The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Erin Murphy's most recent books are Human Resources, Mother as Conjunction: Lyric Essays, and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry. Swoon: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming in June.
Australian Indigenous Poet and Storyteller Jazz Money has had their children’s book Bila: A River Cycle pulled by University of Queensland Press due to its illustrator Matt Chun’s previously-published essay refusing to mourn the Jewish casualties—which included ten-year-old Matilda—at the Bondi beach shooting in Sydney last December. See reports from the BBC and The Guardian.
A bird cannot be a stone.
Our heart cannot be bone.
Our heart must not
be bone.
A damp towel against my head
in the morning while I drape my body
forwards from the toilet
shakes me back into the dream:
I am on rocks. I need to get home.
There are three ships, progressively smaller,
like a babushka series. I need all of them.
I drag the smaller one from the waters first.
The second one follows, large enough to withstand
calm waters and one person only.
I lay the ships on the deck. I am now on the third
ship which is the one I wanted the most.
I didn’t see how I caught it, or how it appeared.
All I know is I have what I need now.
Yet I do not feel settled, and I scour to collect
All the tiny remnants on the ground.
There are metal clasps and tiny fishhooks.
I put them all in a small bowl.
They seem mysterious, worthless and precious.
The ship is attached to a stream of algae and muck
and my perspective zooms out so I am able to hold
it underwater, and carefully with some nail scissors
I cut the debris that cascades like aquatic hair
filled with small creatures and fish, that are large
enough to be food or help, but may be rotten.
I see that the shape corresponds with Sarah Schwartz’
foggy, algae-outlined eyebrow. I trim her eyebrow too.
In the morning, I trim my own eyebrows with the
backwards-glint of dream remembrance in the mirror.
I spend the day accumulating poetic courage
eating Agedashi tofu, glimpsing at the red
leaves and lamenting distances
how five thousand copies of a child’s book
has been printed and promptly pulped
because the illustrator refused to mourn
a Jewish child shot within a sea of Zionists.
Chun states his words were carefully curated
with the help of anti-Zionist Jewish comrades
but not once in his article outlining the reasons
the antisemitic massacre of Jewish people
at Bondi beach, was not in fact, antisemitic,
did he mention Matilda.
At this point, there are no sides left for me
to reside on.
We are in the same river together, you see
You and I
We poison the soil together in our silencing
Our hearts breaking in multiple directions
by the dialectical paradoxes lodged within colonialism
and so they become numb
and so they became numb
I refuse to become numb
I refuse this
I refuse
the same way I refuse the destruction of literature
the same way I refuse the censorship of Indigenous storytellers
writing heartfelt literature for children about the links
between resistance and Country.
I refuse to witness this silencing of another
Aboriginal voice.
At the heart
of all comrades
should ALWAYS be children.
Why else are we fighting?
To be on the right side of history?
For freedom?
For justice?
How can we claim to be fighting for any of this
if we can find a way to make the murder of any child
less
to make it a subsumable statistic
a side comment
within a broader fight
and not the focal point of our writing
our essays
our books
our complaints
our hearts
our resistance?
I condemn Chun’s erasure of Matilda’s humble roots
the same way I condemn the erasure of Palestinian roots
by Chabad and Zionist establishments.
I refuse Chun’s refusal to mourn a ten year old Jewish girl
his refusal to even mention her name
amidst his hypocritical academic silencing of her death
amidst a sea of fishhook reason
I refuse Chun’s silencing
because Matilda was not a neoliberal fascist oppressor.
Matilda was not a white Zionist Jewish-supremacist.
She was a child.
Just like each and every Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian
child is a child
and not an antisemitic Islamic-state terrorist.
The ability and willingness to minimise the murder of
a single child
in the name of the creation, protection
or destruction of a nation
is where the seed of evil is planted.
The destruction of five thousand children’s books
painted by the painstaking hand of a dedicated artist
and narrated by an Aboriginal storyteller
a powerful yellamundie
is also where the seed of evil
is sown.
What will we do amidst
the fruit of this orchard
we have planted
screaming
in silence
together?
Note “It is entirely consistent, and deeply humane, to stand with Jewish people killed and terrorised by racist violence and to have stood, and continue to stand, with Palestinians killed by racist violence. Our grief does not shrink when it is shared and our safety does not grow when it is built on someone else’s disposability,” said Sarah Schwartz at the interfaith and intercommunity vigil of The Jewish Council, an organization that supports Palestinian freedom and justice and opposes antisemitism and racism, to mourn the victims of the Bondi massacre.
Deborah
Marcus is a poet, multidisciplinary artist and educator from unceded
Darramuragal land in Australia. She is obsessed with truth and trees,
potentially synonymously. Her Honours thesis exploring the relationship
between fractal geometry and poetic language won UNSW’s first University
Medal for Creative Writing in 2022. In 2023, she published her debut
collection of poetry titled An Organ of Chaos.
Literally this happens: I’m driving to a mass shooting and on the way to the mass shooting I drive by another mass shooting, recognizing the area, and,
at the same time, on the radio comes the news of another mass shooting. Welcome to America. I think of the Childish Gambino video “This is
America,” the hyperviolence that’s so normative. I think of the name Childish Gambino, Gambino meaning ‘little gambler,’ like a child gambler,
a childish child gambler, and we’re in gang territory, but all of Detroit is gang map on the gang maps I’ve seen online, if those are
accurate. And I think of the words ‘drive by’ at the start of this poem, the dual meaning, and I’m exhausted, driving, and I’m tired
of these mass shootings, but I’m realizing America is number one in mass shootings, that America has perfected mass shootings,
that America equals mass shootings, that other countries laugh at us for our mass shootings, how we do nothing. Jesus Christ,
I’m sick of it. I’ve been going to every single mass shooting in Michigan for the last ten months and no changes are made. None.
Nothing. At the site of the mass shooting, I talk with Pretty Eyes. She wants to be called Pretty Eyes. Her name is accurate.
She tells me, “It’s something we got used to.” She’s used to the shootings. “You can’t change people,” she says. She adds that
“there’s no hope.” I look around, this feel of homelessness and hopelessness, this feel of hole. This massive feel that this isn’t
home. I’m born and raised in Michigan. Trash is speckled everywhere, the way I’ve seen cooks on Top Chef sprinkle
salt so generously: white grocery bags, paper cups, tissues, what looks like piled- up abandoned old slabs of concrete curbs.
This is gang territory and, to be honest, I feel perfectly safe. This is a feeling that’s grown, where I realize a sort of
ridiculousness that black men are some- how inherently dangerous. If anything, they’re inherently courteous. Rushed,
Bill tells me that he doesn’t have time to talk, but says I won’t like his answer to what needs to be done to
curb mass shootings. “It’s strictly God,” he says, “God and prayer.” I like that it’s strictly God, reading
into how he’s worded it. A woman named T tells me, “It’s been like that since I been here.” She says, “You
get used to it,” echoing Pretty Eyes. Nearby, the auto repair sign has the word SHOCKS in caps and
that’s what this is, shock like lack of blood flow to the tissues, shock like feeling distress, shock like violent
collision, and, yes, that’s what led to the mass shooting. Bill tells me it was “just road rage.” Just road rage? Says
it like it’s not a shock that road rage would lead into a mass shooting. Three killed. Where we stand.
He has to go. Pretty Eyes has to get going. T needs to run. I stand there at another gas station where
another mass shooting has happened. I have no idea why, but constantly these mass shootings are at gas
stations. I think of the Strait of Hormuz, the Exxon Valdez, Deep- water Horizon, oil wars, petro-
aggression, petrostates, petrocracy, a sort of arson of the world, and a sort of prison of the world; we’re
at a Sunoco, listed online as an “American vehicle gasoline master limited partnership company”
started in 1886. Master? Why that word? Because it’s dead-on. I talk with Bam. He eats potato
chips, says the answer is “gun laws.” He says, “mental issues cause violence.” He says, “You should
carry.” He says he doesn’t have a gun on him, but has one at home, for protection. He tells me about
his collapsed lung. I asked if he was shot. “No.” “Never.” But “I know a lot of people who’ve
been shot, by accident, or gang- banging.” He’s never been in a gang, says people join gangs
because “they feel they got some- body who loves them.” Love. I didn’t expect that word. Love.
. . . . . . . . .
I drive away, heading home, alone, passing a massive sign above: $499 HEADSTONES.
Aggressive glioblastoma rampant weed slashed hacked but no guarantees
Still, there he was energetically coaxing the best from the musicians
luring them boldly through the gardens of music gardens growing wild and free
sharing beauty and terror with the audience
who rose in homage at the end stood applauding for over six minutes
Unseen in the background that noxious weed still crept
Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee,
where she observes the goings-on of the country and the world and is being
cured of her delusions. She has read in coffee houses, bars, libraries and on
the radio, and has participated in poet/fiber artist collaborations. Among the
journals in which her work has appeared are Gyroscope
Review, Writers Resist,Jerry Jazz
Musician, Rise Up Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Wordpeace, The New
Verse News, Naugatuck
River Review, Your Daily
Poem, Feral.
Wind and dry weather will again pose a critical fire risk this week for the Land of Enchantment. —Santa Fe New Mexican, April 21, 2026
Another day, another day, you, weather, and I, face off over the extreme risk of fire. How I wish it were merely, between us, a matter of words. Instead, your high desert’s majestic cloud cover has transmuted into six months of winter’s unyielding emptiness.
My hand-grown conifer glade, years in the making, can only stand and wait, as chances intensify for a sudden burst of dry lightning. Fierce gusting winds, like a giant, out of control bellows, can turn a single spark, so it seems, into a winged flame capable
of destroying everything, near and far in its path.
I wish these words were simply a meditation on a barren winter. But the pain is real, and when risk explodes into reality, as I have seen, the destruction can go unmitigated for months. Not two or three valleys over, but as if on the tindered bluffs here I call home.
Come summer, it may not be a blaze that swallows our forests and farm lands, but dry throats dying of thirst. And untillable soils, desert hard as long dead bone.
Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, Beyond Words, and others here and abroad. . Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored over 300 poems, published on four continents.
Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in Northern Kenya was established to rescue and release orphaned and abandoned elephant calves. It was featured recently by the AP and on PBS.
They follow her or she follows them, the babies
of Reteti. Swinging their miniature trunks, they
navigate the steep and dusty terrain not far from
the elephant sanctuary—all the while listening
for her voice and the voices of other keepers.
These calves are like little children let loose
in the playground, nowhere near ready to be
released in the wild. Most carry the memory
of a mother’s disappearance, some brutally so.
Others less dramatic. But a lost mother, how-
ever it occurs, is no small thing. When I found
my mother dying beneath her favorite azalea
bush, I sank to my knees crying, Mommy, what
happened? and I was no baby. Nothing prepares
us for losing our mothers, the loneliness of grief.
But Dorothy Lowakutuk learned the language
of elephants. She knows which of them is Sera,
Long’uro, or Sarara—how they play and walk
and sleep. She teaches them to roll in the dust to
keep their skin cool, find plants that are safe to
eat. Humble, yet as regal as a queen, Dorothy
Lowakutuk’s face is radiant as the African sun,
this kind woman and all the rest at Reteti who
talk softly, feed and sing to the children of lost
mothers. Blessed be—blessed be their names.
Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including The Light that Follows Us Home (Autumn, 2026, Press 53). Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize, International Book Award for Poetry, and the Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina, USA.
Malaysia's Karex Bhd, the world's top condom producer, plans to raise prices by 20% to 30% and possibly further if supply chain disruptions drag on due to the Iran War, its chief executive said on Tuesday. —Reuters, April 21, 2026
Safe sex just got more expensive, the price of latex climbing like a fever. There’s an oversupply of children on the horizon, a tidal wave of toddlers waiting to break.
It starts with the fuel, the heavy scent of diesel rising in cost, slowing the world to a crawl. Then the cold creeps in. In northern towns, people turn the heat down, then cuddle
for warmth under quilts heavy as lead, and you know what happens next.
In the tropics, the AC hums a frantic tune, while lovers move in the artificial chill like dancers in a refrigerated dream. With the cost of flight soaring high as a hawk, the world settles for staycations, quiet afternoons where the bedroom door becomes the only destination left.
Without protection, the "frolic" turns to fate. Be prepared: nine to twelve months from now, the world may explode with new life, a sudden reversal of the long decline.,
And while Iran guards its humming centrifuges, and the nuclear material sits heavy and silent, Trump stands at the podium, grinning at the chaos, explaining to the cameras that the crying in the cradles was all just part of the plan.
The Trump administration, dominated by religious anti-abortion conservatives and reeling in money from a new wave of pronatalist tech reactionaries, has long been considering ways to persuade, pressure and cajole women into having more babies. —The Guardian, April 14, 2026
Peter A. Witt
by chance lives in Texas and is a recovering university professor who
lost his adjectives in the doldrums of academic writing. Poetry has
helped him recover his ability to see and describe the inner and outer
world he inhabits. His work has been twice nominated for the Best of the Net award
and has appeared in a variety of online and print publications. He also
writes family history. His book about his aunt was published by the
Texas A&M University Press (Edith's War: Writings of a Red Cross Worker and Lifelong Champion of Social Justice). He is also an avid birder and wildlife photographer.
AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.
They put tariff words now So ll use 10% less God help hyperverbal –they probably end homeless
Marketing all visuals now Cos picture paints 1000 Or strange performance pieces actions speak louder, say
Some took vow silence There are fewer arguments truly , it wasted breath Yet never hear ‘ love you!’
fear proposed tariff space next As immigration needs controlling This poem gone too long though And cost flaming fortune!
A J Dalton is a UK-based writer. He’s published the Empire of the Saviours trilogy with Gollancz Orion, The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy with Luna Press, the Dark Woods Rising and Green Man Ascendant poetry collections with Starship Sloane, and other bits and bobs. He lives with his monstrously oppressive cat named Cleopatra.
"In the City of Shreveport, we have a true epidemic of domestic violence….” —Shreveport City Council Member Grayson Boucher
When I was a little girl, my parents took me on a rare outing downtown; my mother’s face and neck were free of bruises, so we could roam freely among other families. As we crossed a busy Shreveport street, a man shoved a woman against a car and began hitting her with his fists. No one intervened. Finally, a policeman arrived, and pulled the man off the woman. “Listen,” he advised: “Take her home and do that.”
At that moment, I thought I understood everything about my mother’s bruises. It would be years before I understood that—even if a policeman had taken my father to jail—he would not have stayed there. And even if he had, there was nowhere for my mother to go. And even if there were, the slow-dripping acid of trauma had already eaten away her soul, and left burn marks where there had once been beauty and creativity.
The killer in Shreveport had “dark thoughts,” and now, eight children are dead. His wife thought that she had escaped, but now she lies in a hospital, with critical wounds. How do you end an epidemic that courses through decades, neighborhoods, churches, and income brackets, and whose victims—if they live—become carriers of trauma, fear, rage, and assorted deadly germs that damage brains and flatten the souls of the unborn?
Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books), The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press),The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press), and I Can't Recall Exactly When I Died (Kelsay Books). Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.
The neighborhood is a hush of humid air and mown grass. Time feels suspended, marked only by the rhythmic pulse of water hitting the driveway. For a moment, this white picket fence world is nothing but light and motion, before the next headline arrives—red banners scrolling, digits flickering upward.
on the front lawn
the sprinkler ticks like a clock
throwing silver arcs...
his toddler's laughter
chases a beagle's bay
Chen-ou Liu is the author of five books, including Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize, 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and A Life in Transition and Translation (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial Haiku Chapbook Competition). His tanka and haiku have been honored with many awards.
I’m self-schooled in the art of drop-cover-shelter
from the bombing news, but o you wise one,
teach me: how do I turn off this glaring pain
of my brothers and sisters constantly bombing
each other? And how do I forgive
the twin lakes of my eyes for shedding
useless tears—so useless they can’t even feed
into desert desalination plants spared
by thirsty missiles? My tears sting more
than the bitter horseradish a friend brings
on a Passover. She teaches me to dip it
into a nut paste, which is sweet, which,
she says, tastes like
hope. Maybe it’s time for a few Medjool Dates
grown from the cradle-land that I’ve visited
so many times in spirit but never once
in body, so that I keep its soil and water
inside me to nourish a prayer for peace, so that
when I open my door to the unstoppable
spring outside, I can welcome Rumi’s sun
and other honored guests to visit
me today besides pain.
Jiang Pu, Ph.D., is a first-generation Chinese American author and Ed leader. Her recent poems have appeared in California Quarterly, The Tiger Moth Review (Singapore), and Panorama (U.K.) among others and in several poetry anthologies.
