A DIFFERENT KIND OF KOSHER

by Todd Friedman

Dirt under your fingernails, backbone straight,

you would be the New Jew.

 

Clearing the swamp, rifle ready,

no more lambs to the slaughter.

 

The world was with you, Israel,

Buchenwald’s emaciated ghosts still searing.

 

My grandmother shouted through tears for you

in a jam-packed Madison Square Garden.

 

You were our Samson fighting

the entire Philistine army.

 

When you captured Jerusalem, shofars blowing,

it was the Red Sea parting anew.

 

Who can forget that photo of your “crying paratroopers”

standing in front of the Wailing Wall?

 

But now every day your settlers descend the hills masked:

smashing cars, bashing heads, burning villages.

 

And like Joshua’s sun your army stands still—

or even aids in the slaughter.

 

This is what my grandfather fled from in Russia—

only there it was called a pogrom.

 

So here you are, the New Jew,

with ancient real estate “deed” and a different kind of kosher.

 

We now know that Samson

was blind to begin with—

 

and so were we.

 

 

 

Todd Friedman is a retired  NYC high school English teacher who now revels in having time to write.  His poems have been published in Tikkun, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Blue Collar Review, and Vox Populi.

WE LIVED HAPPILY DURING THE CEASEFIRE

by Bonnie Naradzay

More than a month after a ceasefire was announced and all living Israeli hostages were released, Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, without signalling any change in   their intent, said Amnesty International today [November 27, 2025].

after Ilya Kaminsky

We were so satisfied with our stuffing recipes

and so when they bombed tent encampments

blocked entry for prosthetic limbs

for child amputees

blocked machinery for uncovering corpses

from the rubble

blocked doctors who’d earlier been given

“permission” to enter Gaza

 we (forgive us)

looked the other way again

as Israel violated the Cease Fire

over and over again with the slaughter of hundreds more,

atrocities committed with impunity

how easily we looked the other way

as Israel asked us for billions more in aid today

from our house of money

we (forgive us) lived happily during the Cease Fire.

Bonnie Naradzay has been leading weekly poetry sessions for homeless people at Street Sense and at Miriam’s Kitchen and also at a retirement community, all in Washington, DC.  While at Harvard University in the late 1960s, 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. A 2017 graduate of the St John’s College (Annapolis) Graduate Institute, her book of poems Invited to the Feast was published by Slant Books in October 2025; three of the poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. 

BLOOD SIMPLE

by Julia Kantic

Hunger Strike by Glen Le Lievre

Annihilation?

The sum’s not difficult to do.

How many hostages 

Does it take to make a genocide?

How many hospitals,

houses, hearths?

Don’t tell me about 

the algebra of killing

as though it were a zero sum game.

A life is not a life

as settlers solve problems

along with soldiers

and no one asks to see

their working out—

or are shown figures by gaslight.

And if I say this?

I am villainous, nefarious, wicked,

—monstrous—for calling out

—Murder —

Terrorist is a term that has changed

to mean babies, 

and their mothers, 

and their sisters, 

and their brothers, and their fathers, and their doctors, and their nurses, and their teachers, and their others, and their shop keepers, and their road sweepers, and their anyone with a determination to exist

—Alive in Gaza —

or thinks this slaughter wrong.

Julia Kantic is a writer and editor who reads, writes and delights in words and the spaces in between. Follow her wayward ways https://linktr.ee/peculiarjulia

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE?

by Bonnie Naradzay

Israel has grandiosely labeled its latest genocidal move "Operation Gideon's Chariots" wherein, moving from siege to seizure, it plans the bloody conquest, ethnic cleansing, and permanent recolonization of Gaza, using the rhetoric of holy war to justify unholy mass destruction - this, even as many of the Palestinian children who've somehow survived their savage 18 months of carnage now slowly starve to death. Photo: Osama Al-Raqab, 6, is one of tens of thousands of Gazan children slowly starving. Screenshot from NBC. —Common Dreams, May 6, 2025

What kind of times are these,
asked Brecht, when a conversation 
about trees is almost a crime 
because it entails a silence about 
so many misdeeds!  And so
is it fitting to converse about
the ephemeral cherry blossoms
that graced the Tidal Basin trees.?
Elected felons spout obscenities. 
“Have you no sense of decency,” 
someone finally asked McCarthy.
I have grown numb to incivilities. 
The Slaughter of the Innocents
continues again without a pause,
since Israel broke the ceasefire
two months ago and halted
all food, water, and medicine.
Yet people here are arrested
and deported for decrying 
the deliberate slaughter
and starvation of the people
of Gaza, the burning of tents 
in “safe zones” where 
the displaced are sleeping.
Israel calls its war crimes
“Operation Gideon’s Chariots.”
What kind of times are these?
Yesterday, and again today,
for those still counting, 
Israel detonated drones 
and US-made bunker bombs 
in Gaza, killing over 100 
people each day; and 27 
children were said to have 
starved to death already today 
you could count all their ribs 
in these dark times
when we cannot see
the forest for the trees.

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. 

THE DAILY BRIEF

by Michal Rubin

Counting backwards. Day 318 of a war. 

Yesterday the yard flooded,

an email hollered at me-

“317 days of slaughter”.

I apologized.

 

Counting backwards. Day 303 of a war.

Ishaq starved to death. His motorcycle

remained under the rubble,

he loved it. The motorcycle. He didn’t holler.

I apologized.

 

Counting backwards. Day 300 of a war.

West of the city, carrying food on his

bike, Khaled rode too close 

to the missile. Burial site unknown.

I apologized.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

 

.

 

.

 

Counting backwards. Day 36 of a war. 

I am at a conference. Unseasonably warm. 

I brought the wrong clothes. Elham 

dropped the embroidered bag when 

a sniper’s bullet reached her.

I apologized.

 

Counting backwards. Day 13 of a war.

In a poem Hiba wrote “We are not just

transients passing”. Her poems rippled

through the world, she was killed. 

At home. An airstrike.

I apologized.

 

In a beginning. Day 1 of this war.

Clear sky, a small pond, 

a gentle fall in SC. Horror

surges afar. No flutter in this pond.

I call home—

I don't apologize.

Michal Rubin is an Israeli, living in Columbia, SC. The impetus for her writing came from the years-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a  psychotherapist, a Cantor and a poet, she brings forth the challenge of distinguishing truths from myths, awareness vs. denial, conformity vs. individuation. Her work was published in Psychotic Education,  The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Wrath Bearing Tree journal,  Rise Up Journal, Topical Poetry,  Fall-Lines,  The Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Waxing & Waning: A Literary Journal,  South Carolina Bards Poetry Anthology 2023, Palestine-Israel Journal, Critical Muslim, and a chapbook published by Cathexis Northwest Press.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

by Jocelyn Ajami

Credit...Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times, November 13, 2023.

In the competition 

over who is more 

the victim

who is more humane

no child votes.

No child, bruised 

and maimed

battered and beaten

claims membership 

to an aristocracy 

of woes.

In the competition over

who is more 

barbaric

no child, body

peppered with bullets 

propounds…

No child whose lungs and 

larynx collapse under 

the weight of boulders

vindicates the winner

raising his mutilated 

limbs in pride. 

In the competition 

over who is more 

human

no child condemns 

or commends

suffocating

underneath the flaming 

rubble, abandoned

and unclaimed 

in playgrounds 

of slaughter.

Blood void of bias 

splatters on stone

calligraphy of carnage 

to which no child

hurls

a single stroke. 

Jocelyn Ajami is an award winning painter, filmmaker and poet. Jocelyn has received several awards for her films, Oasis of Peace, Gypsy Heart and Queen of the Gypsies. She turned to writing poetry in 2014 as a way of connecting more intimately with issues of social conscience and cultural awareness. She has been published in several anthologies of prize winning poems. Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, she speaks five languages and lives in Chicago, Illinois.

THE BANALITY OF MASS SHOOTINGS

by Julie A. Dickson

Photo from “Terror on Repeat: A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings” in The Washington Post, November 16, 2023. WaPo Editor’s note: The photos, videos and personal accounts [in the report] are extremely disturbing and may be too upsetting for some people.

Repetition in media, another shooting
should sound as old news, except that
tragic loss of life keeps occurring, 
 
more automatic weapons in the hands
of unstable, unhappy humans;
we should have realized, they say
 
each time,  the signs were all there,
an uprising follows: gun rights for some,
while others weep redundantly each time
 
more are shot. The banality of killings,
mass slaughter should lead to change,
not complacency and resignation.

Julie A. Dickson regularly submits to online and printed journals. Her poetry is seen in over 70 journals, including Blue Heron Review, Hotel of Broken Hearts, Ekphrastic Review, and The New Verse News. She writes from art prompts, current events, nature and environment. Her elephant poems help to advocate for captive zoo and circus elephants to be sent to sanctuaries. Dickson holds a BPS in Behavioral Science and shares her home with two rescued feral cats.

WHAT PEOPLE MEAN WHEN THEY SAY LATER

by Devon Balwit

The headlines scream of war and child labor,
the ways humans brutalize each other. The authors
hope to shame us out of apathy. Near
their blare gapes a book with a cow on the cover.
Her long-lashed eyes make this reader hunger
to press my face to hers. She’s been slaughtered,
one of tens of millions every year, numbers
too large to render back into individual creatures,
a fact, with our favorite and customary foods, we prefer
to ignore. We ought care more for human mothers
some argue—for farmers and workers, for the poor,
who cannot afford to eat ethically. Later
we can worry about animal welfare. Later, 
my friends, is a common synonym for never.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. Her most recent collection is Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023].

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE...

by Darcy Grabenstein

 

They plastered their hate-filled propaganda
on walls, on posts, anywhere, everywhere
They started with boycotts of businesses
They isolated us, segregated in ghettos
They labeled us with yellow patches
They pilfered property, possessions
They ruthlessly humiliated us
They herded us like cattle
to concentration camps
Working us mercilessly
through illness, hunger
The cruelly conducted
medical experiments
They implemented
the ”Final Solution”
Until we could not
gasp for breath.
They attempt coups at the Capitol
and across the pond in Germany
 
They slaughter innocents
in nightclubs
synagogues
mosques
churches
 
They ban books
they ban choices
they ban love
 
They’re just warming up.
 
And that chills me to my bones.

Always a lover of words, Darcy Grabenstein started her career in journalism. Now a marketing writer by profession, she turns to poetry as a creative outlet. Darcy is a contributing writer for the thINKingDANCE. She has had works published on RitualWell.org and in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.

MY BIASED DREAMS

by Cindy Hill

People who have arrived from Ukraine wait to board a bus outside the main railway station in Przemysl, Poland, on March 12. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images via The Washington Post, March 13, 2022.

A boat carrying around two dozen migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya on Saturday, with at least 19 people missing and presumed dead, authorities said. Libya’s coast guard said that a group of 23 migrants—both Egyptians and Syrians—set off from the eastern city of Tobruk earlier in the day. Three migrants were rescued and taken to hospital. Only one body was retrieved and search efforts were ongoing, the agency said. The shipwreck is the latest tragedy at sea involving migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean from the North African nation in a desperate attempt to reach European shores. Libya has emerged as the dominant transit point for migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, hoping for a better life in Europe. —The Washington Post, March 13, 2022. Photo: Migrants in Tripoli, Libya on 19 October 2021. Credit: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Middle East Memo, March 14, 2022.

I dreamt about a girl, thirteen years old,

walking from Kyiv wearing a dark teal down

puffer coat, a white knit hat with pompom,

and her cousin’s moon boots, which kept the cold

away, though they’d seen better days. She rolled

her eyes and tugged her earbuds out, then frowned

and waited for her brother. She sat down

on tumbled piles of broken concrete, scrolled

through her phone, then arms-length, took a selfie.

 

I never dreamt a girl in Syria

was walking to the border of Turkey,

or of a girl escaping Libya

by boat, destined to sink in storms of dread,

though each had been alive, and now was dead.

 

My deep-sleeping brain may have remembered

how my great-grandmother’s remaining kin—

slaughtered by Ceausescu on a mountain

pass—were not so far away, as black birds

fly; and those wheat fields that I’ve seen pictured

on the news called to mind her deep-scarred shins,

sliced by brother’s scythe as they dropped grain in

sheaves then stacked in golden stooks. English words

could not console her for what had happened.

 

I dreamt about a girl whose looks I knew,

whose patterns were the same as those I’ve drawn

in cross-stitch on a pillowcase in blue

and gold or black and red, in sheaves of wheat

I’ve etched with cotton thread. I never dreamt

of girls whose stories I have never read,

though they had been alive, and now are dead.

Cindy Ellen Hill is an attorney, writer, musician and obsessed gardener living in Middlebury VT. She is that author of Wild Earth, a collection of sonnets from Antrim Press, and Elegy for the Trees, a book of sonnets upcoming from Kelsay Books. Her poetry has been published in Vermont Magazine, the Minison Project, PanGaia, Sagewoman, WildEarth, Vermont Life, Measure, the Classical Poets Society online, Ancient Paths online, The Lyric, and the National Public Radio Themes and Variations program. She is presently an MFA student at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

WHEN GOVERNOR ABBOTT DECRIES GENDER-TRANSITIONING AS CHILD ABUSE

by Remi Recchia

 

I call my doctor and tell him, I don’t want to be a man 

today. Detransitioning? No. I mean I don’t want to be alive 

 

in a place that thinks my heart strings are puppeteered, that I am  

a marionette genetically modified for road rage, sex drive, alcoholic 

 

tendencies. That I don’t want the pharmacy tech to stare extra 

hard at my driver license on a routine prescription pickup. 

 

That I don’t want to blush when drunk friends ask: 

tampon or jockstrap? Because they’re not asking, are they? 

 

The dive-bar dust on their credit cards will remind them later 

that yes, it was rude, but they were drunk, and they have a right 

 

to know who their friends are, their dates are, what I 

will expect them to suck or fuck. 

 

Greg Abbott isn’t asking why the children want to change, 

he’s asking why they’d want to look like that. 

 

Like a man in a dress or a woman who’s been mutilated 

from the inside out, breasts carved off by a butcher’s 

 

knife or by a tree when she lurched in the wrong direction 

at the shout of “timber,” wearing, presumably, a flannel  

 

button-up under a leather jacket. Like a turtle without its shell 

or a ring-tailed lemur without its jewels. But if Greg Abbott 

 

asked me, I’d tell him, what kind of parents agree to HRT 

in the first place? What kind of parents say, yes, I trust you 

 

to grow a beard you won’t regret? Maybe our mothers  

are lovely and our fathers are brave, but I have always been alone 

 

and I have always made my own choices. I’d tell Greg Abbott 

that sometimes a law is just a word and abuse is a red 

 

herring for an onslaught of transphobic legislature, an actual 

school of fish with teeth and fish with fins, and who, now, 

 

can win against the slaughter.     

Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021); his forthcoming chapbook Sober will be published with Red Bird Chapbooks in 2022. 

DUCK AND COVER

by Indran Amirthanayagam

The sound of helicopters was nothing new. They often arrived to ferry out Turkish troops stationed near Ahmed’s town, a stone’s throw from Syria’s border with Turkey. But this was different. “The sound was horrible,” he said, describing the swarm of U.S. military helicopters that descended on a home less than two miles away from Ahmed’s house early Thursday, on a mission to kill ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. Ahmed, who for safety reasons spoke on the condition that he be identified by only his first name, went up to his roof, he said in a telephone interview. The thunder of the helicopters was eclipsed by a terrible clatter of gunfire “from the sky,” he said… At least a dozen people, including six children, were killed along with Qurayshi, according to local first responders. The Pentagon said that three members of his family were killed when Qurayshi detonated an explosive device on the top floor of the building, along with a child who was killed on the floor below in circumstances that remained unclear. The first responders, known as the White Helmets, said survivors of the night’s violence included a man who lived near the house and a young girl whose entire family was killed. For a time, they said, the girl was unable to speak, from the shock. The group was not sure how the other people died. “Truthfully all the bodies were largely covered in blood, sometimes it could not be discerned if it was bullets or explosions,” a spokesman said in a message. —The Washington Post, Februaryj 4, 2022. Photo: The scene after an overnight raid by US special operations forces against suspected jihadists in north-west Syria. Photograph: Aaref Watad/AFP/Getty via The Guardian, February 3, 2022.

It is hard to palaver on the verandah, or bake bread in the kitchen,

or step out for a drive while helicopters fly above preparing to strike...

One moment you, human and humane, are alive, the next pulverized,

and that evening a headline, made famous instantly until the next drone

in the neighboring country shatters, or a kid shoots into classmates

somewhere, or a young girl is slaughtered by her brother for the family's

honor in a country that ends with 'stan (or states), no country immune

from trafficking in honor, and I declare I am most certainly politically

correct. That said, let us get down to the heart of this body otherwise

split by shards scissoring from the drone that dropped out of the sky

to finish political differences by means of a battering ram, an oxen

head, a threat, then action against what remains of order and grace,

ordinary representatives debating bills, showing the family around

the hallowed halls, certifying an election in these United States.

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). 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 writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube.