ANOTHER CHAPTER

by Peter A. Witt

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge to a Texas county’s removal of 17 books from its public libraries, leaving in place a lower court ruling that allowed the purge. —Newsweek, December 8, 2025

On the second Monday in December,
the Supremes sang a song
of banishment and dark days ahead,
as the Enemies of the Public Library plotted
what volumes to next remove from public view.

Gutting school libraries wasn't enough
for your local paragons of illiteracy,
who meeting in the dark corners
of McDonalds over cheap coffee
and an egg on your face McMuffin,
nominate books, one vote
enough for a frontal assault
on the collective knowledge
available for children, teens,
adults, seniors to read.

When challenged these keepers
of the gates of darkness proclaim --
you can still buy a copy, get
gifted a copy for Christmas
(there has to be some irony here),
or loaned a copy by a friend.

So goodbye Gender Queer,
All Boys Aren't Blue, The Bluest Eye,
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,
and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

Not to mention the classics:
To Kill a Mockingbird,
The Catcher in the Rye,
The Great Gatsby,
Animal Farm, and
The Grapes of Wrath.

Next year the Enemies
will switch their focus
to the Amazons
and the Walmarts,

and the year after that
to independent bookstores,

until nothing's left
but official books
of the thought police class, 
though even those
may be axed some day
as too woke.

Peter A. Witt by chance lives in Texas and is a recovering university professor who lost his adjectives in the doldrums of academic writing. Poetry has helped him recover his ability to see and describe the inner and outer world he inhabits. His work has been twice nominated for the Best of the Net award and has appeared in a variety of online and print publications. He also writes family history.  His book about his aunt was published by the Texas A&M University Press (Edith's War: Writings of a Red Cross Worker and Lifelong Champion of Social Justice). He is also an avid birder and wildlife photographer.

WE WERE, WE ARE, AWAKE

by Jennifer M Phillips

The papyrus PHerc. 1018. Credit: Biblioteca Nazionale “Vittorio Emanuele III,” Napoli–Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale

We’re finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum’s lost library: A whole library’s worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Nearly 2000 years later, we can at last read these lost treasures. —New Scientist, October 14, 2025

We were here. We saw. We remember.

Some of us even write down what unfolds

and teach our children unerasable stories.

We are awake enough to discern

canes and walkers supporting grandmothers

from flagpoles used as battering rams and spears;

to tell rioters from tourists. Our hearing is keen

enough to hear death-chants, curses and threats

not mistaking them for cheers or exclamations of joy.

We know when a phony rendition

is substituted for fact and blared out to the world.

We recognized a gallows set up on the stairway,

a guard being crushed, from a simple push-and-shove.

We can tell sexual assault from a too-forward pass,

and incitement to violence from a rousing speech,

and even recorded these things on our thousand screens

and continue to share them, and store them for history.

Nothing can be covered up for ever. In an X-ray lab, 

in a particle collider, means has been found

to decipher carbonized scrolls in Herculaneum's

two-thousand-year-old library, roasted by heat

of Vesuvius's eruption, philosophy

not quite incinerated. Do not think

that you can now obliterate the past

you deem inconvenient. Great-grand-children will know

what has happened in our time and who has wrought it,

and sort true from fake and good from evil.

January 6, 2021 and what has come after—

the war on our values and democracy—

we will remember, and keep telling the story.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (Wipf & Stock).

THEN THEY WERE MINE

by Corey Weinstein

Witnesses say that the IDF is deliberately killing Palestinians at aid distribution centres in Gaza run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Cartoon by Muzaffar Yulchiboev.

Israeli plan for forced transfer of Gaza’s population ‘a blueprint for crimes against humanity’ —The Guardian, July 7, 2025

Hear it right here. The past is now,
but wrong place, wrong people.
Last time they were mine, desperate,
last gasp assault in Spring of ’43.
 
Wrong place, the Mideast, wronged Palestinians.
Is there dignity not victory for a vanquished people?
In ’43 we yelled into the Nazi tornado,
death throes of the Warsaw Ghetto 300,000.
 
Feeble return fire from a vanquished people.
As Gaza starves, the West Bank terrorized,
famine, genocide of Gaza’s ghetto of two million.
Will the end game be the same weak thrust and slaughter?
 
Tanks fire on the hungry, settlers smash homes, olive groves.
In Warsaw they were mine, Jews to the very last bullet.
Will the world let the endgame be the same last bullet,
can our ears bear to hear the past in this terrible now?
 
As for me, I will never forget, Never Again, 
no matter who, no matter where or when.

Corey Weinstein’s poetry has been published in Haight Asbury Literary Journal, Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Our California 2024, The Ekphrastic Review, Forum (City College of San Francisco), California State Poetry Society, Visitant, Abandoned Mine, Speak Poetry of San Mateo County, California State Poetry Society and Jewish Currents, and he wrote and performed a singspiel called Erased: Babi Yar, the SS and Me. He is a retired physician and has been an advocate for prisoner rights, founded California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he hosts San Francisco OLLI’s Poetry Workshop Circle and plays the clarinet in his local jazz band, Tandem, his synagogue choir and woodwind ensembles.

WOMEN’S HISTORY 2025: SAY HER NAME

by Robin Stevens Payes

my country is busy writing out history
1.     women
2.     immigrants
3.     ukraine
so I must write them in
 
grandma sophie checks
these boxes 
one
two
three
she left the shtetl in 1893
for the american dream
 
she fled
1.     pogroms 
2.     despots
3.     poverty 
 
she arrived by
1.     horse and wagon 
2.     train
3.     ship 
 
violently assaulted
violated
a #metoo moment
before we could speak
such things aloud
my grandmother kept
her life lost a life 
silenced
 
in pursuit of 
1.     love
2.     safety
3.     family
 
silenced by shame she
never spoke her trauma
but passed it down
on top of the genes
 
episilencing generations
1.     ancestors
2.     descendants
3.     ascendance
 
through no fault of her own
and now her landsman
this democratically elected
leader of a free country
 
symbolized by the sunflower
source of seeds and oil
hearth and home like sophie
symbols of peace and resilience
 
comes to defend freedom
and dignity for all
not to grovel
at the tsar’s feet
 
violently assaulted
violated
an #ustoo moment
we must speak aloud
 
I call out the horror 
sophie’s story is america’s story 
truth trauma triumph and all 
 
i am writing herstory  
1.     SOPHIE her name
2.     PROUD her legacy
3.     AMERICA her goldene medina
 
episilenced #nomore 

Sophie

Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies: Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack https://remembertheworld.substack.com/

GATHERING (CLOUDS)

by Indran Amirthanayagam

We are gathering in Kansas City,

poets and publishers, writers

and editors: our people, friends,

colleagues, rivals. But I am

skipping the encounters. I don't

want to rub anything or anyone

except for the keyboard where

I compose this letter of resig-

nation, aware of the moving

staircase, the precipice, rocks

falling from the sky, aware

of train. bus and car wrecks

to come, bombs dropped

on friends' homes and cultures,

fireballs rolling through Chile's

Viña del Mar, vine now of fire

and mourning, through hills

near Valparaiso where

I fear cobblers and tailors

and hardware stores with

their giant signs have 

become ash, in memory, 

thy kingdom come, thy will…

how can we explain our 

suicidal impulse, this expelling 

of hot gas, assaulting 

of children and women 

in Gaza, famine threatening

that strip, and Ethiopia 

again in 2024. Are you 

ready for Live Aid 

once more, the concert 

for Bangladesh? How 

can we reply when the prompt 

calls for murder, 

by climate, by dictator?

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press has just published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun. (Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.