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.

O GREENLAND! MY GREENLAND!

by Anne Gruner

Global AI race makes Greenland's critical minerals a tempting target —NBC News, January 17, 2026

Frozen for millennia,

your ice melts faster and faster,

the shiny shield that protects you

from the sun, reflecting its rays,

like armor deflecting spears, arrows,

and swords but not outrageous fortune.

 

Invulnerable for ages, your permafrost

softens, disgorging its methane and carbon

to fuel the global bonfire of the vanities.

Ancient microbes, freed from glacial captivity

create black holes of “giant” viruses,

standing ready for missions of good or evil.

Fresh and cold, your newly born meltwater

floods the warm salty ocean,

and like a hormonal imbalance,

it slows the sea's circulation,

a fateful harbinger.

 

As your ice bids its long farewell,

you say hello to a new peril,

one from humanity, which may transmogrify

your beauty into toxic mountains of sludge, acid,

dust, and runoff from crushing, grinding,

and chemical bleaching for coveted minerals

and a cesspool of data centers, accelerating

your blackening, melting, warming,

and death. 

 

For the first time in human memory

you have shed tears on your highest peak,

weeping for the Earth.

Anne Gruner is a two-time Pushcart nominee whose poetry has appeared in numerous print and on-line publications including Amsterdam Quarterly Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Honeyguide Literary Magazine, The New Verse News, Humans of the World, Spillwords, and Written Tales. Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in Dogwood, Rhapsody of the Spheres, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, Hippocampus, and others. A former CIA analyst, Anne lives in McLean, Virginia with her husband and two golden retrievers.

AND SO IT BEGINS

by Imogen Arate

Art by Ann Telnaes

I.
The video stunned
The spin followed

An award-winning poet
has been silenced
by the shrill bullets from a
21st-century fast-drawing
cowboy on the man-made
frontiers of the new wild West

Yet we’re subjected 
to the lies of a rapist

Another man trying 
to justify violence
against women

A bad remake
of another family 
forced into mourning

another community
thrown into chaos

II.
Yet we still think in terms
of elephants and donkeys

while neither will draw down
on the military budget

sunset high-tech toys
hardware for the police and

other testosterone-charged 

angst-driven angry boys

tear down boundaries
that gate-check
investments in decency
beyond the borders
of “me and my”

Repulsive successive local waves 
reinforce the national and the 
global of political expedience 
and small and large lies stack 
upon one another to enrage
as the bodies of the sacrificed
emit the noxious gas
of corruption to explode
in a tsunami of grief and fury

III.
He who became
a millionaire at eight
nursed on government subsidies
bailouts and tax breaks
feeds us the fast-food diet of rancor 
while he grabs a pussy a plane 
a tanker a president oil fields 
Greenland and lusts after resort money
built on a still-hemorrhaging mass grave

But he’s just another opportunist
a symptom mushrooming on the 
advantages of Eugenicist 
elitism ripened by everyday
brand ambassadors gladiating
for a piece of the imaginary pie

IV.
Our pens may ink mighty words
but their impressions are paper thin 
against the hurried tunneling
of semi-automatic street artillery
bump-stocked by the political will
of fuel-guzzling AI overtaking human 
value as they peel away with the 
breeze blasé over endless shootings
grown accustomed to washing away 
anguish with yet more agony while 
prayers whistling show tunes 
to soundtrack the cha-ching
of firearms outstripping humans

V.
But she was a white citizen
Why should that be the red line
when we don’t let spilt blood
rust before sacrificing more lives
to our inane judgement of worth 

This social engineering
was never meant to end well
when chaos has no red line
maelstrom cannot be reined in

The hunger of greed 
self-perpetuates
in unchecked growth
to unleash the pandemonium
of a self-fulfilling prophecy

Imogen Arate is an Asian-American poet in search of hope: that humanity will overcome our self-destructive tendencies to work together against the onslaught of the climate crisis. She's also the Executive Director of Poets and Muses, an award-winning multimedia artist platform that has featured diverse contemporary poetic voices from around the globe. She believes that we will only be able to value lives equally when we lend our ears and hearts to the life stories of those we don't readily recognize as our kin and stop requiring the presence of certain socioeconomic trappings to recognize people's right to a dignified existence.

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 .

TO GATSBY

by Devon Balwit

USA Today Instagram graphic, November 3, 2025

A hundred years since Fitzgerald gave us The Great Gatsby,

a man we first meet reaching into the dark.

At first, he seems sad, then sinister, then sad again.

Some people have it so easy, old sport,

he marvels in his practiced accent. We know. We can see 

their ballrooms scintillating, distant and unreachable. 

We gather at their property line and try to make sense of their hilarity.

The vast eyes of advertisements—crypto, AI, online gambling—

stand in for God’s: No matter how hard we work 

the lever, the payout goes to the next guy, to someone 

someone’s only heard about. You need cash to sleep 

with another man’s wife. Spoiler: The book ends 

with a bang—a car crash, Gatsby’s murder, a suicide.

Sycophants queued up for his parties. None came to his funeral.

When not making art, Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

CALLING OUT THE NUMBERS

by Sharon Olson

DOGE Has Decimated the Institute of Museum and Library Services —artnet, March 31, 2025

In some retellings the Library of Alexandria
was burned by Julius Caesar, accidentally,
a casualty of war.

No accident the flashlights of the Doge,
peering with damning light, threatening
the rolled-up scrolls sitting pretty
next to 21st-century flash drives.

I can think of Dewey numbers 
the Great Leader would not like: 
sexual relations both gay and straight, 
301.424, public measures to prevent 
disease, 614.5, the library as refuge 
for the homeless, 362.5, Palestine 
and Israel shelved together, 956.94, 
even something so benign
as 351.1, federal jobs.

Not a bad idea to digitize, lest the temperature
rise to Fahrenheit 451, and only an AI librarian
available to operate the hose.


Sharon Olson is a retired California librarian who now lives in Annapolis, Maryland. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.

WE STILL CALL IT FREEDOM

by Phyllis Frakt

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

Do you still believe 
your world is real?
How medieval! So passé!
Abandon all hope,
enter our new reality—
facts are what we say.
 
We control the news,
can change it at our whim.
Technology will comply,
repeat the truth of every lie
in a thick mix of duplicity
on Fox, Facebook, X, AI.
 
We flood the zone,
you can't catch up.
Chaos is our game!
We still call it freedom.
But when something goes awry,
Joe Biden is to blame.

Phyllis Frakt writes poetry in New Jersey. She has published six previous poems in The New Verse News.

SUBJUNCTIVE

by Adrienne Pilon

Source: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee at Instagram

If I write we are going to the sea if I write
shall be free if I write Palestine if I write 
protest or encampment or salaam
my brother if I write Allah if I write 
genocide if I write bombing or Gaza  
or Hamas if I write Zionist if I write
apartheid or war crimes if I write 
nearly 50,000 dead or children are dying
or ceasefire now these words may 
rise up from the text, flagged and marked 
by a force that gives no quarter 
to what it does not care to understand.
The ink of my pen draws a target 
on my back on the back of my mother 
my father my wife my husband 
my daughter my son my sister 
my brother salaam my brother 
salaam salaam salaam salaam

Adrienne Pilon is a writer, educator, and activist. Recent and forthcoming work appears in The Tiger Moth Review; Room; Tendon Magazine and elsewhere.

A TrOcitieZ

by Abby Caplin

AI slips into my personal emails, a spying  
Big Brother, peering over my shoulder. Last fall, money
circled  
down the drain, in what might be our last election.
Eight years, I guzzled the news. Now I sip and worry how “Dt” might get 
flagged by Em’s tentacles, if not weirdly written. 
Google renames the Gulph.of.MeXicoh to the Gulph.of.AmeRikaH, our maps  
hijacked by data centers in Dallas. Institutions, 
international alliances, even lowly pennies have not been spared. My neighbor 
Jenna, a vibrant woman with twin two-year-olds, was laid off last Friday by Dt/Em’s  
kangaroo government. AI sums up what’s inside my email: 
Letter of Rejection from The New Yorker; Ruth had surgery; Abby offers advice on 
medications. My mother always told me to   
never underestimate the stupidity of the American people. 
Oh, how she was right! I rewatch 
Pride and Prejudice where a wealthy man learns from a strong female lead, so 
quaint, and You’ve Got Mail, where a 
revenue-oriented man’s heart is softened by a trusting,
spirited woman, but not enough to not destroy her livelihood.  
Tr 
Ump will someday be laid out, like Savonarola, upon his bonfire of the 
vanities. But for now, I should watch 
what I write, for the mighty egos, 
extracted from the ashes of the Third Reich, are celebrating their carnage,  
yucking it up in private jets. Congratulations, Na 
Zis, though you too will fail. 


Abby Caplin's poems have appeared in AGNI, Moon City Review, Mudlark Flash, Pennsylvania English, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, and a nominee for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of A Doctor Only Pretends: poems about illness, death, and in-between (2022). Abby is a physician in San Francisco, California.

AI SHANTY

by Joel Glover

LA Wildfires and AI’s Data Center Water Drain: The explosion of data center demand for AI use is draining water resources. Even with efforts to mitigate cooling demands, municipalities and companies struggle to find a balance. —Information Week, January 17, 2025. 

[Refrain]

Oh, the sea was wide, the sun is high

The land is parched, the soil is dry

And clouds swirl over cooling stacks

And soothing rain is what we lack

[Verse 1]

There’s vapour in the atmosphere

And bubbles form, that much is clear

Pyramids and Ponzi schemes

Built on algorithmic dreams

[Refrain]

Oh, the sea was wide, the sun is high

The land is parched, the soil is dry

And clouds swirl over cooling stacks

And the cooling rain is what we lack

[Verse 2]

Profits for some, for us the loss

Ice caps melted, no more frost

Towns in rolling blackout pall

No showers, storms, or thunder squall

[Refrain]

Oh, the sea was wide, the sun is high

The land is parched, the soil is dry

And clouds swirl over cooling stacks

And the cooling rain is what we lack

Former waiter in a Love Boat themed restaurant, reformed mandarin, and extroverted accountant, Joel Glover lives in the woods of Hertfordshire with two boys, one wife, and not nearly enough coffee. His poetry has appeared in oddball magazine, Little Old Lady Comedy, Radon Journal, 5-7-5 Journal, Epistemic Literary, Pulp Lit Mag, and As It Ought To Be. He published a chapbook Untimely Poetry, taking a cockeyed view at the news of 2024.