OBITUARY FOR WOMEN WHO STOP TRAFFIC

by Mary K O'Melveny

Cora Weiss, who was active for more than half a century in support of gender equality, international peace, the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and who helped organize some of the most important mass demonstrations of the 1960s, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 91. —The New York Times, December 8, 2025

          For Cora Rubin Weiss (1934-2025)

 

Women Strike For Peace detected

Strontium 90 in newborn’s teeth,

food, air, water. Filled Central Park

with a million activists for 

nuclear disarmament.

Pedestrian gridlock stilled horns,

thrilled peace advocates everywhere.

Atomic tests were later banned.

 

Later, Cora chaired justice protests,

led the New Mobilization 

Committee to end the American 

War in Vietnam. She carried signs:

Not Our Sons. Not Your Sons as she

pursued Pentagon bigwigs, garbed in

pearls, high heels, demanding war’s end. 

Hundreds of thousands followed her there.

 

Traffic came to a stop when she 

lay down on Park Avenue with 

her resistance sisters, each one

bearing names of  Vietnamese 

dead by US guns, bombs, napalm. 

She ferried letters from Hanoi

POWs to home and back.

Carried hopes, parried criticism.

 

Mentored by Eleanor Roosevelt

as a girl. In college, she met,

married Peter, a civil rights 

lawyer activist. Together, 

they fought against bigotry – from

McCarthy to Trump. Cora knew

the key role that women play in

teaching about love, unity.

 

Throughout her life, she stopped traffic-

king of hate. Fought for global peace

education. Fought for humanity.

She never gave up. Never walked 

away from a righteous cause. Never

stayed silent when protest was called

for. Never got up from a roadway

if something remained to fight for.

Editor's note: Peter Weiss died in November 2025 at the age of 99.

Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.

CRYSTAL BALL

by Laura Rodley

In the knuckle of the nightmare what does he see?

He swivels the joint around, sees faces

of children, no longer innocent, their faces blank,

then blown up. It is not that he had to bury any;

that was not his job. Instead, he was flown

above the rice paddies where the women worked,

their wide hats resembling shiitake mushrooms

when seen from the sky, their tiny hoes

hoeing the fields, gathering the grain,

letting the water out, sprayed with napalm

and agent orange; they all ate it, its perfume

a pollen of poison. He was up in a helicopter,

delivering paychecks, manna from

the government. What is easy to ignore

when survival demands it comes back to stare

you in the face. The children’s faces below,

his fellow soldiers, a flip of propeller blade

and they are gone, but not now, not fifty-five

years later, a whole other lifetime. He still carries

butterscotch lifesavers in his pockets

that he handed out to the children that came begging;

they saw him as Santa Claus, one of his many

camouflaged elves. He can’t turn time back

but his nightmares do it for him, every night

he reenters the war zone he left behind,

taught as a man from birth not to have feelings,

then returning from duty, not to have feelings,

with no one buying him a drink at the bar

or asking him to speak at the high school,

as the World War II vets were so honored. It’s a long

way back, to the fields of yellow pollen that was not

the dust of Ailanthus trees, a long way back to the drugs

that were offered to make you forget, to the beers, to women offered,

to the honor you held tight to your chest.

He knew all the lyrics to The Doors, the Beatles,

Dion and the Belmonts; where does that

get him now? He’s held tight in the fist

of his commanding officer suck it up, be a man.

He’s held tight in the fist of his own heart, squeezing the life out

of him and into him, regulating his every action,

his every breath. But the rhythm of the heart

is not the territory of nightmares, the nightmares

leave notches, catch his breath; he wanted a gentle life,

honor held tight in the fist that is his heart,

caught off balance, flailing, ceaselessly trying

to get into the groove, pay attention.

His life depends on it.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

IT'S NOT OVER TILL IT'S OVER

by Katherine West

In Brazil 600,000 are dead.  The Brazilian jazz band, Farofa, says nothing of this.  They are too immersed in the blessing of music, too busy following and blending genres, traditions, grooves.  They play a Brazilified Tears for Fears song, appropriately, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World."  What happens when there is no world to rule?  Is politics a board game, continuing in heaven?  Do politicians believe they're even going to heaven after selling the planet down the river for a portfolio in their great-grandfather's coal company?  

The violin player is from L.A.  That's where the band met, of course.  He dances as he plays, dances as if he were born in Rio.  The bass player is a comic book character.  If peanuts had a bass player, he would be it.  His big head, with even bigger hair, wobbles without any help from the body whatsoever, like one of those plastic dime store toys I grew up with.  At one point he does a 1970s funk solo.  I close my eyes.  Try to enter the naiveté of Watergate. 

For just one second I've got it:  bell bottoms, afros and ideals, Muddy Waters playing in Peace Park my first year at Mizzou, streaking across the quad to protest the war.  An abstract concept for most of us.  I had never seen anyone with the after-effects of agent orange.  Never seen a metal leg.  Never met anyone with PTSD.

Blindly, I wanted to do the right thing.  I wanted to leave the world a better place for having birthed me, for having said yes to my orphan soul.  

The funk solo ended.  The 70s vanished, leaving nothing behind but that stubborn soul, tossing aside the boring board games to come up to bat one last time, to suss out the pitcher, to grand slam around the bases, run like hell, and hope to reach home before the ump calls me out. 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She hs written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. Using the name Kit West, Katherine's new novel, When Night Comes, A Christmas Carol Revisited came out in 2020, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing for whom she also teaches Creative Writing workshops.  The sequel to When Night Comes will also be released by BRP in 2021. It is called Slave, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist. 

CLOSING THE BOOK ON GEORGE FELL

by Jimmy Pappas

Source: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund

Because of this I will weep and wail; I will go about barefoot and naked. I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl. —Micah 1:8


1.

the page of a book
            can be a leaf
                        can be a butterfly wing

a book in a college dormitory
            on a Saturday night
                        with a young man studying

can be a starting line
            can be a point of departure
                        can be a loaded gun

2.

closing a book
            on a young man studying
                        can be a wormhole

to travel across
            the United States
                         to California

to Vietnam
            to Cambodia
                        to death

3.

I closed the book
on a young man
studying.

A bit of light air
grazed my cheek,
pushed me along.

The weight of air
at sea level is 14.7
pounds per square inch,

but what is
            the weight of air
                         with friendship?

4.

How does a young man studying plead?

Like this: Please, guys, I'm in trouble.
I'm gonna flunk out. I need to study.
Please let me do this.

How does a young man ignore his friend's plea?

Like this: Come on, Man. It's Saturday night.
We're going to party. You can study tomorrow.
There's always time.

5.

How do you close a book on a friend who is studying?
Do what I did: Just take the cover and flip it over.

6.

What makes a breeze?
            The warm air of friendship rises.
            The cold air of ignorance settles.

7.

The breeze moved us through an evening of drinking,
through a day of lounging around until thinking became
exhaustion, became another day of forgetting
until you left us and we forgot about what we did.

8.

pages of a book are many butterfly wings

9.

a chance encounter in a Greyhound bus station

you had the smell
            of fear and death

my friend told you not to go
but you were not one to stir a breeze

10.

On May 23rd, 1970, I saw a giant beetle
lying in a Saigon gutter on its back
struggling with its legs to turn over.

That evening I made love to my girl friend
while you were humping the boonies in Cambodia.

11.

I don't know what the breeze told me that night,
but I did know it would always be there at my back.

It whispered in my ear,

            remember
                        butterfly wings are leaves

            remember
                        leaves of a book are butterfly wings

Something happened. I didn't know what it was.

12.

When I learned about your death,
I could not understand one thing:

How could anyone
            have expected you
                        to kill another human?

13.

I wear my military jacket to get in the mood.
I find your name on the Wall.

I place my
            right knee
            on the ground
I place my
            left arm on
            my left knee

In my right hand I hold a piece of paper
with a handwritten couplet on it:

Over the distance of 10,000 miles I heard your cry
of how very very much you did not want to die.

I set the paper down at the base of the Wall.
I rested my forehead on my arms. I could not pray.
I wanted to cry, but I was unable to.
Instead, I looked up and stared at my reflection.
I placed two fingers against your name on the Wall.

Behind me, elementary school children on field trips
ran through the grass laughing. They have not yet learned
that the world they see today will not be the same world
tomorrow. A breeze will blow and carry them along.
Today they do not understand, tomorrow they will.
They will feel the breeze and understand the butterfly.

One young boy who hangs back,
            frightened
                        by all the noise,
reminds me of George Fell,
            who must have been
            the gentlest soldier
            who ever lived.

Jimmy Pappas served in South Vietnam during the war as an English instructor with South Vietnamese soldiers in helicopter training. At the same time, George Fell, his friend from college, died in the incursion into Cambodia on May 23, 1970. On that day, commanders announced the death of 190 American soldiers, 500 South Vietnamese soldiers, and 8,000 "enemy troops" in what was described as a "success." One day, several years before that, Jimmy and his friends closed a book on George while he was studying one Saturday night. George flunked out of school, and their paths went in different directions. To this day, George's college friends still love him.

DAYS I REMEMBER

by Tricia Knoll

Donald Trump with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the UN on Wednesday. Democrats said the transcript of the pair’s call represented a ‘devastating’ betrayal of America. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images via The Guardian, Sept. 25, 2019

for the times they portend,
the times we were called to hold in memory.

My old-maid French teacher weeping silently
when the high school intercom announced
     President Kennedy is dead. The horse
     without a rider and the little boy’s salute.

During a beer strike in British Columbia, the radio
     told us Nixon resigned.

A hush in the Yale Law School dining room
    when TV announced we were bombing Cambodia.

Assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King,
Robert Kennedy, the slaughter of so many innocents
   in so many places with weapons meant for war

The piece of the Berlin wall in my desk drawer.

Oh, our parents told stories of Pearl Harbor,
D-Day. Yes, a man landed on the moon.
Yes, we elected a President with a darker
skin color than mine.

Others do not come to mind right now.
Add your own.

Whatever happens next, skullduggery and lies
or the light of truth pushing aside the shadows,

the day impeachment opens into T***p’s world
of bigotry, aggrandizement, and hate

I’ll know this as the day I worked out back
yanking invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle

how hard I had to scrub to remove
the dirt from under my fingernails.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who fears the coming disasters of climate crisis as much as she deplores the political nightmare of the Trump era. Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies. Her most recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for motivational poetry.

YOU DON'T

by Laura Rodley

The roll call of deceased unit members, which included 10 men killed in action, was an emotional time for Vietnam veterans who reunited in Berea, Ohio on August 9, 2019. "Even though we have had some sleepless nights, some dreams we want to forget, the remembrance of PTSD, and Agent Orange that just won't let go, we continue to be grateful and to stand for our flag," said the Chaplain. Photo credit: Beth Mlady/Special to cleveland.com, August 17, 2019

You don’t know him, he doesn’t
ask to be known, he won
a bronze star for valor
in Vietnam, he shops
on senior discount Tuesdays
at Big Y, at least he used to.
He doesn’t go out anymore,
even outside. You wouldn’t
recognize him, he’s just an
average Joe in a linen shirt,
rhythm of helicopters whirring
in his head. The Fourth of July,
Friday night fireworks in Ocean Park?
He’s seen enough fireworks, mortar
shell explosions, lights exploding,
himself exploding, he doesn’t want
any reminders. But ask for recognition,
no, valor of Vietnam vets unspoken,
stationed in Da Nang, ground zero for Agent Orange,
his early heart attack just a fluke
the doctor said, hearing loss due to age.
He slept next to a mortar shell field.
They blew up all the time.
He’s not asking anything
from his country that he served,
just to be left alone.

He only has to be as tall
as the ceiling of his livingroom,
where he chomps Fritos, swallows Cokes,
he doesn’t have to see behind him,
beside him, below him as the chopper
brings him base to base to allocate
and release funds, he doesn’t
have to see through forests, they
were denuded by Agent Orange,
someone could drop down on him
from above, but not while
he’s in front of the T.V. The front
door is locked, a cheap remedy
against machine gun fire.
He only has to manage the space
of the couch, the clicker, even
the screened-in porch reveals
too much green, someone could
be hiding in those maples, oaks,
kudzu, and that’s not paranoia,
it was real for him for two tours,
someone hiding to do him harm,
annihilate him and nothing but
his dog tags to know his name.
He would not call this being afraid,
nor is he: he is aware, hyper-aware
of leave rustle, door closing, pop-top
of the can breaking open, the fizzle
of foam. Everything he does saves
his life and those of the men he
served with- not one of them taught
to act alone but as a unit, always
aware of his buddy, aware of combat
boots squishing in the mud of rice paddies
beside him. Hyper-aware of
everything outside of him to save
them all, but nothing but his finessed reaction
for shooting or readiness to bail out of the chopper
of his own internal life. He
lived outside himself, his body, and
having survived when so many
he knew did not, he brought
it all home with him, where
it breathes in the livingroom
with him, he can’t close his eyes,
it’s inside him now, it won’t get out,
won’t let him go.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee, and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Publisher Finishing Line Press nominated her Your Left Front Wheel Is Coming Loose for a PEN L.L.Winship Award and Mass Book Award. FLP also nominated her Rappelling Blue Light for a Mass Book Award. Former co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, Rodley teaches the As You Write It memoir class and has edited and published As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology volumes I-VI, also nominated for a Mass Book Award. She was accepted at Martha’s Vineyard’s NOEPC and has been a participant in the 30 poems in November fundraiser for the Literacy Project of the Center for New Americans. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point by Prolific Press.

BOOMER'S LAMENT ON THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY OF JFK'S ASSASSINATION

by George Salamon
November 22, 2018

"Did a president of the United States, while in command of total nuclear war, detach himself enough from its power to give his life for peace?" — James W. Douglass,  JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

We imagined everything differently
Before our generation's leader was killed.

We read Albert Camus, our bible,
And vowed to be neither executioner nor victim.

We wanted to be rebels, in our fashion,
But ended up consumers in their niches.

We witnessed the Empire's revenge
When bullets took down our peers at Kent State.

We stumbled into our adult lives in the Seventies
While the spirit of Nixon settled over America.

We protested when his agents devastated Vietnam,
Now we howl as Agent Orange deconstructs the presidency.

We tried to make a difference
As the Armies of the Night

We buried our hopes with our heroes
As the colors faded after 1968.

Editor's note: Although he did not film the home movie streaming above, the 13-year-old who now edits this journal will never forget being in the crowd at that place on that day to cheer the future President.

George Salamon has the opposite view of the 1960s from those expressed by the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers.  He lives and writes in St. Louis, MO.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

by Robert Lee Whitmire

B-52 Vietnam

Empty sentiment confounds me,
irritates me, angers me if truth
be told, causes me to see red
but pretend it’s not red.
Today
is Memorial Day,
and I hear
‘Thank You for Your Service’,
empty words showering star-spangled
fireworks on endless rows of white
headstones marking graves
of fell-too-soon human beings.

Oh, say can you see the rockets' bright glare
As green and red tracers tattoo the air?

My ‘service’ was no service to anyone,
least of all the people for whom
I was supposed to be putting my life
at risk. I served hubris, avarice
and a white nation’s desire to beat
another nation of obdurate brown
people into bloody submission.

AKs, 16s, rip like shredding guitars as
Ribbons of cannon fire hurl from the stars

I was the lightning that set the house
on fire, that killed everyone inside,
then struck again and again
and again, killing  killing  killing.
I was a tool, an instrument, a useful
fool ‘serving’ people who shamelessly
drafted or coaxed me and mine to do
the unspeakable in service of the indefensible.

But you believe you are sincere and so you
thank me, and I say ‘You’re welcome’ even
though you are not welcome--but the alternative
is for me to explode in your face like one of those
‘Bouncing Betties’ Charlie used to salt
jungle paths. Or I might infect you like a
shit-tipped punji stick, or turn into a child
wired with C-4 running towards you while
I hide in the trees, finger on detonator.

And children of God entreat for their lives,
Himself in His Heaven is deaf to their cries. 

How does it serve you for me to kill
a child running to kill me and mine,
who is innocent of any crime yet must pay
for that innocence with its life?
How does it serve you for me to fly a B-52
over a landscape tens of thousands of feet
below, dropping stick after stick of
aerodynamic death, more bombs than
fell in all of the Second World War?
How does it serve you for me to kill
more than a million human beings
who did nothing  nothing  nothing
to deserve their fates?

Words, no matter how polite or currently
sincere, are not welcome from those who met
us half a century ago when we were young
and thought ‘finally, safe at home.’ Remember?
Did you spit? Curse? Call us baby killers?
Did you get on your draft-deferred high horse
and go sanctimonious all over our asses? Are
you one of those who now wants to send
more young people to fight and die and kill
more brown people because they won’t
see our truth?

Do not thank me for a service I did not render.

Moans of the dying fading slowly to dead:
Perpetual harmony of fire and of lead.

Robert Lee Whitmire is a Vietnam veteran, a husband, a socially progressive Unitarian, and a retired journalist, photographer, and social worker currently living in Maine and doting on his two small grandchildren.

IMMIGRANT

by Alan Catlin

Does it matter?
Now,
here, today

That they were
grunts in Vietnam,
her father,
uncles, cousins

and that she
the niece,
daughter,
married an
Asian guy

Not a Vietnamese,
not a Japanese,
or a Chinese
but a neighbor
to Nam guy

That he spent years in
refugee camps
before he made
it here

All of those awful years
dreaming of a better
life, of America

That he finally made it.
Worked a decade, more,
for his phd,
fought
prejudice,
discrimination,
ridicule

Does it matter
That he has
a good job,
no a great job,
is a provider
is the father
of their grandchild,
their only grandchild

a half-Asian,
half-American
beauty?

Oh, yes it matters

A lot.


Alan Catlin is poetry editor of online journal misfitmagazine.net. His latest book of poetry is American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press.

AFTER READING 67 SHOTS: THE SHOOTINGS AT KENT STATE

by Alan Catlin

Recalling the all night vigils
Memorial sit ins
Student strike
Church services
Peace March through an Upstate
New York city and all the hostility
for all the long hairs

Recalling the Peace Fair
no one came to
The petitions for a Moratorium
for the Vietnam War no one signed
The peace committee work
that accomplished nothing

Recalling those glorious Spring days
All that time to kill with no classes
no Finals just graduation and
a draft notice that was sure to follow

Recalling playing softball
drinking beer and hanging out
with the cleanup hitter who
couldn’t make weekend end games

“National Guard duty.” he said when asked
why he could play.  “I hope I don’t get
called up. I hope there are no more
student riots like at Kent State.”

“You wouldn’t shoot me, Doug. “
I teased, “we’re friends.”

He looked at me, then toward
the pitcher toeing the mound
and I knew he would, if someone
in command told him to.
“You’re up.” He said.


Alan Catlin has published numerous chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and prose, the latest of which, from March Street Press, is Alien Nation.

TO THE FAMILY OF A VIETNAMESE MAN KILLED IN HIS BOATON THE MEKONG DELTA, 1968

by Peg Quinn

On January 1968, sighting the enemy, the door gunner aboard a Huey helicopter opens fire on a target below in the Mekong Delta. Image source: The History Channel

Dear grieving family,
your father, son, brother, uncle
still screams in the heart of his killer

Was he fishing that day
or wiring mortars?
Doesn’t matter

our young, dumb helicopter pilot
was obeying orders when his
rat-a-tat-tat shattered his target

gripping his soul with a grief
that won’t untangle

fifty years later,
he trembles when telling the story
and your father, son, brother, uncle
lives again,
his dreams floating
in bloody water and we
want to go back
rewrite the day,
let him arrive home, happy
with fish for dinner
because our young dumb soldier
was looking over his other shoulder

and will get to grow old with simple,
ordinary, explainable
regrets.


Peg Quinn is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, mural and theatrical set painter, award winning quilter and art specialists at a private school in Santa Barbara, California.