USED BOOKS FOR SALE

by Brydon Caldwell

As developers race to build more powerful AI models, and lawsuits over copyright mount, a cottage industry has sprung up to supply them with millions of physical books that are stripped apart, scanned into training datasets, and discarded. —Yahoo! Finance, July 29, 2026. AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Soft, almost like felt,

worn down by so

many different thumbs.

Slice. Scan. Destroy. Repeat.

A warm smell with

just a hint of must,

memories of comfort.

Slice. Scan. Destroy. Repeat.

Words carefully arranged,

adjusted, revised just so,

telling a narrative.

Slice. Scan. Destroy. Repeat.

Knowledge, hard won,

meant to be shared,

illustrated clearly.

Slice. Scan. Destroy. Repeat.

Cultural threads woven

together to patch  

gaps in society.

Slice. Scan. Destroy. Repeat.

Lone voices calling

from the past, trying

to share themselves.

Slice. Scan. Destroy. Repeat.

What cost will we pay

when the future devours

the past?

Slice. Scan. Destroy. Repeat.

Brydon Caldwell is a long time teacher and emerging writer from the western edge of the Canadian Shield. He was recently named the winner of the 2026 Icelandic Festival of Manitoba Short Story Contest.  His writing can be found in The Ekphrastic Review, The Fib Review, and the upcoming Fear Dealer, Opolis 2026, and Still From Somewhere anthologies.

THE DEFINITION OF HARM

by Pepper Trail

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

The Trump administration on Friday moved to open the habitats of imperiled animals to farming, drilling, mining, real estate development and other activities in what environmentalists characterized as the most severe erosion of protections for wildlife in half a century. It did so by recasting a single word, “harm.” For more than 50 years, the federal government has used a broader definition of harm to animals under the Endangered Species Act, a bedrock environmental law. It included any significant “modification or degradation” of habitat that kills or injures animals by impairing their ability to eat, shelter or breed... But on Friday, the Interior Department and the Commerce Department announced a final rule that rescinded this longstanding interpretation. Under the rule, destroying an endangered species’ nest or habitat would no longer be considered illegal. —The New York Times, July 10, 2026

Time passed and the madman continued.

Today it was to say the home, the whole living world –

I am speaking of you, the owl, the butterfly, the desert grouse—

is nothing, is to be taken, cleared, burned, drilled

and that has no consequence,

as the capture and disappearance of mothers and fathers,

that has no consequence,

as the end of relief for the dark-skinned dying,

that has no consequence,

as the meanings of words,

they have no consequence.

To the madman it is all a game,

made up every night, announced every morning,

changed every afternoon,

himself against the world, the only rule

being that he must never lose,

if only he knew how to win, to be satisfied.

And so everything is fed into the flames,

the beautiful world, the work of the best minds,

the lives of the children and the artists

and those who want only to live in peace,

because anything free of him

must be brought to heel, or

when that again,

when that always, fails,

must, he delares, be destroyed.

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

BAI TASHCHIT (DO NOT DESTROY)

by Lenore Weiss

Israeli settlers and soldiers killed three Palestinians in their village near Ramallah on Saturday night, the third deadly attack in a week of surging Israeli violence across the occupied West Bank. Israeli settlers have shot dead five civilians during invasions of Palestinian olive groves, villages and grazing land, in the brief period since Israel and the US launched a new war on Iran at the end of February. —The Guardian, March 8, 2026. Photo: WAFA archive.

Deer bite off the heads of my coreopsis, yellow sunbursts of blossoms I was hoping to see every morning outside my window, but now only sad stumps are left leaning against the pavement. Every day, I go outside to encourage the plant, hoping it might grow back, sprout a few new leaves. The way olive trees are being cut, burned and poisoned, and the olive, which is more than a fruit, a symbol of resistance, buckets picked and pressed with a wooden beam, sometimes with a stone to produce golden flowing oil. Every tree which is not being harvested, is lost to the occupation. Deuteronomy 20:19-20 prohibits cutting down fruit-bearing trees during a war as they provide life-sustaining food. Isn’t this an ongoing war? Olive trees growing in the West Bank are the first to go, surrounded by settlements built high on ridges that strangle villages, and even when armed renegades desist, they return with more venom. Concentration camps and the multitude of prisons throughout the United States produce men and women who understand how physical space can be controlled, minds never. Villagers living in Burin say their olive oil is spicier because it is laced with tear gas.

Lenore Weiss’s novel Pulp into Paper and a poetry collection, Video Game Pointers were both published in 2024. Prior poetry collections form a trilogy about love, loss, and being mortal: Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island (West End Press, 2012), Two Places (Kelsay Books, 2014), and The Golem (Hakodesh Word Press, 2017). Alexandria Quarterly Press published her prize-winning flash fiction chapbook Holding on to the Fringes of Love. Lenore edited a poetry and prose anthology for Kehilla Community Synagogue entitled From the Well of Living Waters: Voices of the 21st Century. She is a member the Writers Grotto and serves as the Associate Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Editor for the Mud Season Review.

A HOUSE IN GAZA

by Christopher Woods

Shutterstock file photo

In her mind is the locket

She thinks about so much.

Inside it, wrapped in blue ribbon,

A single strand of black hair.

Her firstborn.

She can’t stop thinking about it,

That hair, how it would be

To see it again, how she might hold it,

Go back to the house

That disappeared

When the bombing began.

If she could know this hair again

Her memory might rest.

 

But she won’t open the locket.

She can’t.

Maybe it’s been too long,

The hair might dissolve in the air.

Maybe birds would carry it away.

 

No matter how much she wants to

She will not open the locket.

She keeps it hidden,

Safe in a drawer, in a room,

Inside a house on a small road,

In a dusty village that no longer exists.

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show Twelve from Texas was performed in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. His monologues have also been performed at The Invisible Theatre in Tucson and the Pro English Theatre in Kiev, Ukraine. He has received residencies from The Edward Albee Foundation and The Ucross Foundation.