A ROTTEN TIME

by Marge Piercy

After violent months of war

no one can win, men with

assault rifles doing what they

were built to do, kill many,

 

world burning, people dying

of heat, hurricanes stronger

more often, tornadoes

fiercer, drought scorching

 

land to desert, Animals,

trees dying off and gone,
let’s not just hope, pray

but work to leave an earth

 

we’re not guilty of spoiling.

Despair is just laziness.

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

Marge Piercy is the author of twenty one poetry collections and seventeen novels, including Woman at the Edge of Time, and SEX WARS. A lifelong feminist, socialist, and anti-war activist, her writing has been exploring labor, environmental justice, and the struggle for a more equitable world over the last five decades.

SWIM THROUGH THE VEIL

by H. G.

UN Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory calls on the Israeli Government to urgently protect Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and ensure his safety, dignity, and physical integrity. The Israeli Government must immediately release Dr. Abu Safiya, or promptly charge him with a recognizable criminal offence and grant him a fair trial. In the meantime, he must be urgently transferred to a civilian hospital to ensure that he receives life-saving medical care. Dr. Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, has been held in Israeli custody since December 2024 under Israel’s Unlawful Combatant Law, without charge or trial. He was arrested at the hospital after refusing to evacuate while treating critical patients. According to his lawyers, Dr. Abu Safiya appears to be at imminent risk of death. Information available to UN Human Rights--OPT indicates he has been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, including prolonged solitary confinement, repeated severe assaults resulting in grave injuries, and denial of medical care. —United Nations, July 9, 2026

Reoccurring
nightmares of my childhood
suddenly surprise my adult dreamscape

I'm drowning again
too deep underwater
sometimes
my ankle tied to a boat
other times
my car went over a bridge 

my chest and lungs
burn building
crescendo of terror
tension rising
behind my eyes
my head:
a pressure cooker

needing to whistle

I accept death
mouth and lungs
a vacuum 
sucking in
only to find

I can breathe underwater 

and I see
my Irish great (times two) grandparents
drowning
as the Staten Island Ferry sinks
with them on board

I feel the rage burning in her chest
the pressure of millions of colonized generations of the Irish

screaming in her head

freedom murdered
death in diaspora 

finally sucking water

into her lungs

and she swims through the veil

into my dreams

bloated

water laden corpses

newly lifeless buoys

bobbing

left behind 

and she breathes underwater with me

she whispers to me,

follow the call

follow our footsteps

to Staten Island

and Jersey City 

to our Palestinian brothers and sisters

and promise

not to leave them behind

even if we all drown

in the blue

of two colonizer flags

and so I wait

in my dreams

with my great (times two) grandmother 
and Refaat Alareer, Michael Collins, and Anne Frank

and the starved, shot, drowned, hanged, gassed, exiled, vaporized, reanimated (and reeliminated), dismembered masses

for Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya

when he arrives

we swim through the veil

and try again

H.G. is an American poet based in New York. She holds an MA in history and is working on her first verse novel. Her previous poems have appeared in The New Verse News, The Inflectionist Review, The Amphibian, Blue Minaret and is forthcoming in Neon & Smoke.

OH BEAUTIFUL

by Chris Reed

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

For the country’s 250th birthday celebration

my sister texts a collage of photos of our mother

in her last years before dying at 100.

At first it seems a strange birthday message

for the nation, until I start looking at the photos.

In my mother’s face, her seated posture, 

often holding flowers or her cat on her lap,

I see the inevitable wear of years, time’s destruction,

a loss of elasticity and nimbleness, 

a loss of focus, purpose and endless energy,

a loss of fitting in to how things work and get done.

 

Yet in her eyes and smile in photo after photo,

I see acceptance and memories of past joys

and loves, her ocean sailings, mountain climbs, 

her shore walks, and dance among multitudes.

I see a hint of denial, pretending that her place

in the family of things is not coming to an end,

only her eyes betraying her knowledge 

that the journey has already started.

Her face tells me all this, but also tells me 

that amid her brokenness and joys and losses,

ever courageous, she is finding new love

and meaning in this, her season of endings.

 

With no flowers for you, let me still say,

Happy Birthday America.

Chris Reed cared for her mother in her last two years of life and found beauty in her mother's decline in health and purpose.  Finishing Line Press recently published a chapbook of Reed's poems about this time, Two Years and Two Months.

HARRY HINES BLVD, DALLAS, TX, 0647 AM

by Kay White Drew

Taillights stream by like corpuscles thru blood vessels, branches
off the aortic arch (there’s a mnemonic for that I’ve forgotten),
blurred and softened by the translucent window shade.
Traffic lights turn from green to brief yellow to long red,
downtown skyline hulking in predawn distance, the stark ovoid 
tower of the Renaissance Hotel lording it over the rest.

A mile down the road, my brother sleeps in an isolation room,
his embattled bone marrow doing what it can to recover
from the chemical onslaught it’s been subjected to
in the name of healing, even as the drivers of these cars
whizzing by my 3rd floor hotel window go about their business—
driving to work, worrying about their bills and their kids
and their ailing parents, listening to some false prophet
on the radio telling them it’s all the fault of the immigrants
and the trans people rather than the demented tyrant in the White House.

How many miles from here to the nearest of the concentration camps
(and how many are there in this state?) where the people detained
would give anything to be driving to work, worrying
about an overdue mortgage payment or a wayward teenage son.
These hulking urban clusters, the fruit of oil/blood money,
can’t help but draw my contempt, even my hatred…

Yes, I hate you, Dallas, not just because my brother’s dying here,
but because our country is, too.

 

Kay White Drew is a retired physician whose poems appear in various anthologies and internet outlets including The Intima, Gargoyle, Second Coming, and New Verse News. She’s also published short stories and several essays, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a memoir, Stress Test, about medical school in the 1970s. She lives in Rockville, MD with her husband. Reading and spending time in nature keep her sane(ish) in these difficult times.

THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN

A Prose Poem

by Howie Good

President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia concluded their summit in Alaska on Friday without declaring agreement on any issue, much less the one Mr. Trump said was at the top of his agenda, ending the war in Ukraine. —The New York Times, August 15. 2025

The other day I saw a bald eagle for only the second time in my life. It soared over the treeline on the far side of the marsh. Almost in the same instant that I recognized it from its distinctive silhouette, it was gone, our national bird, symbol of strength and freedom. We are entering the last days of summer. Some of the plants I planted in the spring never grew, and the plants that did grow have begun dying. I dread the coming winter, a hulking, red-eyed monster roving streets of blackened ruins.

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose poetry collections include The Dark and Akimbo, available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. 

BLOOD OF TIME

by Steve Zeitlin

pierced by a missile, M16 pellet,

arrow, slingshot, or spear, 

 

this time on Ukrainian soil

a dying soldier, 

twisted hands upon on his torso, 

seeks to thwart the going of his life, 

struggles to hold his insides in,

as the blood of thirty, forty, fifty unlived years

oozes from between his desperate fingers –

 

drowning his high school ring of love, 

his wedding and his children—

 

a universal soldier’s sacrifice—

the sacred blood of time. 

Steve Zeitlin is the Founding Director of City Lore, New York City’s Center for Urban Folk Culture, and co-founder of the Brevitas poetry collective. He the author of a volume of poetry, I Hear American Singing in the Rain, and twelve books on America’s folk culture. In 2016, he published a collection of essays, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness with Cornell University Press.  In 2022, he published JEWels: Teasing Out the Poetry in Jewish Humor and Storytelling (JPS/U. of Nebraska Press).

WHAT GROWS

by D. Dina Friedman

“Rising Cairn” by Celeste Roberge

from grief, the prickled ball in my heart

The tank imprinting the sands in Gaza.

The baby on the kibbutz, snatched from its mother’s arms.

Grief as breath and breath as grief

pictures of the dead, the missing

slapped on our bland screens. We might know

this child, his laugh. This teen. She worked for peace.

Grief for the plume of smoke outside the window

of the hospital, for the doctor, searching her pockets

as if she might have stashed a pill she’d forgotten,

that could save the life of a patient, writhing, dying. 

Grief, the crevice in the land split by the river

where you think you might walk down and disappear. 

Grief, a drained lake, a parched throat, a bombed city, 

a soldier singing O Sole Mio in the desert at night

because, sometimes, there’s nothing else to do 

but raise your head to the moon 

and sing as if your life depended on it.

D. Dina Friedman has published in over a hundred literary journals and anthologies (including Rattle, The Sun, Calyx, Lilith, Negative Capability, Chautauqua Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Rhino) and received four Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), a short-story collection: Immigrants(Creators Press), and two  chapbooks: Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press). 

EVEN GROUND

by tom bauer

I was born with my teeth bared hunter-like
and I chased the good life like it was a stag
in God’s forest, chopping workdays like trees,
dragging them back to build a family home
and nourish new children with veggie stews,
candles lit, our smiles in golden shadows
around a table, but there was nowhere
to hide, we couldn’t escape genocide.

And never thinking, not once, it would be
this neural energy, fluids heating
the nervous systems of society
like some mid-century reptilian brain,
terror pouring out of mansions on hills,
muddy rivers flowing, crashing great stones
to earth around us, unable to hide
because we hadn’t escaped genocide.

I had the job, the car, the family home,
I had built a life on plans, blueprints of hope,
big dreams of a career being a star,
but nothing I could do could stop a war,
though I’d hoped there wouldn’t be anymore,
no more bombs and the shrieks of dying kids,
but I think we see there’s nowhere to hide,
we cannot, will not, escape genocide.

tom bauer lives in montreal with his sons and plays boardgames.

SABBATH

by Chris Reed

The deepening fall stalls my step,
invites a seasonal sabbath,
a slowing of time, luring me
to witness the dying world,
the retreat of light, warmth, color,
a trail of endings,
this yearly dress rehearsal.

Here is the world. 
Leaves, red-rimmed, rustle silently
like yesterday’s still photos from Gaza,
Israel, Ukraine, blood-tinged. 
The deck is wet from recent rain,
as water runs out in war-torn lands,
runs out for all, as rivers 
and aquifers shrink, while torrents
wash cities into the sea.

A rest. A time away from politics,
like leaving the red-faced relatives,
arguing in the sunroom, laced
with whisky fumes, surrounded
by blue-blossomed African violets.
I’d sneak into the kitchen 
filled with the smells and warmth 
of my grandmother’s baking bread
as she hugged me and nodded,
a knowing smile on her face.

Was it in Coetzee, I read that politics
is just a form we use for the hate
and frustration already there?
Was it in Miller, I read that when
as children, love is denied, politics
and how we treat our own children,
are where we fine-tune our cruelty?

The leaves turn paler, start to yellow,
the sky, a cleaner blue after the rains.
Sabbath is about sitting with gratitude,
sitting with possibilities,
sitting with some kind of god, 
some kind of love.
I wait.


Author’s Note: The seed for this poem was this week's New York Times story about the Amazon River.


Chris Reed is a retired Unitarian minister. Her poems have recently been published in River Heron Review, The NewVerse News, and US1 Worksheets, among other journals.

SHE THINKS OF MOLTEN THINGS

by Dana Yost

I breathe

But nothing goes in

Or out. But this

Is not true.

I open my eyes

But they see nothing.

A darkness, early-morning

Darkness. Into infinity.

Is this dying?

My ears hear the

Mad-man screams

Of killers. Then the

wails of those

About to die.

A woman thinks

Of molten things:

Eyebrow melting,

Walls to a home

Curling in flames,

Dead bodies in the

Desert, not charred

But dark with bullet

Holes, torn fabric,

Hearts burnt in mid-beat.

Tracers orange, skyward

Flares red. In a room

An evacuee is given

Tea but says no, her

Mother dragged off

Like fire down a hill,

Lurching, shrieking, 

So hot an image

She curls on a cot

And thinks of molten things.

Dana Yost says of this poem: It is allegorical, about the war in Israel. It troubles me deeply and I feel the need to say something about it, but rather than write a direct, reportorial piece about it I wanted to get at the pain of it. I hope this works.

THE WIND SWEPT AWAY

by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt

After viewing photographs of destroyed towns in the Ukraine

The wind swept away 

father’s humming 

mother’s crooning 

her cleared throat  soft lullabies 

her rosaries and prayers. 

 

The wind swept away 

babies’ babbling 

children’s puzzled cries 

scalded and scarred hopes 

wheat fields turned to blackened earth.    

 

The wind swept away 

unfinished stories 

hushed words   secrets 

that once wormed their way 

into corners of rooms. 

 

The wind swept away 

mud planked floors  foundations 

cracked plaster walls  

shattered window panes 

bombs exploding like falling comets 

 

In a fierce whirl of fire and ash   

the wind swept away    

histories, memories, time 

present or to be known     unfettered dreams      

Only voices of survivors remain  

asking in garbled tongues:    

 

What is the difference between 

dying and living?  Where do our shadows take us? 

Editor’s Note: This poem arrived at The New Verse News just as we heard news of the dangerous breaching of the dam near Kherson. Although the poem’s central image is wind, it might just as well, we fear, be water.

Jan Zlotnik Schmidt  is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at SUNY New Paltz where she taught creative writing, memoir, creative nonfiction courses as well as American Literature, Women’s Literature, the Literature of Witnessing, and Holocaust Literature. Her poetry has been published in over one hundred journals including The Cream City Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review,  Phoebe, The Chiron Review, Memoir(and), The Vassar Review, The Westchester Review, and Wind. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000). Her chapbook The Earth Was Still was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time,  by Word Temple Press. Her volume of poetry, Foraging for Light,  was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019.

RIFFS ON "POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN"

by John Minczeski

"poetry makes nothing happen"

—W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

Some nights, like this one, something  

thuds against the house, a tennis ball or branch  

from the shrub below our bedroom window.  

  

Poetry makes nothing happen.  

I mean, we lie awake   

as a bitter wind slashes at the house.   

  

We have no need to shelter in a mosque or subway,   

but still my heart aches. Poetry makes nothing   

happen. It could be a deer  

  

that got into fermented crabapples.  

It could be a deer gnawing the shrub  

below the window. Some windows  

  

crack from the cold. Some explode.  

Poetry makes nothing happen  

and life goes on as if there’s no bounty  

  

on our ordinary world. Remember when the oracle  

said a great general would win the battle?   

The moon continues its unhurried changes  

  

as it has in the small forever of my life.  

It makes nothing happen, poetry. Skin cracks  

in the cold, like a tax on breathing.  

  

Stepping inside to instant warmth  

from the wind, we tell each other  

what we already know about brutality   

  

and winter. Once again poetry has made   

nothing happen. People go on dying daily  

for lack/ of what is found there.   

John Minczeski is the author of A Letter to Serafin and other collections. Recent poems have appeared in Tampa Review, The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Cider Press Review, Bear Review, North Dakota Review, and elsewhere. 

THE DAY BOMBING OF UKRAINE BEGAN, 2/24/22

by Julie Bolt

The old Kiev Restaurant on 7th Street in Greenwich Village; Allen Ginsberg and Quentin Crisp dining there.

It was always a point of debate:

Veselka, Kiev, or Ukrainian National Home

Veselka was busy and bright, 

Kiev was for neighborhood regulars early or late at night, 

UNH was to time travel into a Ukrainian  private club from another age

I loved them all, but especially Kiev 

For the best comfort food in Greenwich Village

And largest portions and lowest prices

And latest hours, the most tolerant waiters

However it was hard to decide whether to order a combo blintz and pierogi platter 

or assorted pierogi platter 

or potato pancakes

Real first world dilemma 

Ideally friends would share what they had

And then there was the challah of clouds with butter

And oh how the boys had crushes on the Ukrainian waitresses

And the head waiter flirted with my mom, cheeks flushed like borsht

And I went so often they sometimes gave me a free cherry blintz!

I knew through my Bulgarian pen pal how oppressive the Soviet Union was

I don’t remember if I thought much about whether the Kiev staff escaped oppression

But I remember that December 26, 1991 was a great day

I had just moved to Philadelphia then

So I could not celebrate at Kiev

I probably just ate a vegetable hoagie

Gorbachev had the map of peace on his head unlike Putin’s face of war

After Philly, I moved to New Mexico, Arizona and California

In 2005, I returned to NYC, ready to feast on Kiev’s sauerkraut pierogis slathered in apple sauce and fried onions

New ownership resulted in Ukrainian-Asian fusion, and small portions, 

aspiring to expensive tastes 

Sadly, Veselka acquired long NYU lines, 

So I decamped to The Ukrainian National Home

It wasn’t long before Kiev shut its doors forever

I will always mourn the closing of Kiev

I hope the owners did not miss the entire bright window of Ukraine’s democracy 

Where are they now?

What are they thinking today

as people flee Kyiv 

as Ukraine is bombed 

as Putin says the dissolution of the Soviet Union that we all lived through is a myth 

Our friends are dying in the crossfires of lies

The blue sky grows dark 

The yellow flowers burn

Julie Bolt is an associate professor of literature and writing at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. Recently, she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Transformative Learning in the Humanities. Her poems have appeared in Thieves Jargon, Slow Trains, The Red River Review, Poetic Diversity, Syntax, Shot Glass Journal and Home Planet News, amongst others. Her book is Border Pedagogy for Democratic Practice.