THE BROAD SIDE OF BARNS

by DJ Benhaim

Grey represents 10,000 city-owned vacant lots in Chicago. Graphic from ChiBlockBuilder.

There are over 40,000 vacant lots throughout Chicago. The majority of these lots are found in predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South and West sides, largely due to long-term discrimination and disinvestment from public and private entities. Neighborhoods without investment struggle to maintain housing demand, which can lead to population loss, property demolition and deterioration, and eventually, abundant vacant land. A large concentration of vacant land can have negative effects on the mental and physical health of residents. Vacant land can also depress nearby property values and correlate to increased crime, leading to further disinvestment. —Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University, April 24, 2025

no one builds barns any more—
only scaffolding, condos,
liquor stores with bulletproof windows
& a prayer room in the back.
wasps had nested up in the rafters
& some uncle worked
where the Walmart stands now.
the soil reddened like scraped knuckles
his father broke with a mule
named Gospel—
worked the rows in prayer
before the yield was taxed out.

|| past is a ledger
but the ink runs. ||

broad side of what?
a body? a billboard?
surfaces now are for selling
what's already been taken.

"used to be Black people out here,"
man in line says,
hocking lone squares for a buck
like that's still a thing.

|| names are dropped
like pins on surveys,
& nobody charts the grief. ||

nana's house = "distressed property"
family land = "redevelopment zone"
heirloom = "liability"
"urban blight" = Black bodies by water

map calls it 'Cal City' now—
we just called it home.
the pecan tree still falls like it used to,
even if they paved around it.

we still claim it's ours
but it's up for sale online—
w/ renderings,
w/ dog parks,
w/ Whole Foods
where the funeral home used to be.
the old deeds hand-written,
passed trembling hand to hand
like hymnals.
now: PDFs, escrow, and computer renderings
of what was.

the city annexed the story.
sold it by the bulk.
a block is 400K now
if you squint
& act like you don't see the runoff,
old promises like mildew
thickening the air.

hands once set in earth
now glide against colored screens—
waiting for Lyft pings,
standing where squash used to grow.

"heritage district" they say—
but only the picket fence remains.
(we had none. never.)

child asks
“wasn’t there a porch here?”
nodding to the concrete slab
where the rocking chair used to squeak.
back when, auntie shell'd peas
in metal bowls on Sunday—
called bingo numbers
like prophecy.

corner now has a mural—
Black woman with afro + fist + sunflowers.
financed by real estate.
our image used
as seasoning.

|| tell me again
who gets pride? ||

story signs on phone poles.
deeds lost to taxes.
a cousin got arrested
and was late for the signing.
a brother was sold low,
"figured they'd take it anyway."

a shoebox full of pictures, water-stained—
someone's arm thrown over a mule,
a baby born of loss
grasping okra
like gold.

we once built fences—
not to keep people out,
but to mark what we meant.

|| crevice in the cement
sweetgrass still grows through. ||

the barn saw baptisms in washtubs,
hog butchering,
first kisses behind feed sacks—
it never forgot the names
whispered in its beams.

barns don't scream
they sag.
they rust like facts—
slow, uncaring
until someone calls it aesthetic
& puts up string lights
for the engagement shoot.

tagged as "roots"
but never allowed to root.

&
here
the wind knows
whose sweat made this space possible—
even if the deeds don't.

DJ Benhaim is an emerging poet from Chicago, IL whose obsession with poetry began at the age of eleven. Additional works can be seen in African Writer Magazine. Connect with him on Facebook @ DJ Benhaim.

MEDUSA

by Akua Lezli Hope

AI-assisted images by the poet.

First lady Michelle Obama considered wearing her hair in braids while living in the White House. But then she thought of the American people. —The Washington Post, November 17, 2022

U.K. Tells Schools They Can’t Ban Afro Hairstyles. School rules about what styles are allowed that mostly affect Black and mixed-race children are likely to be illegal, a government rights commission said. —The New York Times, October 27, 2022

Almost half of Black and mixed-race women have experienced race-based hair discrimination at school, according to a new study. Of these, more than half (57 per cent) say they continue to deal with hair-related trauma today. —Independent (UK), October 7, 2022

Medusa was the serpent-goddess of the Libyan Amazons, representing "female wisdom". (Sanskrit medhas, Greek metis, Egyptian met or Maat ).  She was the Destroyer aspect of the Triple Goddess. Called Neith in Egypt, Ath-enna or Athene in North Africa.  Her inscription at Sais called her "mother of all the gods, whom she bore before childbirth existed." —Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

You think god cursed me, 
that this morphing nimbus petrifies beholders
when it is only your eyes seeing snakes 
and being struck by a beauty you cannot decipher 
 
These S&Z curved electric antennae 
are defense against the gray arts, 
channeling, channeling ancestral energies 
an armor of creation’s forcefield and being 
 
Remove your transgressive hands 
or feel the casual, stinging shrapnel
from misbelief shattering against truth

 
Author's Note: I ache for the children who have been abused for their hair styles. I had a corporate career and wore my hair in what is now called protective natural styles, along with my suit, pumps and—a tie from 1979, until I retired in the 21st century. Here it is another century and the same old stupidity.
 

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music,  sculpture, and peace.  A paraplegic, third-generation New Yorker, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, NYSCA, SFPA, Elgin, & Best of the Net, Rhysling & Pushcart Prize nominations. 

IN FRINGE

by James Penha

“The people of West Sumatra have a culture that can’t be separated from Islam. This has been the case since a long time ago. If the people and government here create a regulation that bans LGBT behavior because it’s not in line with tradition, then it’s not wrong nor is it a violation of human rights.” —Indonesia National Commission on Human Rights Chairman Ahmad Taufan Damanik, February 14, 2019

When human rights

ain’t right in its Head

of Human Rights who

writes off marginal runes

and the humans so cast

to religious rites of hate

and intolerance, a state

wrights a ship with tar

and feathers that sinks

of its own disaccord.

James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News.

THE ALARM

by Pepper Trail





I was looking forward to this evening
After long hours of work
Sitting quietly in the upstairs room
Gazing out at the waning day
The sun bright on the eastern hills
At peace, a glass of wine, a book

But the news of the day has gutted me, again
I slump, hollowed out, unable to escape
Or, for this moment, to resist, the horror
The endless horrors, one following the other
The government-orphaned children, lost
Huddling in the white tents, torn from their mothers
The Supreme Court, that I somehow still believed
To be the last defender of the powerless, their last refuge
In a time when the weak are scorned and dehumanized
When justice is bought, the Supreme Court
Blesses the President’s power to demonize and exclude
(T***p v. Hawaii)
Upholds the racists’ right to disenfranchise
(Gill v. Whitford)
Allows religion the sanction to discriminate
(Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission)
Attacks unions while allowing corporations unlimited power
(Janus v. AFSCME)
And now, the last “moderate” justice gone
The last hope for balance lost

Night has fallen. Up and down the street, the cicadas
Begin to sing.  We call it singing, but it is not
It is a sound of drums, an urgent percussion, it rises
To an almost unbearable pitch and intensity
The shriek of an alarm, echoing against the shut-up houses
Will the doors open? Will my neighbors come out
To stand on their porches? Will we look at each other
Speechless in that din?  Will we come down our steps
Approach, shake hands, acknowledge this extremity?
Will we, at last, awake?

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. In his spare time, he leads natural history tours around the world.

I COULD HAVE BEEN IN NEW ENGLAND

by Linda Lerner

“The picturesque old town of Dachau invites one to linger and enjoy its many places of interest.” —Dachau.de

my father’s voice that I hadn’t heard
since he died interrupts a news report
about anti-Semitic crimes increasing
here, didn’t I warn you, he says
the smoke from 70-year-old explosions in Russia
rises up from bomb threats at Jewish centers now
and I’m fighting with him again to
stop living in the past, that’s over with,
I say, but as the newscaster
continues citing threats across
the country I begin marching
back to my college years protesting
discrimination against blacks
signing petitions against segregation
do it from the safety of my birthright;
there’s nothing to worry about, I tell him
it’s not us, it’s Muslims who have to worry
who need my help today…

outside the sun is shining; in the warm
winter light everything looks as it always has;
a friend is telling me about her trip to Germany
to where the death camps are now tourist sites;
as she walked around the city, went into shops
visited a park, watched children playing,
their parents looking on, relaxed,
said, I could have been in New England

Linda Lerner has new work in Onthebus, Chiron Review, Gargoyle, and SoFloPoJo. In spring 2015, she read six poems on WBAI for Arts Express. Her recent collections include Yes, the Ducks Were Real and Takes Guts and Years Sometimes (NYQ Books) and a chapbook of poems inspired by nursery rhymes Ding Dong the Bell Pussy in the Well.

TERRIFIED

by Marsha Owens

Image adapted from Scott Brundage Illustration.

Who are you? roared the Cyclops.

I’m terrified, I whispered back.

And well you should be, Cyclops said, because it’s like snakes in the baby’s crib.

We are babies, you know, we haughty Americans, two-year olds running around aimlessly, peeing our pants, little boy babies pulling their diapers down to gawk at their penises, all self-absorbed, too young to understand how grown-up 21st Century countries behave, grown-up men and women, you know, the ones who build high-speed rail, and grow a belief system that says YOU, you, and you, all of you will be educated and be able to pay for your blood pressure medicine and be able to have food enough, and YOU, you, and you will live in houses, unlike stray dogs scrounging downtown, still some say YOU, you and you are undeserving because you don’t pray to our father who is in heaven, you don’t speak English, you wear a scarf on your head, you walk with a limp, you run away from bullets shot at your back.  Yes, YOU . . . be afraid, feel the dead of the darkest night, guiding stars dimmed, voices of reason gone underground, black faces smashed, bodies dumped on the trash heap beside McDonald’s wrappers, throwaways, mountains of loss, and the red truck sits in the yard outside my window, says nothing, all metal and strong.

Marsha Owens lives and writes in Richmond VA. #Resist

IMMIGRANT

by Alan Catlin

Does it matter?
Now,
here, today

That they were
grunts in Vietnam,
her father,
uncles, cousins

and that she
the niece,
daughter,
married an
Asian guy

Not a Vietnamese,
not a Japanese,
or a Chinese
but a neighbor
to Nam guy

That he spent years in
refugee camps
before he made
it here

All of those awful years
dreaming of a better
life, of America

That he finally made it.
Worked a decade, more,
for his phd,
fought
prejudice,
discrimination,
ridicule

Does it matter
That he has
a good job,
no a great job,
is a provider
is the father
of their grandchild,
their only grandchild

a half-Asian,
half-American
beauty?

Oh, yes it matters

A lot.


Alan Catlin is poetry editor of online journal misfitmagazine.net. His latest book of poetry is American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press.

THE NEW CURRICULUM

by William Aarnes

                        America First

At dinner tonight
our eighth-grader repeated

how all the kids just love
their Patriotism teacher.

She asked if we knew
that for centuries

people have misjudged
that Samaritan as good.

Each evening she seems
more and more suspicious

of our baffled looks,  
of our needing to have explained

something so self-evident
as the moral that only someone

alien to our way of life
would help a victim

who probably deserved
a worse beating than he got.


William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.

HOW DID WE LET IT GET SO FAR?

by Lucia Cherciu




He wants to close borders and build a wall
while refugees are waiting in pain.
We watch in disbelief and want to crawl

back into bed and hide for four years, then all
come out and vote. We brainstorm ways to strain
his plans to close borders and build a wall.

What strategies shall we use to stall
the madness derailing from his chain?
We watch in disbelief and want to crawl

as every day new stories snowball
into disasters and catastrophes that sustain
his plans to close borders and build a wall.

Those of us who lived under dictators can recall
the disappointment, hurt, and disdain.
We watch in disbelief and want to crawl

and set up stages and struggle to tell all,
gather crowds at street corners and explain
what happens when someone builds a wall.
We watch in disbelief and want to crawl.

Lucia Cherciu is a Professor of English at SUNY/Dutchess in Poughkeepsie, NY, and she writes both in English and in Romanian. Her new book Train Ride to Bucharest is forthcoming from Sheep Meadow Press. Her other books include Edible Flowers (Main Street Rag, 2010), Lepădarea de Limbă/The Abandonment of Language (Vinea, 2009), and Altoiul Râsului/Grafted Laughter (Brumar 2010). Her poetry was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. 

AND THE DARKNESS CONTINUED

by David Pring-Mill

After nearly seven decades in Wyoming, for much of that time facing heartbreak, discrimination and even physical violence, the cross-dresser has finally decided to leave the Cowboy State. Sissy Goodwin, who was profiled in the Los Angeles Times in 2013 for his insistence, despite an often-macho Western ethic, to lead the life he chooses -- as a man who prefers to dress in women's clothing -- is retiring in May from his job as a college science instructor in Casper. He and his wife, Vickie, are moving to the Portland, Ore., area, where they plan to buy a small farm and raise goats and chickens. —Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2015. Photo: Sissy Goodwin, seen here in 2013, has decided to leave Wyoming for Oregon. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Black air was wrapped ’round in elegant gown.
Consistent blare revealed proclivity.
Darkly dress augmented ignited crown.
Sounds spiraled and dimmed with activity.
Buildings trumpeted their presence at skies.
Stars could not outshine the cemented queen ―
Despite fires bright and wide as babies’ eyes,
none could adorn the head of gaudy sheen.
People strode and strutted in worshipped styles.
A woman skipped and wore a tie-dye shirt.
Colors rambunctiously splashed on textiles.
The woman and a man began to flirt.
Bodies blended into the fair city.
Winds whistled out a whimsical ditty.

In cracked sidewalk, an empty square remained,
filled with fluffed, deprived, and struggling grasses,
in place of the tall tree it once contained.
Tattered papers flew from college classes
as our light pollution masked over stars.
I saw a weeping form, drenched in darkness.
I squinted, for assumption often jars.
The edge of coned light revealed, in starkness,
A curled up cross-dresser, badly beaten,
bruises swelling a face now black and blue.
I cried, “Justice strike each twisted cretin!
I’ll call for help! What have they done to you?”
He said, “They loathe their own hidden weakness,
and attack those few who walk with meekness.”

I offered a hand and helped him to stand.
He said, “Fists will never defeat the soul,
destroy a concept, or bear true command.”
He patted my back and resumed his stroll.
I noticed a church that seemed grandiose.
It summoned an ingrained, quiet respect
fed to me in youth in dogmatic dose.
The old church stood as a sacred object
revered more than other bricks and mortars,
for the innate value of a symbol
may lift buildings from shapes to high quarters.
Apt symbol could aggrandize a thimble!
I yelled, “Why should man strive for salvation,
with evil sewn into all creation?”

I ran, renouncing all bewitchery,
spotted the hurt man’s ensanguined shirt, cried,
“How do you mitigate the misery?”
and watched as he calmly turned and replied,
“Although they were determined to hurt me,
only I can determine that effect;
their scheme crumbles if I do not agree
to receive shame they sought to redirect.”
I said, “Such men should not be in our streets.”
He said, “The span of those men’s lives and deeds
dwindles compared to the breadth of love’s feats.
Love has conquered the earth, and love precedes
and follows us all, and though fear may spread,
there is not an inch that love cannot tread.”

I stood sedated in humility.
He walked away, spiritually unharmed,
but then I felt new incivility,
and thought, “Lord, though your world leaves victims charmed,
are we, the makers of dense light clusters
on shadowed continental designs,
meant to be morality adjusters?
What are the semantics of dreamlike signs?
Are you the artist and we the artwork,
capable of launching revolution?
Am I a self-possessed statue with quirks,
who now must seek formal absolution?
Is every deviation a mistake,
or a miracle to which we awake?”

A bus bustled, with interior lit.
The metal tube emitted grinding puffs.
Night air still had a nip that gently bit.
Fluorescents and neon caught sights like cuffs.
The bulbs blackened, though they tried to expose,
for clarity is sharp in sheer absence.
When fists strike and pummel faces in blows,
the matter of people lacks shape or sense ―
The darkness is real, rife with purity.
Should absence and steel containers compete,
I’d consider star-lit obscurity,
if not deep void, where silence and peace meet.
People shuffled on the bus, sat, and leaned,
and above in trees, the hidden birds preened.


David Pring-Mill is a writer and award-winning filmmaker. His poems have been published in Poetry Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Crack the Spine, Eunoia Review, Page & Spine, Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and East Coast Literary Review. He is also author of the poetry book Age of the Appliance. @davesaidso

TO JAMES BALDWIN FROM A WEARYING POET

by Patricia Brooks

Image source: Family Equality Council

You died too soon, precious James.
We need your eloquent voice
right down here, now more than ever.
Some never heard it; others seem to have
forced their brains to forget.
Most are still dazzled by
those old lures of fortune-and-fame.
Some of us – sorry – have been so intent on
exercising our vocal cords in the vain hope
of singing like yours, that I guess we just missed
some of the subtler beats
on their ominous drums.

Into that vacuum,
the manufacturing skills of The Man
have grown craftier.  Could you even have
nightmared this parade of our frivolous lives,
this legion of beautified faces
by which he is masking his face.
While The Chosen can’t seem to get over
the sound of their magnified voices, crooning to us
everything we still want to hear, showing to us,
in their glossy white pages, everyone we ever wanted
in our beds.

You saw so clearly The Man,
working maniacally in his sealed laboratory,
the gleam of destruction in those eyes
we mistook for human, concocting
ever-more-enticing concoctions --
a dash of weakness here,
a taste of envy there,
a big dollop of greed on the top.
And I must report, it is working!
The cells of the basically decent are breaking down
into confusion.  The skins of the only-observing
are showing seared edges.  Next it will be
those who stand on the rung just below them,
promised a big bite of American Pie for their
loyalty, now just going up like the rest of us
in that smoke you so keenly detected
so long ago.

Then there are those – you would weep for them –
locked in locked closets,
once fooled into doing our dirty work for us,
Now -- 80 each day! every day!
are putting their guns into their mouths,
just hoping to be shot
into a better world.

That sure fire you proclaimed
from the top of your mountain
is growing ever-hotter, is faster and faster
turning our lives to vainglorious dust.
While those once well-meaning but weak
have been oh-so-cleverly enticed to shout out
Yes!  Yes!  Bomb those bastards for bombing us!
Torture those torturers!
as lustily as any Roman spurred on his gladiator
blinded by pride, to sink his sword into a lion
just being a lion.

Your eyes would never believe,
James the Ascetic, just how high is
this mountain of goodies The Man, posing as baker,
keeps turning out on our well-polished tables
for our runaway gluttony.
Just the shine of his toys
would blind you in minutes.
And our sons and our daughters,
godhelpthem,
believe they can talk to each other
in only one hundred and forty lowercap letters.
And Jimmy, they actually imagine
they are saying something so tiny
is profound.  Those of us older
pretend that our hearts are still beating,
while the lifeblood of our bodies is leaking,
almost unnoticed, away.  Until soon
we’ll be only so many dried leaves
under his feet.

So we need you, still need you,
kind Mr. Baldwin.  That teacher
who instructed us so softly,
so mightily.  Even the best of our voices
can’t rise to the height of your mountain.
So please, sir, if you cannot come back,
could you possibly find just some castoff connector
from the home of one of the fallen, to give us
just one more transfusion
of your healing fire?

So sing to us, sing to us,
just one more time.  We promise to
study your lyrics more clearly, your words with more
reverence if you’ll only come back to us
just one more time
before it’s too late.


Patricia Brooks is the author of two commercially published novels and is now working 24/7 to finish the epic historical novel Eagle and Child, eleven years in the birthing.  A key chapter of the novel will be published in the Spring issue of the Mandala Journal, the literary publication of the Afro-American Studies program at the University of Georgia.  She has published short fiction and poetry in a variety of journals, most recently Whirlwind, Blast Furnace, The Voices Project, Narrative Northeast, and The Great American Literary Magazine, now posted on-line.

O BEAUTIFUL

by George Held

Image source: I am a Liberian not a virus

Liberia:

African nation created by and for freed American slaves in 1820;

name derived from “liberty”

The stout ebony man in the navy pinstriped suit
And steel-rim specs and white hair and goatee
Speaks into the mike of the lone news station
To cover his presser. His voice is strong, his speech
Articulate, with a faint African lilt. He just wants
To say that he is a Liberian, a West African,
And a healthy man; he is not ebola, he does not
Have ebola. Please do not stigmatize me
Or other West Africans or Liberians as though                        
We are a virus. We are human beings.

What he leaves for his American audience
To think is that he is a despised black man,
He is a cursed West African, a Typhoon Mary
Of a Liberian trying to excuse his type of danger
To our spacious skies, that he should be deported
From our fruited plains, our purple waves of disdain;
O say, can’t you see the fearful American faces,
The hateful American resentment that wants him
Gone from our midst? O God, bless America
And preserve its totally deserved purity.

George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JOHNNIE

by Robert Farmer

BEREA, Ky. — I WAS raised amid the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, but I was always drawn to nearby Berea. The hamlet, tucked into the lush green hills on the western side of the Appalachians, has a long legacy of equality and free inquiry — among other things, it’s home to Berea College, the first integrated and coeducational college in the South. There are lots of folks like me in Berea, who came here for its professed openness and diversity. But we had a rude shock last week, when the City Council voted 5 to 3 against an ordinance to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The vote illuminates a new reality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans. The equality divide we face is no longer between red and blue states, but between urban and rural America. Even as we celebrate victories like this month’s Supreme Court order on same-sex marriage, the real front in the battle for equality remains the small towns that dot America’s landscape.  --Small Towns, Small Hearts, The Battle for Gay Rights in Rural America, Silas Housecoat, NY Times, October 22, 2014. Image source: Angela Worldtrekker.

Whatver happened to Johnnie
who wouldn’t dress out for high school gym,
loved chatting up the girls,
rode them around
in his blue convertible back in ’48.

Once later when we gathered,
smug from foreign places,
he spoke of wild parties in San Francisco
and looked the part
long before our little mountain town
woke up to the world and The Castro.

I’ve looked everywhere.
We’ve lost him.
He’d be about 83 now.
Probably dead.
Back then they just disappeared
from little towns all across the country.


Robert Farmer is a retired forester who lives in Cleveland, Ohio and occasionally publishes poems in small journals.

PROGRESSION

by Kristina England

Yesterday I woke to people talking about ducks,
a dynasty, some man that believes in the bible,
says homosexuality is not what God proclaimed.
I don’t have Cable, stumble through the news,
piecing it together like a young child
does with puberty, hormones, identity.
Today I woke to Uganda passing a law:
life in jail for those who partake in same sex love.
How does the dynasty man feel about this news?
He says he’s a love thy neighbor kind of guy,
does not promote hate or discrimination.
He just sticks to interpretation of the written page.
But what does he think of Uganda?
How does it make him feel inside?
I’ve been around long enough to know
that the human word means little
compared to the judgements of the mind.
Perhaps the duck man will squirm,
hold himself back from quacking
at how hard it is to love yourself,
to realize we are all fallible men.
Or he’ll skim over the headline,
say Uganda is not his problem.
He has nothing to do with Uganda.
He’s just an average, God-fearing man.
Then, he’ll grab his gun, hunt duck for dinner,
So what if he’d rather hunt a moose today.
Ducks are what he knows and understands.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her writing is published or forthcoming at Extract(s), The New Verse News, The Story Shack, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other magazines.