TO SAVE A LIFE

by Chen-ou Liu

The finale of the Israeli award-winning documentary NAZA, a Hebrew acronym for "collateral damage," captures a father trapped in a furnace of grief. Heat radiates from the tangled grid of collapsed iron and melted plastic. Coughing through blinding smoke, he drags broken blocks of drywall away, his cries echoing off the smoldering rubble that traps his children.

calm between fireballs

an armless girl gazing 

heavenward, yet…

Chen-ou Liu is the author of five books, including Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize, 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and A Life in Transition and Translation (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial Haiku Chapbook Competition). His tanka and haiku have been honored with many awards.

ABOUT LOVE

by Ryan Caidic

 

 

Nearly 200,000 people in 124 villages in the northeastern Philippines were affected and over 5,400 fled massive plumes of ash that billowed from Mayon volcano over the weekend due to the collapse of lava deposits from its slopes, officials said Monday. —AP, May 4, 2026

Mayon is the most active volcano in the Philippines, erupting over 52 times in the past 500 years... Its most destructive recorded eruption occurred on February 1, 1814. The volcano belched dark ash and eventually bombarded the town of Cagsawa [where] about 1,200 locals perished in what is considered to be the most lethal eruption in Mayon's history. —Wikipedia

 

 

We live in the time of ash and awe,

where the bell tower of a ruined

cathedral frames the perfect dome

 

its crater glow combusting in pallid

pyroclastic smoke, thousands have fled

its strombolian show

 

of affection, amid the terrible beauty

engulfing kilometers of sky and city

under siege of nature’s desire

 

to shape itself, they say that Mayon

was the womb that rose from the burial

tomb of lovers Magayon and Panganoron

 

passion in the form of fire turned crust

then magma, then igneous stone

then lava, then a quiet, then rage,

 

then warmth, then grief, then ash again—

layers that unravel histories, unpredictable

yet predictable all the same.

 

Those who were burned have forgotten

relocating closer to the pulse

where the fire of Ibalon resides.

 

That’s the theology of love.

To be close enough to feel the rumble

of a molten heart, to be in the shadow

 

of its ending, and to exist,

every time a little more consumed

by its divine ravishing of flame.  

 

 

Ryan Caidic is a Filipino poet and advertising creative living in Denmark. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Columbia Review, The Missouri Review, Southeast Review, Apricity, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere, and has been highly commended by the Bridport Prize and Munster Literature Center.  

DOROTHY LOWAKUTUK

by Terri Kirby Erickson 

 

 

Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in Northern Kenya was established to rescue and release orphaned and abandoned elephant calves. It was featured recently by the AP and on PBS.

 

 

They follow her or she follows them, the babies

of Reteti. Swinging their miniature trunks, they 

navigate the steep and dusty terrain not far from 

the elephant sanctuary—all the while listening 

for her voice and the voices of other keepers. 

These calves are like little children let loose 

in the playground, nowhere near ready to be

released in the wild. Most carry the memory 

of a mother’s disappearance, some brutally so. 

Others less dramatic. But a lost mother, how-

ever it occurs, is no small thing. When I found

my mother dying beneath her favorite azalea 

bush, I sank to my knees crying, Mommy, what 

happened? and I was no baby. Nothing prepares 

us for losing our mothers, the loneliness of grief. 

But Dorothy Lowakutuk learned the language 

of elephants. She knows which of them is Sera,

Long’uro, or Sarara—how they play and walk 

and sleep. She teaches them to roll in the dust to 

keep their skin cool, find plants that are safe to

eat. Humble, yet as regal as a queen, Dorothy 

Lowakutuk’s face is radiant as the African sun, 

this kind woman and all the rest at Reteti who

talk softly, feed and sing to the children of lost 

mothers. Blessed be—blessed be their names.

 

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including The Light that Follows Us Home (Autumn, 2026, Press 53). Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize, International Book Award for Poetry, and the Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina, USA.

LETTER FROM A POET TO AI

by Terri Kirby Erickson 

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

What do you know of heartache?

How it feels to watch your father die 

gasping for air like a fish in a bucket, 

or to find your comatose mother in her 

front yard, dying alone in the dirt? 

My brother bled to death in front 

of my eyes when he was twenty. Can 

you even imagine it? Of course, you 

can’t. You have no imagination, no 

feelings, only data, data, data that you 

spit out like pits from fruit you’ve

never tasted. And what about the good 

stuff? That first kiss from a guy who 

means it? Holding your newborn baby 

in your arms, astonished by how much 

love one person can bear? Have you 

strolled down the Champs-Élysées in 

the rain? Laughed at a joke or made 

love by an open window to the sound

of Italian doves? Tasted a chocolate 

milkshake or pumpkin risotto? Have 

you thrown a softball or climbed a tree? 

Ridden a Merry-Go-Round or a bicycle, 

seen Mick Jagger strut like a rooster 

across a stage or watched the Rockettes

kick their way to Christmas? So you can

write a semblance of a poem or a story

or a novel, so what? Your creations are 

rickety scaffolding, Hollywood sets that 

will never be the Swiss Alps or even

a human home, which is better, even if it 

sucks, than anyplace you could generate 

because you are nothing but a vending 

machine, AI—stocked with empty words.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including The Light that Follows Us Home (Autumn, 2026, Press 53). Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize, International Book Award for Poetry, and the Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina, USA.

THE SOBBING

by Alice Sims-Gunzenhauser

My father awoke one Saturday

and died as fast 

as though a bomb had fallen. 

There was no bomb, only 

the rogue rhythm 

of his heart. 

Our anguish seems so pure now,

the sobbing all turned inward. 

 

Did we understand the gift

we had been given,

to grieve without rage

or horror,

without the knowledge that 

honed malice   

had crushed beloved flesh? 

 

Would that there were a tonic

to suck out the venomous rage

of war, to leave the heartbreaks of life

untainted,

            a balm…

Alice Sims-Gunzenhauser is a visual artist and poet in New Jersey. Her art has been exhibited locally and regionally; she has had poems published in Kelsey Review and on The New Verse News. After a 43-year career working in educational assessment, she is happy to be able to dig deeper into both media. 

OPEN LETTER TO ‘WOMEN FOR TRUMP’

by Nancy Meneely

At least two dozen women have accused Trump of assaulting them or making unwanted sexual advances. The allegations against Trump run the gamut of groping, leering at underaged pageant contestants, forcibly kissing women without permission, and other instances of assault. —Daily Kos, September 7, 2024

We who have been raped
will not find words 
with gnarl enough
to let you know
how terrible it is
to face a rapist’s face 
on every screen,
to hate,
to know again the horror
felt as nausea
too deep to be expelled
and grief disguised as furious
for certainties that spilled
the moment when
the sudden stranger
pulled himself away,
grief for helpless,
never wholly safe again.
 
How little you must guess of us
when you cry love for him.
How careless you diminish me.

Nancy Meneely’s first book, Letter from Italy, 1944 (Antrim House) was noted by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books by Connecticut writers in 2013. It provided the libretto for an oratorio of the same name, composed by Sarah Meneely-Kyder and performed twice by Connecticut choruses and symphony orchestras. Her second book, Simple Absence (Antrim House), was nominated for The National Book Award and placed as a grand prize finalist in The Next Generation Indie Awards and the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award.

AFTERMATH — A FOUND SONNET

by Susan Vespoli

—all words in the poem from a KJZZ Interview with Tom Maxedon

Susan Vespoli and her book One of Them Was Mine

What happened? Officer Lindo shot my son

in the back of his head. Blew everything

apart. In the face of powerlessness,

we should say his name: Adam Vespoli.

 

Phoenix Police Department Disciplin-

ary Review Board: cop was found out 

of policy. Immediately resigned. Freedom 

of Information Act. Aftermath. Coping

 

with grief. A molten slosh of pain. Healing

thoughts and hearts. My son, a big believer. 

My mission, words in mouth, to be his voice. 

Lawsuit resolved. Financial settlement. 

 

The    policeman    is    no     longer 

a policeman. He’s driving a truck in Texas.

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, AZ and believes in the power of poetry to create change.

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). 

KEEP AWAKE

by John Linstrom

Rescuers pull a child out of the rubble of a building in Khan Younis, on October 24, 2023. Photo:  Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty via The Atlantic

for Gaza

The sun darkened, and the moon,
stars falling from heaven, powers

shaken. A toddler is lifted
from a pocket of air

below a concrete slab barely held
by neighbors: her eyes are hollow planets,

dry, they stare—these are not her parents,
she had just been napping and now

the world has gone all dust and jagged.
It was very loud, then very quiet.

This child is the same age
as my own daughter

who wakes with the sun
in the crib across the hall

each day. This child is your child;
she is one of two million.

O God, that you would come down
but you nor no one ever else would be

this child’s mother, nor the quilt
to pull down from over the couch, 

the rocking chair, the picture
of the rabbit at the end of the hall,

the pitcher of juice, the stuffed dog. This child
will now be fed the bread of tears: you

have given her tears to drink. This night
is too dark, carries no answer, and the only words

that come in the furtive inky air are keep awake. 
When she cries, what father will come in to lift her 

in the night? Keep awake. Was there a sibling
for whom those dry eyes moistened? Keep awake.

O God, that you would come down and shield
these children from the blinding grief that falls

with hate, from the ancient territorial tragedy
as we grasp for the revealing of some balm

this child is stricken to the root
deeper than tears, than her voice

and my God may we keep awake, for all
our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth

until we cry out for this stricken girl
and for her loose our voices and

O God kindle our brushwood souls
and fire our water to boiling—powers shaken,

restore us that we might be saved from this,
that all might be saved in this night

for yes, I see, you have come down
and are there: crushed beneath the stone,

and there, sprinting over, lifting boulders, and
there: neighbors lift you and you stare

out among us as stars fall from heaven
and staring, wordlessly demand,

for every child, for every shining light
threatened in the falling night, to keep awake.

John Linstrom’s first collection of poems To Leave for Our Own Country is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in April of 2024. This poem, “Keep Awake,” was written in his role as Poet in Residence at Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish in Manhattan and was read in worship for the First Sunday in Advent. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Northwest Review, North American Review, and The Christian Century. He is the series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press, making available the works of environmental poet-philosopher L. H. Bailey (1858-1954). John holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University. He lives with his wife and their young daughter in Queens, NY.

CASSANDRA SPEAKING AFTER OCTOBER 7, 2023

by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt

I huddle in a thicket  I have been through this for centuries 

Seeing   not stopping it  hearing screams  pleas  screeches  shots 

 

I still want to whisper to yell to stave off disasters 

but my words are ghost breath traveling down centuries 

 

I know about the arched spine in pain 

the bones whittled down thinned by loss 

 

I know the closed eyes that can’t stop seeing 

blue eyes brown eyes hazel ones drained of hope 

 

I know there are no sentences for horror for killing 

Just broken words like ankle bone breast bone thigh bone 

 

No dreaming flesh   no dreaming bodies 

No dreaming breath   always prophecies that come to pass 

 

No one listens to my warnings   just darkened earth  

withered grasses   stones of remembrance  

 

And the  blue thread of an empty story 

in an endless labyrinth of grief 

Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a 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 Westchester Review, Wind, and The Vassar Review. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. 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.  And her chapbook about Bess Houdini, the wife of Harry Houdini, entitled Over the Moon Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini, recently was published by Palooka Press.   

ODE TO THE HONEY LOCUST

by Therese Gleason

With a line from “All Hallows” by Louise Glück (1943-2023)

I want to write a poem about autumn 
that doesn’t decay 
and stink on impact.
I want to write a poem about the beauty
of small children (whose shoelaces flap
and sneakers slap 
asphalt) that doesn’t reek 
of sweetness. 
All I can offer is a dispatch
from a mid-October recess in central Mass., 
the sky scrubbed squeaky
by an overnight rainstorm,
where kindergarteners skip and whoop
as the wind picks up, pointing to heaven
as the tall honey locust drops
its shower of gold: spiraling eddies 
that drift slowly, softly onto cracked concrete.
The bulky apartment complex next door peeps 
between ragged bushes and chain link
as I holler at a child to come down the hill, away 
from the edge of the dark wood
where scattered syringes linger 
in the barrenness of harvest or pestilence:
our playground tree a site of life
and death, both honey and locust, feast 
and famine. We found a dead mouse 
beneath its fraying canopy
last week. I stood astride the carcass 
swatting curious fingers seeking to probe
its torn side buzzing with flies, its tiny 
bared teeth—and in an instant 
I remember the sickening bump 
under my back left tire, a raccoon
on a dark road, how I honked and swerved,
too late… I can’t forget its wobbly tromp, 
its eyes blinded by my headlights 
before I rendered it dead meat—
I feel a tug like grief, like a small hand
at my sweater’s hem, and look down
into cupped palms brimming 
with tattered gold leaves.

Therese Gleason is author of three chapbooks: Hemicrania (forthcoming, Chestnut Review, 2024); Matrilineal (Honorable Mention, 2022 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, New England Poetry Club); and Libation (co-winner, 2006 South Carolina Poetry Initiative Competition, selected by Kwame Dawes). Her poems appear in 32 Poems, Indiana Review, New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. Originally from Louisville, KY, she is an adjunct creative writing instructor at Clark University and an ESL teacher in the Worcester Public Schools.