APOPHENIA

by Frank Conahan

We believe in Tarot cards
Because we grew up
Being told we should credit

The expertise of
Meteorologists, their
Predictions aside.

So we did as we'd been told,
Believing them when
They'd call for clear skies (despite 

The subsequent rain).
We generalized our stance 
To fortune tellers,

Horoscopes, election polls,
And clairvoyants 
Across the board, as kids would  ...

The Jesuits bragged,
Give us a kid when he's young,
And we will own the adult. 

The pundits are sure
About Tuesday's election.
They predict clear skies. 

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. 

INCANTATION FOR THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS

Anti-Hex as Duplex, after Jericho Brown

by Kim Harvey

We are a murmuration of starlings.

Millions move as one, alight in a blue wave.

 

A lighted candle’s flame burns blue at its base. 

Yarrow bloom, salt, and rue to bless and protect.

 

Bless the algae bloom in the Reflecting Pool.

Hate reflecting hate becomes its own fate.

 

The Fates awake to rehearse the verse.

Reverse the curse. There’s power in words. 

 

We’ll be heard. There’s power in numbers. We will

be a herd of zebras, a motion-dazzle.

 

Dazzling and transformed. Painted prayers in motion

from house to house, barn stars in the dark. 

 

In the darkness, we will vote them out.

We are a murmuration of starlings. 

Author’s note: Halloween is hanging in the air along with the midterm elections, and we all know which one is scarier this year. The tight Senate races are leading every news story along with a notable number of Republicans accusing Democrats of being witches. Last week, the Kansas Republican gubernatorial candidate accused his Democratic opponent and her daughter of performing demonic spells on TikTok to try to win the governorship. The same week, when talking about how he's scared the polls look bad for Republicans, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz said, "Right now, if you're a left-wing transgender witch, you hate Donald Trump, and you're going to show up. You're energized." It reeks of desperation and made me want to cast my own spell of protection to repel the hateful rhetoric and keep us and our democracy safe. Honestly, I believe the world can use more magic. Witches or not, let's move together as one, like shapeshifting starlings. Let’s all cast our spells, and—most importantly—our votes.

Kim Harvey is a three-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She was Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. You can find her work in Barren Magazine, Black Bough, Cathexis Northwest Press, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, River Mouth Review, SWWIM, The Shore, and elsewhere. She is the 1st Prize winner of the Comstock Review’s 2019 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award and the 3rd Prize winner of the 2019 Barren Press Poetry Contest. She had two microchapbooks published in 2020, Facing Gladstone from Kissing Dynamite Press and They Say in Your Dreams Everyone & Everything is You from Ghost City Press. In 2026, her ekphrastic poem "Sonnet for the Night Shift" was selected for a Best of Rattle Award.

PROGRESS

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

The Arabs in the Jewish state

Turned out in force to vote.

But Israel's right is mired in hate,

So progress is remote.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has around 380 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, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had sixteen previous poems in The New Verse News.

AN IDIOT TURN

by Indran Amirthanayagam

I will take a few deep breaths

and look at the mirror, the ceiling.

I will look outside the window

at the stars. There are only 

two days to go before the vote.

Millions have already mailed

in ballots. I will look again 

at the article, then endorsement 

of the Republican, Rogers, 

by a Democrat, Stevens,

 

who believes that the Republican 

must win because of his fierce

support for Israel and a promise 

that he will invest in black-owned

businesses, even if his victory 

means one more block 

in the Republican wall,  

seeking to hold on to the Senate, 

deny the chance to judge 

the thieves helicoptering currently 

out of the former Rose Garden.

Meanwhile, can one really

tell the color of the owner

of business X or Y? Aren’t

there colorless banks

ready to offer development 

loans to the CEOs? I am still 

keeping calm. To each his own, 

including the right to betray 

your voters and endorse 

the AIPAC ticket. Good 

riddance I say, Ms Stevens. 

Call yourself contradiction, 

maverick, fool. 

I will not be distracted, 

nor will  the many 

on your team who 

have now resigned.

In two days the defender 

in whom we can trust

will make you a part 

of the modern yet 

ancient curse, where money 

and ideology have trumped 

you stone deaf, stone  blind.

Indran Amirthanayagam received Sri Lanka's State Literary Award for White Space Sonnets. He won the Paterson Poetry Prize for The Elephants of Reckoning. His Lettre aux residents du monde is forthcoming from L'Harmattan. Amirthanayagam edits Beltway Poetry, publishes at Beltway Editions. He writes indranmx.substack.com .

SAVING DAYLIGHT

by Howie Good

We have turned back the clocks, and now it’s dark
both when I leave for work and when I leave work
for home. Tantalizing illusions designed to keep us
toiling have dwindled to a tattered few. I see my own
disillusion reflected in other people’s somber faces
and nagging anxiety. Children choose to stay indoors 
on their screens or are forbidden to play by themselves 
outside. Grackles, a type of scavenger bird, gather in a row
on a powerline, shadows of a broken world. I google it
on my phone. A collection of grackles is called a plague.

Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was  published by Sacred Parasite this year. He co-edits the journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

BLESSINGS FOR TIMES OF CRISIS

by Sam Friedman

Shutterstock photo by Pietre Laborde

Blessed are the children of Paris

for they open doorways

so their people can dismantle

the towers of power.

 

Blessed are Pasha and Ania

for they save lives

amidst a genocidal war.

 

Blessed is Vladislav

who fought the imperial invaders

of his native Ukraine

and refused to submit

to the fascist thugs who savagely beat him

in the delusion that they were defending

the nation he defends.

 

And blessed are the cockroach archeologists

who dig up the poems we wrote

about our long-dead civilization

so our hopes can re-echo

amidst cockroach revolutionaries

so next time, we do not fail.

Author’s note: I first met Pavlo (Pasha) Smyrnov and Ania Korobchuk professionally; they have been very active in harm reduction programs and research around HIV/AIDS in Ukraine. Since the full scale invasion, they have organized medical assistance for villages near the front lines. Vladislav Starodubtsev was in the news recently. All of them are friends of mine.

Sam Friedman is a poet, activist, and public health researcher. He has published two books of poetry and poems in a variety of magazines.

HALLOWEEN IN EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

by Christine Rhein

10/31/25, for Rachel Jamison Webster

One year after Halloween incident, fear remains over immigration enforcement. —Evanston RoundTable, October 18, 2026

My friend bears witness, posts a video
from her front porch, tells of helicopters 
that flew over her town all day today,
of the white, unmarked ICE vans
that cruised the streets, circled stores 
and schools, one of the vans ramming
a car, the woman at the wheel pulled out, 
pushed down, hauled away by men in masks.
This is real, my friend says, this is happening—
parents, teachers, guarding a grade school 
for hours—the children kept inside, 
wearing their costumes. No parade this year 
through the neighborhood—princesses,
pirates, ghosts, superheroes, locked down.
 
It’s nighttime now—my friend posts again 
with her porchlight on, and she’s smiling,
eager to let everyone know how her block 
turned noisy after all, how the sidewalks
filled with laughing trick-or-treaters—
so many of them that she was worried
she’d run out of candy, but there was a boy 
who saw she was holding one last little bar, 
and said Here, I’ll give you some of my candy,
and then all of the kids in that huddled group—
a flock, she calls them, of eight- or nine-year-olds—
reached down into their bags, dropped sweetness
by fistfuls into her bowl. That way, they said, 
there will be candy for the next kids.

Christine Rhein is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Swerve (Wayne State University Press) and of Wild Flight, a winner of the Walt McDonald Poetry Prize (Texas Tech University Press). A former automotive engineer, Christine lives in Brighton, Michigan.

ALL HALLOWS’ EVE

by Devon Balwit

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

We stand

at the thin place:

crane our necks one way, and

 

we look upon the healthy faces

of our grandchildren, the other,

and an ungovernable force erases

 

all flesh. What do you think? Are the specters

phantasms or an inevitability?

Trick or Treat! shout the neighbor

 

boys. I let them be greedy—

why chide an impulse we share,

fistfuls of plenty

 

until we’re so glutted we’re

sick. After, they (we) spill 

our booty on the floor

 

and make deals. 

What isn’t gobbled up becomes landfill.

When not making art, Devon Balwit edits for Asimov Press and Works in Progress magazine.

SPIN

by Tom Cartelli

And this one says and that one says and this one says 

to the one who says this fact is fact this fact is false  

and the movers tik and the shakers tok and the spinners spin

and the liars spout and the liars claim and the listeners listen 

and listening repeat what the liars say and the saying goes on 

and the said gets said and the dead get dead and the dead

stay dead while the spinners spin and the sayers say and listeners

listen to the chatter over wires when this one says 

and that one says and this one says to the one who lies

to the listeners listening as the wireless chatter goes

in and out over time over matter and this one says 

and that one says what this one didn’t but got tangled in the matter 

and the matter is and the matter isn’t what the chatterers chatter 

all the singsong day and livelong night of the chatter 

over wires and the wireless chatter that clacks to the clatter 

that thrums to the beat of the constant patter that keeps at bay

the matter of the matter that riffs and jives and won’t say 

what’s the matter with the liars who lie and the voices that shatter

all the dingdong day and star-tossed night the dreams that come

and dreams that go like raisins in the sun that won’t explode

Tom Cartelli taught literature & film studies for many years at Muhlenberg College and lives in uneasy retirement in far western New Jersey. Recent and forthcoming publications include poems and transcriptions in The Threepenny Review, Möbius, The Antigonish Review, The Field Guide Poetry Magazine, The Avalon Literary Review, TheNewVerseNews, and the online journal Politics/Letters.

THE PEOPLE’S TREES, EAST POTOMAC GOLF LINKS

by Christine Sikorski

Instagram

As if what matters is 
polishing up the place, 
fabricating another lush, 
green display, before he 
is forced to walk away 
from the people’s house
(now half rubble), 
the president had 430
sycamores, maples, 
cherries, willows
cut down. 
 
While I pray 
that offspring 
of the murdered trees 
have flown, fallen 
into ready earth, and 
begun to heed the sun,
they will not be enough— 
if current human young 
and all that follow 
are to breathe and run 
and enjoy a world 
more whole than this one,
from which the felon
stole so much. 
 
What then?
 
Let us demand a grand 
replanting, the man who 
ordered this destruction 
down on his knees with
trowel and dirty hands,
crawling from one 
tender sapling to 
another, repenting.

Christine Sikorski’s work has appeared in The New Verse News, coastlines, Waterstone, Little Patuxent Review, Quartet, One Art, This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant and Academy of American Poets Prizes. She has taught at two universities, the Loft Literary Center, a homeless shelter, a community center, and other venues. She lives with her family in Minneapolis.