COME HOME!

by Ana Doina

“Come home, my love, come home!” I beg

on the phone. “Where are the kids?” you ask 

hurriedly. “Phil is at school, Al was 

late for class again, and is now stuck

in traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel

on the Jersey side.”

“Thank God for that,” you sigh. 

 

On William Street, your office’s windows 

three blocks from the Towers, allow you 

a full view of the conflagration. “I see them,”

you whisper mournfully, “burning 

like two Roman Candles. Last year this time,” 

you say, “I was there, on the ninetieth floor, 

meeting with a client.” I grip my cell phone 

and try to keep my wits, but tears are streaming 

on my face, and my mind is racing to find

a way to get you home. 

 

“The South Tower is struggling,” you say.

“I don’t think it can stand much longer.” 

The certainty in your voice makes me realize

yours is not a guess but the professional opinion

of an engineer. “Lord, there could be over 

fifty thousand people there. I can see flames 

going floor by floor, charring everything. 

 

The building trembles; glass is busting out, 

concrete, pulverized, cascades from it, 

and fragments float away like flakes. It sputters 

smoke and sparks. It’s going to pancake.”

 

“Come home! Get out of there,” I sob. 

All of a sudden, there is a tremendous boom, 

and the phone line goes dead. 

Author’s note: The phone lines in that part of Manhattan were destroyed at that exact time. My husband made it home that day. It took him many hours walking through the singed streets, the clouds of soot, and falling debris, frightened and angry like the rest of us. The poem’s dialogue is almost word by word the conversation I had with my husband at the time the towers were burning.

Ana Doina’s work has appeared in numerous national and international print and online magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. Her chapbook, The Later Generation, published by Kelsay Books, and her full-length book of poems, Legend of Bread, published by Legacy Press Books, were released in 2024. Her book Coming to America: Stories and Essays, to be published by Histria Books, is scheduled for release in October 2026. 

ISRAEL LAUNCHES OVER 100 AIRSTRIKES ON LEBANON IN TEN MINUTES WITHOUT WARNING

by Moudi Sbeity 

as if a warning is a good excuse. 

This means over ten airstrikes per minute. 

What else could we do with a minute? 

I won't name anything lovely for you. 

I won’t save you from this terribleness, saying 

we could plant more than a hundred seeds. 

That perhaps we could feed a hundred people, 

sustain a worldwide hymn till heaven hears this 

aching chorus. Some poems need to show you 

how much it hurts. Some poems need to leave 

you wondering

just how tightly a heart must be closed in order

to champion a thirst for destruction. Just how 

desperately the soul must be choked before 

waging its inner horrors. Just how much more 

can we rip each other before remembering that 

a minute is sixty seconds, and a second is about 

one breath cycle, and one breath cycle is all you 

need to stay alive. I won't even do the math for 

you, the one that calculates all the breath cycles 

that encompass a minute across the millions of 

people now breathing in the unsanctioned dust. 

Just how much ignorance, and how heavy of a dose, 

and how often, does it take to poison one person’s 

blood before he decides to launch more than a 

hundred missiles, before his guilty fingers 

violently reach into God’s pulse. 

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, educator, and psychotherapist. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by The New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression.

EMPTY SPACES

by Adam Bagdasarian

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

There is no pill or drink for this

No pill for the rubble of home

for the dust of flesh

the ash of bone

No drink for the season-less years—

for the trees, for the water

the sunlight one cannot feel

or the empty plate of the evening meal

Each new day comes D.O.A.

rewound, somehow and replayed

rewound and played

rewound, replayed

Adam Bagdasarian’s Forgotten Fire was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. In 2002,  First French Kiss and Other Traumas was a finalist for the ALA Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults.

TRADE-OFFS

by Imogen Arate

The bombs continue to fall. Cartoon by MATE

“Israel's New Gaza Operation Should Be Called 'Chariots of Genocide'” —Gideon Levy, Haaretz, May 14, 2025

I am the long night

that deepens into

a velvet gloom

that rambles the curls 

of your crooked fingers

as you pull irresistibly near

I am the bind

your phobias birthed

that cracks frail bones

rattling of evasion 

I am the deadly silence

strung by the eager

fingers of avoidance

A crystal each missing 

word unspoken 

A precious stone 

each unuttered phrase 

I am the irreplaceable 

treasures you've smashed 

to scatter as dust

while cradling the empty

slogans of freedom 

Imogen Arate is an Asian-American poet in search of hope: that humanity will overcome our self-destructive tendencies to work together against the onslaught of the climate crisis. She's also the Executive Director of Poets and Muses, an award-winning multimedia artist platform that has featured diverse contemporary poetic voices from around the globe. She believes that we will only be able to value lives equally when we lend our ears and hearts to the life stories of those we don't readily recognize as our kin and stop requiring the presence of certain socioeconomic trappings to recognize people’s right to a dignified existence.

DON’T FORGET

by Laura Rodley

The cause of mysterious mass deaths of African elephants has finally been unraveled — and scientists who authored a new report say that the outbreaks could be more likely to occur amid conditions created by the ongoing climate crisis. Thirty-five African elephants in northwestern Zimbabwe dropped dead under baffling circumstances between late August and November 2020. Eleven of the massive herd animals died within a 24-hour period… Earlier that same year, about 350 elephants in neighboring northern Botswana also had died suddenly over the course of three months… It turns out a bacterial infection killed the elephants, according to the research based on samples taken from 15 of the animals that died in Zimbabwe… The deaths took place as food and water resources dwindled during the dry season, forcing the elephants to travel increasing distances to look for water and to forage… The authors said that heat, drought and population density in that area were likely contributing factors to the outbreak. And the extreme conditions that scientists project will occur with more frequency as Earth warms could mean more elephant deaths in the future. —CNN, November 6, 2023

We don’t forget, we remember the waterholes
shown to us by the elders:
in Zimbabwe we trekked lumbering our feet
across the arid dry ground, leaves and
twigs, fruits already eaten
by those hungry before us.
It is a fever that starts first as thirst,
no relief from flapping our ears back,
waving dry dust across each others’ backs,
we remember the waterholes our elders
brought us to in times of thirst—
they’ve been here before, but never so long as this.
We don’t forget, we hold all the memories
of the beauty of the running water,
the coolness in the shade, how
you loved each other, all of you—
don’t forget—the rumble of our feet
transmitting messages to each other as
we roam further apart, the sound
of jeeps from rescuers from other years
bringing banana leaves, but this time,
the water holes we remembered
had dried up, you walked too far away
for our message to reach you—turn back.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

SUMMER OF THE ELEMENTS 2023

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman, OVISS

a seething cauldron

fire   water   drought of air and earth

                       

bitter flames

birthing a dying cough of dust

indifferent flooding

arrid soil

are you

the voices boiling

out of our restless anger

our restless fear

the restless grief

of our barren and fractured hearts

 

         

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, US Catholic, Commonweal, The Christian Century, Presence, Prism, and several anthologies. She was a Pushcart nominee in 2017 and 2020. Five poems from her book, she: robed and words, set to music by James Lee III were performed on May 11, 2021 as part of a concert held at Y92 in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.” Another concert was held in Cleveland, Ohio on March 28, 2023.

OUR QUONDAM COMPANIONS PERSIST

by Jonathan Yungkans

The Human Brain, a painting by Edward Wolverton.

Of my country and of my family I 

have little to say that hasn’t been either
rent or splattered upon. Bone fragments and dots 
of brain create paisley Rorschach patterns in
 
the fabric of my conscience. Let’s allot the 
dappled cotton skein to drape figures gone
more statue than statuesque. Children, how you 
bleed. You shape garnet- and wine-colored mud pies
 
and smear them against your faces and clothes 
to blend with earth, ashes to ashes, bullets
to dust, all the pretty bodies going down.

Author’s note: Title taken from the poem “The Handshake, the Cough, the Kiss” by John Ashbery in the collection A Worldly Country.

Jonathan Yungkans juggles writing and photography with work as an in-home health-care provider, fueled by copious amounts of coffee, while finding time for the occasional deep breath. His second poetry chapbook Beneath a Glazed Shimmer was published by Tebot Bach in 2021.

DROUGHT SONG OF THE ELEPHANTS

by Orel Protopopescu

 

We lumber along and sway  

closer to death, stirring dust

like the skirts of the women

eternally searching for water, 

jugs on their heads, 

their children like bundles

of sticks on their backs.

 

We are searching for water,

but keep finding death

in the soot of the grasses 

that once waved to us.

Who took the rain clouds, 

the green from the trees? 

We walk a parched path

where leaves crack and fall

 like birds from the sky.  

            

We remember the pools,

the pools where we played

before days dried in blood

left a burnt orange haze

of dust in our eyes. 

What drives us, who hunts us, 

what beast made of heat?

 

With the children like sticks

we keep drinking the dust.

We drink and they drink

until tongues turn to ash

and milky eyes close.

 

And now we’re forgetting

the clouds and the grasses,

the haze of the heat

with no name and no face.

We’re forgetting the children

who fell on this path 

where our tongues turn to ash

and our clouded eyes close.

Orel Protopopescu has written prize-winning works for children and adults. She won the Oberon poetry prize in 2010 and 2020. Her first biography Dancing Past the Light: The Life of Tanaquil Le Clercq (University Press of Florida, 2021) received a starred review in Library Journal. 

THE WEST IS BURNING

by Steve Deutsch

On the rise above 

Route 80, by a trickle

that was once 

a river

 

I watch a line

of traffic

a thousand miles long 

going nowhere.

 

The road has 

buckled and a semi

sits on its side

steam still boiling.

 

One by one

the cars and trucks

run out of gas—

dream irony

 

I suppose,

and people stand

beside their behemoths—

afraid at last.

 

The pine

and hemlock forest 

that lined the road

has turned

 

a sickly brown

and trees light up

like candlesticks

one by one.

 

Children fight

the fire

with blankets

and spit.

 

And the dust

and smoke 

and ash

make breathing

 

an occupation.

The west is burning

and few if any

will make it out.

 

I wake with a gasp—

heart escaping.

Smoke colors the moon

the west is burning.

Steve Deutsch has been widely published both on line and in print. Steve is a three time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is poetry editor for Centered Magazine. His poetry books: Perhaps You Can (2019), Persistence of Memory (2020),  and Going, Going, Gone (2021) were all published by Kelsay Press.