TheNewVerse.News
Today's News . . . Today's Poem
The New Verse News
presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
Thursday, October 16, 2025
FIRST BOMBLESS DAY
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
THE BACK ALLEY
![]() |
AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
MASS SHOOTING #7
“All random, wasted, and dispersed”
—Theodore Roethke
The clerk inside tells me she can’t make any comments.
I ask why forty people would be gathered outside at 1:30 a.m.
The clerk tells me she can’t make any comments. I ask
how we lessen gun violence in black communities.
The clerk says she can’t make any comments. I ask
if the loitering signs outside are new. No, she says,
her only comment. Outside, the simple sound of traffic.
Tires on asphalt. Tires on concrete. Tires on cement.
The clerks never want to make any comments. Outside,
a girl with purple hair exits the Speedway. I ask how
we lessen the violence. She uses her car door as a sort
of shield. “Let’s start talking about it,” she says.
She makes comments: “Mental health is a real thing.”
“Everyone is going through something.” “Yes, it is
hard.” “Put yourself in their shoes.” “I have a child
to raise.” She has a 7-year-old daughter. She works
4 jobs. She’s also a professional wrestler. A fan of
Stone Cold Steve Austin and Triple H. Later, I watch
her win a match online, wearing all purple swimwear,
blowing victory kisses to the crowd. She talks of how
kids now need “baseball, basketball,” that sports save
lives, give positive outlets. Next door’s a bp. A clerk
inside makes comment after comment. The shooting
didn’t happen where he worked, so he’s an open book.
And he seconds everything about sports, telling me
“the kids have nothing to do.” Wearing a XXL black
t-shirt, “Dee,” his nickname, says “recreation” is key.
He says there’s no “swimming pools,” “no budget,”
that “the new generation is left with nothing.” Later,
I find out the shooting was a 32-year-old and a 38-
year-old exchanging gunfire. Two sisters, also in
their 30s, were shot. The assumption is that these
shootings are being done by kids. I find this out
later, though, can’t ask them what to do if it, really,
is adults shooting at adults. I ask if it’s dangerous
being a clerk. He says no, that people mostly come
in and play the lottery, do scratch-offs. A woman
comes inside and does just that. 36 different options
for scratch-off tickets, names like STRIKE IT RICH,
LIONS, $2,000,000 LUCKY, JUNGLE CASHWORD.
Driving home, the billboards keep flashing GRAND
BLANC STRONG with a white lit candle to remember
the 5 killed and 8 injured at the September 28 shooting.
I drive to the church, where the shooting happened.
There’s a black-and-white sign there saying GRAND
BLANC BETTER TOGETHER. To my surprise,
the church seems to be untouched, the front doors
fixed. Online, it says the church is “permanently
closed.” The church is lit up with lights. I park.
I can’t believe how quiet it is. I sit there, staring
at the nothing. Between Grand Blanc and Saginaw,
both of the mass shootings, is Frankenmuth. I go
there. To decompress. I’ve never been. The town,
I find, is sort of Disney Euro. Simulacra. Hyper-
reality. I get food at a restaurant with chalet-style
architecture. Staff are dressed in lederhosen and
alpine hats, Oktoberfest dresses. The entire time
I eat, a young boy sits at the front to greet guests.
Later, I realize the boy is actually a statue. Near
the bathroom they’re selling strange small signs
saying: HUNTING: IF A MAN IS ALONE IN
THE WOODS, WITH NO WOMEN TO HEAR
HIM...IS HE STILL WRONG? A toilet flushes.
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.
Monday, October 13, 2025
PLEASE, AMERICA, DON'T TURN YOUR BACK ON ME
AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
the one who surprised me with earthly delights
and let me touch the promised land, again and again,
the one who did not push my hands away as if
they were impertinent puppies, maybe cute
but mostly annoying. I loved everything about her,
her hair on my skin, her mouth, her own wild eagerness,
her eyes turned up to me, the way we enjoyed
the American River on sun-burnished afternoons,
even how she dropped the great, immovable river rock
on my naked heart and made me beg and cry
and empty myself in stupid, sprawling letters.
I thought she loved me and then she didn’t love me.
That was almost 50 years ago—1976—
and this is it again exactly, another love
rejecting me, lifting her marbled foot and stepping
on me with all the gorgeous, colonnaded tons
of her, repulsing my advances, saying keep
your nasty science off of me and covering
her liberal titty. Her voice, that smile and kiss
of democracy, has turned to bray and bawls
and claims that I misunderstood, that she
doesn’t even know me. And, again, I am left
in tears to beg my heart’s case in postcards
and signs, my own voice now raw with the ache
of what I thought I had and now have lost.
Please, America, please. Please come back to me.
Author’s note: The epigraph comes from Chris Banks, a line in his long poem “Core Samples of the Late-Capitalist Dream” in Alternator, Nightwood Editions, 2023. I borrowed the “liberal titty” and the imagery and language of the line “Her voice, that smile and kiss / of democracy” from e. e. cumming’s “Thanksgiving (1956)”
Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025. He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.
Sunday, October 12, 2025
2025
Saturday, October 11, 2025
ENEMY WITHIN
“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable" — George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
They are the bloodthirsty! Parasitic. Anti-freedom, fascist,
Pedophile, compromised ones. The grifting, gaslighting, big-
Lying ones. Way Back Machine, return to the ‘50s —1850s — ones.
The Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, billionaire “enemy within” ones.
They are the thirty pieces of silver ones, camouflaged in stars and
Stripes! Red, white, and blue-wrapped ones — wholly-owned —
Bought and bossed. The remote-controlled ones — rolling red carpet
On bent knee — servicing strongmen. They are: “The Enemy Within.”
They are the enemy within warring on the working-class! Reich-cult.
Sadist bullies dispatching platoons of masked goons! The worst of the
Worse! J6-confederate-felons, flooding factories, fields and streets —
Redacting 1st amendment — Erasing 4th, 13th, 14th, 15th freedoms …
They are chainsaw-brandishing bandits. Looting, uprooting, destroying things
That work! Thieves turning fruits of our labor into personal ATMs. Waste,
Fraud and Abuse disguised as Department Of Grifter Enrichment — DOGE.
Rejecting 99 Cents Store solutions — like mirrors — for detecting themselves.
They are an ethno nationalist food truck serving poisonous menu of misery:
School Shooting Du Jour! War Of The Week! Jobless, Homeless, Hungry
Government Shutdown Gumbo. Medical Neglect Noodles. Post-Constitutional,
Police State Pork Fried ICE. Doom and gloom, dark, death and destruction desserts.
They are warfare state “Drill, baby, drill!” dinosaurs shaking down with teargas,
Pepper-spray, rubber-bullet reign, places we live and love. Fox-box foot soldiers
Prancing like peacocks. Transforming our cities into ‘training grounds’
Instead of solar-paneled, windmill wonderlands running armadas of electric busses.
WE are the ones we’ve been waiting for! Robust resisters riding in on white horses
Named Mutual Aid. United Front, Mass Movement Mamas and Papas. Department
Of Solidarity. Door-knocking neighbors, meeting more than four corners. WE are the
Ones we’ve been waiting for! Street Heat Senators/Shoe Leather Legislators muscling
Up movements! Robust resisters refusing to slip on elephant excrement-donkey dung — Bipartisan — billionaire bullshit!
Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.