Guidelines



Submission Guidelines: Send unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

BLOODBATH

 by Ron Riekki

 



                                               “If you expect nothing
from somebody

                                                you are never disappointed.”

                                                            —Sylvia Plath

 

If I don’t get elected,

it’s going to be a bloodbath…

 

It’s going to be a bloodbath

for the country.

 

Bloodbath—coined in 1867.

1867—the transatlantic slave trade

 

“ends.” Blood red state said,

“The candidate is candid,” but did

 

you realize he’s inciting another

insurrection, an opposite of Resurrection

 

with Easter coming up, playing possum,

a country in toxic immobility, a wrath,

 

a hoodwink, a flood path we walked,

knee-deep, after the storm, the sewage,

 

age 18, me and a friend, Boston, cars

drowned. “It already is a bloodbath,”

 

she says. Adds, “And we’ve already lost.”

There’s a birdbath outside my window,

 

Dearborn, no birds, no deer, no births,

a friend having a miscarriage. There’s

 

a smell outside like hell outside, the factories

in the not-so-distant distance greying the sky

 

violently, no insight, no sun in sight, buried

by clouds, or smoke, or both. “It’s going to be

 

a bloodbath,” my ex- says, choked on the words,

mocks. The clock ticks in the other room, or

 

is that water dripping in the shower? A madness.

Blathering on and on on the TV. We listen. Scared.

 

“He looks like a Star Wars villain.” “Children

are watching this.” “I hope not.” “He has cash

 

in his blood.” Bloodbath dumbass scumbags

aftermath sociopath car-crash collapse. “I always

 

imagine him with a Hitler mustache.” Fat naps.

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.”—Plath.

 

Gasps. Gaps. I read a story about Roman Polanski

walking onto the set of Macbeth that he was directing.

 

the set designer supposed to be filling the room with blood, but

Polanski looked, said, “It’s not enough.” They added more.

 

“It’s not enough.” They added more blood. He said it wasn’t

enough. He said he was there, had seen it; it wasn’t enough

 

blood. Manson murderers targeted Polanski’s home. He’d seen.

“More blood,” he said, “It’s not enough.” My ex-: “How is he

 

even running again? How is this happening?” It’s a repetition.

I was in Macbeth once. We’d say the name of the play, didn’t

 

care about the curse. The boy who played The Boy in the play

killed himself, the week of previews. Macduff’s son. The egg.

 

He jumped off a bluff. Landed in a field. Not found for a week.

I was Macduff. I was bad. I was young. I was not ready for

 

the role. I feel like that now. The bad reviews, of me, at least.

My family, slaughtered. The Boy, a friend of mine. The fall.

 

At the end, the decapitated head. The death. The wooden stage.

The poor attendance. The bad politics, even back then. Poverty

 

in my mining hometown. My boyhood. How I stood on stage

after it was done, the place empty, and from the back of our

 

theater, I saw The Boy, my friend, emerge from the shadows,

and I swear to God, how he appeared, dead, but still there, stepping

 

out, of the silence, the madness of that role, the method acting

I tried to do, failed, succeeded, both, a good attempt, a good

 

failure, and then him, here, there, in front of me, in the dark-

light, this friend, ended, how he stood there, looking at me,

 

and I froze, flecks of blood on his face—no, his face only

blood, and his mouth opened, and he stepped back, and he

 

was gone. And my ex- leaves the room. And I turn off

the volume on the television. And the Presidential candid-

 

ate stood there, stands there, his teeth like ghosts, ghost-like teeth,

his hat like hate, his arterial cap, the horror of this country,

 

the terror of this moment, the repetition of it all, how I’ve

seen this same snippet, comment, from him, already thirteen

 

times today, and the room is silent, and I turn my head and

look to the right, a room that we didn’t know until we’d

 

already paid the rent, signed the lease, but we’d found on-

line that someone had killed himself in this apartment, our

 

apartment, where we lived; of course, it happens, they don’t tell you,

you move in, find out, stumble on it. And I looked into the room.



Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

Monday, March 18, 2024

CIVILIAN SPACES

by Tricia L. Somers


AI-generated image by Shutterstock


Heaven just sounds
like another kind of hell
Truth is the most
dangerous tale to tell
 
With the Torah
in one hand
and 2-ton bombs
in the other they prey
 
on children and their families
Chased from home
to rescue facility
No such thing as a safe place
 
Gas explorations
off the coast of Gaza
All hail to money
and to wealth be the power
 
Hallelujah and Amen
in His image
A reflection of creator
seen in the creation
 
It used to scare me to think
What if there is no god?
Now it scares me to think
What if there is?


Trish is out of L.A. CA where she lives with her Significant Other and a crazy cat or two. Online her poetry can be found at The New Verse News and Rat's Ass Review where she is an active member of the workshop. Offline, she has fierce debates with the cantankerous editor of The American Dissident print journal where she has poetry and essays. To read her take on current issues, and/ or say hi, please visit her newsletter Bitch n' Complain on Substack.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

AYITI, MA CHÈRIE

by Jerrice J. Baptiste


Le Nègre Marron


A long-simmering crisis over Haiti’s ability to govern itself, particularly after a series of natural disasters and an increasingly dire humanitarian emergency, has come to a head in the Caribbean nation, as its de facto president remains stranded in Puerto Rico and its people starve and live in fear of rampant violence. —NBC News, March 15, 2024


I long for sanctuaries of your forests.
Chirping bird—Hispaniolan Trogon.
Enduring name of long ago
La Perle des Antilles
Shimmering light.

I long for your full peasant skirts
flowing with countryside
breeze, where bare 
feet imprint
sand.

I long to be eating sizzling Fritaille 
griot, fried plantains, and pikliz 
of red & yellow hot bonnet 
peppers dancing 
in my belly.

I long for Krik-Krak from uncles. 
Stories told in backyards.
Laughter of familiar 
voices greeting
moonlight.

I long to bathe your infants 
in tranquil turquoise sea.
Dress your daughters
in white organza 
fabric.

I long for your Taino fathers
wearing red & indigo flags 
during carnival or Rara
dancing to Djembe 
rhythm.

I long for your Taino mothers 
Poto-Mitan, ivory backbone 
of our homes. Selling
clusters of quenepe
at street market.

I long for your white conch shell 
blown by bronze lips  
breaking chains.
Le Nègre 
Marron.


Jerrice J. Baptiste is an author of eight books and a poet in residence at the Prattsville Art Center & Residency in NY.  She is extensively published in journals and magazines such as Artemis Journal, The Yale Review, Mantis, Eco Theo Review, The Caribbean Writer, and many others. Jerrice has been nominated as Best of The Net by Blue Stem. She has been facilitating poetry workshops for eighteen years.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

THE PATTIE BOYD COLLECTION AT CHRISTIE’S

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

 

 



Dear Beatles fans,

 

You may picture me as a saucer-eyed flower 

child with golden hair and thigh-high skirts. 

 

I’m eighty now, a lot more covered, a lot more knowing—

 

yet I still don’t understand why George 

soured on me. In “Something,” the song 

he wrote for me, he said I don’t need no other 

 

lover, but that was a lie. You should know—

like picking bon bons from a gift box, he slept 

with any girl he fancied. Until he slept with Ringo’s 

 

wife in our mansion—

yes, I caught them in a bedroom.

Eric, my second husband, pursued me for years, 

 

wrote “Layla” for me. But he, too, couldn’t keep

his sex in his pants. And he drank. 

When he had a child 

 

with his Italian lover, while I was trying

to have a child with him, 

I had to go. Demolished.

 

My womb refused to flower for either spouse.

 

Reading their letters now, thinking

how they trashed my love, is it any wonder

I’m selling these reminders?

 

Old age is expensive. 

The doctor visits, the tests, the treatments—

 

Once I was a sylph with the palest skin and hair, 

too naive to demand more alimony 

from two multi-millionaires

 

who slayed the world with their guitars.

 

 

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Consequence, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Sparks of Calliope.

Friday, March 15, 2024

THE COMEBACK KID

by Marshall Begel


Figure skater Alysa Liu, seen here at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, is to come out of retirement and return to competition.


The years since my retirement
Have left me unfulfilled—
Not meeting the requirement
For one uniquely skilled.

My body's manifested change
Since I was in my prime.
Returning to a decent range
Would be an uphill climb.

But I will muster up support—
Ambition? I have plenty.
But time to shine is running short,
For soon, I'm turning twenty!


Marshall Begel lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He has several pieces in Light and Lighten Up Online.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

THE ARAVA

by Betty Cohen


Fathom deputy editor Jack Omer-Jackaman speaks with Tareq Abu Hamed and Eliza Mayo of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, an academic research centre operating with the premise that cooperation on environmental issues that impact all the people in the Middle East is an effective path to building cooperation among communities that have been locked in conflict for generations. The student body of the Arava Institute, located on Kibbutz Keturah, just north of Eilat in the southernmost part of Israel, is comprised of one-third Israeli Arabs, one-third Jewish Israelis and one-third internationals from neighboring Arab countries. Over the course of an academic semester, these students work together on solutions to issues such as climate change and water scarcity and cleanliness, while developing trust and working relationships. (Source: Intermountain Jewish News, February 22, 2024)


I sit on the stone patio
of the apartment
on a kibbutz
in the desert
which settlers
have brought to bloom.
Trees cast shadows 
patterning the red bricks
with shadows of leaves.
Indoors ten-inch tan tiles
form the cool floor
of the rented furnished
two bedroom apartment.
This visit is to meet
my newborn great-grandson.
The air is thick with silence,
the sky pale blue.
Prior to settling in the desert
to make the desert bloom,
his father, my grandson,
lived with me.
When the kibbutz
was newly formed
a neighboring Palestinian farmer,
across the border,
came to present the kibbutz
with a camel,
his token of Peace,
which still reigns
here in the Arava.



Betty Cohen, a Princeton NJ resident, is now in Arava to see her great-grandson. She introduced this poem via Zoom to her Princeton-area weekly poetry workshop colleagues.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

GHOST LAKE

by Sally Zakariya


A kayaker on Lake Manly at sunset in Death Valley National Park, California on Tuesday. (Bridget Bennett for The Washington Post, March 1, 2024)


They don’t call it Death Valley for nothing.
Dry, desolate desert—who’d expect
an ancient lake to reclaim its old home?

I’m back, the waters whisper to Badwater Basin,
its soil salty with geologic tears, memories
of a time long gone.

Ninety miles long, six hundred feet deep—
that was then, before the last ice age
gave way to a warmer world.

Native peoples, a gold rush, borax mines, 
twenty-mule teams—a busy history 
for the nation’s driest spot.

Now rain, rain, record-breaking rain 
has resurrected the lake, thanks to climate
change gone out of control.

But put your kayak away. Already
the ghost lake is evaporating,
too shallow now for boats.

Farewell, the waters murmur. But
if the humans don’t take care, I’ll
be back before you know it.



Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 100 publications and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table, and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

MY FATHER'S TREES

by Rikki Santer


The Yatir Forest in Israel ends at the border with Palestine. The largest human-created forest in Israel, 12-square-mile Yatir was created in the 1960s on semi-arid land with four million trees, 90 percent of them Aleppo pine. —National Geographic, March 24, 2023


after Hamas, after Gaza


A ring of trees in Israel

encircle his legacy, a memorial

from his bowling buddies

three decades ago. The certificate

declared from Leviticus:

When you come to the land

you shall plant trees.

My father never visited that land

and neither have I but I trust

his trees are there still in the Negev Desert

perhaps an arboreal Heinz 57 of carob,

redbud, olive, almond, pear, cypress,

cedar, and oak. 


Bologna sauce is what my father

cooed he’d squeeze out of me

when his hugs were hymns

in gratitude for finally finding

the good life with wife, daughter, son.

His ideas of assimilated Jewish

migrated to my secular shaping. 

Synagogue just on high holidays, 

Sabbath just another Friday night

for cheeseburgers and Hogan’s Heroes. 

And Zionist? He was more B’nai Brith 

bowling league and temple dues.


These days I imagine his Israeli trees

forsaken by milk and honey. Their roots

sponging up bloodshed. Their skins

trembling with gunfire and bomb.

Their bent architecture davening

a shameful Kaddish.

Their barren fractals of branches

reaching and reaching 

for nothing but air.



Rikki Santer’s poetry has been published widely and has received many honors including several Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2023 she was named Ohio Poet of the Year.  She is currently serving as vice-president of the Ohio Poetry Association and is a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council.  Her twelfth poetry collection Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.

FIRING MORAH

by Stacey Z Lawrence



Morah Hebrew School Teacher Mug



I lean on a miniature 

sea blue chair, the color of Israel

& conduct my class to the curtain call with a 

rudimentary rendition of 

Hatikvah. The boys & girls adjust their babushkas 

torn from superhero 

sheets. They pretend to be partisans, they pretend

to survive genocide with water guns & plastic bricks

plopping the toy props across the stage like burial plots


& the synagogue chapel 

explodes

in waves of gratitude reigning 

down, micro-rubble crushed 

under rubber spinning & spinning 

strikes me as my students hold hands

swaying like paper cut-outs 

mouthing Hebrew words they 

do not understand

squinting & studying me, 

their Morah’s lips we blast


out this anthem beak fed from birth 

myths spun from milk, guts, honey &

the soot of charred Jews 

chanting hollow prayers into green wind 

we cradle some bald-cackling madcap 

who flies rabid dragonflies beyond his fancy 

fence like  

Dylan Klebold with a broken console 

       Boom, Boom, Kaboom, 

Fizz, Kaboom, Fizzle, Silence.


He crunches on fried falafel tossing

bits of chicks & peas, digging the edge of

that six-pointed star between his yellow teeth

planting olive trees & Long Island Zionists

beneath Alephs & Bets 

like Herzl’s Thieves of the West

his flying monkeys, 

stripping us of our Ashkenazi selves 


our Yiddish, our guttural cadence,

depositing our smoldering mishpocha

us Kikes still stinking of Zyklon B,

bitter the almond smell of 

neglected eggs, shoveling us 

beneath BritishpoundsAmericandollars,

wailing limestone.



Author's note: In December of 2023, days after the congregation celebrated my work with my students, the local synagogue fired me, prohibiting my entrance forever. It was the first night of Chanukah. 



Stacey Z Lawrence is a veteran teacher of English and a Literature Professor. She has an MAT in Theater and Speech and is a poet for Writing The Land, a collaboration between poets and protected land. Her poetry was shortlisted for the Fish Prize in 2019, and 2021 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. Stacey’s first collection of poems Fall Risk was released to acclaim in August 2021 through Finishing Line Press