TRAFFIC JAM TRYING TO REACH THE “FIGHT OLIGARCHY TOUR”

by Susan Vespoli

Photo by Kanishka Chinnaraj, The Daily Wildcat,  March 24, 2025

“Don’t become a monster fighting monsters.”  —paraphrased Nietzsche quote

Stuck on the Mill Avenue Bridge in Tempe

a mile (Siri says an hour) from the stadium 

Bernie and AOC fill to capacity with voters

in tee-shirts that say “Resist,” “Tax the Rich,” 

“Hope Persists,” and 1000s more line up outside,

circle the arena, live stream speeches on their phones;

us trapped in the car, the woman behind us melting 

down, honking, gesturing through her windshield

for us to MOVE and my date is the kind of driver

who smiles, waves other motorists into the flow,

but she is blasting her horn, mouthing epithets,

as his jaw clenches, middle finger twitching to flip,

and I get it, but we’re gridlocked here.

My granddaughter once said, if we had a flying car, 

this wouldn’t happen, but we don’t,

so I unbuckle my seatbelt, turn around and rise

so she can see me and I give her the peace sign 

and the namaste hands, and then shrug, what can we do?

And her face looks like it might explode off her neck—

until eventually the logjam loosens and she zooms 

into the next lane, passes us, her back bumper 

stickered with peace signs.

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, AZ and believes in the power of writing to stay sane. Her work has been published in The New Verse News, ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She is the author of four poetry books.

I-89 FROM VERMONT TO CANADA IN WINTER

by Tricia Knoll

The Canadian border is less than an hour north.
Our countries have history. Good neighbors, 
borrow and offer. Fight side by side. 
I get my power through Hydro-Quebec.
Canadians come to shop, ski, hike
icefish, and mountain bike. I drive north
for museums and botanical gardens. Maple sap
runs both ways. Sugar shacks boil
here and there. I love the maple leaf flag 
as much as the blue and yellow of Ukraine. 
We share shock and a blood moon.
So close now
 
to winter’s big thaw. My eyes downcast. 
As if every winter pothole 
might eat me, vomit me out. 
Black slush banks the highway, 
a salt road gleams white. 
Once fleeing to Canada seemed
like an escape-hatch. Love
your neighbor. Don’t beggar them.
Will Canadians forgive? 
The border is less than an hour away.
We are so very close. 

Tricia Knoll lives in Vermont near the Canadian border. Her 2024 collection Wild Apples documents her downsizing and move seven years ago from Oregon to Vermont. The taste of maple is sweet; the anger of neighbors is not.

HELL

by Clyde Always

Eight measly months remain until
the climate summit’s here.
So, highway builders of Brazil,
we’ve got a path to clear!
 
Go raze that swath of jungle there!
Knock down that açai!
How deeply, for the Earth, we care
the summiteers shall see.
 
We’ll labor on it, night and day—
our dying world be saved!
This road will be, it’s safe to say,
with good intentions paved.

Clyde Always is an accomplished cartoonist, poet, painter, novelist and entertainer. His writings and/or illustrations have been featured in Light Poetry Magazine, Freaky, Jokes Review, etc.  Visitors to Bay City are invited to enjoy his carnavalesque sidewalk show: a tall tale extravaganza known as the Surreal San Francisco Walking Tour.

LAZARUS RISES AGAIN

by Royal Rhodes

remembering “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

White House says it will not return the Statue of Liberty to France. A French politician said the U.S. no longer deserved the legendary monument. —Politico, March 17, 2025

The White House sense of what we owe to France

forgets why we are not a monarchy.

This "mighty woman with a torch," perchance,

shows with her flame its dark autocracy.

Yorktown and the sword of Lafayette

have been suppressed in its new made-up tales.

Will God forget us, if we too forget?

As "world-wide welcome" in our marrow fails?

Exiles sought for freedom like fresh air.

America was built by diverse hands,

ignored by a self-centered billionaire.

A golden door was open to all lands.

For wealth, new tyrants rule by greedy whim.

Can someone teach this statue how to swim?

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

Royal Rhodes is a descendent of migrants here in the 17th century from England, and in the 19th century from Ireland.

COLUMBIA, THE GEM OF THE CENSORS

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

“The Thinker” on Columbia’s campus. Photo by Jason Zhao at Unsplash.

Academia Confronts a Watershed Moment at Columbia, and the Right Revels. Threatened with losing $400 million in federal funding, the university agreed to overhaul its protest policies and security practices. —The New York Times, March 22, 2025

Seeing all the force you wield,
Thinking we had better yield,
Letting politicians rule,
Why pretend we're still a school?

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has around 335 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), Politics/Letters, The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had eleven previous poems in The New Verse News.

TORN

by Thomas R. Smith

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

Though our little lives go on, we’re aware
of a massive tearing—a fabric
we’d thought sturdy is being ripped by
unseen hands, cruel, immensely powerful.
This was not supposed to happen in our
country. The rent is pulling apart
the graves of those who died for a proud
ideal. My high school Memorial Days
in the band playing trombone at the cemetery
are torn down the middle, every
school morning that began with the Pledge
of Allegiance in shreds, and the history
book pages of our defeat of fascism
fallen to the ground like shotgunned birds.
Sit with it a moment and you’ll hear it
loud and close, a chainsaw biting into
our soul. Where are our old Scout masters,
our civics teachers who elevated
the virtues of our form of government? 
Where are the leaders we were taught to respect?
Where are the generals sworn to uphold
the Constitution while the demented
king wages war on his own people? Where
is Betsy Ross with her needle to drive
into the hole in our nation’s heart
and stitch back together this wounded cloth?

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.

MEDEA ALSO KILLED HER CHILDREN

by Kathy Gilbert

Medea on her golden chariot, by Germán Hernández Amores

I need to write a poem
But
413 people who were alive
Yesterday are dead
 
I need to write a poem…
Bombed without warning
In the night
167 children killed
 
I need to write a poem?
What happened
To the ceasefire?
 
The poem I thought I’d write
Was how yesterday
I saw ravens collecting
Stout twigs and branches
To build and fortify their nests
Home for their future children
 
The poem I thought I’d write
Was about spring and new life
But
It’s winter all over the world
 
I need to write a poem
 
Only love can save us
Love of action. Gathering twigs
To protect new life
Of spring/ offspring
Those babies in Gaza are
our children we have murdered.

 
Kathy Gilbert resides in the Bay Area and received her MFA from SFSU. She is retired, has written two books and practices tai chi.

EQUINOX

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

AI-generated image by Evgeniatretyakova56 via Dreamstime

Let’s deep six the hatchet and the chainsaw

Bury the guns, ground the bombers

And honor this day of balance

From pole to pole

 

Equal light, equal dark

Overspreading inequity

A banquet where all are welcome

All can eat

 

Tomorrow the hemispheres will

Tilt toward spring or fall

Today earth and sun proffer balance

Let us align

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a Washington, DC naturalist and award-winning author of eight nature books, including Wild Walking—A Guide to Forest Bathing Through the Seasons, City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, and Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island. She has had several previous poems published in the The New Verse News and many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice, including four that have won “Moon Prizes.” Her poetry has also been featured on nature-oriented websites.

SPRING

by Katy Z. Allen

Paolo De Matteis "Cain and Abel" c. 1690 oil on canvas

With thoughts of Esther 9:16 and Genesis 4:10

They disposed of their enemies, killing seventy-five thousand of their foes. 
Skunk cabbage flowers are popping up in wooded wetlands.

In 2023, 2300 people in the US were killed by extreme heat climate events.
Salamanders and frogs are beginning their springtime migration on warm, rainy nights.

As of March, 48,500 men, women, and children are dead in Gaza.
Sap is rising in the sugar maples on warm sunny days.

During the 14-year-long Syrian civil war, 620,000 people were slaughtered.
Golden catkin tassels are blooming on hazelnut trees.

No one is counting how many are murdered around the world by climate change.
Crocuses are bringing color to sheltered spots of urban yards.

Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.
Red-wing blackbirds are trilling springtime songs from leafless treetops.

Spring and death are here.

Katy Z. Allen is a lover of the more-than-human world, rabbi of an outdoor congregation, co-founder of a Jewish climate organization, eco-chaplain, and has been writing since the age of eight, including her poetic book A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text from Strong Voices Publishing.

RED FLAG WARNING

by Laurence Musgrove

Cartoon by Tjeerd Royaards at Bluesky

The weather in our leader’s hot mind
set off sirens late in our beds last night
so we got dressed and gathered our dog
and walked downstairs with our neighbors 
and climbed into our cars in the parking garage
and then watched on our little phone screens
the waves of his anger, delusion, and greed,
blowing blame across our frightened land. 

This morning, my dog and I scout the damage,
the trash hanging in trees, wrapped around
sign posts, the early iron sky, horizon of dust,
stiff wind still whistling, dim puddles to jump,
and my little phone screen says to expect 
more storms from our leader overnight,
colder temperatures, then unwelcome snow. 
Each day it’s harder to predict the weather here.

Laurence Musgrove is the author of four poetry volumes: Local Bird (2015), The Bluebonnet Sutras (2019), A Stranger's Heart (2023), and The Dogs Of Alishan And Other Poems From Taiwan (2025). He is also editor of The Senior Class: 100 Poets On Aging (2024) and the online poetry journal Texas Poetry Assignment.

SUBJUNCTIVE

by Adrienne Pilon

Source: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee at Instagram

If I write we are going to the sea if I write
shall be free if I write Palestine if I write 
protest or encampment or salaam
my brother if I write Allah if I write 
genocide if I write bombing or Gaza  
or Hamas if I write Zionist if I write
apartheid or war crimes if I write 
nearly 50,000 dead or children are dying
or ceasefire now these words may 
rise up from the text, flagged and marked 
by a force that gives no quarter 
to what it does not care to understand.
The ink of my pen draws a target 
on my back on the back of my mother 
my father my wife my husband 
my daughter my son my sister 
my brother salaam my brother 
salaam salaam salaam salaam

Adrienne Pilon is a writer, educator, and activist. Recent and forthcoming work appears in The Tiger Moth Review; Room; Tendon Magazine and elsewhere.

A DAY IS NOT A DAY

by Erin Murphy

AI-generated image by imbox sanothai via Dreamstime

“House Republican leaders on [March 11, 2025] quietly moved to shield their members from having to vote on whether to end President Trump’s tariffs… essentially [declaring] the rest of the year one long day.” —The New York Times

A day is not a day.

A night is not a night.

A star is not a star.

Sunrise is not sunrise.

Rain is not rain.

A robin is not a robin.

A song is not a song.

Darkness is not dark.

 

Reality is not real

and neither is steam

from a whistling teakettle

or the smell of fresh basil

on your fingers

hours after you make pesto

or the calligraphy

of hoof prints in virgin snow

or the neon cotton candy

of northern lights

in Zion National Park.

 

Hunger is not hunger.

A lie is not a lie.

A gun is not a gun.

Fear is not fear.

A deported neighbor

was never here at all,

never taught your son

to dribble a fútbol

in the alley between

your homes.

 

Silence is not silence.

 

A day is not a day.

A year is not a year.

A lifetime is not a life.

 

A kiss is just a kiss,

Dooley Wilson sang

in Casablanca.

But a kiss is not a kiss.

It didn’t lead to love

or lust, not even for

your parents which means,

of course, you don’t exist.

You could tell your analyst

but your analyst is not

an analyst. And no matter

what he says, a cigar

is not a cigar.

 

A poem is not a poem.

Ce n'est pas un poème.

A rose is not a rose is not

a rose is not a rose. We are

not who we think we are.

Erin Murphy’s latest book of poetry is Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024). She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review.

I DREAMED LAST NIGHT

by Gordon Gilbert

Mile Stretch Road, Fortunes Rocks, Maine. Photo by the poet.

I Dreamed Last Night
of Mile Stretch Road and of a world to come,
perhaps only after I myself am gone,
but perhaps in my remaining years.  
 
I dreamed last night
that I was walking south
along a down-east beachside stretch
of crumbling asphalt.
 
On either side the road lay only ruins
where once stood so many houses
up and down the beach,
like all those visited behind
and not so far ahead,
what I feared I’d soon see.
 
But then I saw the colors
blue and red and white
on wooden boards covering a window
in all that still remained of a beach house,
and I walked over for a closer look
and realized why all this came to be: 
It was the end of immigration,
as the nation forgot
that it was the immigrants
who made this country great.
  
It was end of the commons,
as all had been privatized,
further enriching the already rich,
further depriving the already deprived.
 
In the end, it was the end
of all that we once had,
the end of the American dream. 


Gordon Gilbert is a writer living in the west village in NYC, who finds solace in walks along the Hudson River, even while contemplating with trepidation another new year of climate change and political mayhem.