The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have appeared in numerous print and only journals. His new book At the Driveway Guitars Sale is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. He podcasts poems of aging, memory, and mortality at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife Cynthia in northern California.
Felicia Sanzari Chernesky is a longtime editor and picture book author who tracks life’s footprints with poetry as her lens. Her microfiction has been nominated for a 2021 Pushcart and Best of Microfiction. She lives with her family in Flemington, New Jersey
"Joe Biden must usher in a new era," —The Hill, January 20, 2021
"Not the least of the torments which plague our existence is the constant pressure of time, which never lets us so much as draw breath but pursues us all like a taskmaster with a whip." —Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World.
We can stop and draw our breath,
like we did as children, playing,
the flotsam of years is not gone,
the losses of just one year took
on such proportions that the days
grew dark, the stories in the papers
were too much to bear, we grew
hardened, now we can return to
the world of the visible, the world
of the reliable, return to hear the
rustle of the human and the animal,
see the reliable green of forests and
wilderness, touch the solid walls of
houses that did not crumble and be
touched by pictures of painters that
are art until we are ready for the
journey inward to recover the light
of logic we lost in a long and dark tunnel.
George Salamon not sure we are on the threshold of a "new era" yet, or are ready for it, but he hopes we will get there. In the meantime, he expects he'll keep contributing to The Asses of Parnassus, One Sentence Poems, Dissident Voice and The New Verse News from St.Louis.
First day in a white classroom on November 14, 1960.
Angela Davis: Born January 26, 1944.
Became the third Woman on the fbi’s most wanted list on August 18, 1970.
Released on bail after 16 months of incarceration on February 23, 1972.
Acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury on June 4, 1972.
Marsha P. Johnson: Born August 24, 1945.
Stonewalled the nypd on June 28, 1969.
The nypd ruled Marsha’s death a suicide on July 6, 1992.
Martin Luther King Jr: Born January 15, 1929.
Had a dream on August 28, 1963.
Went to the mountaintop on April 3, 1968.
Assassinated by white supremacists on April 4, 1968.
Emmett Till: Born July 25, 1941.
Whistled at a white girl on August 28, 1955.
He was two years older than
Tamir Rice: Born June 25, 2002.
Murdered by a white man with a badge on November 22, 2014.
jim crow: Born Juneteenth, 1865.
just won’t fucking
die
I imagine that mista past president has sat
underneath palms in the Middle East
but has never tasted the warm sweetness
of a date
can’t bring himself to put his lips on
Worn Leather and Scar Tissue and Age Lines
and Exhaustion and Folk Music and Survival
classrooms shove dates down my throat
put their hands over my mouth
so I have to swallow
don’t even prepare ‘em right
leave pits in my stomach
forget the date came from the tree
came from the seed
came from the pit
came from the date
which is to say that linearity and
history are both constructed.
what is a date
without person and place?
time does not march forward
unless we do
I hold a date in the palm of my hand
sink my teeth into it
bite down into the gooey, sticky sweetness
savor the moment
write my own History
write my own poem
call this a radical act
Ethan Thayumanavan is an aspiring poet of Indian descent, from Amherst, Massachusetts. He is a full-time student at Columbia University. His exploration of poetry began when he joined a collegiate spoken word poetry team, but his love for the written word has influenced his transition from performance to writing.
Jimmy Pappas can be found on YouTube interviewed by Tim Green at Rattlecast #34. Jimmy is now writing at least one haiku a day for the rest of the year. Wish him luck with that one.
Paul Smith is a civil engineer who has worked in the construction racket for many years. He has traveled all over the place and met lots of people. Some have enriched his life. Others made him wish he or they were all dead. He likes writing poetry and fiction. He also likes Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one. His poetry and fiction have been published in Convergence, Packingtown Review, Literary Orphans, TheNewVerse.News, and other lit mags.
Amy Elizabeth Robinson is a poet, writer, historian, mother, and many other things. She did live in the eastern mountains of Sonoma County, California, but her collectively-owned community recently burned in the Glass Fire. She is a community leader at Flower Mountain Zen, and her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Literary Mama, West Marin Review, West Trestle Review, Vine Leaves, Rattle’s Poets Respond program, and elsewhere. She blogs at www.turningplanet.org.
Dan Brook teaches in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San Jose State University and is, most recently, the author of Sweet Nothings (Hekate Publishing).
Just down the street, outside a neighbor’s door, it reaches up and out, as if for hope or heaven, in an effort to restore its honor and resist the downward slope traversed by those who lied, who followed liars, who beat a man with those same stripes and stars, who lit and fanned and spread murderous fires that left some dead, the rest of us with scars. I see Old Glory fluttering in the breeze— but elsewhere, desecrated by a gang of thugs, it symbolized not liberties and laws, but rage, and justice by flash-bang. I miss the days when I was confident about what flags by neighbors’ front doors meant.
Jean L. Kreiling is the author of two collections of poetry: Arts & Letters & Love (2018) and The Truth in Dissonance (2014). Her work has been honored with the Able Muse Write Prize, the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Prize, the Kelsay Books Metrical Poetry Prize, a Laureates’ Prize in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, three New England Poetry Club prizes, the Plymouth Poetry Contest prize, and the String Poet Prize.
I’ve been thinking about the Hopi Prophecy as told to me
by a friend, how we would find ourselves in a rushing river,
our body a soggy vessel careening toward the unknown. And the Hopi
instruction was to notice who traveled beside us, not to flail
or cling to the shore, but to trust the water. I’ve been thinking
about the deep bass voice and compelling smell of an armpit, a man
who sang lyrics into my ear, leaned around me as I washed a pan,
crooned, I just can’t live without you, sister golden hair surprise,
how he vanished with that torso he’d spooned around me,
strapped into his own life vest, his SUV growing smaller
as it exited the street in front of my house where I’ve stayed
mostly alone since March, and how the ones who’ve held
my hand and head above water have done so through Zoom
screens or contained in chiweenie fur or while flouncing
around the living room in a size 6x little girl’s net skirt. How comfort
has come via iPhones on speaker, text boxes, Words with Friends
app chats, or from the masked employees at Jiffy Lube,
a uniformed ballet of them who unscrew, drain, pour fluid,
bow, you’re welcome, smile with eyes, say, you’re okay now,
reset the Need Maintenance light that flashed on my dash.
Susan Vespoli has been holed for almost a year in Phoenix, where she's written poetry, led writing circles on Zoom for writers.com, ridden her bike, and walked her dogs. Her work has been published in The New Verse News, Rattle, Nasty Women Poets Anthology, Mom Egg Review, Nailed Magazine, and others.
Heading in to the Quickie Mart I can tell right away something’s wrong,
the kid behind the counter with the plexi-glass wrap-around going at it
with a customer, giving him a piece of her mind, or more. I think perhaps
she caught him stealing, or worse, but he’s a business guy, gray suit, gray tie,
and when I open the door it’s not anger at all, it’s passion I’m hearing,
passion in a Quickie Mart. She’s just a kid, early 20’s or so, hair pulled back,
masked, oversized glasses fogged up. She’s saying, …when even we can see
what’s going on, us average people, people like us, then you know something’s wrong.
And the man doesn’t speak, just nods and turns away, goes past me
like a broken ghost, back to the world again. And I turn to her in this
tiny temple where we all come and go for milk and tickets and cigarettes
and gas, and ask her what it is that all of us should know, all us average people
who gas and gulp and come and go. She says, …the Capitol, what those people did.
And I tell her I agree, it’s a sacred place, that they call it the People’s House,
that Lincoln ended slavery there with the 13th Amendment in the Capitol,
that when you’re actually there it feels more like a church. And then I can’t stop.
I tell her it’s good what you did, speaking up like that. I tell her Siddhartha
says your birthday isn’t really the day that you’re born. It’s the first time
you stand up to your parents, to anyone with power over you, and tell them
the truth. That’s the day when you’re truly born, when you first come alive.
I want to say she was smiling, gleaming like a newborn held up to the light,
but she was wearing a mask. I gave her a twenty for pump number five.
John Hodgen, Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University, won the AWP Prize for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press). His new book is The Lord of Everywhere (Lynx House/University of Washington Press).
they said this man was just like them we said he doesn’t feel the same
they said he said that’s just fake news we said this is a dangerous game
they said he’s making us great again while we witnessed his power abuses
they diminished and deflected delivering his excuses
we called this pattern treacherous nefarious hateful nasty
they called him biblical
patriotic bold and crafty
we said he’s promoting violence
they said he doesn’t mean it
we showed them clips of footage
they said we just don’t see it
we said hands up don’t shoot
black lives matter me too
they said shut up and dribble
all lives matter back the blue
we plead for justice
but just us took a knee
so they beat us up with shields batons and false decrees
we said we have our rights
they said well not today
we said these were our streets
so they gassed us all away
we protested peacefully
get your knees off our neck
they called us anarchists
then wrote themselves some checks
we turned out in record
to win the election
they claimed there was fraud
pledged their objections
we agreed to a recount
they cried stop the steal
maskless they rallied
refusing to heal
they threatened more violence despite our constitution
we said he’s propagating
they called it lib delusion
then hundreds and hundreds
with his flags and motifs
assailed the steps
of our nation’s top chiefs
we cried this is madness
the building’s not secured
they said our take-back has begun and we will not be deterred
we said look at the police
they’re like ushers in disguise
allowing them to enter
with insurgency supplies
we saw gates open wide
with a skirmish or two
then a lonely black cop
with just a stick and film crew
never drawing his firearm
just clutching his baton
yelling and retreating
his leverage too far gone
they paraded their faces
took selfies and stole files
besieged and disgraced
our nations state house defiled
they were released without consequence
set free without question
acquitted of their felonies
at forty fives direction
we watched in horror for hours
what we had known would come true
his fascist america
executing their coup
Rémy Dambron is an English teacher, proud husband, and activist whose poetry focuses primarily on advocating for social justice and denouncing political corruption. His work has been featured on What Rough Beast, Writer’s Resist, Poets Reading the News, and The New Verse News.
zombie daddy trudges on / grudges flying / bringing you your big chance / to shit in marble hallways / what a land of opportunity / for a sweaty daddy / poor daddy / his pinhole hungry-ghost mouth / starving starving / rubbing up against the teevee / daddy eating up the low-class love / slabface swelling & yelling / nooooooo / bloody crash of murder clown car / tactical antlers tangled / kevlar hooves sliding on the pedals / daddy’s at the wheel singing / all the way to / mother of mercy / is this the end of daddy
Originally from Detroit, Martha McCollough now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Radar, Zone 3, Tampa Review, and Salamander, among others. Her chapbook Grandmother Mountain was published by Blue Lyra Press in October 2019.
with these toxic snakes, want to fence them all out.
But what about the homegrown “patriots”—the domestic
side-armed sidewinding rattler, chattering and clattering
its venomous views, sowing discord wherever it chooses?
What about the skin-headed southern cottonmouth
with its deceptive languid accent and aggressive
lashing out? The klanned coral snake, venomous,
yet anonymous? The paranoid tea-
stained copperhead? The credulous shrug them off,
consider them crazies,
not dangerous species
to be monitored and tracked.
They slither from under rocks and brush piles
in the western hills, cluster in nests in lowland swamps,
ooze out of slimy mics all over the homeland.
The willfully oblivious ignore them—
even when they rear back and strike.
Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee, WI, where she is now watching in horror as the homegrown snakes are all slithering out at once. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, both online and in print.
when police squeezed out George Floyd’s last breath
with a knee to his neck, shot their way
into Breonna Taylor’s home,
left her dead on her floor, clicked off
the too-short lives of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin
with flicks of a trigger.
They scarcely discerned it in the eyes of children
ripped from fathers’, mothers’ arms,
caged at the border, never to see
their parents again.
It was not obvious to them when 350,000 souls—
disproportionately black and brown, immigrant, indigenous—
were extinguished by the virus
the president heralded as a “hoax,”
as ICU’s, hearses, morgues choked on bodies
and ambulances were ordered not to stop
for “low-probability” passengers.
It took broken glass and guns at the Capitol,
ghost-faced rioters in MAGA hats, banners, swastikas,
sporting toxic slogans spawned and spewed
by the Commander-in-Chief.
It took hordes single-minded as Atilla the Hun
or shock-troops of the Third Reich storming
up the marble stairs beneath idyllic landscapes,
portraits of iconic heads of state,
pushing past police who never imagined
the possibility of a white mob
forcing their way into chambers constructed,
polished to protect the rule of law,
wielding shotguns and rifles,
wrapped in bullet-proof vests.
It took the legislators in lockdown
little time to detect the pattern,
crouching behind their chairs, calling
loved ones, clutching gas-masks,
as they were herded to hidden locations
while the president’s minions lounged
in their offices, read their mail,
trashed their papers, took selfies.
In the fray below five people died.
It took them only hours to declare a breach,
recalibrate the rules, call for silencing,
impeaching the author of the action
to pluck out the bad seed.
But still, in the white wilderness of our minds,
tiptoe home-grown terrorists nurtured
with our blindness, lethal legacies,
assumptions of supremacy—
the hate so deeply sown
in our own hearts.
Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa. A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing. Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.
The end? Well, we could hardly call it that, as if
Whatever just happened, isn’t found in an old
Paper thin tome nobody’s read for a zillion years,
Instead, the end, or The End, just keeps blistering
The heck out of nearly everyone, though some
Are immune, and will never know when any End
Is just around, looking for hopeless dopes like most
Of us are now, prayers done with, floors mopped
With Clorox, as if that would scare anyone away,
But the Bugs like that deep inhalation we take when
We walk into any room, like sniffing lighter fluid
Right into the lungs where it plans to stay and stay
Until all of us are turned over onto our stomachs
By the kindest of medical staff, hoping the deep
Breaths will pull us out, but most of us have already
Died, and had no clue anything was like The End as
So many are whispering about now, as if Breaking
News isn’t about a new political cataclysm, but rather
Breaking the hearts of so many in so many hugely
Different parts of our world, everywhere even in
Antarctica, and who brought the Bugs in to such a
Pristine, icy world anyway? ICU’s are now in gift
Shops, chapels, parking lots with unique tenting
Materials and refrigerator trucks behind and out
Of sight, keeping all the dead quite cool until we
Find a place that will prepare the dead without
Ending up as the prepared dead. That’s our new
World with the best hopes of looking ahead nearly
Two or three years out, and even then, new varieties
Will awaken all of us again, those who aren’t quite
Living any more, but just waiting, you know for what
Don’t you, call it what you want but here, it’s The End.
Recent poems by DeWitt Clinton have appeared in Lowestoft Chronicle, The New Reader Review, The Bezine, The Poet by Day, Verse-Virtual, Poetry Hall, Muddy River Poetry Review, Across the Margin, Art + Literature Lab, One Magazine, Fudoki Magazine (England), and The New Verse News. He has two poetry collections from New Rivers Press; a recent collection, At the End of the War; and By a Lake Near a Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters, poetic adaptations of Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater, and lives in Shorewood, Wisconsin.
Robbie Gamble’s poems have appeared in Coal Hill Review, Whale Road Review, RHINO, Poet Lore, and Rust + Moth. He was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry prize. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont.
the four thousand people in our country who will die today.
Because it is your birthday, I’m going to erase from my mind
the insane president and treasonous riot he instigated
and the love video he put out to his thug followers as five people died
during the siege of the Capitol, and pretend the polls are fake
that say 45% of Republicans believe the breaking
and entering was the right thing to do, and I’m going
to drive to the card store – the good one, not the grocery
or the pharmacy with their picked-over puns,
but the fancy one that specializes in fine crafted, highly artistic
expressions of earnest emotions, featuring
only the cutest kitten and puppy pics, and charge
at least six dollars and ninety-nine cents for ironic yet sincere stuff like:
You’re not getting older—oh wait!—I just checked
your sun dial—yes you are! Because it is your birthday
I’m not going to even wonder if we should be celebrating
considering today’s particularly disappointing jobs report
and the unnerving delay on stimulus checks and vaccines.
I’m going to interrogate every rack on every aisle to pick out
your perfect card, and because I can’t stop the riots
or bring back the dead, or deliver the checks or administer the vaccine,
I will, because it is your birthday, light the candle, and watch
you close your eyes to the whole world and make your wish.
Michael Mark’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Arkansas International, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Salamander, The Southern Review, The Sun, Waxwing, and The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry. He’s the author of two books of stories including Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).
State and federal wildlife authorities were investigating after a manatee with “Trump” on its back was spotted in Florida on Sunday. Credit: Hailey Warrington, The New York Times, January 11, 2021.
A manatee is no cartouche.
A manatee is not a blimp.
No pharoah's name or Nike swoosh
carved in her flanks shall ever crimp
her honey-languid swimming strokes.
She is no singing telegram,
no contrail, and no ad for smokes.
The same way you would treat the lamb,
thus you shall treat the manatee,
whose every breath's a stinky huff,
who shuffles upstream clownishly.
Love's not just for the pretty stuff,
a fact I thought you'd understand.
Man's what he is, yet God loved man.
Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), a Second Place winner in the Elgin Awards. She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition and by Julie Kane as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s sonnet crown competition the following year. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, and West Branch.
Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, The New Verse News, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his stories “The Visitor” and “A Story for the Rest of Us” for Pushcart Prizes. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collections Words of Power, Dances of Freedom and A Foreigner Wherever I Go as well as several novels and short story collections. His most recent novel is The Enigma Brokers.
Dana Yost was an award-winning daily newspaper journalist for 29 years. Since 2008, Yost has written six books, including last year's poetry chapbook In Your Head.
In a year in which only personal realities are consulted by humans, in which only over-sized creatures are heard and they merely grunt
In a year in which the hogs that grunt are only human, in which it can be seen that their blinkered eyes are rightly suspicious and monitor the intrusive attentions of folks with cameras, who are neither journalists nor tourists, but uniformed executioners bearing witness on themselves In a year in which the words of the truly reproachable bear witness against themselves, in which the words of the prophets are everywhere and too numerous to recall amidst the blinding lights of the next enormity, too large for even the wiser among us to believe, or the most gullible In which even the loudest of unsanctioned mouths fall silent, for there is simply too much to say and no lack of overpaid oath-breakers clamoring to bear witness against themselves.
Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of a novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, titled Suosso's Lane. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as Off The Coast, The Journal of American Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Califragile, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed in 2018. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.
Robert West is the author of three chapbooks of poems including Convalescent (Finishing Line Press, 2011); the co-editor of Succinct: The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems (Broadstone Books, 2013); and the editor of both volumes of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons (W. W. Norton, 2017).
Suzette Bishop teaches at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. Her books include Horse-Minded, She Took Off Her Wings andShoes, Hive-Mind, Cold Knife Surgery, and most recently, a chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Poems about living on the border, animals, and endangered species are highlighted in her most recent poems and books while her favorite way to enjoy the borderlands is by horseback.
She said it without irony, then asked for my name and date of birth. She then directed me to the room where I would wait for my turn to get the long-awaited needle stick in my arm. As I sat, visions
of pleasant young hospital staff
members throughout the country floated through my troubled mind:
My name is America, and I’m going to get you infected with Covid. My name is America, and I’m going to turn my eyes when business owners and government leaders ignore rules that could save your life. My name is America, and I’m sick to death of quarantine. My name is America, and I can’t even get you a Covid test. My name is America, and I’m looking out for illness in the stock market. My name is America, and I’m going to wear my mask
under my nose.
It took only a breath of a moment, the life-saving prick of the needle; I didn’t feel anything at all. In three weeks, I’ll return and do it again. Maybe America will guide me through the final stage of protection. Maybe America will remember me, my face half-covered by a mask, but my eyes filled with grief and fear.
Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbook, Coronary Truth (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.
