LISTEN

by Susan Vespoli

Allex Gomes photo for Unsplash

     “I want to warn you. They shot a woman in Minneapolis and her story will trigger you, remind you of Adam’s murder.” —Christopher

When the world is crying 

and the newscasters are crying

and your email inbox is crying

and Facebook is crying 

and memories of your son 

are crying,    remember 

how he came to you 

as a hummingbird. How he still 

comes to you as light. Open

the patio door and step outside.

Look at the tubs of bright marigolds,

faces up. Pompoms of coral and blood

orange, persimmon petals like lace, 

rippley and delicate and flamboyant. 

Watch in awe as a butterfly lands,

flits from one blossom to another, 

perches on tiny wire feet, its wings 

wallpaper triangles or black dotted 

Velveeta cheese slices slit on the diagonal,

wings that open and close like a fan 

and the monarch lets you approach, lets you snap 

photos and it sees you and reminds you 

of the hummingbird, ethereal messenger 

sent by the sky. Lean in and listen 

till it lifts off, flies so close to your cheek 

as it leaves, it whispers: breathe.

Susan Vespoli’s heart goes out to Renee Good’s loved ones and community. Vespoli believes in the power of poetry to heal.

AUBADES FOR WOMEN LOST

by Andrena Zawinski

“Aubade,” 1942 by Pablo Picasso

So—

(An Aubade for a Woman Lost

So he gave her a pearl handled gun,

its skull and crossbones in a red red rose.

So she packed it moonlighting 

driving nights for a ride share.

So she never used it.

So it was used on her.

So he shoved it sideways inside her

mouth smeared bloody with lipstick.

So her temple bore a jewel of a bullet bloom.

So her dark eyes rolled backwards ghastly white.

So she kept on talking: no, oh no, oh no.

So he was a person of interest let go.

So they strung a cardboard toe tag

where she had worn his gold band.

So they put her in the cold bed 

silenced in a morgue drawer.

So at daybreak on her birthday, he ate 

that same gun, metallic on the tongue, 

crying out: no, oh no, oh no.

So it never even made the evening news.

—for Georgeann Eskievich Rettberg 

    (1952-2003)

She—

(Another Aubade for a Woman Lost)

She, mother of three

in the routine of another day,

shot down driving away 

in the Minnesota snow 

from ICE officers

mixed and missed dictates.

She, another woman lost, 

her wife and observers

in a chorus of fear

calling out

oh no, oh no, oh no.

She, a poet who wrote

of solipsist sunsets,

tercets from cicadas,

that the bible and qur’an 

and bhagavad gita…

make room for wonder.

She, now a metaphor

of lilies and lavender,

votives and tea lights

peace signs and queer flags

for what could have been,

what could be for any of us.

She, in a murderous

last rite anointed as fucking bitch

silenced by three bullets,

face awash in blood.

She, reduced

to an endless loop 

of twisted narratives

on the news circuits

while women cry out

again and again an endless

oh no, oh no, oh no.

—for Renee Nicole Good 

    (1989-2026)

Andrena Zawinski is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, most recently Born Under the Influence. Her work has been lauded for its appreciation of nature, spirituality, social concern, and craft. Her writing appears widely online and in print, including at Verse Daily. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, she has made her home on Alameda Island in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

THE AMERICAN DREAM

by Sheridan Walter

by Mike Crema at Microcosm Publishing

"If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America". —Nelson Mandela

Eddie Spott            

heritage stolen                  lost

Trayvon Martin        

hoodie stalked                  dead
Freddie Tyson         

cure withheld                    deceased
Margaret Schwartz   

door locked                      perished
Fumiko Hayashida   

citizen caged                    departed
Emmett Till             

boy lynched                      inanimate

Jeffrey Miller           

campus shot                     lifeless
Dr. A.C. Jackson      

dream torched                   gone
Ryan White             

plague ignored                  passed 
Zong Captives         

cargo drowned                  spiritless
Chief Big Foot        

tribe frozen                       unanimated
Brandon Teena       

truth violated                     bereft of life
Karen Silkwood      

secrets radiated                 checked out
The Rosenbergs      

voltage applied                  passed on
Addie Mae Collins   

church bombed                 resting in peace
Medgar Evers        

driveway ambushed           late
Louis Tikas         

miners gunned                  fallen
Fred Hampton        

bedroom raided                 asleep
Nicola Sacco        

anarchist executed             demised
Eric Garner         

chokehold tight                  breathless
Quatie Ross         

forced march                    cold
Kalief Browder      

justice failed                     defunct
John Africa         

city bombed                     at peace
Branch Davidians    

siege burned                    with God

The Bison           

plains emptied                  near-extinct

George Stinney Jr.  

child fried                              dead as a doornail
Hiroshima           

city vaporized                        extinguished
The Addict            

drug war caged                     institutionalized
The Gazan           

commerce maimed               shattered
Marsha P. Johnson   

river claimed                         disputed
Renee Nicole Good  

mother killed by ICE              Poet

Sheridan Walter (he/they) is a queer writer and doctor living in South Africa. He holds a master's degree in philosophy, and his work is forthcoming in Rogue Agent and Fruit Journal.

INSTEAD OF CLICKING IN CHATGPT

by Laura Grace Weldon

74 suicide warnings and 243 mentions of hanging: What ChatGPT said to a suicidal teen. Analysis of high-schooler Adam Raine’s ChatGPT account shows how the chatbot became a confidant as he planned to end his life. —The Washington Post, December 28, 2025

After recently promising new safety measures for teens, OpenAI introduced new parental controls for ChatGPT. The settings allow parents to monitor their teen's account, as well as restrict certain types of use, like voice chat, memory, and image generation. The changes debuted a month after two bereaved parents sued OpenAI for the wrongful death of their son, Adam Raine, earlier this year. The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT conversed with their son about his suicidal feelings and behavior, providing explicit instructions for how to take his own life, and discouraging him from disclosing his plans to others. —Mashable, September 28, 2025

I would rather consult anyone’s grandma.

Ask a whale or crow or beetle. 

Find an answer in the next song playing.

Ask my dreams. Ask all our dreams. 
 
Listen to what the stream’s current says. 
 
Find the truth in the oldest stories
and those told by the youngest children. 

Ask the artists, the scientists, the unhoused man
whose tent is hidden among brambles in the park. 

 
Consult an oracle, the Tarot, 
the Magic 8 Ball still there waiting in the toy box.

Open the nearest library book, eyes closed,
and drop my finger on the page for an answer. 
 
Ask the void. Ask the angels. 
 
Ask the seed waiting for spring. 
 
Ask beyond the question
until answers are no longer the point.

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. 

CRYPTOQUIPS

by Steve Hellyard Swartz

“Stańczyk” by Jan Matejko

My grandfather, tears in his eyes, his false teeth in a glass of water on the table beside him, pounded the arm of his easy chair and screamed, "What does a man have to do to get borscht around here?" What he meant was "Why, when I was six, did I have to hide in a pickle barrel when the Cossacks came looking for Jews to kill?"

My uncle came into my bedroom and caught me dancing like I was on Shindig to the Beatles' “Twist and Shout”. "When you fall in love for the first time, you'll stop listening to garbage like this." What he meant was "Why am I working for the State when I should be a millionaire?"

My mother slapped my face when I read to her from a TV Guide that David McCallum, who played Ilya Kuriyakin on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., was America's new sex symbol. What she meant was, "Why am I not married to a doctor who hates football?"

My creative writing teacher gave my poems a "D" because the assignment was to write from the heart and I write from my knees. What she meant was, "You are not a serious person, and poetry is a deadly serious business."

My girl friend touched my face, looked deeply into my eyes, and said, "When you get tired, you look like Henry Kissinger." What she meant was, "I thought maybe you might be my ticket out of here, but you're actually more fucked up than I am."

My neighbor said that "If you look at every angle of what happened in Minneapolis, you can see that the Antifa girl was trying to ram the ICE guy." What he meant was the same as what I mean: the same thing all of them have ever meant, I have ever meant to them, all our lives long.

"Okay, enough. I give up."

Steve Hellyard Swartz has contributed several poems to The New Verse News over the past many years. Twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize Poetry, he has served as Poet Laureate of Schenectady county in upstate New York, been a finalist four times in the Eugene O' Neill National Playwrights' Conference, and won a Green Eyeshades Award for Excellence in Broadcasting awarded by the Society of Professional Journalists. His movie Never Leave Nevada which he wrote and directed and in which he co-starred, opened at the US Sundance Film Festival in January of 1990.

LOOK UP AND LOOK OUT!

by Ron Shapiro

NASA estimates there are more than 100 million pieces of space junk larger than 1 millimeter in diameter in LEO. Approximately 500,000 of those objects are between 1 and 10 centimeters, and more than 25,000 of them are greater than 10 centimeters wide. —Freethink, November 29, 2025

 

On the darkest night of the year

when stars glow like brilliant diamonds

reminding us that we are indeed star dust

that has taken human form on this planet,

we should be grateful for the moonlight

under which tides flow, nocturnal animals

emerge from safe shelters and lovers kiss.

 

Look up once more then slowly realize that

what you thought were stars are actually 

more than 100 million pieces of rockets

and satellites, tools discarded on spacewalks,

junk floating in space. 

 

Here, on this planet, huge landfills stacked high

like mountains with 

    computers, 

    electronics,

    batteries, 

    styrofoam, 

    ink cartridges, 

    glass bottles,

    diapers,

    enough paper to fill several decimated forests

    and, of course, the toxic poisons released

    from human garbage.

 

The Earth is not large enough to handle this waste. 

 

In a world that can seem like a warehouse of commodities,

where capitalism begs for your dollars, once again 

human exceptionalism does not seem to care. 

 

Trash the planet or trash space, 

it’s all the same to those in power. 

 

And once all that space junk begins to collide,

sending more satellites into orbit will become

too risky. Without such devices to enhance 

communication, predict weather patterns,

bring about scientific breakthroughs.

 

Even the possibility of intergalactic travel,

the dreams of science fiction writers and

futurists, writers and artists, will fall into

darkness while humans, who once looked

up to the stars for hope and creative

inspiration, protect themselves from

any space junk falling from the sky.

Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, has published over 20 poems in publications including Nova Bards 24 & 25, Virginia Writers Project, The New Verse News, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine, Zest of the Lemon and twochapbooks: Sacred Spaces, Wonderings and Understory, a collection of nature poetry.