OUT OF THE SHADOWS

by Jiang Pu

I want to bring you a heady symphony of roses, 

lavender and golden poppies as April unfolds

into giant butterfly wings in my yard, but 

I can’t sing; this morning my throat is choked 

like the Strait of Hormuz. 

I’m self-schooled in the art of drop-cover-shelter

from the bombing news, but o you wise one, 

teach me: how do I turn off this glaring pain

of my brothers and sisters constantly bombing

each other? And how do I forgive

the twin lakes of my eyes for shedding

useless tears—so useless they can’t even feed 

into desert desalination plants spared

by thirsty missiles? My tears sting more 

than the bitter horseradish a friend brings 

on a Passover. She teaches me to dip it 

into a nut paste, which is sweet, which, 

she says, tastes like 

hope. Maybe it’s time for a few Medjool Dates

grown from the cradle-land that I’ve visited

so many times in spirit but never once 

in body, so that I keep its soil and water

inside me to nourish a prayer for peace, so that

when I open my door to the unstoppable

spring outside, I can welcome Rumi’s sun

and other honored guests to visit

me today besides pain. 

 

Jiang Pu, Ph.D., is a first-generation Chinese American author and Ed leader. Her recent poems have appeared in California Quarterly, The Tiger Moth Review (Singapore), and Panorama (U.K.) among others and in several poetry anthologies.

POEM TO RUMI

for my granddaughter

by Tina Williams

AI-generated graphic by NightCafe for The New Verse News.

“Ken Paxton sues New York doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to Texas woman: This case sets up a legal battle between Texas’ near-total abortion ban and New York’s shield law that protects doctors from out-of-state prosecution.” —The Texas Tribune, December 13, 2024

A week before the election,

my neighbor next door overnight

posted a Women for Trump

sign and I was too incensed

the next day to wave to her

as she stood on her porch

with a smile as big as Texas

which is where we live

and where my 17-year-old

granddaughter could be raped

tomorrow and made to bear

the damage done

no questions asked.

 

Meanwhile Rumi 

calls from a wall

in my office

that out beyond 

the ideas 

of wrongdoing 

and rightdoing

there is a field

and that we should 

meet each other there

but, Rumi, my dear 

dead Sufi poet,

you never met

my neighbor's 

grab ’em 

by the pussy hero.

 

You never saw

freckles dance

on my 

granddaughter’s

cheeks.

 

In some poems 

there is a field 

too far.

Tina Williams’s poems have appeared in the San Pedro River Review, Quartet Journal, Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Stone Poetry Journal, and Green Ink Poetry.

TO KNOW A MONARCH

by Phyllis Klein

To know it only as a photograph, a memory.

Never to witness again a community of millions clustered 

on Eucalyptus branches, now empty.

These fragile slivers of stained glass

no longer clinging to winter respites.

What is a world that would allow

this extravagant pollinator to die off?

This migrational miracle. 

Rumi says, You were born 

with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?

I want a humanity that weeps 

copiously for this animal who starts off 

in a crawl, shows us how to fly. I want

processions, dirges everywhere,

want to howl over milkweed, bereft, without 

purpose. So much loss. I want to rend my garments.

Burn kaleidoscopes of butterflies into my skin.

What good would that do? Or I could slice

open the sky, so their ghosts torrent down. 

What do I know of softness—my origins 

in an ice-house, in a tradition of cruelty,

of abhorration, torn appendages. Where

are the wings for this? Where the flashes 

of orange slipped through our fingers?

Phyllis Klein’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a finalist in the Sweet Poetry Contest, 2017, the Carolyn Forché Humanitarian Poetry Contest, 2019, and the Fischer Prize, 2019. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2018 and again in 2020. She has a new book, The Full Moon Herald  from Grayson Books. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, she sees writing as artistic dialogue between author and readers—an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels. 

IN SEARCH OF ALIEN CIVILISATIONS

by Martha Landman

According to a new study in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists at the University of Nottingham estimate that there is a minimum of 36 communicating intelligent alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. —CBS News, June 18, 2020

sitting on the veranda the other night
enjoying a hashish pipe
I got dreamy
and disappeared into the Milky Way
passing Venus and Mars
I didn’t stop this time
because they had a domestic quarrel   again
                                      palm to palm
my sky map forged me ahead      to Orion
who offered beer and cigarettes, chips and cheese
Conselice was staying the night
his nephew E.T. played with his Rubik’s Cube
                     trying to solve the Drake equation
we sat on a mega rock   Orion and I had a long chat
                                           between wake and sleep
about alien galaxies meandering around
when his laser phone detonated three loud shrills
it was Peter Backus wanting us to know
“we live in a very quiet neighbourhood”
Orion’s eyes were large      I tried to pacify him
quoting Rumi: “Love is the breath of the cosmos”
he took out his horoscope and zoomed in
                                      on other galaxies
stars were born as we looked at them
alien galaxies were signed in different languages
in front of No 23 a sign on a large wooden gate
said in Hebrew:  תישאר בחוץ לעזאזל – “stay the heck out” -
this is holy land      we assumed
         we needed an exit strategy
we weren’t going to make a covenant with hypocrisy
or with gypsies on walking sticks    their blood green
so we flowed down lava tubes through pigeon holes
                                into a glorious dystopia

Martha Landman writes in Adelaide, South Australia and has previously contributed to TheNewVerse.News.  Her chapbook Between Us was published by Ginninderra Press in November 2019.

IN THE AFTERMATH

OF KASHMIR'S FEBRUARY 14, 2019 ATTACK ON AN INDIAN ARMY CONVOY

by Huma Sheikh

A bitter winter in Srinagar had just started to ease when the latest crisis in Kashmir was sparked on 14 February. That afternoon a local member of a Pakistan-based militant group rammed a car laden with explosives into a bus carrying Indian paramilitaries. The explosion was heard for miles around. At least 40 people were killed, the highest death toll from a single attack in the history of the insurgency. Above: A Kashmiri Muslim woman looks on as Indian government forces stand guard after clashes with separatist protesters. Photograph: Yawar Nazir/Getty Images. —The Guardian, March 2, 2019

No matter what the glistening forms
in blue cosmic wings tell me, I see
drones soaring in despair.

I left Kashmir lives ago and my veins
drained of past gore,
hallucinate in this world—Florida’s panhandle,
pounding, floating wraiths, spanning the distance,
gasping—
Rumi’s chaotic freedom.

Today, on the internet, a deceased trooper's daughter wailing;
forty mugshots scrolling the dead across the screen;
Kashmiri students, children of Indian Kashmir,
disappearing in Dehradun dungeons,
eyes of Sikh keepers burning a storm—protestors’ roar outside;
Kashmiri traders in Lucknow, whipped and kicked;
pack animals, carrying identity wares.

How to rebuild a sense of refuge when hope beans spill,
dissolve, in a battle?
Hadn’t these students, traders, escaped warfare in Kashmir?
Deaths bloom for the kith of the slain;
memories of dear ones an endless crackle of real flesh storm
dropping to ashes.
For Kashmiris still there,
war an everyday meal,
some eat, some fast by chance.

I question violence;
India and Pakistan’s territorial land-grab war,
ask myself if voicing feelings,
otherness, isn’t transcending bitterness?

Kashmir floats with me even here,
new crises piled on old ones—
a pedantic coop, winged prison,
war crumb confetti.
I do the ant’s painstaking
weight lifting of fragments—
senile Socrates.


Huma Sheikh is originally from Kashmir, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State. Her prose and verse have appeared in various journals and magazines. A memoir and book of poems are in progress.

BETWEEN THE HEADLINES

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Image source: Q99FM

Snow and deeper snow,
all day it snows. Over sixteen
inches. On the news, I hear about a mystery man

dining across America leaving $5,000 tips
for $500 meals. It is, he reportedly says,
the work of the Lord, one tip at a time.

So much snow I cannot walk
across the street. The median
is a wall of white.

Of course I could walk
across the street. But
it would be wet. And deep. And cold.

Suzan tells me about the other news,
how all around the country young men
have taken to approaching strangers

and punching them to make them drop.
They don’t steal or mock. The point
is to make the stranger fall and run away.

Five inches of new snow falls on my car
while I speak to my teacher this morning.
She tells me, “Say yes to every experience.”

I wonder what I would do if someone
punched me. Or my husband. Or my dad.
I wonder what Jesus or Rumi would do.

There is no way to know what we might do.
It is all just perhaps until it actually happens,
like a weather report that calls for 16 inches of snow.

Today it is easy to say yes to the weather.
Yes as I scrape it from the windshield.
Yes as I trundle across the street through

the paths made by other trundlers. Yes
as I slip and bring myself down. Yes
as the snow itself makes the fall so soft. And cold.


Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Southwest Colorado with her husband and two children. She is a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. Favorite four-word mantra: I am still learning. Favorite one-word mantra: Adjust.