FINE LINES

by Kathryn Spratt 

My husband hates the Lindsay Clancy case.

Why must I bring it up again?

It's not like

I'm her.

I take one

pill to keep me sweeping up cheerios

when they fall on the floor. 

It's not like

I thought my friend was her

when I said

You drop off your baby girl

anytime.

No judgement.

No questions asked.

I need him to help me carry the horror

like he might a bag of dog food.

Open this can of peaches, please.

Reach the top shelf

of my heartsick disbelief.

That’s it, isn’t it?

It's not like

I feel an urge to kill the infant-

ilization of my kind,

to be the woman’s voice

in a tired man’s head

hissing, We can be killers like

we can be astronauts, engineers,

mothers, doctors,

and even

circus tightrope walkers.

We can murder.

Otherwise, we’re all

little girls

tiptoeing on exercise bands

spread flat on basement floors.

Kathryn Spratt teaches and writes in a quiet corner of the Western United States. Her poetry has appeared in Eunoia Review, Rat's Ass Review, and elsewhere. She has been honored with a first place Brilliant Poetry competition award and an Eleanore B. North Poetry Award. 

NIGHT STALKERS

by Kathyrn Ridall

The New York Times, July 16, 2026

2 AM,

loneliness a siren’s song,

a vampire’s kiss. I try

to remember how it felt

to be loved steadfastly

by my husband from the

moment we met until

he left this world.

A shiver in the night

and our 47th president appears—

a six-foot lizard, upright

with orange hair and a red

necktie, his tail a relentless

scythe that levels fields,

each day slashes the fragile

fruits of freedom.

My small dog senses

something outside

the house and launches

from the bed we share,

her barking a spray of bullets.

She wants to protect us

from creatures that bare

their teeth and stalk us

in the night.

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

Kathyrn Ridall is a poet and non-fiction writer. She is the author of the recent poetry collection The  Living Waters Between Us and of the award-winning Dreaming at the Gates: How Dreams Guide Us. She lives in Ventura, CA where she works as a psychotherapist.

FREE BIDEN

by Indran Amirthanayagam

What we cannot explain. What we cannot 
decipher in mind and heart. What we cannot 
understand. That is the legacy of the man

who supplied 2,000 pound bombs, fighter jets,
attack drones; sent naval gunships to anchor 
within striking distance of the Strip, 

and provided building blocks for the Iron Dome. 
This man who championed and invested 
in America, in more red than blue states, 

besides walking the picket line, this loving 
father and husband, left his mind near Yaffa,
on the road to Bethlehem, yet another

occupied territory. Free Biden I hear 
blowing in the wind. among ashes. Too late.  

Indran Amirthanayagam has just published Seer (Hanging Loose Press) and The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil). El bosque de deleites fratricidas is forthcoming from RIL Editores. He is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

HUSBAND DIVINING

by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose

The murder of Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei (above) by her former partner has reignited calls for stronger action against femicide in Kenya. The 33-year-old Ugandan died days after being doused in petrol and set alight by her ex-boyfriend at her home in Trans Nzoia county in western Kenya. This is not an isolated incident. Kenya has one of the highest rates of violence against women in Africa. Media reports say that in January alone more than 10 women in the country were victims of femicide, defined by the UN as the killing of women because of their gender. —BBC, September 19, 2024

Nearly 34% of Kenyan girls and women aged 15-49 years have suffered physical violence, according to government data from 2022, with married women at particular risk. The 2022 survey found that 41% of married women had faced violence. —Reuters, September 6, 2024

My grandmother recounts a game

she and her sisters played as girls. 

Candle in one hand, mirror in the other, 

they backwards-climbed dark stairs, careful 

not to misstep, not to stumble, not to become

fallen girls. At the landing, their fate revealed

in the flickering reflection one of two futures: 

the image of a husband

or that of the Reaper's.

 

Who will warn the girls of Death's trick,

how too often he wears the face of love?

Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose’s writing appears in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Rattle, The New Verse News, and others. Author of two poetry chapbooks, Wild Things (Main Street Rag, 2021) and Imago, Dei (Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize, 2022), she lives in Rochester, NY.

THE CONVENIENT WIFE

by Elisabeth Frischauf

cartoon by Bill Bramhill

Pockets strife

Shoulders the blame

Picks up the stain

For anyone

Fanning the flame

Against husband’s fame

Deep in her bosom

Buries misdeeds

Twitter poison feed

Lucky this man

Justice of our land

Whose wife

With bravura and passion

Hangs

Our stripes and stars

Upside down

Elisabeth Frischauf is a psychiatrist, grandmother, and visual artist in many media: ceramics, collage, mobiles. Poetry is intimately bound up with her art.  Being multilingual and anchored in two cultures—the family homeland in Austria and New York City— enriches all her work. Her epic narrative memoir poem, They Clasp My Hand, short-listed for the Austria Literary Prize, was published in April 2022 by the Theodor Kramer Verlag, Vienna, Austria. This book is in process for on demand, English only, by She Writes Press.  Two more memoir verse books are in the publication pipeline.  She publishes poems in various on-line magazines. She lives with her husband, playwright Richard France by a lake in Putnam County, New York.

A MOTHER FLEES

by Jack Kristiansen

            after Marc Chagall’s Fire in the Snow (1942) 

"Fire in the Snow" (1942); Gouache on paper by Marc Chagall. Collection: Amy and Eric Huck, Lewisberry, Pennsylvania

 

It’s human  

to start fires 

and every so often 

people approve   

of villages going up 

in flame 

so tonight 

a mother flees. 

 

Like a statue 

that’s come alive 

just in time  

to jump down 

from her perch 

above the altar, 

a mother flees. 

 

Having awoke 

to the coughing 

of her child, 

their house flickering, 

a mother flees. 

 

No crown 

on her head 

to hold in place 

her flaring hair, 

a mother flees. 

 

The night’s gone green, 

the snow green, 

her clothes smoky green. 

Her calm dog 

waiting for her 

to catch up, 

a mother flees. 

             

No husband 

in sight, 

the angels gone 

in disbelief, 

left with a son 

to save, 

a mother flees. 

 

Her child 

too heavy  

to carry far, 

a mother flees. 

Jack Kristiansen exists in the notebooks and computer files of William Aarnes who hopes to move soon from South Carolina to Manhattan.  His new collection The Hum in Human is available from Main Street Rag.

PIVOTS

by Roseann Lloyd

He says he doesn't want the people
to come off the cruise ship
because his numbers will go up...
He likes lots of kinds of numbers
besides the ones that go up
especially the ones he can throw around--
like the millions of masks
like the bigshots who call him at midnight
like the number of reporters he can dress
down in one presser:
That's a nasty question
You don't know what I've ordered
You're a terrible reporter
That's a nasty question [yes, for the second time]
It's not racist to say 'Kung Flu'
I'm not a shipping clerk!

I must pivot away from this vicious old man
and so I turn away from anger to the child
who has come up to me in my chair.
Who says, You look so old. Really old.
Yes, I say, I've had a birthday since I saw you.
Did you see me before I was born?
No, I saw you downstairs playing.

How many numbers do you have?
(After a brief pause for me to decipher)
Desmond, I say, I have 76.
Oh, that's really old.
How many numbers to you have, Desmond?
He holds up fingers on one hand and counts out loud.
1, 2, 3, 4.
Yes. Four. You are growing up.
His grandmother smiles and says her number: 67.
We're sort of twin numbers.

Later at home, I say
Husband, our days are numbered.
Let's enjoy each one.
Let's get married again
When summer comes.

Roseann Lloyd lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has published four collections of poetry—Tap Dancing for Big Mom (New Rivers Press), War Baby Express (Minnesota Book Award for Poetry),  Because of the Light, and The Boy Who Slept Under the Stars: A Memoir in Poetry (the latter three from Holy Cow! Press)—as well as an anthology co-edited with Deborah Keenan, Looking for Women: Women Writing about Exile (Milkweed Editions), winner of an American Book Award.

THERE'S NEVER ONLY ONE

by Joan Mazza 

“Justice Blindsided: Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser comes forward” by Pia Guerra, TheNib, September 17th, 2018

A wife wants to believe her husband
when he swears, after he’s arrested,
he has never picked up a hooker before.
That the affair on a business trip was

nothing, didn’t have anything to do
with his love for his wife, his daughters.
The altar boy feels chosen by the priest,
special child, loved and petted, blessed

by God to be special. The only one.
He won’t tell the other children because
they might covet his blessings, but never
will be chosen. One assault, the one time

he groped a co-worker, demanded sex.
Just once. A moment of recklessness,
like the therapist who hugs a patient,
lies down for comfort on his leather couch.

Once, he tells the professional licensing
board, his wife, his adult children.
It happened once. The judge says,
It will never happen again.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has twice been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Slipstream, American Journal of Nursing, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, and The Nation.

A PRECARIOUS TRAIL

by Leah Givens

Jordan Linn Graham, 22, was charged with second degree murder in a Missoula, Mont. federal courtroom on Sept. 9, after admitting she killed her husband of one week by pushing him over a steep cliff in Montana’s Glacier National Park. --Laura Zuckerman, Reuters, September 13, 2013

Stone and hope intersect
on a trek no longer
ominous
since it's been trodden
so often before.
She knew, though, she
hinted at executing
a vicious trick
if the sky resumed a
certain shade of gray
(or maybe on
a sunny day).
Would do “something,”
which never signifies
blithe, especially
when ascending
a precipice.

In wedding photos
she glows, neck and
below, but eyes pray
like a gas tank
aching to be filled.
He grins, cautioned
but already fixed
on a widow
to be. Women quiver,
he counseled his
soul. Once the ring
is clinched, life's
content. Like-
minded, one trips,
the other recovers.
How fleetingly dreams
lead astray,
crash into a chasm
where they remain.


Leah Givens’ writing has appeared in Sleet Magazine, DOGZPLOT, and The Yale Journal of the Humanities in Medicine, among others. She is currently revising a novel. She received her M.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and focuses on medical research. Her photography is also widely published.

TWERKING ON THE SUBWAY

by Will Stockton

On the D train north
D – isn’t that just too cute? –
twerks my husband.
Without cable we live
in 2009. I saw the performance
on YouTube the morning after.
Without cable Miley Cyrus
is still Hannah Montana
and Robin Thicke is no one
we know. Cyrus says – You're
wanting to make history, y'all –
so pulls old strings of slut shaming,
of swift love and theft.
I thread the move into a lyric
I sang on the El south from Fullerton –
Is it worth it? Let me twerk it –
as D, white hipster, high school
musical dancer, bends over to touch
his toes, to keep his balance
as the train swerves left.


Will Stockton is associate professor of English at Clemson, South Carolina, where he teaches Renaissance literature and queer studies. His most recent book, Crush, forthcoming from Punctum Books, is a collection of poems and lyric essays co-written with D. Gilson.

WIFE SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING IN BLAZE

by Darlene Pagan

Image credit: defokes / 123RF Stock Photo

She never imagined the sheet she lit
would curl him in its hot tongue, never
believed he wouldn’t wake in those flames,
throw back the covers, and wash his feet like
she’d been asking him every night before bed. 

The air buzzed with a lightning storm.
The chickens refused to lay and no matter
how long or hard she kneaded the dough,
all morning, the loaves cooked up
dense and hard as baseball bats. 
At least, no child again this month. 

A photo of them as newlyweds, so young
they look like children playing dress up,
hangs in the hallway.  Too stubborn to quit
a decade later and now look where it’s got them. 

Black petals fall.  Bits of sheet, newly caught
rise like cardinals.  A door opens, the wind
roars, timbers spit and splinter until she finds
herself outside in the grass watching

lightning split a sycamore.  She looks from
the tree to the body they’re pulling too late
from the burning house.  She believes it
when she tells them she has no idea who he is.


Darlene Pagan teaches at Pacific University in Oregon, where she lives with her husband and sons.  A book of poems, Blue Ghosts, was published with Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and essays have most recently appeared in journals such as Calyx, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Madison Review, Poet Lore, Hiram Poetry Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Memoir(and), Brevity, and Literal Latté, among others. Pagan recently completed a full-length poetry project tentatively titled, Setting the Fire. She loves to bike, hike, dig at the beach, walk in the rain, sing, and ride roller coasters now that her boys are just tall enough to ride.