AS THE WORLD BURNS

by Moudi Sbeity

the child who is not embraced by 

the village will burn it down to feel 

its warmth —African proverb

Who didn't love you 

the way you needed to be loved

is what I would ask the men 

in their custom suits, pampered 

and coddled, as they are,

by their kindling of dollars.

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American author, poet, and transpersonal psychotherapist. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, Moudi is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. Their first poetry collection, Alhamdulillah Anyway, and their memoir, Habibi Means Beloved, are set to be published in 2026.

INAUGURATION DAY

by David Rosenthal

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

It’s Monday and the cans are full,
but Friday’s garbage day.
We’ll have to be sustainable,
or else we’ll have to lay

our waste in kitchen corners, or
resort to plastic bags,
and pile them high outside the door
until the old porch sags,

or dig a pit out in the lawn
and bury it down deep,
or burn it all until it’s gone
and crawl on back to sleep.

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

David Rosenthal is a public school teacher in Berkeley, California. He has contributed to Rattle, HAD, Rust & Moth, Birmingham Poetry Review, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and others. He’s been a Nemerov Sonnet Award Finalist and Pushcart Nominee. He’s the author of The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things (Kelsay Books).

ANTI-WAR RALLY

A Correspondence

by Phyllis Klein, Kathy Les, and Renée Schell

KYIV, Ukraine — Makeshift roadblocks have been installed throughout this capital to impede the movements of Russian troops snaking toward the city in a convoy about 15 miles away. On some strategic thruways, Ukrainians have parked trams and buses to restrict driving access. Checkpoints to inspect IDs have also been established to root out would-be saboteurs. “We have a lot of presents” for the Russians, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in an interview. “It’s not sweet. It’s very painful.” The extended 40-mile parade of Russian armored vehicles, tanks and towed artillery headed from the north on a path toward Kyiv has both alarmed and befuddled watchers of this expanding war. It’s not just its sheer size. It’s also because for days, it has not appreciably been moving. U.S. officials attribute the apparent stall in part to logistical failures on the Russian side, including food and fuel shortages, that have slowed Moscow’s advance through various parts of the country. They have also credited Ukrainian efforts to attack selected parts of the convoy with contributing to its slowdown. Still, officials warn that the Russians could regroup at any moment and continue to press forward. —The Washington Post, March 7, 2022

Dear Friends,

I send my love this spring as every

day a new trauma comes

to bury us just as we climb out 

of yesterday’s avalanche. Even here in 

the flatlands, sidewalks seem to turn

into wet clay, our feet leaving prints

that suck my shoes into glue-like cement.

My heart muscles out its love 

to your hearts as I struggle 

to take a walk, no way to avoid those

cruel neighborhoods of bad news. 

How bad news molders in the streets of tar

and disappointment. Flat tires

and tire irons so easy to weaponize.

Trees blighted, only crows left.

Love watches a plague of human heartlessness

trying to destroy it. Love begs 

for combat boots, stands on the fire escape

outside its tenement of low income love-fires.

I say, Let them burn. To kindle what is lovely 

I send you them, the embers.

—Phyllis

***

Whose Spring?

Lately I wonder 

for whose sake 

the flowers bud, 

the trees open. 

I watch the oak tree 

two houses away, 

how it plumes wider 

a little more each day, 

its pent-up exhilaration 

to burst forth, readiness 

for another year 

of leafy dress. 

Two continents away, 

a 40-mile convoy 

of armored trucks 

stalled in unison, greedy 

to penetrate a capital city 

that not two weeks ago 

populated itself with people 

awaiting their next spring, 

a chance to shed 

the heavy cold,

wet nights. 

 

Now those nights 

are filled with embers, 

blasts big enough,

red enough to douse 

whatever hope 

was had for a new year. 

Whose war is this anyway. 

Whose spring? 

—Kathy

***

Sister Cities

U.S. Sister Cities Sever Relationships to Counterparts in RussiaUkraine—Bloomberg, March 4, 2022

Whose spring? 

Whose war?

Here we planted a new 

word for spring:

Weaponize

A word I don’t want 

to taste in my mouth.

When did that appear?

Daily, hourly

wherever you look

fear is weaponized

water is weaponized

tire irons weaponized

words always.

Here, our spring

promise of ranunculus

sky of water vapor

sky of plumes

sky of smoke

A 40-mile convoy stalled, 

headlights and taillights

a rifle barrel’s width apart

a push, a threat, a smack.

There, even the roads 

are weaponized 

not our hearts

never let it be our hearts

There, hearts are strewn 

on the road 

like spent bullets.

When do we learn that there 

contains here?

—Renée 

Phyllis Klein, Kathy Les, and Renée Schell are widely published poets connected through a poetry crafting group meeting on Zoom. They live in Palo Alto, San Jose, and Sacramento, CA respectively.  This conversation poem is one of many collaborations they hope to have.

FIRE THE NEXT TIME

by George Salamon

“Severe heat and drought the hallmarks of a changing west… Unless people drastically reduce planet-warming emissions, the world faces a future of increasingly frequent and severe environmental disasters: coastal flooding, mass extinctions, deadly hurricanes, uncontrollable wildfires.” —The Washington Post, June 20, 2021. Photo: Boats sit unused in Lake Oroville, Calif., on Tuesday. A severe water level drop in the lake has forced about 130 houseboats to be removed. (Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

The worship of money

and machines made us

vile and ugly, nobility

and beauty live in

inanimate things, in

flowing waters and in

moving clouds, in

animals of the wild

green and blue depth,

we sold our souls to

delusions that kept the

people marching down

to nothing at the end of

their dream.

A poet wrote that he'd

"burn his right hand in 

a slow fire to change

the future." The future

has arrived, and we'll 

burn in its fire.

George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO.

MISERIES

by Tricia Knoll

Protesters in Chicago on Saturday.(Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press) The photo accompanies the essay that prompted this poem: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Op-Ed “Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2020

they come down with barbs
on flashing tails    or as slime
on the slope you slipped downhill

did you try to connect them
to a machine to measure amplitudes
and heard gut-punched moans

when they shook their rattles
in your dreams, did you wake,
cower, throw bricks

or put them in a drawer
where they roll like marbles
until ground-shaking stops

and TV spits them out
to chew on with worn-down
molars under cracking klieg lights

until we saw tonight
how they churn to burn
the deepest anger and hurt

so deep you can only guess at
the darkness of an abyss and
smell the smoke into daylight

to give them names they’ve earned
for decades: injustice, racism,
inequity and mourning.

Tricia Knoll is an aging white woman of privilege isolated from COVID in the woods of Vermont. Her poetry collection How I Learned To Be White involved three years of introspection into how privilege manifested in her life—and she is  not convinced she learned everything she must learn. She is grateful for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's op-ed.

RIOT!

by Scott C. Kaestner

“A riot is the language of the unheard.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Set fire to the streets
where George Floyd
was lynched.

Blow up the notion that
being Black is punishable
by death.

Tear this motherfucker down
the blue shield enabling
these acts of terror.

Dump gas on the fire fueling
people’s fury with the futility
of having this happen again.

Another Black man slain
in the name of justice.

Another oppressor sticking his knee
into the neck of progress.

“I can’t breathe... please stop!”

Stop pretending this will get better
and won’t happen again.

“I can’t breathe... please stop!”

Stop blaming victims
and talk about systemic racism instead.

“I can’t breathe... please stop!”

Stop the insanity
and scream “no justice, no peace!”

“I can’t breathe... please stop!”

Stop playing by biased rules
fight fire with fire.

And burn
baby
burn!

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, writer, dad, husband, and former coworker to many. Google ‘scott kaestner poetry’ to peruse his musings and doings.

INFLICTION

by Jess Granger





I watch you from a noncommittal screen, you
with your arm outstretched in the gray mud, you
with your gaping maw that fumbles in the fresh

water for air, nerves searing deep beneath your
blood in convulsions of toxicity, raw rabid foam
enveloping your crooked teeth, the restless muscles

dancing like maggots devouring a fresh carcass,
the yellow vomit spilling from my lips as I watch
your children suffer in their colorful pajamas.

I hold my breath feeling the burn in my lungs as the
alveoli strain to breathe for you, eyes that try to
compensate for your fixed pupils and focus on

the heavy bodies on top of you, pressing you down
into a time where you once knew peace. I’m coming
to help you, I hear your call in the ozone that separates

us, separates you from me, the space I need to ready
my weapons, load the PBXN-109 in their casings
and post your pictures on the metal, the infliction

of my might, for I am civilized, will come in flashes
of light to exploit your torn flesh, modify it into
incendiary ash on the sand of Khan Sheikhoun.

Jess Granger is a U.S. Army veteran and an MFA student in the Creative Writing program at the University of Texas El Paso. 

IN OUR ETATS-UNIS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

the republic is kaput.
We have turned our dhabarkoodas
to the banderas which the Tribunal Supremo
says we can burn,
hoping four anos will pass by like manana.
We live in rebellion secreta.
Our menschen eat shakshuka
and after dinner, play mahjongg.
Only four years. There will still be
algebra, kayaks, canoes, haus katzen,
carne adobada and brassieres.
We are the homogenized parfaits
of years of einwanderung.
We have found chaque autre.

A retired professor of English at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Elizabeth Kerlikowske served 25 years as president of Friends of Poetry in Kalamazoo.

THE BURIAL BOYS OF EBOLA

by Alexa Poteet

Sherdrick Koffa, estranged from his family because he helped burn bodies during the Ebola outbreak. Credit Samuel Aranda for The New York Times, December 10, 2015

In Monrovia,
the wakes used to go on for weeks.
The living applied ointment to the dead
with gentle fingertips, kissed
their eyelids shut. Scrubbed under fingernails,
pressed through earrings. Sewed garments of gold, green
for those who would never dress themselves again. Bodies
were not washed but made new and dirtless
for the next life. Their pockets stuffed

with coins. Working men
went days without food to buy
mahogany caskets, marble markers
and plots large enough for houses.
On Decoration Day, brigades
of families brought bleach and good towels
to polish the hand-chiseled tombstones.
This, Liberia once said, was how to cross
into the next life. To keep ghosts
from weeping at your bedside in the night.
There were no burial boys then, you see.

Now—goggled, gloved, otherplanetary—they arrive. Breath
and sweat trapped in a terrarium of plastic. The medical
membrane that keeps good in and bad out. Underneath,
the pockets of their oil-stained clothes
brim with matchbooks. The tools
of this trade are plain.  The boys don’t cry
anymore because the masks fog in the heat. Burning,
the state says, is the only way

The mourners scream, beat their heads with fists
for children set ablaze. Their hair curling into
charred sulfuric tendrils, skin blistered
black.Their pooled blood—an acrid human ore.
Burial boys is a misnomer;
usually, they don’t have to.

Guardians of a safety no one can bear
to want, their belongings litter the street
outside childhood homes. Familiar voices break
in the telephone: You burning body?
Then I’nt want see you no more around me.
The Ministry of Health did not invite them
to the ceremony where foreign doctors
clasped hands with the president.

It sends them moonshine in old cassava crates
once a month. Easy, because they live together;
there’s nowhere else. At night, they pour
cloudy liquor for each other. Clean fingernails
before shooting up
until their minds are spotless.


Alexa Poteet is a poet and freelance writer from Washington, DC with a master’s degree in poetry from Johns Hopkins University. Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, Lines + Stars, and PennUnion among others. She has also enjoyed staff positions at the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The National Interest.

FIDDLING WHILE NIGERIA BURNS

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

“Nigeria has ordered the closure of all secondary schools in Yobe state after Islamic extremists massacred 42 people at a boarding school in the region.” --The Independent (UK), 8 July 2013

Do you smell the stench, America?  in the vessels of fuel by Islamic extremists, in their vessels  of dried and fresh blood?  of burning flesh? of children at school? of wounded skin and bone? of ruptured tissue? of spilled brains? of a father's torment?  of seeing his two sons? who,  fleeing  fires of  Hell  are shot to death? hacked to pieces? do you hear their cries? smell embered hearts?  or is it a headline? buried with children? in fireworks of a different sort? the kind of American explosion in the sky? on the fourth of July? when we shoot the stars in bursts? when stepping  over ashes of Western civilization, we light our fires? fiddle with grills?  barbecue ribs buried in  smoky sauce? and  sniff the stifled air?   

 
Lucille Gang Shulklapper is a poet, fiction writer, workshop leader mother, and grandmother.