SMALLEST AREA COMPATIBLE

by Pepper Trail

Valley of the Gods in Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument. Dreamstime Photo by Paul Brady.

 

The President is to reserve "the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected." —The Antiquities Act of 1906

President Trump on Monday reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah by nearly 3 million acres, teeing up a legal battle over whether presidents have the power to shrink such sites in the first place. Mr. Trump signed two executive orders to sharply cut the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments to less than 10 percent of their current size. Both sites are known for their sandstone canyons and vast mesas, which are rich in wildlife habitat as well as archaeological sites of importance to Native American tribes. —The New York Times, July 13, 2026

• A body, small, feverish with measles, crying into the hospital dark?
• An automobile, pinned to the curb, bullet-holed, its driver dead inside?
• The dancing-ground of desert grouse, scraped bare and sold for the oil beneath?

No, stick to this case:

A landscape unbroken but for the lines we draw

Canyons, plateaus, water and the channels it makes

Sagebrush and juniper, birds and lizards and deer

Marks etched on sandstone cliffs, testimony to other ways of being

 

A National Monument, “Bears Ears”

   named by the peoples who shared this land

Hoon’Naqvut, 

Shash Jaa’, 

Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, 

Ansh An Lashokdiwe

delineated by thousands of years of indigenous knowledge

thousands of pages of scientific analysis

thousands of voices raised for protection

 

or

 

slashed overnight by 90%

ignorance glorified

harnessed to political calculation and greed

 

The smallest area compatible with proper care and management?

• Our society, torn apart by division and violence?
• Our nation, sinking into a morass of corruption and tyranny?
• Our planet, hurtling toward unchecked climate chaos?

Decide

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

A CHILD CANNOT BE A NEOLIBERAL FASCIST

by Deborah Marcus

 

 

 

 

Australian Indigenous Poet and Storyteller Jazz Money has had their children’s book Bila: A River Cycle pulled by University of Queensland Press due to its illustrator Matt Chun’s previously-published essay refusing to mourn the Jewish casualties—which included ten-year-old Matilda—at the Bondi beach shooting in Sydney last December. See reports from the BBC and The Guardian.

 

A bird cannot be a stone.

Our heart cannot be bone.

Our heart must not 

be bone.

 

A damp towel against my head 

in the morning while I drape my body

forwards from the toilet

shakes me back into the dream:

 

I am on rocks. I need to get home.

There are three ships, progressively smaller,

like a babushka series. I need all of them.

I drag the smaller one from the waters first.

The second one follows, large enough to withstand

calm waters and one person only.

 

I lay the ships on the deck. I am now on the third

ship which is the one I wanted the most. 

I didn’t see how I caught it, or how it appeared.

All I know is I have what I need now.

Yet I do not feel settled, and I scour to collect

All the tiny remnants on the ground. 

There are metal clasps and tiny fishhooks.

I put them all in a small bowl. 

They seem mysterious, worthless and precious.

 

The ship is attached to a stream of algae and muck

and my perspective zooms out so I am able to hold

it underwater, and carefully with some nail scissors

I cut the debris that cascades like aquatic hair

filled with small creatures and fish, that are large

enough to be food or help, but may be rotten.

 

I see that the shape corresponds with Sarah Schwartz’

foggy, algae-outlined eyebrow. I trim her eyebrow too.

 

In the morning, I trim my own eyebrows with the

backwards-glint of dream remembrance in the mirror.

 

I spend the day accumulating poetic courage

eating Agedashi tofu, glimpsing at the red 

leaves and lamenting distances

 

how five thousand copies of a child’s book

has been printed and promptly pulped

because the illustrator refused to mourn

a Jewish child shot within a sea of Zionists.

 

Chun states his words were carefully curated 

with the help of anti-Zionist Jewish comrades

but not once in his article outlining the reasons

the antisemitic massacre of Jewish people 

at Bondi beach, was not in fact, antisemitic,

did he mention Matilda. 

 

At this point, there are no sides left for me 

to reside on. 

 

We are in the same river together, you see

You and I

We poison the soil together in our silencing

 

Our hearts breaking in multiple directions

by the dialectical paradoxes lodged within colonialism

and so they become numb

and so they became numb

 

I refuse to become numb

I refuse this

I refuse

 

the same way I refuse the destruction of literature

the same way I refuse the censorship of Indigenous storytellers

writing heartfelt literature for children about the links

between resistance and Country.

 

I refuse to witness this silencing of another

Aboriginal voice.

 

At the heart

of all comrades

should ALWAYS be children.

 

Why else are we fighting?

To be on the right side of history?

For freedom?

For justice?

 

How can we claim to be fighting for any of this

if we can find a way to make the murder of any child

less

to make it a subsumable statistic 

a side comment

within a broader fight

and not the focal point of our writing 

our essays

our books

our complaints

our hearts

our resistance?

 

I condemn Chun’s erasure of Matilda’s humble roots

the same way I condemn the erasure of Palestinian roots

by Chabad and Zionist establishments.

I refuse Chun’s refusal to mourn a ten year old Jewish girl

his refusal to even mention her name 

amidst his hypocritical academic silencing of her death

amidst a sea of fishhook reason

 

I refuse Chun’s silencing 

because Matilda was not a neoliberal fascist oppressor.

 

Matilda was not a white Zionist Jewish-supremacist.

She was a child.

 

Just like each and every Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian

child is a child

and not an antisemitic Islamic-state terrorist. 

The ability and willingness to minimise the murder of

a single child

in the name of the creation, protection 

or destruction of a nation

is where the seed of evil is planted.

 

The destruction of five thousand children’s books

painted by the painstaking hand of a dedicated artist

and narrated by an Aboriginal storyteller

a powerful yellamundie

is also where the seed of evil

is sown.

 

What will we do amidst 

the fruit of this orchard

we have planted

screaming

in silence

together? 

 

 

Note “It is entirely consistent, and deeply humane, to stand with Jewish people killed and terrorised by racist violence and to have stood, and continue to stand, with Palestinians killed by racist violence. Our grief does not shrink when it is shared and our safety does not grow when it is built on someone else’s disposability,” said Sarah Schwartz at the interfaith and intercommunity vigil of The Jewish Council, an organization that supports Palestinian freedom and justice and opposes antisemitism and racism, to mourn the victims of the Bondi massacre. 

Deborah Marcus is a poet, multidisciplinary artist and educator from unceded Darramuragal land in Australia. She is obsessed with truth and trees, potentially synonymously. Her Honours thesis exploring the relationship between fractal geometry and poetic language won UNSW’s first University Medal for Creative Writing in 2022. In 2023, she published her debut collection of poetry titled An Organ of Chaos. 

THANKSGIVING

by Morrow Dowdle

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

My four year-old comes into the bathroom where I sit. 

He turns the toilet paper roll slowly, says, It’s a nice day

for peeing. Thankful for the body and its routines. 

And so am I—thankful for emptyings and intakes,

 

the food soon to be had, then had for days after. Thankful

I will eat more than a side salad. Thankful this holiday’s lie

of peace between buckle-hatted colonists and Indigenous

victims is obsolete. Thankful we gather anyway. 

 

Thankful for what won’t be at the table—china and silver,

political scuffles, sullen drunks. The chain-smoking

grandmother’s green bean casserole. The pedophile

grandfather’s electric knife. White-knuckled silence. 

 

Thankful for the Peanuts meme my sister texts,

that after all the fallings-out, we’ve righted the rowboat

called Family of Origin. Thankful I’ve been back

on antidepressants for a week and feel like having sex again,

 

or at least a hug. That I can forgive myself for not missing

someone recently deceased, but feel the burn of grief

for those who do, light a candle at the empty plate. 

I can forgive myself for singeing the cranberry sauce

 

and buying the wrong-sized pie crust, and not extrapolate

that I’m a failure. See, I’ve been fumbling towards sainthood,

but now I’m aiming at stable and decent and good enough. 

Thankful to host rather than be hosted, to have more

 

than leftovers to offer. Thankful to prepare every room

for guests, to cross each threshold and see traces

of my persistence. Thankful my son gave me this poem

and that I could receive it, knowing there will be days ahead

 

when verse will flow like gravy, and days there will be none,

and my mind will feel stale as the cheap white bread

we use to make the stuffing. But there will be days. 

There will be days.

Morrow Dowdle (they/them) poet / arts organizer / curator "Weave & Spin" performance series and open mic (founder/curator/host) @morrowdowdle (Instagram)

MY BODY DOESN’T BELONG TO ME

by Linda Laderman

The Alabama Supreme Court [pictured above in Night Country] has ruled that frozen embryos created and stored for in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children under a state law allowing parents to sue for wrongful death of their minor children… The 8-1 majority of the court found that it was a long-established precedent that "unborn children" are "children" for the purpose of the 1872 wrongful death law at issue in the case. It said that any doubt about that was removed by a 2018 amendment to the state's constitution, which declared that it was "the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children." —Reuters, February 23, 2024

I tell my husband that my body doesn’t belong to me.
Does it belong to me then, he says. He thinks he’s hilarious,
 
a comedian. That’s what he calls me when I say something 
he finds absurd or annoying. So I say, are you a comedian?
 
Then he asks me to explain. If your body doesn’t belong 
to you, who does it belong to? All sorts of entities, I say.
 
He thinks I’m overreacting after we watched the episode 
of True Detective Night Country, where we (spoiler alert)
 
find out that the frozen male bodies were not murdered
by a demon, but by a group of indigenous women who
 
were rightly pissed that their friend Annie K was brutally
beaten to death after she discovered a truth hidden from her
 
by her lover. I say, good for those women. Those men deserved
to be put out in the cold  How many times have women put
 
their hands on truth’s hot stove, in spite of its capacity to burn,
and ended up paying for it with everything that meant anything?
 
I ask, did you read the ruling from Alabama’s Supreme Court?
and wave my phone with the breaking news in front of his face.
 
Look, I say, Alabama is the spawn of Dobbs. This is not an episode on HBO.
Well, he says, what are you going to do, throw a bunch of naked law-
 
makers into sub-zero temperatures and leave them to freeze to death?
Only if I have the means and opportunity, I say. You are a comedian, he says.

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet. Her work can be found in many journals, including SWWIM, One Art, The Scapegoat Review, and Mom Egg Review. She is the 2023 recipient of Harbor Review Jewish Women’s Prize and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

STREETS OF BOUGAINVILLEA

by Elizabeth Rose

Since we started collecting data in 2012, 1,335 defenders across Latin America have lost their lives…. Yet very few families have seen justice for these killings. —Global Witness, September 2023

You must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
           —Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”

 

I have my own Indian story.

Fausto, my friend, was also dead

 

by the roadside, macheted

in a waterless gully.

 

Stripped naked,

hanged, and cut through,

 

on a Sabbath.

His daughters asleep in cribs.

 

Fausto could have been

my child had I been born

 

on another continent

with another skin color.

 

We were both bent

toward social justice,

 

for me a conceptual brick

tossed through a window,

 

for him a sink

with running water.

 

His mother’s cavity eyes

his father’s taut mouth

stretched toward inevitability.

 

A cold case upon death.

A national miscarriage of laws.

 

Is this the sadness that kindles kindness?

Allows us to go out each day

 

into the streets of bougainvillea,

and ride the Tuk Tuk,

 

bodies next to baskets

overflowing with avocados

and mangoes.

Photo courtesy of the Otzin family.

Author’s note: This is the story of my friend Fausto Otzin. He was a lawyer in Guatemala. He worked on land rights cases representing indigenous people. He was an indigenous Katchakel himself. He worked in Guatemala City during the week and traveled back to Comalapa on the weekends where his wife and two baby girls lived with his parents, his younger sister and her son, and another brother, sister-in-law, and their three children. I was involved in building a school from rubbish in Comalapa for eighteen years and I became friends with the Otzin family during that time. In October 2009 he went out on a Friday night and didn't return. He was found in a gully hanged and stabbed thirteen times on the following Sunday. There was no investigation and now 14 years later there have been no arrests or even people of interest brought forward.

Elizabeth Rose is a poet and psychotherapist living in Massachusetts. She has previously published poetry in BarBar and Verdad. Her personal essays have appeared in the New Mexico Review, The Boston Globe, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She published a chapter in Escape, a memoir collection published in 2023 by the Pathfinders Collective. She received an MFA from Lesley University in 2019. 

MASSASOIT’S DAUGHTER, MIONEAIME

by Suzette Bishop

Massasoit Sachem or Ousamequin (c. 1581 – 1661) was the sachem or leader of the Pokanoket sachemship. Massasoit means Great Sachem. It was he who allied his people with the Plymouth colonists. Massasoit had five children, among them daughter Mioneaime later called Amie. Above: Statue of Chief Massasoit by Cyrus Edwin Dallin, 1861-1944 Bronze (posthumous casting) Gift of the James F. Dicke Family, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio

On your deathbed

You tell me and my sister and brothers

To make friends with the white man.

We look at each other,

Unease in our eyes,

But nod.

Why would we do this?

Nothing is the same since

They floated into the horizon,

My gathering of mussels

Not the same,

Brief season of warm sand I loved.

So few of us after the sickness,

Flurries, wind, saltwater,

But I knew who I was,

I knew where I belonged.

Even the ones who saved your life once

Are not friends,

Will not own us if we marry among them,

Have children,

I won’t recognize their children’s children, either,

Not the one writing this poem

Not in our language.

You drift away,

                                And I see us as driftwood carved by wind,

                                                                    Remnants of how we lived.

Enemies to the North

Like the heavy storms descending

And the sickness gave you no choice

But to offer peace, welcome, alliance, land,

 

Our seed,

And blue-black shells

Discarded, unused,

Their beauty unseen,

 What I see in the future with our friends.

Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and two chapbooks, including her most recent chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She lives with her husband and two cats.