SHELTER FROM THE STORM

by Steven Kent

The Guardian, March 4, 2026

Our kids feel safe, say dads and moms

(Except for, you know, all the bombs).

They learn their science, math, and spelling

(Also how to hide from shelling).

Bless these teachers—they're the boss!

(Damn both Bibi and Hamas!)

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, The Dirigible Balloon, Light, Lighten Up Online, The Lyric, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, The Pierian, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collections I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) (2023) and Home at Last (2025) are published by Kelsay Books.

SURVIVOR

by Ginny Lowe Connors

As of August 27, there had been 44 school shootings this year alone.

And then today...

No poem, no melody can ever drown out

the sounds that follow this child,

the pop pop of an automatic weapon,

screams of classmates,

friend, blabbermouth, violinist,

pencil-chewer, joker, soccer champ—

each one turned into a victim photo

on the evening news.

 

No cartoon, no billboard can ever block out

the sights that haunt this child,

the boy who fell on top of him, how he shook

and went still, the teacher shielding two girls

with her own body, the book on the floor,

pages slowly turning red.

 

How do we hold him,

how do we shelter

his splintered glass heart?

 

This is an American story

that has no end. A ten-year-old

goes to school one day and returns home,

just blinking and blinking.

He no longer speaks.

Ginny Lowe Connors is the author of six poetry collections, the most recent of which is White Sail at Midnight. Among her awards are the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize, the NFSPS Founders Award, Passager Poetry Contest Winner, and Poet of the Year (New England Association of Teachers of English). She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. As publisher of her own press, Grayson Books, Connors has edited several poetry anthologies. A Board Member of the Connecticut Poetry Society, she is also Managing Editor of Connecticut River Review.

I SUPPORT THE CONSTITUTION

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Cartoon by Ann Telnaes

I had a community read last night. Yes, a good old 

sharing of verse and opinions about the state 

of things, society, government, the neighbor laying 

a pillow outside the Martin Luther King library 

on G Street in the capital, to spend the night 

al aire libre, in the free air, on the eve of 

the 4th of July. Hey, buddy, do you want 

a dollar? How can I get you to the shelter?

Are the shelters disappearing with the ticker tape

after the Big Bloated Butchery Bill? Oh, how 

easy to go after MAGA, just twist the words 

and support the appointments of former 

insurrectionists to the Department of Injustice, 

to the Uncivil Rights Division, to the god-forsaken 

Black House. How unfortunate colors and 

their associations. Let’s change the popular 

perception. When I from black and he from 

white cloud free. Blake said it almost 

two hundred and forty years ago, 

during  the English campaign against 

slavery then. Now we see ourselves

shackled by the police state, surveilled,

our social security numbers sold to Palantir. 

This is rotten, my friends And yet we 

bring out hot dogs and coca cola today 

to feast the 249th anniversary of 

our independence. How sweet it is. 

How bitter. To say Goodbye to All That. 

To say, hello concentration camps 

in every hamlet. To say, NO. NO. NO. 

And yes I pledged my allegiance 

to the Constitution when I naturalized 

in 1988. I did not sing God Save the King.

Indran Amirthanayagam has just published El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores). Other recent publications include his translation of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books, 2025), Seer (Hanging Loose Press), and The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil). He is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

THE FORTRESS, MY UNCLE

by Indran Amirthanayagam

President Biden announced an executive order on Tuesday to essentially block asylum at the southern border, a major shift in how the United States has historically handled claims for protection. The move, a suspension of longtime guarantees that give anyone who steps onto U.S. soil the right to seek a safe haven, is intended to deter illegal border crossings, an issue that has weighed on Mr. Biden’s political fortunes as he heads into the November presidential election… Immigration advocates have said the changes, taken together, amount to a virtual suspension of the asylum system for people crossing the border. The Biden administration “is eliminating key protections to prevent refugees from being returned to harm through imposition of this ‘shout test,’” said Robyn Barnard, a lawyer at Human Rights First. “It will be a recipe for disaster and certainly result in refugees being sent to danger or worse death.” —The New York Times, June 4, 2024

The fortress, the wall, thou shalt

not enter these rolling hills and 

grasslands where bison and 

Natives once roamed. You will 

not drink at the rancher’s 

trough or sleep in the sanctuary 

city’s single residency hotel. You 

will not get bussed to the liberal

East where a temporary home

waits until shelter services stop 

at sixty days and you find

yourself on the proverbial street

unless you have relatives willing 

to keep you off the public books. 

This is no grand illusion, no 

welcome, but you have left 

your local gangs to find 

a safer and more fitting union, 

turned into a red and blue 

wall. Incredible failure 

of the big heart to open, 

to say we will find a way 

to allow the Dream free again 

as in the old poems and movies 

that led our fathers and mothers 

to make the trek west and east, 

north and south. Goodbye 

to all that jazz America. Goodbye.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press has just published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun. (Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

by Lisa Seidenberg

Woman found living in Family Fare sign in Midland, Michigan for almost a year.

It had a roof and a door

space for a laptop and clothes

electric kettle, plant and more

in her improvised home

above the big box store.

warmed on chill Michigan nights

wrapped in rays of a red neon sign 

while unseeing shoppers passed below 

What thoughts crossed her mind

as she lay perched behind the sign;

Is it a crime to be homeless in America?

settlers came to this land 

with only their hands

and some tools and their wits

making up the rules of wrong

and right as survival

is the primal law

not simply a need for shelter

led her to this penthouse nest. 

living for a year like a stealthy mountaineer

scaling the crest of Family Fare. 

a temporary home.

a summit of her own.

Lisa Seidenberg is a writer and filmmaker who makes documentaries and poetry films. She enjoys reading poems on the Rattlecast and other poetry performance venues. 

ROOMS OF HOPE

by Jeannie E. Roberts

—for Amelia Uzun and the Ukrainian Refugees

 

The greenery blooms 

holds truths 

lifts like hands 

seeks the light 

the prayer plant flowers 

as the cyclamen thrives 

they shelter in safety 

in the luster of peaceful living

A young girl blooms 

holds truths 

lifts her voice 

as if a prayer 

the bomb shelter lightens 

the gathering listens 

the room warms as one 

with a song from the film Frozen 

A concert hall blooms

holds truths 

a young girl lifts her voice 

where notes effloresce 

ascend in national anthem 

as if a prayer 

in the light 

she sings for the luster 

of peaceful living once again 

Jeannie E. Roberts has authored seven books, five poetry collections and two illustrated children's books. Her most recent collection As If Labyrinth - Pandemic Inspired Poems was released in 2021 by Kelsay Books. Her poems appear in Panoply, Sky Island Journal, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. She’s an animal lover, a nature enthusiast, a Best of the Net award nominee, and a poetry editor of the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs. 

REFUGEES

by Frederick Wilbur

Drawing by Zhenia Grebenchuk, 13, who fled Cherkasy, Ukraine, with his younger sister and mother, Tanya. His father took them to the bus and then returned home. Tanya said she and her children planned to wait out the war in Poland. Zhenia hoped it would only be a matter of weeks before Ukraine wins and he can kick around his soccer ball at home with friends again. —The Washington Post, March 15, 2022

They hear the drone of planes

like the chorus of evil angels.

 

They do not raise their eyes.

 

But with their lives in skulls

and backpacks, their feet follow

the single file person before them,

freedom stitched to sleeves.

 

It could be anywhere—

distant curve of horizon or jungled

too thick for a view.

 

I cannot say I have worn out shoes,

or begged for shelter—

my anguish is not their anguish,

my hunger is not theirs.

 

Arrogance and greed for power

cannot live among them,

their power is to survive—

survival may not be enough

until they cross the border

that cannot be seen.

 

Frederick Wilbur's poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and The Conjugation of Perhaps.

RIFFS ON "POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN"

by John Minczeski

"poetry makes nothing happen"

—W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

Some nights, like this one, something  

thuds against the house, a tennis ball or branch  

from the shrub below our bedroom window.  

  

Poetry makes nothing happen.  

I mean, we lie awake   

as a bitter wind slashes at the house.   

  

We have no need to shelter in a mosque or subway,   

but still my heart aches. Poetry makes nothing   

happen. It could be a deer  

  

that got into fermented crabapples.  

It could be a deer gnawing the shrub  

below the window. Some windows  

  

crack from the cold. Some explode.  

Poetry makes nothing happen  

and life goes on as if there’s no bounty  

  

on our ordinary world. Remember when the oracle  

said a great general would win the battle?   

The moon continues its unhurried changes  

  

as it has in the small forever of my life.  

It makes nothing happen, poetry. Skin cracks  

in the cold, like a tax on breathing.  

  

Stepping inside to instant warmth  

from the wind, we tell each other  

what we already know about brutality   

  

and winter. Once again poetry has made   

nothing happen. People go on dying daily  

for lack/ of what is found there.   

John Minczeski is the author of A Letter to Serafin and other collections. Recent poems have appeared in Tampa Review, The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Cider Press Review, Bear Review, North Dakota Review, and elsewhere. 

SONGS OF SURVIVAL

by Cristina M. R. Norcross

Pregnant women and children were caught in the bombing of the hospital in Mariupol. —The Mirror (UK), March 10, 2022

“Congress of Peoples for Peace" by Frida Kahlo (1952)

Debris, like ticker tape confetti,

still floats in the air, 

as the camera lens captures

a young mother’s silhouette,

protective hand holding her half-moon curve.

I spot the side of her cheek and eyebrow

dotted with streaks of blood,

where shards of glass or wood must have 

swept past her, mercifully missing 

her vulnerable nest within.

 

A Frida Kahlo painting appears on my screen,

while breaking news continues to drone.

Both moon and sun spheres glow on the canvas.

A tree of life, bursting with oranges,

grows before my eyes.

A mother hen sits impossibly on top,

as if keeping eggs warm on the highest branch.

 

The little girl’s song in the shelter 

lingers from last night, 

stays with me, as I walk through the house.

I hear her honeyed, hopeful voice 

even as I fall asleep. 

Her letting go of sound, word, voice, outcome

is the bravest note I have ever heard.

 

We sing ourselves into a new day,

an insistent melody

where sound itself holds the promise

of survival,

proof that beyond the bombs and tanks overhead,

rooted in the cellar of Ukraine’s earth,

is a chorus of people who believe. 

 

Cristina M. R. Norcross lives in Wisconsin and is the editor of Blue Heron Review. Author of 9 poetry collections, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, and an Eric Hoffer Book Award nominee, her most recent collection is The Sound of a Collective Pulse (Kelsay Books, 2021). Cristina’s work appears in: Visual Verse, Your Daily Poem, Poetry Hall, Verse-Virtual, The Ekphrastic Review, and Pirene’s Fountain, among others. Her work also appears in numerous print anthologies. Cristina has helped organize community art/poetry projects, has led writing workshops, and has hosted many open mic readings.  She is the co-founder of Random Acts of Poetry & Art Day.

FOUND POEM OF WAR

by Ellen Austin-Li

Newborn twin brothers sleep in a basement used as a bomb shelter at the Okhmadet children's hospital in central Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, Feb. 28, 2022. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

A line from Yeats’ poem that reverberates

like a bass chord that becomes a strum,

combined with an image of babies 

kept alive in a bomb shelter, underground,

each breath bagged by ambu into tiny lungs.

This hum an undercurrent—under, under, under

my thumb. This rough beast lumbering, a ton,

a hundred years running, but truly thousands before, 

more’s the sum of history in a new poem—not new, 

but old. What crumbling humans, such endless war.

My hands weary as if I’m delivering each breath.

I know what this means—we cannot take a rest

or the children expire. I tire, but the poem is found.

The cannon, the fodder: explosions of sound. 

Ellen Austin-Li’s work has appeared in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Rust + Moth, and other places. Her two chapbooks were published by Finishing Line Press—Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). She is a Best of the Net nominee. A recipient of the Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship, she earned an MFA in Poetry at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen lives with her husband in a newly empty nest in Cincinnati, Ohio.

MAJOR

by Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum

Joe Biden and Major in 2018, at the Delaware Humane Association. Credit: Stephanie Gomez/Delaware Humane Association, via Associated Press and The New York Times.

the White House

announces

 

its first-ever

pound puppy

 

and I

wonder

 

if this

proclamation

 

is an

indication

 

of more

major

 

changes to

come—

 

that our

president

 

has himself

declared,

 

on America’s

behalf,

 

‘we will

shelter

 

every kind

refugee

 

seeking a

shepherd.’

Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum is a writer and teacher from Wasilla, Alaska. She has published several books through her company, Red Sweater Press, and has work featured in Alaska Women Speak, The Daily Drunk, The Ekphrastic Review, and Verse-Virtual, among others. She currently serves as the Mat-Su Vice President of Alaska Writers Guild.

NEW START

by Matt Witt

Photo by Matt Witt

It used to be

that if you walked along Bear Creek

that runs next to town

you could see the stream

only in a few moments

because the view was blocked

by brambles of highly flammable blackberries

and tangles of branches.

 

Then this summer’s inferno

burned everything to ash,

clearing out the old understory

and leaving only a sprinkling of

charred tree trunks,

like ghosts from the past.

 

Now you can walk freely

across cleared black ground

and see how the stream community works,

the side creeks feeding it,

the ducks and coots and geese

finding food and

shelter from predators.

 

It used to be

that if you walked through town

you could see the money stream

only in a few moments

because the view was blocked

by fairy tales about

rugged individuals and

the generosity of the rich

without ever asking

who all that wealth was

taken from.

 

Then the fire burned everything to ash,

leaving those who could least afford it

to scramble for survival

while developers and bankers met

to discuss how they might profit

by grabbing up the close-in valuable land

and moving “their” workers,

many with brown skin,

to the valley’s outskirts,

all in the name of charity.

 

Now you can see

how money and power flow

from bottom to top

filling giant pools for a few

with not much left to trickle down.

 

Along Bear Creek,

just weeks after the fire,

small sprouts of green

bring the possibility of

a new community

better than the old

with each plant and bird and animal

doing its part.

 

In town,

new sprouts of community

are taking root too

as people work together

to make sure everyone has

food and shelter and hope

and to ask what we can do

so what grows back

will be better for all of us,

now that we can see.

Matt Witt is a writer and photographer from Talent, Oregon. 

MICAH IN THE MIDST OF THE PANDEMIC

by Katherine M. Clarke

Micah

Our puppy arrives, six pounds
of squirming golden fluff chirping and burrowing
under my arm, trembling against my breast.

I reach back to my mother’s knee to find
what I’ve forgotten I know, singing
knick-knack paddy whack give the dog a bone

and nestle him into his crate with Mr. Krinkle
whose face he chews off but who still obligingly rustles,
offering rope hands and feet to gnaw on in the night.

As pandemic chaos reigns outside, love grows inside,
my beloved Lily handling and tending this small body
bursting into life, insisting on what he wants and needs

tired or not, frightened or not, a life counting on her.
She walks softly in stocking feet to feel him underfoot
to know when he races over her toes to hide.

Scooped up Micah rides high along her arm,
a pasha attended by his servant.
Firsts abound—sleeping through the night,

tasting snow, eating grass, throwing up.
Accepting a collar and lead as she hustles
him out the side door to the yard.

Victory, cheering, applause. Relief for both.
No need for social distance as the lord of all wriggliness
plays with Delores, a stuffed sheep, and Road-Kill Buzzy,

the flat woodchuck toy. A spiky rubber teething ring
on the shower curtain spread over the living room rug
as if a sphere of the virus had leapt from the television

screen filled with images of tents and stadiums for hospitals
warehouses loaded with coffins, trucks filled with bodies
while we shelter at home, grateful, joy strewn all around.

Katherine M. Clarke is a professor emeritus of Antioch University New England. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Writing it Real, Breath and Shadow, Wordgathering, Oasis, The Sun Magazine, and Northern New England Review.

TODAY

by Laura Rodley

For you, my grandchildren,
I am saving pine needles in the forest.
For you, my grandchildren
I am hanging up my clothes, saving energy.
For you, my grandchildren,
I am walking the hot sand at East Sandwich.
not flying using fossil fuel, not expanding beyond.
For you my grandchildren,
I am weaving the leafy fronds at Ashfield Lake,
swimming in it, swimming prayers.
For you, my grandchildren,
I drive as little as possible,
work as expeditiously as I can, conserve.
For you, my grandchildren,
I hold my hands over the cool breath
of the snow, so blue, so crisp, so cold,
so I can pat your cheeks with the snow’s breath,
so you can remember the feeling of snow.
For you, my grandchildren, I pray
for the earth’s forgiveness for walking
on her surface, how she holds me suspended
in this time, so close to your future.
For you, I wear sweaters, and burn less oil, no wood,
and send my emissary ghost to Standing Rock.
For you, my grandchildren,
I keep watch for the barred owls that rest
on the hemlocks in our yard.
I’m remembering it all for you:
their wide wingspan, their dark eyes
that hold the future of the long dark night, infinity,
and I tell you this, my grandchildren,
I chose not to be afraid, because I am remembering,
I am remembering all of this to give to you:
the cold breath of the snow, the people
at Standing Rock, the tall hemlocks, the green water
of Ashfield Lake, I am giving you the coldness
to hold onto when the sun bears down
and Massachusetts gets hotter,
I am giving you forests full of hemlocks, ash trees,
beech, canopies of leaves to walk under;
I am giving you the shelter of pines;
this is what I am handing down to you, my legacy.

Laura Rodley's NVN poem “Resurrection” won a Pushcart Prlze and was published in the 2013 edition of the anthology. She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee, won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.