THE LIVING

by Tina Williams

by Argo at Fine Art America

“Fuck you, fuck you"
he said to the poet 
and nurse 
as sure as he said it 
to the autoworker
shouting “pedophile protector!”
Every day, 
he middle fingers
the command
to clear the streets
one way
or another
but the living
come back.
They arm
themselves
with poster board
and their children’s 
future.
They return
on the shoulders
of the dead. 
They dress
for the cold.

Tina Williams lives in Round Rock, Texas. She wants to be part of the solution.

ONE INTERPRETATION

by Erika Takacs

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has come under public fire for publicly endorsing the misogynistic views of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson (above) and his colleagues in a CNN interview… What sparked the latest round of worry is CNN’s interview in which [Wilson] says “women are the kind of people that people come out of”… Hegseth reposted the CNN interview link on X and wrote, “All of Christ for All of Life.” —Baptist News, August 10, 2025 

Oh—like the crone who strides forth 
out of my skin (wise, bossy, bolder)
whenever I see a young woman try
to tuck herself into a smaller, smaller,
smaller space. Or the diner waitress
who can’t help calling everyone Hon,
the school nurse whose eyes catch
on every helpless child, like the gawky
teen in line at the airport who needs me
to tell him when he’s allowed to board. 
There’s my grandmother, when I use salt
(never measure, more is better), 
and my dad, when I cry at commercials 
(Christmas morning, someone is home 
from college, or the army, and has brewed 
coffee). My brother when I am truly selfless; 
my mother when I’m just lucky. I’ve coaxed
wizards from this old body, vixens
and virgins and vamps. So many people
have come out of me, though not one
is my child. Or maybe all of them are—
every one a new creation, a dazzling
refraction of an infinite heart. 

Erika Takacs is an Episcopal priest, teacher, musician, and poet originally from Wilmington, Delaware. Her writing has been published in The Orchards Poetry Journal, Earth & Altar, The Christian Century, Braided Way, and Thimble Literary Journal. Outside of her work and her family, her three great loves are the music of J.S. Bach, books, and baseball. She currently resides in North Carolina, where she and her husband serve at the pleasure of their very spoiled beagle. 

TRANS FATS

by Chris Kaiser

This is not a real book. Its cover has been A-I generated at Shutterstock by The New Verse News to accompany this poem.

Trump falsely claims children being forced into gender transition ops at school in rambling fantasy-filled rally speech. —The Independent, September 9, 2024

I sent my boy to his fifth grade class 

and he returned a girl, 

apparently operated on by the school nurse,

without our permission, 

just like Trump predicted. 

The school also confiscated his backpack 

(or her backpack? I’m not sure. 

It was easier to imagine others 

with this woke problem). 

In his—ok, wait here while I ask 

my previous son what pronoun to use. 

He said she wants to play 

with his sister’s dolls, 

while she said he wants an operation too. 

I’m confused. 

And then my wife mentioned polyamory,

and I said, we already store our guns 

in more than one bunker. 

The book they confiscated from my son’s — 

wait here—

“Terry!” 

He said she wants to spell her name with an ‘i’.

The book they confiscated from Terri’s backpack was

“Trans Fats: The Real Story,”

which the school librarian, 

who moonlights as the science teacher, 

thought was about fat boys transitioning 

into skinny girls, 

and vice reversa. 

Though Trump railed against 

these secret surgeries as if they’re evil incarnate, 

I’m not so sure. 

Terri has since won All State 

in her youth softball league

and her sister is on track to win gold 

in boy’s figure skating.

Chris Kaiser’s poetry has appeared in Rattle, Eastern Iowa Review, Dissident Voice, Better Than Starbucks, and The Scriblerus, as well as in anthologies from Moonstone Press. His poetry also appeared in Action Moves People United, a music and spoken word project partnered with the United Nations.

THE PECULIAR CASE OF COMPASSION

by Adnan Abbasi

A nurse at New York University’s Langone hospital was fired after mentioning what she described as a “genocide” in Gaza during an award ceremony speech. Hesen Jabr, 34, a labor and delivery nurse who worked at NYU Langone for nearly 10 years, made the remarks while accepting an award earlier this month for providing excellent care to patients suffering perinatal loss… In a statement, Steve Ritea, a spokesperson for NYU Langone, said: “Hesen Jabr was warned in December, following a previous incident, not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace. She instead chose not to heed that at a recent employee recognition event that was widely attended by her colleagues, some of whom were upset after her comments. As a result, Jabr is no longer an NYU Langone employee.” —The Guardian, May 31, 2024

In the Court of Selective Outrage, now in session,
Where empathy's on trial, facing suppression.
The jury: stone-faced statues, deaf and blind,
The judge: a mirror, cracked and ill-defined.

Exhibit A: A nurse with healing hands,
Accused of love that spans divided lands.
"How dare she care," the Prosecution cries,
"For suffering that we've chosen to disguise?"

Witnesses parade, with badges of disdain,
Experts in the art of curated pain.
They testify of horrors, oh so select,
While wearing blinders, perfectly erect.

The Defense presents a stethoscope that hears
All heartbeats equal, through walls and through fears.
"Objection!" roars the court in unified voice,
"Such equity of care is a dangerous choice!"

Evidence mounts: bandages stained with tears,
A speech that dared to bridge the gap of years.
The clerk records each word with trembling hand,
As Truth stands gagged in the witness stand.

In summation, Irony takes the floor,
Painting compassion as an act of war.
The verdict echoes through antiseptic halls:
"Guilty of healing beyond these sterile walls."

Sentence is passed in a language absurd:
Silence for her who made suffering heard.
As Hesen exits, head unbowed and tall,
Justice weeps softly in the empty hall.

Outside, the world spins on, in chaos and in pain,
While in the court, they sanitize again,
Preparing for the next case on the docket:
"The Olive Tree vs. Concrete in Its Socket"

Adnan Abbasi’s writings have appeared in Hindustan Times, EconLib, The Straits Times, and CNN-News18. He is associated with Students for Liberty's South Asia chapter.

WALKING THE PATH

by Laura Rodley

Retired, nurse Jean nurses the homeless along
Chico’s bicycle path near the intersection
of Rio Lindo without washing their backs
or dispensing medicines: she gathers their trash,
clothes, and wet-wipes with a three-foot-grabber
bequeathed by a friend. Fellow walkers along
the path say thank you while she fills plastic
bags, wears cheap plastic gloves, monitoring
her own heart with her pace-maker. Only walls
away divide her from being homeless herself,
though she worked full time since her teens.
She gives back to her country walking
amongst her brethren fallen on hard times,
some still homeless after the Paradise Camp fire.
It’s her home, her country;
in the handkerchief-sized plot outside
her apartment her tomatoes reach
the size of baseballs. You know people
kill rattlesnakes, she says, all you have
to do is walk around them. They live
here too. The Hopi consider them
to be sacred, as is the ground she walks on,
lifting another clump of trash into her bag,
just the way my father gathered litter
as he walked from the train station
on his way home, a veteran longtime gone,
planting tomatoes when he could no longer
see, counting them as round shadows
that hung in the air, sixty-seven last count.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

ON ANOTHER AVERAGE EVENING

by Ethan McGuire

Top: Art by Molly Crabapple, special to ProPublica, April 24, 2020. Bottom: Graphic from National Nurses United.

She lies sprawled across a battered couch,

green scrubs still covering her body,

a cheap wine glass dangling from outstretched fingers.

He swings through the splintering apartment door,

blue, button-up uniform unbuttoned,

stained undershirt beneath it. “I’m home.”

“I had an awful day at work,” she sighs

as she picks up a bottle of Woodbridge merlot.

Pouring a glass, her eyes search the hall for him.

“Yeah?” he grunts, opening the fridge.

“Been having trouble with the charge nurse again,

and my plantar fasciitis is back.”

“Oh, no,” he says, pausing in the hallway.

“Administration, man, they’re coming down on us!

‘Course they won’t lower censuses for a damn thing... 

Maybe just another freaking pizza party... 

They’ll call us heroes but won’t give us a chance.”

“That sucks,” he says, as he limps through the hall

and as he sinks into the couch beside her.

“I hate being a floor nurse, hate it like hell.

I’ve gotta do something else.”

“I’m sorry.”

 

They sit still

in the cold and the quite then.

They only stare absently into

a noiseless, motionless TV, until

their hands touch. A certain love connects them.

She scoots over closer to his body,

and he slides his soiled, calloused hands under hers.

Ethan McGuire works by day as a healthcare information technology professional and by night as a writer, whose poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Better than Starbucks, The Dark Sire, Emerald Coast Review, and The Poetry Pea, among others. Ethan McGuire grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, but he, his wife who also works in healthcare as a nurse, and their new daughter currently live in the Florida Panhandle near the Gulf of Mexico. Twitter: @AHeavyMetalPen

WHEN IT IS OVER

by Katherine Tian

A weekend afternoon, the park near my room,

the stone table where my friends and I used to sit is covered with a thick layer of dust.

Untrodden weeds cross the dirt path.

When it is over,

we will come together like a wind gust.

Our friendship will only bloom.

 

After a long day at work, a nurse mother goes home with a sigh of bliss.

She can only embrace her toddling daughter with her gaze and tears,

close at hand, but on opposite sides of the canyon.

When it is over,

my little dear,

Mom will hug you in her arms with a long kiss.

 

During a festival, I walk on the empty square,

music and fragrance that once wafted through the restaurant disappear like a cloud.

Now only cold wind blows through.

When it is over,

the long-lost crowd

will gather again to breathe the free, healthy air.

 

Golden wedding grandparents pass away in isolation, looking at each other like new lovers.

The memory and close goodbye can only dwell

in the relatives’ sorrow hearts.

When it is over,

the belated remembrances and farewells

will turn into rainy tears and falling flowers.

 

I miss the sound of my teacher's marker scratching on the white board,

the crowd in the hallway,

the morning flock of school buses.

When it is over,

to my dear teachers, I will say,

in the back of the classroom, I will never fall asleep or get bored.

 

The early spring flowers are about to sprout.

The birds in the trees are singing happily as they cheer.

At this darkest moment of the pandemic,

my dear friends,

can you hear

the footsteps of the warm sunshine behind the heavy cloud?

Katherine Tian is a senior at Ward Melville High School on Long Island, New York. She is a long-time dancer and a long-term volunteer at a local elder-care center.

FOR JACOB BLAKE

SHOT BY A COP, PARALYZED, AND SHACKLED TO A HOSPITAL BED


by Margaret Rozga

As Jacob Blake was freed from handcuffs in the hospital, the Kenosha police union said Friday that Blake put an officer in a headlock moments before being shot in the back. Since Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot seven times in the back by a White officer, local officials have not discussed many details citing the ongoing investigation led by state investigators.

On Friday, the Kenosha Professional Police Association took issue with the public narrative, saying that he confronted officers, put an officer in a headlock and carried a knife that he refused to drop when ordered to by police, the union said. For Blake's attorneys, the police union's narrative is merely a tactic to justify the officers' actions. "I think it's the common strategy that police departments use in these type of circumstances. It's always trying to justify murder for misdemeanors," attorney B'Ivory LaMarr told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Friday. —CNN, August 29, 2020

Who made the decision to shackle him?
Who shackled him?
Who is the nurse who cares for him shackled?
Who is the doctor who does the surgery? Surgeries?
Was he shackled during surgery?

They did not say shackle. They said restrained.

What words minimize, hide, disguise, mask:
who uses words like this?
What words for this?

His father said handcuffed, handcuffed to the bed.
His father’s words leave the bedside, leave
the hospital, hit the air, hit the air waves,
hit the heart, cry out for release, cry for justice,
words that restrain other words, words that free.

Still to be told:
the nurse’s story, the nurses’ stories
the doctor’s,  the doctors’.

The decider, the deciders, hold a press conference,
are pressed. Pressed, they leave. They leave questions
opening like unacknowledged wounds,
lingering like ghosts of the dead they cannot shackle.

Margaret Rozga is the current Wisconsin Poet Laureate.  She writes poems from her ongoing concern for social justice.

TO THOSE WHO REFUSE TO WEAR A FACE MASK WHEN ADVISED TO DO SO

A WARNING

by Brooke Herter James

Last week I was strolling the banks
of a creek in Montana when,
out of seemingly nowhere,
a sandhill crane exploded
from the tall grass at my feet.
She was fully my height,
her wings wide open,
beating theair,
her long beak pointing—
jabbing at me.

Beneath her, two eggs.

I am a mother,  too. I get it.

Especially right now,
with one child, pregnant,
working twelve-hour shifts
as a nurse in a walk-in clinic
clear across the country.

If you choose not to wear a face mask—
and you get sick—
and you seek care from my daughter
or any of the thousands of health care workers
who are some one else’s beloved child—
thereby endangering them with your selfishness,
I will come after you like that sandhill crane.
It’s that simple.

Brooke Herter James is the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Widest Eye ( 2016) and Spring took the Long Way Around (2019). Her poems have appeared in PoemTown Vermont as well as the online publications Poets Reading the News, TheNewVerse.News, Flapper Press, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice (forthcoming).  She was chosen as a finalist in the Poetry Society of Vermont’s 2019 National Poetry Contest. She lives on a hillside in Vermont with her husband, four hens, two donkeys and a dog.

THIS IS NOT A SAFE HOUSE

by Ellen Austin-Li

I speak to my son through a wooden door, his bedroom a quarantine zone, Day 12. 

His brilliant smile hides behind a mask. I pine to hold him. I leave his favorite food by the door: Ramen with two eggs, yokes poked open with chopsticks. and a dollop of hot sesame oil, yellow cake with sweetened condensed milk (like NiNi makes), cinnamon tea with honey. One bathroom extends his bunker. I am too afraid to enter to clean. If this is Coronavirus, it’s too late for his brother and so for us all, as he showers there. Sooner or later we’ll all get it—a cavalier cloak covers my husband's fear. He is on the Crisis Airway Team at the hospital. Back in my burn-nurse days, I learned to be strict with gloves, scrubs, gowns, masks. We have broken technique. Don’t you answer the call to work, he said in a naked moment. If I don’t make it, someone has to be alive for the boys. We are broken. Day 12 and my husband finally agrees. We are not a safe house. I text my son about the bag of Cadbury Mini-Eggs I laid on the floor outside his door.

Ellen Austin-Li is an award-winning poet published in Artemis, Writers Tribe Review, The Maine Review, Mothers Always Write, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Masque & Spectacle, Green Briar Review, Panoply, and other places. Her first poetry chapbook Firefly was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. Ellen is a student at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

POSTHUMOUS EXISTENCE

by John Hodgen

Were we not paying attention, attention-deficited even then,
even before the term was wheeled in on some gurney
with a wobbly wheel? Brooklyn Hospital, so overrun,
where Fauci was born, where Whitman volunteered,
his beard as face mask, tending Union soldiers,
bringing peaches, poems, writing letters for them,
urging them to believe that a woman back home
would still marry them when they came home,
marching Johnnies through the rye,
missing a leg or an arm or an eye?

And Keats, quarantined in the harbor in Naples,
not nearly the quaranta giorni, the full forty days,
on the Maria Crowther, six weeks out from Gravesend,
typhus all around, bobbing like rhythm, like synaesthesia
in the bay. Keats, mortality weighing “heavily” on him,
“like unwilling sleep,” Keats half alive,
“half in love with easeful Death.”

Did we not see it, fully take it in,
poets and plagues interwoven, the world caving in,
the burst of tubercular blood in Keats’s handkerchief,
Whitman’s soldiers (“warriors,” T***p says) who survived,
stood, hobbled and grim, and married just as he told them
they would, writing back years later to tell Old Walt,
fierce believer in grasses, sheaves and hymns,
that they had named their children after him.

Or is it simply that we have lived too long
to have seen it again?

And who moves quickly now, masked, from bed to bed,
giving succor, solace, taking selfies with the nearly dead
to share with the families prevented from being there,
with Poe’s masquers, red death, double ventilated with dread?
What nurses, doctors, poets glide among us again,
like shepherds, pastorals, like trashbagged antibodies,
nearly invisible, shining with novel, singular grace?

John Hodgen is the Writer-in-Residence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. Hodgen won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His fourth book of poetry Heaven & Earth Holding Company is out from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and his first book In My Father's House has been reprinted from Lynx House/University of Washington Press. Hodgen’s fifth book The Lord of Everywhere is just out, also from Lynx House/University of Washington Press.

RED FLAG

by Tricia Knoll

You stepped in the doorway.
Come, you said, to comfort me.

A long way to come without
having gone anywhere new,

I thought, the nurse watched
over me to help me contain

my anger, but I could not.
The background: strangers

arrived to check out a victim.
Such a long way to come

without moving an inch.
My fingers searched

for a red flag to hold up
when I spit out

ban assault rifles,
don’t let white men

use them as banners
for hate.

The hate you wave
at every turn.


Tricia Knoll asks how she might feel if she were in a hospital bed after a shooting and the President arrived.

LIFESAVER

by Mark Ward

“Former nurse Niels Högel—who has admitted to giving potentially lethal drugs to patients so he could try to resuscitate them—has been sentenced by a German court to life in prison for murdering 85 people.” —NPR, June 6, 2019. Photo: Högel in court, awaiting his verdict in Oldenburg, Germany. Credit: Hauke-Christian Dittrich/AFP/Getty Images via NPR.

Their bodies ailing,
they flail, fitting,

disrupting the night’s
boredom. I’m there,

knuckles cracked, ready.

They say to compress
to 120

BPM pop songs:
Staying Alive,

Another One Bites

The Dust. The syringe
makes them erupt,

their hearts needing me,
my steady hands.

Most of them come back.

Sometimes the nights push
the plunger down

and their bodies make
one last complaint.

I watch. Do nothing.

Mark Ward is the author of Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Cordite, Assaracus, Softblow, and many more. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. He is currently working on his first full-length collection, Nightlight.

EMERGENCY ROOM, NYC

by Terese Coe

Sitting on a cot in the walkway of the ER for hours

to get up and walk the circle of disease and decay,

he is struck by the bleeding case, the festering case,

the dying woman no one tends but her daughter.

After four hours the intimidation team of interns

marches in to insist on an overnight stay. You’ll

have a bed within two hours. Another three hours on,

no bed. He cases the joint for exits. Uniformed officers

stand at every exit except one, which is locked,

and prove their seriousness when he

approaches them. Having signed himself in, he is

no longer free to quit the place. He climbs into his

clothing again, saying he’s cold, ambles to the empty

interior hall and waits. Five minutes later a nurse

enters the hall, fails to notice him in the dead

end on the other side, swipes her card on

the pad for the unguarded door and, like a

miracle, passes through the magic portal with her tray

of meds. It remains open just long enough for him to follow

her through unseen. He finds himself in the main hall

of the hospital, suddenly unconstrained across meandering

public areas and out the front door. Intact. At home,

Arlene calls to say she went to visit him in the ER

and they were looking for him: I asked them how you

could have disappeared and a nurse said “He’s not a

psychiatric patient, so we can’t force him to stay.”

He says, “If I’d been there any longer, I would have been

a psychiatric patient.” That night the swelling subsides

when he takes a shower. No one calls from the ER

to ask questions--yet.

Terese Coe's poems and translations have appeared in Threepenny Review, Poetry, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Huffington Post, Poetry Review, TLS, Agenda, New Walk Magazine, Warwick Review, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications, including anthologies. One of her poems was chosen for the 2012 London Olympics Rain of Poems and heli-dropped across London, and her latest collection of poems will be out in February 2015.

SCARED S#!TLESS IN MAINE

by Paul Dickey

They say you may get Ebola

if in public you sip a Coca Cola,

or just being in Maine,

or in Dallas deplane.

They don’t know s#!t from Shinola.

She just went for a ride on her bike,
but was followed by folks with a mike.
They wanted to know
she’d stay home with her beau,
but her answer the Guv did not like.

The reporters were terribly scared,
but it was for our safety they cared.
They got near her so close
with their questions so gross
to warn it’s our air she has shared.

But soon, 21 days will pass
though the Guv won’t admit he’s an ass:
“I just did what’s right
though it caused quite a fright,
but next time, I won’t mess with this lass.”


Paul Dickey’s most recent volume of poetry is Wires Over the Homeplace from Pinyon Publishing.  He published They Say This is How Death Came Into the World with Mayapple Press in 2011. Dickey’s poetry has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Potomac Review, Prairie Schooner, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Mid-American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Pleaides, Bellevue Literary Review and many other journals, both print and online.  Additionally, Dickey daily posts humorous political limericks such as these at his Facebook site, The Liberal Limerick and has published an e-book of his witty verse Liberal Limericks of 2012 (available free at Amazon.)

NIGHTFALL

by Anton Yakovlev

The Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire

 
She looked like Robin Wright in The Princess Bride.
She was your nurse, but you called her “my muse”
ever since your first check-up.

Your colonel threatened to lead you into harm’s way,
assuming you imagined her in wet dreams,
failing to grasp the meaning of the word “muse.”

This game of alphas was all well and good
until, just halfway into your deployment,
he did let your vehicle get blown up.

You awoke, and many thought you might still return
to active duty, until a routine injection
prompted you to knock your nurse muse unconscious.

For months you shied away from traffic lights.
Thankfully, your aim had gotten so bad
you missed your own temple at point blank range.

Today you spend most evenings in Middle Earth,
imagining you’re at a campfire with hobbit brothers.
The night falls.

For two months of the year
you’re the star of the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire,
jousting and wooing.

You’ve acquired a handful of Twitter followers.
You balladeer tasteful maxims
about the well-tuned diplomacy of pole dancers.

Your voicemail greeting is a legend.
The chickens in your front yard drive
every local farmer to jealous rage.

When children come trick-or-treating,
you throw a Dracula cape over your chain mail
and shower them with Belgium’s finest chocolate.

But their parents impose strict curfews.
And even the hobbits have their bedtime restrictions;
Thorin the dwarf has to take care of his beard.

You slip back into that night in the hospital.
Your muse in scrubs lies on the floor next to your bed.
If only you could help her up.

An anchor stares at you from the TV screen.
A blast down the street
sends tremors through the hospital windows

and all those people running into your room.


Anton Yakovlev grew up in Moscow, Russia, but moved to the United States in 1996. He studied filmmaking and poetry at Harvard University. Anton lives in Ridgewood, NJ and works as a college textbook editor. His poetry has appeared in The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, CityLitRag, The Poet in New York and Instigatorzine, and is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Raintown Review, and 823 on High. He has also directed several short films.