NOW THERE IS NOTHING NEW

by Eric Nicholson

Keir Starmer has announced that Britain will “fight for peace in Europe” with a generational increase in defence spending paid for by slashing the foreign aid budget. The move, just two days before the prime minister is due to meet Donald Trump, raised immediate concerns that he was pandering to the US president, and fury from aid groups that say it could cost lives in countries that rely on UK support. —The Guardian, February 25, 2025

Now there is nothing new,

The Minister of Fear has spoken,

We are vulnerable, we must meet force with force

And station Destroyers on the Thames.

Now there is nothing new,

We stand naked on the beaches, in the fields, in the hills

As icy gusts of fear whip across the seas.

Now there is nothing new.

Footsoldiers and tanks must protect our shores,

Drones and jets must command our air space,

Battle ships defend our coastline.

Now there is nothing new.  

Factories must go into overdrive,

Re-armament is good for Growth,

Our conveyor belts must convey security,

Fear must be assembled night and day.

Now there is nothing new.

Office windows must be blacked out,

Street lights switched off,

The London Underground prepared.

Now there is nothing new.

Rule Britannia.

Let the younger generation 

Fight the good fight,

MAD is might is right:

Now there is nothing new.

Eric Nicholson is a retired art teacher residing in the UK. He remembers protesting as a member of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in his younger years. He does not often write political poetry but in today's climate finds it difficult not to.

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.

MY WIFE SENDS ME A VIDEO OF ISRAELI ARABS AND JEWS SINGING “SOMEWHERE” FROM WEST SIDE STORY AND ASKS ME TO WRITE A POEM

by Dick Westheimer

The song sung in three tongues

swells and descends with the beat 

Bernstein intended, “Someday”

in English the tenors hold every note 

as they would hope. In Hebrew, 

full throated soprano voices sing,  

“We'll find a new way of living,”

followed in muted harmony, 

Arabic singers whisper about “a way 

of forgiving.” The music fills me

with the stuff of hope, of a 

new way of living and then 

I remember the plot, 

the Sharks and the Jets

didn’t make their lousy world

and Tony always had to die.

And as the the music fades

Tony rasps, “I didn’t believe 

hard enough.” But then 

I remember Maria’s 

final note was sung 

over the top 

of a major chord.

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, OneArt, Abandon Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Minyan. His chapbook A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine is published by SheilaNaGig.

WITNESS

 by Amy Shimshon-Santo

I am the person formerly known as _____ _____ - _____.

Now she is the bird left behind from the flock.

She is the figure weeping in the sand.

A witness, witnessed only by the sea.

I am not a war correspondent or a social media expert. 

I am not a documentarian of suffering.

Don’t worry. I have nothing to teach you and nothing to say. 

I’m just skipping words like stones along the water, 

knowing they will bounce and then sink down.

The birds laugh at us.

Birds side eye sonic jets and helicopters. 

Maybe they will tell the trees what’s going on — what they see and feel.

Last week I was a writer.

Today I am a barnacle on the belly of a whale. 

I am moaning like an underwater animal.

When did time stop? When will it start back up? 

Will it? Is this the new time, 

the timeless time, lost in unknowing?

I am not a flag.

I am no longer really a woman, I just gave birth to life.

I am not a faith, just faithful.

Oh broken bones and heavy stones

How far will you tumble?

How far down will you fall?

Six days ago was the sabbath. We gathered 

with 29 members of my family across four generations. Cousins with cousins. 

Sisters with sisters. Brothers and children and grandparents.

Six days ago was a Friday.

Today is six days past a moment of miracles, six days past the bomb.

24 hours x 6 ago there was a night where we could all lay down and hope to sleep.

If I am going to sit with the page I have to say that I don’t want to say

I want this to not be true.

Before I speak, I want you to know that I am wrong. 

Not because I know nothing but because everything is wrong. 

Not every thing but the big world of powers that evaporate worlds. 

I don’t want to remind my mind and relive what has become a beginning.

I don’t want to state the facts because the facts are a mush of kindnesses and disasters.

I am the person formerly known as a self.

I melted into the Mediterranean, sonic booms above our heads. 

My tears salt the water and make everything sting.

I want to tell you about the weeping. 

The mother collapsing onto her belly like a conch shell whose life has departed. 

She is the throw away, the detritus of those left behind.

Author’s note: I have been in three cities in Israel during this past week. I am from Los Angeles. My mother was born here in 1932 as a Jewish person under the British Mandate Palestine. I am a mother, a teacher, and a culture maker. I am deeply opposed to murder, torture, war, and intergenerational harm. War is the loss of lives and infrastructure and dreams and time. Torture and war are the worst uses of human energy and potential.

THE BLOODIED BOY AND THE GAMES

by Jay Sizemore





Can you hit the water like a knife,
so sharp and so quiet
it remains oblivious to the stabbing?
          No somersaults by choice.
          Every building a potential grave,
          a rubble of tombstones disarrayed.

Can you run faster than death,
with a nation of gasps
riding your shoulders and spine?
           Here, a gold medal for a sunrise.
           We wipe the blood from our eyes.
           We dig our children free of debris
           and carry them like bombs.

Are you sure you picked the right God?
Has the arrow loosed itself
from behind your ear
and found the center of the universe?
Doesn’t the ocean sound like applause?
           There are so many that are lost.
           Their names vanish like landscape details
           pulled further and further away.
           This fog makes blind strangers of us all
           bruised bodies hurting to be touched.

Is the world watching?
I’ve balanced my entire life
upon a beam no wider
than the average human foot.
I’ve turned myself into a compass,
a needle floating inside a leaf.
I’ve conditioned my frame,
hardened my senses
through repetition,
becoming an instrument
of precision
lifting fighter jets
up over my head.
Will you fold my indiscretions into a flag,
while a black man bites the curb,
and forgive me for being great?
             Stare into his eyes.
             Dark as polished stone,
             the blank gaze
             of a shell-shocked child,
             his blood dried to his cheek
             like an unwanted birthmark
             not given at birth.
             It’s no mistake that the human heart
             is larger than a grenade.
             Are you sure you picked the right God?


Jay Sizemore writes poetry and fiction. He has been  published in places such as Rattle, McNeese Review, Jabberwock, and Crab Orchard Review. He lives in Nashville, TN.

WE BOMBED IRAQ SIX DAYS AFTER PARIS FASHION WEEK

by Clara B. Jones

New photographs show the Unites States Air Force preparing for strikes on ISIS targets at a secret military base in the Persian Gulf. Daily Mail, Feb. 26, 2016. Getty Images Photo via Daily Mail.

Climate crescented when Anthropocene
overwhelmed Antarctica, displacing
penguins whose food no longer swelled

the ocean, each year of our lives displayed
in glass cases cleaned every day, reflecting
a day-glow billboard sign selling scale

models of maps more detailed than the
landscapes they defined, so finely drawn
that cities looked like flies fixed in pixels.

The secret to my cat's success is her element
of surprise—clowns jumping out of bomber
jets, boreal birds barreling into bathrooms,

babies speaking sentences. In 2003, we
bombed Iraq six days after Paris Fashion Week.
Now we have drones to keep runways safe.


Clara B. Jones is a retired scientist, currently practicing poetry in Asheville, NC. She is a staff writer for the poetry journal, Yellow Chair Review. As a woman of color, she writes about the “performance” of identity and power and conducts research on experimental poetry. Her poems, reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous venues.

GAZA HIDE AND SEEK

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Israel's Operation Protective Edge entered its fifth day on Saturday, with rockets continuing to target Israeli towns and cities and the IDF continuing to carry out massive airstrikes across the Gaza Strip. Palestinian sources in Gaza describe Friday night as the most lethal yet since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge, with 14 people killed in the Strip, raising the number of Gaza deaths in to 121. On Friday, ten Israelis were wounded, one of them seriously, by rockets that struck in Be'er Sheva and Ashdod. An elderly woman died after suffering a heart attack while seeking shelter in Haifa, which was targeted for the first time during the current round of fire. Israeli jets have bombed over 1,100 targets across the Gaza Strip since the operation began. Reports from Gaza indicated widespread damage to houses, infrastructure and public buildings, with large numbers of civilian casualties. --Haaretz, July 13m 2014

Ready or not
Scream the maniacal F16s
Streaking across
The scalded sky
Here we come

On the ground
The terrified children
Of the rubble
Scatter
But they cannot hide


Buff Whitman-Bradley is the author of four books of poetry, b. eagle, poet; The Honey Philosophies; Realpolitik; and When Compasses Grow Old; and the chapbook, Everything Wakes Up! His poetry has appeared in many print and online journals. He is also co-editor, with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley and Sarah Lazare, of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.  He has co-produced/directed two documentary films, the award-winning Outside In (with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley) and Por Que Venimos (with the MIRC Film Collective).  He lives in northern California.

WHAT BASEBALL MEANS TO ME

by Zach Fishel

Somewhere in

between the worn edge

of my debit card and bar tabs

sings the sound of an old

guitar leaning

forgotten between

            portfolios and pie charts.

The dust collects

                        as the paint cracks

on every Midwestern

water tower,

                        reaching starward

against this flatness.

            Roaring like the extra

jets arcing overhead,

too many blasts,

            bottles,

            bombings bursting

in bottlenecks as balding

            and half cracked

bells ring out of

their ipods,

            On metro rails, and city subs,

The red and blue lines

pump us through the El or

into happy hours

and coney dogs.  

With the patience

of a forgotten

tree house,

you wait

            for us to remember,

            how to climb

            back to

our thoughts

and prayers,

the quiet little toughness

of deciding to

            cuff that old

bully on picture day.

                        Unless it means

Actually showing up to practice. 


Zach Fishel is the poetry editor for the University of Toledo Press as well as operator of Horehound Press, which specializes in limited run books and broadsides. His poetry has twice received Pushcart Nominations and has appeared in multiple countries. He can be contacted at zachary.fishel(at)gmail.com for all writerly things, especially his chapbook Prayerbook Bouquet.