AN IMAGINARY PAGE FROM VIRGINIA GIUFFRE’S DIARY

by Lisa Seidenberg

The photo of [Virginia Giuffre who committed suicide last week] and Prince Andrew, taken in London in 2001, became emblematic of the royal's entanglement with [Jeffrey] Epstein… who was said to have taken the photo—died in jail facing sex trafficking charges. Ghislaine Maxwell—who helped him abuse young girls and is pictured to the right of Prince Andrew and Ms Giuffre—is in prison in the US. Prince Andrew has stepped down from all public duties. And Virginia Giuffre, a smiling teenager in the photo, is now dead. —BBC, April 28, 2025

“Giuffre alleged that after taking the role (as massage therapist to Jeffrey Epstein) she was trafficked to the financier’s friends and clients and ‘passed around like a platter of fruit.’ Among them, she claimed, was Prince Andrew.” —The Guardian, April 26, 2025

Today I am a mango
arrayed on a plate 
ripe for the choosing 
in a billionaire’s lair

Yesterday I was a peach
with downy skin, freckled 
like a fawn’s back
In hunting season

Tomorrow I will be
a delicate treat—
a plum or a strawberry
finger food for preying hands

They will take me to shop 
for a proper dress 
offered up like a fruit tart
for the entitled eyes of a prince

Someday I will be a pomegranate
my seeds of bitter truth 
left like Persephone 
on a path away from the dark


Lisa Seidenberg is a 2025 Pushcart nominee. She is a writer and filmmaker residing in coastal Connecticut and a poetry reviewer for Whale Road Review. Her writing has been published in Atticus Review, Asymptote Journal, Gyroscope Review, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, The New Verse News, and others. Her photo book Dark Pools is available from PrintedMatter.com. Her documentaries and poetry films screened at Sundance, London, Athens and Berlin International Film Festivals. She is currently at work on her first chapbook.

GODDESS OF THE UNDERWORLD

by Martin Elster 

A newfound species of millipede (Eumillipes Persephone) has more legs than any other creature on the planet—a mind-boggling 1,300 of them. The leggy critters live deep below Earth's surface and are the only known millipedes to live up to their name. Image credit: Paul E. Marek, Bruno A. Buzatto, William A. Shear, Jackson C. Means, Dennis G. Black, Mark S. Harvey, Juanita Rodriguez, Scientific Reports via LiveScience, December 16, 2021.

We look for life on Mars, yet deep below

our feet she’d crept unseen, a creature blessed

with far more legs than any life we know:

thirteen hundred plus! With a great zest

for fungi, she was the world’s cellar-dweller,

ginormously antennaed, lacking eyes—

a tendril. Her recycling skills were stellar

(although she wasn’t looking for a prize!). 

Earth’s only millipede uniquely “milli,”

she was the slenderest and longest weed  

that we had ever hauled up willy-nilly.

We’ve christened her “Persephone.” Indeed,

although she led a life of utter gloom,

our little cousin helped the flowers bloom.

  

Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, was for many years a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra (now retired). He finds contentment in long woodland walks and writing poetry, often alluding to the creatures and plants he encounters. A full-length collection, Celestial Euphony, was published by Plum White Press in 2019.

ON THE CHEETO WITH TINY HANDS

by Sue Brannan Walker

Hades, Hell’s Bells, the smoke’s getting to me, Hephaestus sending Olympian signals ‘bout all the hubbub happening on earth, worse than Hermes hiding Apollo’s herd of cows, no matter that Hera and Helios and hordes of many-headed beasts thought it was a horrible thing to do and getting all heated up about the theft, and I say that even worse than Hades hitting on Persephone and hauling her off to the Underworld is old Howhard’s grabbing girls by their honey-pots and his acts of deportation and well, you could hear all the howling from Hell to Houston, from Hamburg to Hanoi to Hermopolis in Greece, and damned if that orange windbag, that short-fingered Vulgarian with baby hands, that wallaroo hailing huge crowds and all those alternative facts erupting like Klyuchevskoy in eastern Russia: cough, choke, hawk, hem and—Deîmos kaì Phóbos, yuge horror and fear. Smell rotten orange, hear it, the nasalizing pain of it, the oink, grunt, squeal of that canker-headed scobblelotcher that needs to be hog-tied?  It is hard to get a handle on all the hullabaloo, but trust that trumpdignation and limiting the reach of mini-hands might set us free. 

Sue Brannan Walker is Professor Emerita from the University of South Alabama. She was Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2003-2012. She is the publisher of Negative Capability Press, the author of The Ecopoetics of James Dickey, ten books of poetry, and has published critical articles on Marge Piercy, Richard Eberhart, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, as well as edited numerous anthologies.

COALS

by Elizabeth Johnston

Image source: DonkeyHotey

“[He] is being raked over the coals in the press right now. People are trying to destroy him”

—Glen Beck in “Witch Hunt: Bill O’Reilly Deserves the Benefit of the Doubt” 

“We will not be staked this time.” 

–Cari-Lee Miller, “Granddaughters”

Myth smokes with the corpses we’ve inherited,
simpering seventy-times-seven girls:
Gretel, escaping the oven to wrap arms around her dead-beat Dad.
Persephone in a singed bikini boarding the bus for Spring Break.
Corn-woman begging for the stake so bellies might be fed.

We are the granddaughters of the witches you burned
and our tongues won’t, anymore,
wrap around the lie:
            Once, Long Ago, Far Away

Like fugitives of Pompeii
we’ve borne the blistering surge,
been arrested mid-joy, fixed
to the earth for centuries, lain airless,
buried under soot, cocooned
our voices like fingers
cast in their clawing.

But go ahead, storytellers.  Rewrite.

Return to the scene shouldering your excuses like shovels,
dismissive as a pickaxe.
Fill the void with your plaster white,
your sight-seer-safe.
Stake your claim. Charge your fees.

There’s profit in bigotry, big money in violence.

Stand over the volcano’s mouth piece,
sermonize, ejaculate,
make your pithy sacrifice.

Never mind the ghosts
who sneak up from behind,
palms facing forward.


Elizabeth Johnston teaches writing, literature, and gender studies in Rochester, NY. A past contributor at TheNewVerse.News, her most recent work appears in The Atlantic, Feminist Formations, and The Boiler.