DOES THE SUN RISE (FOR ME)?

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Does the Sun rise 

for me? Or if not 

for me, does it rise

for my brother,  

for my sister?

What about

the sun rising

over Tehran

or Gaza,

London,

or Doha?.

Does the sun

rise for me?

Who is 

my brother?

Who is 

my sister,

the mother

wailing beside

the rubble

of the school,

her girls

bombed

to bits?

Does the Sun 

rise anyway

over killing fields?

Does it rise

over our bodies

thrashing 

in the dark?

Does it rise

exposing

the open 

grave?

Does it rise

helping plants 

to bloom?

Does it rise

whether

we live 

or die?

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

HURRAY FOR HAIRY SNAIL HUNTERS

by Jerome Betts

Search is on for the German hairy snail in London:

Conchologists and citizen scientists team up to seek

out endangered mollusc species along River Thames.

—The Guardian,November 24, 2025

  

Hush, hush, chortle who dares,

At people out looking for shells growing hairs!

They’re along by the Thames under pieces of  wood,

Only fingernail-sized, though they may have withstood

A break from old Europe worse than Boris’s Brexit

As Doggerland sank and sea rose to annex it.

So here’s to conchologists, clean-shaven or hirsute,

As they seek tiny molluscs encased in a fur suit!

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the verse quarterly Lighten Up Online.

AL-FASHER BELONGS TO GOD

by Seth R. Merritt 

An analysis revealed in a recent report has shown that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed mass killings in Sudan's Al Fasher amid rising violence in the region. The report published by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health provided satellite imagery of the atrocities committed by the RSF following their capture of the violence-hit region. "The Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) finds evidence consistent with Rapid Support Forces (RSF) conducting mass killings after capturing El-Fasher, North Darfur," the report said. —TRT World, October 29, 2025

The UN Human Rights Office is receiving multiple, alarming reports that the Rapid Support Forces are carrying out atrocities, including summary executions, after seizing control of large parts of the besieged city of El Fasher, North Darfur and of Bara city in North Kordofan state in recent days... The Office has received reports of the summary execution of civilians trying to flee, with indications of ethnic motivations for killings, and of persons no longer participating in hostilities (hors de combat). Multiple distressing videos received by UN Human Rights show dozens of unarmed men being shot or lying dead, surrounded by RSF fighters who accuse them of being SAF fighters. —UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, October 27, 2025

It is Al-Fasher and midday.
A mother ties a strip of paradise’s garden around Omer’s wrist.
His wrist shimmers in the sun and Daa smiles.
She tells him to hold his hand out when they flee, to show the soldiers he belongs to God.
He nods as children nod when they cannot imagine the cost.
He tucks his hand behind his back.
They move.

Another time. A white church on a dirt road.
A preacher says God keeps perfect track.
Blessings fall on those who walk straight.
No one imagines a bullet at the end.

Al-Fasher’s morning shines. Dust moves like sifted flour.
A fighter calls his brothers through a loudspeaker.
A safe corridor. Promises.
Bodies clamber. Mothers pass infants forward like water.

Later-than-now but earlier-than-later:
The Hague. Microphones. Translation headsets.
A man asks for numbers.
How many bodies. Which villages. Which dates.
Procedure speaks the language of care.

Elsewhere: screens glow in London and New York.
Conference rooms. Someone with clean hands pauses the footage.
They circle the cloth around Omer’s wrist.
They label his skin.
They label the men with rifles.
Cursor blinks where innocence should be.
A reporter whispers sectarian violence over B-roll.
A senator tries ancient hatreds into a podcast mic.
A professor types failed state in an article.
Each word drags the thing further away.

Warm and full and afternoon.
Daa lifts Omer’s hand to the soldier for inspection.
The cloth glistens. Catches light.
Young and tired. A face a mother once loved.
The soldier sees.
He holds the rifle.
The muzzle stares into Omer’s eyes.
Soot. Metal. Heat.

Omer’s hand shakes. His eyes tear.
Habibi, I have done nothing wrong.
As-salamu alaykum.

The soldier glances at the mother. Nods.
Habibi. There is nowhere to go.
As-salamu alaykum.

Skin and bone and muscle and tendon do not speak loudly when they sever.
Daa is another mother crying.

Once, promises were guarantees.
No one said God speaks every language used in an execution.

It is Al-Fasher and midday.
A mother gathers Omer’s body.
The cloth shimmers emerald in the dust.

Author’s note: This poem fictionalizes one mother and child in Al-Fasher, Sudan. The events depicted are not a single documented case, but a composite drawn from ongoing reports of civilian killings and the forced sorting of bodies under the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) offensive.

Seth R. Merritt is a writer from the Ozarks living in Mexico City. His work has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine and Hard Crackers, with work forthcoming in Scalawag. This is his first work of poetry.

THE ART OF WHAT’S LEFT

by Matthew Murrey

 

Banksy confirmed he was responsible for the work with a post on Instagram, showing the graffiti before it was covered over. It has been interpreted by some as a comment on the arrest of hundreds of people for supporting Palestine Action by holding up placards at protests. Palestine Action was banned by the government as a terrorist group in July after activists damaged RAF planes. --BBC, September 10, 2025

What was just one raging judge 

bludgeoning one poor bloke 
lying helpless on his back 
has now been scrubbed 
into anyone, anywhere where 
faceless power hammers 
the harmless: families asleep 
in wrecked schools and sad tents, 
thousands on foot, on donkey carts, 
and in cars fleeing their flattened 
neighborhoods, starving hundreds 
shot while crowding for food, 
the badly wounded and bleeding
on their backs begging for mercy.
A gray afterimage of the mural 
remains on the courthouse wall 
like a blast shadow in Hiroshima, 
like a black-gray pall of smoke 
above human beings being burned, 
like some relentless nightmare ghost 
that ought to haunt us night and day.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection, Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026). Recent poems are in Dissident Voice, Escape Into Life, Tiny Wren Lit, and elsewhere. He was a public school librarian for more than 20 years and lives in Urbana, IL with his partner. He can be found on Bluesky and Instagram under the handle @mytwords.

BIRNAM WOULD

by Adele Evershed

There was anger and sadness among people who turned out over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend to protest at the destruction of a tree in Enfield thought to be up to 500 years old… The pedunculate oak, which was cut down on 3 April, was located on the edge of an Enfield council-owned park in north London and overlooked the Toby Carvery pub... Mitchells & Butlers, the owners of the Toby Carvery pub chain, said they cut down the tree after being told it was dead. —BBC, April 21, 2025

I was born in a time of unrest,
where tongues swelled against
religion and unfaithful wives,
riots in the street,
and resentments as large as cats
festering in unemptied bins.

I grew through it all—
pandemics and plagues,
great fires and floods,
watching people work themselves to death,
to be replaced as easily as spokes on a wheel,
bent on moving the carts forward,
but I was in no hurry,
so I was left alone.

The Thames iced over
while frost fairs and firing squads
amused the people,
and all the artists with numb fingers
captured the scenes—
though sometimes they painted over
dead children in the snow.
I never forgot they were there.

The wind moved through me,
leaving a coating of urban sprawl,
and I was the one left
bearing witness to
bombs, broken nights, boozy slashes
oozing rivers of blood,
the good and the very, very bad—
I survived it all,
until a man from a toby-jug pub,
came with a weapon of mass destruction
and cut me down.

Soon there will be no thing left
to tell the old stories,
and how will you know yourselves then?

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the valleys for the American East Coast. You can find some of her writing in Gyroscope, Free Flash Fiction, Trash Cat Lit, Janus Lit, and Poetry Wales. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Her third collection In the Belly of the Wail is upcoming with Querencia Press. She has published two novellas in flash, Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and has a forthcoming novella, A History of Hand Thrown Walls, with Unsolicited Press.

QUEUED

by Annie Cowell

The queue for Queen Elizabeth II's lying-in-state is visible from space in this photo taken Sept. 16, 2022. (Image credit: Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies @Maxar via Space.com.)

We feel

it is a very

British thing,

the queue.

That we 

invented it,

monopolise it,

transformed it

into art. 

We queue,

best foot

forward, wearing

stiff upper lips,

displaying 

plumes of

peacock pride.

For centuries 

we have practised; 

in war time 

ration lines, 

supermarkets, 

airports, 

Wimbledon. 

It agitates 

our sense

of fairness;

we are ready

to be tested, 

to fight 

for our 

rightful

place. 

Now, 

we have

the mother

of all 

queues.

A record 

breaker,

meandering

for miles,

flowing 

like the

Thames through 

the heart 

of London.

A pulsing

tail of 

humanity,

from Britain 

and abroad

eager to 

embrace

a marathon

of waiting

and be a part 

of history.

No agitation

here, instead

a camaraderie

of shared

experience,

of sorrow.

At last,

there is

the end.

A pause,

in which

to bow 

our heads.

Pay respects.

Duty

bound, 

it seems,

to say

farewell. 

Annie Cowell  grew up in Northern England. She is a former teacher who lives by the sea in Cyprus with her husband and rescue dogs. She is widely published in Popshot Quarterly, The Milk House, Paddler Press, and more. Her debut chapbook Birth Mote(s) is now available.