PEACE TO ALL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Many people who worked with Pope Leo XIV when he was Bishop Robert Prevost of Chiclayo, Peru, couldn’t hold back tears when his election was announced on May 8. For them, it was not just a sign that God answered their prayers for a new pope who would follow Francis’s path, but also the confirmation that they had been guided by an extraordinary leader. —CRUX, May 9, 2025

Peace be with you. 

We are suffering 
the pandemic. 
We are hungry 
and we need 
to breathe. 

We need 
oxygen tanks 
in Chiclayo. 
I will get you 
the tanks. 

We need food. 

We need to walk 
the empty streets
and knock on 
every door
and leave 

food and water.

We need to bring 
the sick to hospital 
and help them to breathe. 

This is pastoral work.
This is Archbishop 
Robert Prevost,
now Pope Leo 
the Fourteenth.

Indran Amirthanayagam has just published his translation of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books, 2025). Other recent publications include 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 and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

MY SYMPTOMS APPROACHING ELECTION DAY

by Paul Hostovsky

I’m shaking my head all the time

and it looks like a tremor, it looks like

Parkinson’s. But in fact it’s negation.

It’s: No, no, no, no, no, no, no!

It’s disbelief and disapproval,

refusal to accept what’s unacceptable,

what’s so unspeakable I can only

cover my mouth and wonder how such people

can think such things. It’s unthinkable,

yet we who think it’s unthinkable

could very well be in the minority. I shake

my head and cover my mouth

and groan. Are you sick? a man asks me

at the post office. Here, take this.

And he hands me a red tote bag 

with MAGA emblazoned on both sides. No 

thank you! I say, and vomit directly into it,

cover my mouth, and shake my head

and leave him there holding the bag.

AI-generated graphic from Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.

LOCKDOWN DAYS, EARLY SPRING 2020

by Miriam Weinstein

Before this king of viruses came to power,
her mother reminded her daily during phone calls,
I’m 96. Now she reminds her, the hospital won’t 

treat me if I catch coronavirus. Too old. An easy
target for this novel illness. Why waste
a ventilator?

The path by the creek, more popular these days
with gyms closed. A few weak smiles greet her,
some voices mutter hello. Rarely do eyes meet,

most look off in the distance or down at the ground.
People move to the edge of the path or pile of leaves
beside it to pass. We mustn’t get too close.

This is what she feels and fears. The distance, not
the virus itself. The stepping away. The incessant
hand washing. After each time she touches

her iPhone or a door knob? Washing packages
she purchased at the grocery store? This far
she refuses to go, but the checking of numbers

preoccupies her. Generally uninterested in daily
stats, now each morning she notes the uptick.
The confirmed cases, the sick, the dying, the dead.

Birds know spring is here though bits of snow still lie
crusted on flower beds. Time to stake out territory,
robins have returned north. Strutting down sidewalks

and on lawns, wild turkeys arrive out of no where,
peck at the ground. Males with tightly fanned
tails circle females.

Miriam Weinstein’s chapbook Twenty Ways of Looking was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry appears in the anthologies Reflections on Home: The Heart of All That Is, Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands, A Little Book of Abundance, Rocked by Waters: Poems of Motherhood, and in several journals.  Her manuscript How To Thread a Needle was short-listed for the Concrete Wolf Louis award competition.

THE DOCTOR WHO DIES OF THE CORONAVIRUS AFTER THE HOSPITAL RUNS OUT OF GLOVES

by Terri Kirby Erickson

Alameda Health System nurses, doctors, and workers protest the lack of personal protective equipment available in Oakland, California, on March 26, 2020. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images via Vox

A doctor in Italy who described his concerns in a recent television interview about how the shortages of medical supplies meant he had to treat patients with coronavirus without wearing gloves, has died from the illness. Marcello Natali, 57, from Codogno, in the northern province of Lombardy, had also sounded the alarm over the number of doctors who were getting infected, during an interview with Euronews before he tested positive. He told the channel bluntly that he was not able to work with gloves because "they have run out." —Newsweek, March 19, 2020


There is no linear time in the hereafter. Angels do every-
thing at once. They see the last pair of latex gloves drop
to a hospital floor in slow motion, the look of fear on the
face of the gloveless doctor who, in the blink of a human
eye, goes on caring for patients. They can watch people
being brave (since fear is the birthplace of bravery) and
the people who are sick, some of them dying. But those
who pass away during the doctor’s glove-free hours feel
the touch of warm skin on his or her forehead when they
take their final breaths. This is the unselfish mercy that
humans are capable of, which makes the angels marvel.
Divine creatures respect mortality and all that it entails.
And from every angel’s non-linear, eternal perspective,
a doctor can do his job and at the exact same time, enter
the great mystery of his own dying. Angels may ooh and
ahh over this lone human being’s merciful acts as well as
mercy shown around the world, and still catch his soul the
instant it leaves his body. One whispers words of solace.
Yet another sings the doctor’s favorite aria, Puccini’s “O
Mio Babbino Caro,” as they carry him to the place where
there is no grief or sorrow—and no need for gloves at all.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including Becoming the Blue Heron (Press 53). Her work has appeared in “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Poet’s Market, The Sun, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Her awards include the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Nautilus Silver Book Award. She lives in North Carolina.

RUSSIAN FELLOWSHIP

by David Feela

Just as Quakers sit in silence
moved to stand
when the spirit insists

so does the American public
occupy its bench
in perfect contemplation

of the moment.
Then Democracy quietly rises
without speaking,

shuffles into the bathroom
and with uncharacteristic clatter
bolts the door.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. A Collection of his essays, How Delicate These Arches, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Unsolicited Press will release his new chapbook, Little Acres, in April 2019.

NAMING OF PARTS

by Tricia Knoll

Image source: White Mountain Puzzles

After Henry Reed

Spring eased the almond blossoms open
and promises of cherries while we named parts
left over from winter. Collusion. Taking
away, reducing, throwing in the trash
legal widgets that keep the water pure,
air open to the cherry’s pollen flight.

We named parts with words round
to our tongues, like emoluments, to see
how that piece fit in the grooves
of palaces and greens like golf courses.
Lies are new lower swing swivels
alternatives, the stock aiming.
We call the liar  a number, not a name.

We watched tired armies of people
whose papers dictate that they bolt
backwards, locked. Riled bees assault
the fumbling flowers and some too
called that easing the spring.

Assembled from parts, the barrel
is loaded and pointed at every one
of us. The sick. Disabled. Those
who stumbled. Women mourning
in too many dry cities to count.
Children born to know only this.

Whatever bitter cold silence ensues,
whatever violence, these parts came
forged as cocking-pieces, and the many
words to name them buzzed over us
diseasing the spring.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who in the last week has read Henry Reed's famous 1942 poem "The Naming of Parts" about fifteen times, sharing the dismay of progressives at how rapidly important protections of people and the environment can be dismantled. Her new book, Broadfork Farm, is a series of love poems to a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington.

THERE'S SOMETHING DYING IN MY BRAIN

by Gil Hoy

Why, in wealthy America

must the beggared sick
lay ill in their beds

While a well-to-do
privileged white man

Dines on fine rich foods,
swings at a little white ball

at his country club
in warm sunny Florida.

While a smiling young girl
skips along the beach in her
wildly carefree exuberance

While an inquisitive circling
seagull soars overhead,

Searching for something
fresh to eat in the sea’s puddles.

Gil Hoy is a personal injury lawyer in Boston, Massachusetts, a former Town Selectman, and a regular contributor to TheNewVerse.News. His poetry has appeared in numerous print and online journals.

DON'T GET SICK IN AMERICA

by Alan Walowitz

Despite not being a doctor, I give him my best advice:
AARP, I tell him.  Always, At all costs, Remain Perpendicular.
My old pal Willard would laugh if his hearing aid hadn’t come loose
and we’d been sitting at the diner,
shooting the breeze over coffee, him telling me the same story
the third or fourth time.  I love the guy.
But now he’s lying on a gurney in the ER corridor for the 4th straight hour,
getting edgy, and who can blame him after all this time,
and against my best advice, parallel to the floor
along with all the others, quiet on their gurneys
or writhing gently in pain,
even the pain-energy wrested out of them?
Each either has or doesn’t have insurance—
they’re black and brown and grey and young
and the doctor--who hurries by from time to time
gives me a look that signifies, I know, I know, it’s crazy—
she’s a beautiful yellow-beige, with a face shaped like a heart
and I think I’m in love. The ER, this is America,
the great equalizer, no one’s special here,
no one gets to see the doctor first because he’s middle class or white,
or he used to be a Protestant from Rochester back in the day
and he was famous for clicking his heels and proclaiming,
In Germany they stand up when I enter the room!
And everyone would tell him, Sit down and shut up, Will!
Though I’m not next of kin,
a nurse figures I must be close, so stops by and tells me,
he’ll have a stress test first thing in the morning,
after spending the night in the hall
cause the treadmill’s booked the rest of today.
And just in case you needed a reminder,
Don’t get sick in America,
you gotta have patience to burn,
and one way or another,
you’re gonna have to pay.

Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan’s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing. He’ll be reading at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village on Tuesday, March 7th at 6 pm.

RESPECTING BELIEFS

by F.I. Goldhaber

Ad created by AML

If your beliefs include marginalizing other people
because of their skin color, their religious faith, their gender,
their sexual orientation, their origin, their age;
If your beliefs allow justification for depriving
other people of their civil rights to life, liberty, and
happiness pursuits declared in seventeen seventy-six;
If your beliefs condone slaughter, rape, assault, subjugation,
imprisonment, execution of those you see as "others";
If your beliefs create stigmas to prevent those who appear,
think, love, or speak differently than you from making a living,
feeding their families, buying a home, earning retirement;
If your beliefs allow children to go to bed hungry, the
sick to go bankrupt, the disabled to struggle to survive,
the mentally ill to wander homeless, the store clerks to need
welfare benefits, the elderly to freeze through the winter;
If your beliefs prevent access to reproductive health care
while keeping young people ignorant about the facts of life
and the realities of sexual health, choices, and pleasure;
Then I'm under no obligation to respect your beliefs.
Keep your hate to yourself. Keep it out of our country, state, and
city laws, our schools, parks, stores workplaces, and public restrooms.

As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, F.I. Goldhaber produced news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now, her poems, short stories, novelettes, essays, and reviews appear in paper, electronic, and audio magazines, ezines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies.