WHILE TAPPING MY FOOT

by Mark Hendrickson

Rothko Style Art at Etsy

AI slop tops Billboard and Spotify charts as synthetic music spreads —The Guardian, November 13, 2025

MIT Invents Injectable Brain Chips —Futurism, November 16, 2025

While tapping my foot

to the AI-generated 

number one song 

on the billboard charts

that I asked Siri to play,

I abandon my Kindle book 

and switch to my iPhone 

to shop for paintings 

in the style of Rothko on Etsy,

but I become distracted 

by automated news summaries

reporting that computer chips can now 

be injected directly into our brains,

and how many jobs will be lost

to AI and automation,

and an article saying 

that one day soon 

robots will replace or kill us all.

I laugh to myself and say, 

“Never gonna happen” 

as I click the Buy Now button

because I decide 

I like the reproduction

better than the original.

Mark Hendrickson (he/him/his) is a poet and writer in the Des Moines area navigating the Sturm und Drang of daily life through wordcraft. His words appear in The Ekphrastic Review, The New Verse News, and Modern Haiku. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or at https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/mhendrickson .

TWELVE DAYS

by Shirrin Jabalameli

There was no sound.

But the walls struggled to breathe,

and flecks of plaster rained down like strands of an old woman’s hair who could no longer sleep.

 

The woman came up from the basement.

Not out of fear,

but to see a sky that could no longer be seen.

 

She was a painter.

There was no paint.

No coffee left.

A voice in her head whispered: Paint. Even with ash.

 

The calendar flipped forward,

like an endless explosion bursting through seconds.

And the clock froze 

at 3:20 AM.

 

Day One

 

A dragon leapt out of a painting.

A dome cracked open.

Silently.

With a tremor only she felt.

Something broke beneath her feet,

and she polished the shoes she hadn’t worn.

 

Day Two

 

A message arrived.

The number wasn't saved.

It read: “Are you alive?”

She didn’t reply.

She just sat there, stared at the cracked photo frame, and said:

“How did you know I should be dead?”

The city emptied.

 

Day Three

 

No smell of bread.

No scent of blood either.

Only the thud of words pounding the walls.

The tiles recorded the blast.

She wrote: “We are still words.”

Then she drew the letter “N” backwards,

added two diacritics beneath the “K.”

A man saw it,

and ran.

 

Day Four

 

A child found a seashell on the ground.

He asked his mother: “Is this the sea?”

She said nothing.

The woman picked up the shell and answered:

“No. It’s the last remnant of listening.”

An old man’s cane began to calligraph across the stones.

 

Day Five

 

The mirror cracked.

But its reflection didn’t cry.

The woman inside the mirror was no longer her.

One of them was asleep.

The other,

awake and fighting.

And in that same dawn,

a verse trembled.

 

Day Six

 

The phone rang.

No name saved.

A voice said: “Remember that mountain you climbed as a kid?”

She laughed: “You saw me?”

The voice replied: “Still stubborn. Still painting.”

 

Chopin’s notes tangled with the roar of an explosion.

 

Day Seven

 

The alleyways had fallen asleep.

In their dreams,

they swallowed the lead.

A crow asked: “Why are you still awake?”

Sejjil interpreted the dream.

  

Day Eight

 

Someone on the other side of the wall was talking to himself.

Half of his words were Persian.

The other half—screams.

She didn’t hear it through the window.

She heard it through the wall’s skin

in the precise place where sound no longer existed.

But her skin did.

 

Day Nine

 

A man shouted: “Enough!”

His voice echoed back into him.

The painter woman said:

“No. We’re not there yet. You must go all the way.”

 

Day Ten

 

Rain didn’t fall,

but the ground was wet.

The air had wept.

Someone wrote:

“You’re alive. Do it.”

 

Day Eleven

 

She painted a piece that smelled of burned coffee.

The one-legged goat said:

“I’m not the way back?”

 

She replied:

“You’re the reason I stayed, though you may never understand.”

 

Day Twelve

 

Everything was just as it had always been.

But nothing was in its place.

She looked at the word she had written on the wall.

It hadn't been erased.

Just slightly more ... upside-down.

 

The End?

No.

These were just twelve chapters

of a book not written in blood,

but in the color of resistance, 

resistance that could still be seen,

even through smoke.

Shirrin Jabalameli is an Iranian writer, painter, photographer, and storyteller. She is currently working on a poetry-photo hybrid collection reflecting on memory and witness.There was no sound.

BÉLIZAIRE

by Suzanne Morris

after “Bélizaire and the Frey Children”  attributed to French portraitist Jacques Amans, 1837, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023

He stands tall, one shoulder

resting against a wide-girthed tree

on the pleasant green expanse

of a Louisiana plantation.

His arms are folded

contemplatively

across the front of his

tailored coat.

His face is solemn,

cheeks highly colored,

gaze fixed on some

point in the distance

as if he’s assessing

his place above

the three young,

open-faced siblings

in dainty frocks

standing below:

What might have led to an

enslaved youngster’s appearance

in a portrait of his

owner’s fair children?

And if this be vouchsafed by

sweet Heaven’s intent, then

might these

privileged youths

who boast to him of their

McGuffey Readers and are

well-versed in Bible stories

one day take up 

their writing pens and

set down the truth of

his people’s history?

Some sixty years hence,

the yoke of American

slavery broken,

Bélizaire’s noble figure

will be cunningly painted over

leaving his ghost to hover

between the artist’s vision

and the sunny sky, added later,

to obscure him.

The antebellum portrait of

three comely white children

will be forgotten

in the dark reaches

of attic and basement

until the dawn of the

21st century, when

Bélizaire’s figure

is finally restored

and the work receives

due veneration

the full franchise of 

his people bought with

calloused feet and heroes’ blood.

Yet now, less than

two decades passed,

Bélizaire looks down

contemplatively

from high up on a

museum wall

as a generation

come lately

forswearing the truth 

painstakingly written

again takes up the brush to

paint over him.   

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works.  Her poems have appeared inThe New Verse News and The Texas Poetry Assignment, as well as other online poetry journals, and anthologies.  A native of Houston, she now makes her home in Cherokee County, Texas.

BRUSH WITH BRAVERY FROM 4,500 MILES

by Becky DeVito

“Walk Through Claude’s Gardens” by Tatyana Pchelnikova.
Tatyana Pchelnikova’s website of original art.
Tatyana Pchelnikova at Made for Bravery.
Tatyana Pchelnikova on Instagram.

I’m on my second of four cups of gunpowder 

green tea and here’s a tweet from Zelenskyy: 

now there’s Made With Bravery, an online shop 

where anyone with a Visa card 

can make a miniscule contribution to the war. 

I don’t like to brag but if online shopping 

were a competitive sport I could medal 

in the cool stuff at a good price event, so let’s get to it: 

vyshyvanka shirts—I could wear one of those. 

Such a flattering cut, but the stitching sprouts all over. 

Look at this men’s vyshyvanka. Simplicity 

is elegance, right? No one to buy it for 

but why should that stop me? The sleeves 

would be too long and perhaps they’d snicker 

at my cross-dressing. I don’t think I’d care 

much about that but then there are folks 

who would think culturally illiterate

and so many already think that goes with American

so I can’t buy one of those. T-shirts are okay but 

I can’t wear yellow near my face and hey—

there’s an art category and that’s perfect. 

I won’t have to worry about the size, but the shipping! 

And international—better not think about it 

or I’ll never get to the finish line. 

 

That abstract painting with every shade 

of pink and green and all those textures…

which I can always return to later. Scroll down to a riot 

of flowers. I mean, a peaceful demonstration. 

That word is used inappropriately so often. Crowded, 

standing together. Reds and yellows and purples shout 

over each other, but they have something substantial to say.

About joy, or the need to let all your color catapult 

you into the next dimension and whatever shape that takes, 

I could use reminding. Click and it’s Walk 

Through Claude’s Gardens, and I believe it. 

Those petals curl right off the canvas the oil is so thick 

and wait, this is an oil painting, not a print? 

I’ve never owned an oil painting. Maybe I can afford it—

yes, $247 is something I can do, especially for an original.

How big is 50*50 cm, anyway? Another tab to convert 

centimeters to inches, 20x20, that’s a nice size 

and I definitely love it. Have to have it. 

 

Put in my address: why can’t Chrome translate 

the countries in the dropdown list? I’ve seen США 

so many times in the tweets but it would be a shame 

if it got sent to the wrong country. 

Google Translate says I was right 

and I’d better be, after 6 ½ months 

of keeping up with this war 

that was supposedly never again, 

and why won’t they let me specify my state? 

I guess it could arrive with only the zip. I want it. 

I put in my Visa number and the next screen 

isn’t in dollars anymore but UAH. 

 

Whoa, that’s a lot of digits 

so another tab for a currency converter 

and yes it’s right so I press Pay and it says 

I still need to make the payment for my order. 

At least they’re recognizing I have an order. 

I call the number on the back of the card 

and plug my other ear to hear the voice from India 

say nothing was declined, nothing was purchased 

today and they would know even if it was a minute ago 

so I have to solve it through the site. I email 

and ask if someone could have bought it 

during the cup of tea between when I started 

putting in my address and when I pressed Pay 

and so could I commission a similar one 

and I’d better get this taken care of soon 

because if she sells her entire stock on the first day 

it won’t be long before they’re four times the price. 

Good for her, but I’ll be shut out 

and there are so few occasions to join 

this awful war from 4,500 miles away 

and it’s not in my cart so I really hope 

it’s being saved in cyberspace  

while the customer service people wade 

through the backlog including three emails 

from me and that painting would 

fill the beige void I get sucked into 

for every virtual meeting 

much better than this starting-to-get-long 

black-and-white poem. 

 

By now they’re all struggling to sleep 

through air raid sirens because the Russian army 

thinks they’re making gains when they lob 

their missiles at apartment buildings, but those HIMARS 

we sent have been really good at shooting 

rockets out of the sky so maybe none will land near her 

tonight and Kyiv is 7 hours ahead of Connecticut 

so I hope when I wake 

there will be more than the automatic reply from Bravery 

waiting for me here in my inbox. Hold on—

how did this fraud alert slip in? 

Yes, I recognize that purchase. 

Why did it take eight hours 

when the lady from the credit card company 

said it would have shown up instantly? 

 

Thank God I left the tab open 

after I kept telling it to Pay 

because I can’t find the painting on the site 

anymore but they’re still trying to fingerprint my browser

from hours before so I reload and press Pay 

and it doesn’t work the first time but 

reload that sucker again and 

Wahoo! I’m the new owner of actual art 

and look I got it done before midnight 

and wow she must have been just as frazzled 

because it’s only 6:46 am there 

and here’s the shipping label, all ready to go. 

Tatyana Pchelnikova, you’re amazing. 

I subscribed for updates because I have another 

empty wall and you’ll be my go-to artist 

even after the invaders 

have had enough of their genocidal nonsense. 

 

Becky DeVito is pleased to report subsequent purchases at Made With Bravery have gone much more smoothly, including the names of countries appearing in English in the dropdown list. Becky DeVito has used poetry as a means of working her way through trauma. Her experiences writing poetry led her to investigate the ways in which poets come to new insights through the process of drafting and revising their poems for her doctoral dissertation. She is a professor of psychology at the Capital campus of CT State Community College in Hartford, Connecticut. Her poems have been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Frogpond, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Naugatuck River Review, Ribbons: Tanka Society of America Journal, and others. Join her on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.