WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON

by Gail White

Explosions in Kyiv heard live on air https://t.co/JGLvh4k8tX

— HectorM (@JaguarVer) February 24, 2022

All times are times of impending doom,

If one knows how to read the signs.

But old gods walk through the living room

And lay down nets and fishing lines.

Clutching the mesh, I begin to seek

Wonders and signs I’ve let slip by:

The fish impaled on the heron’s beak

Miraculous as the butterfly.

Between war and depression the end will come.

With plague and famine we take our chance.

But the cat moves her kittens one last time,

And the sandhill crane does a mating dance.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

A CAT WHO LOOKS LIKE HITLER

by Chris O’Carroll

Image source: Cats That Look Like Hitler

Your kitten’s face is white with a black patch,
A toothbrush mustache, underneath the nose.
You named the little furball Adolf, natch.
(You could have gone with Chaplin, I suppose.)
Since cats cleave to no ideology
That one could label pro- or anti-Jew,
And are not really into irony,
What the name signifies depends on you.
It could be just a joke about a face
That seems as comical as monstrous now,
Could be a shout-out to the Master Race
That operated Auschwitz-Birkenau.
  The eponym enjoyed such baneful fame,
  It’s hard to know what’s in a namesake’s name.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in Angle, Folly, Light, The Rotary Dial, Snakeskin, and other print and online journals.