TRAVEL ADVISORY

by Shalmi Barman

"A visa is not a right. It's a privilege," [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio said on Tuesday. Trump administration officials have said student visa and green card holders are subject to deportation over their support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel's conduct in the war on Gaza, calling their actions a threat to U.S. foreign policy and accusing them of being pro-Hamas. —Reuters, May 21, 2025

The State Department has told U.S. consulates and embassies to immediately begin reviewing the social media accounts of Harvard’s student visa applicants for antisemitism in what it called a pilot program that could be rolled out for colleges nationwide. —Politico, May 30, 2025

Counselors who work with foreign students eager to attend college in the U.S. are advising them to purge their social media accounts of posts that could attract the attention of U.S. State Department officials. —CBS News, May 39, 2025

To demonstrate that I don’t pose a threat,
I strip the stickers from my laptop case,
purge the Kindle reader, ctrl-shift-del
my browsing history as if the past
two, ten, eighty years had never been.
 
We’re experts here at inoffensiveness,
smalltalk savants, the brightest and the best
arriving on these shores to earn our keep,
inflate the GDP and pay our dues—
the price of entry to the winners’ club—
in labor, taxes, learned neutrality.
 
A privilege, not a right. In Khan Younis
the going rate for a sack of gritty rice
exceeds my weekly wage. Faucets frothing
overrun my glass. A legless child
plucks maggots from his wounds. I sink a knife
deep in the turkey, utter ritual thanks
for innocence far from the blasted plains
of Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon…
 
Purpose of visit? To become just like you,
I want to tell the agent matching my name
against a neutered profile. To shop at Target
on the Fourth of July, pledging allegiance
like a marriage vow. For this I stand in line,
bereft of fluids, jacket, shoes, and shame,
not-thinking of checkpoints a world away,
asking smilingly how much? how high?


Shalmi Barman is a South Asian national, a holder of a student visa, and a newly minted PhD. She spent several years at the University of Virginia writing a dissertation on class and labor in Victorian fiction, and doing other things that would likely be deportable offenses today. Her poetry has previously appeared in The New Verse News and also recently in Boudin, Blue Unicorn, EcoTheo Review, Gyroscope Review, and elsewhere.

BOTH SIDES NOW, or THE THREE D’S

by Maria Lisella

Smoke rises following an Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, on Dec. 16, 2023. (AP via Arab News)

"The plumes of smoke from tanks, artillery and the planes of the air force will continue to cover the sky over the Gaza Strip until we will achieve our goals," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. —NPR, January 21, 2024

Destruction, displacement, death;

the toll soars past 28,000 on one side
1,400 on the other; hostages by the
hundreds spark nonstop defiant
 
statements from the father whose
tech savvy son posts incendiary
messages from the warm rays
of the Florida sun. Like father, like son,
 
they ignite destruction, displacement, death.
Brethren in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen
rise to actions of the heart mind: force
meeting force, clamoring to save and
 
sacrifice sons, daughters. More destruction,
displacement, death. Deaf to calls for a ceasefire
postwar plans promising a two-state solution,
they focus only on Israel’s future credit rating.  
 
Standing Together, Jews and Palestinians post:
“We are aching, all of us… It seems we are
not allowed to hurt for both.”
Now is the moment, “to hurt for both.”

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate and an American Academy Fellow; her work includes Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She is a member of the Thursday Morning Poets, Brevitas and co-curates the Italian American Writers Assoc. literary readings.

HAIL, MARY

by Maria Lisella

Buon giorno, buen dia Maria

Full of grace and wisdom and power

The Lord may be with thee, and you

May be Blessed among women but

 

What about the children? Not the one

In the womb that has been consecrated

As the son of God, but God, your god,

My god has many sons, daughters all

 

Around the world. They are not all blessed

Some are cursed and lost and under a pile

Of rubble in Ukraine, Yemen, Israel, Palestine, Gaza;

Others live in the darkness of the blind, are

 

Plagued by hallucinations, cursed with spasms

Of a mind that plays tricks on them all day, all

Night. Imagine a predator behind you, in your

Shadow, silent, stealthy, looking over your shoulder

 

Or under your bed. You cannot see but you know

They are there and they mean you harm for no

Other reason than you are where you find yourself

Not for an act you perpetrated on someone else,

 

Just for being who you are. The luck of the draw?

And Holy Mary, Mother of God, do you pray for

The innocent as well as the sinners? The pilots,

The soldiers firing artillery rockets, are they too

 

Prayed for? Rockets with ranges of 30-50 miles, fired

In barrages for the most effect, the most damage.

Are they too in your prayers to god and which god

Might that be? What does that God look like, what

 

Does that god think, plan, why does that god never

intervene? Humans shooting hate and rockets blindly

into Ashkelon, Beersheba, under the eyes of Israeli 

drones … range is crucial for rockets, for prayers too.

 

Pray for us sinners and for the innocent, for my own son

Living in a world plagued with demons he cannot see

or touch or hear but knows they are there, so music

and words come to him as if a shaft of light in day

 

Or night, raises his voice above the din in his brain, to

Feel the lift above the iron dome of paranoia, the upsurge

Of spirits that haunt, and fly, and invade his small cot in an

Institution with cinder block walls, netted windows he can’t

 

See but knows they are there: the limitations, the lack

Of liberty, the outside in; the other sons and daughters

in Gaza, or Yemen or Ukraine are bombarded with a panoply

of air power used in a steadily escalating series of attacks.

 

What I wish for my own son is comfort, warmth, knowing

There is a meal, a roof over his head, a dog at his feet, a

Sun he can feel but not see… Mother of God, what do you

Wish for your sons, your daughters now and at the hour

 

Of their deaths? When will your god hear your pleas or

Have the mothers and daughters been silenced to the

Tunnels, the basements, the streets, have they lost their

Voices, their powers to heal, now and at the hour of now?

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate and an American Academy Fellow; her work includes Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She is a member of the Thursday Morning Poets, Brevitas and co-curates the Italian American Writers Assoc. literary readings.

UNDER FIVES

by Laurel Benjamin

The world's worst humanitarian crisis is on track for its worst year yet. Famine alarms are ringing again as over half of Yemen’s population is going hungry. A record 50% of all children under 5 are acutely malnourished and 400,000 are at risk of dying without treatment. —International Rescue Committee’s Amanda Catanzano at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Yemen, April 21, 2021

If "Hunger Ward" wins an Oscar Sunday night at the 93rd Academy Awards, it could help the short documentary save lives. [The] 39-minute doc was shot in two pediatric malnutrition hospitals in Yemen in 2020. Its main "characters" are health care workers and two children, Abeer, who was 6 and weighed 12 pounds during filming, and Omeima, who was 10 and weighed 24 pounds. —StarTribune, April 23, 2021

They call it under fives

as eyes sockets 

hold bulging red globes

girls and boys with greasy curls 

built on a raging war

as we pull the trigger

“others” bombing

like ribbons cut from the sky

and a pavilion for mourners

now an obscene shroud

no honor for the dead.

In a hospital, crippled

strips of barely flesh 

ladle on a handmade scale—

weigh the bones—

and as one by one 

names on the list

are crossed off, each mother

screams through the corridor.

The girl wears pink 

against hair and skin a light brown 

her eyes green eyes.

How will she become a woman.

The nurse says “smile”

and cradles the girl’s cheek 

with veined hands

as another girl bounces a balloon

over a stareless boy.

No one can get the goods in 

yet we shelve pictures 

in our memory bank 

of knees wider than thighs—

we’ve seen these all our lives

and our new leader says

he’ll pull back 

but more than Saudi support 

like any war

the words civilian, collateral,

starvation. Just separate 

the sinews

cover them with mother’s

breath.

Laurel Benjamin holds an MFA from Mills College. Her work has appeared in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, California Quarterly, The Midway Review, Mac Queens Quinterly, Wild Roof Journal, Tiny Seed Journal, Global Quarantine Museum Pendemics issue. She is affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers. 

STATISTIC

by Howie Good

After six years of war in Yemen, it looks like the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is being forgotten and treated with indifference. —Atlantic Council, September 17, 2020. Photo: Burying a child who was killed in an airstrike in Sana, Yemen, in 2017. Credit: Yahya Arhab/European Pressphoto Agency via The New York Times, September 16, 2020.

A boy lies sprawled

by the edge of the road,

his chest torn open

by a chunk of shrapnel.

You could see his heart beating

if you bothered to look. 

Howie Good is the author of The Death Row Shuffle, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

THE DEATHS OF CHILDREN

by Marshall Witten

In the north of Peru archaeologists found a mass grave. Over 500 years ago, almost 140 children and more than 200 animals were sacrificed here. Researchers are now reporting on the background of the bloody ritual. According to the researchers, details of the site also reveal the possible reason for the ritual: it is covered by a thick layer of mud, into which the mass grave was embedded. Footprints and hoof prints show that the mud was still wet at the time of the sacrifice. The researchers suspect that the actually very dry place was hit by heavy rainfall and flooding at that time. This leads them back to the climate phenomenon El Niño, which continues to cause flooding in the coastal region to this day. "The sacrifice of so many children and camels was a significant investment of resources for the Chimú state," they write. "The temptation to assume that the mass sacrifice of children and camels was an attempt to appease the gods and mitigate the effects of a larger El Niño event that occurred around 1400-1450." Teller Report, March 7, 2019

The photo bares a 15th century open
Peru grave in desert sand, egg shaped, two
children snuggled together, headdresses, red-
cinnabar paint on their skulls, facing east
toward the coast, 140 victims,                                                      
both sexes, at a ritual-massacre site.
Victims’ chests cut open, hearts ripped out.    
200 baby llamas also sacrificed,
buried facing west toward the Andes.

Evidence hints a disastrous El Niño caused
torrential rains, vast flooding, killing mud
flows, buried cropland, ruined fisheries, farmers’
deaths, civil terror that supported mass sacrifices.

I saw, superimposed over the picture, images
of Yemeni children killed by our drone strikes,

of young Guatemalan children separated from parents
cuddled in blankets at our border, caged.

The Yemeni we kill for oil.
The Guatemalans we tear from parents, psychologically damage,
and sometimes cause death, for votes, racial fear.

Like the Chimú, our child murder-cruelty rests
on fear of change. What might we do when climate
horrors really pinch, food-water shortages,
constant weather cataclysms, civil collapse,
Bikers for T patrolling the streets?

Unsheathed gods of fear may not be controllable.

Marshall Witten is a retired lawyer who has lived and practiced in Vermont for 58 years. His poems have appeared in The Mountain Troubadour, Stanza, Birchsong, and his chapbook Reflections on Change.

THOSE IN THE LIGHT DON'T SEE THOSE IN THE DARK

by George Salamon

The death toll from the sinking of two boats carrying migrants to Yemen from Djibouti rose to 52 on Thursday, the UN migration agency said, appealing to regional leaders to take action to stop such tragedies. . . . The sinking of the vessels, which survivors say were carrying Ethiopians, is the latest tragedy to occur on the risky route used by African migrants seeking work in the Middle East. —News24, January 31, 2019. Photo: People collect bodies on Wednesday along a beach in Obock, Djibouti, after two migrant boats capsized off the coast. — AFP/VNA, January 3, 2019.

"I lost massive amounts of money doing this job. " —President T***p to The New York Times, January 31, 2019


For forty-eight hours here in
The heartland ice and snow
And arctic cold stopped
America's wheels from turning.
Nothing stopped the mouths of
America's rich and powerful,
These time-bombs to the planet's
Survival, these Attilas the Hun to
Its peoples' welfare, from the
Usual lying and whining,
While the poor, the homeless,
The nomadic dispossessed in its
Cities, on its borders, adrift at sea,
Can only live in imaginary places, or,
As migrants in rickety boats, drown
In the frozen seas of the human heart.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO. He thanks Bertolt Brecht for the title.

A CHILD SPEAKS

by Jonel Abellanosa

Amal Hussain, who died at age 7. “My heart is broken,” her mother said. Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times. Listen to ‘The Daily’ for the story behind this portrait that brought the widely overlooked human catastrophe in Yemen into devastating focus: The Daily, December 7, 2018.

I dreamed of snow and
crows, God carving a Yemen
in our small stomachs

Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, the Philippines. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, Poetry Kanto, McNeese Review, Mojave River Review and Star*Line. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Dwarf Stars award. His fourth poetry collection Songs from My Mind’s Tree was published in early 2018 by Clare Songbirds Publishing House (New York), which will also publish his collection Multiverse in late 2018. His poetry collection Sounds in Grasses Parting is forthcoming from Moran Press. His first speculative poetry collection Pan’s Saxophone is forthcoming from Weasel Press.

CHILD OF YEMEN

by Darrell Petska

"The path to ending the war is clear. First, the United States and other countries must cease arms exports to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Security Council should pass a resolution demanding an immediate end to the war and compelling the Saudis and Emiratis to withdraw from Yemen. The United Nations must sponsor a political process that begins by obligating all parties to the conflict to disarm their militias." — Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman, "Enough is enough: End the war in Yemen," The Washington Post, November 21, 2018. Photo: A Yemeni child after receiving treatment for malnutrition in a hospital in Taiz on Wednesday. (Ahmad Al-Basha/AFP/Getty Images via The Washington Post)

Here I am
too thin for a shadow,
too weak to cry.

Can you see me?
I'm traveling light
down Paradise road.

I leave behind my mother
but go to see my brother
who feasts on heaven's bounty.

My face will shine again,
my feet fly with angels.
This sorrow I'll forget

which eats me from within
and abandons me to die,
a husk on my native sand.

Can you see me?
Is anyone there?
Does anyone care?

I am here,
hunger on the breeze
just beyond your window.


Editor's note: Recommended listening: The Daily Podcast: Why U.S. Bombs Are Falling in Yemen.

Darrell Petska is a Middleton, Wisconsin poet with many reasons to feel thankful. Sadly, there was no Thanksgiving in Yemen on Thursday.

DEJA VU

by Phyllis Wax

'WORST FAMINE IN 100 YEARS' COULD SEE 13 MILLION PEOPLE STARVE IF SAUDI-LED COALITION KEEPS BOMBING YEMEN: U.N.” —Newsweek, October 15, 2018. The United States supplies bombs and other support for the war that’s killed civilians and is creating famine. Children in Yemen are acutely malnourished. Those who survive will often be stunted for the rest of their lives, physically and mentally. Photo Credit: Hammadi Issa/Associated Press via The New York Times, September 26, 2018.

Some of us remember the photos
when the camps were liberated

skeletons
lethargic from lack of food
legs and arms just fleshless bones
ribs perceptible without x-rays                       
                                                                     
In Yemen
it’s the children—
big-eyed
visibly starving                           
                                                     
pinned in place
by warheads
made in the USA
targeting markets
funerals    schools

Social issues are a major focus of Milwaukee poet Phyllis Wax. Among the anthologies and journals her work has appeared in are Portside, Obama-Mentum, TheNewVerse.News, Surreal Poetics, Ars Medica, Naugatuck River Review, The Five-Two, Star 82 Review and Mobius.  When she’s not writing you might find her escorting at a local abortion clinic. She can be reached at poetwax38 (at) gmail.com.

DELIVERY

by J. D. Smith

Yemeni children vent anger against Riyadh and Washington as they take part in a mass funeral for the 40 children killed in an air strike by the Saudi-led coalition last week. Photograph: STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images via The Guardian

“US supplied bomb that killed 40 children on Yemen school bus” 

—The Guardian, August 19, 2018

At this late date I have accepted
how the rain falls on the just and the unjust,
as does the air-dropped ordnance.

The downpours’ frequency still eludes me.

Another front, another deluge
far from page one, that is,
far from its readers, and we
might ask “What in the actual hell?”
except that it is already on display
by way of a blasted bus and limbs distanced
from their shattered frames.

What’s left of the means is marked
as coming from my country,
yet I don’t remember being asked
if I wanted to contribute, as if many would
outside of an alternate universe
where a collection might be taken up
as for flowers to send a co-worker
in the hospital, such as can no longer aid
those counted in the story.
Instead of “Best wishes” or “Get well soon”
the card might read “Thinking of you”.

J. D. Smith's fourth collection, The Killing Tree, was published in 2016, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science and the children's picture book The Best Mariachi in the World. Smith lives and works in Washington, DC.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SORROW IN YEMEN

by John Guzlowski

Dozens of children, many younger than 15, were killed in a Saudi-led coalition airstrike that hit a school bus in northern Yemen on Thursday, according to the Houthi-controlled Health Ministry. The children were on a field trip when their bus was struck at a market, the first stop of the day; 50 were killed and 77 injured, according to the ministry. Most of the children were inside the bus when the airstrike hit, according to a local medic, Yahya al-Hadi. The International Committee for the Red Cross said a hospital it supports in Saada had received 29 bodies of "mainly children" younger than 15, and 40 injured, including 30 children. —CNN, August 10, 2018

Sorrow is the gift
God gives to teach us
what won’t last,
what will fall and be left
on the side of the road
by the mother lost
among refugees.

Sorrow teaches her
the value of screaming.

It will last longer
than bronze shoes,
longer than her baby’s
photograph.

Nothing else she loved
is left. The home in Yemen
God bestowed? The husband
whose love was worth so much?
The baby?

The gift of everything is lost,
the way a penny is lost
In the dirt around her.

All that’s left
is the road she stands on—
that and the sorrow
He bestowed, the scream
that ends in screaming.

John Guzlowski's writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Rattle, Ontario Review, North American Review, and other journals.  His poems and personal essays about his Polish parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany and refugees in Chicago appear in his memoir Echoes of Tattered Tongues. Echoes received the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer Foundation's Montaigne Award for most thought-provoking book of the year.  He is also the author of two Hank Purcell mysteries and the war novel Road of Bones.

THE ROAD BACK TO YEMEN FROM A BROOKLYN LAUNDROMAT GOES UP IN SMOKE

Editor's Note: We are pleased to repost this poem, originally published in TheNewVerse.News on Tuesday, May 19, 2015. It is one of our 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees.


THE ROAD BACK TO YEMEN FROM A BROOKLYN LAUNDROMAT GOES UP IN SMOKE
by Linda Lerner

                                                     
separate, he asks, as he puts my laundry
on the scale.  Yes, separate, I say
still . . . week after week, tries to make
this American woman understand
what it feels like, no, make me smell
the smoke of mortar & rocket fire politics
keeping him from getting his wife & daughter
everything so carefully arranged, end of
June, his graduation from college, and then . . . puff
do you see?
                what I see is the road
twisting and turning  in his mind
teasing him  now it’s here, now it’s gone
he says of a promised cease fire;

when he speaks of his birth country
of things getting worse
I see frightened people imprisoned
in their homes  being deprived of basic necessities

I see a country being raped…
I do not see his wife and daughter
he will not let me

Internally displaced people bathe and wash clothes in a local river close to the Al-Mazraq IDP camps, Al-Mazraq, Yemen. Source: Daily Mail

Linda Lerner’s latest  collection "Yes, the Ducks Were Real" (NYQ books) and her chapbook "Ding Dong the Bell  Pussy in the Well" (Lummox Press) were published recently. 

THE ROAD BACK TO YEMEN FROM A BROOKLYN LAUNDROMAT GOES UP IN SMOKE

by Linda Lerner

                                                     
separate, he asks, as he puts my laundry
on the scale.  Yes, separate, I say
still . . . week after week, tries to make
this American woman understand
what it feels like, no, make me smell
the smoke of mortar & rocket fire politics
keeping him from getting his wife & daughter
everything so carefully arranged, end of
June, his graduation from college, and then . . . puff
do you see?
                what I see is the road
twisting and turning  in his mind
teasing him  now it’s here, now it’s gone
he says of a promised cease fire;

when he speaks of his birth country
of things getting worse
I see frightened people imprisoned
in their homes  being deprived of basic necessities

I see a country being raped…
I do not see his wife and daughter
he will not let me

Internally displaced people bathe and wash clothes in a local river close to the Al-Mazraq IDP camps, Al-Mazraq, Yemen. Source: Daily Mail

Linda Lerner’s latest  collection "Yes, the Ducks Were Real" (NYQ books) and her chapbook "Ding Dong the Bell  Pussy in the Well" (Lummox Press) were published recently. 

AMEN YEMEN

by Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote

Editor’s note: Key infrastructure in war-torn Yemen, including water supplies, health services and telecommunications, are on the verge of breaking down due to a major fuel shortage, a United Nations humanitarian official has warned. "The services still available in the country in terms of health, water, food are quickly disappearing because fuel is no longer being brought into the country," Johannes van der Klaauw told AFP news agency on Saturday. "Without fuel hospitals can't work, ambulances can't go out. You can't have the water system working because water has to be pumped. The telecommunication network risks shutting down. "If something is not done in the next few days in terms of bringing fuel and food into the country, Yemen is going to come to a complete stand-still," he warned. —AlJazeera, May 2, 2015



No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 

BEALE AIR FORCE BASE, GOOD FRIDAY 2014

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Image source: Occupy Beale Air Force Base*

                      for Roger Stoll and Kate Raphael


We stand outside the Air Force base
To grieve the deaths of innocents
Assassinated thousands of miles from here
By missiles fired from unmanned planes

We have come to deliver a letter
To the base commander
Insisting that the drone attacks be halted
In the name of our common humanity

In the broad field in front of the base
Redwing blackbirds are singing in the long grasses
And we wonder what songbirds there are
In the mountains of Pakistan, the deserts of Yemen

And we wonder what is the last sound
That the unsuspecting victims hear
Before they are obliterated from above
The twittering of a small bird? the roar of the approaching missile?

When jet fighters take off every few minutes
Their diabolical roar obliterates all other sounds here
We cannot hear if the blackbirds are stunned into silence
Or if they continue singing in defiance of the din

With our letter in hand we cross the line
Onto the Air Force base
And are immediately taken into custody
By polite young men and women dressed in camouflage

In the guard house the MPs are respectful and solicitous
As they ID and fingerprint and photograph us
Then hand us each a letter stating
That we are banned from the Air Force base forever

Children incinerated in drone attacks
Simply for being in the wrong places at the wrong times
Were not treated with such courtesy and consideration
Before they were banished forever from our shared life

One by one we are escorted back across the line
No war planes are taking off just now
And we allow ourselves to feel a flicker of hope
Hearing the redwing blackbirds singing in the long grasses


* Drones flown from Beale Air Force Base, near Marysville, California, do not fire missiles, but do reconnaissance and targeting for attacks by other drones.


Buff Whitman-Bradley is the author of four books of poetry, b. eagle, poet; The Honey Philosophies; Realpolitik; and When Compasses Grow Old; and the chapbook, Everything Wakes Up! His poetry has appeared in many print and online journals. He is also co-editor, with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley and Sarah Lazare, of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.  He has co-produced/directed two documentary films, the award-winning Outside In (with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley) and Por Que Venimos (with the MIRC Film Collective).  He lives in northern California.