BLESSINGS FOR TIMES OF CRISIS

by Sam Friedman

Shutterstock photo by Pietre Laborde

Blessed are the children of Paris

for they open doorways

so their people can dismantle

the towers of power.

 

Blessed are Pasha and Ania

for they save lives

amidst a genocidal war.

 

Blessed is Vladislav

who fought the imperial invaders

of his native Ukraine

and refused to submit

to the fascist thugs who savagely beat him

in the delusion that they were defending

the nation he defends.

 

And blessed are the cockroach archeologists

who dig up the poems we wrote

about our long-dead civilization

so our hopes can re-echo

amidst cockroach revolutionaries

so next time, we do not fail.

Author’s note: I first met Pavlo (Pasha) Smyrnov and Ania Korobchuk professionally; they have been very active in harm reduction programs and research around HIV/AIDS in Ukraine. Since the full scale invasion, they have organized medical assistance for villages near the front lines. Vladislav Starodubtsev was in the news recently. All of them are friends of mine.

Sam Friedman is a poet, activist, and public health researcher. He has published two books of poetry and poems in a variety of magazines.

UKRAINE: AN ERASURE

by Skaidrite Stelzer

The drone that killed one-year-old Anhelina circled above a park before dropping on to a nearby path and exploding. The shrapnel killed six people in Nova Vodolaha, a small town outside Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv. The girl’s mother also died. Pictures from the immediate aftermath show Anhelina belted carefully into her pram, the laces on her peach-coloured shoes tied into neat bows. She was dressed in a warm bear-shaped maroon romper with small felt ears. Her tiny hands were stained with blood. —The Telegraph (UK), October 21, 2026

To hide the graphic and traumatic nature of the infant's body slumped in the stroller, news outlets, social platforms, and officials applied a blurred box or white square over the graphic sections of the image before distributing it.

When the face of the infant

lying dead in her stroller is blocked

by a white square to keep us from weeping,

we may weep more than ever,

suddenly realizing that the square

is a mirror

as the signals of hope become blocked

by generals just following orders.

No warning to be given.

Nothing to see here.

The final erasure of childhood.

The infant just learning to smile.

Skaidrite Stelzer’s poetry has appeared in Glass, Midway Journal, The Baltimore Review, Storm Cellar, and many other journals and anthologies. Her chapbook Digging a Moose from the Snow was published by Finishing Line Press in 1921. She enjoys watching shifting clouds.

SHELLS

by Sam Friedman

AP, October 1, 2026

On this first day of fall,

my 84-year-old body totters

on my afternoon walk.

Acorns litter the street,

and a shattered shell lands

beside me,

straight from a gray squirrel’s mouth.

 

I think of my dear friends

Ania and Pasha

many thousands of miles

east of that sated squirrel,

east of that shattered shell,

 

and I hope and I pray

no shells land beside them

straight from a Russian drone’s mouth.

Sam Friedman is a poet, activist, and public health researcher. He has published two books of poetry and poems in a variety of magazines.

MY WIFE AND I WERE DISTURBED

by Kevin Boyce

 

while watching the nightly news 

by a noise coming from outside.

Thunk                 thunk                   thunk

 

A catbird in our rhododendrons 

had declared war on his reflection in

our basement window. Each time 

his attack was repelled by an equal 

and opposite force. 

Thunk                  thunk                   thunk

 

He could not be deterred from defending 

his homeland from this imaginary foe.

Something had to give in the battle 

between this birdbrain and glass pane.

 

I covered the window with cardboard

to curtail his instinctual onslaught 

and save him from an early demise.

My wife and I went back to the news.

 

In August of 1914, soldiers enlisted 

in the War to End All Wars, assured

that the conflict would end by Christmas. 

Four more years and 15 million souls would pass 

before the close of this grand adventure.

 

Then 2003 brought Bush on the boat with his banner

prematurely exclaiming “Mission Accomplished.”

The Iraq War lasting a mere eight more years

after victory was secured.

 

Vladimir Putin invaded an independent Ukraine confident 

of conquest within months. Here we are four years later.

 

Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026

with Israel and the US attacking Iran certain that 

they could not resist. Mission accomplished.

 

Thunk                  thunk                   thunk

 

 

 

Kevin Boyce is a poet, photographer, children’s book author, and lifelong resident of New England. He volunteers in his hometown, leading a community-sponsored contest and publication for emerging authors. Kevin’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in ONE ART, Nostalgia, The New Verse News, The Broken Teacup, Discretionary Love, The Poetry Lighthouse, and elsewhere.

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).