DAUGHTERS

by Clare Richardson-Barlow

Judith Butler

Amid all the other breaking news consuming the United States this month, the University of California, Berkeley, arguably the nation’s most elite public university, gave the Trump administration a list of 160 names of faculty, staff and students, as part of an investigation into “alleged antisemitic incidents”. While all the names on this list are significant, one name in particular that UC Berkeley handed over to the Trump administration stands out: Judith Butler, the eminent queer theorist, literary theorist and philosopher, and one of the most famous public intellectuals in the United States today. In addition to Butler’s name representing one of the most high-profile academic scalps demanded by the Trump administration in its campaign against higher education so far, Butler’s name is also notable for another reason: Butler is proudly and publicly Jewish, and has written extendively about their Jewish identity and how it informs their politics. In the name of “fighting antisemitism”, the Trump administration is publicly making an example out of arguably the most famous Jewish public intellectual in the country today. —The Guardian, September 22, 2025

They pass the names along,
as though paper could hold a body.
Butler’s among them—
the one who told us
gender is a stage,
a script rehearsed until it feels like bone.

Now the government calls their name,
writes it as accusation,
as though thought itself
were treason.

I think of the mothers in Palestine,
their daughters’ names whispered
to checkpoints and borders,
written into files,
circulated in offices
where no one sees their faces.
A name becomes a burden to carry,
a permission denied.

Butler compared it to Kafka—
to McCarthy, to lists, to silence—
and I believe them.
A list is never just a list.
It is the beginning of forgetting
and the rehearsal of fear.

And still,
I return to the crib
where my baby curls her hand around mine,
her pudgy fist the size of a plum.
She cannot ask yet what it means to be a girl,
but already the world
is writing her story,
already she is among the daughters
who must learn to abide.

Butler’s voice is not just theirs.
It is the echo of every woman
who has been told to hush,
every mother
who has watched her child’s name
crossed out by a hand of power.

What is silenced will not stay silent.
What is written down
will be read again.
Even in exile,
even in mourning,
Her many voices endure—
not performance,
but song.

Clare Richardson-Barlow is a writer, political economist, and lecturer at the University of Leeds. Her work spans academic, policy, and creative forms, with a focus on climate, energy, and justice. Before academia, she worked in Washington, D.C. think tanks on international policy. Her poetry and essays often explore womanhood, memory, and myth, especially how women’s voices are silenced and reimagined as strength. Originally from Oregon, she now lives in Yorkshire.

ALMA MATER

by Catherine Gonick

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather in front of Sproul Hall during a planned protest at UC Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., on Monday, April 22, 2024. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

A goddess of silence carries

my severed right arm

 

my Zionist  

arm they call 

 

genocidal among

many other names.

Silently moving

out of sight

through camps

where the righteous

sing from tents 

it waves goodbye.

   

I hear

the blood of words dry

feel the pain

of my phantom limb. 

Catherine Gonick's alma mater is U.C. Berkeley. She has published poetry in journals including Live Encounters, Notre Dame Review, Forge, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and in anthologies including Support Ukraine, Grabbed, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She works in a company that slows the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate. 

(NONFICTION) THE SÁMI WORD FOR ‘HELP’ IS VEAHKKI! AND I YELL IT IN MY DREAMS TONIGHT, AND ALWAYS

FOR SACHEEN LITTLEFEATHER AND MISKOPWAAGANIKWE

by Ron Riekki

Above: Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, known as Áillohaš in the Northern Sámi language (23 March 1943–26 November 2001), was a Finnish Sámi writer, musician and artist.

“I am not saving my life for the future” 

—Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Trekways of the Wind 

 

Tomorrow I go in front of a board 

to speak on the allegations that I 

was “speaking of native issues too 

frequently in class.”  When I heard 

 

these allegations, no, this allegation, 

no, this pissing-on-a-bonfire, I had 

the revelation of being had.  I had, 

yes, in class, spoke of indigenous 

 

issues, not realizing it’s a crime, 

but I am guilty of being native, of 

being Sámi, of being Karjalaiset, 

of being of a background where I 

 

hear, here, “I’ve never heard of 

that.”  The that falling flat.  And 

it’s a board of seven people.  And 

it makes me think of the time in 

 

Berkeley, where I was walking 

down the street and saw a black 

man, around 70 years old, peace- 

fully being drunk, on a bench, 

 

buzzed, yes, eyes red, yes, and 

leaving the world alone, then 

a police car drove up and an 

officer asked the man some- 

 

thing and he said something 

and another cop car pulled up 

and another cop got out and 

another cop car pulled up and 

 

more police got out and then 

a van pulled up, a cop van, 

a SWAT team reaction for 

this septuagenarian swept up 

 

so quickly into the back of 

the swallowing vehicles, all 

painted black, as if to mock, 

as if to mask them in night 

 

where the body was taken 

and I stood there and realized 

how there is the centrality of 

overreaction, of SWAT-style 

 

action movie hyperbole where, 

in the end, there is the pairing 

of kissing the woman while 

killing the man who didn’t 

 

matter, the man who was 

reduced to villain and a woman 

seduced by cliché and audiences 

in the dark, snoring.  And a First 

 

Nation playwright in Montreal 

told me that Hollywood cinema 

is all about conflict, that they 

love conflict, because colonialism 

 

is hearted in conflict, but native 

playwriting and screenwriting and 

story is about community, not con- 

flict, not the incarceration of their 

 

films, but instead about connection, 

and he said that there was a reading 

where afterwards a white man 

raised his hand and said he’d have 

 

to be honest and he said the play 

was boring, and behind him was 

a group of Anishinaabe who were 

all in tears, their sleeves filled 

 

with tears, and this man was 

bored.  And tomorrow I don’t know 

if I am getting kicked out of college 

or if I’m getting killed out of college 

 

or if I’m getting left in decorticate 

position, funeraled, how I was told 

that I was not only speaking too 

much about native issues, but I was 

 

being too “aggressive” with how I 

was talking about native issues and 

an elder, Red Pipe Woman, on 

the phone told me, “Oh, let me get this 

 

straight: a native person is being 

told they are ‘aggressive.’  They’re 

telling you that you’re being ‘savage’ 

by speaking of native issues.”  And 

 

our laughter was as normal as all 

the tall clouds above, and our laughter 

was sky-deep, and our laughter was tears, 

and the grey clouds were coming and 

 

I love walking in the rain and I walked 

home and I wondered if tomorrow 

they were going to try to destroy me 

and tomorrow I am going to find out. 

 

And tomorrow I am going to find out. 

And I will live even if they kill me. 

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

BEFORE CORONA, THE CORONA

by Charles Harvey

Junkyard Find: 1968 Toyota Corona

Before the Corona
Was a virus, it was a car,
Carrying us like
The wind to Woodstock,
Berkeley, Kent State,
Selma, Detroit, Watts—
All them hotspots.

Six of us piled in.
Inches apart was a luxury.
We didn’t give a duck,
Coziness roused our hormones
And made us want to fuck.
Our long hair tangled in the seats.
Our ‘fros flattened and sweated
To the rhythm of soul beats.

Before the Corona
Was a virus, it was a car,
Traveling all around the world
Spawning revolutions,
Liberal ideologies,
And X-gen babies.

Before the Corona was a virus
Before T***p was a virus
Before social media was a virus
Before Fox News was a virus
Before the Republican Party was a virus
The Corona was a car, baby!

Charles Harvey is a native Houstonian. His work has appeared on TheNewVerse.News over the years. He recently published Rough Cut Until I Bleed. 

C0LDER (S0NNET 0) AND C0LDER, BERKELEY

by Ron Riekki

“Arrests made as hundreds protest Ann Coulter speech” 

—Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2019

Walking to the grocery store, I turn a corner to see
dozens of cops in riot gear, them loading vans
with weapons, the militarization of the police
where I see more of them in this minute—as I walk
nervously through their bulletproof everything—
than I had seen in a decade of small-town life,
but this is the time of riots and gear, of fire and fear,
and I remember walking to the same store just after
the last riot where the ground held footprints in blood
where I could see the exact path where someone had run
for their life, and my neighbor told me, "I bet today
was the hottest day it’s ever been here,” and there’s
a streetlight gone, the post yanked out of the ground.


Ron Riekki’s most recent book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).