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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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

Sunday, July 13, 2025

BITS AND PIECES

by Lynn White




They waited patiently
standing in line
hunger made them quiet
un-childlike
too quiet for children
standing in line.

Who knew what they’d be
when they grew up
those children
tinker, tailor, soldier, spy
on our side or theirs
whoever the us and them are.

Now we know for certain that 
they’ll be none of those things
now they’re scattered 
in bits and pieces
bombed to bits
just in case.

Futures laid to rest
in bits and pieces
just in case.


Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

Saturday, July 12, 2025

I CAN’T HEAR YOU

by Chad Parenteau




the chief 

of sticks

proclaimed.

Too busy

turning on

faucets

 

hoping to

sluice away

immigrants

 

back down

to Mexico. 

Water. 

 

It goes 

right down

the hole.

 

Know that

from pre-k

diarrhea.

 

Excuse me.

Listening

for cracks

 

and all of

the people

falling through.

 

Once screams

finally stop

close hole.

 

Not right now.

Reapplying 

ear stigmata.

 

Need to have

gold card to

reach in here.

 

Have these 

documents 

to soak out

 

in deep south

salted by tears

of crocodiles 

 

that are now

jealous of 

our alligators.



Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His latest collection is The Collapsed Bookshelf. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and anthologies such as French Connections and Reimagine America. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine.

Friday, July 11, 2025

JULY 8

by Lynda Gene Rymond





Last night under my window

I heard a coyote clack its teeth.

Today’s skies grow dark, darker.

Clouds purr at first

but then it’s full-throated growls

breaking to thunderclaps

to shake the house

 

while in the city of angels

men on horseback stalk

like corrupted knights

to intimidate children.

Tactical vehicles prowl.

A small black woman,

Madam Mayor, confronts,

her fury rising like heatwaves.

 

Be furious. Be thunder.

Shake their houses.

Steal their horses, count coup,

paint their dishonor.

Find a mightier pen to wield.

Tell tales that crack walls.

Sing, sing all the way to morning.



Lynda Gene Rymond lives and works on Goblin Farm in Applebachsville, Pa. She is a winner of the Pennwriters Short Story Prize and a multi-year finalist for Bucks County Poet Laureate. Her latest publication, Spellbook, has just been published by Moonstone Arts.

Wednesday, July 09, 2025

A DRY SPELL IN UTAH

by Susan J. Wurtzburg


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


Statewide drought, evaporating lakes, whirlwinds, catastrophe; 
amidst this mess, our Governor pleads “Pray for rain.” Angels,
witches, devils descend from the sky to the chosen, but no blessed water.
 
My garden meadow browns to wasteland, crisp crackle underfoot,
hummingbird departs. Has he expended all his heartbeats in July’s
harsh heat? Warm colors of swallowtails, monarchs—gone. 
Finches, sparrows silent, beaks gape wide, throats too dry for song.
 
City residents stop sprinklers, while farmers, and our Governor
grow water-hungry alfalfa—drain rivers and aquifers. Spinning drops
irrigation-spread, artificial rainbows brighten verdant fields. Cloudbursts 
transformed to feed chug across the ocean, as our lakes recede. 


Susan J. Wurtzburg has won or placed in several poetry competitions. She is a Commissioned Artist in Sidewalk Poetry: Senses of Salt Lake City, 2024, and an Associate Poetry Editor at Poets Reading the News. Her book, Ravenous Words, with Lisa Lucas was published in spring, 2025.

CAMP MYSTIC

by Karen Marker


With no advance warning 

the San Antonio National Weather Service

had already been reduced to rubble

missing meteorologist, hydrologist, 

staff forecaster.

 

Frantic parents pray for their children 

caught off guard by the flooding

Guadalupe. No more have been found alive

clinging to trees.  

 

The governor signs a declaration. 

The search and rescue in Central Texas

will continue looking.

 

In this state while water spills over 

the banks of rivers in another 

water’s gone missing. The Great 

Salt Lake is starved to death. 

 

Protestors speak like sybils, prophets, seers.

And still the senators, the governor claim 

climate change a hoax.They can’t see 

through their frozen hearts the melting ice,

can’t smell the noxious gases, admit what 

this means for our survival.

 

It costs them nothing to offer their prayers

 

We all feel haunted like Hamlet did 

in Elsinore.  Perfumes can’t cover over 

the smell of what’s rotten—a shriveled lake

with its dead fish, a bloated river where children 

float downstream like Ophelia.

 

 

Karen Marker is an Oakland, CA. poet activist who has committed to writing a poem a day of protest and hope in response  to current events. Her first poetry book Beneath the Blue Umbrella came out recently with Finishing Line Press and explores family mental illness, stigma and healing. 

LIVES SWEPT AWAY

by Philip Kitcher



“A flood”, he says, “once in a hundred years”:
            unwilling to concede
            our planet’s urgent need,
he shows no true engagement with their tears.
 
Disdaining loss of human life, he stokes
            the storms, the fires that burn.
            This willful child won’t learn
the truth: that climate change is not “a hoax”.
 
Because of his refusal to believe,
how many future families will grieve?


Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His new book The Rich and the Poor (Polity Press) is all about the costs of abandoning morality in politics and public life. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.

OLD TESTAMENT TEXAS

by Laurence Musgrove


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


And our Lord God released his anger

upon the innocent, saying, “Perhaps,

I will gain their attention on the day

they celebrate their independence

from logic with a big horrible flood,

a punishment for their blasphemies

against the creation I have gifted

them for their salvation, while they

instead, continue to burn it all down,

drowning their children in Satan’s oil.”



Laurence Musgrove teaches English at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. He also edits the online poetry journal Texas Poetry Assignment. 

Tuesday, July 08, 2025

THEN THEY WERE MINE

by Corey Weinstein


Witnesses say that the IDF is deliberately killing Palestinians at aid distribution centres in Gaza run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Cartoon by Muzaffar Yulchiboev.


Israeli plan for forced transfer of Gaza’s population ‘a blueprint for crimes against humanity’ —The Guardian, July 7, 2025


Hear it right here. The past is now,
but wrong place, wrong people.
Last time they were mine, desperate,
last gasp assault in Spring of ’43.
 
Wrong place, the Mideast, wronged Palestinians.
Is there dignity not victory for a vanquished people?
In ’43 we yelled into the Nazi tornado,
death throes of the Warsaw Ghetto 300,000.
 
Feeble return fire from a vanquished people.
As Gaza starves, the West Bank terrorized,
famine, genocide of Gaza’s ghetto of two million.
Will the end game be the same weak thrust and slaughter?
 
Tanks fire on the hungry, settlers smash homes, olive groves.
In Warsaw they were mine, Jews to the very last bullet.
Will the world let the endgame be the same last bullet,
can our ears bear to hear the past in this terrible now?
 
As for me, I will never forget, Never Again
no matter who, no matter where or when.


Corey Weinstein’s poetry has been published in Haight Asbury Literary Journal, Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Our California 2024, The Ekphrastic Review, Forum (City College of San Francisco), California State Poetry Society, Visitant, Abandoned Mine, Speak Poetry of San Mateo County, California State Poetry Society and Jewish Currents, and he wrote and performed a singspiel called Erased: Babi Yar, the SS and Me. He is a retired physician and has been an advocate for prisoner rights, founded California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he hosts San Francisco OLLI’s Poetry Workshop Circle and plays the clarinet in his local jazz band, Tandem, his synagogue choir and woodwind ensembles.

Monday, July 07, 2025

PURPLE HEART ARMY VETERAN SELF-DEPORTS

by Morrow Dowdle




The quiet girl I’d admired on the playground

defended me against a boy with rough grasp  

and bad breath. Ended with her knee scraped, 

 

dark with embedded mulch. The boy 

ran, exiled from swing and slide.

That spring, I gave her a locket 

 

from the five and ten, real sterling plate. 

Not a partial heart, with zig-zag edges, 

I trusted her to take the whole. And wasn’t she 

 

the bearer of some universal principle:

What you shed for someone incurred a debt.

In the military, I spilled not one red drop—

 

still, the discharge, honorable. Still, years later, 

thanked by strangers. What did I do? 

Sat in the clinic. Tried to save the wounded 

 

from an aftermath I could hardly fathom. 

There is a man, now, up in the air. 

A slick plane flung between continents.

 

My friend and I pricked our thumbs with a needle, 

pressed them together. Citizens then, of each other. 

Not enough to make a man homeless,

 

he must be motherless, childless as well.

His body belongs to no country.

His body gone, with its generous blood.



Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and has work appearing or forthcoming from New York QuarterlyRATTLEONE ART, and Southeast Review. They run a performance series which features historically marginalized voices and are an MFA candidate at Pacific University.

Sunday, July 06, 2025

TWELVE DAYS

by Shirrin Jabalameli




There was no sound.

But the walls struggled to breathe,

and flecks of plaster rained down like strands of an old woman’s hair who could no longer sleep.

 

The woman came up from the basement.

Not out of fear,

but to see a sky that could no longer be seen.

 

She was a painter.

There was no paint.

No coffee left.

A voice in her head whispered: Paint. Even with ash.

 

The calendar flipped forward,

like an endless explosion bursting through seconds.

And the clock froze 

at 3:20 AM.

 

Day One

 

A dragon leapt out of a painting.

A dome cracked open.

Silently.

With a tremor only she felt.

Something broke beneath her feet,

and she polished the shoes she hadn’t worn.

 

Day Two

 

A message arrived.

The number wasn't saved.

It read: “Are you alive?”

She didn’t reply.

She just sat there, stared at the cracked photo frame, and said:

“How did you know I should be dead?”

The city emptied.

 

Day Three

 

No smell of bread.

No scent of blood either.

Only the thud of words pounding the walls.

The tiles recorded the blast.

She wrote: “We are still words.”

Then she drew the letter “N” backwards,

added two diacritics beneath the “K.”

A man saw it,

and ran.

 

Day Four

 

A child found a seashell on the ground.

He asked his mother: “Is this the sea?”

She said nothing.

The woman picked up the shell and answered:

“No. It’s the last remnant of listening.”

An old man’s cane began to calligraph across the stones.

 

Day Five

 

The mirror cracked.

But its reflection didn’t cry.

The woman inside the mirror was no longer her.

One of them was asleep.

The other,

awake and fighting.

And in that same dawn,

a verse trembled.

 

Day Six

 

The phone rang.

No name saved.

A voice said: “Remember that mountain you climbed as a kid?”

She laughed: “You saw me?”

The voice replied: “Still stubborn. Still painting.”

 

Chopin’s notes tangled with the roar of an explosion.

 

Day Seven

 

The alleyways had fallen asleep.

In their dreams,

they swallowed the lead.

A crow asked: “Why are you still awake?”

Sejjil interpreted the dream.

  

Day Eight

 

Someone on the other side of the wall was talking to himself.

Half of his words were Persian.

The other half—screams.

She didn’t hear it through the window.

She heard it through the wall’s skin

in the precise place where sound no longer existed.

But her skin did.

 

Day Nine

 

A man shouted: “Enough!”

His voice echoed back into him.

The painter woman said:

“No. We’re not there yet. You must go all the way.”

 

Day Ten

 

Rain didn’t fall,

but the ground was wet.

The air had wept.

Someone wrote:

“You’re alive. Do it.”

 

Day Eleven

 

She painted a piece that smelled of burned coffee.

The one-legged goat said:

“I’m not the way back?”

 

She replied:

“You’re the reason I stayed, though you may never understand.”

 

Day Twelve

 

Everything was just as it had always been.

But nothing was in its place.

She looked at the word she had written on the wall.

It hadn't been erased.

Just slightly more ... upside-down.

 

The End?

No.

These were just twelve chapters

of a book not written in blood,

but in the color of resistance, 

resistance that could still be seen,

even through smoke.


Shirrin Jabalameli is an Iranian writer, painter, photographer, and storyteller. She is currently working on a poetry-photo hybrid collection reflecting on memory and witness.There was no sound.