The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.
Debbie Benson’s recent poems appear (or are forthcoming) inIndiana Review, Passages North, Bennington Review,Ninth Letter, andThe Penn Review. Past awards include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Vern Cowles Prize, an International Merit Award fromAtlanta Review, inclusion inBest New Poets, and a “Best of the Net” nomination. She is a prior contributor atThe New Verse News. She works as a clinical psychologist in NYC.
May the air you breathe be poison-free and fitting
for all your toiling people, and all life.
Mariana Mcdonald is a poet, writer, activist, and scientist. Her work has been published and anthologized widely. A southerner with lifelong ties to Puerto Rico, she lives in Atlanta.
Inspired by the traditional Ghanian tale “Anansi and the Box of Stories”
Anansi was not an itsy bitsy spider
but a trickster from Ghana
who asked the Sky God for some stories
God supplied only an empty story box
so the tricky, spindly spider
traveled the world gathering tales
till the spider stole all the stories ever told
and stored them neatly, categorically,
searchably, in the box.
Then Anansi scrambled tales, fabricating new ones, till we, the tellers, grew superfluous
We pleaded with the Sky Gods to help us
take back the box of stories.
stamp out the spider
give the tales back to those who lived them.
We confronted the arachnid ––
you’re not the real Anansi,
ancient figure of legend and lore
tell us your real name! we cried!
AI, the scorpion replied.
Steve Zeitlin is the Founding Director of City Lore, New York City’s Center for Urban Folk Culture, and co-founder of the Brevitas poetry collective. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, I Hear America Singing in the Rain (First Street Press, 2002), and How Do You Wear the Universe? (2026, Mediacs Press) as well as twelve books on America’s folk culture. In 2016, he published a collection of essays, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness (Cornell University Press). In 2022, he published JEWels: Teasing Out the Poetry in Jewish Humor and Storytelling (JPS/U. of Nebraska Press).
AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.
Damon Runyon had a bunion AI said eat half an onion the other half is for the bunion
Edgar Allen Poe herpes blister on the toe AI said Mister Poe you did the nasty with a hoe herpes blister on the toe
Percy Bysshe Shelley bite marks on the belly AI said to be or not be smelly Shelley bite marks on the belly
John Keats tits or teats thinner or fatter what does it matter AI said poetry is alive John Keats is dead at twenty-five
Rochelle Owens was part of the 1950s Beat scene in Greenwich Village as well as the early ethnopoetics movement,and eventually became involved with the start of the St. Marks Poetry Project and Deux Megot reading series. Known as one of the pioneers of experimental off-off-Broadway theater, Owens has written several plays that have been cited for their imagination, innovative language, and controversial themes. In 1969, her first play Futz was made into a film, and her plays have been presented worldwide. A recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle, Owens has published over a dozen books of poetry and received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio Center), among others.
Father of Baby Shot Dead by IDF in Hebron: I Stopped When Asked, Then They Opened Fire. 'The soldier was about ten meters away from me. He saw me, he saw my wife and the children. The car windows were not dark, it was daylight and everything was clear. You can't say he didn't see that it was a family,' Fahed Abu Haykal told Haaretz, June 6, 2026.
I’d like to write like Tu Fu, whose poems are like branches of trees reflected in water –
the branches of trees. Like a group of trees seen through clouds or mist, they appear, then disappear.
But I learned that today Israeli forces murdered a Palestinian baby, in the West Bank, in Hebron.
He was in his mother’s arms, in a car the soldiers shot into. They’d ordered the driver, the baby’s father,
to stop, and he did as they said, and raised his hands in submission. The baby’s mother sustained shrapnel
injuries near her heart, may not survive. The soldiers had been standing idly in the street. After firing
into the car, they walked unconcernedly away from their carnage. Today in Gaza City, Israelis aimed
a drone at the Jawazat camp for people who’d been displaced. The drone killed seven, wounded 15 others.
How can I honor the lives of Palestinians? Like a group of olive trees, they are destroyed and made to disappear.
Bonnie Naradzay is the author of Invited to the Feast (Slant Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Journal of Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, The Georgia Review, Cumberland River Review, Dappled Things, New Letters, Poet Lore, Rhino, Innisfree, and many other journals. While at Harvard University’ graduate program, she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Poetry.” She was a winner of the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize (a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary). Three of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She is a 2017 graduate of the St John’s College Graduate Institute. She has led poetry classes at the DC Women’s Jail and currently leads weekly poetry sessions at Street Sense and at a retirement community both in Washington, DC.
In place to chase balls older legs won't catch ...
Low forties are when singles slams elude
Lawn-tennis stars who still win doubles. Yet
If, two slams short, Serena feels renewed
And forty's her new thirty, who will bet
Ms Court and Mr Djokovic still beat
Serena's singles-slam count, when complete?
Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His poems have appeared in Current Conservation, Ekphrastic Review, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, WestWard Quarterly, and several other journals.In 2025 he won the Children's Unpublished category of the Eyelands Book Awards with Flora’s Flock and Other Stories to Read Aloud.
W Hillsdale St and Chestnut St, Lansing, MI, April 23, 2026
“A gunman walked up to an intersection near downtown Lansing on the night of Thursday, April 23 and fired into a crowd, sending six people to the hospital with gunshot wounds, police said." —Lansing State Journal, April 24, 2026
Sky lacks stars, I drive up, midnight, wanting to see what it’s like in these mute soot-colored neighborhoods’ packed scars of late-night shootings that seem to be so common. I’m in a black car. I exit, rushing, pull a quick right into a black tar empty lot, sit tight, headlights hit bright like flame on an unnamed unkempt apartment complex lit like a mild Wes Anderson noir attempt, almost too exact,
windshield like film frame, the poor building a rich pitch-/kiln-black, except that one sole light’s on, yellow as all hell, giving this gushing xanthic-like light like gigantic Atlantic with yellow gushing out of this most bright bright lit room almost dead center. From limbo, I see a head; a body rises—a living ghost—comes to the window, stands there, looks at me, unforgiving, I suppose, yes, in his best Wild West anger gunslinger quick-draw pose, hands close to his sides (never rides sidesaddle). I’d appear, I guess, maybe
like a narc, or a mark, parked in dark shadows, this look on his face like Hell no. I’m alone. I realize this is his home. I’m coming to these shootings as a poet-reporter, as a quote-recorder, as I’ve wrote over and over on how guns torture, a sorta post-traumatic press disorder. But this is simply his home. This poem is an intrusion, my body too, my skin yellow in the streetlight and I think of yellow journalism, of dirty laundry, of firm boundaries. I feel apologetic. Diegetic sound of some distant car, distinct, far in the distance, De Palma’s Blow Out-ish.
But this isn’t mishmash of film. He’s not a character. These are people. These mass shootings are mass killings. They’re real. I feel, for the first time, that I shouldn’t be here. For real. My wheels peel out, go out the way I came. No quotes captured; no names named; no new insights. Six people were shot here. Daughter, shot here. A 14-year-old girl shot here, in the ear. Five females shot here. A 5-year-old girl shot in the leg. I imagine that 5-year-old standing in that window in the night, bleeding, watching me, needing me to do something other than just write.
The Archbishop of Washington DC removed The senior priest who
Has been the diocesan Exorcist for the Last nearly twenty years
After the latter Said that Unidentified Flying Objects were
Demons. Actually, one would Think that Monsignor Rossetti would be in a
Good position to Make such an assessment, Although it is the
Twenty first century and There are no such things Actually as UFOs.
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.
