WHISTLE CHOIR

by Jennifer Clark

 Bde Maka Ska, January 31, 2026

Whistles once nesting in our throats like drowsy wrens

now fly out of their warm homes and hatch bright noises,

cracking the white glaze of ice creeping over this cold, hard land.

A whistle is a toy, is a shield, is a song of resistance 

rising above this raucous world bursting with whiny snowblowers,

chirping dishwashers, the damp sound of fear.

Whistles sway from necks and perch on the edge of lips

forming o no you don’ts. Galloping through towns,

whistlers on their midnight rides emit the same sharp staccato cry: 

Danger is coming. We love you, neighbors. Run. Do not come outside.

Some will cover their genteel ears and complain of the shrilling.

Do not grow disheartened.

Remember: you don’t need everybody.

When you grow weary, march onto the frozen skin

of Bde Maka Ska where deep below largemouth bass,

walleyes, and muskies await April’s orders.

As wind howls, stand shoulder to shoulder with your neighbors and form

an SOS sounding the alarm. As any good referee will tell you,

until the game is over, don’t set down your whistles.

Jennifer Clark’s fourth poetry collection, Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions, was recently released by Unsolicited Press. Clark is also the author of three more books, including a memoir, Kissing the World Goodbye, which blends family stories with recipes and was named a top-selling book of 2022 by Unsolicited Press. You can find her at writingwithoutanet.substack.com where she writes about writing, poetry, books, and gives out free magnets to her cartoon contest winners.

JUMP TO IT

an abecedarian

by Cecile Earle

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

A grasshopper chirping and clicking his legs
by the flower pot, sees me, sits up, rolls his eyes,
“Come on,” he says to me, “A 
dictatorship is coalescing.
Even I know—Let’s call it what it is: 
Fascism. Has a stun gun turned you into statues?
Gather your forces,” he says, “Come on
humans! All of you—Yes, you too, Cecile. Now!
In this moment! Wake up! 
Jump on it! Now! You teeter! You 
know nations can explode in a flash!
Listen! All I see you doing is waving arms,
making gestures, filing papers. And still,
nothing is coming together as this 
oligarchy solidifies like a glacier. And you?
Puzzled. Positing solutions. Talk. Talk. Stuck in glue. 
Questioning as you chatter, chatter.
Rally now.
Stop them.
Time’s up! Don’t 
use now to 
veer on the side of caution!
Wake up! Democracy! Ours! Don’t let
X and his minions rule our world!
You can do it,”  the grasshopper says, as he 
zips into the garden. Waves. “See you tomorrow.”

Cecile Earle taught English at UCB and Bay Area Colleges. She also focused on Latin American affairs and social justice as editor with the Center for the Study of the Americas in Berkeley. She has published poetry, essays, memoir, and short fiction, and she has won awards for writing on immigration, nomadic migrations in Northern Kenya, and climate change with, among others, Soul Making Keats of the National League of American Pen Women, Bay Area Poet’s Coalition, Word Peace, and the Mendocino Writer’s Conference.

DIE-OFF

by Pepper Trail

Ocean Heat Wiped Out Half These Seabirds Around Alaska: About four million common murres were killed by a domino effect of ecosystem changes, and the population is showing no signs of recovery, according to new research... [The researchers] believe it is the largest documented die-off of a single species of wild birds or mammals.  —The New York Times, December 12, 2024. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photos above: A murre colony in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, seen before and after the 2015-16 marine heat wave.

Credit...

The Arctic sea-cliffs are not silent

The birds, the murres, still throng the ledges

Black and white, sharp-eyed, clamorous

Even as half their millions are starved and dead

 

The birds, the murres, still throng the ledges

As we would still fill the New York streets

Even if half our millions were dead, crushed

Beneath weight of heat, a fatality never imagined

 

We would still fill the New York streets

Though senseless with grief, with loneliness

After a heat, a fatality never before imagined

A disaster beyond our comprehension

 

Though senseless with loneliness

The birds still fly, feed, tend their young

Despite a disaster beyond comprehension

Their world changed beyond recognition

 

Here, we would still work, tend our children

There would be no choice, never any choice

But in a world changed beyond recognition

A warning that could no longer be ignored

 

We would have no choice, at last no choice

If the dying took millions from a great city

The warning could then no longer be ignored

But this happened far away, a distant warming sea

 

This dying took millions of only birds

Somewhere far away, a distant warming sea

Just another warning to be ignored

The Arctic cliffs, after all, have not yet fallen silent

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

LEAFLET

by William Aarnes

Imagine yourself old enough

to have survived Operations

Cast Lead and Protective Edge.

 

Imagine a fellow refugee

            videoing flyers drifting

down from a blue sky,

 

then focusing on you

            as you pick up a leaflet

                        at once a plea for news

 

about pictured hostages

            and an implicit warning

                        that soon your current shelter

 

will be demolished by bombs.

Imagine knowing the world

can see what’s happening.

 

Imagine knowing the world

keeps failing to react.

Imagine your dulled terror,  

 

your bewildered loyalty,

your desperate rage.

Imagine your aimless trek.

 

Imagine your imagining

there’s somewhere to go

where the flyers

 

won’t drift down again

to tell you to keep moving.

Imagine the leaflet

 

as one of the keepsakes

            that will give purpose

to your children’s lives.   

William Aarnes lives in Manhattan.  For perspective he recommends Norman C. Finkelstein's Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.

SHISHI-ODOSHI IN THE CONSTITUTION GARDEN

by Richard L. Matta 

A bamboo pipe

sun-bleached to parchment paper white

trickles water like truth

makes deliveries to a receiver pipe,  

and when it’s had enough, it doesn’t lie still 

but sounds an alert. 

Big red dragonflies 

alight on the pipe, as if to refute the value

of the water, and all the while 

little blue dashers 

zigzag for attention. The lower rocker pipe 

fills and pivots and spills 

and smacks a rock and

who should stay in place 

but the big red dragonflies. 

The device is like a gavel for everyone to hear

but despite the crack 

it’s become background static.

Not even a deer or boar

would hesitate to spy and steal 

and disrupt the plentiful garden 

where a shishi-odoshi 

is just an artful design. 

Richard L. Matta grew up in New York and now lives in San Diego. Some of his work is found in Ancient Paths, Dewdrop, San Pedro River Review, Third Wednesday, Gyroscope, and many international haiku journals. 

HAZE

by Ron Riekki

            “a slight obscuration of the lower atmosphere, typically caused by fine suspended particles” 

—Oxford Languages 

 

“Shortly after the police report was released to KTSM, NMSU chancellor Dan Arvizu announced the men’s basketball program had been shut down for the remainder of the 2022-23 season.” 

—KTSM, February 12, 2023

 

 

My ex- went to NMSU. I visited it and, 

there, she started singing a song by 

 

Everything But the Girl, but changing 

the lyrics, so that instead it was, her 

 

voice beautifully off-key: NMSU, 

like the deserts miss the rain! So that 

 

‘And I miss you’ became the initials 

for her university, and she loved it there, 

 

she said. And I asked why and she said 

Because it was affordable. And I asked 

 

if there was anything else and she said, 

My friends were there. And I felt safe. 

 

And things change. Time flies. And in 

my mind, I go back in time so often. Some- 

 

times I think that’s what trauma is, this 

constant forcing of the mind back in time. 

 

When they hazed me in baseball—no, 

when Scott hazed me, when I just wanted 

 

to play baseball, came up behind me, 

pinned me to the ground, pressed into me, 

 

this future homecoming court member, 

the summer sun burning its light in my 

 

eyes, my arms Christed at my sides, 

and he’d spit, over and over, in my face, 

 

sucking it back into his mouth, no purpose 

except control, and his father was best friends 

 

with my father, the sickness of childhood, 

the dirt anxious below us, the tree branches 

 

trembling in the lack of wind, and when 

they hazed me in basketball—no, when 

 

Bud hazed me when I just wanted to play 

basketball, in a way similar to NMSU, 

 

in a way similar to Florida A&M, similar 

to Binghamton, the forced public nudity, 

 

then throwing me into a pool, and when 

I joined the military, it was like some 

 

infestation, how you don’t fear the quote- 

unquote enemy as much as you fear those 

 

around you, in your barracks, the blanket 

party done on a kid ten bunks down from 

 

mine, how they came in the night and I 

woke to the sound of fists in the darkness 

 

and it wasn’t me, but it would be, later, 

the “Crucifixions” they did at my duty 

 

stations, tying you to a fence, reminding 

me of Matthew Shepard, and they’d take 

 

rotten food they’d left in the jungle heat 

for days, pour it over your head, insects, 

 

the clock, your wrists, the vomit, and 

the repetition, so often, and so many 

 

who didn’t even fight, how they came for 

me, in the night, because I did not want to 

 

reenact hell, how they’d come up behind 

you, duct tape your mouth shut, your 

 

arms, to the chair, wheel you down 

the hall, clatter you outside, transfer 

 

you to fence, your body a map, time 

a skull, hate a latrine, and they killed 

 

one of us, during training, murdered, 

Lee, his name, Lee, Midwestern, like 

 

me, and the “violent physical hazing” 

at the University of Michigan is VCU’s 

 

death is University of Missouri’s student 

who’s blind now, can’t walk, can’t talk 

 

now, and the list of incidents, the copious 

amounts of alcohol, the unconscious-and- 

 

flown, the hit-his-head, and asphyxiation, 

the collapsed-lung, the polytrauma, and 

 

this is normative? and I see them, see 

their photos, of those killed, yearbook 

 

photos, where they glow, dressed in black, 

new glasses, smiles of hope, hair trimmed 

 

yesterdays, majors of Aviation, Engineering, 

Ecology, Middle East Studies, Social Work, 

 

and I’m teary looking at their photos, this 

sudden caesura,  the blank page,  knowing 

 

at least one university hazing death per 

year, from 1969 to now, with hundreds 

 

of deaths since 1838, with the most deaths 

at Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the University 

 

of Alabama. And this isn’t a poem. It’s 

a warning. And this isn’t a poem. It’s 

 

a war. And this isn’t a poem. It’s non- 

fiction. And this isn’t a poem. It’s hell. 

 

And I go to the college to complain about 

this and someone warns me, telling me 

 

not to do it, that I’m just wasting my time, 

and I do it anyway, and I’m in his office, 

 

and I explain to him how I’ve been 

harassed on this campus, and how I know 

 

others are being too, that it’s happening 

here, now, and he listens—no, he doesn’t 

 

listen, he hears me, sort of, and says, 

Look, I’m drowning with complaints. 

 

What do you want me to do about it? 

And I tell him that I want it to stop, 

 

that we need it to stop, and he looks 

at me and says, OK.  How? And I 

 

tell him that that’s his job and he sighs 

and says, OK, thanks for stopping in 

 

and I ask him what he’s going to do 

and he starts escorting me to the door 

 

and I repeat it again and he says, 

You want me to be honest? And I say 

 

that I do. And he says, Nothing. 

And the door closes behind me. 

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.