THE REST IS STILL UNWRITTEN

by Katie Kemple

Instead of watching the inauguration,
I conduct a series of online searches
for cast members of The Hills. Because
I heard one of the couples lost
a home in the Palisades fire. Holy shit,
I thought, they're still together?!
A hot mess on the show. I guess
that's the magic of editing. How sweet
to learn they'd had kids, sold crystals,
posted socials together. Now they're
suing the city of Los Angeles. Back
in The Hills days we were new to realty
TV didn't realize playing a villain
could be profitable, a career even.
The lines blurred between villain, 
hero. I think about The Apprentice,
watching that first season with my
husband, trying to decode the language
of boardroom politics, house poor
snuggled into our IKEA sofa.    
You're fired! a phrase we parroted
for laughs. I'm nostalgic for innocence
to be honest. There's no rain today.
My skin, dry. The Santa Anas blow
fire. Who decides what happens next? 

Katie Kemple still gets choked up listening to Unwritten—its optimism and faith in the future. She hasn't lost hope in our country yet. She has contributed poems to The New Verse News in the past. Her poems have appeared in Rattle (Poets Respond), SWWIM, and Maudlin House.

THE PECULIAR CASE OF COMPASSION

by Adnan Abbasi

A nurse at New York University’s Langone hospital was fired after mentioning what she described as a “genocide” in Gaza during an award ceremony speech. Hesen Jabr, 34, a labor and delivery nurse who worked at NYU Langone for nearly 10 years, made the remarks while accepting an award earlier this month for providing excellent care to patients suffering perinatal loss… In a statement, Steve Ritea, a spokesperson for NYU Langone, said: “Hesen Jabr was warned in December, following a previous incident, not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace. She instead chose not to heed that at a recent employee recognition event that was widely attended by her colleagues, some of whom were upset after her comments. As a result, Jabr is no longer an NYU Langone employee.” —The Guardian, May 31, 2024

In the Court of Selective Outrage, now in session,
Where empathy's on trial, facing suppression.
The jury: stone-faced statues, deaf and blind,
The judge: a mirror, cracked and ill-defined.

Exhibit A: A nurse with healing hands,
Accused of love that spans divided lands.
"How dare she care," the Prosecution cries,
"For suffering that we've chosen to disguise?"

Witnesses parade, with badges of disdain,
Experts in the art of curated pain.
They testify of horrors, oh so select,
While wearing blinders, perfectly erect.

The Defense presents a stethoscope that hears
All heartbeats equal, through walls and through fears.
"Objection!" roars the court in unified voice,
"Such equity of care is a dangerous choice!"

Evidence mounts: bandages stained with tears,
A speech that dared to bridge the gap of years.
The clerk records each word with trembling hand,
As Truth stands gagged in the witness stand.

In summation, Irony takes the floor,
Painting compassion as an act of war.
The verdict echoes through antiseptic halls:
"Guilty of healing beyond these sterile walls."

Sentence is passed in a language absurd:
Silence for her who made suffering heard.
As Hesen exits, head unbowed and tall,
Justice weeps softly in the empty hall.

Outside, the world spins on, in chaos and in pain,
While in the court, they sanitize again,
Preparing for the next case on the docket:
"The Olive Tree vs. Concrete in Its Socket"

Adnan Abbasi’s writings have appeared in Hindustan Times, EconLib, The Straits Times, and CNN-News18. He is associated with Students for Liberty's South Asia chapter.

FIRING MORAH

by Stacey Z Lawrence

Morah Hebrew School Teacher Mug

I lean on a miniature 

sea blue chair, the color of Israel

& conduct my class to the curtain call with a 

rudimentary rendition of 

Hatikvah. The boys & girls adjust their babushkas 

torn from superhero 

sheets. They pretend to be partisans, they pretend

to survive genocide with water guns & plastic bricks

plopping the toy props across the stage like burial plots

& the synagogue chapel 

explodes

in waves of gratitude reigning 

down, micro-rubble crushed 

under rubber spinning & spinning 

strikes me as my students hold hands

swaying like paper cut-outs 

mouthing Hebrew words they 

do not understand

squinting & studying me, 

their Morah’s lips we blast

out this anthem beak fed from birth 

myths spun from milk, guts, honey &

the soot of charred Jews 

chanting hollow prayers into green wind 

we cradle some bald-cackling madcap 

who flies rabid dragonflies beyond his fancy 

fence like  

Dylan Klebold with a broken console 

       Boom, Boom, Kaboom, 

Fizz, Kaboom, Fizzle, Silence.

He crunches on fried falafel tossing

bits of chicks & peas, digging the edge of

that six-pointed star between his yellow teeth

planting olive trees & Long Island Zionists

beneath Alephs & Bets 

like Herzl’s Thieves of the West

his flying monkeys, 

stripping us of our Ashkenazi selves 

our Yiddish, our guttural cadence,

depositing our smoldering mishpocha

us Kikes still stinking of Zyklon B,

bitter the almond smell of 

neglected eggs, shoveling us 

beneath BritishpoundsAmericandollars,

wailing limestone.

Author's note: In December of 2023, days after the congregation celebrated my work with my students, the local synagogue fired me, prohibiting my entrance forever. It was the first night of Chanukah. 

Stacey Z Lawrence is a veteran teacher of English and a Literature Professor. She has an MAT in Theater and Speech and is a poet for Writing The Land, a collaboration between poets and protected land. Her poetry was shortlisted for the Fish Prize in 2019, and 2021 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. Stacey’s first collection of poems Fall Risk was released to acclaim in August 2021 through Finishing Line Press. 

UNDER INVESTIGATION BY THE DOJ, PHOENIX POLICE DEPARTMENT REVISES USE OF FORCE POLICY

by Susan Vespoli

             “I think god has another plan for my life.” —Adam Vespoli, weeks before he was shot

City of Phoenix

solicits public input

on “Use of Force” policy.

        Officer Donnell Lindo, the cop who shot

               my son is gone.     

Core Principles: Goal 

of every encounter is

to resolve without force.

       Turned in his gun,

               his holster, badge.  

Employees shall make 

every effort to preserve 

sanctity of human life.

      was found by Critical

                Incident Review Board to be in the wrong.   

                Referred for discipline.

Employees shall respect, 

uphold value, rights, liberty,

dignity of all

      Resigned before he was fired.

                (Didn’t resign before he fired the gun.)  

persons at all times.

Always use de-escalation

tactics. Shall be held

      The cop who shot   my son 

                is gone.

accountable for

violating policy. 

Discharge of firearm. 

      Where’d he run?

“He no longer works for the department.” 

    —Clerk at Phoenix Police Public Records

Turned in his badge,

his bullets, gun.

Shooting person close 

range   in the head    is Deadly 

Force       always last resort.

My son is gone.

Author’s note: Words in italics are “found poem” from mail conversation with Police Records and "Use of Force" Proposal.

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, Arizona where she continues to write toward finding some sort of justice for her son, Adam Vespoli, who was shot and killed by police on March 12, 2022.

Editor's Note: The New Verse News previously published five of long-time contributor Susan Vespoli's poems about the killing of her son by police:  "Before I Knew Adam Had Died" and "My Ex-Husband Calls To Tell Me Our Son Has Been Shot By Police," "Police Violence in Reverse," "Dear 2022," and “I Am Finally Handed the Critical Incident Review Board Report.”

FREE SPEECH

by Alixa Brobbey

Image Credits: Jim Watson/AFP/ (collage by TechCrunch) / Getty Images

You are free to stand on the sidewalk

with your thumbs up. You are free to like

this Tweet. You are free to boo silently.

You are free to clap loudly. You are free

to give me a dollar to vote in this poll.

You are free not to vote. You are free

to choose between silence and tinnitus.

You are free to leave. Here is the back 

door. You are free to leave without a 

goodbye. You are free to swallow

thumb tacks. You are free to live inside

this snake’s nest. You are free to

decide: hunger pains or cyanide.

You are free to give me another dollar

to vote in a new poll. You are free to know

nothing—I change this game at my whim.

You are free to play this game by my rules.

You are free to leave. You are free to

shut up and like this tweet. You are free

to comment well wishes. You are free

to correct my science—once. You are

free to be fired. You are free to leave.

Go stand outside. Sip some blue air.

Ponder the wide and winding road

that led us, somehow, here.

Alixa Brobbey spent portions of her childhood in The Netherlands and Ghana. She has a B.A. in English from Brigham Young University, where she won the Ethel Lowry Handley Poetry Prize in 2020. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Blue Marble Review, Segullah, Inscape, The Albion Review, The Susquehanna Review, The Palouse Review, The Exponent II, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and others. She is currently a law student at Brigham Young University.

BUT

by William Aarnes

Art by Clara Lieu

The guy who’s keyboarding these lines

wants to hope that the world would be better—  

more hospitable, less deadly—
if people agreed to do without guns.

But I’m the dread in his head, dwelling      
on how many guns are already loaded,

how many aimed, how many already fired,
piercing lead already in the wounded, in the dead,    

my thoughts having shot their way through    
his fingers on to his computer screen:

“Time to buy a gun or two?  Or stockpile
an arsenal?”  Sure, he’s already deleted

those thoughts. But I’m the dread in his head. 

William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.

BROKEN WINDOWS

by Alan Walowitz

The New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death in 2014 was fired from the Police Department and stripped of his pension benefits on Monday, ending a bitter battle that had cast a shadow over the nation’s largest police force. Commissioner James P. O’Neill’s decision to dismiss the officer, Daniel Pantaleo (pictured above in May), came five years after Mr. Garner’s dying words—“I can’t breathe”—helped to galvanize the Black Lives Matter protests that led to changes in policing practices in New York and around the country. Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Associated Press via The New York Times, August 19, 2019.

Some more fake news from the great American fable:
a baseball shatters the neighbor’s window
into a bullseye of splinters
as the old guy emerges, face on fire,
newspaper rolled into a cudgel clutched in his paw.
But a pussy cat at heart,
he’ll remember when he was young and will smile.
Or a doughy lady gets launched like a pinball
after too much slow-baking,
and more than a little tippling,
her apron aflutter and rolling pin awag,
but she’ll offer cookies to the kids.

In our tale, the window always heals itself
or gets forgotten in the false fever
of our Mayberry dreams—
We’ll make America great again.
Turns out it never was about the window,
only a way to get our next episode rolling.

If you attend to a broken window
the whole neighborhood’ll get fixed
and America made great again.
Tompkinsville on Staten Island’ll
become Short Hills, Grosse Point, Scarsdale,
or even Lake Success, right near me,
where the cop who pulls you over
doesn’t know from loosies—
what a lustrous word for a dark occupation,
a guy trying to make a buck on the street.

But just the same the cop might be thinking,
I’d like to strangle this guy,
as he writes you up for driving distracted
by that cracked windshield
you haven’t found the time or money to repair.
But he’s friendly enough
for all his formality
about rights and recourse.
See you in court, he says,
sneering in your rearview mirror
as he waves you on.
We’ll make America great again, alright,
Just be sure you’re white and bring plenty of cash.
We don’t take credit cards or checks.


Editor’s Note from Frontline: The 1980s-era theory known as “Broken Windows” . . . argues that maintaining order by policing low-level offenses can prevent more serious crimes. But in cities where Broken Windows has taken root, there’s little evidence that it’s worked as intended. The theory has instead resulted in what critics say is aggressive over-policing of minority communities, which often creates more problems than it solves. Such practices can strain criminal justice systems, burden impoverished people with fines for minor offenses, and fracture the relationship between police and minorities. It can also lead to tragedy: In New York in 2014, Eric Garner died from a police chokehold after officers approached him for selling loose cigarettes on a street corner.


Alan Walowitz has been published various places on the web and off.  His work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017 and 2018 and he is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love is available from Osedax Press, and his full-length book The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. 

THE PANEL

by Joan Colby

“CNN dismisses Jeffrey Lord after Nazi tweet,
instantly upgrades panel discussions.”

—Erik Wemble, The Washington Post, August 10, 2017

Grid of heads.
Former congressman. Aide to a
President twice removed.
Retired General. Snarky blonde.
Outspoken Latina. Ex-chairman
Of a political party. Sports
Figure. Billionaire. Secretary of
Defense in a former administration.
Familiars of talk show hosts who moderate
Or instigate. Night time birds
Pecking and screeching. Disembodied
Heads stuffed with opinions.
The once-was or might-have-been.
Solemn or verbose.
Each day’s outrage invokes
The squawking panel.
A zoo of exes. A new career
For reincarnated experts.
Patchwork quilt of somebodys
Revived to quote or quibble.
Opening their addictive
Testimonies. Sphinx.
Cassandra. Sage. Ghost.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

COALS

by Elizabeth Johnston

Image source: DonkeyHotey

“[He] is being raked over the coals in the press right now. People are trying to destroy him”

—Glen Beck in “Witch Hunt: Bill O’Reilly Deserves the Benefit of the Doubt” 

“We will not be staked this time.” 

–Cari-Lee Miller, “Granddaughters”

Myth smokes with the corpses we’ve inherited,
simpering seventy-times-seven girls:
Gretel, escaping the oven to wrap arms around her dead-beat Dad.
Persephone in a singed bikini boarding the bus for Spring Break.
Corn-woman begging for the stake so bellies might be fed.

We are the granddaughters of the witches you burned
and our tongues won’t, anymore,
wrap around the lie:
            Once, Long Ago, Far Away

Like fugitives of Pompeii
we’ve borne the blistering surge,
been arrested mid-joy, fixed
to the earth for centuries, lain airless,
buried under soot, cocooned
our voices like fingers
cast in their clawing.

But go ahead, storytellers.  Rewrite.

Return to the scene shouldering your excuses like shovels,
dismissive as a pickaxe.
Fill the void with your plaster white,
your sight-seer-safe.
Stake your claim. Charge your fees.

There’s profit in bigotry, big money in violence.

Stand over the volcano’s mouth piece,
sermonize, ejaculate,
make your pithy sacrifice.

Never mind the ghosts
who sneak up from behind,
palms facing forward.


Elizabeth Johnston teaches writing, literature, and gender studies in Rochester, NY. A past contributor at TheNewVerse.News, her most recent work appears in The Atlantic, Feminist Formations, and The Boiler.