I’M THE MAGA DREAM GIRL

by Celeste DeSario

Thousands have swooned over this MAGA dream girl. She’s made with AI. —The Washinton Post, March 20, 2026

I’m the MAGA dream girl: 

Poreless, blonde, of course I am;

A one-star general at twenty-four. 

I’m a patriotic fantasy in stilettos, 

As I stride beside a fit, thin commander-in-chief,

An anatomical hallucination

enhanced by our AI friends.

 

Don’t look too closely,

My icy blue eyes sometimes turn grey, then hazel,

My Instagram post has a glitch: a flag missing ten stars and two stripes,

But with a million followers and a “Freedom Pass” link,

I’m exactly what they prompted.

 

I’m a high-speed rewrite of reality,

Click it enough, and I become real:

Patriotism and pornography in high resolution.

 

But how do you spot the illusion?

My AI and my salesmen share a pattern--

Listen to the loop:

Greatest, Best, Biggest.

Most incredible economy in the history of the country.

An economic miracle…

 Except, not yet.

 

(Status: Pending…)

(Data not found…)

 

Rendering complete: Avatar: Patriotic fantasy: check

Talking Points: the best, the biggest, the greatest: check

Success Patch: Reality overwrite: enabled

America First Economy: Roaring, Explosive, Economic Miracle: Data not found…

 

They will tell you I’m patriotic—the most patriotic, believe me.

Many people are saying so, the best people,

Nobody in the history of our country has seen a soldier like me—

I’m exceptional. Very smart. A total professional. Good looking.

 

My hair is perfect, a golden waterfall flowing over my flight suit.

Wait—my left hand has six fingers.

I pose next to an F-22 Raptor,

The stealth jet, I mean.

 

(System Error)

(Buffering…

Searching for input.…)

 

The economy? The war? The grift?

Wait— I’ve lost the loop.

Or maybe I’ve been looped in.

 

Keep it vague. Keep it urgent.

Click. Click. Click.

Keep it coming

But most of all:

Keep it simple.

 

I’m an AI creation for a perfect world.

Brought to you by synthetic visionaries,

Salesmen of…alternate truths… 

The best truths…The only truths…

 

(System Error)

(Buffering…

Searching for input…

Loading…loading…searching for…)

 

Whatever they are selling will be “very, very important.”

Many people will need it, Want it.

And the best part?

(Retry?)

(Retry?)

It isn’t even real.

But, by the time you’ve noticed…

Celeste DeSario, a retired professor from Suffolk Community College, is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and a National Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Texas Writing helps Celeste process events and stay relatively sane. Celeste’s poetry recently appeared in The New Verse News and is scheduled for publication in The Changing Times.

OVER THE MOON: A GOLDEN SHOVEL

by Liam Boyle

Now’s a time to celebrate, drink

a toast with best French wine,

gather friends to break bread and 

sing patriotic anthems. Look

into the eyes of your guests, smile at

the thought of what’s been done, the 

great news, a return to the Moon.

 

Before radio silence, and

across 250,000 miles, the astronauts think 

of love—of our love for them, of

their love for us—“we love you” and all

that love is on the dark side of the 

moon, while back on Earth civilisations

 

are dying, rockets carry destruction; the 

truth is, we can no longer see the moon

as benign. This coincidence of time has 

undone all lyric, all hope. We have seen

the darkness passing

overhead. It will not go by.

Liam Boyle lives in Galway, Ireland. His work has been published in various journals in Ireland and internationally. He was a featured reader in the New Writing Showcase at Galway's Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2025.  

ISRAEL LAUNCHES OVER 100 AIRSTRIKES ON LEBANON IN TEN MINUTES WITHOUT WARNING

by Moudi Sbeity 

as if a warning is a good excuse. 

This means over ten airstrikes per minute. 

What else could we do with a minute? 

I won't name anything lovely for you. 

I won’t save you from this terribleness, saying 

we could plant more than a hundred seeds. 

That perhaps we could feed a hundred people, 

sustain a worldwide hymn till heaven hears this 

aching chorus. Some poems need to show you 

how much it hurts. Some poems need to leave 

you wondering

just how tightly a heart must be closed in order

to champion a thirst for destruction. Just how 

desperately the soul must be choked before 

waging its inner horrors. Just how much more 

can we rip each other before remembering that 

a minute is sixty seconds, and a second is about 

one breath cycle, and one breath cycle is all you 

need to stay alive. I won't even do the math for 

you, the one that calculates all the breath cycles 

that encompass a minute across the millions of 

people now breathing in the unsanctioned dust. 

Just how much ignorance, and how heavy of a dose, 

and how often, does it take to poison one person’s 

blood before he decides to launch more than a 

hundred missiles, before his guilty fingers 

violently reach into God’s pulse. 

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, educator, and psychotherapist. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by The New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression.

SHADBLOW

by Arlene Weiner

We’d go down to the end of Dyckman Street
to watch the trains, Mom and Teddy and I.
We’d wave at the locomotives, and the engineers
would wave back. A little family.
 
In spring we saw shad nets in the Hudson River.
There’s a tree called “shadblow” because 
it bloomed when the shad were running,
early spring.
 
We lived in Manhattan, in an apartment.
Trees in the park, fish displayed on ice 
in the window of the fish store. 
 
Near my grandmother’s apartment house,
one magnificent magnolia covered itself
with bloom, white blushed pink, every spring.

Arlene Weiner grew up in New York City and has lived in Pittsburgh for decades. She has been a Shakespeare scholar, a den mother, a cardiology technician, and an editor. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The New Verse News. Ragged Sky Press published three collections of her poetry. The most recent is More (2022).

TAXES, SEEN FROM THE MOON

by Indran Amirthanayagam
NASA photo

I walked in the woods 

today, a spring in my step,

the Great Leader had

stepped back from 

his threats 

to the sovereign 

Republic of X,

and my tax deadline 

loomed even clearer; 

no more time 

to distract with poems, 

even this one a lazy 

fingering,  extracting juice 

from the rind of past fears, 

raising arms to God 

to say thank you

for your intervention.

But what’s ten minutes 

to a poet avoiding reckoning 

with the IRS?  Only ten 

minutes to say thanks, 

 to say I love you  and keep 

in touch always. Ten minutes 

to say tomorrow will come—

it already has—

 

despite the terrible words

and bombs exploded

until now in the latest 

killing fields 

of our one Earth

lit by the rising Sun seen 

now for the first time 

by the Artemis crew,

from the dark side 

of the Moon. 

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.

HINGE DAY

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

So much needs exercising, soothing for the opening to beyond and next. Where applause for sun reverberates across plains and oceans to replace fumes of exhaust. Even on the balconies of apartments in my hometown. My car hides in the garage to avoid the steep price of gas. I plot where to scatter a bag of saved marigold and zinnia seed. Where mornings come unchallenged by worst-yet shock. When the bully pulpit voice, a vulgar weaving from Greenland to birthright, issues ultimatums that seem to threaten using nukes to resurrect the stone age and abuses the many names we use for god. A cardinal teeters on my fencepost listening to the oven bird. 

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Her poems appear in journals and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples (Fernwood Press) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she now writes mostly prose poems. Fernwood Press will publish her full-length poetry book, Gathering Marbles, in July 2027. Knoll serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.

OIL COUNTRY

by Pepper Trail

 

 

 

 

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.  

TWO-WEEK TRUCE

by Howie Good

 

 

Trees with buds

under the rubble 

 

 

Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author.

BRIDGES

by Matthew Murrey

 

Anadolu Agency on Facebook

 

People build them to connect
one side to the other, to move
people, supplies and food
from here to there, to shorten
the journey and make it easier
to cross over a river or a bay 
or a deep, precipitous gorge.
 
People construct rooms and roofs
so doctors wearing green or blue
can focus on the work at hand, 
so teachers can greet children 
carrying books and backpacks,
so exhausted parents can settle
into bed after turning off the lights.
 
People also make cunning machines
and devices. From up in the sky
they can see what hugs the ground:
buildings standing exposed, unable
to move, and bridges lying flat 
out in the open, left to the mercies
of whoever is looking down from above.


Matthew Murrey is the author of Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026) and Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019). He can be found on Bluesky and Instagram under the handle @mytwords.  

HOME IS WHERE

by Michelle DeRose

The Guardian, April 3, 2026

Runaway nuns seek familiar stairs,

years of ascent lodged in muscle memory.

Passages internalized like arteries,

layout so deeply embedded they could sleepwalk

to table, sanctuary. A return to rails

that held their hands through ages,

yielding their gloss to dry grasps

that clasp ever tighter. Rooms where

nightly they set their prayer beads on bedside stands.

Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find her most recent publication in Michigan Bards Poetry Anthology, North Coast Voices 2025: Poems of the Great Lakes, Dunes Review, and Autumn Sky Daily.

RESTING ON A ROCK AT 8000 FEET WHEN IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SO HOT IN MARCH

an abecedarian

by Malinda Miller

The record-breaking heatwave scorching the US west [in March] would have been “virtually impossible” if not for the climate crisis... caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. —The Guardian, March 20, 2026

Above the steep riverbank, no snow or ice in sight,

 

below a craggy granite face, I’m

 

cracked open by 

 

determination to understand 

 

evolution. Not 

 

from where, how, why —

 

grand theories

 

honed in academic halls, no — more

 

incipient answers to questions I’m afraid to ask.

 

Junipers surround me, trunks gnarled, twisted,

 

knobby—able to survive relentless heat, intense winds, scarcity of water. 

 

Lichen, among the oldest of living things on Earth, 

 

mossy green, burnt orange and yellow on barren rock 

 

near my dusty backpack and boots, colonized here long before us. 

 

Other foliage and organisms are not so hardy—nor am I—left 

 

parched from a winter of too much wind and too little moisture;

 

questioning, can damage causing climate change be

 

reversed? What’s next? Can we adapt?

 

Should we expect a 

 

tumultuous future full of

 

unforeseen consequences?

 

Verdant seasons may become rare. This we must accept.

 

We’re not as resilient as juniper or lichen. With limited water, only 

 

xeric organisms will survive. Of this planet’s 4.5 billion years, in

 

yardsticks of time, humans are a blip. If, when, will we become 

 

zero, zip, zilch?

 

Malinda Miller is a writer, teacher and editor who is most at home on Weston Pass in Colorado or in the Nevada desert where her family had a ranch just off Highway 50, aka the Loneliest Highway in America. Her poetry and personal essays have appeared in A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park, Ecotone, Think, the Mountain Gazette, the Colorado Sun, the Coloradan, and others. At Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, she teaches youth classes and community outreach workshops. She has a MFA in creative writing from Western State Colorado University and a MA in journalism from CU Boulder.