HALF-STAFF

by W. Luther Jett

W. Luther Jett's  poetry has been published in numerous journals, as well as several anthologies. Luther is the author of six poetry chapbooks — his most recent is  The Colour Wars, (Kelsay Books, 2024). His full-length collection, Flying to America was released by Broadstone Books in 2024. Luther is also a singer-songwriter who performs sporadically in wine-bars and cafes. He has released two singles and is in the process of recording an album of original material.

TO MADISON'S DAD

by Cathy Hailey

 

 

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Monday that he will return to the upper chamber this week after taking time off for the death of his daughter, Madison. The Virginia senator wrote on the social platform X, “As we remember our incredible daughter, Maddy, my family has been deeply touched by the outpouring of support we’ve received. Thank you to everyone for your kind words.” —The Hill, April 27, 2026

You were the Northern Cardinal cheering me on, 

sending notes of congratulations in song 

as we celebrated student voices and publications 

across the Virginia Commonwealth we share.

I became the Carolina Wren of gratefulness 

as you shored up the forest of poets laureate—

my daughter among the honorees—     

supporting grants for the arts and the word. 

Now we are mourning doves together, 

clinging in a chorus of grieving parents, 

a child’s death disrupting the timeline of our lives 

and stealing future nests and dreams.                     

From Alexandra’s Mom

Cathy Hailey is a poet and educator (Prince William County Schools and Johns Hopkins University). She organizes In the Company of Laureates in Prince William County and works with youth poetry programs for The Poetry Society of Virginia and The Word Works.  Her chapbook, I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth, was published by Finishing Line Press. Publications include The New Verse News, FotoSpecchio, Little Free/Painted Pebble Lit Mag, First Frost, Making the Unseen Seen anthology and The Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poetry & others.

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. 

A PUBLIC CORPSE ROTS FASTER THAN A PRIVATE ONE

(After the July 2025 Midtown Manhattan Mass Shooting)

by Michael T. Young

When you read news about
a mass shooting, when you read 

the names of the dead, you don’t expect 
to know anyone. You don't expect 

to wither into a shock of knowing,
your words to wither into the heart-shaped 

emptiness of condolences. And you are
surprised by your anger at conspiracy theories

that feast on day-old death as it were bacteria
on a corpse, brown-rot on a piece of fruit—

the coverup, the motives. And where is there
to hide if your private connection becomes

a public debate, and questions pervert your
mourning, filling it with voices and doubt, until

your loss is corrupted into another story
that conceals what no one dares speak?

Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Rattle, and Vox Populi.

INAUGURATION DAY 2025, THE PELICANS ARRIVE

by Catherine Arra

White grace floats the lake, rippling in icy torrents

of another Trump tirade.

 

A stopover in migration, a congregation

of reacquaintance-feeding-reuniting in purpose.

 

They paddle in silent choreography, know nothing

of deportations, hate-vengeance-greed.

 

Know to stay clear of marsh grass, where alligators

nest-hunt-eat more than needed.

 

Their long-bowed faces remember loss—how easy

to destroy a nest than to build one.

 

They glide into flight formation. Broad webbed feet

flapflapflap in domino percussion.

 

Snowy wings underscore the black of mourning.

They fly away. 

Catherine Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter, when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Arra teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. She is the author of four full-length collections and four chapbooks. Recent work appears in Unleash Lit., Eclectica Magazine, LitBreak Magazine, Poem Alone, and The Ekphrastic Review.

I CLIMB ABOARD THE TRAIN

by Hannah L Brooks

Elnaz Rekabi on Instagram

A female Iranian rock climber, who did not wear a hijab at an international competition in South Korea, has returned to Iran as Iranian groups based abroad raised alarms over her fate back home. Elnaz Rekabi, 33, competed without a hijab during the International Federation of Sport Climbing’s Asian Championships in Seoul on Sunday. Videos of her wearing a headband with her hair in a ponytail while competing spread on social media. —CNN, October 19, 2022

I slide into a seat.

I slide through videos tagged @mahsaamini.

Women wave black hijabs as they march.

A cluster of men beat another

curled on the ground.

 

NPR posts: A rock climber forgets,

or forgoes, her hijab; becomes ‘accidental hero.’

Comments exhort the reader 

to pray. 

They say: She was called back. 

They say: She will be arrested.

They say: She will die!

 

I imagine the climber speaking:

                                      Climber.

                              A

             AM

I

                                       Heaven.

                       Toward

        Climb

I

 

I climb.               I go home.

Either way, I move 

closer to heaven.

 

Outside my train window, I see the river 

and a perfect blue October sky.

I watch the waves rise

as the wind whips the water. 

I think: in some places, we cannot move without a hijab.

Here, we are free to wear what we want.

I wear black.

Most of the passengers wear black. 

Black has become de rigueur;

as if we are in mourning,

forced to bear the unwanted.

Hannah L Brooks is a retired surgeon and now writes. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in Chronogram, Hudson Valley Magazine, and the podcast Anamnesis.  She founded the Newburgh Literary Festival because she lives in the Hudson Valley, and it was necessary. 

A REQUIEM FOR OUR WORLD

by Janet Leahy

For more information about the Boccaccio Project, please click here.

How will our story be told, a world

in mourning for the millions who have died.

Who will write the score for the new

requiem, our sense of loss overwhelms,

day by day we feel the dread of what 

may come next.  How will a new symphony

hold the pain of pandemic, will the cello

anchor the gravitas with a call to prayer,

will strings of violins rage against

the virus, will the oboe conjure healing 

in the slow low notes of a minor key.  

Is a musician at her piano today, 

arranging chords to evoke

the pain of isolation, the fear of Covid.

Does she know her music will save us,

will redeem our lapses into despair.

I think of composers from the past… 

will a new Mozart, Verdi, Dvorak, arrange

dissonant chords to tell this story,

a Requiem Mass for Our World.

Janet Leahy is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her poems have recently been published in Halfway to the North Pole, the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar 2021, and Art in so Many Words.  She has published two collections of poetry.

EMPTIED

 by Andrena Zawinski

The streets and playgrounds, the courts and fields are emptied. 

The string of row house swings emptied of coffee klatches 

across porch rails. Silence on cobbles glistening in morning dew, 

heady scent of honeysuckle wafting by windows we close. 

Framed by the limits of imagination, ears cocked to a sparrow’s song,

sun setting on pyramids, creek beds, ice floes, desert flowers 

past our views of the world, ghosts carousing night winds 

of our mourning, all the eyes on clear skies boasting stars above

moored cargo ships, snow capped peaks, the sweaty rainforests.

Our windows view the emptied harbors, farmlands and vineyards, 

fire escapes and stoops. All of it emptied of the large and small 

solitary pleasures of our fractured lives in this godawful air.

Andrena Zawinski’s poetry has received awards for lyricism, form, spirituality, social concern, many of them Pushcart Prize nominations. Her latest book is Landings (Kelsay Books); others are Something About (Blue Light Press PEN Oakland Award) and Traveling in Reflected Light (Pig Iron Press Kenneth Patchen Prize) along with several chapbooks. She founded and runs the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and is a previous contributor to The New Verse News.

FLAG

by Frederick Wilbur

An artwork by Banksy is seen in this image obtained from his Instagram account on June 6, 2020 [Banksy/Instagram/ via Reuters via Al Jazeera]

In the flag’s shadow
memorial flowers darken, wilt.
It is a black tatter
distressed by political wind.

Ours, for which it stands,
is in mourning—
the common good
is dead.


Frederick Wilbur’s second poetry collection Conjugation of Perhaps is available from mainstreetragbookstore.com.

MOURNING IN A PANDEMIC

by George Salamon

Protest on 23 April against the Trump administration’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters via The Guardian.

"Faced with an appalling US coronavirus death toll, the right denies the figures."

—The Guardian, May 15, 2020

After close to 90,000 in our land
Have been buried or burned, the
World remains as it is. You grasp
What is essential: They are dead.
Shunning theatrical shallowness or
Surrendering to the lure of eternity,
You seek earthly innocence.

George Salamon does his mourning in St. Louis, MO and most recently has contributed to The Asses of Parnassus, Dissident Voice, and TheNewVerse.News.

FORGOTTEN

by Tricia Knoll

I forget the name of the first boy who kissed me,
which books I read by Jane Austen during that summer
the l7-year locusts made their outbreak, the names
of most of the horses I’ve ridden except for Daisy—
the bay mare who galloped me to a win in a quarter-mile
race against a field of adolescents on dude ranch mounts.
I remember ear infections as a child with no medicines
because my parents believed in faith healing.
I remember my first polio shot at the age of 18, more
than a decade after everyone I knew had theirs.

Forgotten? The word, sir, blasphemes the dead
and those denied funerals and family mourning.
Those struggling to recover and keep family safe.
The worn out first responders and medical teams.
I fear for a grandson born in this year, a wee boy
for whom immunity is uncertain. I have staged
my will where my family can find it. I have
family who sit home from their jobs. We know
those risks for people of color from old,
old inequities, wonder why those who jobs
are critical to our survival as a people
work for minimum wage, without masks.

You may forget. At your peril and ours.
Are you counting your investments
in the medicine you hawk? Open
will not mean the way the world was.
Open will mean masks, tests, shots,
sanitizers, worry, strategies, research,
and consequences. New normal
will not forget what we have endured
and what we learn about the way
the world’s fate is tied up as one.
We have seen our Enemy.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet hunkered in the deep woods. Her recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry.

BLEEDING OUT

by Lisa J. Rocklin

Let's just leave it down:

the flag—
half-staff.
Raise it high
on days when

no one dies
            like that. 

Declare a holiday. 

Thoughts 
make ineffective gauze.
Prayers 

absorb no blood.
Flags were not meant

to serve 
as tourniquets
or crucibles of
            patriotism.

Let's just kneel 
together
every time
our banner waves
for these days 
we share—
collecting grief like debt.

Let's mourn 
the self-destruction
            of a nation. 

Let there be rage for 
the addict we can't save
who shoots up 
skin that isn't his
triggered by . . . 
            it doesn't matter why.

As long as he's fed
as long as we're willing
to yield more dead
as long as we keep 
loading the chamber
let's just leave it down—
as a shroud—

star-spangled 

and red.

Lisa J. Rocklin is a writer, facilitator, community builder, and associate director of Women Writing for (a) Change, a nonprofit organization in Cincinnati, OH, that offers supportive writing circles to nurture and celebrate the individual voice.

MOTHER OF ALL

by Mimi German

Marker Painting "PIETA-2" Black Pieta Ethnic Folk Art Black religious art African

The Mother

of all

Bombs



the

(space)

mother

(space)

of

(space)

ALL

(space)

bombs

The
Mother
of all
bombs

repeated chanted repeated chanted
sung liturgized canonized infantilized eroticized epitomized

into being

a mantra of man

the Mother
of All

Bombs

the mother of ALL bombs

chants the news so many times
that it becomes a thing

this

Mother

of all
Bombs



My
nipples
lactate
blood




tonight
cloaked inside
my Grandmother’s blanket
my mother’s mother,
i write
with mourning sickness
under my fingernails

the taste of burnt skin
inhabits my tongue

my grandmother
had a scar
on her abdomen
a c-section.

my mother
wanted
to enter life
feet first

the Mother
of ALL
Bombs

an
empty
womb
is
bleeding



mother
mother
mother
mother

mother of all
mother of ALL
Mother of ALL

bombs

goes the chant


mother
of dead child
on exploded soil
on Mother Earth
in the Mother Land
in Afghanistan


314,000,000 dollars worth
of
mothers
of
dead children
and
children
with
dead mothers

wrote a poem this morning
about shadows

while

the Mother
of All
Bombs

was chanting itself
into being

there are

no Mothers

of

Bombs


only
men
who
make
bombs
to
drop
them
on
Mothers.


Mimi German is a Queer Poet, Free Radical and an Activist for human rights in Portland, OR.