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.

EVERY LITTLE BIT: A HAIBUN

by Miriam Weinstein

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

My assignment—oranges and limes—As much or as little as you’re able to bring—the emailed instructions specified. Food and supplies collected for people afraid to leave their homes during the ICE invasion of Minnesota. Operation Metro Surge. Thousands of uniformed, masked agents carrying weapons—now a common sight on the streets of my city. Agents of fear acting erratically. Lying in face of facts. Spreading terror and chaos across my State—land of ten thousand lakes, surging rivers, roaring waterfalls. In the church parking lot, volunteers load carts—boxes of diapers, canned goods, packaged products and produce. A middle-aged man wheels a cart to the side of my car. I pull out two large reusable bags, empty contents. Five, six pound bags of oranges, five, three pound bags of limes. Small offering considering—68, 400 people, rounded and roughed up, interrogated, arrested. In the name of searching for illegal, criminal aliens, citizens and legal residents—seized—two Americans murdered by ICE agents. Their real agenda—to breed uncertainly, fear, and chaos. Every little bit counts my friend tells me. I’m desperate today to believe in something. Has the produce I dropped off  reached its destinations? During this unfathomable crisis, is someone, somewhere being nourished?

Dusk display—turkey vulture 

soars, swoops down. Curved beak 

grasps carcass, carries rat skyward.

Miriam Weinstein completed a two year apprenticeship program at the Loft Literary Center in 2013. She has two chapbooks published by Finishing Line Press: Twenty Ways of Looking and How to Thread a Needle. Her poems are in several anthologies and journals including A 21st Century Plague, Rocked by the Waters, Poems of Hope and Reassurance, The Heart of All That Is, Survivor Lit, The New Verse News, Plum Tree Tavern, Vita Brevis Press, St. Paul Almanac, and American Jewish World. Her manuscript Here. Between. Beyond. was a finalist for the Concrete Wolf Press Louis Award. Miriam Weinstein is an avid birdwatcher and environmentalist. She lives in Minneapolis, MN.

FLOOD TIDES

by Adele Evershed

Mystery surrounds the appearance of hundreds of Victorian hobnailed shoes which have washed ashore on a beach. The black leather boots, thought to date back to the 19th Century, were discovered by volunteers cleaning up rock pools on Ogmore By Sea Beach in the Vale of Glamorgan, south Wales. Emma Lamport from the Beach Academy social enterprise which found the shoes said there was speculation locally that they could be from a shipwrecked Italian cargo vessel said to have struck nearby Tusker Rock about 150 years ago. —BBC, December 24, 2025

winter sea

cresting waves

of protest

 

The dregs of December wash up a cobbler’s lot of footwear—Victorian working boots, bloated with salt and hard labor. They’ve made a pilgrimage to Ogmore-by-Sea, walking on water, to reach the wrinkled sand.

Now they rest in rock pools with winkles and sea snails. Some are as black as Dad’s Boxing Day silence, some as tiny as a mermaid’s purse, some baring hobnails like teeth—leather tongues whispering their names to the slack tide.

They came ashore from a ship snagged on Tusker Rock—a floating cargo of tar-dipped ghosts, leaving out shoes for Christmas treats. If this was a kinder time, St Nick would fill them with gold and a life begun again. Instead, they’ll be gathered in sacks, tossed on the rubbish heap like all the other shoeless souls washed up on our beaches, their names known only to the high tide.

 

cold front—


a robin’s song 


crosses the border

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Comstock Review, Modern Haiku, Avalon Literary Review, Black Bough Poetry and The New Verse News. She is the author of Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and has a forthcoming poetry collection, In the Belly of the Wail, with Querencia Press. She has published three novellas-in-flash— Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and A History of Hand Thrown Walls (Unsolicited Press). Her short story collection, Suffer/Rage, was released by Dark Myth Publications.

BORN AND BREAD

by Adele Evershed

A center-left Welsh nationalist candidate defeated the governing Labour Party and Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform U.K. in a Welsh Parliament special election on Thursday that has been closely watched as a potential bellwether of major upheaval in wider elections next year. Plaid Cymru, a party that supports Welsh independence from Britain, had been vying with Reform U.K…. in Caerphilly—for decades a Labour Party stronghold—amid poor approval ratings for both Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government and its main opposition, the center-right Conservatives. —The New York Times, October 24, 2025

Welsh is lilting all over the airwaves, with no definite article and plenty of soft mutations. Plaid Cymru won in Caerphilly against the odds, beating that odious little Reform Party—fashioned in the image of MAGAdom, with red hats, pitchforks, and teal (I ask you, teal?) rosettes.

Now, in Wales, we love a bit of scarlet. Jemima Nicholas beat the French back in the day with a pitchfork and a tall black hat, so we don’t mind a prop or two. And although we wouldn’t know teal from turquoise, we’re not colour-biased.

And there you have it—the nub of the thing. I listened to a woman describe herself as born and bred in the cradle of Labour’s heartland—think Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan—but now, because of Reform’s rhetoric, she fears for her sons in the town she grew up in, because her children are biracial.

We all know Farage might talk about the cost of living—how he’ll bring down the price of eggs—but all he cares about is buttering our daily bread with fear. This time he was told to go back to where he came from (and I’m not talking Clacton), but next year he’ll slide out of his gutter again, forked tongue slick with Eton-mess promises. And I’m not sure a Welsh hat will be enough.

full English breakfast—
I ask to swap the beans
for laverbread

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Modern Haiku, Flashflood, Free Flash Fiction, Atrium and Literary Mama. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Her third collection, In the Belly of the Wail, is forthcoming with Querencia Press. She has published two novellas-in flash, Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and has a third called, A History of Hand Thrown Walls, (Unsolicited Press). Her short story collection, Suffer/Rage, was recently released by Dark Myth Publications.

BIRD BY BIRD BENEATH THE LIGHT OF A NEW MOON

a Haibun

by Laurie Rosen

  After Anne Lamott 

My son would come home from college, pull out the dozens of photo albums I assembled

over the years. Together we’d laugh at how young we all were, remember our trips, 

our adventures, the birthday parties. My more recent photos are stuck in my phone, 

no longer easily available to share or reminisce as though life ended in 2005. 

I hear myself saying things like,  I miss the old days, before drones and internet,

when cameras had film, and a day at the beach meant lying supine in the sun 

as we swatted the flies and bees.

Yet, every family has their catastrophes, every era, its own crises to contend with. 

Our family still grieves a devastating plane crash, life-changing diagnoses, family 

estrangements all set against the crashing of the World Trade Center, horrendous 

school shootings, racial strife, and endless war. 

I sit on a beach and the buzzing above isn’t a mosquito, while my photos float 

up to the clouds, and our government catapults us back to vaccination-free days, cuts 

money for research, erases history and people, sends women to the alleys and even to jail. 

I’m left speechless and hopeless, when for so long, despite it all, I felt hopeful, 

that we were moving forward if ever so slowly. 

Maybe I’ll scroll through each photo, choose favorites, send them out 

to be printed, organize them in albums labeled by years. 

It’s overwhelming and tedious; but I can’t sit back and watch 

our story end here.

A sliver of moon

reclaims the star-studded sky,

waxing resilience 

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in Gyroscope Review, Zig Zag Lit Mag, Oddball Magazine, The New Verse News, The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, One Art: a journal of poetry, Nick Virgillio’s Haiku in Action, Pure Haiku, and elsewhere. Laurie won first place in poetry at the 2023 Marblehead, MA Festival of the Arts.

PERIOD PAINS

by Adele Evershed

On the radio, they talk about having a temper, as if it’s a wild creature, something you house in your chest—either caged or rampant. But the bigger conversation is about the trouble with boys, fueled by the latest viral offering on Netflix: Adolescence, which touches on the toxic brew of manhood and violence against women. I’ve watched the show, and unlike most sausage-stuffing series, it offers no explanations—no cathartic “I guessed that all along” or shocking dénouements. You’re left with more questions than answers. It’s simply a story about someone’s son who does something bad, and in the margins, there are glimpses of misogyny, of mob thinking, illustrated with kidney beans and dynamite emojis—look them up, especially if you have teenagers.

But then a man rings in and talks about how “what it means to be a woman” has changed over time, how this has been embraced and encouraged, and unbidden, the Beyoncé song Run the World starts a beat in my chest that tames my beast. Then he adds that “what it means to be a new man” has been ignored, but when asked how to combat that, he’s stumped. Finally, he says, “We need to talk about it.” And there’s the rub—because in my experience, men like to run the world, but find it hard to talk about things they consider “female vices” like accountability, coping strategies, and keeping their temper.

blood moon…
I ask my husband to buy
some tampons
 

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the valleys for the American East Coast. You can find some of her poetry and prose in Grey Sparrow Journal, The New Verse News, Gyroscope, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Janus Lit, and upcoming in Poetry Wales. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Her third collection In the Belly of the Wail is upcoming with Querencia Press. 

MASSACHUSETTS MAN BUYS $395,000 HOUSE DESPITE WARNINGS IT WILL ‘FALL INTO OCEAN’

haibun by Jerome Berglund

with found prose quotations from headlines for the September 11, 2024 Guardian article by Maya Yang.

David Moot…

 

smoking with

the windows up

ball lightning

 

…nabs ‘dream’ Cape Cod home…

 

intelligent 

design 

splitting adam

 

…next to eroding cliff…

 

overcast 

a hot spot 

in the blues

 

…in imminent danger of crumbling…

 

we buy 

neglected properties 

skeleton key

 

“A man who says life’s too short…

 

under 

the rock 

hard fast rules 

 

…to resist buying a home that might fall 

off a cliff in a few years…

 

bible belt 

center 

mass

 

…has taken ownership of a house with a beautiful view…

 

stroke 

of luck 

arching back

 

…of the slowly encroaching ocean.”

 

three fingers 

the trees dropped are removed 

in the night

Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Frogpond, Kingfisher, and Presence. His first full-length collections of poetry were released by Setu, Meat For Tea, Mōtus Audāx press, and a mixed media chapbook showcasing his fine art photography is available now from Yavanika.

SPINNING

by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

The latest weather dome has uncovered us from its blanket of unrelenting heat. At last, I can walk the trails near my house and not need the inhaler in my pocket. I let the laundry pile up in order to save the grid for more important things—lamplight, fans, the refrigerator’s hum. I’m wearing a T-shirt I haven’t worn in almost ten years with its rainbowed Love is Love on soft heather gray and Legalize Gay on the back. I still remember crying that day the courts ruled in favor of my daughters’ future weddings. I imagine the celebration in the hearts of Black Americans when the Civil Rights Act was signed, a year before I was born. I was too young to understand the ruling in ’73 but have been grateful for rights afforded to our sisters, our mothers, our friends. Now the Ferris Wheel is spinning in reverse. I watch the unraveling of progress in the name of pseudo-freedom, mock patriotism and the so-called good ole days. And here we stand, hand in hand, left wondering which car will be stuck at the top, once this ride comes to an end.

carnival tickets 

scattered like wildflower seeds

we wait for the rain

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poems have appeared worldwide in literary journals including Calyx, ONE ART, Eunoia Review, Blue Heron Review, Tule Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, About Place Journal, and Snapdragon, to name a few. She is the author of What She Was Wearing, a chapbook that reveals her #metoo secret after forty years. She’s co-founder of The Poetry Box press and managing editor of The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three amazing humans and Nana to one darling baby girl. She shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon.

SONG FOR A SOUCOUYANT

by Geoffrey Philp

Hurricane Beryl has ripped across the Caribbean with winds of 150mph tearing roofs from buildings, uprooting trees and devastating the islands in its path. —BBC, July 4, 2024. Souvouyant graphic via The Compendium of Arcane Beasts and Critters.

It was only a glancing blow, they said, when Beryl wrapped her arms around the island's spine, pinning us inside our home, avocadoes pelting our roof whose nails barely held against the howls that tore blossoms off the naseberries nestled in the dried gully, which became a river before she overturned fishing boats and ripped houseboats from their moorings. And all the while, she wailed like a Soucouyant, drowning our prayers, leaving us knee-deep in the storm surge, the floods, as boulders tumbled down the mountains into islands of leafless mangroves, the briny odor clinging to my hair. 

coiled at the center 

of the hurricane's fury:

 screams of Africans 

Geoffrey Philp, a Silver Musgrave Medal recipient, is the author of Archipelagos, a book of poems about climate change which was long-listed for the Laurel Prize. Philp’s Twelve Poems and a Story for Christmas retells the nativity story, transporting readers back to that holy night in a fresh yet traditional way. His poem “A Prayer for My Children” is featured on The Poetry Rail—an homage to 12 writers who shaped Miami's culture. He is working on a children’s book, Marsha: The Mangrove Guardian, and is anticipating the release of his graphic novel My Name is Marcus on September 15, 2024.

STEELING

by Adele Evershed

Cwtched up in my bed in a Connecticut winter I listen to the news about Port Talbot Steelworks. It seems they are to be closed down, stealing three thousand jobs. Other facts are thrown out like breadcrumbs—the blast furnaces pump out too much muck and not enough money—the future is in recycled steel. And all that might be true but I remember the steel works at night winking in the gloom like a magical fairy village. I’d imagine Queen Mab being driven on a plume of smoke in her hazelnut coach over the bay to make mischief as we slept—birthing dreams and promising things that made the cold light of day seem less cruel. All these years later I like to believe it was Mab who whispered in my ear that even if you are from a small grey place in South Wales you could still sparkle and believe you deserve so much more.

 

the coldest month

I steel myself 

for another change...

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who now lives in America. Her prose and poetry have been widely published in journals and anthologies such as Every Day Fiction, Grey Sparrow Journal, Anti Heroin Chic, Gyroscope, and Janus Lit. Adele has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for poetry and short fiction and Best of the Net for poetry. Finishing Line Press published her first poetry chapbook Turbulence in Small Places. Her second collection The Brink of Silence is available from Bottlecap Press and her novella-in-flash Wannabe was published by Alien Buddha Press in May.

MONSOON BLUES

by Geoffrey Philp

Venice is sinking. So are Rotterdam, Bangkok and New York. But no place compares to Jakarta, the fastest-sinking megacity on the planet. Over the past 25 years, the hardest-hit areas of Indonesia’s capital have subsided more than 16 feet. The city has until 2030 to figure out a solution, experts say, or it will be too late to hold back the Java Sea. —Bloomberg, December 6, 2023

Walking along Jalan Tebet Baru Timur where the East Tebet Sugar Plantation once sprawled across the delta on which modern Jakarta is built, cranes hover over a metropolis dotted with blue and black plastic water tanks. The air seems thicker, trapped between the glass and steel towers crisscrossing the city where water supplies wither under a blazing tropical sun, and the city's thirst drains the last drop from depleted reservoirs.
 
While sea levels rise
Jakarta waits for the rain
in the Ring of Fire.

Author’s Note: As coastal megacities like Jakarta sink under the combined weight of rapid development, rising seas, and unstable land subsidence, these converging forces spotlight the harsh realities of climate change threats facing our urban future.

Geoffrey Philp, a Silver Musgrave Medal recipient, is the author of Archipelagos, a book of poems about climate change which was long-listed for the Laurel Prize. Philp’s Twelve Poems and a Story for Christmas retells the nativity story, transporting readers back to that holy night in a fresh yet traditional way. His poem “A Prayer for My Children” is featured on The Poetry Rail—an homage to 12 writers who shaped Miami's culture. He  lives in Miami and is working on a children's book Marsha and the Mangroves.

RED TIDE RISING

by Geoffrey Philp

“This is absolutely scary!” declared Mary Jones when she beheld thousands of dead fish lining the Harbour Head shoreline in Harbour View, St Andrew, yesterday morning. She was among several persons who made the usual Saturday morning trek to the area for recreational fishing and was shocked by what greeted them. Photo by Ricardo Makyn. —The (Jamaica) Gleaner, December 10, 2023

It began slowly at first. Mary was the first to notice the algae’s tendrils, wispy and scarlet, intertwining with the seagrasses. But like the warmer winters, she paid it no mind, for she was determined to finish her Christmas shopping in New Kingston before the end of the day.

 

As far as she saw

in the season of light, fish

drowning in the sea.

Author’s Note: Whatever the source of the buildup of nutrients, either from sewage or ship impacts, Jamaican authorities need to develop policies that limit the spread and severity of devastating red tides.

Geoffrey Philp, a Silver Musgrave Medal recipient, is the author of Archipelagos, a book of poems about climate change which was long-listed for the Laurel Prize. Philp’s Twelve Poems and a Story for Christmas retells the nativity story, transporting readers back to that holy night in a fresh yet traditional way. His poem “A Prayer for My Children” is featured on The Poetry Rail—an homage to 12 writers who shaped Miami's culture. He  lives in Miami and is working on a children's book Marsha and the Mangroves.

GASSED

by Royal Rhodes

Today, U.S. officials announced that the final munition in the nation's obsolete stockpile of chemical weapons has been safely destroyed—a disarmament milestone decades in the making. 

—U.S. Department of Defense, July 7, 2023

Gassed (1919) by John Singer Sargent —Wikiart

The staggering line of gassed soldiers, each Tommy blindfolded as if in a deadly children's game, moved slowly over a ground-cover of wounded and dead, and were linked by a sagging rope of hands on shoulders. The society painter, more famous for portraits of the wealthy and renowned, a world of watered-silk frocks and highly polished silver tea sets, covered a vast canvas with these larger-than-life figures that overshadow the startled visitors gazing at the past. In the background a spirited soccer game caught their eye.

War made forests ash

and remade farmland

to fields of headstones

Royal Rhodes lives in Gambier, Ohio, and has published poems in The New Verse News, Ekphrastic Review Challenge, and Snakeskin Poetry.

ANIMAL FARM 2021:1. BRAZEN BULL

by E. L. Blizzard

A young male bottle-fed, head-petted, indulged, insulated from common bovine. Aggressive disposition rewarded, elite pedigree admired, need for dominance nurtured.

 

Let loose, it mounts at will. Out for blood. Horning and pawing dirt, snorting, trying to gore everything in its way.

 

Humans walk on eggshells, circling periphery, scratching heads, wondering what went wrong. Much too late for dehorning and castration, but they gather keystone and bands, readying to interrupt its flight zone.

 

pasture grazing—

sickly bellows

scatter the herd

E. L. Blizzard has recent poems forthcoming or in The Other Bunny, Bones, Drifting Sands, Failed Haiku, Autumn Moon, Under the Bashō, Wales Haiku Journal, Femku and Poetry Pea. Over years of nonprofit work, she’s advocated on issues faced by immigrants and refugees, survivors of intimate partner violence in cis and LGBTQ+ relationships, and those experiencing homelessness.

JUST STAY CALM

a cento-haibun
by Ed Gold

It’s going to be just fine. We are doing an incredible job. Everything is under control. It’s just one guy coming in from China. We do have a plan, and we think it will be handled very well. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done! I said it would go away, and it will go away. Everything is totally under control. Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. Stock market starting to look very good to me! The flu is worse! Just stay calm, it will go away. One day, it’s like a miracle. It will disappear. We have handled it very well. I’m choosing not to wear a mask. It’s only a recommendation; it’s voluntary. So when we have a lot of cases, I don’t look at that as a bad thing. I look at that, as in some respects, a good thing because it means our testing is much better. Really, it’s a badge of honor. Some areas we thought may be gone, but they flared up, and we’re putting out the flames or the fires. This is the democrats’ new hoax! 99 out of 100 cases are totally harmless. It’s going to be just fine. We are doing an incredible job.

Just stay calm. One day,
It’ll be a miracle:
he will disappear.

Ed Gold has a chapbook, Owl, and poems in the Ekphrastic Review, TheNewVerse.News, Passager, Think, New York Quarterly, Kakalak, Window Cat Press, Kansas Quarterly, Cyclamens and Swords, Poet Lore, Rat’s Ass Review, Homonym Journal, and many others. For 15 years, he taught at the University of Maryland and now is a writer, editor, and writing trainer for various government agencies and large corporations. For the Poetry Society of South Carolina, he runs the Skylark contest for high school poets. Ed lives in Charleston with his wife, Amy Robinson, and their terrier, Edie.