BIRNAM WOULD

by Adele Evershed

There was anger and sadness among people who turned out over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend to protest at the destruction of a tree in Enfield thought to be up to 500 years old… The pedunculate oak, which was cut down on 3 April, was located on the edge of an Enfield council-owned park in north London and overlooked the Toby Carvery pub... Mitchells & Butlers, the owners of the Toby Carvery pub chain, said they cut down the tree after being told it was dead. —BBC, April 21, 2025

I was born in a time of unrest,
where tongues swelled against
religion and unfaithful wives,
riots in the street,
and resentments as large as cats
festering in unemptied bins.

I grew through it all—
pandemics and plagues,
great fires and floods,
watching people work themselves to death,
to be replaced as easily as spokes on a wheel,
bent on moving the carts forward,
but I was in no hurry,
so I was left alone.

The Thames iced over
while frost fairs and firing squads
amused the people,
and all the artists with numb fingers
captured the scenes—
though sometimes they painted over
dead children in the snow.
I never forgot they were there.

The wind moved through me,
leaving a coating of urban sprawl,
and I was the one left
bearing witness to
bombs, broken nights, boozy slashes
oozing rivers of blood,
the good and the very, very bad—
I survived it all,
until a man from a toby-jug pub,
came with a weapon of mass destruction
and cut me down.

Soon there will be no thing left
to tell the old stories,
and how will you know yourselves then?

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the valleys for the American East Coast. You can find some of her writing in Gyroscope, Free Flash Fiction, Trash Cat Lit, Janus Lit, and Poetry Wales. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Her third collection In the Belly of the Wail is upcoming with Querencia Press. She has published two novellas in flash, Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and has a forthcoming novella, A History of Hand Thrown Walls, with Unsolicited Press.

ON THE JOB

by David Chorlton

AI-generated image by Canva for The New Verse News.

Late glow on the slopes, desert streaming
between the ridgeline
and the streets below, Friday afternoon,
T-shirts spotted with the stains
a day’s work leaves behind
                                                  and cashiers
at the supermarket scanning
what the weekend needs. Mourning doves
for restfulness, grackles for
opportunism and he who all day
wheels the carts
                               stacks another line to steer
back to the entranceway. So much
to be done: bread to bake and orders
to compile, restrooms to be cleaned
and a country to be run. A painter
splashed white is picking
up fruit,
              a man dressed in black
casually steps between coffee
and the cookie shelves with a sidearm strapped
conspicuously at his side. So much
to be done:
                    wash the floors, make
appointments, secure domestic peace
and spray the fruit to keep it fresh. Almost
Saturday, but there’s work
for the workers to do even when the sunlight
looks nervous. No rest
for the doctors, mechanics, plumbers
and all
           who believe that even
a rudderless ship reaches port in a storm.


David Chorlton lives in Phoenix close to a mountain preserve. He likes to keep track of the wildlife at the meeting of desert and the urban zone as well as the people at the nearby supermarket. His book Dreams the Stones Have was published last year by The Bitter Oleander Press.