BEN SHAHN VISITS ICE DETENTION CENTERS

by Rikki Santer

ICE Detention Center in North Carolina to Be Among Largest on East Coast: The new complex near the Virginia border signals that even as ICE has retreated from its plan to buy warehouses, the agency remains determined to increase its detention capacity. —The New York Times, July 23, 2026

“Allegory” (1948) by Ben Shahn (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX)

Tomorrow’s art, if it is to be at all stirring, will no doubt be performed upon today’s forbidden territory.  —The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn  (1898-1969)

 

What will he paint to make the terror stop?  

This red kettle bell ringer whose blotted, stuttered 

lines contoured a lifetime for social justice.

In this circuit of fatelines, it is those whose lines 

of flight crossed an administration’s line

into cruelty. To make detention so bad

they’ll want to deport. So it’s not a formal

visit because they don’t know who he is

and artists are damned liars anyway.

Will his palimpsest of thrashing marks show

what’s behind locked doors and spirals 

of barbed wire? Tiny holding cells

with insects crawling, scant food, water,

medical care or contact with family or lawyers, 

sewage bubbling up from shower drains, cold 

nights that some wear socks on their arms,

other nights some in suicide surrender. With 

currency of pictorial language, will he paint 

another raging, demonic chimera with flaming

mane, refusing to suckle its children, leaving 

their lifelesss bodies beneath its udder 

in a heap of time-tested allegory?

 

 

Rikki Santer’s poetry collection, Resurrection Letter was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books. In 2023, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year and currently serves as Artist-in-Residence at the Fran Ryan Center in Columbus, Ohio and a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council. Her fifteenth poetry collection, Could Be, was published this spring by Sheila-Na-Gig Press.

DELANEY HALL

by Roberta Batorsky

This is the emblem of the age

Children shivering all alone

Where ICE holds sway

Nothing at all for to atone

 

Five day’s hunger strike rallies the world

To Newark’s prison, a public shame

Justice, fairness, integrity hobbled

Throwing dirt on America’s name

 

Delaney was a leader of civil rights

His hall rejiggered as an infamous jail

By Trump and his pernicious acolytes

Holed up in their version of Versailles

 

Delaney, the emblem of this age

Should inspire international rage

Immigrants, fiber of American life

Uprise, uprise, uprise, uprise

Roberta Batorsky, a New Jersey poet, recently published her first book of poetry, Perihelion.

THIS YEAR, WE MARCH ON MY BIRTHDAY

by Ann E. Wallace

I was born in a springtime blizzard. 

     I know to expect storms that run roughshod 

over delicate crocuses poking their stubby 

 

buds from the hard, freeze-weary earth. 

     I read the news each day—of men trafficking 

in children with bluster and impunity,

 

of blue butterfly girls detained in cells, 

    out of sight, where they learn to withstand 

the cold sting of humanity’s turned back 

 

and our leaders’ smug shrugged shoulders. 

    This is the way winter is, they say. 

But seasons change. And I know, 

 

in my small, weathered body, we are built 

   to stand up to gales and thunder, to the old 

guard of winter’s flailing bravado.

These storms, we will ride them out. We stretch 

   and yawn, gather force under hostile conditions. 

Today, we call forth a new season.

Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey and the author of Keeping Room(Nixes Mate, 2026), Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID's Long Haul (Kelsay Books, 2024) and Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019). You can follow her on Instagram @annwallace409.

SURVIVOR’S GUILT II

by Julie Weiss

Photo by Seema Miah at Unsplash

It snowed last night, an unusual

enough flurry in our part of Spain

to make the news. Downstairs,

my children pelt each other

with snowballs, their voices

all sparkle and windchime.

The sky, though gray, has no

reason to grieve. I stack dishes

in the sink, sweep up crumbs,

grumble, because who doesn´t

grumble about housework?

If a bang knocks a flock of birds

off course, I assume it´s a car

backfiring, no need to scramble

outside in pajamas, search

the snow for blood. It´s easy

to chide your children for tracking

mud inside when a government

thug isn´t kicking down your door.

Easy to indulge in a cup of hot cocoa,

extra marshmallows please, when

your neck isn´t crushed under

a state-sponsored knee. Tomorrow,

they´ll shove another child into

an unmarked van. Another child´s

mother will vanish, or die. Here,

far from my homeland, the sidewalks

will have frozen over. We´ll glide

to school, graceful as skaters,

hoping not to break any bones

on the hard, hard ice.

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in February, 2025. "Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children" was a finalist for Best of the Net, she won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for "Cumbre Vieja," and she was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Recent work appears in ONE ART, Stone Circle Review, Gyroscope Review, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review and MER. She lives with her wife and children in Spain.

HOW CAN I WRITE A LOVE POEM?

by Rose Mary Boehm

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

Do I write about poets with red holes

in their forehead? Students whose eyes

have been shot out, the mother of four

small children is rotting in a cell full of other people,

excrement, wails, the sounds of metal and wood

on flesh and bone.

 

How can I write a love poem when 

all I know is that planets no longer align,

that war has been declared on peace,

that all the crystals disintegrate into millions

of nano shards, shaken by the vibrations of hate.

 

How can I write a love poem when

I am no longer allowed to trust my eyes,

when blue is red, up is down, no means yes,

when, while I am hollow and starving

a blonde demon laughs and tells me I have riches

to look forward to. Perhaps even in this life.

All I have to do is believe.

 

And haven’t we all been taught to believe?

To believe that there is a big old man on a cloud

somewhere, an old man with a long, white beard

who has a big book and writes all your 

little misdeeds in big letters,

and who they say is love and who asks you to love

‘the other’ as you love yourself.

 

So, for many it’s easy to believe that in his name,

in the name of love, you are being hung

upside-down by your feet until you

confess how much delicious hate you feel,

and that you never had it so good.

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her work has been widely published mostly by US poetry journals. A new full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026.

PLANET EARTH WEATHER REPORT, JANUARY 2026

by Mary K O’Melveny

Icicles weep from each rooftop corner 

dangle from windows   cast steep shadows

Temperatures keep falling  falling 

It’s so cold we could be residents of Uranus

 

Our mailman likens this winter to Old Times

This morning a thick-coated doe licks away

heaps of rock salt from our asphalt driveway

snow and ice have buried grass for weeks

 

In Minneapolis, snow sweeps past protesters

Renee Nicole Good’s last words—That's fine, dude. 

I'm not mad at you—a study in poetic irony

Someone should re-name ICE Murder Inc

 

In 2025 thirty-two people are known to be dead

from ICE detention   At least sixteen people shot

four killed   by Trump’s [bleep]ing storm troops

carrying sleek weapons of war to US city streets   

 

Tasers  rubber bullets  white smoke  pepper balls 

swirl whirl like Saturn’s wind-blown gases 

Space station astronauts are returning to Earth

The gravity of the situation will soon be evident

 

This week there is a stargazing party in an upstate

New York park  Peeking at stars is often best 

in darkness while others sleep  There is also

stormy weather on Jupiter  Venus  Mars

 

This month’s Wolf Moon beamed   brayed

its afterglow stayed chill until  dawn

The wolves are scowling  howling  prowling

We are all in danger   We are all afraid

Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.

DROPPING OFF THE NATIVITY

by Tricia Knoll

For the community of Winooski [Vermont], the week following Thanksgiving began with a disturbing absence: a second-grade student’s desk was empty. What followed was a rapid-fire sequence of press releases, emotional pleas, and contradictory reports that have left many Vermonters confused about how a seven-year-old boy went from a holiday road trip to a federal detention center in Texas. —Compass Vermont, December 7, 2025

Handmade of painted paper mâché, the figures of the old nativity scene rest in the tattered box I pick up at the church bazaar for $2. Baby Jesus. A goat. Two men with lambs on their shoulders. Mary. Joseph. Five wise men bearing gifts. Two identical angels hinting this might be a combination from two original sets. A blue angel who cannot stand up. A flimsy barn and dry grass. I leave it on the doorstep where my favorite children live, hoping someone might tell the children the story of outcasts, love and humble housing. How Christmas got its name. Even if they use pagan filters. A text arrives: their house doesn’t do nativity. It’s going to Goodwill. I ask for it back. The news: ICE pulled over a seven-year-old and his mother in Illinois. Originally from Ecuador, they live in the town just upriver from me. The child’s school was the first declared sanctuary school in Vermont. The mother and child are now in detention in Texas. The superintendent of schools works to raise money for legal aid, to help the father contact them. Inside me sounds like sanctuary, mercy, peace, star of hope and love reverberate like the striking of a distant temple bell. 

Tricia Knoll's hometown of Williston, Vermont is the center of ICE's national data collection and the place scouring social media to find evidence of immigrants without citizenship. She is a poet currently writing in prose. Her chapbook The Unknown Daughter was recently a finalist in the New England Poetry Club chapbook contest.

THEY

by Jim Hanson

Cartoon by Ann Telnaes

They’re running it, ruining it
off the rails, in the ditch
sell the wreckage, get rich.

Truth killed, collateral causality
lies arise, as reality
deftly made, as cool aide.

Dollar inflated, debt escalated
hyper crypto, value to go
assets bereft, nothing left.

Empire today, for USA
Greenland now, Canada then
Ukraine to lose, Russia to win.

Love incarnate, just for the lust
Epstein teens, Trump playboy queens
sex for pay, with NDA.

Immigrants, detention camps
hit squads, brown shirts worn black
dream children here, sent back.

Justice ignored, polls soared
guilty of crime, no time
impeachment twice made, still stayed.

Troops march, mayors watch
cities, occupied
politics, on wrong side.

Money sought, elections bought
billionaires gave, taxes to waive
offices for sale, free from jail.

Republicans scared, of primary loss
all bow down, to the MAGA boss
funny money, from dark accounts.

Legacy seen, power absolute
pride resolute, for life to be
none than, the presidency.

Jim Hanson is a retired university researcher and sociologist who lives in the St. Louis area. He has published four poetry collections, also some thirty single poems, and is a member of the St. Louis Poetry Center and Illinois State Poetry Society Southern Chapter.

ARE WE THERE YET?

Ode to Passover

by Anita S Pulier

Painting by Frans Pourpos the Elder (c. 1565–1580) depicting God showing Moses the Promised Land. Source: Wikipedia.

Celebrate forty years of wandering.
Forty years of searching.

Read Haggadah to the children,
give thanks,

sing praises
for the tribe surviving.

Focus on the ancients,
not the news.

Ignore ICE, as it issues
this warning: if officers

view you as Other,
hear a foreign accent,

take notice of tatoos,
you will be wrangled

like cattle into pens
and, paperless or not, deported.

To where? Weep, explain
you have lived here

since you were two,
this is your home.

Your wife, your children,
your aged mother

may never see you again.
Glory be to what?

Listen! Angry screams nurtured
by hatred, drown out the cries

of kids in Florida, or Texas, or next door.
How many more will be force fed this poison

in the name of a merciless God
punishing the sin of survival?

and Gaza
and Gaza

Tonight, we Jews co-opt words;
suffering, pain, freedom.

I imagine the day that
anyone’s God

will deliver enlightenment,
angels will sing,

heavenly light will shine
on the cruel irony of the self-righteous,

the day each of us will be revealed
as the supplicant,

each of us the Other.
The day our ancient journey,

our Passover celebration,
will not fall so woefully short

of the promised land.

Anita S Pulier's newest  books are Paradise Reexamined and Leaving Brooklyn  (Kelsay Books). ). Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.