IS TODAY ENGLAND AND CONGO OR JORDAN AND FRANCE?

by Jennifer M Phillips

The heat-dome trundles in like a tumbril

lugging 98 degrees. Men are laying asphalt

in the courthouse parking lot, smell

my drug of choice in childhood, tincture

of summer, intoxicating toxin of tar.

I want to summon the ice cream truck for them

with its salutary jingle and chill. Is it still

rumbling round on Willow Lane

in after-school hours? Or divert a mountain rill

to ripple between the marble columns

down the marble steps to cool their feet.

We share a co-misery of heat this July

that tamps our civic feuds and ardors. 

In the deep south, men in kilts stride the lobby

of the Grand Bohemian Hotel—of course they do.

This makes us unreasonably happy.

Boston is learning La Marseillaise,

dining on Fufu and practicing The Wave.

The possibility of joy backspins between us.

Even sad souls without Spanish

now know the meaning of pausa de hydratacion.

Hometowns are parade-ready,

balconies skirted in red, white, and blue.

The French assume it is for them, and why not?

World Cup is a feast for all fools and fans.

We all have sibling-skin in this game.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (Wipf & Stock).

WE WERE, WE ARE, AWAKE

by Jennifer M Phillips

The papyrus PHerc. 1018. Credit: Biblioteca Nazionale “Vittorio Emanuele III,” Napoli–Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale

We’re finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum’s lost library: A whole library’s worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Nearly 2000 years later, we can at last read these lost treasures. —New Scientist, October 14, 2025

We were here. We saw. We remember.

Some of us even write down what unfolds

and teach our children unerasable stories.

We are awake enough to discern

canes and walkers supporting grandmothers

from flagpoles used as battering rams and spears;

to tell rioters from tourists. Our hearing is keen

enough to hear death-chants, curses and threats

not mistaking them for cheers or exclamations of joy.

We know when a phony rendition

is substituted for fact and blared out to the world.

We recognized a gallows set up on the stairway,

a guard being crushed, from a simple push-and-shove.

We can tell sexual assault from a too-forward pass,

and incitement to violence from a rousing speech,

and even recorded these things on our thousand screens

and continue to share them, and store them for history.

Nothing can be covered up for ever. In an X-ray lab, 

in a particle collider, means has been found

to decipher carbonized scrolls in Herculaneum's

two-thousand-year-old library, roasted by heat

of Vesuvius's eruption, philosophy

not quite incinerated. Do not think

that you can now obliterate the past

you deem inconvenient. Great-grand-children will know

what has happened in our time and who has wrought it,

and sort true from fake and good from evil.

January 6, 2021 and what has come after—

the war on our values and democracy—

we will remember, and keep telling the story.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (Wipf & Stock).

DOWN-SIDE-UP AND BACK-ASSWARDS

by Jennifer M Phillips

Bali's Tanah Lot temple being sucked down a sinkhole: AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

Bali's Tanah Lot temple being sucked down a sinkhole: AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

Jakarta (ANTARA) January 31, 2025 - Indonesia's special envoy for climate change and energy, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, said he considers the Paris Agreement no longer relevant for Indonesia following the US withdrawal from the deal. "If the United States does not want to comply with the international agreement, why should a country like Indonesia comply with it?" he asked at the ESG Sustainable Forum 2025 in Jakarta on Friday.

Today in the tabloids Indonesia is leaving Paris,
so many broken hearted occlusions
across the ways we fixed to meet.
Sports news has coined negative milestones.
I’m picturing
monuments earth sucks down like sinkholes
swallowing minivans. Drilling down
in our former refuge. Ignoring
acceleration
of ice-melt, diminishing aquifers, displaced bergs,
and this is just our warm-up act, witnessing
the double un-tundra.
Wondering if this might be the ending
of the beginning?

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock)

MOMENT

by Jennifer M Phillips

"I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!" —Trump on TruthSocial via Newsweek, September 21, 2024

You could surrender everything
hearing the mesmeric voice of the predator
saying, I will make you safe, will save you
from your body, from decisions between the imperfect,
from nebulous fear, from the unknown future, from your tired heart;
fluttering at the excitement of the sycophant carrying a big idea
of someone else's like a hydrogen balloon,
his tongue a blurted  flame, and suddenly
you long for detonations. Life's long patience
and quiet hands you shake off like your mother's
holding you back from the thrill of traffic,
the allure of the other side.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock)

ANOTHER LION MEETS WINTER

by Jennifer M Phillips

Time to step back from your long labors, Joe,
and let the eager young ones try their hands.
You've kept the long watch safe all night, we know,
and spared the ship of state from bergs and sands.
Heed the prophet's words, predicting, at his finish,
"another will increase, and I must diminish."
 
Your whole career you've served the working jack,
walked the union picket-line, yanked foreign jobs home,
foreseen future industries, retooled the work,
and understood such tasks are never done.
How it pains the industrious will to step away
before well-laid plans arrive at light of day.
 
It goes against your conscientious grain
to leave unfinished what's urgently needed
for this time of tempestuous fire and intemperate rain,
but the ground is prepared and a good harvest seeded.
Trust our resilient future, its competent folk,
to find new pathways for new repairing work.
 
You've fought for justice, remedy, and franchise
on an uphill slope and seen strong weapons shattered,
and though, as always, demons and enemies rise,
you've braced to hold the line when it has mattered.
Now there is a rank of fresh supply behind.
Fall back with honor. Trust the guiding Mind.
 
Democracy feels a fragile edifice
that monks must sweep away when prayers are done
like a painting in sand that time and wind erase.
One God-breathed moment: hearts are not the same.
See: the fresh art commences, the template resurrects;
renewed hope finds voice, as the Spirit directs.
 
O world-sorrow always with us, wars that never end,
but flurry like grackle flocks from one tree to another;
Many losses borne; retirement's one more to mend.
Your back is strong, your loves close by, your  team calls you brother.
you've led us by your best lights, and now will lead in this.
Believe that a gallant soul is never purposeless.

Jennifer M Phillips is a bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower, with two chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (Blurb, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Phillips' work has appeared in over 100 journals, and is currently twice-nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize.

TAX SEASON

by Jennifer M Phillips

Confess—you'd prefer the other partner, death.

Even, perhaps, the dentist, than to have joy creamed off

the top of your good or mediocre year. Stealing breath

from your lungs, so it feels, though reason scoffs

 

about social good and duty and infrastructure.

A hundred to one, poets prefer death as their topic—

the old adversary, its weapons known and sure;

grief well honed; mourning, politic.

 

 But taxes! What's to say? It's impolite,

like defecation. We may complain with a wink

and shake of the head when processes back up tight—

everyone knows what that's like. But I think

 

the tragedian may find good meat for musing

on the rectitude of civic debt and the virtue

of paying one's dues and sorting out the confusing

archival tangle of what wealth did and didn't do.

 

Unlike religion, it is no use to protest

agnosticism. Tax gives no fig for belief

or its lack, just the ignoble quest

for loopholes, exemptions and write-offs for relief.

 

Each Spring, it is the other "little death”—a ration

of dispassionate accountancy, facing the music

of peccadillos, waste, or procrastination.

We make amends with our checkbook's antiseptic.

 

A touch self-righteous, I find I'm glad to say

to myself, watching firefighters fight

a blaze, or a town hall be built, I helped to pay

for that with my puny widow's mite.

 

So of the old pairing, I think I prefer

taxes, which come with certain resolution. I admit

it's annoying the way they increase and recur,

and possibly, after all, both come with an audit,

 

and after both, our wallet may end up thinner;

but after death, we miss our own reception

while our guests enjoy a character-dissection.

After taxes, the refund could take us out to dinner.

 

Both invite us to a reckoning self-examination

but death puts paid to our chance for amelioration.

A sage once said, by inspecting your checkbook stubs

I can see at a glance what you have valued and loved.

Jennifer M Phillips is a  bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower. Two chapbooks are Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022, Phillips' work appeared in over 100 journals, and is currently twice-nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize.