THE KILLERS

by Howie Good

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

You can hear the slow tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine. It’s the end of the so-called “American Century.” Conscienceless killers disguised as police prowl factories and airports and schools for new victims, and all with the sanction of a government of liars and thieves. The lamp beside the golden door has been shot out. My grandparents were poor Jews from the shtetl – in current parlance, “garbage people” from “shithole countries.” And look at me. My face, with its hollows and shadows, its worry lines and age wrinkles, is like a map, sort of, a map of a country I no longer know.

Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author.

WOMEN’S HISTORY 2025: SAY HER NAME

by Robin Stevens Payes

my country is busy writing out history
1.     women
2.     immigrants
3.     ukraine
so I must write them in
 
grandma sophie checks
these boxes 
one
two
three
she left the shtetl in 1893
for the american dream
 
she fled
1.     pogroms 
2.     despots
3.     poverty 
 
she arrived by
1.     horse and wagon 
2.     train
3.     ship 
 
violently assaulted
violated
a #metoo moment
before we could speak
such things aloud
my grandmother kept
her life lost a life 
silenced
 
in pursuit of 
1.     love
2.     safety
3.     family
 
silenced by shame she
never spoke her trauma
but passed it down
on top of the genes
 
episilencing generations
1.     ancestors
2.     descendants
3.     ascendance
 
through no fault of her own
and now her landsman
this democratically elected
leader of a free country
 
symbolized by the sunflower
source of seeds and oil
hearth and home like sophie
symbols of peace and resilience
 
comes to defend freedom
and dignity for all
not to grovel
at the tsar’s feet
 
violently assaulted
violated
an #ustoo moment
we must speak aloud
 
I call out the horror 
sophie’s story is america’s story 
truth trauma triumph and all 
 
i am writing herstory  
1.     SOPHIE her name
2.     PROUD her legacy
3.     AMERICA her goldene medina
 
episilenced #nomore 

Sophie

Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies: Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack https://remembertheworld.substack.com/

SLUM LORD

by Steve Deutsch

This is what an eviction threat from Donald Trump looks like. (From a 1987 case involving an elderly couple living in the building at 100 Central Park South.) —CNN, March 28, 2016

You send the beef
in bowling shirts
and shitkicker boots
every Sunday morning
to collect from the perennial poor
in the claptraps
you own on Stone Avenue.

Rumor has it
the hobbled wretch
who begs at the five and dime
offered lip
instead of money
and they showed him out
through a third floor window.

Dad’s mom lived
on the fourth floor of #720.
A refugee from the shtetl
she was well prepared
to live without heat
or running water,
to navigate the teeter-totter stairs
in the half light of a 40 watt bulb,
to coexist with roaches and rats,
the acrid smell of cabbage,
untended garbage,
and the methodical cruelty
that humans without hope
inflict on one another.

I know you.
You have the health
and building people
in your ample hip pocket
and while you might
hire some people to spit
shine your shoes
and some to break legs,
you spend every Sunday night
counting and recounting
the stack of smalls,
the nickels and dimes—
because for you,
Donny,
a sumptuous view
of the New York skyline
can never compare
to the heft of a roll
of nickels.

Steve Deutsch lives in State College, PA. His recent publications have or will appear in Panoply, Algebra of Owls, The Blue Nib, Thimble Magazine, The Muddy River Poetry Review, Ghost City Review, Borfski Press, Streetlight Press, Gravel, Literary Heist, Nixes Mate Review, Third Wednesday, Misfit Magazine, Word Fountain, Eclectica Magazine, The Drabble,  TheNewVerse.News and The Ekphrastic Review. He was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2017 and 2018. His chapbook Perhaps You Can will be published in 2019 by Kelsay Press.

DIASPORA

by Risa Denenberg





I see them in nightmares, or when silent in meditation.
There, they were doctors, green-grocers, artists, stone masons.
Here, they snake around barricades like a river.

I don’t see them when I’m serving dinner to the homeless
in my home town on Christmas day, because after all,
I’m Jewish and have nowhere else to go.

I see them when I meditate, or hike a mountain trail.
There, they ate breakfast, went to jobs, read the daily, made love.
Here, they lie dead on highways like roadkill.

I don’t see them when I’m working in the clinic
offering unguents and kindness to soothe wounds,
then staying late to finish chart notes, weary and irritable.

I see them when I hike, or when I pray
(which I do sporadically and) mainly when I envisage them
streaming as a long bridge across sinister waters full

of vipers, swelling the roads to a town near you.
There, they were proud of their kids’ report cards.
Here they struggle, defenseless to save children from drowning.

I pray to see them and to not see them
because it’s so much worse than I can fathom
and I can’t imagine an act that could make it right.

I see them as my family, ghettoed in their Russian shtetel,
then, crossing the ravenous Atlantic to an unknown fate.

There, they prayed and were slaughtered.
Here, we forget to pray, and prosper.

Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She reviews poetry for the American Journal of Nursing and is an editor at Headmistress Press, a small press that publishes poetry by lesbians. She has published three chapbooks and two full length books of poetry, Mean Distance from the Sun (Aldrich Press, 2013) and Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016).