AL-FASHER BELONGS TO GOD

by Seth R. Merritt 

An analysis revealed in a recent report has shown that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed mass killings in Sudan's Al Fasher amid rising violence in the region. The report published by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health provided satellite imagery of the atrocities committed by the RSF following their capture of the violence-hit region. "The Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) finds evidence consistent with Rapid Support Forces (RSF) conducting mass killings after capturing El-Fasher, North Darfur," the report said. —TRT World, October 29, 2025

The UN Human Rights Office is receiving multiple, alarming reports that the Rapid Support Forces are carrying out atrocities, including summary executions, after seizing control of large parts of the besieged city of El Fasher, North Darfur and of Bara city in North Kordofan state in recent days... The Office has received reports of the summary execution of civilians trying to flee, with indications of ethnic motivations for killings, and of persons no longer participating in hostilities (hors de combat). Multiple distressing videos received by UN Human Rights show dozens of unarmed men being shot or lying dead, surrounded by RSF fighters who accuse them of being SAF fighters. —UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, October 27, 2025

It is Al-Fasher and midday.
A mother ties a strip of paradise’s garden around Omer’s wrist.
His wrist shimmers in the sun and Daa smiles.
She tells him to hold his hand out when they flee, to show the soldiers he belongs to God.
He nods as children nod when they cannot imagine the cost.
He tucks his hand behind his back.
They move.

Another time. A white church on a dirt road.
A preacher says God keeps perfect track.
Blessings fall on those who walk straight.
No one imagines a bullet at the end.

Al-Fasher’s morning shines. Dust moves like sifted flour.
A fighter calls his brothers through a loudspeaker.
A safe corridor. Promises.
Bodies clamber. Mothers pass infants forward like water.

Later-than-now but earlier-than-later:
The Hague. Microphones. Translation headsets.
A man asks for numbers.
How many bodies. Which villages. Which dates.
Procedure speaks the language of care.

Elsewhere: screens glow in London and New York.
Conference rooms. Someone with clean hands pauses the footage.
They circle the cloth around Omer’s wrist.
They label his skin.
They label the men with rifles.
Cursor blinks where innocence should be.
A reporter whispers sectarian violence over B-roll.
A senator tries ancient hatreds into a podcast mic.
A professor types failed state in an article.
Each word drags the thing further away.

Warm and full and afternoon.
Daa lifts Omer’s hand to the soldier for inspection.
The cloth glistens. Catches light.
Young and tired. A face a mother once loved.
The soldier sees.
He holds the rifle.
The muzzle stares into Omer’s eyes.
Soot. Metal. Heat.

Omer’s hand shakes. His eyes tear.
Habibi, I have done nothing wrong.
As-salamu alaykum.

The soldier glances at the mother. Nods.
Habibi. There is nowhere to go.
As-salamu alaykum.

Skin and bone and muscle and tendon do not speak loudly when they sever.
Daa is another mother crying.

Once, promises were guarantees.
No one said God speaks every language used in an execution.

It is Al-Fasher and midday.
A mother gathers Omer’s body.
The cloth shimmers emerald in the dust.

Author’s note: This poem fictionalizes one mother and child in Al-Fasher, Sudan. The events depicted are not a single documented case, but a composite drawn from ongoing reports of civilian killings and the forced sorting of bodies under the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) offensive.

Seth R. Merritt is a writer from the Ozarks living in Mexico City. His work has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine and Hard Crackers, with work forthcoming in Scalawag. This is his first work of poetry.

BLOOD OF TIME

by Steve Zeitlin

pierced by a missile, M16 pellet,

arrow, slingshot, or spear, 

 

this time on Ukrainian soil

a dying soldier, 

twisted hands upon on his torso, 

seeks to thwart the going of his life, 

struggles to hold his insides in,

as the blood of thirty, forty, fifty unlived years

oozes from between his desperate fingers –

 

drowning his high school ring of love, 

his wedding and his children—

 

a universal soldier’s sacrifice—

the sacred blood of time. 

Steve Zeitlin is the Founding Director of City Lore, New York City’s Center for Urban Folk Culture, and co-founder of the Brevitas poetry collective. He the author of a volume of poetry, I Hear American Singing in the Rain, and twelve books on America’s folk culture. In 2016, he published a collection of essays, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness with Cornell University Press.  In 2022, he published JEWels: Teasing Out the Poetry in Jewish Humor and Storytelling (JPS/U. of Nebraska Press).

RETURNING TO VIETNAM IN PEACETIME

by Karol Nielsen

New York Times, April 22, 2025

My father served in Vietnam War with the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. He figured out that it was not a winnable war soon after he arrived in country. He felt his mission was to keep his men alive. Once, he found a dead North Vietnamese soldier with a photo of his family in his pocket. My father had a family, too. He thought that under different circumstances he and this soldier could have been friends. Forty years later, my father, mother, and I traveled to Vietnam. We traveled to all the places he had been—along the central coast and up in the central highlands. Our guide told us his father had been sent to a reeducation camp. In Kontum in the central highlands, we teamed up with a local guide. He took us to fox holes where Vietnamese took cover from bombings and then to his friend’s cafe. It was in a tropical garden with art about the war. The cafe owner and our local guide had studied art in Hanoi. Later, our main guide told us they were Viet Cong. But in that lush cafe, we all talked like friends. My father thought Vietnam was a beautiful country and he always wanted to return in peacetime. Now our government has told diplomats not to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

Karol Nielsen is the author of Walking A&P: A Vietnam War Memoir and other books. Her Gulf War memoir Black Elephants was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poem “This New Manhattan” was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in Epiphany, Guernica, The New Verse News, and elsewhere.

PIETA

by Kay White Drew

for Women’s History Month

To the women in the Vietnam memorial:
One of you holds the dying soldier, one hand
to his chest. One hand, not two. You seem to know
he is beyond CPR, past the point where
anything can save him. The new volunteer
who crouches behind you, stricken,
in her fresh fatigues and boonie hat, must
know this too, green as she is. Your hand rests
on his shrapnel-filled chest not to rescue,
but to comfort, to say, “You’re not alone.”
Your sister-in-arms who’s become
the best friend you’ll ever have,
lays her hand along your arm
for mutual comfort and support
as she calls for help out of habit
in her resonant voice. To a compatriot:
“Need a doctor over here!” To the universe:
“Enough! For the love of God, enough!”

In a time when petty tyrants rewrite
history to suit their bigotry, your granite
tableau stands solid in resistance.

Kay White Drew is a retired physician whose poems appear in various anthologies and internet outlets including The New Verse News. She’s also published short stories and several essays, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a memoir, Stress Test. She lives in Rockville, MD with her husband. Spending time in nature helps her stay sane in these difficult days.

I AM GAZA

by Ralph Dranow

Poster (via Flickr) created by Michael Thompson for a Gaza Freedom March… in 2010!

I am a three-year-old Palestinian boy,

shattered body a sorrowful song

sung by an Israeli bomb.

I am an 18-year-old Israeli soldier,

the stench of death seeping into my nostrils,

invading my whole being.

I am a Palestinian mother, my heart weeping,

my six-year-old daughter fainting from hunger,

my infant son fading fast.

I am Benjamin Netanyahu,

clinging to the life raft of power

in a turbulent sea.

I am a horrified Jewish-American,

the thread of connection sewn into my cells,

demanding an end to the killing.

I am an Israeli settler in the West Bank,

wishing the Palestinians, like noxious insects,

would just go away.

I am an evangelical Christian,

eager for Hamas to be demolished,

so that the Kingdom of Christ can manifest in Israel.

I am a Hamas soldier,

enclosed inside the righteous armor of my cause,

prepared to kill and die for the liberation of Palestine.

I am an Israeli peace activist,

murdered by Hamas on October 7th,

my body destroyed, my spirit refusing to die.

Ralph Dranow works as an editor, writing coach, and poetry teacher. His poems and articles have been widely published. He lives in Oakland, California with his family.

WHAT GROWS

by D. Dina Friedman

“Rising Cairn” by Celeste Roberge

from grief, the prickled ball in my heart

The tank imprinting the sands in Gaza.

The baby on the kibbutz, snatched from its mother’s arms.

Grief as breath and breath as grief

pictures of the dead, the missing

slapped on our bland screens. We might know

this child, his laugh. This teen. She worked for peace.

Grief for the plume of smoke outside the window

of the hospital, for the doctor, searching her pockets

as if she might have stashed a pill she’d forgotten,

that could save the life of a patient, writhing, dying. 

Grief, the crevice in the land split by the river

where you think you might walk down and disappear. 

Grief, a drained lake, a parched throat, a bombed city, 

a soldier singing O Sole Mio in the desert at night

because, sometimes, there’s nothing else to do 

but raise your head to the moon 

and sing as if your life depended on it.

D. Dina Friedman has published in over a hundred literary journals and anthologies (including Rattle, The Sun, Calyx, Lilith, Negative Capability, Chautauqua Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Rhino) and received four Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), a short-story collection: Immigrants(Creators Press), and two  chapbooks: Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press). 

LOVE IN TIMES OF WAR

a poem for Palestine
by Maliha Iqbal

Thousands of people attended a joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial ceremony for victims of the conflict in Tel Aviv on Monday night, running the gauntlet of a handful of right-wing activists who shouted hated slogans. —Haaretz, April 24, 2023. Photo by Gili Getz, The Times of Israel, April 25, 2023.

The last thing that survives
When the frightened mother
Hides her littler children behind her
In the face of the hard glint of a soldier’s gun
The last thing that survives
When the eldest child loses his childhood and innocence
Because he is the only one left
To look after his little brothers and sisters
The last thing that survives
When the soldier stares at the picture
Of his dead daughter and crouches down,
Wishing to shut himself off from the world and sob forever
The last thing that survives
When little children lying in hospital beds
With IV drips attached to their arms
Smile through the bandages at their parents
To give them something to go on
The last thing that survives
When everything is covered with thick choking smoke
Like a massive cloud has crashed on earth
And all you see around yourself
Are dead bodies floating in the cloud
You vaguely recall the boom of the bomb
And the gunfire that shattered the windows of your home
The smoke strangles you, makes you tear up
But you don’t care because 
You have just remembered the scream of your loved ones
And right now you are too busy looking for them
The last thing that survives the night of war
Is the love that waits for the break of dawn.

Maliha Iqbal is a student and writer based in Aligarh, India. Many of her short stories, write-ups, letters and poems have been published on platforms Live Wire (The Wire), Creativity Webzine, Cerebration, Histolit, Countercurrents, Times of India, The Palestine Chronicle, Freedom Review, ArmChair Journal, Counterview, Good Morning Kashmir, Writers’ Cafeteria, Café Dissensus, Borderless Journal, The Cadre Journal and Indian Periodical. She can be reached at malihaiqbal327(at)gmail.com.

A CHURCH ON UKRAINE’S EASTERN FRONT

by Suzanne Morris

Fighters from Ukraine’s Karpatska Sich Battalion in a church on Dec. 25 that was destroyed by shelling and reportedly looted by Russian forces during their occupation, in the Lyman district in the Donetsk region. Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The Church is torn from

limb to limb

daylight flooding through

gaping holes in hallowed walls

Russian spies posing as

monks and priests and nuns 

and at least one Ukrainian abbot 

convicted of espionage.

So I wonder about

the soldier in combat gear

entering through

an arched door

wrested from its hinges,

glass blown out

his heavy boots crunching

on the pulverized pieces

littering a floor

thickly layered with shell dust

below a magisterial portrait of

Jesus praying in the

Garden of Gethsemane,

looking heavenward

as if to beseech God for

an explanation for this

violent schism between two branches

that grew from the same root,

for the shell holes that

pock the background of the

star-speckled sky

above his haloed head

and the rock he kneels against

to pray.

Jewel-toned paraments

embroidered in gold

are strewn about the floor

and flung against

the high upholstered back of a

filigreed chair

while the Virgin Mary

enfolded in deep blue and rose

ponders in her heart

from high above:

For this, my son died on the cross?

Nearby, the wooden altar

with elaborate detail

is deeply scarred, panels missing

its top piece knocked awry

and all around, sections of

towering, frescoed walls blown out,

the portraits adorning them ripped,

iconography broken and dangling.

The soldier’s head is bowed

as though he has escaped

for a few moments of prayer

within this tattered sanctuary.

Or, perhaps he has come to

search for evidence of treason:

lists of people to be killed,

wads of illicit cash,

pamphlets of Russian propaganda

to be traced

so that justice

can be served.

And all the while the

raging war

hurtles into its second year... 

Suzanne Morris is a novelist and a poet. Her poems have appeared in online poetry journals including The New Verse News, The Texas Poetry Assignment, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Pinecone Review, and Emblazoned Soul Review.

POEM FOR A RUSSIAN SOLDIER

by Jesse Dukes

Written on the Eve of the Invasion of Kyiv

A dead Russian soldier in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Credit: Tyler Hicks, The New York Times.

I believe you know right from wrong. Go back.

You polish your boots, oil your gun.

Watch dispatches from your blue-eyed master.

Brew tea with thyme in your uncle’s samovar.

Brought back from Afghanistan, in dead of winter.

Better drink it now, while it’s still warm.

 

It is cold in Donetsk. In your uncle’s house, it’s warm.

Do you think marching west will bring glory back?

Renew a once terrible empire, melt Russian winter?

Will you do something useful with that gun?

Nikita knew to stay close to the samovar

Who is more clever, master or Man?

 

You are a man who needs no master.

Your uncle’s house is already warm .

You have tea, lemon, an ancient samovar.

You have Tolstoy, Checkov, Lermontov. Back

Home, you have a madman.  On your mantle, he’s placed a gun.

He’s sent you to Ukraine in winter

But you are the French at Borodino, fighting the winter.

You are the Germans in Stalingrad, sent by their master.

Too far from home never firing their guns.

Dying forgetting the comfort of warmth.

Ukraine is no enemy. You can still go back

Find your uncle, fire the stove, fill his samovar.

 

You know the story, Vasily leaves the Samovar.

Plunges back into the very teeth of winter.

And when he realizes his danger, it’s too late to turn back.

And what kind of master would leave a man

Stranded in the cold, without a way to stay warm?

Do you mean to kill winter with a gun?

 

You still have a choice. The gun

May yet stay on the mantle. The samovar

May yet fill the house with steam and warmth.

You and your fellow soldiers cannot defeat winter.

But you can defeat your master, just a man.

You still have a choice. Go Back

 

Stay warm despite the winter.

Heat the samovar, heed no master

Take your gun and go back.

Author’s Note: I wrote this over dinner last night, thinking about Tolstoy's Master and Man, and "Checkov's Gun". I love Russian culture, Russian history, and the Russian people I've met, and I hope they'll find their way to the right path. 

Jesse Dukes is a Senior Producer of Podcasts at WBEZ, Chicago Public Media. Twitter: @CuriousDukes

EASTERN UKRAINE POEM

by Indran Amirthanayagam

                               for Ilya

The town is not amused. Bombs have been dropping

every ten minutes and thousands of women and children

have already fled, but Ilya's cousin on the Zoom call

keeps insisting on calm. What gives? I wish I could

shift the debate to my own little conflict, lobbing

poems into cyberspace and expecting the fallout

to give some clues about diction and meter, the finishing

couplet. Once again, my poem shifts to a discourse

about me and my proclivities.What about those family

members on the trains? What about the fellow trying

to pacify his cousin via Zoom? What about the soldier

on the border wrapped in an overcoat carrying a rifle?

Is he really able to fight in the modern theater against

the satellite-beamed remote killing device?

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.