CORNELL

by L. Roger Owens

ID 49525974 ©Chengusf | Dreamstime.com

Would it have made her day
easier, the day she scrolled Instagram
during Chem II, during lunch, during
AP Lang, during band, the day she read
the news of a gang rape two years ago,
would she have been prepared had we
sat her down—and at what age, 3, 7, 13?—
and told her of men who do not consider
her body her own, of men who fly planes
into towers, of men who tie bombs
to railroad tracks, of powerful men
who launch missiles into girls schools,
of men who believe her body to be
the plane, the towers, the train, the school
and her life potential charred debris
to be forgotten amidst their boasting?
But she already knew of these men,
the Epsteins, Weinsteins, the boys
sitting next to her in class who
might grow into them. And she wasn’t
prepared—how could she have been?
As I tucked her in that night, she said,
“I hate school,” said, “I want to go home,”
and of course she was home.
But I knew what she meant.

 
L. Roger Owens teaches spirituality, ministry, and creative writing at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He is an MFA student at Ashland University.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO THE TOWERS FELL

by Al Ortolani

September 11, 2001 by Ann Telnaes

In twenty-five years

I lost two sets of parents. All four

of my children married happily. My wife

& I traveled to the Blue Mosque, faced Mecca,

Watched the whirling dervishes.

                                  The alignment of planets.

In Athens we took a selfie outside Socrates’s cell.

I retired from caving & mountain climbing,

made peace with the Catholic Church,

almost became a Buddhist like Thomas Merton

almost became a Buddhist. Gave my kayak

                                    to a duck hunter.

Kept my paddle in case I was ever up a creek.

My daughter taught English in Chinatown.

When the Towers collapsed, the school filled

with dust & debris. The children crawled

along the hallway wall to the gymnasium.

My daughter, moving back to Kansas in 2000,

called & called the school on her cellphone,

prayed for the parents rescuing their kids

                                     under the basketball goal.

Since that day we’ve had six grandchildren

added to our family. Two cats have died

& I’ve buried them under the Japanese maple.

                                     I own the same Toyota.

We rescued a dog at the beginning of Covid.

He has grown & been loved & is living

what people call his best life. He has visited

the mountains & the desert & the ocean.

He’s been kicked out of poetry readings

for whining at poorly written lines.

                                      I was told in Spain

that we had an idiot for a president. America,

once the shining light of democracy is an

embarrassment to me. Stupidity in red & white

& blue. NATO rotting. We’ve threatened

Greenland with invasion. Canadians flip us the finger.

Our president renamed the Gulf of Mexico &

Lake Ontario for America & the Kennedy Center

for himself,

                   and & and & and, each American

promised five thousand dollars if his sycophants

were elected in November. The Towers fell

twenty-five years ago, since then we’ve attacked

Iraq & Afghanistan & Venezuela & Iran,

                   our migrants in the streets.

We honor our dead with more dead. Our tears

with Taps. War begets war for generation upon

generation.

                    Someone smart said this.

Saint Peter in his cell. Gandhi making salt.

Mother Teresa in her slums. Chief Joseph

who today will fight no more forever.

Ukraine & Gaza & The National Parks.

There is no god, but God. No death, but Death.

No poem in the streets, but the Rant.

Two of my grandchildren are eligible for service

in the military. I consider a house for them

in Canada near my cousin Tony who fled Nixon

across Lake America in seventy-one. Today,           

                    I tipped the kid on the trash truck

twenty bucks to haul off my dead television

for his supper.

Al Ortolani is a poetry editor for the Chiron Review. His poems have appeared recently in Rattle, One Art, Pithead Chapel, and Muleskinner Journal.  New York Quarterly Books plans to release his poetry collection, American Watercolor, in early 2027.  

SURVIVOR’S GUILT

by Sarah Fitzpatrick

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

8:47 a.m., the world is a siren. The train folds down its newspapers in unison. A thousand dominos clack to impossible silence. Playbills flutter into ash. Billboards tie themselves into prayer flags screaming past a capsule sealed against the miasma of falling towers. A new infant surfaces to gasp blue light. Mother’s breasts engorge with the fair-weather clouds beyond the cesarean drape. Someone is screaming down the hall. The willows of Central Park shudder the sign language of calamity. The molten core of Earth constricts. The trees understand it as music. 

Saved by a teacher conference, your feet give way. You’ve stayed an enormous golden pendulum, its wire dusted with powdered glass. Enraged muscles conspire to squeeze until your tender hand is empty of blood. It runs to colorize the sidewalks of a ghastly silent movie screened only in Manhattan. The city as monolith, a scientist’s constant. The pendulum is a false prophet. You become the fixed point. Transfuse time back into the veins of every paramedic, every finance worker, every new mother, every suicide bomber. Steal back all that is magnetized by the core. Give back the seasons to the trees.

Sara Fitzpatrick works in animal welfare in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her poetry and fiction have been published in places like Merion West, Jet Fuel Review, X-R-A-Y, and Tampa Review. A collection, Bury me in the Sky, was published in 2020 by Nixes Mate Books.

COME HOME!

by Ana Doina

“Come home, my love, come home!” I beg

on the phone. “Where are the kids?” you ask 

hurriedly. “Phil is at school, Al was 

late for class again, and is now stuck

in traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel

on the Jersey side.”

“Thank God for that,” you sigh. 

 

On William Street, your office’s windows 

three blocks from the Towers, allow you 

a full view of the conflagration. “I see them,”

you whisper mournfully, “burning 

like two Roman Candles. Last year this time,” 

you say, “I was there, on the ninetieth floor, 

meeting with a client.” I grip my cell phone 

and try to keep my wits, but tears are streaming 

on my face, and my mind is racing to find

a way to get you home. 

 

“The South Tower is struggling,” you say.

“I don’t think it can stand much longer.” 

The certainty in your voice makes me realize

yours is not a guess but the professional opinion

of an engineer. “Lord, there could be over 

fifty thousand people there. I can see flames 

going floor by floor, charring everything. 

 

The building trembles; glass is busting out, 

concrete, pulverized, cascades from it, 

and fragments float away like flakes. It sputters 

smoke and sparks. It’s going to pancake.”

 

“Come home! Get out of there,” I sob. 

All of a sudden, there is a tremendous boom, 

and the phone line goes dead. 

Author’s note: The phone lines in that part of Manhattan were destroyed at that exact time. My husband made it home that day. It took him many hours walking through the singed streets, the clouds of soot, and falling debris, frightened and angry like the rest of us. The poem’s dialogue is almost word by word the conversation I had with my husband at the time the towers were burning.

Ana Doina’s work has appeared in numerous national and international print and online magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. Her chapbook, The Later Generation, published by Kelsay Books, and her full-length book of poems, Legend of Bread, published by Legacy Press Books, were released in 2024. Her book Coming to America: Stories and Essays, to be published by Histria Books, is scheduled for release in October 2026. 

BLACK BOX

by Eric David Helms

The UK government has paid "substantial" compensation to a man who was tortured by the CIA and remains imprisoned without trial at Guantanamo Bay after almost 20 years, the BBC can reveal. Abu Zubaydah was the first man subjected to the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" techniques after the 11 September 2001 attacks. It was claimed he was a senior al-Qaeda member. The US government later withdrew the allegation. MI5 and MI6 passed questions to the CIA for use during Zubaydah's interrogations despite knowing of his extreme mistreatment. He brought a legal claim against the UK on the basis that its intelligence services were "complicit" in his torture. The case has now reached a financial settlement. —BBC, January 12, 2026

 

Both are dressed 

in the bright coat 

of international 

orange.

 

Inside the Cat’s eye

Zubaydah is being

zipped back

into prison togs—

 

bubbles of a goldfish

rise from his mouth,

speaking for the raw

shortfall of intel

 

still buried in the World

Trade Center reels of flight

as the feed from his revival tube

begins to pump up the duff.

Author’s note: The "Both" [in the first line] nods to Zubaydah and any black box of an airplane which is painted orange to ensure maximum visibility for investigators.  Since the black box of the 9-11 planes were never recovered, Zubaydah (dressed in the same orange) became a human black box for the CIA.

 

Eric David Helms holds degrees from Furman University and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Having spent seven years in the city of New York, he currently resides in Salt Lake City, Utah. Some of his work can be found in the Asheville Poetry Review, key_hole, Prelude, Diagram, MadHat Lit, Souvenir, American Athenaeum, Rhino, 4×4 and Blunderbuss. His debut collection Valley of Empty Pockets can be purchased through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

WHAT COLOR WAS THE SKY THAT DAY?

by Susan Cossette

Impossibly clear, painfully blue.

 

So much sun, the perfect morning,

then all changed irrevocably.

 

Humanity raining from the sky,

down to the bedrock,

down to the Hudson’s slurry wall.

 

Your lives now confetti.

 

22 years later I regard the bloody eye

of tangled and twisted steel,

the fraught echoes of last calls home.

 

There is no light 70 feet below ground,

in this place,

where we will always remember you.

 

Bagpipe music pumped in,

Amazing Grace, how sweet the contrariety.

 

I take my sandals off.

root into the bedrock,

my small white hand pressed to your tomb.

 

2,977 lives.

 

No day will erase you from the memory of time.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

ITEMS NOT SEIZED FROM RUDY GIULIANI'S HOME

by Chad Parenteau

Art from 1999 by Robert Lederman.

Photo of Hillary Clinton

in white pantsuit, black stripes

drawn on in marker.

 

Five laptops with “Hunter”

scratched onto each bottom.

 

FDNY firefighter axe

with ninety-eight notches.

 

Two copies of

Time Magazine’s 2001

“Person of the Year” issue.

 

One copy signed to

“Abner Lube-Me-Up,”

 

the other to “Amadou Diablo –

Now you can count to forty-one!”

 

Atlas Shrugged book, pages

blacked out, “Truth isn’t truth”

written on back cover.

 

“Adolph Giuliani”

protest poster, signed.

 

One envelope returned

to sender. Contents include:

 

additional copy of

Time Magazine’s 2001

“Person of the Year” issue,

 

“For Trump” written on cover

in gold marker.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, Ibbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He is a contributor to Headline Poetry & Press and serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His latest collection The Collapsed Bookshelf was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award.

INSURRECTION MALAISE

by Tricia Knoll

Image via Getty Images.

I watched that mob with confederate flags 

use their poles as stabbers. I thought we could never

get beyond this, never heal, and their coiled timbersnake

curled all too ready to deliver poison. Threat 

on glaucous yellow background. 

 

I thought we would never get beyond this.  

My stomach seized. Like when the towers fell. 

How tear gas billows as if the theater director

called for high-tone smoke and no going home

with a program in my pocket because warplay 

has no script apparent to the watchers 

even if the actors think it does, yell

bad dialogue in murder tones. 

 

I thought we would never get beyond that. 

The next morning’s coffee bittered as if exposed

to air too long and even the cream wasn’t enough

to settle me. Then sugar dumped from a big spoon,

and more sugar from the same spoon, same mug.

It was not the same as getting through this. 

One minute of sweetness at the bottom. After 

in the morning joe. One at a time. 

Tricia Knoll is busy writing letters to Republican Senators about why they should vote to impeach. The fear on insurrection day was built on lies.

FIRES THIS TIME

Clackamas, Oregon, September 12, 2020


by Carolyn Martin

Dozens still missing in Oregon. Burnt roses are seen outside a destroyed home as destructive wildfires devastate the region on Friday, Sept. 11, 2020, in Talent, Ore. (AP Photo/Paula Bronstein via OregonLive)

While I check out evacuation routes
and pray our packed cars are precaution,
not necessity, thousands have lost
all there is to lose except each other
and maybe a treasure or two:
a dog, a cat, livestock raced
to fairgrounds, a child’s diary.

They don’t see what we—
the hunkered-down-in-place—see:
miles of ash heaps, contorted
cars and trucks, war-weary firefighters
who breathe the unbreathable.

Meanwhile, my mother lies in a NJ nursing home.
She can’t remember if she ate her lunch
or how to answer her phone. I watch her mind
slip into the smoke that wipes out
our Douglas firs and seeps into our home.
Today she doesn’t know her air is clean
or that nineteen years ago, she breathed
the ash of 3000 souls drifting
through another blackened sky.


Carolyn Martin is happily retired in Clackamas, OR where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. She is the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

by Dawn Corrigan

At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.—The New York Times, September 8, 2020. Photo: A Somali woman carried wood to make a shelter in a camp for internally displaced people in December 2018. Credit: Mohamed Abdiwahab/Agence France-Presse —Getty Images via The New York Times.

   Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation
   can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely
   under the influence of a great fear.
   —Bertrand Russell


Never forget, they say, as if we have a choice.
Never forget, as though we have minds
eager to comply with orders, willing recruits
dropping to give us twenty, standing guard duty,
lifting the mask to suck in gas and mutter
our rank and SSN. But the minds we have
are AWOL at least half the time, poor soldiers
dropping their guns in battle, abandoning plans,
neglecting the mission in favor of a story
about us and that high school crush,
or us and a pile of money,
or us and a bottle as big as the world.
We remember, but not because they say to.
We remember because our minds like chaos
even more than peace. They urge us to remember,
a wish they share with that other they, the they
who made Father close his blinds forever,
Mother shiver at the sight of every plane.

Dawn Corrigan is still waiting for the Age of Anxiety to end.

SPRING AND FALL

by Fran Schumer

An empty FDR Drive in New York City was photographed on March 25, 2020. Credit: Phil Penman via The U.S. Sun

It was a beautiful fall, and we all remembered that it was because it was
such a terrible time. From the reservation near my house, you could see
where the towers stood. For days afterward, someone posted a sign:
Dear Jesus, Please bring Mr. Spinelli home.

This spring is beautiful, too; piles of pink on the streets of my deserted
suburb, the magnolia trees past their prime. I walk every day with my
husband, our new routine, and notice what I might have missed before, like
the hawks flying overhead, above the skyline where the buildings burned.

I see hyacinths and daffodils and creeping phlox, pale and soothing like the
blue the doctors wear or the coverlets on patients in the ventilators. We’ll
remember those patients, and how good it was not be one of them, to eat a
banana after weeks of canned pears, not to be the only person living in fear.

It’s not so bad when everyone is afraid of the same thing, though some
days you’re afraid of those other things too. On those days, especially,
it’s good to be distracted by the work it takes just to eat, to go out, and,
heaven forbid, risk it at the bike shop because one of your tires is flat
and you need to ride to see all this beauty, the expressway beneath you, so eerie
and empty of cars. In more normal times, the traffic could kill you.

Fran Schumer is the author of Powerplay (Simon and Schuster; NYT bestseller) and Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). Her work has appeared in various sections of The New York Times including Op Ed, Book Review and Sunday Magazine; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She is the winner of a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.

TEXT 911 FOR RESERVATIONS

by David Feela

Summer camp, scrapped
for the Taliban at Camp David,
the outing such a secret
not even the Taliban knew

if there’d be time for swimming
before their bombs blew.
The commander and chief
counselor promised

hot dogs and marshmallows,
airplane rides, and maybe
if they were good a story
around the campfire

about thousands of ghosts
who still haunt the woods.

David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook Thought Experiments won the Southwest Poet Series. The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. A collection of his essays How Delicate These Arches was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Unsolicited Press released his newest chapbook Little Acres in April 2019.

THE GREAT FIRE

by Rick Mullin

Trinity Church steeple in silhouette on 9-11-2001.

Trinity Church Cemetery, Manhattan

At lunch, they ask me where to find the grave
of Alexander Hamilton. “The other
side,” I tell them, pointing to the nave
and tower-shadowed trees. “I hate to bother
you...." Don’t tell me... Hamilton. The same.
Tomorrow I should think to bring a sign:
The Other Side of Trinity [an arrow
pointing right], and sit back from the line
of tourists searching wide-eyed on the narrow
paths between the headstones for a name
that Broadway brought to light outside the oldest
steeple on a precipice and port
of no return, September at its coldest
in a New York City of another sort,
more human-scale and redolent of flame.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Transom.

HERE, HOLDING ON

by Carolyn Martin

Photo by Rob Sheridan: Ground Zero, New York City. October, 2001.

                                             
                        for New York City


October 1, 2001

Twenty days of barricades
and twos and threes pause
on Chambers Street—
business suits, backpacks, hoodies,
uniforms in every shape.
No one pontificates
over vacant desks and pews,
tear-wet beds, fire stations gone,
bone fragments searching for home.

Here, they’re awed.
Tower shadows fled.
The first time in thirty years
Village streets and living rooms,
store fronts with their sidewalk signs,
responders struggling with ash
bathe in sun. They bathe in the sun.

Here, light takes hold
and I, a stranger from 3,000 miles west,
grab a subway strap,
head to an uptown hotel
to write this down.

August 7, 2017

Here, breaking news:
DNA defines one more loss.
(Male. Unnamed. Per family request.)

Who’s left?

Eleven-hundred twelve gathered
in dusty dark, sharing thoughts
they thought as shadows dissolved.
Comparing notes on deals signed,
dinners served, dreams deferred
for the practicalities of work,
little words unsaid.

Here, holding on—each to each—until
they’re freed from this room
where they’ve agreed on the coarsest truth:
closure is a human myth.        

From English teacher to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin has journeyed from New Jersey to Oregon to discover Douglas firs, months of rain, and dry summers. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in publications throughout North America and the UK, and her third poetry collection Thin Places was released by Kelsay Books in Summer 2017.

MONTHS AFTER

by Alan Catlin

Months after
the towers came down
he sat an Upstate
New York bar
drinking lunch,

in town for business,
his friends teasing him,
“So were you one
of those guys we saw
on TV running away
as the second twin
came down?”

“Bet your ass
I was.”
He said.
Not smiling.
Not even vaguely
amused, as if he was
thinking, ”I could
have been one of those
human specks falling
down the side of
a building from
just-above-impact-
floor.”

“What would you
have done?  Hung out
to watch or stayed in
the lobby to see what
happened next?
I don’t think so.”

I didn’t either.

Alan Catlin is poetry editor of online journal misfitmagazine.net. His latest book of poetry is American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press.

EAST THIRTEENTH STREET

by Terese Coe

Eventually he touched upon what she meant to him, not in so many words. In New York on 9-11 she walked the two miles crosstown to his apartment. They needed each other now. No other friends in walking distance. No transportation. Everything had stopped. The city was silent. He had tv news on. They sat on the couch the entire day, transfixed. Soon she could no longer speak. He didn’t see why. Asked her soberly,        

            Are you in shock?
            No, I’m not in shock.
            Why aren’t you talking?
            There’s nothing to say.

He looked at her as if he didn’t understand. He’d been talking to Bob on the phone. She said it more intently, so he’d know.
         
            There’s nothing anyone can say.

His silence may have been a form of agreement. It did not persist.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection is Shot Silk.

AT CENTURY 21

by Rick Mullin

Image source: drjudywood.com


It happened. And the man in front of me

exploded straight up off the street, a mile

high. Many things seemed similarly

amplified. A woman cried as all

the contents of her briefcase scattered

over Dey Street. I assume she worked

in Tower One and would have made it in

by 9. And then the transit cruiser parked

on Broadway hit its lights and faded in-

to smoke and mirrors and a sense that mattered 

more than any rational surmise.

A shadow stream. Outrageous hip hop sneakers

rocketing. I saw the clearest skies

rain paper as a fire at the farthest reaches

closed a ring on everything that shattered.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.