Maybe history belongs in an aquarium,
sealed glass, nothing escapes,
tourists tapping,
their faces blurring into the water
like fish circling stones,
forgetting how a river ever tasted.
Blindfolds are now built into the monument,
no need to hand them out.
People gather,
guessing at the gaps,
swapping stories about words that used to live here.
There’s a kind of bravery in pretending
not to flinch.
Slavery, taken from the wall.
Women erased,
the ones who refused to fold themselves small.
Immigrants, scratched out.
Only the dead left,
the ones good for a headline in June.
Someone decided truth was too “woke” for the daylight.
Wouldn’t want anyone catching empathy from a plaque.
You stand in front of absence,
try to piece together stories from what’s left in the shadows.
The monument looks lighter,
but the air is heavy,
pressing on your chest,
the way silence does
when no one wants to go first.
Tourists line up for their photos,
kids run the steps.
It gets too easy,
not seeing what isn’t there.
History shrinks down,
something you can keep in your pocket,
hard questions packed away in dust,
stories left behind
because they were too honest to let us sleep.
And I wonder,
what happens to a country
that keeps pretending it’s finished telling the truth,
when everyone who knows better
is still standing here,
waiting for their name to be spoken
in the story that always belonged to them.
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AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
“I’m throwing a Party,” the Mad Hater decreed,
“And it’s only for those of Certain High Breed.
The workers and riff-raff will not be allowed
We’ll clear this Great Land of such unwanted crowds.
We’ll send them all packing to back where they came
And build big border walls in Liberty’s name.”
He wanted the people meek and afraid,
Instead they came chanting and dancing, they prayed.
They flocked to the aid of their neighbors and friends,
They poured through the streets, angry crowds without end.
“Criminals!” the Mad Hater shouted with venom,
“Violent assassins, we’re going to get ‘em!”
He called out his proud boys, his goons and his gnome,
Said, “Smash their car windows, crash into their homes.
You’re breaking no laws if you do what I say,
My Words are the only Law you must obey.
But these people with cameras and signs in their hands
Are the worst of the worst, destroying our Land.
Arresting them all is how we stay Free,
Anyone is a traitor who doesn’t agree!”
The people still came with their banners and songs,
Would not be defeated, they knew right from wrong.
Then, “Off with their masks!” the large crowd declared,
“Let’s see why these big men are so terribly scared
Of children and mothers and men holding phones,
It makes them all trembly right down to their bones.
Their pepper and guns are no match for such threats
As inflatable frogs and knitters in sweats,
And pink dancing sharks and sweet unicorns,
And kids banging drums and blowing on horns!”
With all this distraction, this hullaballoo,
The Hater was pleased by something he knew.
He rubbed his small hands and gave a sly smile,
“At least they’ve forgotten about those damn Files!”
Lisa Shulman is a poet, children’s book author, and teacher. Her poetry has appeared in Sheila-na-gig, About Place, Anacapa Review, Inkfish, Kitchen Table Quarterly, ONE ART, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Fragile Bones, Fierce Heart. A Pushcart nominee, Lisa teaches poetry with California Poets in the Schools, and workshops for women in recovery.
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| A preliminary review by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s internal watchdog office found that Alex Pretti was shot by two federal officers after resisting arrest, but did not indicate that he brandished a weapon during the encounter, according to an email sent to Congress and reviewed by The New York Times [January 27, 2026]. |
We were both
ten years old,
and best friends,
the colonel’s
daughter
across the street
and I,
when he said
I think
you’re old enough
to see these
army newsreels,
from my days
back
in World War II.
Down into
the basement
we went.
Before he turned
out the lights,
we watched
as he took out
a giant reel
of sixteen millimeter
black and white film,
he fitted
to his old army
projector.
The two of us
watched in terror,
as people were
dragged from shops
and apartment
buildings,
thrown
to the ground,
and beaten.
With the same
fright in our voices,
we asked
what they
did wrong.
The colonel
stopped the film
and turned
on the lights.
What did they
do wrong,
he repeated.
Hitler—
a name
we knew barely
at a distance—
hated Jews,
he said.
The people
pictured here
were Jews.
In that quiet
fatherly tone,
I knew so well,
he looked at me
and said,
you’re Jewish,
aren’t you.
The next images,
forever fixed
in my mind,
showed mounds
of dead bodies
being bulldozed
into trenches,
at what he called
“the camps”.
A vile end,
I later thought,
for a people
doing nothing
wrong,
but approaching
their god,
in the Fuhrer’s eyes,
from the wrong
testament.
***
I can’t pick up a paper,
or see a newscast,
that doesn’t remind me—
as ICE grabs individuals
off the street,
or wades into crowds
with smoke bombs,
to break up protests—
of those images
the colonel
shared with us,
that day long ago.
We were still
too young
to understand
when he told,
how Hitler came
to control the truth
proclaimed
by print
and radio.
As truth today
seems to reincarnate
with each sunrise,
the colonel’s films
begin to feel
eerily familiar.
Have America’s
once welcome
immigrants,
incarcerated now
at every turn,
I ask myself,
become
yesterday’s
vilified Jews,
our government
more Hitlerian
by the hour?
And more
terrifying?
Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, and others here and abroad. His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored over 290 poems, published on four continents.
Do I write about poets with red holes
in their forehead? Students whose eyes
have been shot out, the mother of four
small children is rotting in a cell full of other people,
excrement, wails, the sounds of metal and wood
on flesh and bone.
How can I write a love poem when
all I know is that planets no longer align,
that war has been declared on peace,
that all the crystals disintegrate into millions
of nano shards, shaken by the vibrations of hate.
How can I write a love poem when
I am no longer allowed to trust my eyes,
when blue is red, up is down, no means yes,
when, while I am hollow and starving
a blonde demon laughs and tells me I have riches
to look forward to. Perhaps even in this life.
All I have to do is believe.
And haven’t we all been taught to believe?
To believe that there is a big old man on a cloud
somewhere, an old man with a long, white beard
who has a big book and writes all your
little misdeeds in big letters,
and who they say is love and who asks you to love
‘the other’ as you love yourself.
So, for many it’s easy to believe that in his name,
in the name of love, you are being hung
upside-down by your feet until you
confess how much delicious hate you feel,
and that you never had it so good.
A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her work has been widely published mostly by US poetry journals. A new full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026.
The world is burning,
So I took a lighter and match,
And set fire to my craft,
So my nails could saw and sear my keyboard,
So black plastic can burn and rise,
Sting wide nostrils, smoke Spanish shaped eyes,
With memories of my community in zip ties,
Hoping its loud clack might drown and drown,
The images of that little girls tears,
As her mom was forcefully pushed down,
By a non-native in a black vest,
Twisting our poetry into tar,
To gag our syllables and curls,
As white women recorded and watched, for their performative internet fodder,
A small brown girl escorted home, without her father.
So I go deep in the iambics of colonizer language,
Because they cut, lynched and burned our tongues,
In the Rio Grande of Texas,
And from Boston,
I can hear the screams of Chicago and Canal Street.
They can come and hang me from the Texas Oak Trees,
In high June,
Before they take the words in me,
They can tighten the rope,
Make it a hundred degree day,
Scorched earth and crackling grass,
The smell of magnolias and cookouts,
They will see the blue come over me,
Before they take the Mexican me.
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