DEAR JUDY

a duplex poem

by Trish Hopkinson

Today, a successful assassination

happened near where you last lived.

     In Utah, where I once lived with you

     a right-wing activist was shot dead.

In Evergreen, a school shooter was shot dead

on the same Wednesday in Colorado.

     It’s Wednesday in Utah and Colorado

     where I now live, 200 miles from the dead

no longer living: two men, shot dead,

two schoolchildren fatally wounded.

     This year, four kids dead, thirty-five wounded.

     They were not soldiers; they were students.

Murder on campus, witnessed by students,

no ear grazed: successful assassination.

Trish Hopkinson is a poet and advocate for the literary arts. You can find her online at SelfishPoet.com. Her poetry has been published in several literary magazines and journals; and her most recent book A Godless Ascends was published by Lithic Press in March 2024. Hopkinson happily answers to labels such as atheist, feminist, and empty nester; and enjoys traveling, live music, and craft beer.

A PRESIDENTIAL CENTO PANTOUM BY RODRIGO DUTERTE

by Melissa Alipalo

On March 11, 2025, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in the Philippines on a warrant by the International Criminal Court. The Philippine media and human rights groups estimate his war against drugs resulted in the murder of more than 30,000 people over a 6-year period.

Forget the laws on human rights. 
I am a man of many flaws and contradictions.
That is true. That is very true. 
I am not the man I am portrayed to be by some. 

I am a man of many flaws and contradictions.
If I make it to the presidential palace, 
I am not the man I am portrayed to be by some. 
I will do just what I did as mayor:  

If I make it to the presidential palace, 
You drug pushers, hold-up men, and do-nothings 
I will do just what I did as mayor
I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay and fatten all the fish there. 

You drug pushers, hold up men, and do-nothings
Do the lives of 10 of these criminals really matter?
I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay and fatten all the fish there. 
I have done this before. Why would I not do it again?

Do the lives of 10 of these criminals really matter?
If you are corrupt, I will fetch you using a helicopter, and I will throw you out. 
I have done this before. Why would I not do it again?
Whoever said I hated the media?

If you are corrupt, I will fetch you using a helicopter, and I will throw you out. 
Give me salt and vinegar, and I’ll eat his liver.
Whoever said I hated the media?
Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination

Give me salt and vinegar, and I’ll eat his liver.
Fate has many faces
Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination
If you’re a son of a bitch.

Fate has many faces
And if you hang me for all that I did, go ahead. 
If you’re a son of a bitch
Relax. God will somehow enlighten me.

And if you hang me for all that I did, go ahead. 
Many are asking what my credentials are and what I can do for the Philippines. 
Relax. God will somehow enlighten me.
I do not know. 

Many are asking what my credentials are and what I can do for the Philippines.
I really do not know how to solve the problem of the Philippines. 
I do not know. 
I cannot be the savior of this republic.

I really do not know how to solve the problem of the Philippines. 
Forget the laws on human rights.
I cannot be the savior of this republic.
That is true. That is very true. 


(Sources: Online media reporting of press conferences, campaign rallies, and interviews with Rodrigo Duterte)  

Melissa Alipalo is a writer, teacher, and international development consultant. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine and an MSc in Social Development from Ateneo de Manila University. Melissa spent nearly 20 years living in the Philippines, where she worked in journalism and development. Now based in Maine with her family, she is completing her first poetry collection, which reflects on their urgent departure from the Philippines in 2017 and the experience of resettling in the U.S.

NOVEMBER 22, 2023

by Marc Swan

iHeart podcast

Before we finish steaming bowls of homemade
chicken soup at our favorite cafe on Washington Ave,
talk shifts from the dilemma with his wife’s family
and the chaos and uncertainty of the next election
to where we were sixty years ago today.
He was in a fourth grade class in Memphis
when the principal released them,
no explanation he can recall.
On the ride home the driver had a transistor radio on.
She slowed to a stop, turned to the students,
eyes red-rimmed, cheeks flushed,
told them what had happened 
in Dallas earlier that day.
When he got home the house was quiet.
He can’t recall if his parents ever talked of JFK.
I was on a Greyhound east of Chicago 
on a cold rainy ride through open countryside
when a lady a few rows back turned her radio 
up high. We all heard the news.
Two bluesmen began singing “Jesus is Coming Soon,”
one strummed a battered old Gibson out of tune.
A bottle of Southern Comfort made its way up the aisle.
I took a long pull, slipped it to the lady beside me.
She never looked up, downed a gulp
and passed it along. The driver pulled to the side 
of the road. We stood together, a light rain falling—
I never imagined what the future could hold.

Marc Swan lives in coastal Maine. Poems recently published or forthcoming in Gargoyle, Nerve Cowboy Anthology, Misfit, Sheila-na-gig, among others. His fifth collection, all it would take, was published in 2020 by tall-lighthouse (UK).

YOKO LEAVES THE DAKOTA

by Maria Lisella

Yoko Ono’s WishTree at the Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
UK’s Daily Mail broke the story last month of Yoko’s leaving New York City.

… to raise cows on a 600-acre farm

she & Beatles legend John Lennon

purchased 45 years ago, outfitting it

with a herd of 122 cows and 10 bulls …

a dream to live on land as his father did

 

with no plans of returning

 

their attempt to create new lives,

away from crowds, smog, love-ins

and the ceaseless need to be THEM

on West 72 St.—until 1980–

shot in the Dakota archway, Lennon fell

on the feast of the Immaculate Conception

 

with no plans of returning

 

Outdistancing his dad, 47-year old Sean

pushes wheel-chair bound Yoko

from stage to stage, celebrity galas;

she perches alone on the Marcellus Shale

plateau, protests “fracking” for the rest of us,

no longer hibernates in the sprawling Dakota

 

with no plans of returning

 

Controversial, she lived, starved

through World War II,

like a modern-day Eve, gossipy fans

blamed her for breaking up Camelot… 

she offered them her “wish tree” series.

Now widowed 50 years, at 90,

it is as if she has lived 400 years

 

with no plans of returning

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate and an Academy of American Poets Fellow. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her collections include: Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). Forthcoming is The Man with a Plan.

REBUILDING

by Indran Amirthanayagam

I did not want to write right after the crack, letting my mind fill slowly,

Caribbean and North American plates, moving side by side, whiplashing

each other for a moment, causing walls and roofs to tumble and Fortuné

to lose his bet, just one of several hundred dead already, thousands

with open wounds, tropical storm on the way. But there are some

cheerful consequences, the truce called by gangs so rescue trucks

and supplies can move south from Port Au Prince, heroism everywhere,

doctor performing surgeries on the tarmac, a man lending his propeller

plane to lift wounded to hospitals in the capital, hundreds digging

with pick axes, shovels, hands, to free family trapped under concrete,

sparing of human life at my friend's family compound, although

the famed swimming pool full of holy water has cracked and will

require repair, but faith remains in place, survivors have nowhere else

to turn but to internal (and external) resources. Aid ships are flying,

trucks rolling, but if only money I give can assuage pain, even if it buys

no pardon, if it means just that someone will get medicine, food, a blanket.

As for the political cyclone, early morning murder of the president,

and now systematic killing of investigators of the crime, these too must

be resolved. Murderers cannot be allowed to wipe away tracks, and

the memory of this latest natural beating can only be honored by building

with bricks, leaving space within foundation pillars, to allow for swaying

with the plates when they come together again the next time.

Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020) and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). Indran Amirthanayagam's Blue Window/ Ventana Azul, translated by Jennifer Rathbun,  is about to be published by Lavender Ink/Diálogos Books. In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.

SOWERS

by Alejandro Escudé




We’re on a passenger plane
On its way to Ukraine.

All of us on board—the ones
Who economically strain

To carry our beloved,
Unaware of the warlord

Below, strafing shrapnel,
Sower of discord,

Or planning assassination
As though it were a tea.

Who cares? It’s only people
Who have ceased to be.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

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.

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.

DC APRIL '68

by Sally Zakariya

Front pages of The Washington Post, April 5 (left) and April 6, 1968, during the riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. (The Washington Post)

I was there when the city burned
smug-safe in white girl invulnerability
watching the angry smoke rise
over 14th St., hearing the sirens blare.
Mother wanted me to leave but
D.C. was my city too. Evenings
I’d walk home up 18th St.
with my black boyfriend
in time to meet the curfew
the acrid smell of tear gas
clutching at our throats.
And then we’d stop and kiss
good-night as soldiers watched.
It felt like a small victory
proof that it would all come right
but in my heart I knew
some dark veil had been lifted
some page turned and we
could never close our eyes
again to the cold facts
of what my people
had done to his.

Sally Zakariya’s Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry has appeared in some 70 print and online journals. She is the author, most recently, of When You Escape (Five Oaks Press, 2016), as well as Insectomania (2013) and Arithmetic and other verses (2011), and the editor of Joys of the Table (2015). Her chapbook Personal Astronomy is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

ON THE BUS

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya





On the long bus-ride home, spring day in SoCal, we talked about Simon and Garfunkel until news broke into the top 40 station the bus driver permitted. Dr. King was shot. He was already dead. And we all stopped because what else can you do and we all kept talking because what else can you do. No one at home said a thing, usual routine, tutoring my sister in math, the dishes, my homework. They had hated that I belonged to the Brotherhood Club. Now that too was dead. I held the cats close.

I wore my black dress. Homeroom announcements told us where the service would be if anyone wanted to skip school and go, a church on 17th and Wilshire. I thought I’d go. I thought I should. I was the only kid there from the high school, I was the only white person there, the speakers were bitter and all the words that go with bitter, and how not? I kept my head down. Even at fifteen I got that it wasn’t about me.

The next day I fasted, as on Yom Kippur because that was how you marked great sorrow and great complicity. Fasting won’t bring him back, my folks scoffed, but it was something I could do, though there was nothing I could do. And when Bobby was killed later that year I went inside a little more, a little lower but nothing more, because now this was what could happen, all the time.


Karen Greenbaum-Maya, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News, feels very tired these 50 years on.

ROLE MODELS

by Alan Walowitz

FBI to release all of its JFK assassination files. In this file photo, President John F. Kennedy's hand reaches toward his head within seconds of being fatally shot as first lady Jacqueline Kennedy holds his forearm as the motorcade proceeds along Elm Street past the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. | James W. "Ike" Altgens, File/AP Photo via Politico, October 30, 2017

I was in homeroom when JFK got shot
and we weren’t told much
about what’d happened—
or about much else—
this was high school, late shift,
and the afternoon wore
so damn slowly into night.
But that day I learned
from the very purposeful
and well-dressed Mr. Wulf
that life must go on
and a greater angle of a triangle
is opposite a greater side,
and though I never had the need
to read the Warren Report,
I hear those august guys
absolutely nailed Theorem #6
with their fine discussion and diagrams
of angles and distance from the Book Depository
to the limo riding by in Dealey Plaza
carrying a human god, the man we most admired,
though we later found out
he had feet of clay and was just a guy.
I also learned that
if a teacher remains in the back of the room
and tamps down weeping to a quiet, plaintive sob,
a tough old bird like Mrs. Hirsch in English
can wring a pink handkerchief dry
then drown it again with her tears
and no one will think less of her.
Though the president we’ve got now
makes me sick with his lies,
his ugliness, and everything else he hides,
there’s nothing left in the vault,
unrevealed from 1963 or ‘64
that could have taught me any better
what kind of grownup
I ought to hope I’d grow up to be.


Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan’s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing.

ANKARA 19 DECEMBER 2016

by Tad Gruchalla-Wesierski

When the hammer came down
The room had been cleared
Russian head pressed to the floor
He could not bolt for the door.

The room had been cleared
The innocent were safe
Russian could not bolt for the door
The sentence had been executed.

The innocent were safe
The reasons were reported
The sentence had been executed
The screaming was recorded

The reasons were reported
“Do not forget Syria”
The screaming was recorded
“Allahu akbar. Do not forget Aleppo”

Do not forget Syria
Where Russian government had no jurisdiction
“Allahu akbar. Do not forget Aleppo”
The city the Russian government cluster bombed

Where Russian government had no jurisdiction
The innocent were collateral damage
The city the Russian government cluster bombed
It was easy to execute the Russian sentence.

The innocent were collateral damage
Though they breathed, ate rats and screamed
It was easy to execute the Russian sentence.
They did not have Russian mothers.

Though they breathed, ate rats and screamed
Their last words “Don’t forget Aleppo!”
They did not have Russian mothers.
The city needed to be cleared.

Their last words “Don’t forget Aleppo!”
Perhaps made the Russian think “But,
the city needed to be cleared.”
When the hammer came down.

Tad Gruchalla-Wesierski is a Canadian and writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Canmore, Alberta, Canada or wherever else he may happen to be.  He was drawn to this vocation after a 30-year career as a corporate and international lawyer.  “The practice of law was a tourniquet on the flow of words,” he said “but now that it’s removed, my words can pulse down unused canals to where they should pool”.

DECEMBER 8

by John Azrak

On this day in history
Raymond Carver came to town
a hulking man with sapphire blue eyes
drinker's nose and a tipsy finger-
tip handshake with time to kill
before his reading at Columbia University;
He shared cocaine at the apartment
of a young writer, Jay, who idolized Ray's
piercing minimalist fiction, his own life
a bent out of shape Carver character,
having recently lost his mother,
wife to divorce, any notion of self-discipline,
his fact-checking job at The New Yorker.
Ray, of course, knew from dissipation
and suggested that the young writer
might want to flee the dangers and distractions
of the big city to work on his craft far upstate.
On the train uptown Jay worried the idea
as if he had a writer's stake in the heart
of the publishing world, worried it more so
in the room where the soon to be huge
Ray Carver read “Put Yourself in My Shoes”
to a small but ecstatic audience
while not fifty blocks away Mark Chapman
hid in an alcove at the stately Dakota.


John Azrak has published widely in literary magazines and anthologies; his most recent poems, in Nimrod and Stoneboat, deal with the war in Syria. He is an admirer of the work of Raymond Carver and John Lennon.

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.

SAILOR

by Mick Murphy





The woods are quiet today.
Not even birds
this late November.

Oddly warm for one who can
remember another day-
chill wind-
in Washington.

Drums
hoofs
gravel

a boy in a short coat.

Mother, who rarely wept,
weeping
by the TV.

A coastal boy,
he once carried a man
for miles through turquoise water

unharmed by the Great White
or other creatures of the sea.

Mick Murphy is astudent of Amy Holman at the Hudson Valley Writers center in Sleepy Hollow New York. A former business executive, he has studied and written poems for many years. His work looks at personal and spiritual issues and the intersection of these with the life of his generation. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. He also writes about sports.

POSTPARTUM, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

by Penelope Scambly Schott

                                                                                                               
Do I need to say I was twenty-one, my boy just four months,
my breasts still tight with milk,

my bare feet unwrinkled, and even the part in my hair
was sad?

The apartment got smaller, the kitchen table uglier,
the window gray with fog,

and all I could breathe was diaper pail deodorant
and my husband’s indifferent tobacco.

My one comfort was the warm gust from the floor vent
ballooning my white flannel nightgown.

I had thought carefully about this whole situation
and because I did want to be a good mother,

I had decided I couldn’t proceed to poison myself
without suffocating my baby first.

Then the phone rang and somebody I barely knew
said, The President has been shot.

My tiny kitchen filled up with ambulances, black limos,
the book depository, the grassy knoll,

until the moment when Kennedy was pronounced dead,
and I stood there shocked and frozen,

and then, suddenly, it came to me that maybe,
just maybe, I didn’t need to kill us,

and as I stood there holding my jolly baby,
I breathed out from healthy young lungs

the waxy gardenias of the dead.


Penelope Scambly Schott’s newest books are Lovesong for Dufur and Lillie Was a Goddess, Lillie Was a Whore.   She lives in Portland and Dufur, Oregon.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

by Chris O’Carroll

He wasn’t good.  He wasn’t great.
It’s 50 years now since he died.
Weird fantasies proliferate
About who plotted and who lied.

We crave real grandeur.  “Camelot”
Suffices as a substitute.
The romance of who might have shot
Trumps the dull fact of who did shoot.

We did not lose a golden age
Because the sniper found his aim,
But truth is never all the rage;
Myth is a more crowd-pleasing game.

When presidents are rated, he
Ranks as a gilded bantamweight,
More tawdry than he seemed to be.
He wasn’t good.  He wasn’t great.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  On November 22, 1963, he heard the news over the intercom in a Massachusetts junior high school.  Since then, he has published numerous poems in The New Verse News, and also in First Things, Light, The Rotary Dial, Snakeskin, and other print and online journals.

FIRST GLASSES

by Laurie Lamon

Fifty years ago I waited

in a room lined with

chairs where everyone

was old behind the dark

glasses that unfolded

and rippled, pressed

to eyes and temples,

and tremulous as my voice

when I read every street

sign and billboard each mile

home, 1963, the world 

for the first time hard

and fast and unmistakable.

Laurie Lamon's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Ploughshares, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Plume, and other magazines and journals, including 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days, edited by Billy Collins, and thePoetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. In 2007 Lamon received a Witter Bynner award, selected by Poet Laureate Donald Hall. Lamon has also received a Pushcart Prize. Laurie Lamon has two collections of poetry are The Fork Without Hunger and Without Wings, CavanKerry Press (NJ), 2005 and 2009. Lamon is a professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington and the poetry editor for Rock & Sling.