SONNETS LEANING LEFT, RIGHT

by Olga Livshin

Left-Leaning Sonnet

                           For Maria Gapotchenko

What can we do   WHAT CAN WE DO   We

can hide in a sonnet   Its milky worn 

warmth  You look hot in a sonnet 

Like a baby elephant  Pull the taffeta   

over your eyes  Turn off the news  

How to help from under a word comforter  

Stick out one hand   Poke the nearest sufferer

Hey fellow victim   Hola      Pryvit     How’s it all

hanging   Do you need anything

I know about tragedies  Can I write one about you

Or sing you into the velvet car of my ghazal  

Sell all my books and Venmo you a little sum

I would send a sun      or my hardy son   but 

don’t know  what am I doing   What have I done

Right-Leaning Sonnet

I say you can’t see borders from space  just fat land slices

and blue elixir  He chuckles When did that ever matter 

I say  You make money from different parts of the world

He talks about the history of empire

and dictators cycling like water   I say  Nature 

flits like pixies       Burning Siberian peat

brought Anchorage  soot He says  Sad Not 

your fault Enjoy your short life   I say I am  

enjoying my friendships in Lviv and Kharkiv  and 

want hamsters and parakeets to live on  He replies 

Arrive  Thirty-four years late  Better than never   

Look    The whole planet on your well-chosen plate

Sweet and staring at us both with disbelief

Docile and looking up with brilliant hope

Olga Livshin’s poetry recently appears in Poetry, The Southern Review, and AGNI. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019) and translator of Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023). 

UPON THE BEAUTY OF COLOR

by Anne Herrick

Ducks Likely OK As Trump Admin Dumps Hydrogen Peroxide Into Green Reflecting Pool —HuffPost, June 19, 2026

Days after his administration claimed the pool was actually “crystal clear,” despite an unmistakably green hue, the US president acknowledged issues—and, without evidence, blamed foul play. —The Guardian, June 20, 2026

Who doesn’t agonize over color

for a kitchen, bathroom, house siding,

a fence, the front door? Or

even the color for a pool, to make

it bright, enticing, exciting.

So you try strolling down past doors

and walls in Ireland, Italy, Mexico,  

or find yellows in Van Gogh’s flowers

his blues in Starry Night, perhaps examine

the deep and bright reds of Kahlo,

or even view the wide selection

of Monet’s greens. Some study flags,

like the yellow and blue of Ukraine,

the red, white, and blue of the UK,

or, for that matter, of proudly independent

America—the blue perfect to highlight

a very long pool, a tourist attraction

feting a famous president,

and perfect, too, to invite the beauty

of algae, that emerald green 

celebrating warmth, humidity, and sun.

Yes—such is the power of summer energy,

it gifts green to water, and even peels

blue paint, encouraging new tourists, 

ducks, to fly in for a visit hoping it is a snack

of duckweed, while men and women 

in waders, scoop and scoop, day after day,

until the pool eventually becomes dry.

Until, in fact it will lie still in peace

in its comfortable century-old familiar

worn grey coat.

 

 

Anne Herrick has published a few poems and prose in the US and UK.

THE 7TH DAY

by Adam J. Scarborough

The day

misplaces the sun.
Somewhere
a sky still burns blue
but not here.
Here—
a black noon.

The maps keep shedding people.
Five hundred thousand
coats and shoes—missing from their hallways;
names folded into cars, trucks, 
onto motorcycles and buses,
heading north from Lebanon.
 
A child carries a key
to a pile of ash.
—
Missiles write their brief alphabets
over Abu Dhabi—
two hundred thirty-eight
steel sentences
falling through prayer. 
Most of them
erased mid-air.
Even the sky now
has editors.
—
Control of the air,
they say.
The sky is a throat
they have learned
to close.
Jets move there
like indifferent saints.
—
Smoke remembers the night.
Tehran wakes
with black in its mouth.
Balconies gather soot
like winter birds.
Cars wear the same dark coat.
The street
a long finger,
dragged through ash.
—
Oil depots
burn through the hours
when sleep should hold the city.
Ten million lungs
turn quietly
in their beds.
Above them
the sky writes in smoke—
language without vowels.
—
Morning arrives
as rain.
Not mercy.
A rain that stings the eyes,
touches the throat
with a thin metal hand.
Acid falling softly
on bread
on figs left in bowls
on the open skin
of the city.
—
The doctors speak
from distant rooms.
Particles,
they say.
Invisible dust
entering the small, naked doors of the body.
Asthma remembers.
The heart
tightens its fist.
Even the air
now carries
a slow instruction.
—
Do not open the window.
Do not turn the fan.
Cover the food.
Wait.
As if waiting
could rinse the sky.
—
A special relationship
spits across red neckties 
tied like telephone wires,
fizzing with foreign cries.
 
Night keeps arriving early.
Lebanon counts its dead
in the hundreds—
three hundred ninety-four
and still the number
breathes.  
 
Dust enters the lungs
of the city.
Beirut
a broken bell.
—
Elsewhere the world practices
this same dark grammar:
Sudan
South Sudan
Ukraine—
where the ground
remembers fire
longer than people do.
—
And somewhere a man
with a borrowed crown
waits in a golden room
for the door
to open.
 
Another country
dragged forward
by the nose of a name.
—
Still
someone lights a stove.
Someone boils water.
 
Someone somewhere
opens a window
to see
 
if the sun
has been returned.

Adam J. Scarborough is a Scottish writer and social practice artist based in Minnesota. His work has been presented across Europe and New York. His poetry has appeared in Gutter Magazine.

ZAPORIZHZHIA OBLAST

by James Gage

MOSCOW, Dec 29 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin on Monday told his army to press on with a campaign to take full control of the Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine after a Russian commander said Moscow's forces were 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) from its biggest city.

Goodbye 

to the merely discarded 

wrenched from their clutches 

and penchants 

and bright pearl-knit bags.

 

Goodbye

to the voices of 

the ironclad poor 

and the hapless yank,

the misanthrope’s trope 

adrift in the mainstream 

at the salon or the square

where Vicky’s mint cookies

and yesterday’s masts read

The Waters Run Red 

From Putin’s Unprovoked War.

 

These unprovoked lies 

rise up like smoke 

over the grim granite markers

in Kiev or Donetsk,  

over the lit cherry blossoms 

and redneck ears

of the keeper 

in pursuit of the truth

because there is only one truth

that will huddle the masses.

 

So live and let live, the gravekeeper pled

and watched from a distance as the leftovers fled.

James Gage is an anti-war poet and songwriter whose work has been published in dozens of periodicals and literary journals including Main Street Rag, Inkwell, Wordrunner, Sand Hills, New Verse News, Mountain Gazette, Oyster River Pages, and others. His first two books of poems True If Destroyed (2016) and True If Not Destroyed (2025) are available from Finishing Line Press.

BLOOD OF TIME

by Steve Zeitlin

pierced by a missile, M16 pellet,

arrow, slingshot, or spear, 

 

this time on Ukrainian soil

a dying soldier, 

twisted hands upon on his torso, 

seeks to thwart the going of his life, 

struggles to hold his insides in,

as the blood of thirty, forty, fifty unlived years

oozes from between his desperate fingers –

 

drowning his high school ring of love, 

his wedding and his children—

 

a universal soldier’s sacrifice—

the sacred blood of time. 

Steve Zeitlin is the Founding Director of City Lore, New York City’s Center for Urban Folk Culture, and co-founder of the Brevitas poetry collective. He the author of a volume of poetry, I Hear American Singing in the Rain, and twelve books on America’s folk culture. In 2016, he published a collection of essays, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness with Cornell University Press.  In 2022, he published JEWels: Teasing Out the Poetry in Jewish Humor and Storytelling (JPS/U. of Nebraska Press).

MY FRIEND TEXTS

by Ron Riekki

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

“my typewriter is

tombstone”

—Charles Bukowski,

“8 count”

 

for S. and H.

 
            My friend texts:
 
It was great.  But today I
got a terrible news from
Ukraine. My best best
friend was killed by
Russian soldiers. So, all
my good memories
about graduating just
disappeared
 
I call her.  She says she
doesn’t want to talk.
I call her the next day,
she says she still doesn’t
want to talk.  I don’t know
how to write a poem
right now.  Another friend
calls.  She was a refugee
 
from Iraq.  Her house was
burned down there.  She
says it’s hard to talk about,
that forever she’s felt
silenced.  I feel the need to
write poetry.  I cannot handle
history.  I don’t know how
to cope other than through
 
poetry.  I had a meeting
recently where I talked
about what happened
to us in the military.
I told the woman
sitting in front of me
that I couldn’t talk
about it for decades
 
I’d get aphasia.  I
couldn’t speak.  I’d
want to speak, but I
couldn’t speak.  During
those decades, I wrote
poems.  Not enough
people read poems.
Poems sometimes
 
are the silenced
trying to speak
when their voice
is being choked,
when their words
are being taken
by history.
Like now.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

THE DEAL

by Pepper Trail

Art by Terry Graff at Michael Moore Substack

No word is savored with such relish
by those infantile, strangely moist lips
forever yearning, reaching for the teat
of unconditional love, with the infant’s
single-minded greed, the belief that
he alone is the center of the world
his demands alone must be met and
whenever he cries and always and now
 
Such a different word, in his mouth
than “agreement” or “treaty” and with
no implication of cooperation or respect
but only the self-satisfied smirk of the
bully standing over his helpless victim
surrounded by worshipful sycophants
among whom, you can be sure, stands
his next choice for public humiliation
 
For him, the art of the deal is deceit
the goal of the deal is domination
the result of the deal is not some benefit
some lasting accomplishment or legacy
– see his casinos, his hotels, his “university” –
but only the “win,” his claim of victory
and the wreckage he leaves behind
is just what’s coming to suckers
 
To those who took his deal somehow again
who chose to join the bilked investors, the
ex-wives, the abandoned students, the unpaid
lawyers, the discarded loyalists and now the
NATO nations, the Ukrainian people, the career
scientists, the medical researchers, the firefighters
and park rangers and the entire world economy
this is what you get: you must lose so he can win
 
That’s the deal.

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

NO JOKES

by Peter Witt

Tee shirt detail

The White House Correspondents' Association announced Saturday that its annual dinner will not feature comedian Amber Ruffin, nearly two months after it announced her as its selection. In fact, this year's show won't have any comedic performances at all. —ABC News, March 30, 2025

There’ll be no humor at this year’s
White House Correspondents Dinner,
no jokes to remind the trumpster that 
sometimes he seems more buffoonish
than presidential, no attempts to rib 
the VP for discovering
that Greenland is f’ing cold, 
 
no jokes about butt letting the editor
of the Atlantic into a war plan call
while he sat astonished in a Safeway
parking lot,
 
no jokes about the hint of musk
in the white house, and efforts
to unplug Tesla sales, and no hint
that the president has spent
more money on golfing weekends
than the dogers have saved
through their court contested dismissals. 
 
There’ll be no jokes about Jan 6th
invaders getting pardons, or 
failed efforts to settle the wars
in Gaza and Ukraine on the promised
first day in office, or how Canada
has scored a hat trick as the
president can’t remember
if today he raised or lowered tariffs.
 
The newspeople will gather, eat
drink their cocktails, eat their shrimp,
talk about who will be banned
from next week’s press conference,
listen while the master of ceremonies
talks longingly about freedom of the press,
as the crowd whispers what the jokes
might have been if their leadership
hadn’t cowed to the jokester in chief
who is still out there somewhere 
on the 18th green.

Peter Witt is a Texas poet, a frequent contributor to The New Verse News and other online poetry web-based publications.

I-89 FROM VERMONT TO CANADA IN WINTER

by Tricia Knoll

The Canadian border is less than an hour north.
Our countries have history. Good neighbors, 
borrow and offer. Fight side by side. 
I get my power through Hydro-Quebec.
Canadians come to shop, ski, hike
icefish, and mountain bike. I drive north
for museums and botanical gardens. Maple sap
runs both ways. Sugar shacks boil
here and there. I love the maple leaf flag 
as much as the blue and yellow of Ukraine. 
We share shock and a blood moon.
So close now
 
to winter’s big thaw. My eyes downcast. 
As if every winter pothole 
might eat me, vomit me out. 
Black slush banks the highway, 
a salt road gleams white. 
Once fleeing to Canada seemed
like an escape-hatch. Love
your neighbor. Don’t beggar them.
Will Canadians forgive? 
The border is less than an hour away.
We are so very close. 

Tricia Knoll lives in Vermont near the Canadian border. Her 2024 collection Wild Apples documents her downsizing and move seven years ago from Oregon to Vermont. The taste of maple is sweet; the anger of neighbors is not.

WOMEN’S HISTORY 2025: SAY HER NAME

by Robin Stevens Payes

my country is busy writing out history
1.     women
2.     immigrants
3.     ukraine
so I must write them in
 
grandma sophie checks
these boxes 
one
two
three
she left the shtetl in 1893
for the american dream
 
she fled
1.     pogroms 
2.     despots
3.     poverty 
 
she arrived by
1.     horse and wagon 
2.     train
3.     ship 
 
violently assaulted
violated
a #metoo moment
before we could speak
such things aloud
my grandmother kept
her life lost a life 
silenced
 
in pursuit of 
1.     love
2.     safety
3.     family
 
silenced by shame she
never spoke her trauma
but passed it down
on top of the genes
 
episilencing generations
1.     ancestors
2.     descendants
3.     ascendance
 
through no fault of her own
and now her landsman
this democratically elected
leader of a free country
 
symbolized by the sunflower
source of seeds and oil
hearth and home like sophie
symbols of peace and resilience
 
comes to defend freedom
and dignity for all
not to grovel
at the tsar’s feet
 
violently assaulted
violated
an #ustoo moment
we must speak aloud
 
I call out the horror 
sophie’s story is america’s story 
truth trauma triumph and all 
 
i am writing herstory  
1.     SOPHIE her name
2.     PROUD her legacy
3.     AMERICA her goldene medina
 
episilenced #nomore 

Sophie

Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies: Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack https://remembertheworld.substack.com/