PEAT MOSS AND CLOVER

by Julie Steiner

Photo credit: Julie Steiner

Some smells are Portkeys: following your nose
will take you where you wouldn't choose. The past,
as patient as a paparazzo, lies
in wait in harmless objects, poised to spring.
One soap brand’s scent assaults you. (There’s no way
you’d share that silly symptom with a doctor.)

Your mother had a friend who was a doctor —
the sort of gent who won’t look down his nose
at those beneath him. Honored by the way
they’re treated, social climbers think they’ve passed
some test that’s caused their public stock to spring
up fifty points. (We tell ourselves such lies.)

Our own redemption makes us idolize
such reputable citizens as Doctor
Snow. We’re baptized in their sacred spring.
If kissing up to them should brown your nose,
you hold them blameless. Demigods are past
reproach. Shit happens, but some other way.

So when your kid complains about the way
he shows affection, know the trouble lies
in misinterpretation. No one’s passed
the slightest ugly hint about the doctor.
He hugs a lot—that, everybody knows—
but Honi soit qui mal y pense. Don’t spring

to damaging conclusions. Irish Spring
(a bar held in her mouth) should wash away
the filth she’s said. But soon the whole town knows
about your kid’s attention-getting lies.
She starts accusing classmates, not just Doctor
Snow. The social life you loved is past.

And now these drawings! When will she get past
this stage? You hope her sex craze doesn’t spring
from something in your gene pool. Playing doctor,
miming sex acts—this could be the way
your grandpas went so wrong. Salvation lies
in moving to a place where no one knows

your problem child. There, doctor up her past.
Ignore her noes. Keep buying Irish Spring.
Don't cave to tantrums. That way madness lies.

Author's Note: The following context for the sestina "Peat Moss and Clover"—named for the scent profile of Irish Spring deodorant soap—might cast light on two recent news stories: first, the attack ad featuring Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton's mother calling her a liar, and second, the Cornell Seven situation.

The second-person narrator changes from the child's perspective to the mother's over the course of the poem, to reflect the erasure I have felt whenever I've tried to get my mom to acknowledge that I did, indeed, experience sexual abuse from ages five to seven, and that she and my father punished me for trying to report it (as well as for my attempts to come to terms with it, through drawings and playacting). She still clings to her preferred narrative—namely, that I was a deeply sinful kid, but through firm parental discipline and fervent prayer, she and my father saved me from being a pervert like the many convicted sexual predators in her family tree.

It is unsurprising that both my own mom and Amy Acton's are so deeply invested in characterizing their daughters as liars. The alternative is admitting that they made a bad situation worse for their kids, and that they continue to wrong us by being in such obstinate denial decades later. If I can't expect my mother, with whom I am otherwise on good terms, to give up the self-exonerating idea that her young daughter's claims of sexual abuse were just attention-seeking lies, I certainly wouldn't expect Acton's estranged and unstable mom to be able do so.

I had thought that the sexual abuse I experienced from other kids was an outlier, because my elementary school situation seemed unique. Many of my classmates were years older than I was, because I was put into an "open education" class—my elementary school's dumping ground for special needs kids of mixed ages. Hans Asperger was still a decade away from publishing the news that some individuals with autism have average, or even high, intelligence, but can be overwhelmed by sensory input (such as buzzing fluorescent lights, or by an entire classroom's worth of kids radiating laundry detergent and shampoo perfumes). My school didn't know what to do with me. I had entered kindergarten as a strong reader and was excellent at math, but I disrupted any classroom I was put into with my near-daily tantrums and distracting "stimming" behaviors. So they put me where I would only disrupt the almost non-existent education of the throwaway kids—those referred to in the day's lingo as "mentally retarded." These kids also happened to represent the population that is at the highest risk for being targeted by sexual predators. Some of my classmates were probably experiencing sexual contact outside of school, and were trying to make sense of it by experimenting on younger kids, like me. (I regret to say that I, in turn, did the same thing myself, when given the opportunity.)

But perhaps my victimization by, and of, other children was less unique than I'd thought. In an Oct. 20 PBS NewsHour interview, an expert on child sexual abuse said: 

"Up to 70% of contact offenses in the U.S. are caused by other kids. People are surprised that a lot of it is at the hands of other kids, and it can be every bit as harmful as adult-perpetrated abuse. But kids often do it for different reasons and under different circumstances [than adult offenders]. [...] Being cognizant of the fact that your kids are capable of causing harm, and teaching them not only about giving consent, but also about receivingconsent—this topic is coming up more and more, especially in the moment with the Cornell Seven. A lot of people are looking at the parents' involvement, and thinking about 'How did they teach their kids?' [...] It's a really good example of how we should be teaching our sons and our daughters about both sides of the [consent] equation."

I highly recommend the full interview with authors Elizabeth Letourneau and Luke Malone about their book One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis, available for free viewing on the PBS NewsHour website. It is surprisingly hopeful.

Editor’s note: The New Verse News is honored to continue to host, in the wake of the news at Cornell, a series of courageous memoir poems.

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego. For her other poems in repeating forms and/or on this topic—many of them first published in The New Verse News—see her Substack, Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus.

WORLD SERIES GAME FIVE

by Phyllis Wax

Blue collar Milwaukee

cheers its team all the way

to baseball’s peak, then

can’t afford thousands to see them play

at the stadium their taxes helped pay for.

Cheaper by far to fly down to St. Pete,

buy a ticket in the other team’s park,

even stay overnight,

and they do!

At an exuberant Tropicana Field

almost a third of the seats

are filled with spirited Brewer fans,

beer cups in hand, cheering them on—Go Brewers!—

helping them compete—Yay Brew Team!—

to an easy victory! Only one more win

to bring the trophy home!

Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee, where she observes the goings-on of her city, the country and the world. 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. She's not a sports fan, but tries to be aware of what's going on. Go Brewers!

REFUGEES

by Pepper Trail

On September 14, birders gathered at La Cumbre Peak, a bump at about 4,000 feet along the ridge that rises behind Santa Barbara, California. They were hoping to see nutcrackers, an alpine bird normally found above 8,000 feet many mountains away… Over a thousand flew past in two hours. It seemed as if all the nutcrackers in California were pouring out of distant mountains… This mass movement of nutcrackers has been range-wide, with many observations in places well beyond their usual range, and often in surprisingly large numbers… Is the sky falling, is this climate change? Probably. Are the mountains falling into the seas? No, but their birds are. In an act of desperation, they have chosen a self-imposed refugee status, at least temporarily. It is not known how many will make it back to their alpine homes. —Stephen Carr Hampton Substack, October 19, 2026

So many, suddenly everywhere

Not yet starving, but knowing starvation

Knowing it is coming, so they must leave

It has been too dry for too long

The crops are failing, have failed

There is no seed to fill the storehouses

There is no choice, and they cross the invisible border

Our world is a mystery, a hope

Also a danger–they feel that in their bones

But abundance, enough to share

If only sharing would be allowed

If only they knew the right words to ask

But they do not

How could they, being birds?

Strange finches, nuthatches, nutcrackers, crossbills

Creatures of wilderness and winter

Known to us only from the pages of fairy tales

Fleeing scarcity, now in our neighborhoods

Invisible to most, welcomed by a few

Threatening no one

How could they, being birds?

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

KEHLSTEINHAUS

by David Alberto Fernández

On the top of the dwarfing mountain
Looking down on a city of salt
That house was a weighted sentinel
bearing down on all of us

A high refuge
Of godlike detachment
An alpine height
for predatory birds

Four score years after they traded 
our friends for soot 
The orange glow showed
The equanimity of flame

Let the fire 
pay its homage to their dwelling
Let the the bitter wind
Receive their handiwork

For all they took from us
Let's leave them what's left there
When fools try to pay tribute
To architects of collapse
Let them taste charred wood

We can best honor them
By forgetting their names,
By giving breath
To their smoldering ruin
And preserving forever
Their monument of ashes

David Alberto Fernández is the poet laureate of the City of Takoma Park, Maryland. He is an Associate Editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, co-founder of the Beltway Café reading series at the MLK Library in Washington DC, and the pop-up poetry art project Vocal Takoma.  

THE BOTTOM LINE

by Katy Z. Allen

Nearly All of the World’s Shallow Coral Reefs Are Now Critically Endangered: If climate change continues apace, 96 percent of shallow coral reef ecosystems may collapse within 50 years, including in Australia’s Great Barrier reef. —The New York Times, October 22, 2026

I read it in the business section 

of the newspaper today, 

the prediction that in 50 years 

almost all coral reef ecosystems

in all the oceans and seas

will be dead

due to climate change

and ocean warming.

Perhaps it matters 

only because of its impact 

on the marketplace? 

Or is it of interest 

only to people

involved in business? 

Or is it a matter 

of the monetary value 

of the coral reefs? 

To whom does it actually matter? 

It certainly matters to the fish and anemones,

sea urchins and octopuses,

invertebrates of all stripes 

and so many other creatures

living amongst the coral,

and it matters, of course, 

to the coral themselves. 

It probably matters to people 

who go snorkeling

or deep sea diving. 

It definitely matters to fishing people. 

It matters to some artists. 

It matters to people 

whose hearts

are tied to the sea

and the land and the air. 

But the reality is, 

what is happening to coral reef ecosystems

matters to every iota of life 

on this Earth,

for when one of us goes, 

it is only a matter of time

until we all go. 

But today the sun is shining,

a breeze is blowing,

the trees are turning,

my beloved is at my side,

and some say we can still

save the coral reefs.

Life goes on. 

For now.

Katy Z. Allen is a lover of the more-than-human world, poet, retired rabbi of an outdoor congregation, former healthcare chaplain, and co-founder of a Jewish climate organization. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in print and online in such places as The New Verse News, Amethyst Review, The Bluebird Word, Cosmic Daffodil, The Soliloquist Journal. She was awarded Honorable Mention in The Prose Poem’s 2025 Prose Poetry Competition, her chapbook My Sister and I was published by Botlecap Press and A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text by Strong Voices Publishing. 

TO SPITE A CURFEW

by Vincent

Around a hundred neo-Nazis and hooligans marched through Lyon on the evening of Monday, October 19, in violation of the curfew, defying the city while shouting racist and neo-fascist slogans. This show of force by the movement took place under the passive gaze of the police. —Liberation, October 20, 2026

under cover of darkness
they slither through 
small winding streets of lyon

their pieces slowly gathering 
until their manblock is formed

their clothing all black
their faces all white
nothing about them reads 

shades of grey

at the helm 
the celtic cross crudely painted
over the french flag

flanked by militants
marching down victor hugo street
the irony likely lost on them

as chants of intolerance 
despicable calls for ethnic purity
echo through shuttered storefronts and empty stoops

despite the curfew in effect
they remain unaffected
by the forces of order

not an officer to be seen

unburdened by the strike of a baton
explosions of grenades
or tears of gas and despair

no these men march unmet
by the munitions of the rule of law
almost as if afforded this window

not just to be heard
not just to be seen
but to be feared

the message loud and clear

among those filmed
a familiar face emerges
renaud mannheim 

known agitator
leader of the group blood and honor
proud neo-nazi

his entourage of reproductions
duplicates of him
a biomass of copy pasted identitarians

in one voice their chants
demand the swift removal 
of those unlike them

our streets they yell
france wake up they shout
fists in the air they throw 

remigration their euphemism 
giving oxygen 
to another false narrative

propagated by the very government
that stands to benefit
quietly thriving in their chaos

Author's note: In France, since August high school students throughout the country have been voicing concerns about the conditions of their buildings, overcrowding in classrooms, unreasonably heavy workloads, lack of teachers, issues with mandatory online platforms that allow them to apply to college, and unsanitary conditions in which there is no toilet paper or soap, toilets don't work, mold is visible, and rats have been seen... In the last few weeks, they reached a tipping point and began organizing walkouts (especially in less affluent neighborhoods), which have since morphed into large-scale protests that were declared to the authorities in advance. Rather than attempt to address their real concerns or offer solutions, the government responded by changing the approved routes at the last minute and deploying tens of thousands of militarized police, which has led to minors being dismembered, disfigured, unlawfully jailed, gassed, kettled, and beaten. As in many situations that involve civil unrest, unrelated groups have taken advantage of the chaos to loot and vandalize, but the media has falsely linked these activities to the protestors and progressives despite the fact that the evidence and footage does not support these claims. Instead of reporting on the scale and rejection of police-led violence and their disproportionate response, many news outlets have focused on the looting, while perpetuating a false narrative that left-leaning political leaders are behind the destruction. However, police action has overwhelmingly been directed at protestors, while leaving businesses completely vulnerable to bad actors. On the night of the nazi march, nearly 300 chanting men roamed freely, without a single police officer confronting them. 

Vincent was a Portland-based poet and advocate for social justice who left the United States in 2025 because of the the tr*mp regime. His work has been featured in The New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Writers Resist, and Words and Whispers to name a few publications. He currently lives in France, where he is deeply saddened by a similar political climate taking shape. He has seen firsthand some of the injustice referenced in his work and he hopes that his writing will encourage people to do their research, think critically, and vote intelligently.

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.