Michael Minassian: Cinéma Vérité

This morning, I look out my window

and think I see an old girlfriend

standing under a tree holding a gun.

Then realize it was the next-door neighbor

watering her lawn, aiming the nozzle

of the hose in my direction.

My ex, a psychiatric nurse, liked

to take a silver-plated pistol

out of her purse before we went to bed.

After I saw her for the last time,

she turned up at a friend’s wedding

and threatened to shoot her former husband.

Even though I felt sorry for her,

I didn’t want the added drama.

Let her be in someone else’s movie,

I thought, but often wonder

what happened to her, self-destructive,

unhappy, drinking wine at nine

in the morning when she gets home

from her night shift, her patients

still asleep in the cinema of her pain.

Michael Minassian is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, A Matter of Timing and Jack Pays a Visit, are all available on Amazon. His collection 1000 Pieces of Time was released October, 2025 by Sheila-Na-Gig. 

https://michaelminassian.com

Gus Peterson: Love Poem for the Terminally Online

I hearts. 

I likes like love, 

love instead of like 

whenever it’s allowed. 

I refresh. I feed. I watch 

the aortic, the ventricular, 

the four chambered all 

of it lift like a spark out

from under my thumb. 

I feed. I refresh. I block. 

I am needy, not a fool. 

No one like that has ever

requested the likes of 

me. Hashtag duck lips. 

Hashtag tropical setting, 

living your best bronzed

beach life. Still, I check. 

It’s a fact we’re never truly 

alone. That love can be

emoji-less, a secret admirer

construction cut from 

the most bloodshot paper, 

slipped onto your desk

some grey February day

after recess. Oh, my heart. 

Oh, scroll on. How, for weeks 

after in the halls, on the playground, 

I looked for clues. No google. 

No metaverse to guide. 

Only that programmed language 

of kindness. Its everlasting 

encryption. God, feed what’s left of me 

into the algorithm. Feed what’s left 

until this so-called world drowns 

beneath the red wave of 

its longing. 

Gus Peterson lives and writes in Maine. His work is forthcoming with Prairie Schooner, Hole in the Head Review, and locally. He decompresses by co-hosting a monthly poetry salon at his favourite bread/bookstore. His first book, Male Pattern, was published in 2025 by Finishing Line Press. 

Ojo Olumide Emmanuel: Shards

Bruises are measured with the pinch of a finger.

i crave your voice & a morgue came.

i have unearthed my heart for you

i search my ears for the last beep of your voice, your laugh.

this world is strange, but what's more strange is

how each passing moment drowns you in an elusive frenzy

of what could have worked.

i observed my feet, they ache.

ached from a journey i thought had ended.

& damning thought that what/who

you call home is only a steam in a kettle- it never stays

it leaps & distance keeps stretching itself

the first poem i wrote after you became a bird is that:

if you were a dove, you'd bear home on your back & return

but when the poem conjured an owl, i knew you had gripped

the night & night is a peevish hope-

it dribbles dawn even when it tries to flicker rays on dimples.

again, in my meditation, i saw a gale around a stream.

i was washing my weariness & i tried to hold you in my arms.

as i came nearer, you dissolved like a gust of glucose on the tongue.

i waited, stared at the nothingness you've become;

i prayed & prayed & prayed

& i went back to bathe my weariness a second time.

mum says, someday your wings will dust itself above my roof;

she exhorts that i feed my heart butter because

hope does get fat & when it is plump,

it morphs into faith. & yes, i have faith, but

i have never tried it on what's lost.

Ojo Olumide Emmanuel is a Nigerian Poet and Book Editor. He is the author of the Poetry Chapbook "How Flowers Pollinate Before the Arrival of Butterflies (Authorpaedia, 2022). He is the winner of the Nigerian Prize for Indigenous Language (Pidgin, 2025) and the WeNaija Literary Contest (Non-Fiction, 2023).

Jackie Chou: God Is the Best Timpani Player in the Universe

Circular ripples

punctuate

the wet pavement 

I open the glass door

stepping into 

the frigid air 

How quickly 

my hair dampens

in the outpouring!

I tilt toward 

my reflection 

in the puddle 

The music of rain 

has drummed

into my ears

How close 

I have come to 

tipping over

Jackie Chou is a poet from Southern California. Her work has recently appeared in Lee Herrick's Our California Project. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Sorceress and Finding My Heart in Love and Loss (Cyberwit Press). 

May Garner: To Learn To Endure

Some things arrive without asking:

the tilt of a jaw,

the way silence settles in the chest.

I carry my family in my body –

every apology that went unspoken,

every night that taught us

how to swallow silence.

Some things arrive without asking:

the tilt of a jaw,

the way silence settles in the chest.

This is how we are passed down:

not in stories, but in what we learn

to endure.

May Garner is an author and poet residing in rural Ohio. She has been writing for nearly fifteen years and has been sharing her writing online for over a decade. She is the author of two poetry collections, Withered Rising (2023) and Melancholic Muse (2025). Find her work on Instagram (@crimson.hands).

Howie Good: AI Blues

It’s a cold, hard world – literally. The snow on the ground has crusted over. Walking the dogs or out to the car is as treacherous for someone with my old bones as wing walking in an aerial circus would be. Aging has broken me little by little, part by part, kind of like a slow-acting poison. My heart is chipped and dented, and my head crawling with monsters. No one knows the real me, including me. In the Book of Isiah an angel touches the lips of the prophet with a burning coal in a rite of purification. What can I help you with today? my AI copilot asks.

Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author.

Daniel Romo: Sequel

I’m uncertain if the man in the Target parking lot

is actually playing or if his clarinet is merely rigged

to the speaker welcoming tips and ignorance;

that’s how it goes until perception meets finality.

And when I recently sat next to my 20-something

son watching a movie about magicians, the sound-

track I played for myself was different than when

I sat next to my now 70-something dad a decade

ago and saw a movie in which a man killed a

Grizzly with only a knife and grit. These days

I’m filled with more answers than questions as

if I forgot to ask the basics such as, How was your

day, son? We either succumb to or strangle the

bears that appear before us, the way a dad shapes

or breaks a legacy with his bare hands, and at 52,

I’m only now beginning to examine the effect

my callouses have had on those whose hands

I’ve ever held. After the movie, I hugged my

son goodbye until the next time I flew in to

see him and I stepped into the center of the

subway car, my body balanced by a pole as if

propping up a man learning how to mend each

bad note he’s ever played.

Daniel Romo's latest book is American Manscape (Moon Tide Press 2026). More at danieljromo.com. 

LaVern Spencer McCarthy: Looking At My Brother's Photograph

 I was washing dishes the day

my brother was slapped into the Army.

Smirking and bold, loaded with

eighteen years of belligerence,

he was lounging at the kitchen table

bad-mouthing my uncle, not there to defend

his treacherous ways.

 

Mother, always handy with water-blistered knuckles,

knocked Harold all the way

to the recruiter's office.

Afterward, a Greyhound bus

propelled his furious momentum

toward boot camp.

 

He returned two years later

body-bagged and silent, all rebellion

lost in a rice paddy somewhere in Viet Nam.

Mother cried, but I stood at his coffin

angrily plucking petals

from his spray of long-stemmed roses,

wondering how he came to be dead

from a single slap.

 

 

LaVern Spencer McCarthy is a state and nationally awarded poet. She has written and published five books of poetry, five books of short stories and three journals. She is a life member of Poetry Society of Texas and National Federation of Poetry Societies. She lives in Blair, Oklahoma.

Mukut Borpujari: Stoic

It’s already summer, and we’re getting rid

of clothes, getting ready to greet

the scorching days ahead;

making the place airy and less cluttered.

We’re living on the edge, restructuring the house,

getting rid of the old furnitures,

obsolete machineries and funny gadgets.

A small table in the kitchen for two. Our world is

changing, our wardrobes mostly empty;

gone are the skinny jeans and the fancy moccasins—

the windchimes and the trinkets.

When someone comes to visit and admires

our complete works of Yeats,

the peacock feather in the open thesaurus,

the mantle vase on a shelf, we say

take them. This is the most important

time of all, the age of dissipation,

knowing full well what we are divesting is

like the fragrance of a burning incense stick

that lingers hours after it has been doused.

An ordinary Friday afternoon

when one of us stared,

and the other one just laughed.

Mukut Borpujari (he/him) is a freelance writer and a poet. He has a plethora of poems and articles published in top journals around the world. An active member of the Greenpeace Movement, he has a deep-rooted conviction about nature and the natural world. His other hobbies include computers & Internet, and driving.

Paulette Calasibetta: The Blood We Share

in dusty archives

you carried silent hope

walked

damp earth

marked by granite

headstones

weighted   memories

hushed

beneath the soil

you carried

a birth certificate

like a memento

haunted by

faceless names

wrinkled

and frayed

in the width

of time.

your beard

grows white ~

fingers tremble

unsilenced hope

flows in the

blood we share,

our mother’s

secret

unearthed.

Paulette Calasibetta is inspired by nature, and the spirit of the human condition; motivated by celebrations of life, and the weight of the hollowness of grief. Published in Ariel Chart, October Hill, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, Spank the Carp, and various other publications and anthologies.