SONNETS LEANING LEFT, RIGHT

by Olga Livshin

Left-Leaning Sonnet

                           For Maria Gapotchenko

What can we do   WHAT CAN WE DO   We

can hide in a sonnet   Its milky worn 

warmth  You look hot in a sonnet 

Like a baby elephant  Pull the taffeta   

over your eyes  Turn off the news  

How to help from under a word comforter  

Stick out one hand   Poke the nearest sufferer

Hey fellow victim   Hola      Pryvit     How’s it all

hanging   Do you need anything

I know about tragedies  Can I write one about you

Or sing you into the velvet car of my ghazal  

Sell all my books and Venmo you a little sum

I would send a sun      or my hardy son   but 

don’t know  what am I doing   What have I done

Right-Leaning Sonnet

I say you can’t see borders from space  just fat land slices

and blue elixir  He chuckles When did that ever matter 

I say  You make money from different parts of the world

He talks about the history of empire

and dictators cycling like water   I say  Nature 

flits like pixies       Burning Siberian peat

brought Anchorage  soot He says  Sad Not 

your fault Enjoy your short life   I say I am  

enjoying my friendships in Lviv and Kharkiv  and 

want hamsters and parakeets to live on  He replies 

Arrive  Thirty-four years late  Better than never   

Look    The whole planet on your well-chosen plate

Sweet and staring at us both with disbelief

Docile and looking up with brilliant hope

Olga Livshin’s poetry recently appears in Poetry, The Southern Review, and AGNI. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019) and translator of Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023). 

THE FIRST DEATH

by Thomas R. Smith

So a lost brother has taken a bullet.

We grasp after a coherent motive.

Another of the terminally online?

Noticing the victim did nothing to help

protect others from this kind of death.

Said a few deaths are worth his “freedom.”

Would he have considered his own death

by the gun worth it? Are we allowed to ask

whether this is irony or karma?

The mind unmoored from spirit, scrambled

by strange signals, tears loose from the real.

Can we be honest about our part in this?

Life is change, but fear turns change to death,

fear rooted in hatred, self-hatred

of the changing different one within.

I mourn his first death, the earlier one

when he turned away from decency and kindness

to join the church of the desecrated heart.

Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.

ON EDGE

by Beth Paulson

NYT, January 14, 2025

It always was where urban met the wild
hilly interface of forest land and city
where on a clear day you could see the sea, 
where roads rose up or meandered into
the steeper, southern side of the San Gabriels. 
 
Today smoky air hangs heavy, sun’s blotted out
where avenues lined with old deodar cedars
grown tall, a firebreak for lucky residents
where we walk uphill from our saved home 
amid downed branches, dangling power lines.
 
The fireman on one corner let us pass
if we promised to head back to our car
down the next road. We don’t talk much,
know sirens in the distance signal fires
still spark and smolder east of Lake Avenue. 
 
Our block of Santa Anita escaped the fire
where this morning knots of neighbors gather
who surely know the line is thin and tenuous
between being a victim or survivor.
We bend to scoop up embers from the grass
 
yet around the corner a home burned to the ground.
A plume of burning gas marks the backyard,
ash pile with charred beams, blackened bricks,
twisted metal, a chimney all that’s standing,
a concrete driveway leading in and out.

Beth Paulson moved recently to Altadena, California from Ouray County, Colorado where she founded the Poetica Workshop, directed Poetry at the Tavern, and served as Poet Laureate. Her poems have been published nationally in over 200 journals and have four times been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.  Luminous (Kelsay Books, 2021) is her sixth collection.  

HELENE

by Terri Kirby Erickson

Cadaver dogs and search crews trudged through knee-deep muck and debris in the mountains of western North Carolina on Tuesday looking for more victims ofHurricane Helene days after the storm carved a deadly and destructive path through the Southeast. —AP, October 1, 2024

He found his wife’s body draped over

a limb, her skirt flapping in the wind

 

like a bedsheet pinned to a line, her

long hair hanging like Spanish moss.

 

He dropped to his knees in the mud,

moaning like a bear caught in a steel

 

trap, ready to gnaw off its leg to stop 

the pain. He didn’t care, anymore,

 

about their splintered house floating 

like matchsticks down the river, never

 

felt the dog’s rough tongue trying to 

lick the agony from his face. Still, he

 

could not make himself believe what 

he was seeing—pictured her, instead, 

 

walking down the aisle with flowers 

tumbling from her hands. He vaguely

recalled saying to her, Till death do us 

part, but it tasted like gibberish in his 

 

mouth, words with no meaning about 

a time he was sure would never come.

Author's Note: My poem, ‘Helene,’ is an imagined narrative prompted by reading and hearing about the devastating destruction and loss of life in western North Carolina (my beloved home state) that occurred as a result of Hurricane Helene. I also drew upon my own experiences with trauma, grief, and sudden loss while writing this poem.

 

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Rattle, The SUN, and numerous other publications. Her awards include the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, International Book Award for Poetry, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize among many others. She lives in North Carolina, USA.

THE TERRORIST

by George Salamon

Rahul Gandhi delivered a lecture at Cambridge University [February 28, 2023] on “Learning to Listen in the 21st Century.” Recounting how the yatra [the march he recently led through India] changed him, Gandhi said the interactions with the people who held his hand during the yatra trusting him as a brother and confided in him changed him as a politician, his perspective. As the yatra entered Kashmir, Gandhi said, "As I was walking, a guy came up and showed me a few men standing nearby. He told me they are militants. I thought I was in trouble because in that situation militants would kill me. But they did not do anything because this is the power of listening.” —Hindustan Times, March 3, 2023

Can anyone ever reach you?

Would we have to dissolve

into the white hot fire inside

of you to see you?

Would you talk with us then,

touching the rivers of fire

cooling in our own blood 

so we too become weightless

like you, no longer capable of

joy or grief, and rise for the

journey that unbinds us and

knows of no return?

Most of us remain weighed 

down, unable or unwilling to

submit to the exuberance of

terror that nothing can appease.

Terrorism is not merely an act

of terror, but also one of

nihilism

Its fire burns all—motivation,

victim and terrorist.

George Salamon recalls reading Hermann Rauschning's 1939 book TheRevolution of Nihilism meant as a warning by depicting Hitler's National Socialism as, at least in part, a "revolution of nihilism," a pact between leader and people for destruction and self-destruction. 

LOOK, UP IN THE SKY

by Michelle DeRose

Trey Ganem's company, SoulShine Industries, created special caskets for 19 of the 21 victims killed at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas.

What music accompanies a Superman coffin?

What song will waft your boy over buildings

that block your sun, black your path

with shadow? Does the melody

to lull you to sleep exist, and 

will the hum of your own voice

be enough? Birdsong mocks, small 

throats on spindly legs, sparrows still

in the care of their father. Where 

will your boy fly now, outstretched 

arms and closed fists planing so fast, 

so fast, 

away from you?

Michelle DeRose teaches creative writing and Irish, African-American, and world literature at Aquinas College. Some of her recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Midwest Quarterly, Dunes Review, Sparks of Calliope, Making Waves, and The Journal of Poetry Therapy.

TOXIC REDUX

by Diane Elayne Dees

Video: Britney Spears’ full opening testimony during her conservatorship hearing. She speaks directly to Judge Brenda Penny and asks her to end the conservatorship.

“I want to feel heard, and I’m telling you this again so maybe you can understand the depth and the degree and the damage that they did to me... ” —Britney Spears

Hysteria was said to be cured 

by having sex. Or giving birth. 

Or having the Devil cast out

of a woman’s body.

Or being touched by magnetic hands.

Or hanged from a tree until dead.

“Don’t worry your pretty head, take this pill”—

and they danced as fast as they could,

then wound up shaking and quivering

in hospital rooms, sweating in bedrooms, 

and dazed in the dark rooms inside their heads.

“No one did that to you—the therapist put it

in your head.” 

“It’s your imagination.” 

“Why would you say those things about our family?”

“Stop acting like a child.”

Crazy women make good stories, 

good movies, good punchlines, 

good alibis.

You can drug them, wind them up, 

watch them dance, and steal their money.

All you need is a judge, a doctor, a lawyer,

some nurses, and the right genitalia.

The court declared you a protector—

of a mind, a uterus, a woman.

But crazy women everywhere know

that what is protected 

are your bank account,

your delusions, and your secret desire

to cast the Devil out of all of us.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbook Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books) and two forthcoming chapbooks. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women's professional tennis throughout the world.

WHEN I DIE IN THE NEXT MASS SHOOTING, HERE'S WHAT I LOOK FORWARD TO

by William McCarthy

"American Exceptionalism" by Nick Anderson.

“We never thought it would happen here,” my neighbor Sheila says.

Flags fly at half-staff; the governor holds me in his thoughts and prayers.

Another surge in the sale of assault weapons.

My senator reiterates that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

 

My senator holds me in his thoughts and prayers.

More dollars promised to help the mentally ill.

Flags fly at half-staff; my governor reiterates that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

Congress proposes another bill, weakens it, lets it die in committee.

 

Even more dollars promised to help the mentally ill.

On the six o’clock news, my children leave the church with my coffin.

Congress proposes another bill, weakens it, lets it die in committee.

The surgeons release my wife from the ICU.

 

On the six o’clock news, my children leave the church with my coffin.

Newspapers savor the irony: I survived a mass shooting a month ago, only to die in this one.

The surgeons release my wife from the ICU.

My thirteen-year-old daughter tells Anderson Cooper how much she will miss me.

 

Newspapers savor the irony: I survived a mass shooting a month ago, only to die in this one.

Another surge in the sale of assault weapons.

My governor’s wife holds my two-month-old son in her arms.

“We never thought it would happen here.”

Thirty years ago William McCarthy joined the Connecticut Writing Project and hasn’t recovered yet. “Since then," he writes, "I've tendered my drafts almost monthly in a writing group of other recovering CWP teachers. There’s a closeness among us we get nowhere else, as we share bits and pieces of our lives—our trials with truculent pianos, unpredictable children, and failing parents. Part is honing our craft, part is shaping our experiences, part is understanding who we are.”

THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME

Robert West is the author of three chapbooks of poems, including Convalescent (Finishing Line Press, 2011); the co-editor of Succinct: The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems (Broadstone Books, 2013); and the editor of both volumes of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons (W. W. Norton, 2017).

RED FLAG

by Tricia Knoll

You stepped in the doorway.
Come, you said, to comfort me.

A long way to come without
having gone anywhere new,

I thought, the nurse watched
over me to help me contain

my anger, but I could not.
The background: strangers

arrived to check out a victim.
Such a long way to come

without moving an inch.
My fingers searched

for a red flag to hold up
when I spit out

ban assault rifles,
don’t let white men

use them as banners
for hate.

The hate you wave
at every turn.


Tricia Knoll asks how she might feel if she were in a hospital bed after a shooting and the President arrived.

BOTH CAROLINAS WEEP: HOMAGE TO UNC CHARLOTTE

by Earl J Wilcox

Riley Howell, 21, took three bullets while tackling a gunman last week at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He was one of two killed. In interviews with relatives and friends of Mr. Howell, not one person was surprised that he had acted decisively and with little regard for himself. —The New York Times, May 6, 2019. Above: Photographs of Riley Howell at his viewing ceremony on Saturday in Waynesville, N.C. Credit Swikar Patel for The New York Times.

Up the interstate about forty minutes
from our campus, Charlotte 49ers
weep as do their Eagle friends—
both schools connected by Carolina
geography, by our students taking
classes there, friends come for classes
here, some adjunct faculty teach at both
schools. Carolina cousins, uncles, aunts,
friends, sports competitors, youthful
world citizens making their way.
Today we grieve our mutual losses—
a semester ending too soon for some.


Earl J Wilcox is a retired Emeritus English Professor at Winthrop University (whose mascot is the Eagle), located about 25 miles south of Charlotte, NC.

A MOTHER'S LAMENT FOR AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

by Shirley J. Brewer




Gun shots punctuate country music.
An endless series of ragged wounds
ruin amber waves of grain.

A damaged boy in black
takes aim behind his killer toy.
Gone our purple mountain majesties.

All the years I spent nurturing my child
dissolve in puddles of blood.
America! America!

Without solace, alone I become
a maternal vigilante.
Till all success be nobleness
and ev’ry gain divine.

A grieving parent, I want to destroy
weapons of rage throughout this land.
Oh, beautiful for heroes proved
in liberating strife.

My mission: Annihilate the guns.
Let the alabaster cities gleam
undimmed by human tears.

My child’s life matters.
Will you help me, please?
America? America?
From sea to shining sea.

Shirley J. Brewer serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts & Technology in Baltimore, MD. Recent poems appear in Barrow Street, Comstock Review, Gargoyle, Passager, Poetry East, Slant, and other journals. Shirley’s books include A Little Breast Music (2008), After Words (2013), and Bistro in Another Realm (2017).

IN THE VIDEO STILL OF THE SAUDI JOURNALIST KILLED BY THE SAUDI GOVERNMENT

by Alejandro Escudé




















The victim strolls into the scene
wearing dress shoes and a sport coat.
His icy gait is that of a strong, idealistic man,

a man whose life has been propped up
by words written in looping Arabic.
The man independent, unsympathetic.

To the journalist’s right, a Mercedes van,
black, parked like a stand-in for death.
It is the quietus of the journalist.

Mourn his words, wheeled like scimitars,
like mosaic pieces of a shattered mosaic.
The Mercedes ornament on the van’s grille

reflects the dead man in the sport coat
with the fallen words, walking assuredly past
—who is that? A conspirator? A guard?


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

HER BROTHER

by Penelope Scambly Schott

Abdi Ali Ibrahim speaks during a Reuters interview after burying the hand of his sister Asha Ali Ibrahim believed to have been killed during an explosion that killed hundreds last Saturday in KM4 street in the Hodan district in Mogadishu, Somalia. -- REUTERS/Feisal Omar, October 17, 2017.

He came downtown to hunt for his sister.
He couldn’t reach her on her cell phone.
He can’t find her in any of the hospitals.
Someone has collected loose body parts
and put them into black plastic bags. He
searches in the bags until he recognizes
his sister’s wedding band. Now this man
stands ankle deep in the charred rubble.
He holds all he has–his sister’s left hand.


Penelope Scambly Schott was awarded four New Jersey arts fellowships before moving to Oregon, where her verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. In 2013 she had two books published: Lovesong for Dufur and Lillie Was a Goddess, Lillie Was a Whore. Penelope’s most recent book (2014) How I Became an Historian is a lyric examination of the connections between past and future, both in her family and in the larger world.

LOVE & HATE ON A PORTLAND TRAIN

after the last words of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche

by Scott C. Kaestner





hate versus love on a train
hate slashes at love, stabs
love in the heart, claims two
brave souls who defended
love in the face of hate and
as love lays dying on that train
a victim of hate, one last brave act
one last message of love, one last
ounce of love to give offering hope

"Tell them, I want everybody to know, I want everybody on the train to know, I love them."

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, a dad, Lakers fan, guacamole aficionado, and leftist dreamer. Google 'scott kaestner poetry' to peruse his musings.

CHELSEA MANNING, NOT JUST HERSELF

by Devon Balwit

Chelsea Manning tried to commit suicide last month as she was starting a week of solitary confinement at the prison barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., her punishment for a previous attempt to end her life in July. —The New York Times, November 4, 2016. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters/Newscom via The Intercept.

The constraints are multiple:
Chelsea jailed inside Bradley,
Bradley penned inside the military,
a deployed soldier inside a perimeter

The voices are multiple:
of wrongness, of rage, of never
belonging, of DADT, her security
clearance no security.

The postures are multiple:
curled over a desk, curled fetal,
clenching fists, crying, screaming,
flipping tables, flipping the bird.

The labels are multiple:
MOS, 35F, PFC, Specialist,
gay, trans, gender dysphoric
traitor, victim, hero, woman.

The reactions are multiple:
bullying, scorn, vilification,
compassion, incomprehension,
indifference, pity, respect.

The wishes are multiple:
to move on from being traitor
or whistleblower, to die, to live,
to be heard, to define herself.

Devon Balwit is a poet and educator in Portland, OR.  Her work has appeared before in TheNewVerse.News and elsewhere, in places such as Unlikely Stories Mark V, Five 2 One, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Rattle.

ON HER BEHALF

a found poem
by Mac McClurkan

The sentence handed down in a trial for incest in rural Valley County, Mont., pictured here, has led to a call for the judge in the trial to be impeached. Matthew Brown/AP via NPR, October 20, 2016.

The defendant’s daughter, age 12, did not attend the sentencing hearing. No one testified on her behalf. The presiding judge in Montana cited the lack of direct input from the victim, or an advocate on behalf of the victim. The defendant, who admitted to raping his daughter multiple times, was sentenced to 60 days in jail. Court records show the victim’s mother, who testified he has two sons that still love him and need their father in their lives, walked in on the father raping the child. The victim’s mother’s mother testified the defendant’s children, especially his sons, will be devastated if their dad is no longer a part of their lives. The defendant’s daughter, age 12, did not attend the sentencing hearing. No one testified on her behalf.

Mac McClurkan is a hobby farmer, disc golf enthusiast, and aspiring writer. He lives in rural Michigan with his wife (who is a MUCH better writer), two dogs, and five chickens. 

NO CLOUDS LEFT TO COVER US

by Allie Long

Into orbit around Jupiter. Lockheed Martin built the Juno spacecraft for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Photo credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin via UniverseToday.

The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature. —NASA explaining how the space probe Juno was named.

Jupiter covers his infidelity
with thick clouds, masquerading

behind an entire atmosphere
as something we’d want to discover.

He surely looks at Earth and laughs
at the colorless vapor that veils

the outlines of land and sea, at how
we are tilted in constant bow to the sun.

We cannot cover our sins like a god.
The façade of our planet is cracked

like the skin that surrounds a laceration,
framing a picture for the Universe

of our uniformed men sweeping our black
bodies away in a flood of blood-spatter

while we choose to read lists of their crimes
as eulogies. They must die a thousand times

on our televisions and a thousand more behind
the eyelids of loved ones. We turn blue fabric

purple, soaking it in the holes our bullets dig
into the men who resemble killers. We are unable

to grant that lungs still rise and fall below
badges, that no offense can hide a dead body

as it rots without reverence in the street,
that no cloud can clot bullet wounds.

Soon, Juno will peer through Jupiter's curtain
and crash to her death on his surface,

and we will finally be forced to recognize
that a guilty man never becomes the victim.

Allie Long is an economics and English double-major at the University of Virginia. Her poetry appears in Ground Fresh Thursday, Yellow Chair Review, and Bird's Thumb.

EGG RACE

by Devon Balwit

Image by Melodi2 via Answer Angels.

I write hate crime, mass shooting, extremist,
target, victim, second amendment, make
my students copy and pronounce, make
them lift their heads from their phones
and listen, all of us awkward, the ones
fasting for Ramadan, the ones who may
be gay, the ones who, secretly, do not care,
Orlando a place they’ve never heard of
in a country they barely know; they want
my language, not my history, and this lesson,
they can do without, my fumbling to do
justice to horror, while balancing the fragile
egg of blame in my tiny spoon, trying to dash
to the finish without letting it fall, homophobia,
intolerance, assault rifles, class ends and
I’ve taught something; none of us sure what.

Devon Balwit is a writer and teacher living in the Pacific Northwest.  Her work has appeared in TheNewVerse.News twice before. Her recent work has appeared or will soon in The Fog Machine, The Cape Rock, The Fem, Of(f) Course, drylandlit_press, and The Prick of the Spindle.

READING ABOUT BROCK TURNER DECADES AFTER MY RAPE

by Larina Warnock

Image source: The Other 98%

I feel that I should be silent because this isn’t about me.
Don’t misunderstand: It is not that I believe our society
should leave each person to themselves, but that I respect
a woman’s right to her tragedy without others hanging
the weight of their own rape upon it. I am afraid
of appropriating someone else’s pain. And I want to forget.

Yet, I have woken in a cold, terrified sweat night after night
for days. There is only one sure way to not be afraid: Justice.
But a judge says justice only matters for wealthy, white men,
even when  jury says otherwise. And the most frightening
part is knowing that this means my daughters live in the same
world I did when it happened to me. Sidenote:

This is the essence of PTSD. Reading someone else’s case
and reliving one of the worst days of your life over and over
and over. You know that it is not rational, that these things are
years and years behind you, that it is unlikely that a Brock Turner
act-alike is waiting outside the door (though not impossible).
You understand clearly that the more you think about it, read
about it, get angry about it, the more afraid you will be, but you
are completely, utterly incapable of turning away, of
re-appropriating the rational person you were yesterday.

But back to my daughters. I take a deep breath and another look.
The voices of men, many men, are rising, and they are not
frightening. They are saying, “This is not okay.” They are saying,
“This is not her fault.” They are saying, “Rape is rape and this man
bears the blame. Alcohol does not a rapist make.” This is not the same
world I grew up in. This is a better place. I want to thank these men
I can trust to be just to my daughters.

I am torn between silence and gratitude and an inability to forget.

Larina Warnock teaches in Roseburg, Oregon. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction has appeared in Space & Time Magazine, The Oregonian, Touch: The Journal of Healing, Wheelhouse Magazine, Poets Market 2011, and others. She is currently working on her EdD in Education Leadership from Creighton University.