NEW YORK CITY, 7 AM, SUNDAY, 2026

by Naomi Pliskow

Fat pigeons peck hopefully

at Saturday night’s scat–

tickets, receipts, ketchup-stained napkins–

dotting grey cement as though they were 

the leaves of autumn.

 

The Saturday night squawks and judders, 

the clangs and gulps and sighs,

are replaced by an echoing quiet,

as though covered by a layer of soft cotton

intruded on only by pigeon murmurs and 

the petulant honk 

of a single metal beast on rubber legs

piloted by some human who didn’t   

make it home last night.

 

The smell of sweat and alcohol

from a hooded passerby  

interrupts the aroma   

of bread baked at four this morning

when the baker’s dark hands grasped soft white dough 

trying to hold on to these islands 

for just a little while longer

before being forced to return  

to his ravaged own,

where people peck for leavings

like hopeful morning pigeons

and bake bitterness into 

every scarce loaf.

Naomi Pliskow published her first poetry collection in a three-ring binder at age eight. She recently returned to writing poetry after a long hiatus. Her poems have been published in One Art, Adanna, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Canary, and several anthologies. Her satirical song lyrics were published in The New York Times in 2024. Her chapbook Entering the Water will be released in September of 2026. She is editor of the Philadelphia Mad Poets Society newsletter.

MY LITTLE TYRANT

by Sergio A. Ortiz

Image source: The Onion

And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

—Donald Trump

You stopped to desire what you looked at,

you stopped to invent what you looked at,

but you were never at a standstill. 

You understood the docks, the places
where salt is a blind lady seated on your soul,
where foam gnaws at the base of everything,
with its small teeth resembling
the quicksand of what is forgotten,
the sites where old anchors and barges
of oversize engines oxidize in droppings
of seagulls and pelicans, the small white tumults
where peace and movement intertwine
their nets in the old-fashion-way of the sea,
the landscapes that surrounded you
without you knowing how far from your imagination,
your most intimate arguments could travel.

There is a sky full of vessels that eyes contemplate
from below tears, from where your gaze runs out of breath.

An eternity that anyone could say,
is worn out by extreme use, fondled by the dead,
softened by the complaints of the sick,
an afternoon that is sinking like a boat
in a landscape that belongs to nobody else but you.

You understood most of this,
you distrusted your desire, but it was your saliva
that shone on the teeth of your desire,
you were the doughy dough someone chewed
the dough that ended up in your stomach.
It was your hand, the one with which you said goodbye.

That is why you hesitated in the middle of the night,
you heard the trees get lost in their branches,
you felt the wind halt, as if in search of something
between the folds of the curtain, you heard the dead
laugh in their holes imitating moles,
you will discover oblivion, let it walk into your bedroom
dressed as a butler to announce what is already served at the table.

Unintentionally you will dine with great appetite and at the end,
leaving the napkin on the table, you will praise the menu.

Sergio A. Ortiz is a gay Puerto Rican poet and the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and a 2016 Best of the Net nominee. His poems have been published in hundreds of journals and anthologies. He is currently working on his first full length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

LISTENING TO THE NEWS AT MY FARM TABLE IN MAINE, OR SOWETO SAYING SO

by Patricia Smith Ranzoni

This morning’s bread is a recipe and a half to make full use
of yesterday’s ricotta whey. I mix and think, the drop leaf
of my old oak work table crying in rhythm with my kneading,
Mandela’s death on the radio turning into a living ingredient.

It comes to me, making this week’s oatmeal-molasses
this enriched way, that I need to look up Soweto Bread
and invent an outback Maine version, in honor, the way
our Obama Bread rose from the joy we elders earned.

Wondering at my work, I knead. And drizzle Nebali tree olive oil 
all the way from the Canaan Fair Trade route from Palestinian
farmers to brother Schaibles’ caravan downeast, its bittersweet
anointing a clear film consecrating the overcoming of apartheid
in South Africa and how, once we knew, we wrote, petitioned,
and marched, the way, after television made it this far north,
showing us, we did over our own country’s shame.

Wondering at my work, I gaze into this dough lifting
by this fire here in this north, for hope, asking, if, as we
keep hearing, people who plant trees in whose shade they know 
they will not live to sit have begun to know the meaning of life,
what can be said of those who uproot, ax, chainsaw, burn,
rip out by thousands ancient trees of others, the ancestral
food and means trees of others? The very identifying
and sacramental trees of others? The olive trees of neighbors?

Do separation barriers make them not neighbors anymore
or neighbors held apart in a less than human way? Wondering
at my work.
              
     Do not the Mandelas of the world foretell
     that the writing on the walls of the oppressed
     proves other Freedom Days are rising?
     That making bread with Palestinian oil in Maine,
     we must make up our own minds and, like Soweto,
                                        say so?


Health troubles keep Patricia Smith Ranzoni from public participation so she relies on joining her voice this way. Her unschooled work documenting the Canadian-American, mixed-blood Yankee cultures of her people has been published across the country and abroad, including past issues of The New Verse News and most recently in Parallel Uni-Verse, Tuesday Anthology of the Oregon Coast, and Bedding Vows, Love Poems from Outback Maine (North Country Press), her 9th collection. She participates electronically with the Blue Hill Peninsula Peace & Justice group.

WIFE SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING IN BLAZE

by Darlene Pagan

Image credit: defokes / 123RF Stock Photo

She never imagined the sheet she lit
would curl him in its hot tongue, never
believed he wouldn’t wake in those flames,
throw back the covers, and wash his feet like
she’d been asking him every night before bed. 

The air buzzed with a lightning storm.
The chickens refused to lay and no matter
how long or hard she kneaded the dough,
all morning, the loaves cooked up
dense and hard as baseball bats. 
At least, no child again this month. 

A photo of them as newlyweds, so young
they look like children playing dress up,
hangs in the hallway.  Too stubborn to quit
a decade later and now look where it’s got them. 

Black petals fall.  Bits of sheet, newly caught
rise like cardinals.  A door opens, the wind
roars, timbers spit and splinter until she finds
herself outside in the grass watching

lightning split a sycamore.  She looks from
the tree to the body they’re pulling too late
from the burning house.  She believes it
when she tells them she has no idea who he is.


Darlene Pagan teaches at Pacific University in Oregon, where she lives with her husband and sons.  A book of poems, Blue Ghosts, was published with Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and essays have most recently appeared in journals such as Calyx, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Madison Review, Poet Lore, Hiram Poetry Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Memoir(and), Brevity, and Literal Latté, among others. Pagan recently completed a full-length poetry project tentatively titled, Setting the Fire. She loves to bike, hike, dig at the beach, walk in the rain, sing, and ride roller coasters now that her boys are just tall enough to ride.