CATALOGUING OUR NAMES

by Karen Marker

 

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts. —The New York Times, February 13, 2026


Still in the down of the dream world a text 
comes from Mona that says you are so brave
which means she must have seen my Facebook post 
about ICE and knows of the threats made 
about collecting names. I also named 
the commandment from Exodus about how 
we should treat the stranger. 

Such a long list of us, once strangers ourselves. 
Will they record our names, imprison all of us, 
including the thirteen-year-old who read the torah portion 
and the rabbi who said all who want to take a stand rise
and come up for the blessings?  No one was left in their seats.  
We were packed so tight together, all of us touching 
someone who was touching the parchment, another name 
for light holding the words like a mother. Like the mother 
who stood beside me holding her child 

with deep brown eyes staring straight into my eyes.
She didn’t look away from my tearing up 
like I can’t look away from what keeps me awake 
at night thinking of the children in the prison camps,
the names I need to speak so I won’t forget.
Receiving blessings, touching light, 
we were one breathing body.  

What can I text Mona that will soothe her fear
for the dark skin she got from her Indian Hindu 
father, her Mizrachi Jewish mother?  Even 
with her credentials that made her a top doctor
specialist, gave her a beautiful suburban life, 
she’s still afraid for her son and tells me she couldn’t 
survive without her medicines, not one day 
in that prison camp and I admit I’m just as scared 
of being sent away. It’s all that’s unhealed 

that makes us even more afraid.  It is the cage,
the chains, the clanging doors of our brains, 
how the past climbs back up and casts us out. 
But now Mona is calling, telling me how
everyone’s been working so hard in Ohio, like one
family.  At least for today there’s a stay by the judge, 
the Haitians in Springfield are safe.

    
Karen Marker is an Oakland, CA. poet activist and retired school psychologist whose poetry of protest and hope in response to the news will be coming out as a book in the coming year.  Her poetry has appeared in NVN and various other journals including The MacGuffin, The Monterey Poetry Review, the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Slant, and WordPeace. Her book of flash memoir and poetry Beneath the Blue Umbrella is available through Finishing Line Press and explores resilience in face of family trauma.  

TO ALL THE IMPRISONED CHILDREN

by Julie Weiss

Hold on. You´re a rabbit, clever

and bold, galloping free through

tomorrow´s boundless grasslands.

Hold on. You´re the most extraordinary

lotus, blooming through cracks

in your country´s polar ice caps.

Hold on. They may have grounded

your body, but your mind

can fly a thousand glorious kites

in the rising winds of resistance.

Your will, sharp enough to slice

a prison guard´s insults into fluff.

Hold on. Right now, you may feel

more like a beetle climbing

a mountain under a crush of boots

than anything human, but you´re not

alone. You´re the song we sing

when the notes in our throat

have lumped impossibly together.

You´re the rainbow colors we use

to airbrush our hope across the sky.

You’re the poem we bellow at every

demonstration. Imagine! Your beauty

flowing in epic proportions.

You´re our brightest star, the one

that anchors us to our place

in the universe. Hold on. Without you,

we´d all be hurled deep into space.

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection Rooming with Elephants was published in February, 2025. She was a finalist for Best of the Net, won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award, and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Recent work appears in ONE ART, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Gyroscope Review, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, MER, and SWWIM. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. 

THE INHERITANCE

by Jim Bellanca

Gainesville, Georgia, 2020 (Shutterstock)

Jim Crow’s obituary read,

“After a lengthy illness, Jim has passed away,

His Crow name now just history.” 

I thought “maybe not, maybe so.”

(You cannot trust the news these days.)

 

I knew Jim’s sister Jane had moved to Toronto

with her DACA son Juan

a surprise, a ten-year caboose

behind three sisters college gone,

had joined the family late.

Juan Crow was the most interesting one,

a son who’d volunteered for war, 

three tours in Afghanistan’s battle fields,

a Silver Cross and long times spent from love.

Back home, a hero named, he learned again, 

(most definitely not his first experience),

the curse of Jim Crow’s name, 

with his life separated by skin

in school,

        —at water fountains

        —on school bus ride

        —in restaurants

        —in restrooms

        —in voting booths

        —in marriage beds

the profile depicting all brown men

as one no matter where or who or when

ICE labeled shady caricatures,  

        —“beaner”

        —“wetback”

        —“gringo”​

        —“spic”

who tequila too much, siesta too long, 

just “don’t belong” on our turf;

accused of job stealing, rape, and more, 

tattooed as M-13,

by Presidential decree,

      —“the worst of hombres”

      —“the most detestable of human beings”

      —“the lowest despicable animal beast”

      —“a greaser druggy poisoning our lands”

any excuse the man can name

while hooded fiends from ICE 

day-quota-sized kidnapping any brown man

      —in church or school  

      —in hospital bed

      —in shopping mall

      —in strawberry fields 

      —in pizza huts

all blared and shared in local tv news, 

dread images bent with bowed shaved heads, 

arms tattoed with criminal marks

slow marched to caged jail cells,

(no one knows where)

—to scare the most innocent

—to leave their family love 

—to end their journey to freedom’s land

—to prove the power of the President

            by breaking what laws, he wished.

 

Juan Crow’s red blood

once given to save the land, the nation he loved,

no longer flows free. Juan sits in Alcatraz,

in his separate unequal cell

all son and martyr and hero dream

of Jim Crow newborn, a cosmic transfer,

a heritage inherited without recourse

Jim’s curse transferred to Juan, 

a lifetime injustice to bare, 

all ball and chain and prison wrack, 

all Sisyphus rock on his back.

Jim Bellanca, former English teacher, publisher and gadfly, now a late blooming poet, favors paining memory images about nature, family, peace, social justice and wry comments about senior life. He fervently assumes a “No Prufrock I” position when he writes about social injustice. More than two dozen poetry journals including Witcraft, Write City zine, Aerial Journey. Down In the Dirt, Sparks of Caliope, Westwood Quarterly, The Lyric, and East on Central have published his poems.

PAPILLON

by Lynn White

France plans to build a maximum-security prison wing for drug traffickers and Islamic militants near a former penal colony in French Guiana, sparking an outcry among residents and local officials. The wing would form part of a $450 million prison announced in 2017 that is expected to be completed by 2028 and hold 500 inmates. The prison would be built in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, a town bordering Suriname that once received prisoners shipped by Napoleon III in the 1800s, some of whom were sent to the notorious Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana… It was once an infamous colony known for holding French political prisoners, including Captain Alfred Dreyfus (above left), who was wrongly convicted of being a spy and spent five years on Devil's Island, from 1894-1899. —Le Monde, May 20, 2025. Henri Charrière was convicted of murder in 1931 by the French courts and pardoned in 1970. He wrote the 1969 novel Papillon, a memoir of his incarceration in French Guiana.

The butterfly knows no death
in its metamorphosis.

It knows it will rise again
with the certainty
of Papillon now.

And as he rises to tell his story
history
repeats again.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

FIRST CONTACT

by Michelle DeRose

Detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil (file photo above) was allowed to hold his one-month-old son for the first time Thursday after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the father and infant separated by a plexiglass barrier. —NPR, May 22, 2025

Tuck that baby in close. He needs
to hear your beats; you, to smell
his hair. Skin itching for touch,
building bonds by contact. Once,
an old man in a home pressed
palms to pane. His daughter prayed
along, her breath frosting the air.
Neighbors hung curtains on shared
lines, clasped amidst the plastic.
Twice in recent life they advised
no contact: to slow the spread
of a spiked virus and to wedge 
between father and his newborn son
an unwarranted block of ice.

 
Professor Emerita of English, Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find her most recent publications in ONE ART, Panoply, One Hundred Poems for Hearing Dogs (anthology), and The New Verse News. 

HOUSE ARREST

by Devon Balwit

A few months before he began his 2022 Senate campaign, JD Vance reached out to a conservative family policy group with an idea for an opinion essay. He wanted to write about why government-subsidized day care was bad — and why most young children do better when one parent stays home... “We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hard-wired to bond with mom,” said Jenet Erickson, a co-writer of Mr. Vance’s 2021 essay and a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative policy group that advocates for raising the birthrate. “They know her smell, they know her heartbeat, they know her voice. I just think, why should we deny that?” —The New York Times, May 12, 2025

 

 

It is impossible for any situation to go on well where one is at the bottom who ought to be either independent or at the top. I am at the bottom and ought not be there. —Florence Nightingale, private note, 1851, in Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters

 

Lacking a penis, the young Florence Nightingale

had to satisfy herself with the yearly sorting of linens

and kitchen utensils. She noted, wryly, in her journal

that, as for the latter, form didn’t follow function—

she hadn’t the faintest idea of their use. She hoped,

that Capital, by creating a need for them, had allowed some

at least, to earn their bread. Luckily, proper scope

for her talents emerged in the war hospitals of Crimea.

 

Now, talk has again turned to what 

is “natural” for women—surprise—a predilection for babies

and scutwork. Out comes the myth, trailing dust,

that career women are selfish and their children unhappy.

Have we learned nothing since the Victorians—

that if unchosen, a woman’s home is her prison?

When not making art, Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press and Asterisk Magazine.

EL SALVADOR

by Margaret Rozga

A name the conquistadores imposed

as if Christian, as if a name said it all.

There is not a single savior anywhere

anymore, if ever there was. Now

there in the name of the Savior, they

twist, strip meaning, bend backs,

shackle, shave heads, imprison,

no hope of return.

What angel, angels, to roll back this stone?

Arise, arise as one. Be one, good people.

Margaret Rozga, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee at Waukesha Professor of English Emerita, served as the 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate and the 2021 inaugural artist/scholar in residence at the UW Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station. She has published six books, most recently Restoring Prairie (2024) and Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems (2021).

THEY NAMED THEIR DUNGEONS A HOUSE OF MIRRORS

by Arshi Mortuza

The interim leader of Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus, has told Sky News former prime minister Sheikh Hasina will stand trial for crimes against humanity. Ms Hasina is accused of overseeing a system of enforced disappearances during her time in government, as well as the mass killing of protesters in July and August last year.... Professor Yunus recently visited one of the now infamous secret jails, code-named the 'House of Mirrors.' The economics professor, known as the 'banker to the poor' and now chief adviser of Bangladesh, said he was beyond shocked at what he saw. "This is just the ugliest thing that you can see, you can feel, or you can observe," he said. —Sky News, March 5, 2025

As a Bangladeshi out of Bangladesh,
I’ll admit it felt too sudden for me,
Like the flipping of a switch.

The flipping of a switch that sent them scurrying
Like rodents and roaches,
Leaving behind trails of their filth
And the crumbs they had hoarded.
Leaving the nation to unearth
Atrocities—buried and burrowed.

The audacity—
To give torture cells a poetic name:
Ayna Ghor—House of Mirrors
A glass prison that entrapped
Our fathers and brothers.
A name that reflected their distorted minds,
Their inner vermin.

But it all came to light, eventually—
Each shard of the mirror
Igniting flames and upheaval
Amongst a nation once plagued.

A nation that is free to denounce
A venomous matriarch
Without the fear of Ayna Ghor.

Arshi Mortuza is a Bangladeshi writer in her late 20s, currently based in Canada. She is the author of One Minute Past Midnight and is working on Pressed Flower, a manuscript exploring preservation and entrapment. She can be found on Instagram as @poetessarshi

PICTURES OF PEACE IN OUR TIME, PROTECTION IN OUR DAY

by Michelle DeRose

A paper badge held aloft over eyes

thirteen years’ wide, the funds to find

their cure cut. Texas brothers,

three and five, their mother dead

in the state’s bid to keep the unviable

alive. Women moved to men’s prisons

to prevent concussions in girls’ sports;

the study of injuries among girls removed.

Four hundred million dollars rescinded

for failure to stop campus harassment

one week after three Gentiles circled

and humiliated, pointed and shouted

to muffle the modestly dressed Jewish man’s

assertions he’s not playing that game.

This whether we like it or not.

Newly named Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michelle DeRose’s poetry won the Chancellor’s Prize in 2024 and the Faruq Z Bey Award in 2023 from the Poetry Society of Michigan. Her poetry has been published in dozens of venues, most recently The New Verse News, Sparks of Calliope, The Midwest Quarterly, and Dunes Review, and is forthcoming in Months to Years and One Hundred Poems for Hearing Dogs (anthology). She is participating in the 2025 Stafford Challenge—a cohort of poets who have committed to writing a poem a day for a year. The daily news supplies plenty of material for that effort.

CRUELTY

by Bonnie Naradzay

Some people say
that, having stopped 
reading the news, they 
feel better.
 
The old Chinese poets
remind me to include
today’s weather report
in each poem.
 
Dr Issam Abu Ajwa said
he was forced to sleep
on a floor covered with small, 
sharp rocks, hands and legs tied,
eyes blindfolded.
 
The weather is warm this week—
in fact, the cherry blossoms
here are projected to peak
somewhat earlier this spring.
 
Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia
was tortured for seven months 
then released without charge. 
“I was clubbed, beaten with rifle butts, 
attacked by dogs. I was beaten so badly 
I couldn’t use my legs or walk, he said.
 
Dr Ahmad Mhanna, director
of al-Awda hospital in north Gaza, 
has been in Israeli prisons 
more than a year without charge.
 
Nightfall here, and the evening
becomes a still life—
it glistens like a Chinese lantern
in a garden without strife.
 
Some people try to memorize
a meaningful poem one line
at a time as a way to neutralize 
the news.  In severe winter cold
 
seven children froze to death
in Gaza in the last 48 hours
but today’s weather elsewhere
is quite pleasant overall.

Bonnie Naradzay’s manuscript will be published this year by Slant Books.  For years, she has led weekly poetry sessions at homeless shelters and a retirement community.  Poems, three of which have been nominated for Pushcarts, have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, and other places. While at Harvard she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize – a month’s stay in Northern Italy – in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary.  There, Bonnie had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read drafts of Pound’s translations. 

MUSEUM OF CUTTING-EDGE TECHNOLOGY

by Kenneth Arthur

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

When we paid the entrance fee

the sign promised “a glimpse

into the stable genius of our future”

but when the tour guide

led us into a room

dreary, dark and a little damp,

brushed away giant cobwebs,

expounded upon the macabre exhibit,

Kitty For Dinner in water colors,

I had my doubts.

When we were issued

rubber gloves

raincoats

knee-high boots

led deep down into the building’s bowels

I knew we’d been swindled.

As tour progressed through gallery

of beautiful asses and large breasts

with interactive display

a soft mewl crept into awareness.

Before I could discover its source

we were whisked away

to view the prison full of Mexicans,

then film of disabled with full laugh track

I wanted to cry

masked people shooting up disinfectant,

forest rangers raking leaves

I wanted to cackle

golden throne atop a hill of green land,

orange statue straddling a canal

I wanted to scream

then that sound again, a whimpering,

young boy crying 

chained to the wall

just beyond his reach a door and sign:

Now leaving Trump’s brain.

Sorry, Donny. I have to save myself.

I ran for the exit.

Kenneth Arthur is a queer minister with a background in computer science and who dabbles in poetry. Several of his poems have been published in journals including The New Verse News, The Skinny Poetry Journal, and Pensive. He is also the author of Out of the Ashes: Constructive Theology for Those Burned Out on Christianity and blogs at kenarthur.substack.com.