PICTURES OF PEACE IN OUR TIME, PROTECTION IN OUR DAY

by Michelle DeRose

A paper badge held aloft over eyes

thirteen years’ wide, the funds to find

their cure cut. Texas brothers,

three and five, their mother dead

in the state’s bid to keep the unviable

alive. Women moved to men’s prisons

to prevent concussions in girls’ sports;

the study of injuries among girls removed.

Four hundred million dollars rescinded

for failure to stop campus harassment

one week after three Gentiles circled

and humiliated, pointed and shouted

to muffle the modestly dressed Jewish man’s

assertions he’s not playing that game.

This whether we like it or not.

Newly named Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michelle DeRose’s poetry won the Chancellor’s Prize in 2024 and the Faruq Z Bey Award in 2023 from the Poetry Society of Michigan. Her poetry has been published in dozens of venues, most recently The New Verse News, Sparks of Calliope, The Midwest Quarterly, and Dunes Review, and is forthcoming in Months to Years and One Hundred Poems for Hearing Dogs (anthology). She is participating in the 2025 Stafford Challenge—a cohort of poets who have committed to writing a poem a day for a year. The daily news supplies plenty of material for that effort.

BROKEN WORLD

by Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of The Dark, a poetry collection forthcoming from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

GRAVITY WILL GET US

by Alan Walowitz

“Just last night, there were shots fired outside of Temple Israel in Albany. And just yesterday, the menorah of Chabad Sunset Park in Brooklyn was vandalized.”  —Mayor Eric Adams, December 8, 2023

Some of us are willing to wait
till our native caution fails  
on the worn and slippery stairs.
No matter our disparate falls 
in the garden, or the desert, the reclaimed land,
or holding the safe door tight, 
against the next volley.  
It all becomes so much the same
in the short history of you and me. 
Today it’s news, tomorrow we’re gone. 
Who has the will to study and learn,
as Torah demands, such a short stay?.   
 
Everyone’s bound to fall,
even the lithe and balletic among us 
give way to age and our own sad shuffling.
Some will make a thud when we hit the ground, 
some a noise of lesser note,
as we learn, again, as if we didn’t know, 
this is not a movie. 
No shot, no bang, no dying fall.
Sometimes a shatter will sound
before we get the sharp reminder
what the slimmest shard might do.
 
Let me hide in plain sight long as I can—
I’ll agree to shut my mouth for now.
My forebears knew how to sound grateful,
and content, the price for being taken in. 
But one dyspeptic uncle, always a stranger,
warned never to feel safe—even here,
in The Golden Land.
Hah! his voice-- though not heard for years--
now rings like an alarm in my ears:
Boychik, you just wait and see. 

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.

QUESTIONS WE ASK OURSELVES

by Rachel R. Baum

A Moorpark College professor was charged Thursday with involuntary manslaughter and battery in the death of a Jewish protester who authorities said died after a confrontation with pro-Palestinian demonstrators at a rally in Thousand Oaks, CA.

 

Questions we asked ourselves 
   in 1930s Germany and in 2020s America:

Should we remove the mezuzahs from our doors? 
oh but you can see the shadow, the shape
the ghost mezuzah, clear as any sign. any target
 
Should we take off our Star of David necklaces? 
Christians’ crosses gleam from their throats
our naked tender throats invite, incite violence
 
Should we avoid attending demonstrations?
where angry people meet to blame 
Zionists or Jews, no difference to them
 
Should we hide our opinions, our politics?
even safe rooms we know are not safe
no matter, speak out or stay quiet, we die anyway.

 
Rachel R. Baum, a Best of the Net nominated poet, has tried unsuccessfully to avoid writing poems about current events. She lives in upstate New York with her dog Tennyson.

AMERICAN HISTORY

by Deb Freedman

                                           

Dozens of synagogues across different states have been targeted by “online trolls,” which has disrupted services, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Jewish advocacy organization said a series of antisemitic “swatting” incidents and fake bomb threats have targeted at least 26 synagogues and two ADL offices in 12 states over the past month. Swatting refers to the act of making false claims to the police with the intention of provoking an aggressive response from authorities at a particular location. —The Hill, August 16, 2023

1965

A swastika

in concrete

inscribed the only path

to my elementary school.

1971

Alone,

our house

was without Christmas lights,

so someone decorated for us

with dogshit.

 1977

In Sociology class,

the captain of our high school’s football team

said Hitler was right

and should’ve killed us all.

Half my class agreed.

Our mild-mannered teacher

exploded.

Rumors spread

she was crazy.

 2005

Our synagogue hired armed security guards

for the High Holy Days

after swastikas and “Kill the Jews”

were spray-painted bloody red

on its brick walls

—an artifice of safety.

2009

A confident junior,

in his oral presentation

I assigned to my Honors English class,

explained all Jews

are rich and greedy.

Some of my class was surprised.

The presenter didn’t understand

why this was a problem;

he’d given a similar speech last year

in History

and aced it.

 2022

At our local supermarket,

the sweet-voiced lady in front of me

in the checkout line,

told the cashier she was so grateful;

her niece healed from cancer

because she prayed for her.

Fervently, she asked me

if I was a Christian.

I smiled.

told her I was Jewish

and believed in the power of prayer.

Her mouth clanked shut

as she hurried from the store.

 2023

My stomach is distended

by history

by now

ordinary.

Deb Freedman is a poet living in Pennsylvania. Her poems have been published in The New Verse News and DVP/US 1’s Worksheets 67.

REVENGE

by Howie Good

Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City more than doubled last month from a year ago, NYPD data show — a troubling trend that unfolded against a backdrop of high-profile figures making headlines for remarks targeting Jewish people. —New York Daily News, December 5, 2022

The nicely dressed grandmother

seated next to me at the holiday concert

began to complain under her breath

when the high school orchestra

broke into the Chanukkah song “Dreidel Dreidel”

after 40 minutes of Christmas music.

It’s a good thing I’m accustomed

since an early age to cringing inside.

My father, after the factory permanently closed,

would just stare at the TV for hours,

a broken man, morose, prostrate, unshaven.

Out of the corner of my eye

I examined the still muttering woman

and for once wished that life

was like the plot of one of those

direct-to-video Bruce Willis actioners—

blah blah, pow pow.

Howie Good's latest poetry book is The Horses Were Beautiful (2022), available from Grey Book Press. Redhawk Publications is publishing his collection Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems later this year.