THE LAST JEW IN VINNITSA

 by Roselyn Kubek

Detail showing the murderer now identified as Jackobus Omnen from the photograph known as "The Last Jew in Vinnitsa" Warning: Viewers will find the original photo at the link provided disturbing.

At Last, a Name for the Murderer in a Holocaust Photo. —The New York Times, November 28, 2025

Now he has a name.

Or we have it—

Finally we know what to call the person 

whose ennui pulled a trigger in front of:

     one photographer

     two dozen standing-bored

     so many piled bodies

We learn this murderer 

was once a school teacher

who still teaches though armed 

with a different lesson

      Jackobus Omnen

How pleasant to roll that 

off history’s tongue

to store in the sepia of then

It’s a name full of roundness 

like the anonymous circle 

of witnesses

like the shallow pit where 

a man sits on the edge

perpetually anticipating 

the end

Chin raised

he watches us all

from the bottom 

of a photograph

and waits to become the last.

Roselyn Kubek is a teacher and a New England poet whose work has been featured in a number of publications and venues including, most recently, Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope series and the Maine Poets Epistolary Poetry Exchange. 

JULIO

by Judy Strang

Screenshot provided by the poet’s son from the video he recorded.

My son told me 

he’d put on his vest and 

hooked the phone into the chest pocket facing out, 

pressed video, then strode across the narrow city street. 

That was his spontaneous choice, 

just home from his night shift, 

after parking his car across from his apartment,

after seeing two masked figures accost a person on the sidewalk.

 

In his paramedic suit and bullet proof vest with the phone-on-video,

he told them his name and pointed to his photo badge. 

He asked them to identify themselves,

looked at their badges—photo-less, flimsy, 

“Those could be printed on Etsy,” he said, “How do I know who you are?” 

They would not answer. But he got the name of the person they were taking, 

who gave it to him freely. 

My son yelled at the masked faces, “Take off your masks. 

Show us who you are.” 

And he yelled it again, venting his anger at their secrecy 

at their silence 

at their unjust power—

then it was over.

They had shoved the man into their unmarked car and were driving away.

 

My son told me

that’s when he let loose the language he’d wanted to spit in their faces. 

He threw it at their backs, watching the car disappear,

then stood there on the sidewalk, 

next to the door to the stairs leading to his apartment, 

and called the police. 

He waited for them to come so he could report the incident. 

A paramedic, he would speak his truth, 

“to serve human need, with respect for human dignity,”

and he would wonder what would happen 

to the man he would never see again 

whose name he would never forget

 

Judy Strang lives in the woods of Amherst County, VA, where she writes creative nonfiction, directs the Sourwood Forest artist residency program for the Pedlar River Institute, and works part time for the Harte Center for Teaching & Learning at Washington & Lee University (Lexington, VA). Her creative nonfiction, including What Holds Us Here: pieces from a place in the woods (Blackwell Press 2023), examines how humans understand (or not) their place within more-than-human nature. 

THE GULF OF AMERICA, NÉE MEXICO

by Susan Ayres

The U.S. Department of the Interior announced on Friday that they will implement President Trump’s name change for the Gulf Coast.(wjhg)

 

                        I laugh at what you call dissolution,

                        And I know the amplitude of time.

                                                            —Walt Whitman

 

And yet she too is dissolved in a sea

of fears and worries. Will the rocks smash

her if the saltwater lets her go? In the muted

submersion there’s an isolation. The air

 

bubbles rise in a tickle. Small fish nibble

her toes. It’s not like she’s fallen to pieces.

She’s just lost her reason, her name.

She’s the brain mush and muscle mash

 

of dark swirls in the clear green water,

the murky way men possess women. Her particles

bond to the tickles. The waves push her

forward with the incoming tide. She laughs

 

at what they call dissolution. Floating

face down she knows the amplitude of time.

Susan Ayres is the author of Walk Like the Bird Flies (Finishing Line, 2023) and Red Cardinal, White Snow (Main Street Rag, 2024). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals. She studied Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico, practiced karate for nine years with her son, and now spends time in Texas writing, collaging, teaching, and learning tai chi.

STRAIGHT TALK FOR AMTRAK JOE

by Patricia Phillips-Batoma 

One of the photos Lunden Roberts posted on Instagram of her daughter during a trip to Washington.

After Maureen Dowd, “It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President,” The New York Times, July 8, 2023

Mr. President, for the love of God, learn to count to seven—
one boy, six girls—and include the one named Navy.
Be quick. You hold a ticket for the good old train to heaven.
 
You love to fist bump all of America’s little children,
except one who hopes you’ll call and waits so patiently.
Please, Joe, for God’s sake, learn to count to seven.
 
What’s more she’s cool. A true made-for-shades Biden.
Gift her your good name and wrap it in some empathy.
Snap to it, you hold a ticket for that good old train to heaven.
 
It’s embarrassing to have to give a President a lesson,
and hard truths voice themselves with such severity.
So, no more malarky, just count all the way to seven.
 
Once those pearlies close, you might sense some tension,
the sound of heart space, forever and forever empty.
Too late, the good old train pulls into the eternity of heaven.
 
Spare her the taunts, this awful earthly aggression.
Navy! Navy! Not a welcome baby!  So can you maybe,
Joseph Robinette Biden, count all the way to seven?
Even presidents hold a ticket for the good old train to heaven.

Patricia Phillips-Batoma is a writer and teacher who lives in Illinois. She has published poems in Skylight 47, An Capall Dorcha, The New Verse News, Off Course, and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis.

THE WIND SPEAKS

by Laurie Kuntz

“I have lost my name and I have lost my reputation.” 

-Ruby Freeman

The wind speaks your name

and carries it into crevices

where only the wind can go

 

far from your calling,

and you find yourself 

begging for the return

of all who called you Lady.

 

Witness your life breaking,

see loss and corruption corralled

in a gust of swirling air.

Struggle to end each day

not with the same stare tasking sadness,

but with a vision of some new thing.

 

Comes a June awakening,

a solstice wind makes chimes spin,

spreads a crimson sheet of plum blossoms over grey streets

and changes your moods, cools an anger,

makes you hear the song of stones sweeping red earth away.

 

You can see a clearing

in the horizon, get a different view

as the wind slaps you in an embrace,

and carries back your name.

Laurie Kuntz is a widely published and award winning poet. She has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net prize. She has published two poetry collections, The Moon Over My Mother’s House (Finishing Line Press) and Somewhere in the Telling (Mellen Press), two chapbooks, Simple Gestures (Texas Review) and Women at the Onsen (Blue Light Press). Her 5th poetry collection Talking Me off the Roof is forthcoming from Kelsay Press in late 2022. Many of her poems are a direct result of working with refugees in refugee camps soon after the Vietnam War years.  Recently retired, she lives in an endless summer state of mind. 

SHACKLED

In the wake of growing outrage over the role the Sacklers may have played in the opioid crisis, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Sackler family jointly announced on Thursday that the Sackler name would be removed from seven exhibition spaces, including the wing that houses the Temple of Dendur. —The New York Times, December 9, 2021

Bonnie Proudfoot has had fiction and poetry published in the Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Sheila-Na-Gig, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and other journals. Her first novel Goshen Road (Swallow Press, 2020) was selected by the Women’s National Book Association for one of its Great Group Reads for 2020.  The novel was also long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway award for debut fiction.

D IS FOR DELTA

by Mary K O'Melveny

In math, Delta means change.

An isosceles triangle points the way

to changes in quantity:

  more sick

  more hospital beds

  more ventilators

  more dead

  more masks

  more six foot limits:

    apart from each other

    down in the ground.

 

Changes as in differences in.

  As in:

    yesterday there was reason to hope

    last week we went to a concert

    the airport was full of tourists

  As in:

    the rate of change is significant:

    red lines rise on graphs

    there are no lines of people seeking vaccines

    there are now some lines but not enough.

Changes as in variables.

  As in:

    yesterday I met you at a party

    today I am at the doctor’s office

    tomorrow my family will hold a zoom remembrance.

In science, Delta means a sometimes triangular mass of sediment.     

  As in:

     silt and sand lodged in a river’s mouth

     spit into the sea  or a lake  or a plain

        as in Mississippi    or Okavango   or Kalahari

     tides and waves create sandbars and dendritic silt

        as in the Nile   or the Ganges

     estuaries of brackish water form at the confluence of sea and river

        as in China’s Yellow River.

   Some Deltas become abandoned  

the rivers leave   discard their channels   dry up

   that too denotes movement   change. 

  That change is called avulsion:

    As in:

      the sudden separation of mass from one place to another

      the sudden separation of reason from the brain

      the sudden movement from reality to fantasy.

 

Delta can be a girl’s name:

   books of baby names call it appealing   chic  unique

       fit for a child of grace and distinction.

 This too will change. 

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

MARLON RETIRES

by Anita Cabrera

Photo source:  Photo credit: Lucas Jackson/Reuters via The New York Times.

In uniform-approved black shoes
feet now less nimble, snug inside
compression socks, he brings
checks and bills, report cards and
acceptance notices. Stuffs in flyers,
voter registration forms, packages
small enough to fit, before trudging
ahead heavied with our secrets (a

Card from prison, lien or loan). A
habit or skill not to sweat or to
complain through heatwave days or
winter rains? Varicose veins and
senile terrier nips endured with
tempered grace. Each pause at
box or slot, obedience to route and
oath. Gives us time to ask about
his family, catch him up on ours.
For years I called him

Merlin before learning Marlon is
his name, as in Brando. The
months his child lay quiet in a
coma, he kept a steady measured
pace, balanced the envelope of
grief and duty. Both our temples
greyer now, he’s ready to go
out of circulation, fly first-

Class, get whisked away, back to
where he can rest his legs, just
in time, before all of
our mail piles up
undelivered.

Anita Cabrera is a poet, essayist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Berkeley Poetry Review, Brain, Child Magazine, Colere, Acentos Review, The New Guard, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Award, and adapted and performed by the Word for Word Theater Group. Ms. Cabrera lives and teaches in San Francisco, CA where she is active in dance and recovery communities.

WATCH VS. WARNING

by Marjorie Maddox

                                                                                        “Female-named hurricanes kill more

                                                                                          than male hurricanes because people

                                                                                          don’t respect them, study finds.”

                                                                                                            —Jason Samenow, 
                                                                                                   Washington Post,  June 2, 2014

Surely the whirling of this world

into some wind-gone-wild transport to Oz-

    opposite names the same tree-thrashing terror

or should, a double-edged Saffir-Simpson scale

of nurture/nature of respect in respect to

whose wrath shakes our quaking spirit

more, which also is just breath gone haywire,

this life built in the lungs and expired

into air as turbulent as any cascading

into climate-crashing crescendo

off the coast of somewhere.

Dorothy/Don, this isn’t

Kansas anymore.

      Each day

               the breeze

                 and we

                       pick up

                       more

                         vio-

                        lent-

                  ly

                brok-

          en.

Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox’s book,  Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013), focuses on living in an unsafe world. In addition, she has a new ebook, Perpendicular As I ( Kindle version, Nook version, Kobo version).

HIS NAME

by Andrea Marcusa

Image source: Mansfield News Journal

The most pointless thing of all was how he wasn’t allowed to have his name stitched on his school knapsack – strangers can steal a child that way.  So were those vaccinations against diphtheria, meningitis, polio and the morning vitamin he hated – a chewable pink bear.  Or that car seat he was made to sit in on rides to school, even though most of his friends no longer had to use one, so futile. But there was something about his name – he’d taught himself to write it all by himself when he was two. Wanted everyone to use his full name. Not a nickname, not a shortened version. A good strong one for a boy.  Greek, after an apostle, after a king, and his grandfather in Alaska.  But that morning in the classroom with them all scattered around--there was no way to tell--no trace of it anywhere on him. But inside the neck of his too big, long-sleeved striped jersey, a strange, gloved hand peeled back the collar where he was found limp and face down, and that’s when they spotted it -- in black markered script. Dear child, in those first minutes, even your name was gone, displaced by the one on a hand-me-down from your brother, now a fourth grader in a classroom on the other end of the school, where he was crouched trembling, hiding in the closet.

Andrea Marcusa's  work has appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Ontario Review, The Antigonish Review, Copper Nickel, NewSouth, and other publications. Her work appeared in the essay collection, In the Fullness of Time (Simon and Schuster). She was a finalist in the Ontario Review’s 2007 fiction competition and winner of the Antigonish Review 2008 Fiction competition. She divides her time between literary writing and working in the areas of health care and sustainable agriculture.  She lives in New York City with her husband, two sons and pet cockatiel, Turko.