WE’RE RIGHT, BEHIND YOU

by Steven Kent

"Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani's supposedly radical policies as 'normal'" —The Guardian, November 6, 2025

It's Communist, beyond the pale

Of all our freedom-loving norms,

To look at European forms

So goshdarned guaranteed to fail.

Free healthcare? Transport? Daycare, too?

We ain't about to spring for those,

Since everybody 'round here knows

They can't succeed--oh wait, they do?

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, The Dirigible Balloon, Light, Lighten Up Online, The Lyric, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, The Pierian, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collections I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) (2023) and Home at Last (2025) are published by Kelsay Books.

PRAY

by Jean Varda

This video contains black and white footage after the liberation of Buchenwald.

I light a candle for peace and everywhere I go I pray

in my room on my bed on the street in my car,

when I breathe each inhalation is an image of hope

that the bombs will stop falling, the tanks will turn around no nukes will rain down, and those who are fleeing will reach safety and not die on their way.

How can one bear the thought of the little girl in blood

stained pajamas her mother running with her for help

then dying when she reached the hospital.

Even before I was born my mother protested war,

after the horrors of serving as a nurse in WWII

“How could they have kept from us Buchenwald,

Auschwitz, Treblinka?” She would repeat as she showed

me black and white footage of the camps and told me

how lucky I was to be born where I was with my Jewish

blood. She took me on my first peace march to protest

Vietnam, we stayed up all night on an old school bus,

I had never seen so many people at one time

as we marched on Washington.

My father taught me the Russians weren’t our enemies

that they wanted peace just like we did.

It didn’t match what I learned in school. He went to Cuba and Nicaragua, he loved the countries and the people. He was accused of being a Communist before I was born. I took my daughters to protests when they were small and showed them what I believed in, 

still we pray for peace.

          

Jean Varda's poetry has appeared in: The California Quarterly, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Speckled Trout, The New Verse News, and The Boston Literary Magazine. She has led poetry writing workshops and Open Mics around the country. She presently resides in Chico, California where she is working on an anthology of her poetry.

FRANCIS' LAMENT

by Ed Bennett 

Photograph: Getty Images

How does one deal with this,
the stubborn, stolid expressions
on sleek faces well acquainted
with the banquet table?
The words of Christ rejected
as I bless the poor, call for
their protection, elevate them.

If I am a Communist
than what was Christ?
He reviled power, condemned
the exploitation of his own.
Now the money has turned some,
twisted the divine words to elevate
their “donors”, castigate the rest.

Lord we cannot wait
for an afterlife when bread
is unaffordable and our toil
is a yoke borne by the many.
Forgive us but give us this day
the ability to hear your words above
the clink of gold in diocesan coffers.



Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment, and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine and the author of A Transit of Venus.