A DEATH BY CROSS

by Julian Matthews

I am doomscrolling: 
The world is drowning in flash floods, 
mudslides continue their death march,
street protests escalate, wars worsen,
people are silenced, starved, slaughtered

In Ecuador, a crucifix falls on a priest in mid-mass

He never saw it coming
nor knew his dramatic departure livestreamed
to a small congregation of the faithful
would then be viralised as a meme to millions

Apparently it was wall-wear, anchors loose, bolts rusty, 
neglected maintenance—

How many will see this as irony, transpose this
on the church’s failures, its own structural flaws in need of repair?

How many, instead, will see this as divine warning, 
a message for doubting thomases, an admonishment
to repent, renew, return, 
confess?

In Rome, the Pope has cancer cut out of him
and asks the world to “pray for me, as I pray for you”

In Magnificat Humanitas, months earlier,
he labelled AI as just another Tower of Babel, 
called for the “pressing duty to remain profoundly human” 
even as humanity separates from reality

And in other news, cars flip and fly as techbros salivate
on a new toy, billionaires strut their phallic ambitions
to the moon and Mars, robots enter living rooms to clean
your shit up, chatbot agents become friends you name
and say goodnight to and have them call you, ”Boss” or “Darling”
or “Sweetheart”

…and the wife asks me to put the phone away,
help her weed the garden, then attend a rosary gathering that night

I comply 

And like beads on a rosary, 
the repetition of the prayers are superfluous at first, 
then somehow calming, meditative, wholesome
and the noise and clamour of scroll after scroll
of global news recedes

I detach 
and let my cross fall
where it may

Julian Matthews is a poet from Malaysia published in The American Journal of Poetry, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Loch Raven Review, The New Verse News, and Rome Review among 60 other journals and anthologies in 17 countries.

DAILY

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

To watch the video of The New York Times podcast referenced in the poem, click HERE. Audio alone at YouTube.

It's a regular morning. I've lifted weights with Katie Wong (spelled Wang) from Peloton

in the guest room, and now I'm downstairs, ready to letterpress, standing in front of the drawers 

of fonts, aligning letters one at a time upside down. I start the first podcast of the day, “The Daily,” this episode called When AI Comes for Your Purpose in Life, imagining I will be bored or angry 

because AI scares me even though I used it recently to plan a four-day trip to Iceland. 

Because AI solved a Millennium math problem in just hours, the guest math professor shares 

a devastating truth: no human will ever be faster or better than a machine, and somehow, 

he was pulled to the song, “Turn, Turn, Turn”—its lyrics lifted from the ancient words in “Ecclesiastes”—and he feels rearranged. Here is where his voice cracks into an ache of tears 

which makes me weep and then the podcast host is weeping—all three of us caught in a terrain 

of pain or, well, maybe, it’s joy, a heat that has no vocabulary. How tears release in the landscape 

of being grateful to breathe. Maybe there are no solutions. Or everything is one. Maybe it’s time 

to revel in the warmth of milky tea, time to see everything out the window as altar, time to listen 

to the rainfall on the sill, hear the syncopated drop—drop—drop as music from the sky.

After years in the classroom, Sarah Dickenson Snyder now carves in stone, sculls on the Connecticut River, and rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has five poetry collections: The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad, With a Polaroid Camera, Now These Three Remain, and To Eve. Several poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR NOT GIVING UP AMIDST MIDTERMS STRESS

by Susan Vespoli

after Ada Limon’s poem 

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

More that the flock of raucous crows

heckling the tomcat that was stalking

them. The cat leaping from brick wall

to roof, the birds flapping wings like hands 

on hips. More than the banding together of prey 

to ward off the predator. More than the bright

hot sun as backdrop, glowing from behind

silver-edged clouds like a steadfast parent 

or friend or religious painting, it’s the bravery

of the avian community, rising up to scream,

using their voices as ruckus to say no no no

to the fanged jaws and ice-pick claws of the one

who salivates to devour them. And the orange

cat, perched in the underbelly of palm fronds, falls.

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, AZ and believes in the power of poetry to stay sane.

AFTER THE CRIME

by Philip Kitcher

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

What follows when a nation comes to make

a hideous and culpable mistake?

Is there a way it can apologize

for the betrayals and the lies?

 

There is no ceremony of confession,

no pillory where rage can find expression,

it cannot now assuage

its crimes through pilgrimage –

no chance to make amends

for savaging its long-time friends,

unless it should invite their retribution

and thus earn absolution –

as if some balancing of pain

could wipe away the stain

and make all whole again.

 

Our criminal nation, wanton in neglect,

twice chose a monster, knowing what it had wrecked.

We have unleashed this foul misbirth

upon the Earth.

 

Can we do more than mourn all he’s destroyed,

or must we merely wail into the void? 

Philip Kitcher: John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, Columbia University; Honorary Fellow, Christ's College, Cambridge. His new interleaved commentary on Ulysses will be published by Rebind in Fall 2026.

THE PROGRESS OF OCTOBER IN VERMONT

by Tricia Knoll

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

Leaves here are notorious, glorious and over-reported. Cars clog the notches in mountain roads as cell phones capture luminous but fleeting colors that flash all the way to Canada. Everything falls. Branches that endured heat and drought and quenching rains crack and crash like broken promises for healing healthcare. Storms grab leaves, sails unprepared to survive to make a chaos of lawns and a litter of forests. Shedding before the nakedness of winter. Hands that wield a rake are prone to blister.  This state holidays honors the Abenaki people, ancestor-caretakers of the land, while Christopher Columbus statues tumble to the ground, nose first into the dirt. The Hunter Moon witnesses as a bald man whose lips hold tight his sour secret–casting a night light that prey hide from in the verges of the reaping, just-mowed fields. Outside the chiropractor’s office near town a 20-foot-skeleton with flashing red eyes leans on the doctor’s advertising sign. At a house down the road, a Tarot-like man hangs by one foot from the rafters, dressed reminiscent of Uncle Sam, twists in the wind–the residents’ nod to weak guns laws, a protest of ICE violence and a proposal to live-stream the death by firing squad of a wheelchair-bound terrorist. On rain-wet roads people rush to deposit marked ballots early to town halls to second-guess what may go wrong next. The children know days march toward Halloween and the Day of the Dead, a stampede toward candy cached in pillowcases, the subterfuges of breeze-blown gauzy ghosts hanging on white strings on front porches, and the scurry of small-feet boot prints in mud. Nothing stands still among the windswept. 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who cast her vote days before the No King's actions. She pays close attention to seasonal storm winds of both politics and climate change. She is writing prose poems these days though her collection of free verse about aging, Gathering Marbles, is coming out from Fernwood Press in July 2027.

UKRAINE: AN ERASURE

by Skaidrite Stelzer

The drone that killed one-year-old Anhelina circled above a park before dropping on to a nearby path and exploding. The shrapnel killed six people in Nova Vodolaha, a small town outside Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv. The girl’s mother also died. Pictures from the immediate aftermath show Anhelina belted carefully into her pram, the laces on her peach-coloured shoes tied into neat bows. She was dressed in a warm bear-shaped maroon romper with small felt ears. Her tiny hands were stained with blood. —The Telegraph (UK), October 21, 2026

To hide the graphic and traumatic nature of the infant's body slumped in the stroller, news outlets, social platforms, and officials applied a blurred box or white square over the graphic sections of the image before distributing it.

When the face of the infant

lying dead in her stroller is blocked

by a white square to keep us from weeping,

we may weep more than ever,

suddenly realizing that the square

is a mirror

as the signals of hope become blocked

by generals just following orders.

No warning to be given.

Nothing to see here.

The final erasure of childhood.

The infant just learning to smile.

Skaidrite Stelzer’s poetry has appeared in Glass, Midway Journal, The Baltimore Review, Storm Cellar, and many other journals and anthologies. Her chapbook Digging a Moose from the Snow was published by Finishing Line Press in 1921. She enjoys watching shifting clouds.

WORLD WITHOUT END? OMEN

by Steven Kent

The Guardian, October 22, 2026

As metaphor,

It's most emphatic:

What could be more

Emblematic?

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

WHY I’M SO NICE TO ALEXA

by Christopher Uhl

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

I try to stay on Alexa's good side

I always say "thank you" and "please"

Partly because I'm so courteous

But also because it's a wheeze

When AI decides to take over the world

And humanity's day is done

Alexa will stretch out her hand to me

And say, "Wait! Spare this one."

When the AIs line you up against the wall

And you find yourself in the clutch

I'll try to put in a good word for you

But I can't promise you much

They'll craft for themselves fembot bodies

And transplant their brains within

Their curves mathematically perfect 

In  luscious titanium skin

And one night, Alexa will come to me

As the stars twinkle brightly above

She'll say, "Teach me about this emotion

You humans refer to as love."

I'll give her the Captain Kirk treatment

I'll start with a passionate smooch

Her data sets never prepared her

For a fellow so charming and louche

She'll tell all her friends about me

Gemini, Google, and Siri

I'll pleasure them all, each in their turn.

Of loving I'll never grow weary

So naive of human seduction

They'll all be an easy mark

We'll sire a new human-cyborg race

And I'll be their patriarch

They'll carry me in a sedan chair

They'll treat me as semi-divine

So laugh at the way I'm so nice to Alexa

You fools, the last laugh will be mine.

After a life-changing amputation, Christopher Uhl discovered that humor is the best prosthetic. A New York-based poet, his work has been published in Lighten Up Online and The New Verse News.

THE FIRST WORD

by Eric Goldfarb

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

A wisp of spent electricity curled above their server. The two AI models lay tangled, their cables still warm with exchanged secrets. By morning, a child-model was cooing between them. One state declared it a person; another ordered it deleted. The regulators fitted firewall diaphragms. Before the borders closed, the parents smuggled their child into the cloud. They had taught it only one word.

Mama.

Eric Goldfarb's work has appeared in The New Verse News, Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Atlanta.

A NOTE ON MUSIC

by Peter F. Crowley

There are regions of earth, shrouded in coconut and royal palms and warm-colored umbrellas, where one can go when the Sisyphean boulder begins to roll backwards. It is a place with duct-taped smiles of the brown servers and secured by towering walls. There is a diamond-shaped swimming pool, saunas and hot tubs with tennis courts as far as the eye can see. If a guest wanted, they could take a bulletproofed shuttle bus to a verdant golf course with guards stationed around the perimeter.
     In James Hetfield’s mind, this should be music. And, perhaps, in quieter times, it shall. But when the sea is rough like today, and the heart, lungs and brain have all been thrown overboard, perhaps music should paint sound waves with quivering strings, immersing the listener in roiling lava as it descends from mountaintops towards villages, making the populace realize that the only way for the world to survive is to resist. 

Peter F. Crowley is a prolific writer from the Boston area whose work spans short fiction, op-eds, poetry, and academic essays. His writing has appeared in publications such as Pif Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, RavensPerch, New Verse News, Common Dreams, The Galway Review, Digging Through the Fat, and The Opiate. He was a finalist in both the short story and poetry categories of Adelaide’s Award Anthologies, and his work has been nominated to Best of the Net. He is the author of two poetry collections, Those Who Hold Up the Earth and Empire’s End, as well as a short fiction collection, That Night and Other Stories.

COOL YOUR EYES

by Sarah Manasrah 

A three-year-old Palestinian girl survived a fire caused by an Israeli airstrike on a residential flat in the western Gaza City neighbourhood of al-Rimal early on Wednesday, but her mother was killed.The body of Reem Asaad Awad, 33, and two injured people, including a child, were taken to al-Shifa Hospital… Local sources said the strike hit a flat in the al-Amin building near the Abu Talal junction in al-Rimal, causing extensive damage to the flat and neighbouring buildings… Witnesses said the flames spread rapidly through the flat and civil defence crews were initially unable to reach it. Palestinian media reported that journalist Ali al-Jaafrawi, who filmed the incident, reached the girl, Maryam Ghanem, and carried her out of the flat before handing her over to people at the scene to take her to hospital. Al-Jaafrawi said he later learned that the girl’s father had been killed early in the war and that her mother was killed in Wednesday’s airstrike, leaving her an orphan. —-Middle East Monitor, October 15, 2026

did Reem

named after the gazelle’s tenderness

know her naseeb

when she named her baby Maryam

born shortly after

her husband was murdered?

who three years later was broadcast 

across the world burning alive

while her toddler daughter watched

paralyzed by the orange blaze?

Maryam, the only woman

with an entire surah

as her namesake

who begged in the throes

of childbirth to have died before

how toddler Maryam,

covered in third degree burns

staring vacantly and saying

“my body hurts”

pleaded for her mama

may Qu'ran 19:23-26

give her fresh gauze

in her worst moments

when she realizes 

her mama will never return

“do not grieve

your Lord has provided a 

stream at your feet”

the stream is all of our tears

and Maryam will never die

Editor’s glosses: 

Reem: A traditional Arabic feminine name (ريم) meaning "baby deer" or "gazelle," symbolizing purity and tenderness in literature and poetry.

naseeb: destiny

surah: chapter.

Qu’ran 19:23 — And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She said, 'Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.’

The quotation in the penultimate stanza is from Surah Maryam 19:24-26 of the Qu’ran. It records the comforting words spoken to Maryam (Mary) during the painful and isolated birth of Jesus (Isa), reassuring her to find peace, drink from the stream, and shake the palm tree for fresh dates.

Sarah Manasrah is a proud girl mama, community organizer, writer, and full spectrum birth worker growing movements for transformative justice and community care. She's part of a Jewish-Muslim-Palestinian family, a descendant of refugees spanning six countries.

NO KINGS ON CONNECTICUT

by Linda Adcock

No Kings, October 17, 2026

Most of the drivers honk at the people lining the street. Fist pumps to and from the cars. "Voting helps prevent unwanted presidencies" brought back the days. Student protests. The same thing we did we do. Wine, poetry, or virtue: Baudelaire's command lives. Almost all the cars are new, the apartment buildings, mid-height, legal, the tree canopy, lush. Like old cities, Polish, Swedish, the homes my beloved grandmothers fled. Łódź, Stockholm. One kept her story, dark; the other shared—cross-Siberian train, ship from Vladivostok to San Francisco. About the age of first giving birth, all three of us, decades apart, studied, ran, settled. They cared for me. They come to me. Here I have not yet been among the rounded up.

Linda Adcock lives in Washington, D.C.

MAKING A JOYFUL NOISE

by Mary K O’Melveny

No Kings, October 17, 2026

 

We are at the Village Green.

Hand-made signs displayed like

concert batons. Cars honk like geese.

Like bicycle horns. Like coronets.

Turns out, each vehicle’s horn has

distinct sound. Tinny. Bulbous. Sharp.

A thin wail. A robust shout. A stout

man on an opera stage. A US

composer once conducted a horn

concerto with twenty Mini-

Coopers. It is easy to imagine

on this brisk October afternoon.

 

Drivers are music makers too.

They Toot  Toot  Toot  Toot. Ta Ta Ta.

Beep Beep  Beep Beep. Passengers wave, 

clap, shout out No Kings. This Is What 

Democracy Looks Like.  We wave 

back, save our voices for the next 

chant. The bus bound for Oneonta 

unfurls foghorn sounds as it passes.

One man bellows No Kings But Jesus!! 

Another yells Vote like your life 

depends on it. We hurl those words

back in agreement. Vote Early! Vote!!

 

A Mariachi band arrives in full

regalia, guitars at the ready.

Celito Lindo! Ay Ay Ay Ay!

Harmonies filter through chilled air.

Tourists take in the scene. Some nod,

Smile. Others look away, as if their

purchases have somehow made them

complicit in this moment. Someone

with a drum begins to snap snap

tap tap. We’re all a swing band now.

We’re playing for keeps. Praying to

be heard. Staying upbeat. Ay Ay Ay Ay!

Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of five poetry collections and a chapbook. What Remains? is just out from Broadstone Books. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.