EPSTEIN WAR

by KP Liles 

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

It was always about the crude.

Extracting the dark

archives out 

from under us.

A few wealthy men 

plotting to own

everything, down

to the last

liquified remains 

they groom 

to burn. Virgin 

trillions naked

for the taking.

O Power! the Power!

Unrivaled deployment—

Military, ICE, beyond oversight…

Taste Venezuela: 

lest we forget

it’s a jungle out there. 

War

drugs, law, lust

regime change

Mexico, Cuba

Minneapolis

Iran

Portland, Greenland

Behold! A politics of scandal 

heaped on scandal heaped

on scandal heaped on

morals. On truth.

Still, the trafficked girls

will not be

silenced. Drill! 

If you have the stomach for it.

It was always 

about the crude.

KP Liles desires a better, safer world for his daughter. For his son, his family, his students, his community, his fellow decent human beings. So, while he would have preferred to have spent time indulging in his newfound enthusiasm for birding, he felt obligated to put on the poet uniform for this piece.

BOARD GAME

by Tricia Knoll

Trump threatens to sideline Exxon from Venezuela’s oil: ‘They’re playing too cute’  —CNBC, January 12, 2026

Favored tokens in Monopoly are still Top Hat and Scottie Dog. Today the Battleship gets new attention. A miniature assault rifle and tankers with modifiable flags have appeared in our box thanks to wise-ass teenagers in my house. They used AI to make genius modifications to the board too. Players can build pipelines on Venezuela’s Carabobo, Intercampo, Tia Juana and Lagunillas oil fields. Rolling penalties: go to Cuba, jail or Greenland. Suffer bankruptcy. The young designers ditched the rail lines and Water Works in favor of oil companies though the Electric Company has some cachet. Plaza de la Candelaria and El Centro have replaced the outdated landings of Oriental and States Avenues. The dollar is the paper currency unless you decide to gamble, flicking a spinner to take advantage of or risk fluctuating exchange rates for Bolivars. Names of docks replace the red properties. Park Place and Boardwalk are too iconic to change. The kids kept Vermont because we live there. I dug out Miss Scarlet from Clue as my piece. A woman token. What never changes in Monopoly is the marching. Around and around, never knowing if or when the game ends. Or what the battleship will do next. 

Tricia Knoll's family had a Monopoly game set up in the basement of their Illinois house to play during times of tornado warnings. She never liked the game. After 18 years of writing free verse published in dozens of journals and nine collections, she now focuses on prose poems.

A NOTE FROM US

by Marshall Begel

Art by Ann Telnaes

We hope Venezuelans will value the respite
that comes from abducting your self-serving despot.
We, too, love our country and venture to save her—
so, won't you consider returning the favor?

Marshall Begel became a serious poetry hobbyist when he found that bad jokes are better received when presented in meter and rhyme. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin and has had many pieces in the journals Light and Lighten Up Online.

AND SO IT BEGINS

by Imogen Arate

Art by Ann Telnaes

I.
The video stunned
The spin followed

An award-winning poet
has been silenced
by the shrill bullets from a
21st-century fast-drawing
cowboy on the man-made
frontiers of the new wild West

Yet we’re subjected 
to the lies of a rapist

Another man trying 
to justify violence
against women

A bad remake
of another family 
forced into mourning

another community
thrown into chaos

II.
Yet we still think in terms
of elephants and donkeys

while neither will draw down
on the military budget

sunset high-tech toys
hardware for the police and

other testosterone-charged 

angst-driven angry boys

tear down boundaries
that gate-check
investments in decency
beyond the borders
of “me and my”

Repulsive successive local waves 
reinforce the national and the 
global of political expedience 
and small and large lies stack 
upon one another to enrage
as the bodies of the sacrificed
emit the noxious gas
of corruption to explode
in a tsunami of grief and fury

III.
He who became
a millionaire at eight
nursed on government subsidies
bailouts and tax breaks
feeds us the fast-food diet of rancor 
while he grabs a pussy a plane 
a tanker a president oil fields 
Greenland and lusts after resort money
built on a still-hemorrhaging mass grave

But he’s just another opportunist
a symptom mushrooming on the 
advantages of Eugenicist 
elitism ripened by everyday
brand ambassadors gladiating
for a piece of the imaginary pie

IV.
Our pens may ink mighty words
but their impressions are paper thin 
against the hurried tunneling
of semi-automatic street artillery
bump-stocked by the political will
of fuel-guzzling AI overtaking human 
value as they peel away with the 
breeze blasé over endless shootings
grown accustomed to washing away 
anguish with yet more agony while 
prayers whistling show tunes 
to soundtrack the cha-ching
of firearms outstripping humans

V.
But she was a white citizen
Why should that be the red line
when we don’t let spilt blood
rust before sacrificing more lives
to our inane judgement of worth 

This social engineering
was never meant to end well
when chaos has no red line
maelstrom cannot be reined in

The hunger of greed 
self-perpetuates
in unchecked growth
to unleash the pandemonium
of a self-fulfilling prophecy

Imogen Arate is an Asian-American poet in search of hope: that humanity will overcome our self-destructive tendencies to work together against the onslaught of the climate crisis. She's also the Executive Director of Poets and Muses, an award-winning multimedia artist platform that has featured diverse contemporary poetic voices from around the globe. She believes that we will only be able to value lives equally when we lend our ears and hearts to the life stories of those we don't readily recognize as our kin and stop requiring the presence of certain socioeconomic trappings to recognize people's right to a dignified existence.

LIBRE VENEZUELA

by Chris L. Butler

Art by Clay Jones

Animus aggression
unhinged & unchecked.

Jet propulsions
accompanied by
mass explosions.
Convicted felons
claiming criminality.

An ironic eruption.
Manifest destiny?
No, even worse.
Manifested violations
of international law.
A cruel collective
giving dangerous
directions to gain
crude investments.
Got other nations
quaking each time
he utters the word

liberation. Cabinets who
claim to be peacemakers 
yet the traits exhibited
are the total opposite
of Quakers. Some see

a circle of friends.
To us? We see a circle
of dictators. Perpetrators
of neo neo colonization.
It’s like we learned nothing
from Iraq, Afghanistan,
Vietnam, Libya, or Syria.
Forget our issues in America
if oil money is on the table.
Copy & paste a country name
here enters Venezuela.

How is this any different?

Chris L. Butler is a Black American-Canadian poet from Philadelphia, PA living in Southern Ontario outside of Toronto. He is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Melodies of the Oppressed (Ethel Zine, 2026) and four other chapbooks. Chris' work has been featured in Variety Pack, Poems for Persons of Interest, Ghost City Review, Pinch Journal, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and more. He is a 3x Pushcart Prize nominee, and a 1x Best of the Net nominee.

MADURO MADNESS

by Catherine McGuire

Art by Nick Anderson

Listen my children and you shall hear

of the midnight raids, as Trump interferes –

just past the end of 2025

with Miller and Marco, he did connive

to throw the world into chaos and us into fear.

 

He said to Bondi, “since he’s already charged

with drug crimes, that makes it all right

to drop bombs on Caracas then barge

into the palace, kidnap and take flight.

Drag them onto our ships, then launch out to sea

where your crooked lawyers had better be

ready to lie and make hash of the arm

of our law, claim criminal harm

which we will prosecute; thus Epstein’s disarmed.”

 

Then he watched all night, with unmuffled roars

as the airmen and soldiers assaulted the shores

of Venezuela, a country so rich in oil

that oil barons willingly embroil

themselves in an illegal war

to abscond with the goods, and to ignore

true ownership—the hell with rules! Far

better to seize, then let countries chide,

gnash their teeth, try to override.

 

You know the rest. In books we will read

how the Orange Pestilence spread, his misdeeds

piling like dung heaps, and the calls

to impeach and arrest ineffectual –

until true patriots chased red hats down each lane

to uphold the rule of law once again.

Under new-minted Congress, we strove

to repair all the damage, our country re-wove.

 

It starts now: this red line cannot be ignored

our cry is defiance, and not one of fear.

Our voice in the darkness must open the door

to accountability for him and each buccaneer

who soiled our history, and their greed financiers.

 

In this hour of darkness and peril and need

the people must waken and each volunteer

to protest and clamor till the country is freed

from the depredations of this profiteer.

Catherine McGuire is a writer/artist with a deep concern for our planet's future, with five decades of published poetry, six poetry chapbooks, a full-length poetry book,  Elegy for the 21st Century, a SF novel, Lifeline, and book of short stories, The Dream Hunt and Other Tales.

LETHALITY

by Nan Meneely

His father taught him how to enclose a spider
so gently in tissues he can carry it live from his room
to a better place outdoors.
 
He grieves when a chipmunk lies mid-road, 
as exquisite as alive, forepaws stretched 
toward the brambly green safety ahead.
 
Knowing he might be too soft, he signs
with the Army to muscle up. But he didn’t bargain
for lethal, a word the recruiters never said.
 
He’s as certain of this as anything:
if he killed those named his enemies—
Venezuelans in fishing boats oceans away,
 
brown men working shop floor or field for minimum wage,
protesters armed with sandwiches shouting truth
to power, Somali immigrants fleeing hate—
 
he would kill the important part of himself,
the part he would fight for in anyone else.

Author's Note: This matter matters to me. My father, a doctor with the 10th Mountain Division in WWII, joined up enthusiastically but came home with a hatred of war and what we now know as PTSD. Eventually he killed himself. So Hegseth's lethality can be lethal in too many ways. 

Nan Meneely’s first book Letter from Italy, 1944 (Antrim House) was noted by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books by Connecticut writers in 2013. It provided the libretto for an oratorio of the same name, composed by Sarah Meneely-Kyder and performed twice by Connecticut choruses and symphony orchestras. Her second book Simple Absence (Antrim House) was nominated for The National Book Award and placed as a grand prize finalist in The Next Generation Indie Awards and the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award. She has been published and rejected by The New Verse News.

A GHAZAL FOR VENEZUELA: PRESIDENT MADURO DENIES HUMANITARIAN CRISIS

by Elane Gutterman

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Red Cross volunteers distributed the first shipment of badly needed emergency supplies in Venezuela on Tuesday after months of feuding between the government, which has denied the existence of a humanitarian crisis, and opponents who have been seeking to use the delivery of aid to force President Nicolás Maduro from power. —AP, April 16, 2019

A father hugs his child good night, his nightmare, her dwindling insulin doses.
For love of his country, Maduro turns down aid, insists “We aren’t beggars.”

A mother sells her thick, braided hair to buy rice, beans and chicken for her children.
With chants of venceremos, Maduro raises his fist “We aren’t beggars.”

A mother grieves for her older child stabbed when they grabbed his cell phone.
With hatred toward his enemies, Maduro resists “We aren’t beggars.”

A pregnant teen reveals there were no contraceptives or money to buy them.
In his embrace of the dead Chavez, Maduro can’t desist “We aren’t beggars.”

Now a father lines up by a Red Cross van for water purification tablets.
As a maid pours his fine wine, Maduro shifts yet persists “We aren’t beggars.”


In the latest issue of Journal of Global Oncology, Elane Gutterman, a health researcher, read how cancer care in Venezuela has been transformed from an advanced level of diagnosis and treatment to rudimentary services through government policies and indifference. In addition, she credits her friend and former Spanish teacher, Ana M., with making the needless suffering of the population personal through sharing stories of her Venezuelan family. Elane has published poems in Patterson Literary Review, U.S. 1 Summer Fiction Issue, Kelsey Review and TheNewVerse.News.

5TH AND AVENUE E

by Stephen Cafagna

“Bus Stop” by Reginald Marsh. Image source: Encore Editions

i stod at the bus stop as a man late for work
looking down the street
wishing this bus would appare from thin air
I’d trade the life of every passing car for my bus

I stod at the bus stop alone
feeling as if i where to die at any moment
almost in shock that i wasnt

i stod as a man looking for his only ride
like when I was four
me and my father waited for the tractor
to take us around the apple ranch
i look down

staring at my hands
think if all i have done with these
ive build, destroyed, takin and give
but what did you do?
What was your triumph?

I stod at the bus stop as a boy
hearing the rpms
twine as when the transmission shifts
the complete stop
Kushhh! brakes awoke me to another dream…

And the only thing i had of my father’s was a glass from Venezuela
He died when i was 5, his glass went when i was 21
the corner where it broke still smells of old whiskey

I had my heart ripped out before
I dont like doing it to others, tho it happens…
Would you rather be the gun shot victum?


This poem by Stephen Cafagna is from his dissertation, finalized in Fayetteville. It functions in the interstices of language and urban life -- in dialect, representing a bridge of sorts, connecting the world of illiteracy, in all its unappreciated beauty, to the literary world.