SLIMY GREEN CESSPOOL REFLECTING CAPITALIST RULE

by Raymond Nat Turner

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

Capitalism says corporations are people… It says,

Money’s speech… Buying, bossing, sock-puppet

politicians on Capitalist Hill; White Supreme Court; and

Offal Office’s corrupt cabinet of Epstein class War House.

Capitalism pulled One Big Beautiful Bank Job, stage whispering, 

DOGE really means Department Of Grifter Enrichment! Then,

boasted about looting fruits of our labor; while its Cruel Reich Cult 

casually kills on our streets and strolls unaccountable into the sunset.

Capitalism’s painting our streets crimson, killing class bothers and sisters 

San Diego to Maine. Turning cobwebbed warehouses into torture, murder,

Mengele Medicine hells. Bombing humble boats full of fish on the high seas.

Reducing apartment buildings, hospitals, schools teeming with dreams to rubble…

Capitalism crowned a chainsaw prancing prince of apartheid

First Techno-Fascist Trillionaire. And celebrated his warped

worldview of spastic stiff salutes and spit-shined jackboots—

Mirroring the stinky, slimy green, cesspool—reflecting capitalist rule.

The stinky, slimy green, cesspool—reflecting capitalist rule

Mirroring testosterone-intoxicated, pomade man, obeying orders 

of Captain Morgan, Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. Foolish Fox-box 

foot soldier lusting blood: Blowing up schoolchildren and teachers!

The stinky, slimy green, cesspool—reflecting capitalist rule

Algae attack, metaphor for war. Peeling paint, Pentagon pimps

shredding social safety net with looped, weapons-testing, wars

Horrific, eternal, trade shows of terror… 

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

BLACK BOX

by Eric David Helms

The UK government has paid "substantial" compensation to a man who was tortured by the CIA and remains imprisoned without trial at Guantanamo Bay after almost 20 years, the BBC can reveal. Abu Zubaydah was the first man subjected to the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" techniques after the 11 September 2001 attacks. It was claimed he was a senior al-Qaeda member. The US government later withdrew the allegation. MI5 and MI6 passed questions to the CIA for use during Zubaydah's interrogations despite knowing of his extreme mistreatment. He brought a legal claim against the UK on the basis that its intelligence services were "complicit" in his torture. The case has now reached a financial settlement. —BBC, January 12, 2026

 

Both are dressed 

in the bright coat 

of international 

orange.

 

Inside the Cat’s eye

Zubaydah is being

zipped back

into prison togs—

 

bubbles of a goldfish

rise from his mouth,

speaking for the raw

shortfall of intel

 

still buried in the World

Trade Center reels of flight

as the feed from his revival tube

begins to pump up the duff.

Author’s note: The "Both" [in the first line] nods to Zubaydah and any black box of an airplane which is painted orange to ensure maximum visibility for investigators.  Since the black box of the 9-11 planes were never recovered, Zubaydah (dressed in the same orange) became a human black box for the CIA.

 

Eric David Helms holds degrees from Furman University and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Having spent seven years in the city of New York, he currently resides in Salt Lake City, Utah. Some of his work can be found in the Asheville Poetry Review, key_hole, Prelude, Diagram, MadHat Lit, Souvenir, American Athenaeum, Rhino, 4×4 and Blunderbuss. His debut collection Valley of Empty Pockets can be purchased through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

REMINDERS

by Phyllis Wax

Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian man in the occupied West Bank, stripped him naked, tied his arms and legs and then zip-tied his penis, he, his family members and another witness said on Wednesday. “I thought I was going to die,” the man, Suhaib Abualkebash (above), a 29-year-old shepherd, told The New York Times. “I thought this was the end.” Photo by Afif Amireh.

Even as ghosts their bones

are visible: ribs, backbones,

sticks of arms and legs.

But the occupiers in the West Bank,

the army in Gaza,

do not see the ghosts

of their ancestors,

do not hear their rattling bones

or their ghostly admonishments

not to duplicate the cruelty done to them,

seem deaf to the idea that never again

means not to anyone.

Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee, where she observes the goings-on of the country and the world and is being cured of her delusions. She has read in coffee houses, bars, libraries and on the radio, and has participated in poet/fiber artist collaborations. Among the journals in which her work has appeared are Gyroscope Review, Writers Resist, Jerry Jazz Musician, Rise Up Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Wordpeace, The New Verse News, Naugatuck River Review, Your Daily Poem, Feral.

CRUELTY

by Bonnie Naradzay

Some people say
that, having stopped 
reading the news, they 
feel better.
 
The old Chinese poets
remind me to include
today’s weather report
in each poem.
 
Dr Issam Abu Ajwa said
he was forced to sleep
on a floor covered with small, 
sharp rocks, hands and legs tied,
eyes blindfolded.
 
The weather is warm this week—
in fact, the cherry blossoms
here are projected to peak
somewhat earlier this spring.
 
Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia
was tortured for seven months 
then released without charge. 
“I was clubbed, beaten with rifle butts, 
attacked by dogs. I was beaten so badly 
I couldn’t use my legs or walk, he said.
 
Dr Ahmad Mhanna, director
of al-Awda hospital in north Gaza, 
has been in Israeli prisons 
more than a year without charge.
 
Nightfall here, and the evening
becomes a still life—
it glistens like a Chinese lantern
in a garden without strife.
 
Some people try to memorize
a meaningful poem one line
at a time as a way to neutralize 
the news.  In severe winter cold
 
seven children froze to death
in Gaza in the last 48 hours
but today’s weather elsewhere
is quite pleasant overall.

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. 

BASHAR’S BOUDOIR

by Salma Amrou

Physicists are born when bombs fall 

on heads like apples. According to the law of inertia,

once a dictator falls he never stops falling

flat on his face in Homs and Aleppo and Damascus

and Deraa, on graffitied walls invoking broken Hippocratic oaths

and stripped bare down to his underwear in a leaked

boudoir shoot and photos by the pool, 

skin draped taut across collar bones like tent poles,

albums showing all the skin where the sun never shone:

girls raped and children raised in prison cells

and corpses crushed between metal, dead rose

pressed between the pages of a ledger, each pose

for the camera a little sassier than the other. In the second law

of motion, the greater the suffering, the greater

the force needed to suppress it. Sednaya’s red wing walls 

varnished in the most sensual shade of blood

a shrine where the mouths of praying prisoners

are forced to swallow his name in place of God’s. Starving 

for some form of salvation, a country cannibalizes itself,

a dietary regimen to sate the appetite of the regime: detainees

swallowed and digested in the guts beneath ground.

In the third law of motion, revolt is regurgitation, 

bowels of bloodlust rising in an upchuck reflex, 

streaked across his tongue like the sweet nothings 

and the blush in his wedding pictures, too shy to look his bride 

or his people in the eye, fleeing from the gravity of his vows,

from the fact that he’s been falling 

and falling–

One of the photos of Bashar Assad discovered by rebels and posted on social media.

Editor's note: You can help the White Helmets rebuild lives and hope in Syria.

Salma Amrou is a former Youth Poet Laureate of Southeastern Virginia and an undergraduate student at the College of William & Mary. An Egyptian-American poet and aspiring novelist, her work explores themes of identity, belonging, and the experiences of the Arab and Muslim diaspora. Her work will be featured in the forthcoming issue of Zhagaram Literary.

WHAT A HORROR MOVIE REALLY LOOKS LIKE

by Gil Hoy

Nightcafé graphic

I got up Wednesday and saw 

She won Vermont. 

Which led me to believe

There was still hope.

 

But then I saw she lost

Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas

California, Colorado, Massachusetts

And all of the rest

 

Which led me to believe 

He must be

A Master Hypnotist.

 

Which led me to believe 

Vermont is special. 

I love Vermont.

 

I thought about Massachusetts. 

 

Which led me to believe 

Maybe the one state that 

Voted for McGovern 

Had changed over the past 52 years.

 

Which led me to believe 

Maybe it was a good thing 

I moved to Arizona.

 

To get a better handle on things

In a swing state.

 

Which led me to believe 

Maybe I should be talking to as 

Many of his supporters as I can 

To try to understand

Where their brains have gone. 

To look for a cure

Before it’s too late.

 

Which led me to believe

That this kind of thing 

 

Has happened before 

In democracies and the results 

Weren’t pretty. Pretty horrific in fact. 

 

Torture, genocide, politicide. 

 

Which led me to believe 

November might be the most 

Important election in history. 

Do or die we might say.

 

Which led me to believe 

We ought to work like hell 

To protect what we have. 

 

Which led me to believe 

We ought to fight like hell 

‘Til the fight is done. 

 

Which led me to believe 

The good guys need 

To keep on believing.

 

 

Gil Hoy is a Best of the Net nominated Tucson, Arizona poet and writer who studied fiction and poetry at The Writers Studio and at Boston University. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He is a semi-retired trial lawyer and a former four-term elected Brookline, MA Selectman. Hoy’s poetry and fiction have previously appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Chiron Review, Third Wednesday, The Galway Review, Right Hand Pointing, Rusty Truck, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Penmen Review,   Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Bewildering Stories, Literally Stories, The New Verse News, and elsewhere.

MATTEO MESSINA DENARO’S GIORGIO ARMANI SUIT HOLDS A PRESS CONFERENCE

by Patricia Phillips-Batoma

Giuseppe di Matteo was kidnapped in 1993 in an attempt to blackmail his father into not giving evidence against the Mafia, Italian prosecutors said. The 12-year-old boy was held in captivity for two years before he was strangled and dissolved in acid. Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the mobsters who ordered little Giuseppe's kidnapping and murder, was finally caught yesterday in Palermo while he visited a private clinic for cancer treatment. —Mirror (UK), January 17, 2023

For Giuseppe di Matteo, who loved animals.

I stand before you today

single-breasted and slim cut

of jacquard silk-wool blend

with breast pocket for a pocket square

made with Italian love.

Gentle fingers

stitched together all the precision-cut

pieces of me into the kind of shape

that dreams someday it will grace

a UEFA champion at a red-carpet gala

or the jaunty gait of a screen star

collecting a prize.

 

Now imagine

our fate in the closet of U Siccu—Diabolik

—hoarder of Raybans and Rolexes,

my Armani brothers, my Versace cousins,

in bunkers during 30 years on the lam.

 

Scars are etched in every single place

he sweats acid of the same grade

used to melt bodies after torture

and strangulation. That is to say

those not simply blasted away.

 

Here on the threshold of his demise

I announce today my candidacy

to serve as outfit for the cremation.

 

After all, nobody wants to don me,

and I, uncomfortable now on any skin,

no longer abide the humiliation of covering up

a criminal body. The way he felt my buttons,

caressed my smooth weave, precludes

all pretense to future dignity.

 

But the worst was how he adjusted each sleeve,

likely how he strangled that pregnant woman,

 

with  just  one  tug. 

Patricia Phillips-Batoma is a writer and teacher who lives in Illinois. She has published poems in OffCourse, Plants & Poetry, Parentheses, Tuck Magazine, and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis.

A SOLITARY MAN

by Mary K O'Melveny

For the past 27 years, Dennis Wayne Hope (above) has been in a Texas prison cell that is somewhere between the size of an elevator and a compact parking space. For one hour, seven days per week, or two hours, five days per week, he is let out to exercise—alone—in another small enclosure. The only people he comes into contact with are the guards who strip search and handcuff him. The last personal phone call he had was in 2013 when his mother died. More than a quarter-century in isolation has led him to hallucinations, chronic pain and thoughts of suicide. Solitary confinement is a sanitized term for torture. Mr. Hope, 53, whose plight was described by the New York Times, has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case on the grounds that his prolonged isolation is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s bar against cruel and unusual punishment. Lower courts denied Mr. Hope’s petition and court observers are skeptical the Supreme Court will take up his case. So sure are Texas officials that the court, with its conservative majority, won’t agree to hear the case that they waived their right to respond to Mr. Hope’s petition for a writ of certiorari. —The Washington Post, February 16, 2022

For twenty-seven years,

I have not seen a bird’s shadow.

Nor felt a droplet of rain.

No one has touched me

save the guards who strip-search

me to take me to an indoor

cubicle for solitary weekly

exercise. They do hold my hands,

to fix them to steel handcuffs

required for our walks down

cement block hallways of a

Texas prison. In 2013, I received

my only telephone call.

My mother was dead.

 

Last month, my lawyers asked

the Supreme Court to weigh

the parameters of punishment,

to tell me if unusualness or

cruelty come to their minds

in circumstances such as mine.

Some say prison focuses one’s

viewpoint. If it tends toward

the myopic, there is good reason.

I would ask them to focus

their eyes on distant objects –

a task I can no longer perform

because my narrowed world

affords no view of light or distance.

A compact car would be too large

to park in my 6x9 foot cell.

 

Next, I would ask them to consider

how vocal cords can atrophy,

as muscle, ligament, mucosal

tissue diminish from lack of use.

I did not take a vow of silence

when I entered this place

but my voice has hollowed

as its volume faded and its pitch

turned to a thin reed-like whisper.

At first, I talked to myself. Even

sang. But soon enough, I was

not enough. Words failed me.

Now, my head aches constantly.

My heart pounds, my pulse races

as if I was running up a mountainside.

But all I do is sit on my metal slab

or stand and watch walls wave, shift

as though a fan was moving them

like air. Sometimes, demon spirits peek

through wearing pinpricks of light.

 

Some say if you do the crime,

you can’t complain about the time.

But duration and despair should not be one.

I do not sleep. I have no sense of space

or stage. My brain must work overtime

to construct reality from scant available

signals. I read about a 1950’s experiment

on rhesus macaque monkeys. After thirty

days of isolation, they turned away from

social interaction, became disconsolate.

Each day I remember less.    Less.

I hope the Justices will answer me

while I still know my name. While I can

still name most things I have lost.  

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

A WOMAN IN TIGRAY

by Sarah Mackey Kirby

Britain's Channel 4 recently aired a devastating report on these atrocities. One survivor recounted a harrowing 10-day ordeal to the network during which she said she and five other women were gang-raped by Eritrean soldiers. She said the troops joked and took photos as they injected her with a drug, tied her to a rock, stripped, stabbed and raped repeatedly her. Doctors who've treated Tigrayan women have said one woman's vagina was stuffed with nails, stones and plastic. —CBS

is filled with stones,

nails. By her captors.

If she is not human,

if she must be bloodline-cleansed

from existence,

then why does crying matter.

 

The sun rises all over the world

as if it doesn’t know.

And sets apricot embers

each evening.

In darkness, a woman in Tigray

is filled with stones.

Filled with soldiers.

Alone below Orion’s belt,

sharp in the night sky,

glowing fire

three stars in a row.

Sarah Mackey Kirby's first poetry collection The Taste of Your Music (Impspired) will be published in May 2021. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Chiron Review, Connecticut River Review, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere. She and her husband live in Louisville, Kentucky.

THE UNSPEAKABLE

by Sister Lou Ella

Dianna Ortiz, an American Roman Catholic nun whose rape and torture in Guatemala in 1989 helped lead to the release of documents showing American involvement in human rights abuses in that country, died on Friday in hospice care in Washington. She was 62. —The New York Times, February 20, 2021. PHOTO: Sister Dianna Ortiz in 1996. After being raped and tortured in Guatemala, she helped focus attention on the 200,000 people who were killed or disappeared during that country’s 36-year civil war. Credit: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

           in memory of sr. dianna ortiz, osu

                         rape and torture victim

“I’m not sure what it means to forgive.”

friday after ash wednesday

2/19/2021

 

the death certificate read cancer

but i know better

the unspeakable terror

that tortured your flesh years ago

has finally had its way with you

then and then daily the Holy in your body

screamed why have you forsaken me

perhaps you are the saint of the struggle

that wrestling with the command to forgive

but the Holy will also have Its way

It too Unspeakable

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and The New Verse News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo.  She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015. (Press 53.)