Guidelines



Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

THE INEQUITY OF JUSTICE

A Sestina

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper




Dreams die in the blood of children,                                          
embryos born from the seeds of sorrow,
the milk of starvation, the torture
of chains and broken bones, the searching
of scorched earth; of survival as the “other.”
Mother and child, deported, disappear.

A cancer-ridden toddler and his mother disappear.
The video follows the mother, struggling to free her child
from the chains that bind them to “others,”
to the brutal and inhumane soldiers, deaf to sorrow,
prodding them toward a military plane, after searching
naked bodies with naked hatred as prodding guns torture
 
the nameless, bent and broken, then pack them in tortured
positions, until the engines roar, the plane lifts, and America disappears.
Activists march in the streets, carrying signs of protest, searching,
their eyes and ears alert to the danger of their neighbors. Children
and strangers in their midst, yet unaware of pain and sorrow, 
might be kidnapped, handcuffed, and thrown into cars with “others.”  
 
As if on cue, masked men swoop down upon “others,”
targets of skin and color, a mother and three daughters, tortured 
by HSI in their own home, left with smashed lives of fear and sorrow,
shivering in their underwear, in the rain, until the men with guns disappear,
leaving terror, and trauma cut with razor blades, on the backs of children
 looking for meaning in sleep, and awaken to desperate searching. 
 
Is there no end to a life whose desperate searching
leaves scars and barriers to block all “others,”
grieving as ICE hunts men, women, and children.?
The loss of deported loved ones enduring torture
affects human beings who mourn their disappearance,
and pursue justice in community and legal searches.?
 
Today, a Vermont man was not deported. Released from sorrow,
returning to his community which made, rehearsed, and researched 
plans to release him, they acted to assure his reappearance.
Hope returns with him, to all of us in helping “others”
escape the lawlessness of criminals in their acts of torturing
“Illegal aliens”, the name given to adults and innocent children.
 
            How much longer can children endure grief, sorrow, and torture?
Who will name these children? Why are they the “others”?  Has justice disappeared?


Lucille Gang Shulklapper is the published author of five chapbooks of poetry,  short stories, and picture books. Her work appears in journals, magazines, and online. She has taught reading from K-college, made recordings for the blind, and led workshops for The Florida Center for the Book, and others. Though she wrote from the age of six, she was never published until  the age of 60. Three decades later, she has started an Open Mic Poetry Program for her residential, and assisted living fellow retirees.   She lives in Boca Raton, Florida. 

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE?

by Bonnie Naradzay


Israel has grandiosely labeled its latest genocidal move "Operation Gideon's Chariots" wherein, moving from siege to seizure, it plans the bloody conquest, ethnic cleansing, and permanent recolonization of Gaza, using the rhetoric of holy war to justify unholy mass destruction - this, even as many of the Palestinian children who've somehow survived their savage 18 months of carnage now slowly starve to death. Photo: Osama Al-Raqab, 6, is one of tens of thousands of Gazan children slowly starving. Screenshot from NBC. —Common Dreams, May 6, 2025



What kind of times are these,
asked Brechtwhen a conversation 
about trees is almost a crime 
because it entails a silence about 
so many misdeeds!  And so
is it fitting to converse about
the ephemeral cherry blossoms
that graced the Tidal Basin trees.?
Elected felons spout obscenities. 
“Have you no sense of decency,” 
someone finally asked McCarthy.
I have grown numb to incivilities. 
The Slaughter of the Innocents
continues again without a pause,
since Israel broke the ceasefire
two months ago and halted
all food, water, and medicine.
Yet people here are arrested
and deported for decrying 
the deliberate slaughter
and starvation of the people
of Gaza, the burning of tents 
in “safe zones” where 
the displaced are sleeping.
Israel calls its war crimes
“Operation Gideon’s Chariots.”
What kind of times are these?
Yesterday, and again today,
for those still counting, 
Israel detonated drones 
and US-made bunker bombs 
in Gaza, killing over 100 
people each day; and 27 
children were said to have 
starved to death already today 
you could count all their ribs 
in these dark times
when we cannot see
the forest for the trees.


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. 

Monday, May 12, 2025

BELATED INAUGURAL POEM

by Paul Hostovsky




Bumptious was Wednesday’s
Webster’s Word of the Day,
and because it kind of rhymes 
with the guy in the White House
and because it’s the perfect word
for what he is—rudely and noisily 
overconfident and over-assertive—
and because it comes from bump 
and the suffix -tious, which gives us
other apposite modifiers such as
captious and fractious, which also
perfectly describe this guy for whom
no one was inspired to write an inaugural poem—
neither the first time around nor the second—
and because the opposite of bumptious 
is humble, a word that is not in his vocabulary, 
and finally, because better late than never, 
I offer you this belated poem on the occasion 
of the inauguration of the bumptious dick
(which is a perfect example of synecdoche, i.e.
that part of him representing the whole of him)
who does not represent me, who does not represent 
anyone I know or love, who does not represent
anything I believe in—which is not only a fact,
a true fact, but a good example of anaphora.


Paul Hostovsky’s poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and Best of the Net. He has been published in Poetry, Passages North, Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, The Sun, and many other journals and anthologies. He has won a Pushcart Prize, the Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Award, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, Frank Cat Press, Split Oak Press, and Sport Literate. Paul has thirteen full-length collections of poetry, the most recent being Pitching for the Apostates (2023). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. He lives with his wife Marlene in Medfield, Massachusetts.

Sunday, May 11, 2025

THE GOOD NEWS

by Joanne De Simone Reynolds


AI-generated image from Dreamstime.


for
billions:
 
white
bird
 
column 
of 
smoke:
 
America’s
leonine
antidote
 
to
vice
 
injustices 
 
+ dogedom 
 

Joanne De Simone Reynolds watches the progress of the nation and the world from the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean. Some of her work can be viewed at http://theumbrellaarts.org/

PEACE TO ALL

by Indran Amirthanayagam


Many people who worked with Pope Leo XIV when he was Bishop Robert Prevost of Chiclayo, Peru, couldn’t hold back tears when his election was announced on May 8. For them, it was not just a sign that God answered their prayers for a new pope who would follow Francis’s path, but also the confirmation that they had been guided by an extraordinary leader. —CRUX, May 9, 2025


Peace be with you

We are suffering 
the pandemic. 
We are hungry 
and we need 
to breathe. 

We need 
oxygen tanks 
in Chiclayo. 
I will get you 
the tanks

We need food. 
We need to walk 
the empty streets
and knock on 
every door
and leave 

food and water.
We need to bring 
the sick to hospital 
and help them to breathe. 

This is pastoral work.
This is Archbishop 
Robert Prevost,
now Pope Leo 
the Fourteenth.


Indran Amirthanayagam has just published his translation of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books, 2025). Other recent publications include Seer (Hanging Loose Press) and The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil). He is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

Saturday, May 10, 2025

THE FIRST 100 DAYS

by Akua Lezli Hope


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


I rebuke calm voices sitting around tables 
decatastrophizing recontextualizing, 
explaining this inexplicable harm
incalculably mounting, betraying trusts, alarming allies
banishing wards, destroying safeties, conscripting civilities
this insanity this madness, this indifference that grabs
that disrupts, that destructs as if our prior state flawed
as it was somehow merited this manic monstrous mayhem
that peace we knew 100 days ago,
somehow called to be smashed and spat upon
as if any of what was wrong then,
called for the dismantling of all our frameworks
leaving us frail exposed unprotected unprotected,
this dire daily detonation of assistance, food banks,
literacies, the hows of how we made do, made it through,
assured ourselves our air would be clean and the hungry
could be fed and access gained and opinions expressed
and why are the town criers, these well-fed talking heads
not running screaming through the streets
with hair on fire and why are these transgressions
relayed piecemeal in calm tones
bit by disassociated incoherent bit
without anyone saying it’s all torn up
it’s all torn down, you may not see the whole
but it’s falling down yes yes the sky is falling
by eccentric emergency, executive fiat
by a rapacious, murdering, lying, orange clown
and now rush out dearies to hold the exploded
earth, the shattered reality, floating away in this
inverted gravity, hurry citizens to grapple with these
fragments and hold them, before all is lost, hold them
hold them down.

 

Akua Lezli Hope is a paraplegic wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music,  sculpture, adornments, and peace whenever possible.

Friday, May 09, 2025

CHANTING OVER GRAVES

by Jocelyn Ajami


AI-generated gif by NightCafé for The New Verse News


     “Our Golden Age has just begun.” —Donald Trump


Gold is great

From the rubble they erect gaudy 
temples, trimmed with gold and lust 

Wine cellars lick the soil, imbued 
with the fetid scent of slaughter 

Gold is great

From children’s eyes they steal  
rainbows to light arches and roulettes

from their marrow, mortar to seal the               
sandstone fronts

Their hair thread arabesques 
into the dice that roll and roll

Gold is great 

The root of sorrow, buried beneath 
the shimmering spectacle, seethes…

slowly migrating, breaching sea
and stone

until no false suns remain 
to scorch the truth 


Jocelyn Ajami is a painter, filmmaker and poet. She turned to writing poetry in 2014 as a way of connecting more intimately with issues of social conscience and cultural awareness. She has been published in various anthologies of prize winning poems and has been nominated for Pushcart and Touchstone awards.

Thursday, May 08, 2025

DISPATCH FROM GAZA AFTER THE CEASE-FIRE CEASED (MAY 2025)

by Carolyn Martin





For your information: 
in Gaza we don't eat vegetables, fruits, 
meat, eggs, fish, milk, cheese. 
And the list goes on.
 
Most people don't have work, flour, sugar, 
ghee, oil, thyme, gas, electricity. 
And the list goes on.

Extermination is a man's plan, but God,
the best Disposer of affairs, is sufficient 
for us to go on.


Author’s note: This poem is based on a message I received from Yasser Abu Rida in Gaza. 
Yasser with his children Youssef, Maria, and Mohammad.


Carolyn Martin is a recovering work addict who’s adopted the Spanish proverb, “It is beautiful to do nothing and rest afterwards” as her daily mantra. She is blissfully retired—and resting–– in Clackamas, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in more than 200 publications throughout North America., Europe, and Australia.


Wednesday, May 07, 2025

C’MON PEOPLE NOW, SMILE ON YOUR BROTHER, EVERYBODY GET TOGETHER AND IMPEACH THAT MOTHERFUCKER RIGHT NOW

by Phyllis Klein


Photo used with permission of the photographer.


In spite of despair, dictatorship 

looming, you can color a poster board, drag 

your wide markers over its surface. In spite of hope’s 

burial, your sign is a monument to streets with memories. 

Resistance calls.

You too can have a dream. 

 

Resistance speaks eloquently: Hands off,

National Malignancy, They All Gotta Go,

and the very catchy Fund Science, Fuckwits.

Resistance riffs you with vibrato. 

 

It frees your pursed lips locked 

with fear’s masking tape. Yes it stings, 

the ripping off. You cry out against 

criminals on pedestals, their dissonance.

C’mon people, why is the other side so happy 

to destroy their own futures with yours? 

 

You understand you are fucked, the charred 

neighborhoods, your tarred and pelted planet. 

In spite of this because of this— you get inflamed.

Resistance is a matchmaker, meetup for the terrified. 

Its panoply of choices: Protect the Parks, Support 

the Vets, Rehire Federal Workers, Believe in Science. 

 

So many more, you parade for The Women, 

The Immigrants, Kilmar Almondo Abrego Garcia, 

and the disappeareds whose names 

have been erased. Resistance tells you to notice. 

On the street you are drumrolls, jazz bands. Resistance

doesn’t care about how it looks as long 

as there’s a message. You scroll down its images 

looking for what’s cool, feel your pain in a badass way.

 

There are theories saying it’s as terrible

as it’s ever been here, but resistance remembers

the tribes, the slaves, the wars, hate thorns thick 

as cactus quills. In spite of this because of this 

Resistance tells everyone This can’t go on.

It says, Today you will feel big and big hearted.

Resistance is bands of the bewildered waving desperation

at honking cars. It doesn’t promise to resurrect, 

but maybe…Who knows what will happen when 

Stop Nazi Shit ceases to wave in the wind?



Phyllis Klein’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, has won several finalist awards, and has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. Her book The Full Moon Herald a poetic newspaper, was 2021 finalist in the Eric Hoffer awards. She hosts Poets in Conversation, a Zoom reading series started during the Pandemic. She was having trouble writing about the latest edition of hatred and fascism we are facing, but the words are starting to come.