CHICAGO STOCK (YARDS) 1954

WHISPERS OF THE NOW

by Corey Weinstein

We were born on a sigh of relief

trembling lips after Nazi butchers’ blade,

pasty grins of “don’t mention it please”

elders hiding this truth from their brood.

 

Trembling from Babi Yar family’s ruin

our adults invoked a solace of silence.

Just let us strive, be free range kids. 

We, fizzy bubbles of sorrows’ cauldron.

 

     (now this genocide in Palestine)

     (children, press, doctors targets)

 

High grades and high jinks were our sweet lot

summer’s play, bikes and balls all day.

Bubbles can only break, learn the horror

noxious smells waft up from stockyards.

 

     (rubble trapped death stench)

     (homes and hope lie in waste)

 

Hot days joy mixed with sirloin slaughter

what could our folks have had on their mind?

Pens of cattle, hogs not dear Kyiv cousins,

grins not groans for Rogers Park preteens.

 

     (miasma of cruelty’s purpose)

     (to break a peoples’ spirit)

   

When we unearthed the bloodbath’s facts

sighs of relief became embarrassed stutters.

Children left to fathom a world’s dread, 

parents’ silence a kindly confusing legacy.

 

     (what are parents thinking now?)

     (telling kids about Gaza now?)

Corey Weinstein’s poetry has been published in Haight Asbury Literary Journal, Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Our California 2024, The Ekphrastic Review, Forum (City College of San Francisco), California State Poetry Society, Visitant, Abandoned Mine, Speak Poetry of San Mateo County, California State Poetry Society and Jewish Currents, and he wrote and performed a singspiel called Erased: Babi Yar, the SS and Me. In his free time, he hosts San Francisco OLLI’s Poetry Workshop Circle and plays the clarinet in his local jazz band, Tandem, his synagogue choir and woodwind ensembles.

CONVERSATIONS

by Liam Boyle

 

in memoriam Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026)  

 

In his later years, Jürgen Habermas was sometimes described as “the last European” – a reference to his passionate commitment to the ideals of the European Union (although not always its modern reality). The great German philosopher was also the last surviving exemplar of a generation of postwar intellectuals formed by the experience of the second world war. Like Jean-Paul Sartre in France, Habermas was as at home in the public square as the seminar room, debating the future of a continent that needed to be rebuilt ethically as well as physically. In the new age of unreason, where brute exercise of power is explicitly prized above the force of moral argument, the loss of any such figure is to be mourned. But Habermas’s death at the age of 96, as the US and Israel wage an illegal war of choice, and the far right is in the ascendant in France and Germany, feels particularly poignant. A member of the Hitler Youth as a boy, Habermas then made it his life’s work to philosophically ground the democratic values which are now under threat again. A renewed focus on the great insight that drove his thinking would be an appropriate legacy. The Theory of Communicative Action, his 1980s magnum opus, was not (to put it mildly) as accessible as some of his newspaper opinion pieces. But its central idea – that our nature as linguistic beings puts reason and the search for consensus at the core of who we are – remains an antidote both to intellectual relativism and Trumpian “realism”, which elevates national or individual self-interest above all other sources of human motivation. —The Guardian, March 18, 2026

 

I have to think that it matters
my own small contribution 
to the project of democracy
going door to door at evening time
arguing the merits of my candidate. 
 
And I know there isn’t time enough
to trace each reason back to source
and I know, between my tired feet
and families readying meals,
this is not the ideal public sphere 
that you described.
 
In your obituary the familiar gripes –  
too much Enlightenment,
too out of its time,
too emphatically rational. 
But that’s what I liked, the ambition of it all, 
the long conversations 
step by step to consensus.
 
The horror of holocaust formed you.
You saw the mirage of Nazism
and its brutal reality. 
Your “never again” meant reckoning 
with the whole story of modernity. 
You sought to rescue its promise
from the twisted wreckage around you. 
 
And with the recent turn from talk,
all the strong men who do because they can, 
might is right, and all that gab, 
the giddy march of atavistic nativism, 
it can be said that you failed. 
 
But I thank you for the ideal you sketched 
of undistorted conversation
of reasons advanced and scrutinised
in the slow careful business 
of building understanding and agreement. 

 

Liam Boyle lives in Galway, Ireland. He was a featured reader in the New Writing Showcase at Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2025. Many of his poems deal with memory and heritage. He enjoys spending time with his grandchildren.

THE LAST JEW IN VINNITSA

 by Roselyn Kubek

Detail showing the murderer now identified as Jackobus Omnen from the photograph known as "The Last Jew in Vinnitsa" Warning: Viewers will find the original photo at the link provided disturbing.

At Last, a Name for the Murderer in a Holocaust Photo. —The New York Times, November 28, 2025

Now he has a name.

Or we have it—

Finally we know what to call the person 

whose ennui pulled a trigger in front of:

     one photographer

     two dozen standing-bored

     so many piled bodies

We learn this murderer 

was once a school teacher

who still teaches though armed 

with a different lesson

      Jackobus Omnen

How pleasant to roll that 

off history’s tongue

to store in the sepia of then

It’s a name full of roundness 

like the anonymous circle 

of witnesses

like the shallow pit where 

a man sits on the edge

perpetually anticipating 

the end

Chin raised

he watches us all

from the bottom 

of a photograph

and waits to become the last.

Roselyn Kubek is a teacher and a New England poet whose work has been featured in a number of publications and venues including, most recently, Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope series and the Maine Poets Epistolary Poetry Exchange. 

THIS POEM ISN'T GOING TO SOLVE THE MIDDLE EAST PEACE CRISIS

by Shannon Frost Greenstein

Death and suffering in Gaza. Cartoon by Marilena Nardi.

I believe in a Free Palestine. 

 

Wait, hold on… that wasn’t how I wanted to start at all. 

 

This poem isn’t going to solve the Middle East peace crisis. 

 

Well, that’s hardly any better, but what I’m really trying to say is,

I love my Jewish husband. 

 

I love my sweet, supportive, circumcised Jewish husband,

and I love his family, 

and I love their families, 

all of whom accepted a shiksa who adores Christmas

right into their homes; right into their tribe. 

 

But I believe in a Free Palestine. 

 

And I am the first to acknowledge that I know absolutely nothing

about the epigenetic trauma of being Jewish; 

after all, my people have always tended to do more of the oppressing.

I cannot speak to the experience of a Holocaust 

or to the damage that comes from being hated and hunted

for 3,000 years in a row. 

 

But I believe in a Free Palestine. 

 

So when my husband and I sit down

to discuss Gaza and the Nova Festival and all of the starving babies—

the horror and the suffering and all of the fear—we do not always see eye to eye. 

 

And if we have issues discussing human rights and geopolitics and the existence of war crimes, 

you can just imagine how family dinners at my in-laws’ get.

 

I am a mother and a pacifist, at the end of the day, 

with too much empathy 

and an unfinished Ph.D. regarding the philosophical nature of ethics;

I like it best when everyone just gets along.

But I also believe in a Free Palestine

while simultaneously attempting to respect my Jewish husband’s heritage 

and that is apparently an untenable position in which to be.

 

This poem isn’t going to solve the Middle East peace crisis. 

 

But maybe it will alleviate some tension in my marriage. 

Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) is the author of Through the Lens of Time, a forthcoming fiction collection with Thirty West Publishing. She is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Follow Shannon on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks

POST MORTEM: THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

The history of a planet in sixteen lines

by Greg McClelland

Source: Mail Online

It all began when a molten mass,

boiling within,

battered from without,

barreled through a gaping void.

 

Peaks of solidity surfaced;

tectonic hands and burning digits

designed antediluvian bone:

basalt, sandstone, granite, schist.

 

Through five hundred million years,

from Ordovician to Cretaceous,

our mother birthed and killed five litters

of living tissue.

 

Then she birthed a sixth,

which brewed its own poisons—

digital, solid, nuclear, microscopic—

leading to the first synthetic holocaust.

Greg McClelland is a retired government ethics attorney. He has published poetry in Ancient Paths, The Road Not Taken, All Around the Mulberry Bush, and his college alma mater newsletter. Besides writing poetry, he spends his retirement working in political activism, helping to ensure that Trump will never see the inside of the White House again.

IN THESE FEARFUL TIMES I FIND THE THING WITH FEATHERS AT HOME DEPOT

by Lois Marie Harrod

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News

It’s been dismal—

the mice began invading my cupboarded coconut flakes

because, said my neighbor Ed, who knows about such things,

it’s so hot outside they come into the cool, and my neighbor Cheryl

started calling me The Mouse Slayer,  

because I snapped seven of their hot little necks,

and then a thunderstorm wedged the roof vent flap open,

letting the storm leak onto the toilet where I was sitting,

and a dead squirrel deposited himself in my yard,

and because my dead husband can no longer do it,

I had to shovel the desiccated little rodent into a garbage bag

because the ground is too dry to dig a proper grave,

and then the spin switch on my forty-seven-year-old washing machine

gave up like democracy, and I had to wring out the bath towels,  

hand by arthritic hand, and scoop out gallons of water with a measuring cup.

Next I had to go off to The Home Depot where I spent more than I hoped

on a new ecologically-friendly washing machine, 

and when the bearded salesman gave me the receipt,

he said, And what do you think of what’s going on in this world?

Who are you voting for?

 

And, yes, I was afraid to answer. I knew what was coming . . .

 

but I said Kamala anyway, because what could this 6-foot bearded guy

in an orange apron do to a less than 5-foot customer in The Home Depot?

Shoot me?

But his beard spread into a grin, and he said Good,

and spent another 27 minutes telling me about his grandfather,

a holocaust survivor, and his uncle who saved 19 people at Pearl Harbor,

and how Hitler came into power and just how would-be dictators

are still coming into power—all of which I knew—but he needed me to listen.

 

And, yes, as I left, Emily Dickinson’s Hope,

that little thing with feathers, flitted down the paint aisle—

but Emily, are you listening from your grave?—

you are wrong, that little bird does demand a crumb from us,

many crumbs from us.

We must feed her.

Lois Marie Harrod’s recent publications include her 18^th  poetry collection Spat (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and her chapbook Woman (Blue Lyra, 2020). Dodge poet, life-long educator and writer, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3.

ACCEPTABLE LEVELS OF CRUELTY, STEADILY RISING

by Gordon Gilbert

In the not-so-distant past,
genocidal acts, a holocaust,
distant from our shores,
rumoured only, but for most unseen,
finally revealed in retrospect
indelibly to soldiers’ eyes,
brought home in photographs,
not to be denied.
 
Ah, we said, if only… If only…
But we did not know
at the time, only later,
and alas, too late to do
what we surely would have done
had we only known…
 
But now this genocide comes to us live,
like a fog slowly lifting, revealing
the landscapes of barbarity:
bombs falling; the destruction of
homes & neighborhoods,
schools & hospitals,
mosques & churches;
the death of civilians—
babies,  children,  women,  men;
the cries and wails of those
(for now) still alive.
 
Survivors,
searching in the rubble for those they lost.
We know this time. 
We cannot say we do not know. 

Editor's note: The title of this poem is a line from “To the Days” by Adrienne Rich.


Gordon Gilbert is a writer living in NYC's west village.  During the pandemic, he often found solace and an inner sense of peace by taking walks along the nearby Hudson River; now he does so as unwilling witness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

OH, ISRAEL

by Bonnie Proudfoot

Next Year in Jerusalem is said at the end of the Passover Seder. It is an ancient tradition that was first recorded by Isaac Tyrnau in the 15th century. Above art by Caren Garfen.

Oh, Israel, if my love is a suitcase, when I get to your house

I won't unpack, even though my mother and her mother,

my uncles and cousins are buried in pine boxes beneath

a star of David and our Rabbi wept for victims of the Holocaust,

 

cried for a homeland for the children of Zion. Yes, I used to feel

my chest swell open when I heard Hatikvah, yes, you've suffered,

people taken in sleep, in song, as they walked out of their homes.

I know you are perched on a precipice of strife. I too have felt

 

like a stranger in a strange land, my family holding our faith close

to shield us from hate or harm. Here, in the safety of my small

life, I see signs on the highway, a deer rearing up, a warning one

may careen across the road, but that isn't how it happens, not

 

right beside a road sign. When terror charged, you weren't

ready. I see stolen homes, stolen land. I see that hate calls out 

in darkness for more hate. Gazan families starve, pick through 

ashes to find bodies to bury while you shatter hospitals, shelters. 

 

I mean blood will stick to you, Israel. You shatter us too, we 

who were raised with a dream, who held you in the light each

Friday night. Two peoples, breath of one breath, voices raised to 

the same God. The more faith you steal, the less you'll keep.

Bonnie Proudfoot was raised in Queens, NY, and currently resides in Athens, Ohio. Her poetry has appeared previously in The New Verse News and many other fine journals and anthologies. Bonnie's first book of poems Household Gods was published by Sheila-Na-Gig editions, and her first novel Goshen Road was published by Swallow Press. It was named the WCONA Book of the Year and long-listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

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. 

WITNESS

by Jean Mikhail

I have witnessed little animals, 
their death throes at my doorstep,  
ones killed or maimed by my cat, 
Phoebe,  and from time to time, 
I have nearly stepped on some small dead 
something, and I’d love to catch her 
before the killing act, to turn back time, 
and gently place the baby rabbit back 
in its burrow, or set the fledgling 
robin on a branch, safely, but instead, 
I have tossed the carcass in the trash 
or pitched the body into the woods,
a safe distance away, and I have   
shifted my focus, turned my eyes  
from their bloody mouths, lifted 
my shoe to float over them, 
like  a cloud crosses the convex 
eyes of a child of Gaza, lying dead, 
and I saw him in, of all places, 
a Facebook video while scrolling 
through all the other videos of surfers 
surfing, of people giving cooking 
lessons, and the bombing of this 
building, the concrete caving into
a boy’s chest,  he will never crack 
a smile, or break into laughter, ever 
again, he was made to be a martyr, 
in his mother’s eyes, a martyr, 
his brown eyes softening into cloud 
wisps, into blue sky reflection, 
and he and other children throughout
history, the children of the Holocaust,
of Syria, and those others murdered 
for no reason, no fault of their own, 
don’t even have a doorstep 
tombstone,  or a proper burial, 
or a bell ringing like a doorbell,  
no one will answer the question 
why their deaths don’t matter, 
or how can this be happening, 
because let’s face it, 
we’d never get anything done 
if we solely focused on the world’s 
horrors, we’d never even get our 
shopping done, or have the strength
to lift our heavy brown paper sacks 
to the car because everything would feel 
so burdensome, heavy as a body, 
as concrete collapsing into the child
counted among the dead, a number, 
a child cocooned in a burial cloth, 
and the world tilts on its heavier side, 
and we are on the lighter side giving  
nothing but a thumbs up for dying children, 
and all we can do is hope for better 
endings, for a ceasefire and for peace, 
I  can no longer watch a mother grieve,
yet can’t look away from her, either, 
as she  performs the ungodly task 
of collecting her child’s blown off 
ears and fingers, wiping tears 
on her hijab because what else 
does she have but a sheer will 
to survive and head covering, 
and how else can she know 
her child’s hand from any other 
child’s hand, like my own children's 
hands, how would I recognize them,  
whose hand would I hold, whose 
fingers thrown into the air, asking 
which almighty to help them. 

Jean Mikhail lives in Athens, Ohio with her husband, who is Egyptian. Two of her children are Guatemalan adoptees. She has published in The Appalachian Review, Sheila Na Gig Online, Pudding Magazine, and other journals and anthologies.