THE RECKONING

by Julia Griffin

But for the young, I might not care too much.

I’ll go on reading in my little hutch

And typing quirky poems, as before;

I don’t in fact expect a civil war:

This outcome leaves small danger of a putsch.

Books, dogs, Prosecco—I intend to clutch

My pleasures, drifting further out of touch.

I’d be content just to enjoy them more

But for the young.

Here’s four more years of vicious double dutch,

The crumbling earth denied a vital crutch,

More guns, bent laws, less safety for the poor,

Billionaires’ bribes—all this I might ignore;

It’s not for me my misery is such,

But for the young.

Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia.  She did what she could.

ALT OR REALITY? INAUGURATION 2025

by Judy Trupin

I enter uninvited

faceless

masked or maskless unseen

I hide under a chair facing backward

a metal prong pokes my back

dagger to my heart no less

2016 flies high in the sky

banners everywhere

too late now for pussy hats

dragon suits or chimera wings

you and you and you

triumphant

trumpet 

aglow with glaze of your private galaxy

while we the countless uncounted

crouch

the nation visible

here where you do not look

or if you do 

crush under your boots 

as you rise we fall

the dawn no longer ours

not rock not river not tree

we the

hopeless, 

dreamless

 unseen.

Judy Trupin writes, thinks, and votes in Pittsburgh PA.

WE’LL TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER

by Thomas R. Smith

Everything is a little damaged now.

Even the things you buy new, like a book

or a chair. Long lines at the return counter.

The country is a little damaged too,

or maybe a lot. People’s ability

to speak honestly stunned by threat, even

churches preaching the gospel of force.

Best turn away from the gambling dens

of the pollsters, twist the radio knob

to cut off the loud voice in mid-sentence.

Walk down some quiet street in your town

that’s loved you. Trust the kindnesses received

and especially the kindnesses you’ve given.

That goodness can’t be voted out of your heart.

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.

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

by Kelly Fordon

I feel like a shoelace someone keeps stumbling over—stupid, shoddy, unsafe.

 

Outside, it's gray. Of course.

 

Detroit will either come back or it won’t. We were almost there, but now I don't know. On Wednesday, people may be handing out guns on the street corner. 

 

Yay, for the Second Amendment said no one who lived through MSU, Sandy Hook, Vegas, you name it.

 

Of course, many people didn’t live through MSU, Sandy Hook, Vegas, You Name It. 

 

I guess they don’t count.

 

Many people will either count on Wednesday or they won’t. 

 

I am setting up my pop-up outside the pot place—a prime location to take in all the shenanigans while maintaining a bland aspect. 

 

I ate eight cookies yesterday, but later this week, I might best that. 

 

Horrible Encounters with the Monsters in My Life is the name of the film playing 24/7 in the park. 

 

The principals keep rotating. 

 

We will either have patience for the alternating cast on Wednesday or not. 

 

Let’s hope no one shoots the messenger.

 

My Irish ancestors lived in mud huts. Mud floors. I heard they were often lucky if they had one stool—just a log they’d sit on called a creepie.

 

Scooch your creepie up to the fire. 

 

The Irish knew what it was like to live beneath the hand, squashed like so many crumbs and swept away. 

 

Stomped on.

 

Will that be me on Wednesday? 

 

I am watching Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect. It was filmed in 1991.

 

I don’t want to go back there. 

 

There is a long list of people I can tolerate today, but maybe not on Wednesday.

 

Please don’t try this at home.

 

My dog will likely sleep through everything.

 

He is only safe because I care.

 

I guess that’s always the case.

Kelly Fordon’s latest short story collection I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020) was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her 2016 Michigan Notable Book Garden for the Blind (WSUP) was an INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist. Her first full-length poetry collection Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019) was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. It was later adapted into a play by Robin Martin and published in The Kenyon Review Online. Her new poetry collection What Trammels the Heart will be published by SFASUPress in 2025. She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and has received a Best of the Net Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in three different genres. She teaches at Springfed Arts in Detroit and online, where she runs a fiction podcast called Let’s Deconstruct a Story.

MESSENGER RNA

by Claudia Gary

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

Vaccine doing its work

sent signals overriding

emotion, music, words,

hunger, desire—but only for

one day, that messenger.

Soon there would be sunset 

with orange hues to mark

the hours that made up

a day of gratitude—

vaccine, then first-day voting—

two gifts! Will I recall

such joy? And will the volume

of voting be sufficient

to stop that other virus?

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, composer of tonal songs and chamber music, and an advisory editor of New Verse Review. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is online.

PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS

by Anita S. Pulier

The campaigns are almost over.
The talking heads are on rerun.
I feel a strong urge to mop the bathroom floor.

Things are far from perfect 
and I am not sure
where the fix should start.

The ads have worked. The politics of fear grip me.
Clearly we are not who we were,
but I am not sure who or what we hope to be.

Wide awake I dream of raw power,
calculated intolerance and wrenching violence. 
Surely things were easier

before technology wired the globe,
when the world was vast,
unknowable, exotic.

Wasn’t life once lived day to day
by gut instinct, luck of the draw
take it as it comes?

A parade of bogus claims
line the mantle of my mind cluttered
by endless campaign puffery.

Do I understand so much more now,
about truth, deception
and the fickleness of time?

Still, I yearn for order,
for comfort, truth,
for simple decency,

for the strength to bother
caring, the naivete to believe
a single political promise and
 
the grit to mop the bathroom floor
at midnight, clear my head,

grapple with the paralysis of deep REM sleep.

Anita S. Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butchers Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press. Paradise Reexamined came out in 2023 (Kelsay Books). Her new book Leaving Brooklyn is due out in Jan '25 from Kelsay Books  Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.

THE HIGH SCHOOL BAND AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

by Martha Deed

1 The Students

Tonight!
Gigantic Rally
at Madison Square Garden 

Our high school band
invited to play

Admission Free

We will march up Eighth Ave
in a ticker tape parade

President Eisenhower in person!

We will play “Hail to the Chief”
for real

Was I playing clarinet that year?

We will play in Madison Square Garden
as sure as 
as sure as the Knicks
to entertain the crowd

Or was I playing glockenspiel?

2 The School Authorities and the Parents

We’ll let them go
even with the usual field trip worries
the bus could break down
a chaperon on the sauce
a kid throws up on the bus
or starts a fight

We shall vigorously lead the way
to a review and revision
of our immigration laws

after overcoming the fear of partisanship
we will not worry about the bomb threat
phoned to the New York Daily News
an hour before the rally began
because we won’t know about it

Four years ago
we wandered wearily
in the darkness
of a drifting war

because there is no internet to scare us bloodless
yet

we wondered how long a government
could effectively lead the free world
when it no longer commanded
the pride of its own people

We have welcomed an effective attack on inflation

Even as he speaks 

I have seen the face of our land
soil, rivers and forests
their richness and power conserved

and promises

to serve our national interest
to promote understanding in the world
to give new validity
to America’s role of leadership
in this world

they won’t remember anything he said.

3 Two days later

The letter from The White House
The letter copied for each band member
The words forgotten
The letter kept

Martha Deed’s third poetry collection Haunted By Martha was released by FootHills Publishing, July 2023. She has published ten books (poetry, mixed media, non-fiction) and ten chapbooks along with inclusion in more than 20 poetry anthologies. Individual poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Earth’s Daughters, First Literary Review—East, Shampoo, Gypsy, and many others.

MOUNT PENN (SE ACABO)

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Do the lookout oaks speak English

and remember George Washington

are the spotted beetles from Asia

that people mistake for Lady Bugs

harbingers of a polyglottal future

here in fortress America

Pennsylvania Dutch speak

German

children invent their own

pidgin

Jefferson thought in French

But it’s Spanish that’s spoken all around

the mountain’s foot where you can get a fade

a dye job a shave and look like

you just stepped out of De Leon’s fabled fountain

dripping with what was supposed to have been Florida

Not this Keystone State

No more for the Union Dead on a rainy train ride

to an Adams County graveyard in November

the battle has moved from Lincoln’s beard to the barrio

la bodega si, se puede

The DAR and descendants of Confederate

Veterans, they like their café con leche

se acabo.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada for now but spent election day 2004 working in Reading, PA. Like many, he's watching the US election with nauseated optimism. You can follow him on Substack @sandcounties. 

PEEING IN ODESSA, TEXAS

by AV Rasmussen

Truthout

People look twice sometimes,
call me “sir, I mean ma’am”
sometimes turn away quickly
sometimes snicker
sometimes look at the sign
on the bathroom door

Their eyes
are now weapons
that drill through
stall doors
and strip me for parts

They rip off my clothes
desperate, I suppose,
to know the original
plumbing

my body
is their bounty

but my body proves only
the human need
to pee

AV Rasmussen is an avid teacher, writer, backpacker and photographer who teaches English at Dallas College in Texas. Their poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including North Dakota Quarterly; Veils, Halos, and Shackles; and Impossible Archetype.

A TEAR FALLS FROM THE MOON

by Richard L. Matta

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

Hideous weeds hide

in high grasses. Experts examine

lawns with satellites, surveil 

with drones, send in spies.

Intelligent eyes can’t locate 

the wild pests so tap-tap-tap 

go the buttons and neighborhoods 

are bombed and burned and stripped 

bare and young lingering eyes of flowers 

are cut off at the head.

I could ask a question of the wise 

pale moon in the thick evening heat 

but it’s dusted with debris. 

A speaker echoes…

         indiscriminately

                   inhumanity.

And I ask myself is this not a swarm

of bees in the making, generations 

of hate stewing, a turn of minority 

to majority, a dark legacy.

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, Slipstream, and many international haiku journals.