ON MT. FUJI EXPERIENCING ITS LATEST SNOWFALL IN 130 YEARS

by Carissa Coane

AP image via Republic, November 13, 2024

At first, I think I’ll write an ode:

to the snowdrops finally

crowning this hallowed summit, 

to nature’s ineffable persistence.

I’ll envision the peak blanketed,

not merely dusted, by snow,

postcard-perfect, framed from afar

by scarlet maples. 

I’ll weave the ballot I cast

last week, my hopes fluttering

away in the crisp breeze

of the mountain’s foothills, 

into a feeble metaphor—

It’s never too late—that crumbles

like withered foliage

in my hands. 

Because the only firsts

these days

are ever-higher temperatures,

stretching up to the stars.

The only glass 

being shattered 

encases blood-red mercury.

How it oozes.

I don’t want to think

about where we’ll be

4 years from now,

yet alone another 130.

And, even when reminded

of Fuji’s majesty, 

the only poem

I can bring myself to write

is an elegy.

Carissa Coane's poetry has appeared in Body Odyssey (Heroica), Proud to Be (Laurel Review), and various journals. She is on staff at Asymptote Journal and #FemkuMag. She is 21.

DEDICATED TO THE UNKNOWN: A HURRICANE MARKER FOR LIFE OR DEATH

by Susan Terris

KBTX, September 27, 2024

Florida’s venomous snakes:

Her mother gave her a marker to put

Name & birthdate on her torso

 

She promised   swore they'd be all right

Today is not all right   She’s not okay

Her mother’s missing   ghostly   gone

 

In a glass she stares at ink-black ink

Backwards & snake-less

Remembers how stupid it seemed

 

Where is she now this day when she

Has not seen even one killer snake

Who is she now    and who can she be

Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 8 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, 2 plays.  Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review,Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Blackbird, Swwim, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Spring 2024, her eighth poetry book Green Leaves, Unseeing was published by Marsh Hawk Press, May 2024. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway & an editor at Pedestal.

SMALL DIFFERENCES

by Moira Magneson

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

Three days

we've watched

the acorn

woodpecker

perched atop

the telephone

pole

bright red

crown

black beak

driving

into

the glass

insulator

over and over.

His fury

for the bird

who looks

just like him—

side-eye

glittering—

knows

no bounds.

He refuses

to give up

the fight

with his own

reflection.

He will win 

this war.

He will not 

surrender.

Each will hammer

the other down.

They will stop

at nothing.

Author’s Note: "Small Differences" addresses the June 12, 2024 Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel which came after Israel killed a senior Hezbollah commander in southeastern Lebanon in a June 11 airstrike.  The poem's title is based on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of “the narcissism of small differences" in which he proposes that people tend to amplify the minor differences between themselves, leading to feelings of hostility, estrangement, and contempt.

Moira Magneson's full-length collection of poems In the Eye of the Elephant will be published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2025. Her novella A River Called Home—a river fable illustrated by Robin Center was released by Toad Road Press in early 2024. She is currently working as the poet-in-residence for ForestSong, artist Andie Thrams' project exploring solastalgia, biophilia, and resilience in the face of wildfire devastation and the climate crisis.

A JEWISH WEDDING

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

Wild lilac orchids frame

a garden curled in jade

rainforest, where two ask,

How are we so lucky when the sons 

of Abraham are fighting?

The state built on ash 

in the desert kills to survive. 

A heel smashes a glass.

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Topical Poetry, Consequence, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Sparks of Calliope.

THE WRONG HOUSE

by Thomas R. Smith

dedicated to Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis

“Wrong House” by Tala Madani (2014)

Say it’s the city, late evening, dark.
You’ve stopped to pick up your brothers,
thought you had the right address,
but now you’re unsure, seeing the pale
man the other side of the glass door.
Something in his hand, something shiny
in his trembling hand. Raises it,
a flash, the sound of glass
breaking, you breaking.

Say you’re in the country. It’s easy
to get lost on those dirt back roads.
Your car pulls into a driveway, but
the number is wrong. Turn back out.
From a nest of darkness
in the trees, bullets spit, one
catches you where you sit. Your
friends get you to a hospital, 
too late.  You’re gone.

Say you’re a country. Thought you knew
the Address, confident in your way
around the shining city. What brought you
here to the door of this horror movie?
Who armed the frightened old man,
the violent sociopath? Why has your
heart taken so much lead? Are you
wounded but alive, or dead? Why do you
keep showing up at the wrong house?

Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. His most recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press).

JOHNNY DEPP WINS, AND I, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, THINK OF THE MAN WHO ABUSED ME

by Emma Rhodes

I’m in a courtroom with him in my dreams.

Years live, tangible and growing inside of me.

Stench rotting from the inside out makes me gag, and

the judge thinks I drink and doesn’t believe a word I say.

 

As things rot, their appearance, smell, stories change. 

Leave something to fester long enough it becomes absence, 

memories warp but sickness remains. 

 

We beg you to believe our guts even when they stink.

 

There is a constant drip on the windshield of this car. The evidence is shown 

through the screen so it’s water-warped & memory-warped & 

dream-warped but he doesn’t deny a thing

 

The jury appreciates his honesty, his charm. 

 

Court takes a break. He says we need to play laser-tag—the judge said so. 

That can’t be true and yet suddenly I’m shot by light from all angles, 

put me under a spotlight and call me a liar.

 

The water continues to drip on the windshield.

 

They tell me I had the means to get out. Look at me now. Just drive away they say. Just drive away if it was so bad why didn’t you leave but facing the other wall is a boot on the wheel and I am stuck in his bed, his bathtub, pacing the one single hallway while he left in a car to see 

 

his parents (who are so proud of him, by the way. He was always a great boy.)

 

And Taylor Swift hasn’t said anything this time, none of the #MeToo baddies have spoken.

The water on the windshield breaks through and shatters. 

Glass shards in the courtroom. Everyone yells 

 

“violence!”

 

And I am left. Picking up one shard after another. He walks by, stomps on a shard so it crumbles into a million more (another inconsistency), says 

 

“thanks for keeping me around.”

 

I’ll stop writing about violence when I stop seeing it. 

I’ll stop writing about violence when the world stops trying to kill its women.  

Emma Rhodes is an emerging Queer writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee people. Her work has been published in places such as Prism International, Plenitude, Riddle Fence, and elsewhere.

FIRE INCANTATION

by Miriam Steinbach

    oh, bitter flame     run
run until you find home again     I know
you tripped over your own skinny legs
behind your mother’s church, knee caps crowned with
     shards of glass     I know
     the sting     I know
the swig, then scorch of vodka trickling over
bare bone, the taste of
     copper and salt     I know
     the screaming days     I know
     the flickering rage     I know
this isn’t death, this is a reset
life will breathe again,
in our garden of ash


Miriam Steinbach is a college student and poet based in Salem, OR. She enjoys being outdoors, playing cello, and posting poetry on her Instagram (@baldmilk).

TEAR GAS AND WOAD

by Peleg Held

A nude protester—dubbed later “Naked Athena"—faces off against law enforcement officers during a protest against racial inequality in Portland, Ore., on July 18. Credit Nathan Howard/Reuters via The New York Times.

Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem. —Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars


She fingers the blue on slowly, feralled in its wake;
she counts the steps from inside out the fenced-in fields of grace.

A vitrumned likeness wavers, a cats-lick from the rim,
in the tea cup in the circle of the saucer's closing ring.

Let the tongue tip shape the watchword in the shallows of its bow;
let sentry sleep and serpent sing beneath the shuddered vow.

Here is where their end is born; there is nothing at the gate
but ink and skin, the sylph herself: the cunt-directed state.

Caesar may misread you in the peripherals of his glass
or more likely overlook you, a needle in the grass

but as you plunge into his heel he will see the face
of what gives womb its dark and what gives blood its taste.


Peleg Held lives in Hiram, Maine with his partner and 21 chickens led by the world's tiniest rooster, Gavroche-That-Lives.

THAT BEAUTIFUL OBJECT NEXT DOOR?

by D.B. Goman

When the world started to end
the other day there was still
a glass of water the soup on
the gas stove the bills delivered
to laptop the car to pick up
meds the warm lamp by a bed
for novels and monthly mags
the vents with cool air the plane
ticket to Tobago hot on fridge
the spin of dryer the stupid
tv talk-show hosts the friends
inside a phone happy to shoot
every thing made or about to be
     conceived

I also was a lover before now
before the imagination’s other
half grew strong clouds in eyes
before the virus killed all I knew
as love walking in nature wanting
more when my hand was held
and a river sang with us as trees
on guard let us laugh with birds
in nest and we took for granted
blossoms and I thought I knew
myself because we did try so
hard to know each other then
before I learned the world wasn't
ours and things stopped working

How long is long this simply goes
on with the fear of just beyond
the door I don’t know who’s next
door right now is there someone
next door I don’t hear a thing
I don’t speak anymore I don’t
dare the old dreams are there in
the shadows at upstairs window
across the yard I want it there
I don’t can’t want it so beautiful
a picture of arms knees hair
neck wrists ears thighs shoulder
blades unprocessed I can’t be
sure a chip in glass and whatever

isn’t there isn’t thinking this too

D.B. Goman continues to be upset that he wasn't born with real wings. And a stinger. For penance, many of his poems and essays have been published in a variety of journals including Ditch, Quarry, Eye Magazine, 2River View, Jones Av., Travel Mag, The Literary Bohemian, 2 Bridges Review. A collection of poems is forthcoming this autumn.

5TH AND AVENUE E

by Stephen Cafagna

“Bus Stop” by Reginald Marsh. Image source: Encore Editions

i stod at the bus stop as a man late for work
looking down the street
wishing this bus would appare from thin air
I’d trade the life of every passing car for my bus

I stod at the bus stop alone
feeling as if i where to die at any moment
almost in shock that i wasnt

i stod as a man looking for his only ride
like when I was four
me and my father waited for the tractor
to take us around the apple ranch
i look down

staring at my hands
think if all i have done with these
ive build, destroyed, takin and give
but what did you do?
What was your triumph?

I stod at the bus stop as a boy
hearing the rpms
twine as when the transmission shifts
the complete stop
Kushhh! brakes awoke me to another dream…

And the only thing i had of my father’s was a glass from Venezuela
He died when i was 5, his glass went when i was 21
the corner where it broke still smells of old whiskey

I had my heart ripped out before
I dont like doing it to others, tho it happens…
Would you rather be the gun shot victum?


This poem by Stephen Cafagna is from his dissertation, finalized in Fayetteville. It functions in the interstices of language and urban life -- in dialect, representing a bridge of sorts, connecting the world of illiteracy, in all its unappreciated beauty, to the literary world.