SEASON OF THE WITCH, 2025

by Laurie Rosen

Usha Vance official portrait

The straw brush of my fireplace broom broke free. I refuse 

to throw it away, someone must surely need it. I could refit it, 

attach it to a long branch. I dream of bringing it to Usha Vance, 

insisting she take the broomstick and make for a speedy escape. 

I assure her that sisters and aunties will rise to guide her and her 

children to freedom. 

I might be wrong in offering Usha more protection than I do 

Melania, who seems ruthless, caring only for herself, money 

and comfort. Who can forget: “I really don’t care, do you?”

Usha stays quiet, appears surprised by where she’s been taken 

hostage––her eyes full of terror like a deer in my meadow, 

during hunting season, who looks up from her grazing, realizes 

I’m staring at her. Nudging her fawn, they run for safety. (Though 

many men would hurt them, I never would). 

When they met, Usha was an attorney, a democrat, Vance was 

someone else too. But he’s been remaking himself from the 

beginning. He’s a master of reinvention, like Woody Allen’s Zelig 

or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, altering his name and persona 

again and again. I’m guessing he promised Usha that with him, she 

could have it all, career, kids, an opinion. Instead bit by bit, with each

change, he steals her voice then her power, leaving her unrecognizable 

even to herself.  

Usha, I say, save yourself, your children too. Take the broom, and 

fly, fly, fly away. 

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in One Art: a journal of poetry, Gyroscope Review, Oddball Magazine, The New Verse News, The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, Zig Zag Lit Mag, Minyan Magazine, and elsewhere. Laurie was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize.

THE GREAT LOUVRE CAPER

by James Schwartz

I map the security cameras 

Locked windows 

& locations 

Tap

Tap 

Tap 

I disable a camera 

My Amish father 

Is behind me

In hot pursuit 

Tap

Tap

I snare 

The painting

Cubist.

Tap

Tap

Tap

My Amish father

Rolls the dice

Still behind me.

Tap

Tap

The window is locked.

Tap

Tap

Tap

On a winter afternoon

We enjoy the board game 

Clue: The Great Museum Caper.

Tap

Tap

Tap

A teenage memory 

Forgotten until headlines 

Of the Great Louvre Caper.

Tap

Tap

I make my escape.

James Schwartz is a Detroit based poet and author of various poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America (2011) and most recently Big Island Beatnik: Poetry & Photography from the Lower East Rift Zone (Alien Buddha Press, 2025). queeraspoetry.bsky.social 

WEDDING IN ISRAEL

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

The green cotton nightgown—clean, 

stuffed next to sweaty 

T-shirts—is going home.

I hope not to hear again

the phone alert go off

in my gut, a morbid tuning fork.

I thank the cousins—sojourners 

with me to this fête—who,

bent over phones, found 

the fixer, the vans, the flights.

Thank the lover back home—pounding

head, twisted stomach—who pleaded,

Keep going.  

On the road to Amman, another siren.

We enter a concrete capsule

by a gas station.

Close the door.

 

 

Author’s note: Recently I traveled to Israel for a family wedding. Just hours after the last dance, Israel and Iran began attacking each other. Israel’s airport closed, trapping me, and the whole country, under barrages of missiles and drones. On the road to Jordan, and a flight out, I endured one final air raid siren and shelter. Even escaping, there was no escape.

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Sheila-Na-Gig, Nixes Mate, and Streetlight Magazine.

BOWSER THE RUNAWAY TORTOISE

by Cecil Morris

Slow and steady runaway tortoise crosses highway before Portland police rescue —Oregon Public Broadcasting. August 2, 2024

This summer’s heat beat his hard shell
like a hammer on an anvil,
and even the dandelions
were discouraged onto wilting,
so he decided he had to go
like OJ in his white Bronco,
slow-mo escape through open gate.
He thought he’d find a place both lush
and cool, the greens still succulent,
the dandelions crisp delight.
He thought Cool Hand Luke shaking it.
He hummed slow tortoise on the run,
felt the sun like cymbals on him,
heard passing cars as electric
guitars. In two days gone, he went
a mile and crossed the 205.
This was his flight, his fancy free,
‘til he was caught. Should we say found?
Now Bowser’s back in the yard,
a new tracker on his arm,
and wishing like all of us
to taste freedom one more time.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere. He and his patient partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between the cool Oregon coast and California’s relatively dry Central Valley.

TO THE TOTAL ECLIPSE

by Bill Meissner

Though we don’t know exactly why,

we travel from afar just to see it. 

We’ll journey a hundred miles. A thousand. Ten

 

thousand or more. For some reason we don’t understand,

we want to turn our heads

toward the sun and see it slowly disappear, the same way

our hunched Neanderthal ancestors did, when they noticed  

a sudden strange moment of night just outside the mouth of the cave.

 

But we are modern, and civilized. We drive SUVs to Texas or Maine,

find the exact location with our GPS.

In case of a traffic jam, we pack the car with

rations and necessities: water, snacks, and cell phones.

 

We realize it will not be an easy journey.   

It will be almost like a war zone—

those four or five million people

all flocking to the narrow path  

where the eclipse

makes its total promise to the sky.

 

We don’t know exactly why, but something calls us to leave

the bright landscape where we live

and go there, to the land where the sun dims, and, eventually,

surrounds itself

with a thin gold wedding ring.

 

We’re drawn to that place, a place where we can finally put

our cell phones down, tilt our faces toward the sky,

hold hands with those we love,

and be primitive again, and full of something we don’t understand,

as we escape the world

for those four minutes and twenty-one seconds

of frightening, beautiful darkness.

Bill Meissner is the author of 12 books, including five collections of poetry and three novels. His most recent book of poems is The Mapmaker’s Dream (Finishing Line Press). His new carnival-themed novel The Wonders of the Little World features a fortune-teller mother who, with her precocious 11-year-old daughter, goes on a search for her tightrope walker husband. His previous novel about the effects of the Vietnam War on a family in a small Midwest town is Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire.

ESCAPE

by Paul Hostovsky

He crab-walked up and out of there
and I can’t help admiring him a little for that

especially since they keep replaying it on TV 
and thousands of cops are combing Pennsylvania 

and they haven’t found him yet. And I can’t help
rooting for him a little as though he were

the underdog, and not a killer who stabbed
his girlfriend to death in front of her children.

My God. They will never get over that. Have you
ever found yourself rooting for the wrong 

side? Crab-walking is moving sort of sideways
and diagonally in an awkward, furtive manner. 

Please pass the popcorn. I wonder if they’ll ever
find him. Voyeurism is sort of furtively taking

pleasure in disaster, catastrophe, pain, and without
ever feeling the pain, or ever getting caught.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.

SILENCE AFTER THE MAUI FIRE

by Christian Hanz Lozada

I deconstruct the “Santa’s Village” Lego set
and the house has been quiet all day
 
while Hawaiian Uncle with stage 4 lungs watches the news
and the house has been quiet all day
 
the county asks family of the missing to submit DNA to match ashen remains
and the house has been quiet all day
 
after the fire Hawaiian Uncle escaped by sleeping on the shore
and the house has been quiet all day
 
and by crossing an ocean and by needing his niece’s husband to clean his ass
and the house has been quiet all day
 
long enough for health insurance ones and zeroes to change Hawaii to America
and the house has been quiet all day

Christian Hanz Lozada (he/him) is the son of an immigrant Filipino and a descendent of the Southern Confederacy. He knows the shape of hope and exclusion. He authored the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not (2023) and co-authored Leave with More Than You Came With (2019). His poems have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review (Pushcart Nominee), Bamboo Ridge Press, 34 Orchard, Mud Season Review, among others. Christian has featured at the Autry Museum and Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, CA and uses his MFA to teach his neighbors and their kids at Los Angeles Harbor College.

NADEZHDA OF KRAMATORSK

by Moira Magneson

The Kramatorsk railway station was hit by Russian missiles at about 10:30 local time (07:30 GMT) on Friday, April 8. Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, has said the death toll has risen to 50. That number includes five children… The mayor of Kramatorsk said there were 4,000 people, most of them elderly, women and children, at the station at the time of the attack. —The Guardian, April 9, 2022

Only yesterday Nadezhda had gone with her mom to pick up the red

eyeglasses. Once they'd been fitted, looped around her ears, snugged

to the bridge of her nose, she stepped into the street and the sudden

 

fanfare of the world rose to meet her—linden trees lining the sidewalks,

their green clear song—the sharp corners of buildings, the pebbled earth, the perfect

yellow rings of the blackbird's eyes.

 

Why had no one told her life could look like this?

 

At five a.m. today, glasses on, she was strangely happy packing up her belongings

alongside her mom and sister—a duffel, two suitcases, her sister's stuffed pink

hippo, a carrier for her cat.

 

Their neighbor dropped them off at the train station, promising to see them soon—

 

When the war is over.

 

Hundreds queued on the platform, bundled in down, watchcaps, scarves, and coats, some wearing surgical masks, westward bound to Lviv and safety.

 

Jostling shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, one long winding caterpillared creature, one breath steaming in the morning air.

 

Nadezhda reveled in the dazzle, color, and length of it, heartswelling, newfound sight

taking in each detail, scrap, and shape, vowed to love everyone, even

the lead-grey pigeons hobbling in the dust.

 

It was half past ten when she heard the cat's mewl and twisting cry.

 

It was half past ten when she saw the birds wheel up into the cobalt sky.

 

Half past ten when she felt the wave of wind shove through her skin.

 

She turned to her sister to say—

 

How do the birds know to rise as one?  

 

The words stilled forever on her tongue.

 

Red eyeglasses spilled on the red stained brick.

Author's note: When I read about the Kramatorsk train station bombing on my phone's news feed, the videos and photographs of people's personal belongings—children's stuffed animals, juice boxes, eyeglasses strewn pell-mell across the blood-stained brick—filled me with horror, driving home all over again the cruelty and pointlessness of war. I wondered what it must be like to be a child living and traveling in wartime. How might a child see the war? How could she possibly make sense of it? This poem—with its imagining of a child I call Nadezhda—emerged from these questions.

Moira Magneson's work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Plainsongs, Canary, The Rumpus, The Tule Review, California Fire and Water—a Climate Crisis Anthology, and Halfway to Halfway and Back. Her chapbook He Drank Because was published by Rattlesnake Press.

LEAVING IRPIN

by Eugene Datta                                           

                             

Photograph by Jérôme Sessini / Magnum for The New Yorker, March 7, 2022

He was going away; he was leaving 

Irpin—his suitcase still upright, waiting—

 

a trustful dog next to the master’s body:

the hand that held it, half-open, blood-

 

smeared, the right foot pointing away. 

Who’s the one lying close by? A friend? 

 

A brother? A co-escapee? Half-covered, half 

on the sidewalk, across curbstones painted 

 

yellow and white, plastic waste strewn 

around. What’s on the mind of the soldier 

 

kneeling on the monument? Head bowed

in grief, flag in hand, flowers in front of him, 

 

two bodies behind—it’s much harder, he’s 

learned the hard way, to do good than bad; 

 

so many more ways for things to go wrong 

than right. Three men with bags in hands 

 

leaving now—lucky to be late, to be in time, 

lucky to be leaving. A willow weeping 

 

behind a shattered roof, a slate-gray sky 

crisscrossed by overhead lines—

 

a farewell exhaled in haste covering the body, 

the suitcase still upright, waiting—

Eugene Datta's writing has appeared in The New Verse News, Poetry Bay, the Richmond Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, West Coast Line (currently Line), and Poetry Salzburg. He lives and works in Aachen, Germany.

GURFA

by Joan Mazza

From one remaining gallon of water,

precious drops pooled in the palm.

The fighting continues after two long weeks,

the air filled with dust and the stench

of rotting bodies.

Water and electricity have been turned off,

no food and no way to cook any food remaining

in half a house that has been shelled. Next door,

a home on fire, two dogs howling, left behind.

How to escape?

Three children, but only two hands to hold

onto them. Who will carry what they’ll need

wherever they might land? Which way is safe

passage, a welcome waiting from strangers?

How to escape?

Tanks line up for miles, out of gas, ammunition

spent. Phone dead. Each vehicle with a driver,

no more than a trapped boy, his stomach growling,

howling. No water. He cries for his mother, his bed.

How to escape?

Who asked for this war? One man with a few drops

of power he wants to hold. No matter who

suffers, dies. Didn’t other leaders kill millions?

Stalin. Hitler. Pol Pot. He can, too. Confident.

No need to escape.

Joan Mazza has worked as a microbiologist and psychotherapist, and taught workshops  on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self, and her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia.

TO GUINEA, WITH LOVE

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Amid Ukraine Exodus, Reports Emerge of Bias Against Africans —VOA, March 2, 2022

The tradesman from Guinea has lived in Odessa for fourteen years. He is

afraid. In one day all of Ukraine's airports shut down. In one night heavy

bombs fell just ouside of town. They are falling now. Russian soldiers

landed on the beach and are marching towards Kyiv. The horror. The sadness.

It is happening. Shock and awe. Awful. Wrath. Madness. Chernobyl, symbol

of nuclear death has been captured. No reports yet on the state of the concrete.

Where are we going? I listen to the trembling voice of my friend from Guinea.

He says he will watch and wait for another day or two, huddle at home

by his television in the apartment block. If fighting comes to his neighborhood

then he will call Guinea. Ask to be flown out. How many diplomats has

Guinea posted in Ukraine? How many cars and planes? Airports are shut.

But the sea flows by Odessa. He has lived in Odessa for fourteen years.

He knows people with boats. He has sold them housewares. He will

ask them to take him away. Past the battleships. To Guinea.

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube.

WINTER BREAK

by Katie Kemple

On my Instagram feed, one family

posts smiling photos from ski slopes,

snowy white backgrounds that match

perfect teeth. Another family travels

to a tropical paradise: bikinis, blue

waters and palm trees. And then, a

photo of a family packing their car

trunk in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Coats

on and loading plastic bags of their

belongings. What to leave? Baby teeth,

cleats, a wedding dress. The oven's

set to nothing for the winter. The clock

goose steps the seconds forward.

Each last look like a photo now,

the kind on film with limited takes. 

Katie Kemple's poems have appeared in recent issues of Atlanta Review, Ligeia Magazine, and The Shore. 

THE CALL

by Maria Lisella

The call came

A three-story roof,

not a big building

serious enough

to break bones.

A day later,

another call comes.

A room

at Jacobi.

 

I plan.

He drives.

I’m the passenger.

She’ll be there, you know.

I know, I hear myself say,

the mother is always there.

 

I hate

the stereotype, but it fits.

The mother takes him back.

He doesn’t get better.

He never leaves except

this way.

 

The cycle—failure,

salvation, failure,

a passive remote control.

Patched up.

Lateral moves

ward to ward.

Suicide watch.

 

From the parameter,

I watch.

Stepmother

not blood

not natural.

Despair respects no borders

legal, illegal.

 

You love what you touch,

love more what touches you.

Maria Lisella is the recipient of a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the American Academy of Poets and the author of Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She co-curates the Italian American Writers Association readings and is a travel writer by trade.

ON MARS WE'RE BRIEFLY FLYING

by Chris Vola

 

The winds declined to rip

the helicopter to pieces,

its carbon-fiber blades

spinning furiously,

defiantly, churning

for a few seconds

in the flushed sky,

even though sooner or later,

like all expensive toys,

its sunken parts would be left

to fill with dust,

even though a storm

would eventually

take an antenna,

the circuitry would garble,

landing gear would be

plucked like scabs.

Still, NASA applauded.

Elon Musk re-tweeted.

Someone proclaimed

“a red-letter day on the Red Planet!”

From 178 million miles away,

another data burst confirmed

that the helicopter

had touched softly

back down on the rutted 

ground, where only rovers

dared to tread.

The waiting was finally over

for the engineers,

who, giddy from their screens,

began to believe the future

could be tolerable.

They immediately forgot 

the gorgeous sunlight that

filtered through the oaks

outside the command center,

or the clogged freeways 

where blood & plastic 

spilled like SpaceX

propulsion fluid across

our still-living desert.

The Earth's concerns

had become irrelevant  

to them, like a neighborhood

with unknown sirens & sickness,

or the bus-stop profile 

of a sleeping family.

The Earth itself, unmoved

by progress

on another sphere,

would only turn

& brace its stem

against its own putrid winds.

Most of us would continue

to stay in the homes

we’d been staying in 

& busy ourselves

with the swipe-&-click

routines that could never

really sustain us,

pretending not to hear

the whirring in our heads,

or see the ugly

bubble cockpit

of a much different chopper,

one fueled by muzzle-flash,

& boredom,

& lungs twisted

full of loss,

its impact heavier

than a verdict,

emptier than the spacesuits

we’d never wear 

while prancing

in the Martian gravity,

awaiting Elon’s rise

from cryogenic slumber

to save us

on the third day.

We'd long

given up wondering

why it came

for us this way or

if we might escape

it, its appetite whetted,

its wide blades

ready to grind us into

the only dust

we’d ever know. 

Chris Vola is the author of six books, most recently I is for Illuminati: An A-Z Guide to Our Paranoid Times (William Morrow, 2020). His recent poems appear or are forthcoming in New Pop Lit, The Collidescope, The Main Street Rag, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Horror Sleaze Trash. He lives in New York. 

ESCAPE PLANS

by Barbara Simmons

 

We do it without thinking, sighting those red block letters, 

reassuring our leaving places we have found ourselves,

or, more precisely, where we’ve found ourselves lost, 

in theaters, malls, relationships, 

those gathering spaces where, 

not sure sometimes why we're there, 

we fold away small notes to self, including routes by which we’ll leave.  

It's been a year since we took leave

from what? Routines, connections, worn out paths of

customary comings, anticipated goings,

a year of changing patterns, forswearing the habitual,

creating novel ways to meet, to share, to love, to spend

time trying not to think where we should have been, 

envisioning new plans to leave the here and now

without abandoning ourselves. What's left

when signs are not available? The word itself lies next to

others in the dictionary, including existential, 

become new guides for taking leave, and flight, and hold

of who we are

as we discover what

it is to paint our own way out of boxes, out of corners,

over all walls that restrict our freedoms

finding what we've missed seeing, how we've missed living.

 

 

Barbara Simmons grew up in Boston, now resides in California—the coasts inform her poetry. A graduate of Wellesley College, she received an MA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins. Retired educator, she savors smaller parts of life and language, exploring words as ways to remember, envision, celebrate, mourn, and try to understand more. Publications have included Santa Clara Review, Hartskill Review, Boston Accent,  The New Verse News, Soul-Lit, 300 Days of Sun, Capsule Stories, and Journal of Expressive Writing.

THE NUN WAS TORTURED

by Karol Nielsen

The nun founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC).

The American nun, who was gang raped and tortured in Guatemala, died of cancer in Washington, DC. She had been helping indigenous Guatemalans when she was captured. The government suspected the indigenous of left wing subversion, with the United States backing the Guatemalan military in its civil war. The nun was burned by cigarettes, exposed to dead bodies and rats, and forced to mutilate another captive with a machete. She jumped out of a car as the man with accented Spanish drove her to a new location. She fled to the United States and struggled to remember her life there. She sued a Guatemalan general who was studying at Harvard. A judge ordered him to pay millions but he escaped to Guatemala. She told a reporter that even though she was Catholic she struggled to forgive.

Karol Nielsen is the author of two memoirs and two poetry chapbooks. Her first memoir was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. 

D&D IN 2020

by Patricia Davis

On the one hand we’ve got Phandalin

a fantasy mining town besieged by dragons.

We are trying to learn the rules at the dining room table—

attributes, quests, etc. Then we move on

to real life, sitting in front of the fire,

exploring the properties of air on sparks.

Then Anna goes to bed

and I check Twitter for #MartialLaw

just like every night for the past two

months.  Half of America

(or a tenth of America and an industrious

factory of Russian bots) clamor for their rights

to be doused.  Choose your adventure.

They implore the president to JUST DO IT

Do Martial Law.  Save the Republic.

The only real thing is the fire

crackling on dry logs,

my daughter stretched out

with our remaining cat,

telling me the plot of her story—

how can four teenagers escape after creating

a distraction? One a light wielder, one a wielder

of shadows, one a wielder of time, one of frost

and a mindreader and telekinetic.

I tell her how powerful they are.

Of course they can rescue the captured one.

Of course they can escape.   

Patricia Davis’ poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The New Verse News, Smartish Pace, Third Coast, The Atlanta Review, Salt Hill, Crab Creek Review, and other journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has an MFA from American University, where she was a Lannan Fellow. She is currently translations editor for Poet Lore.  

DOWN ON BENDED KNEE

by Sari Grandstaff

Sari Grandstaff is a high school librarian in the Catskill Mountains/Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. Her poetry has appeared in many print and online journals such as TheNewVerse.News, Eastern Structures, and Chronogram. During National Poetry Month 2020 her haiku was chosen to be featured by poets Danez Smith and Jane Hirshfield on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

NIGHTMARE IN UTAH

by Dawn Corrigan

A sign at an abortion-rights rally in Miami on Thursday. (Lynne Sladky/AP via The Washington Post, May 26, 2019

A particular kind of dystopia has arrived, and we’re beginning to see its fuzzy outlines. It would involve a whisper network on social media. It would entail announcing “Off to go see Navy Pier!” and then going instead to an abortion clinic. Thousands of women would have to learn—or remember—how this all worked before 1973, when desperate women also had occasion to visit their cousins, old friends, and aunties. —Monica Hesse, The Washington Post, May 26, 2019

Last week they closed the border
and ever since we've been on the run,
wearing black clothes, travelling at night,
food and water in packs on our backs.
We've arrived at the state line and stare
longingly into Nevada. The sentries
are scattered but they have a clear shot
at us here. We're not far from the railway.
I've heard they're stopping the passenger trains
but maybe we could hide in a freighter.
Given time and a lot of luck we might wake up
somewhere new, someplace with more rights
and bodily autonomy than we're used to.

Dawn Corrigan works in the affordable housing industry in Pensacola, FL and serves as assistant editor at Otis Nebula.