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| Cartoon by Clay Jones |
They climbed up to Capitol Hill,
Mike Pence they were going to kill;
and now, for their crime,
’gainst reason or rhyme,
their pockets they’re hoping to fill.
The criminals of January six,
are getting a monetary fix.
Yet women abused
and sorely misused
by Epstein and friends still get nix.
Paul A. Freeman is the author of The Movement, a dystopia-Americana novel set in a future United States of America. The book is available from Amazon as an ebook download and as a paperback. His first book, Rumours of Ophir, a crime novel taught at ‘O’ level in Zimbabwean high schools, was also translated into German. In addition to having two novels, a children’s book and an 18,000-word narrative poem (Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers!) commercially published, Paul Freeman is the author of numerous published short stories, poems, plays and articles.
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.
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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.
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.
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&!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
