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.

THE NEW DHARMA BUMS

by Bradley McIlwain 

When I could not sing

Drunk on disillusionment
And pain 

Shiva drank the poison

From my throat 
To free my spirit 

From city lights

That burned too bright 
My past cremated in ashes and bottle caps

Too much bar puja

Midweek between pints 
And poetry 

Searching for Kerouac’s

Drunken Dharma Bums
Looking for enlightenment 

In the Desolation Peaks

And the road is a ghost 
Holding out my thumb 

Like old Dean Moriarty 

The highway line a rehab
Of breakthroughs and breakdowns.

Enlightenment 

A bridge that burns 
At both ends 

And the only way out

Is in;
The only way to the universe… within

Hopping freight trains 

In early morning fog
The lakes and forests 

Of America 

On fire with desire 
Boxcar wine and scrawl 

Of poet pirates 

Prophesying on 
The great railway lines 

Swallowing the landscape 

Like a serpent 
Of what might have been…

Vasuki

Coiled in the winds 
Of immortality 

Carries me to the desert 

Of mirage and reality 
Of starlight and self doubt 

A new Mahabharata

Through doorways 
Of non Euclidean dreams

Where the chaos 

Of freedom is born 
In the dust of factory floors;

Discarded verses 

Rediscovered in dust 
Swept up and drank 

From voices with dry tongues 

As a tonic for the cause.
The well spring of hope 

Lies just beyond the sun,

My rucksack as heavy 
As the heart of the mountain’s back.

Bradley McIlwain works as a Teacher-Librarian, where he strives to provide meaningful and inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and advocacy. He believes that poems and poets can be agents for social change. Bradley’s latest book Dear Emily was published by Roasted Poet Press last year.

ON THE EVE OF A NEW ERA

by Lis Anna-Langston

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

I am waiting for the sun to dip

low over the hilltops in an act of defiance.

I am waiting for our government
to rise up again and say,
Give me liberty or give me death.

I am waiting for the free flow moments
to carry me to the seas that bump against
the belly of Savannah

and I am waiting for the tenderness to return to the night.

I am waiting for the spies to reveal their secrets
and cast aside the masks they’ve
considered identity

waiting for the bells to toll,
announcing the coming of relevance

I am waiting for elementary particles
to create their own game show
challenging anti-matter to a bet.

I am waiting for the Aztecs to conquer the Spaniards
with wit, beguiling them with the crooked smile of Montezuma’s revenge.

I am waiting for the hot neutron glow
of the sun to illuminate our place in the Universe

and I am waiting for the Warlords
to cast off their weapons and disappear into the mist.

I am waiting for the ghost of Elvis
to return to the white house
in Tupelo, Mississippi where his Mama
is standing on the front porch calling for the shadow of him
to return
from the long lines of fans
waiting
at the gates of his grace land.

I am waiting for Thomas Jefferson to bow to the
kindred spirits in the streets of Philadelphia and
walk back to Carpenters Hall to call a meeting
regarding the state of delinquent bets with the Republic
and its people.

I am waiting for the catcher in the rye
to take the hand of John Lennon and pull him back to earth.

I am waiting for my grandmother
to return to this life
so I can tell her I miss her
and I am waiting for the mailman
to bring my new book of poetry.

I am waiting for art to express form,
not just feeling
like the gut of Picasso driven and seeming.

I am waiting for the unmarked grave
of Che Guevarra
to sprout one thousand wild flowers.

I am waiting for God to find the box of crayons
I sent him
special delivery
with the sharpener on the side.

I am waiting for Dorothy to wake up in Oz,
get out of bed
and do something about that pedaling witch
once and for all.

I am waiting for the Disciples to stop serving redemption at the last 
supper.

I am waiting for Truman Capote to stop drinking
and finish another novel
and waiting for the raven
to return weary
back to the door of Edgar’s dreary.

I am waiting for the Romans to take back the Empire
on a Sunday morning
while all the good heathens are praying.

And I am waiting as patiently as a kidnapping plot
hashed out over coffee
for the scavenger angels
to walk out of the alleyways
cloaked in darkness
dragging the age of enlightenment
with their dirty hands
to rise up and startle us
with utter abandon
again.

Hailed as “an author with a genuine flair for originality” by Midwest Book Review and “a lovable, engaging, original voice…” by Publishers Weekly, Lis Anna-Langston is the author of Skinny Dipping in a Dirty Pond, Gobbledy, Tupelo Honey, Maya Loop, Wild Asses of the Mojave Desert, and the short story collection Tolstoy & the Checkout Girl. Raised along the winding current of the Mississippi River on a steady diet of dog-eared books she attended a Creative and Performing Arts School from middle school until graduation, went on to study Literature at Webster University, Creative Writing through the Great Smokies Writing Program through the University of North Carolina at Asheville and recently graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2023. Her novels have won the NYC Big Book Award, Independent Press Awards, and dozens of other book awards. As writer and producer her films screened and won at film festivals around the world. A three-time Pushcart award nominee, her work has been published in dozens of literary journals including The Literary Review, Emerson Review, Hobart, Barely South Review, and Emrys Journal.

CAMP FIRE

by Sydney Doyle

“That to the heighth of this great argument I may assert eternal providence, and justify the ways of God to men.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost


Not lost, but devoured.
A whole town mouthed
entire and swallowed down
a burning throat
in what should have been
California’s rainy season.
We were warned
the garden was formed
with snake-sized holes,
but in this Eden,
all trees are forbidden.
We’ve left enlightenment
to a blind man—
and did he, sightless, know
that Paradise was left
exposed, not undefended,
but indefensible?


Sydney Doyle earned her MA in English and creative writing at the Pennsylvania State University and her MFA at Johns Hopkins University where she currently teaches courses in creative writing. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Canary, Waccamaw, Animal Magazine, Glassworks, and elsewhere.

BUDDHA HAD IT EASY

by Michael Mark

The Bergin University of Canine Studies Puppy Cam

It was so much easier
to become enlightened then.

They didn’t have the
Puppy Cam to deal with.

Buddha could spend all day under
the Bodhi tree with no thought
of puppies wiggling and
tumbling.

So cute.

Puppies sleeping in piles.
Puppies waking up.
Puppies blindly crawling
over each other to get food.

Each move updated in
real time,
to your phone, iPad, laptop
right to your HDTV!

Puppies peeing.
Puppies’ eyes opening.
Puppies barking and
scaring themselves.
So cute.
Puppies being licked
clean by mom.

That’s how he was
able to concentrate with
such precision, for so long.

Cobras encircled Buddha.
Elephants charged him.
Mara sent his sexy daughters
to be his concubines.
He didn’t blink.

But Buddha didn’t have
the Puppy Cam.


Michael Mark is a hospice volunteer and long distance walker – his latest journey was the Camino De Santiago. His poetry has appeared or is set to appear in Angle Journal, Awakening Consciousness Magazine, Empty Mirror, Everyday Poets, Forge Journal, OutsideIn Magazine, Petrichor Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, Ray’s Road Review, Scapegoat Journal, Spillway, Red Booth Review, Red Paint Hill, Sleet Magazine, The Thing Itself, The New York Times, UPAYA, Word Soup End Hunger, Wayfarer and other nice places.