THE SANDWICH MAKER

by Pamela Kenley-Meschino

“It’s rare to see a government so eager to prove its critics right in real time. But here we are, watching the Trump administration fire a Justice Department employee, slap him with a felony, and publicly humiliate him—for the crime of calling them “fascists.” That the accusation came seconds before he allegedly threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent is almost beside the point. The symbolism is too perfect: in today’s Washington, labeling the regime “fascist” is more scandalous than acting like one...” Nick Anderson, Pen Strokes, August 14, 2025

It probably wasn’t vegan.
Hopefully, it had some heft.
Not like a baton or a stick
or the base of a flagpole,
the smell of onion sneaking
through waxed paper,
maybe a dollop of mayo leaking
out in flight made contact with a thud
of audacity, outrage. Why are you here?!
Why the f—k are you here?!
The sandwich maker who cut the bread,
arranged condiments, while the man (felon?)
waited by the counter, had no idea.
Maybe he felt the weight of anger,
spread yellow mustard thick,
added extra pepper,
a wedge of heavy cheddar,
imagined his throwing arm gathering
a day’s worth of ham and cheese
he could sail over the heads of invaders
to reach those starving children
on the other side of insanity.

Pamela Kenley-Meschino is originally from the UK, where she developed a love of nature, poetry, and music, thanks in part to the influence of her Irish mother. She is an educator whose classes explore the connection between writing and healing and the importance of shared stories.

A HAUNTING AND A CURSE

by Patricia Smith Ranzoni

               

     Came a land with no children but many flowers. 

Weeded out by ground thieves, God-given, they thought 

and said. Their right, being most moral to themselves.

     In mothers’ wombs slaughtered sons and daughters. 

In incubators denied power. Refused milk, starved, no matter 

their wails, no rescue or slightest mercy even water.

     Survived to toddle, shot in their heads. Walk or run, 

in knees hobbling for life. Life? Called lawn to be mowed.

At mid-youth, still alive, picked off, 

     thought of as rats on forbidden dumps. And grass 

to be cut. Bombed and drone-shot day and night til nothing

but chunks rolled in dirt like fish in flour 

     from nets also forbidden. Came a land with no 

children, a foot, arm, patch of flesh while rubble baked and 

blew away in the sun, then the absolute misery of winter 

without shelter not a dry or safe space to be had not a meal 

     and the people who wanted it that way, staked and 

claimed, liking it with no children or only childrens’ bones, 

congratulating themselves. No humanitarian aid allowed! 

No humanity for Christ’s sake!

     Came a time their stolen olive trees turned blood red 

fruiting with the colors of newborn eyes watching them.

     Their soiled window boxes boasted the lushest 

greens ever seen, breaking out with poison petals 

startlingly splendid but quick to rot. 

     Their gardens made them sick. Trees never 

stopped boiling over with tears. Yet still, they praised

themselves, thanking their gods. 

     The map to the land with no children can be found 

by the cries the wind is made of. World ‘round, it is named 

shame in laments whispered and screamed forever.

Outback Maine native Patricia Smith Ranzoni is a child veteran of WWII and retired educator nearing the land of 85. Daughter of a woodsworking paper mill rigger and farm woman, she and her second generation Italian-American husband met and married while working their way through the University of Maine (1962). With their three children they have devoted their lives to keeping the family G.I. Bill homestead for three more generations. They were the last on both sides to keep a family cow. Her mostly self-taught poetry has been published across the country and abroad, including numerous times in The New Verse News where she goes for solace.

FLOUR MASSACRE

by Shelley Ettinger

‘Flour massacre’: Lifesaving aid becomes a deadly struggle in Gaza

At least 112 Palestinians were killed and more than 750 others were injured on Thursday after Israeli troops opened fire on civilians gathered at a convoy of food trucks southwest of Gaza City, Palestinian health officials said. Israel denied it was to blame, saying that many victims were run over by aid trucks in a rush to obtain food. The massacre comes as the UN warns of an “almost inevitable famine” in the besieged Palestinian enclave amid increasing reports of children dying of starvation. —France 24, March 1, 2024

You think it’s irony at first

it’s spelled wrong at first

in your head a fun metaphor

it’s blossoms buds stems scents

you picture birds maybe

or animals eating petals maybe

insects descending in swarms

devouring flowers in fields on trees

it’s ironic because it’s iconic

nature doing its cyclical thing

pure innocent instinctive

 

You spelled it wrong in your head

now you know not metaphor it’s actual

no bees no flying beings not natural

it’s people downed mass as in murder

acre as in designated slaughter site

the hungry strafed their bodies bloodied

arms outstretched for flour sacks dropped

because feeding starving children is not

permitted must be swiftly stopped because

the death deliverers determine eating to be

a capital crime in Palestine

Shelley Ettinger is the author of Vera's Will. Her work has been in Allium, The Wild Word, Gertrude, Nimrod, Mississippi Review, Mizna, The New Verse News in August 2007, and other journals. She is a Lambda Literary Foundation LGBTQ Writers' Retreat fellow. A queer social-justice activist for fifty years, Shelley now lives in San Antonio.

DOUBLE TRITINA ON THE DEATH OF EAVAN BOLAND DURING A WORLDWIDE PANDEMIC

by Jenna Le




In Eavan Boland’s poem “Quarantine,”
there’s much to be admired: how she rhymes
slant, rhyming 1847 with woman,

say, or how the perished man and woman
in the three lines that start with line 18
are dignified, like headstones touched with rime,

by strict iambic beats. The point that rhymes
most richly with me, living as a woman
in a world starved gray by quarantine

in this year of our Lord COVID-19,
however, is the way that Boland’s rhymes
affirm love’s primacy: I’m not the woman

her poem describes, the starving Irish woman
whose feet, for lack of shoes of soft sateen,
molded themselves against her husband’s grime-

dark chest; yet Boland’s poem reminds me I’m
a member of the cult of man and woman,
built like a virus from the same protein.


Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), a Second Place winner in the Elgin Awards. She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition and by Julie Kane as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s sonnet crown competition the following year. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, and West Branch. 

POSTCARD FROM THE PANDEMIC

by Pauletta Hansel




Crabgrass beneath the iris rhizomes
where my muddy fingers
can’t tell one root from another.
Meanwhile, down in the French Quarter
the rats are starving.
No tourists, no trash.
What can they do but feed on their young?
Everything wants to survive.

Inside our lungs the virus slips
itself into the Ace-2 receptors and is remade.
Scientists call what happens next a cytokine storm.
Bugler, sound the charge! An army of cells
march up from the trenches,
destroy what they can’t save.
“We have to think about this pandemic from the virus’s position.”
All it wants to do is to eat us alive.

Pauletta Hansel’s seven poetry collections include Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award. Her writing has been featured in Rattle and Still: The Journal, and on The Writer’s Almanac, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016- 2018).

AWOL

by Rick Gray

Kabul sunrise. Image source: Panoramio

In a locked-down house of disconnection,
this is the hidden room of yellow exclamation.
Outside its mirrored windows dawn explodes the targeted capital
And strikes a starving boy on the corner waving a smoking tin can
Begging for a fragment of fresh luck.

Deserting an endless war of circling thought
I walk away from the blue face of my frozen screen
and step AWOL passed dreaming guards cuddling Kalashnikovs.
Digging down into the animal heat of my thigh
I grip metal jangling against a shriveled coma on antidepressants.

Oh, it’s so nice to stroll in the Kabul Sunrise!
“Give me muddy!” the boy on the corner orders me,
his English broken as my abandoned laptop.
I release my fist and watch Afghan coins drop 
Flaming into the yellow cracks of a hungry human hand.


Rick Gray teaches in Kabul. He has work forthcoming in Salamander and the book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock.