Its latest outrage of tilted table. Loaded dice.

Marked cards. Everyday Angelenos hate the

Capitalist decay—that must be swept Away

With 8.5-hour days of resistance!

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.

EVERYWHERE FRACTURED BONE/IT SEEMS

by Al Ortolani

los angeles is in the air/a few

acres of protest within five hundred 

 

miles of city/stretched/tendons

in the streets/now

 

muscled by federal policy/bent 

to hyperextension/bone

 

in socket grinding: a home

for some/a charnel house

 

for others/this America 

not the America we learned

 

to love/the disruption/

the disunity/the distemper/

 

troops in riot gear/rubber bullets

a bicep flex/

 

the fist/well-knuckled

in the face of the weak:

 

this new scapegoat of migration

is shaken in our faces/blinding us

 

to the Samaritan within:

all the while/a sleight of hand

 

finger tipping through the

streets as planned

Al Ortolani, a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. He was the recipient of the Bill Hickok Humor Award from I-70 Review. He’s a contributing editor to the Chiron Review.

WEDDING IN ISRAEL

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

 

The green cotton nightgown—clean, 

stuffed next to sweaty 

T-shirts—is going home.

I hope not to hear again

the phone alert go off

in my gut, a morbid tuning fork.

I thank the cousins—sojourners 

with me to this fête—who,

bent over phones, found 

the fixer, the vans, the flights.

Thank the lover back home—pounding

head, twisted stomach—who pleaded,

Keep going.  

On the road to Amman, another siren.

We enter a concrete capsule

by a gas station.

Close the door.

 

 

Author’s note: Recently I traveled to Israel for a family wedding. Just hours after the last dance, Israel and Iran began attacking each other. Israel’s airport closed, trapping me, and the whole country, under barrages of missiles and drones. On the road to Jordan, and a flight out, I endured one final air raid siren and shelter. Even escaping, there was no escape.

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Sheila-Na-Gig, Nixes Mate, and Streetlight Magazine.

WARNING SHOT

by Catherine Gonick

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

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday named eight doctors and researchers, including four who have spoken out against vaccination in some way, to replace roughly half the members he fired from an expert panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. —The New York Times, June 11, 2025

I go to CVS to get a Covid booster.

A pharmacy staffer prepares the injection.

Do you think we'll be able to get

these much longer? I ask.

Is this a political question? 

she shoots back.

We are strangers. I realize 

she might be asking 

if I'm MAGA. Maybe she

is. But if either of us were,

would we be here,

giving and receiving

life-saving help? Is this political?

I repeat inanely. Battle-lines wait

to be drawn, and I'm lost

in a small fog of war,

until she asks, Have you heard

what's happened to the CDC

and vaccines? Now I know

we're on the same side

and it's safe to answer, Yes, 

we're in a horror movie. She jabs

my arm and I flinch. You need

to stay still, she warns,

plunging deeper. When I leave

and thank her, she smiles.

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including The New Verse News, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, and Orchards Poetry Journal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her first full-length collection, Split Daughter of Eve, is forthcoming in June from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She lives in the Hudson Valley, where she works in a company that slows  the rate of global warming.

SONNET FOR THE COMPTROLLER

by Beth Cleary

He is showing us what to say, how to be, when
they come for us: upright, measured in tone and gaze,
Do you have a judicial warrant? You do not have 
the authority to arrest U.S. citizens. Show me
your judicial warrant. These are the ways, the phrases,
memorize them. I have memorized them, in the night
when footage of the arrest—I am not
obstructing anything I am standing here—replays
in the basement of my heart, near where my diaphragm
tucks up, presses down, basement where I store
cups, snippets, grains of information, instructions
for later. For when they come for us, soft body and cheek
jammed against a pillow/wall, gloved hands breaking our backs.

Beth Cleary's essays and poems appear in Ninth Letter, The Maine Review, Artist & Influence, Fourth Genre, and other publications. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the main No Kings! march was upwards of 60,000 strong despite shock about assassinations, unknowns about an active shooter, and warnings to stay away. 

WAR BREAKS OUT…

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Source: The Spectator

in every field, on every street,
booming, blooming, blasting, 
blathering, while fishmonger

and greengrocer, student
and priest, run home until
walls shudder and windows

crack and shrapnel rains
on the silver,  the cats,
the children, oh the children

bleeding and screaming.
What absolute lack of 
foresight, no bunkers, 

no caverns, no metro 
tunnels close by to wait 
until bombers and drones 

return to base, nowhere 
to hide. In the fields, 
farmer on a tractor, another 

with a hoe; tally ho, 
fellow, go now to your God. 
We the executioners

rule the skies. 
War did not break 
like a pimple

or rash
or pus-ridden
bacterial flesh.

A human being
ordered bombers
and bombs 

to launch. 
A human being, 
otherwise known 

as a  leader, 
a democrat,
of what’s otherwise 

seen as a democracy.
And by the way,
the State is me.

Cartoon by Ramón Díaz Yanes.

Indran Amirthanayagam has just published his translation of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books, 2025). Other recent publications include Seer (Hanging Loose Press) and The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil). He is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.