NEVER LOOK A GRIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH

by Steven Kent

Nigel Farage has provided a new explanation for why he accepted a £5m gift from a Reform UK donor in the weeks before he announced he would stand in the last general election. In an interview on Thursday, Farage said the money was a “reward” for campaigning for Brexit. Previously, he had said the gift was given for security purposes, to keep him “safe and secure” for the rest of his life. —The Guardian, May 14, 2026

Concerning gifts,

The story shifts:

Security?

A Brexit fee?

Such camouflage

Befits Farage,

Who claimed, when caught,

I can't be bought.

With this much dosh,

His brag is bosh.

It's not a bribe?

Sure has that vibe!

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, The Dirigible Balloon, Light, Lighten Up Online, The Lyric, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, The Pierian, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collections I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) (2023) and Home at Last (2025) are published by Kelsay Books. 

CANVASSING

by Mark Williams

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

If a man’s home is his castle,

he reluctantly lowered his drawbridge. “Is she

a Democrat or Republican?” he asked us.

 

Manicured lawns, foot-high grass.

Porches with fishing rods, feral cats.

“She had three litters before she was fixed.”

 

A woman on oxygen. A man with a cane.

A woman using a walker

who agreed to put up a yard sign.

 

“I always vote Republican.”

“I vote straight Democrat.”

“I’m not registered.”

 

We were offered water, beer;

given thanks, directions, advice,

even hand-wipes. We learned

 

of dogs who’d been rescued, the price

of a condemned house. One woman’s grandson

is studying classic literature in Italy.

 

As for the king of his castle, he said,

nay, shouted, “Get off my land!” which,

as far as he was concerned,

 

wasn’t made for some of you and me.

Mark Williams's poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Writers Resist, as well as The Southern Review, ONE ART: a literary journal, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the collections, Carrying On and Life. He and his wife, DeeGee, live and canvas in Evansville, Indiana. 

DO THEY KNOW?

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

My nature app is as baffled as I

Along the upland trail

Above Rock Creek

In the wild wooded heart of Washington, DC

 

The forest floor is mantled in unfamiliar green

Paired leaves with parallel veins

An emerald carpet, enigmatic

Until recognition dawns

Sprouts of American beech, thousands

Are gathered in ritual circles

Around the smooth gray trunks of their parent trees

Who rise from the earth like standing stones

A menace is advancing

In the wake of chestnut blight

Dutch elm disease, woolly adelgid

And emerald ash borer, marching toward the capital

Beech leaf disease, as determined as Civil War General Jubal Early,

Not quite present yet but promising a deadly campaign

Could it be the Rock Creek Park beeches got word through a signal corps

Beyond our understanding, with news traveling by root or forest atmosphere? 

If only we had known what was coming for us

And thrown down our own green gauntlet

Melanie Choukas-Bradley lives in the beautiful yet besieged capital city of Washington, DC. She is the author of  City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park and Wild Walking. Many of her poems have appeared in The New Verse News.

CONSTRUCTIONS

by Tricia Knoll

AI video created by Nightcafé for The New Verse News.

Bowerbirds do it. Paper wasps. The beaver’s mound accessible from under water.  Such a soft spot we hold for nest builders, from weavings to cups and knot-hole drillers. My two grandsons built two forts of fallen limbs leaned up against beech tree trunks. I can stand up in the bigger one to admire the couch dragged into one corner, a broken log. In the hands of the ultra-rich, the opposable thumb demands grandiose. Outrageous and expensive. Palaces. A home with its own power plant. Walled compounds. Cliff-top villas. Gilded mansions. Subject to the whims of time, rot, fire, and penury. Shelley on the narcissist’s build: “Nothing besides remains.” Prince Prospero’s ballroom could not withstand the contagion of the red death. Vanity and striving after the wind. What happened to the angel who saved three men who refused to bow down to King Nebuchadnezzar’s gold statue. She chastised the sneer of cold command known as retribution. The artifice of blue-tinged pools. As for the Arch, what words carved there would memorialize war, lies, inflation, tears of the hungry, sick and veterans betrayed. Good people disappeared. Such lone and level sands stretch far away. 

Most poets have memorized many of their favorite poems. Tricia Knoll is sort of stuck with Shelley's Ozymandias. In recent months she has moved from free verse to prose poetry. Her chapbook The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club Chapbook contest. Wild Apples details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. She is a Contributing Editor to Verse Virtual.

NO KINGS

by Joan Gerstein

I painted two-foot high NO KINGS

in bold block letters on my blue fence

Months later   it remains unmolested

Months later   gas is $6.00 a gallon

Months later   Trump doesn’t know how to end wars he started

Months later   Trump rants senile threats and insults

On a busy street   my fence remains unmarred

Months later   Trump insults the Pope 

Months later   Trump posts a picture of himself as Jesus

Months later   Trump controls the Supreme Court 

In this Marine Corps city no one defaces my fence

Months later   Trump defies lower courts 

Months later   Trump strong-arms Republican lawmakers

Months later   Trump empties our treasury 

Months later   Trump demands effigies of himself on everything

and enriches his personal wealth through corruption  greed   lying

No one disfigures my fence in this conservative-leaning metropolis

because my message is meh     NO KINGS

I wish I had the guts to write     Dethrone the evil   vile   *$#)V&!

Joan Gerstein, a retired educator and therapist, teaches creative writing to incarcerated veterans. And, yes, at 78 she was up and down the ladder.

INHUMANE, CRUEL, UNACCEPTABLE

State inspectors reviewed seven immigration detention facilities across California, including the recently opened California City detention facility in Kern County. Attorney General Rob Bonta said overcrowding and staffing shortages are creating dangerous conditions. “They are running these facilities with inhumane, cruel, and unacceptable conditions,” Bonta said.

The report documents allegations at several facilities, including delayed medical care, overcrowding, unsanitary living conditions, lack of clean drinking water and excessive use of force.

Investigators also reported six detainee deaths between September 2025 and March 2026, the highest number since California began conducting inspections in 2017.

At the California City facility, detainees described extremely cold conditions, leaking cells during rainstorms, and inadequate clothing. In April, Giovanni Gomez, a friend of a detainee held at the California City detention center, described what he said his friend experienced during transport to the facility. “She said that when she got captured, and they moved her from Bakersfield to the facility, they just put some chains in her feet, and then in her hands, and they put them in the cold room,” Gomez said.

State officials also said that, despite claims the crackdown targets violent criminals, many detainees reviewed during inspections had little or no criminal history.

—BakersfieldNow (KBAK), May 15, 2026

Joanne Kennedy Frazer is a retired peace and justice director and educator for faith-based organizations. Since writing her first poem at age 73, she has been published well over 100 times. Having now achieved 84 years on this planet, she appreciates leisure to delight in its gifts, as well as time to grieve its desecration. Her second chapbook, Seasonings (Kelsay Books), was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her third book, Well Seasoned (The Poetry Box) has recently been published.  She lives in Raleigh, NC

Ralph La Rosa has published prose on major American writers, including Emerson and Thoreau, and has placed short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film scripts. These days, he mostly writes poetry, appearing on the Internet, in print journals and anthologies. His books include the chapbook Sonnet Stanzas and full-length Ghost Trees and My Miscellaneous Muse. And he loves The New Verse News!

NOMENCLATURE

by Frank Conahan

Art by Michael Kline

I read today that

The disease formerly known 

As "Polycystic

"Ovary syndrome," (or as

POCS), was

Renamed "Polyendocrine

Ovary syndrome,"

(Or as POMS). The

New name, which is more

"Accurate," according to

The article, ought

To bolster research because,

Presumably, if

You call things by the right name, 

They'll yield to you.

I'm supportive but wonder

If calling things the

Right name really helps any.

Our problem doesn't 

Seem to be what we call things

As much as what we

Do with the stuff afterwards;

Guns, for example,

Or other people's secrets.

But this is research. 

Surely we know how to use

Language in science…

Dr. Frank Conahan lives in reclusive retirement outside of Baltimore, Maryland. He follows current events with trepidation and copes by writing verse. He has recently published poems with "Bards of Maryland." His collection Nothing Is Coming was published in April.

THE SIREN SONG OF TRUTH

by Robin Stevens Payes

Believe women. Believe girls.

The women, the girls know.
Our story ancient. Our voices new.

They make us believe
The crime is our fault.
Men take our bodies,
Unable to resist the siren
Song of our bodies.

The song of our bodies
Does not belong to us.
Girls whom men called sirens,
Children wounded into silence,
Sing their bodies.

Sing their truths aloud.
Strongmen claim they are victims
Of the song of our bodies.
Weak men whose bodies
Are out of control.

Bodies anatomically ungoverned.
Bluster out of control.
Vanquishing other bodies—
Seas, straits, oil fields,
Mines, minds.

Strap yourselves tighter to the mast.
Now the bindings break.
Your strength offers no protection
Against the siren song of Truth.
The women. The girls. Know.

Mother Earth sings Her body,
Raped by weak men
Whose strength is measured
In violence. Did their mothers
Teach them this was fair game?

We sing our truths aloud,
Sirens flashing red:
Pull over now. Stop raping
Our minds, our bodies,
Our mothers, our daughters.

Ourselves. Loudly we sing
Our bodies to wholeness.
Weak men are broken,
No fault of ours.
Blame your wounds, not our anatomy.

Our siren song strengthens.
Our story ancient.
Our voices new.

Believe us.

Robin Stevens Payes is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, storyteller, and cultural steward whose work braids ancestral memory, science, myth, and moral imagination. She is the author of the YA time-travel adventure series Edge of Yesterday and creator of [re]member the world, a multi-genre project retrieving and reweaving the silenced history of her grandmother’s flight from Ukraine’s Pale of Settlement. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards, Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She writes about creative ethics, generational healing, and cultural repair on her Substack, Releasing Memory. 

BABY TALK

by Deb Myers

On TV a man “splained”

falling fertility rates

citing statistics

average output equals 1.5 babes

.6 shy of the replacement rate needed

to keep the population steady

like women are machines

underperforming

uteri transforming raw materials

egg and sperm 

into finished product

in insufficient volume

underbabied 

he babbled

shortly before

his boss "blinked"

Deb Myers spent her career helping companies create and improve technology products. She has left the business and technical writing world behind, and now writes poetry from her home in coastal Maine.

ABOUT LOVE

by Ryan Caidic

 

 

Nearly 200,000 people in 124 villages in the northeastern Philippines were affected and over 5,400 fled massive plumes of ash that billowed from Mayon volcano over the weekend due to the collapse of lava deposits from its slopes, officials said Monday. —AP, May 4, 2026

Mayon is the most active volcano in the Philippines, erupting over 52 times in the past 500 years... Its most destructive recorded eruption occurred on February 1, 1814. The volcano belched dark ash and eventually bombarded the town of Cagsawa [where] about 1,200 locals perished in what is considered to be the most lethal eruption in Mayon's history. —Wikipedia

 

 

We live in the time of ash and awe,

where the bell tower of a ruined

cathedral frames the perfect dome

 

its crater glow combusting in pallid

pyroclastic smoke, thousands have fled

its strombolian show

 

of affection, amid the terrible beauty

engulfing kilometers of sky and city

under siege of nature’s desire

 

to shape itself, they say that Mayon

was the womb that rose from the burial

tomb of lovers Magayon and Panganoron

 

passion in the form of fire turned crust

then magma, then igneous stone

then lava, then a quiet, then rage,

 

then warmth, then grief, then ash again—

layers that unravel histories, unpredictable

yet predictable all the same.

 

Those who were burned have forgotten

relocating closer to the pulse

where the fire of Ibalon resides.

 

That’s the theology of love.

To be close enough to feel the rumble

of a molten heart, to be in the shadow

 

of its ending, and to exist,

every time a little more consumed

by its divine ravishing of flame.  

 

 

Ryan Caidic is a Filipino poet and advertising creative living in Denmark. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Columbia Review, The Missouri Review, Southeast Review, Apricity, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere, and has been highly commended by the Bridport Prize and Munster Literature Center.  

AMERICAN FLAG BLUE

by Bonnie Proudfoot

In the twilight of my life, I came 

to the history of indigo: color 

and currency, “a length of cloth 

in exchange for one human body.” 

The secrets to its cultivation known 

by Africans. “In the 1700’s profits 

outpaced those of sugar and cotton.” 

The first American flag stitched with 

indigo-dyed cloth. Wave a flag sewn 

by shackled fingers while the blue 

bruise thickens, seeps its way into today, 

stain of the past slumps in the corner 

of every classroom, pain threaded into 

every pledge, each anthem we sing. 

Now, 250 more years around the sun,

we’re waiting for the arc of the moral

universe to catch the freedom train,

but the station is empty, streetlights

have begun to fail, first one, then another, 

shadows lengthening while our ears

press the rails, listening for the thrum.

My country tis of thee, sweet land—

it’s twilight here in the heartland.

the indigo light dims and lingers.

 

 

Author’s note: Source of the poem’s quotations: Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World by Catherine McKinley.

Bonnie Proudfoot's fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in anthologies and journals, including Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Gyroscope Review, Rattle, The New Verse News, and the New Ohio Review, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart. Her novel Goshen Road(OU/ Swallow) received the WCONA Book of the Year and was long-listed for the PEN/ Hemingway. Poetry books include Household Gods, a chapbook, on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, and Incomer, released in 2026 on Shadelandhouse Modern Press.