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.

COLLEGE WALK

by Philip Kitcher

Students and neighbors are suing the school [Columbia], magnifying the broader complaint that institutions stifle free expression when they restrict access to public spaces following protests. —The New York Times, March 27, 2025
 
 
The locals used to wander through.
No obstacles. They’d pass
the open gates. They’d spend an hour or two
kicking a ball, or lying on the grass.
 
No student ID was required,
no need to fear
they were unwelcome. Young ones were inspired
to think they’d study here.
 
Now it’s a fortress. Honeyed words can’t stem
the nagging fear
that higher education’s not for them:
they are intruders here.
 
Officials at the shuttered gates divide
the privileged from neighbors. Must they feel
that they are destined to remain outside?
Can wounds inflicted daily ever heal?

Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His new book The Rich and the Poor (Polity Press) is all about the costs of abandoning morality in politics and public life. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.

I’VE SEEN THIS BEFORE

by Jerry Krajnak

David Shapiro, Who Gained Fame in Poetry and Protest, Dies at 77: A renowned member of the New York School of poets, he also found accidental notoriety when he was photographed during the 1968 uprising at Columbia University... Mr. Shapiro was just weeks from graduating when another student photographed him when the office of the university’s president, Grayson Kirk, in Low Library was occupied. Shown seated in a high-backed chair behind the administrator’s paper-strewn desk, Mr. Shapiro captured the spirit of a moment, casually smoking one of Mr. Kirk’s cigars while wearing sunglasses and a defiant smirk. —The New York Times, May 10, 2024

They locked us out of Schofield Hall,
police demanded we disperse,
warned us we disturbed the peace,
endangered safety, led us away;
 
meanwhile, eight thousand miles away,
bamboo huts were being torched,
buffaloes and chickens shot,
farmers’ daughters raped,
 
and military chiefs kept score
with their bloody body counts
repeated nightly on channel 13
before the local weather.
 
I slowly rock on a cabin porch,
a snoring dog at my feet,
listen as a mockingbird calls
from far across the pond.
 
Another responds, so near to us
that we both flinch, get up
and enter the cabin, turn on the news,
hear about Gaza, Ukraine.
 
We watch as New York tents get smashed,
see ziptied children led away.
I join them, rise with my gray hair
in solidarity.

Author’s Note: I was in college in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1968. The events were not as dramatic for us as they were for Columbia students either then or now, but they are all true. Also, I thank the spirit of Sylvia Plath for help with the penultimate line.

Jerry Krajnak is a Vietnam veteran who later survived forty years in public school classrooms. A Pushcart nominee, his recent work appears in The New Verse News, Autumn Sky Poetry, One Art, Star 82 Review, Rat's Ass Review, and other journals.

SENATOR UNINFORMED

by Indran Amirthanayagam

A U.S. senator calls 

the tents set up 

at universities

camps for Hamas;

and he says

he supports Israel

and if Hamas 

surrenders

and hostages

are released

the war will end.

He adds 

that he is 

deeply 

disappointed

that the President

has paused

some shipments

of heavy weapons

to Israel. Deeply 

disappointed

Senator 

Fetterman?

That is how 

I feel as well 

about you. 

Your ignorance

resounds. This

is not  binary.

Instead 

of pledging 

allegiance to Israel

come what may,

why don’t you 

in turn bow 

to the Palestinian

right of return

to homes from which 

they have been  

expelled since 1948? 

Why don’t you cite 

the ever smaller

wedge of Palestinian 

land, about twenty 

percent of what 

was assigned

to them in 1948?

Can you manage

to turn your head

around that fact?

Twenty percent?. 

One fifth of 

a shrinking pie?

And you say,

hard disagree

deeply disappointed.

Mr. Fetterman

pitch your tent

in Gaza. Wait

for food 

to be dropped

from the sky

Run and hide

when bombs

fall down 

instead.

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.

FINAL EXAM WEEK AT NC STATE

by Jerry Krajnak

Last week, students at North Carolina State University concluding their first week of finals learned of terrible news: two apparent student suicides. “This is heartbreaking,” Chancellor Randy Woodson wrote in a community message Thursday. “And I know there’s little I can say to console the deep hurt or heal the immense grief felt by the family and friends of these young people and others we’ve lost this year. What I can say is that I, along with so many caring members of our community, share in this grief.” Such messages have become familiar on the Raleigh campus this year, where 14 students have died, half of them the result of suicide. —NC Newsline, May 1, 2023. Graphic by Chiara Zarmati for The New York Times.

Two more students killed themselves this week.
That’s seven on campus this year. We watched the news,
wondered if some fool would wander off Hillsborough Street
with an AK-47, start shooting one day.
But the perp we should have feared was here on campus
all along, hiding among the beautyberries,
under dawn redwoods. Academic demands
and social pressures lay in wait to spring
on those he'd already chosen. Our seven this year.
Our two this week. We wonder who is next.
 
Our Pack depleted, we mourn as we lug our stuff
to our Moms’ waiting mini-vans.  As a mower roars
or as we pause before springing off a board
this summer, we will think about the need they all felt
to escape the crushing pressures that shattered their lives.
We’ll memorize 988. Return in August, 
greet friends, view them with new eyes, listen 
to them more closely. Hope they will do the same.

Jerry Krajnak gardens, writes poetry, and worries in his North Carolina cabin. Recent poems appear in Autumn Sky Poetry, Rat’s Ass Review, The New Verse News, The Examined Life, Star 82 Review, and other journals.

DRAG SHOW FUNDRAISER TO SUPPORT LGBTQ TEENS CANCELLED BY CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS

by Cecil Morris

When the evangelical Christian group objects

to the drag show fundraiser at my high school

I think about the layers and layers of clothes

that drag queens don to hide and reveal themselves,

the revelation there disguised as camouflage.

I think of the teen performers, their happy hearts

aflutter, swelling at doing good for their friends

and, maybe, speaking their own truth this one night,

free at last of fear. I think, too, of the swim team

I coached, the high school boys and girls in Lycra suits

so tight, their all revealed to minimize their drag,

the chlorinated water streaming over all 

those athletic kids, their genitals (whichever ones)

on sanitized display. And the cheerleaders at games,

the girls at school dance shows in scanty costumes clad,

their gyrations, their undulations, their high kicks, 

the boys dressed as cheerleaders at powder-puff games

(with balloons for breasts inside those too-tight sweaters), 

all well and good and part of God’s great plan I guess

for no tsunami of e-mailed outrage floods

the school board and threatens to bring their righteous faith

to fill the board’s next meeting with the fear of God.

I think of our school board members, no Moses-es

to part the Red Sea, their elected hearts hardened

against LGBTQ kids, those two-faced pols

who applaud the group for supporting our LG

BTQ students who struggle for acceptance

but thank them for not doing it on our campus

where Pentecostal flames yet burn. God, they are snakes.

Cecil Morris wiles away his retirement—after 37 years of teaching high school English!—reading, writing, and riding the bike that doesn’t move through scenery of podcasts and boredom.  His recent publications include "The Nine Ways of St. Dominic" at Amethyst Review, "after our daughter passes, we go camping" at Neologism Poetry Journal.  He also has poems in or forthcoming in Carmina Magazine, Evening Street Review, The New Verse News, Sugar House Review, and other literary magazines.

HOW MANY MORE?

by Laura Apol

I don’t start to cry until I see Hannah’s name and a quote from her
at 10:57 p.m. on the New York Times feed—which means at least 
this one’s alive, this last-semester student with the pink hair and the
big laugh, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath for hours, for
these hours of not-knowing. I keep looking at the same images: the
streets, the sidewalks, the doorways, the windows, the diagonals of
the museum turned blue and red, blue and red with lights from
ambulances-firetrucks-police. Every intersection closed, students
fleeing, huddling, wearing clothes they wear to class each day, and
I search the images, blurred by distance and dark, for faces I know.
The sounds of helicopters overhead are transferred through the
microphone of a reporter who seems at a loss loss loss for what to
say. Time and again this happens, beads on a broken rosary, but
this time it’s here—the place I’ve called home for twenty-five years.
These students are still children, and these are the buildings we’ve
met in, sidewalks we’ve walked, sometimes in celebration, sometimes 
in protest, sometimes in snow or rain, sometimes under star-bright 
skies, but never on a night like this. A colleague writes, Part of me 
is hoping that none of the deceased students were in my classes 
these past years. A selfish hope, indeed and while I’d like to disagree, 
she’s right. Of course it’s selfish; tell me, how can we not be selfish,
praying that the ones we love are safe—though no one’s safe—
knowing that each silence, each not-answering is someone’s 
student, someone’s roommate, someone’s best friend, someone’s
child. How many more?

Author’s note: This poem was written in response to the first message that appeared on the MSU Rock and before the names of the students who were killed (Arielle Anderson, Brian Fraser, Alexandria Verner) had been released.

Laura Apol is a faculty member at Michigan State University, where she teaches poetry, literature and women's studies. From 2019-2021 she served as the Lansing-area poet laureate. 

SLEEPLESS

by Leslie Anne Mcilroy

Emma Sulkowicz. Image source: “The Cut” New York Magazine

Haul it, drag the cum stains
with you, drag it ugly, unmade,
the imprint, sheets soiled
and stiff, this borrowed bed
of midnight and spotlight —
voice — some say symbol,
but it is not a symbol,
it is the place you sleep
you dream, it is yours.

Carry it under your arm,
above your head. How thin,
and common it becomes,
muscles accustomed
to the weight, stronger
than hands bruising
your wrists, across your
mouth, shhhh, shhhh,
no one can hear,  no one
will hear, still, no one’s
heard. Still, he is in
the dark room with you,
allowed, unexpelled,
developing negatives,
as you clip prints,
evidence, some darker
than others, some shadows.
He dips his hand in
chemicals, washes,
cleans himself beside you.
According to the rules,
you can’t ask for help (can’t
ask for help) though, you can
accept it if someone offers.

Hoisting your bed over
our heads, we go bearing
bodies (if they tell you
no one died, they are lying).
The dead are conveniently
tucked inside the living,
worn fabric weight, cheap
discount springs. We walk
to history, the library, the laundry
room, we will not put it down.
We sleep on it between classes
dream of the his exile/
extermination/expulsion —
the weight of his body
so damn heavy.
This bed. It used to be
yours. It still is.

We shift beneath the mass
of it — collective carry — share it,
as if we could. Me? I see eyes
behind mine, in mine, as I walk —
a trick of sunlight and cadence —
the give of the mattress,
each step, each edge ragged
with sweat and stain. If I
close my eyes, I will trip
and it will all come
tumbling down — the bed,
the only soft thing between
skin and asphalt — a catastrophe
for all to see, as if it wasn’t already,
as if we hadn’t woken to the body’s
fury, its shame, its bedded rage.


Leslie Anne Mcilroy won the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rare Space and the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Gravel. She also took first place in the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards Competition judged by Gerald Stern. Her second full-length book, Liquid Like This, was published by Word Press in 2008. Her current poetry manuscript, SLAG, is forthcoming from Main St. Rag in 2015. Leslie’s work appears or is forthcoming in numerous publications including Connotation Press, Dogwood, Grist, Jubilat, The Mississippi Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, PANK and Pearl. Leslie is Managing and Poetry Editor of HEArt — Human Equity through Art — and works as a copywriter in Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her daughter Silas.

ACHING FOR THE GENTLE LIGHT

by Jennifer Lagier

“Columnist George Will thinks that being a rape victim is now a ‘coveted status’ on college campuses.” –The Huffington Post, June 9, 2014. (Image source: Victoria’s Look Into Gender.)

Bethany’s date slipped her
a roofie, tied her up
with her own underwear,
viciously raped her.
She woke up alone,
covered with abrasions,
dried semen, bruises.
Drove herself home,
threw up for hours.
Scrubbed herself raw
in the shower.
Prayed her period
would come, not
HIV or gonorrhea.
Flinched when touched.
Avoided men, even family.
Only felt safe when
among other women.
Couldn’t concentrate
on schoolwork, her job.
Attempted suicide twice.
Lived behind
triple locked doors.
Suffered flashbacks,
night terrors
that lasted forever.


Jennifer Lagier has published eight poetry books and in multiple literary magazines. She taught with California Poets in the Schools and is now a retired college librarian/instructor, member of the Italian American Writers Association, co-edits the Homestead Review, helps coordinate monthly Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium Second Sunday readings.

OUTSIDE THE CAMPUS COMFORT ZONE

by Chris O’Carroll

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans. -- New York Times, 5/17/14

It should be noted that none of the schools cited in the Times article have actually implemented a policy that would mandate trigger warnings, and that college classrooms have often served as testing grounds for vital policies that might at first have seemed apocalyptic or Pollyannaish. Trigger warnings could eventually become part of academic environments, as unobtrusive and beneficial as wheelchair ramps and kosher toaster ovens. --Jay Caspian Kang, “Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind,” The New Yorker, May 22, 2014


Our syllabi have warning labels now.
We fear that certain stuff in history
And literature classrooms could somehow
Become a “trigger” for PTSD.

Slaveowners, Nazis, and the KKK --
These are a few rogues from the gallery
Of sadists calculated to dismay
Students with special sensitivity.

The cross, the rack, the bullwhip, and the stake;
Rape, warfare, genocidal tyranny --
There’s only so much college kids can take
Of painful truth about humanity.

We warn them and invite them to avert
Their eyes from education that might hurt.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in First Things, Folly, Measure, The Oldie, and Snakeskin, among other print and online journals, and in the anthologies The Best of the Barefoot Muse and 20 Years at the Cantab Lounge.

from BECAUSE FEAR NOW IS NEVER FOREIGN TO ME

by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Image source: Postnoon

In Laurie Garrett’s book, The Coming Plague,
death is microscopic, indifferent,
hovering in a friend’s sneeze
or riding piggy-back
on the kiss of reassurance your husband gives you
before he leaves for work in the cotton mill
Joe McCormick later figures out
is where N’zara’s Ebola epidemic started—
a microbe no one in Sudan had seen before,
or anywhere else for that matter,
and so, in the makeshift hospital
that took your husband in the day he started bleeding,
how could they have known what they were facing?

And when nothing they did to treat you helped,
and you died a few days after they buried him,
and your family came to push and pull the waste from your bowels
and to make your corpse vomit
the food sitting undigested in its stomach,
how could they have known
that curled inside this cleansing
meant to send you as pure to your grave
as you were when you fell from your mother’s womb
a death waited to be born
that would cleanse the earth of them as well,
and of all who came to make sure their dead too
had left behind in this world
the last things they’d taken from it?

Or sometimes death is a darkness honing in on you,
a Muriel Degauque, whose Roman Catholic life began
in the coal-mining black-country corner of Belgium.
Handpicked, The New York Times suggests,
for the color of her skin
and the way the voice she spoke her language in
could pacify suspicion, Muriel
stepped off the edge of her days
on November 9, 2005 in Baquba Iraq,
a Muslim come to kill American soldiers,
choosing, though no one knows why—
after she exploded herself,
they found her passport and some papers
but no explanation—choosing
the world to come promised to its martyrs
by her new husband’s religion.

Now, sitting here by myself
in the garden’s south end,
the morning quiet more quiet than usual,
I’m remembering those bullets years ago
that you and Shahob fled,
even though they were fired
far from where you were shopping,
and the shooters were apprehended
before you reached the mall’s exit.
You told me the story that same night,
and after I closed my cell phone,
I went out to walk
beneath the lowest
full moon I’d ever seen,
across the tree-lined campus in Hamilton, NY
where I was writing poetry for the week,
down to the lake,
passing without thinking
close enough to the swan’s nest
my friend had found the day before
that the cob—I was surprised
he was awake—stood up and hissed at me.
He followed behind me a few quick steps,
though he probably thought of it as chasing,
and only when I was safely distant,
returned to his post,
confident his mate and soon-to-be cygnets
were, at least for the time being, safe.

“Stray bullets kill no differently than well-aimed ones,”
you’d said before we hung up,
and as I turned to watch that male bird
settle back down—
one eye, I’m sure, locked on me—
and I plotted a way back to my room
that would not disturb him,
I thought how no vigilance
would have been sufficient
if the force pushing one of those bullets
through the commerce-filled air
of middle class Long Island
had pushed it instead at an angle
precisely intersecting the path
you thought meant safety.

I did not then, as I do not now,
pray, and the gratitude I felt,
large enough though it was
to hold the moon now risen high
and all the endless stars
trying to fill infinity with light,
invoked no debt,
though sometimes
I wish it had.

Richard Jeffrey Newman writes about the impact of feminism on his life as a man and of classical Persian poetry on our lives as Americans. He has published four books, three of which are translations from classical Persian. The Teller of Tales (Junction Press 2011) is the most recent. The Silence of Men, a book of his own poetry, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2006. Newman is Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY. He also curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Queens. The poem published here is one part of a longer piece called Because Fear Now is Never Foreign to Me.