SMALL DIFFERENCES

by Moira Magneson

AI-generated image by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

Three days

we've watched

the acorn

woodpecker

perched atop

the telephone

pole

bright red

crown

black beak

driving

into

the glass

insulator

over and over.

His fury

for the bird

who looks

just like him—

side-eye

glittering—

knows

no bounds.

He refuses

to give up

the fight

with his own

reflection.

He will win 

this war.

He will not 

surrender.

Each will hammer

the other down.

They will stop

at nothing.

Author’s Note: "Small Differences" addresses the June 12, 2024 Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel which came after Israel killed a senior Hezbollah commander in southeastern Lebanon in a June 11 airstrike.  The poem's title is based on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of “the narcissism of small differences" in which he proposes that people tend to amplify the minor differences between themselves, leading to feelings of hostility, estrangement, and contempt.

Moira Magneson's full-length collection of poems In the Eye of the Elephant will be published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2025. Her novella A River Called Home—a river fable illustrated by Robin Center was released by Toad Road Press in early 2024. She is currently working as the poet-in-residence for ForestSong, artist Andie Thrams' project exploring solastalgia, biophilia, and resilience in the face of wildfire devastation and the climate crisis.

BRIAN WILLIAMS

by Dennis Mahagin

Brian Williams, suspended anchor of NBC Nightly News, with American troops at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, Iraq, in March 2007. Credit Photo by Jeff Riggins/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images accompanying “Was Brian Williams a Victim of False Memory?” by Tara Parker-Pope, NY Times, February 9, 2015

You got fourteen seconds
To make it
Right … INCOMING ! Heh he he he heh, just
Kidding, guy, I like a little
Lie, good
In the sky.
It’s like listening to a
Vacuum, the next
One and the next,
It’s like
Anti-Macassar,
Hezbollah, black flak
Cleaner in another room,
One down the hall
A whopper in the hopper
And knowing
Will come to an end
Soon. I want you to take five
No eight
Months, be chilling in Cancun,
Wait for my call, wait for it
This will all blow away
Like an Andover squall
One of those big bruise colored
Motherfuckers grin
Like Oz
@ the rim, ask God
Ask him
How it’s all done
With mirrors, a little white one
Now and then. You’re our
Man, you have always been
I played a little cornerback
Myself, have I told you?
NYU, then Cornell, no quarter
Back quarterback !  heh heh
How I learned my best
Dance steps, sweater vest,
Show you my
Gene Kelly
Someday, this is fading, fading
Away, already, the truth
Is a voice
In an air vent, it
Drips from the eaves, hits
Rockefeller’s
Pavement
… look fuckit, take
A year, will ya?
Search for
Your Soul, go where
it meant.


Dennis Mahagin’s poems have appeared in Evergreen Review, Absinthe Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, Everyday Genius, elimae, The Nervous Breakdown, Corium, Stirring, Juked and Night Train. His latest poetry collection is called Longshot & Ghazal – available now from Mojave River Press.