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Smoke from wildfires in provinces of Ontario and Quebec in Canada made Philadelphia’s iconic Belmont Plateau skyline nearly invisible on June 7, 2023. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY) |
Today's News . . . Today's Poem
The New Verse News
presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
Friday, June 09, 2023
GRAY HAZE
HAIKU
Thursday, June 08, 2023
WHILE READING THE GUARDIAN, I RECOGNIZE A FAMILIAR NARRATIVE
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A three-year-old Palestinian boy has died in hospital, four days after he was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers while riding in a car with his father in the occupied West Bank. Mohammed al-Tamimi (above) was airlifted to the Sheba hospital near Tel Aviv after the incident on Thursday night and remained in a critical condition until medical officials announced his death on Monday. His father, Haitham al-Tamimi, 40, is still being treated at a Palestinian hospital. His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening. —The Guardian, June 5, 2023 |
After blocking entrances to a village
in the Occupied West Bank,
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shot
a father and his three year old boy
because they lived there.
Bullets went through the boy’s head;
he was airlifted to a Jewish hospital
near Tel Aviv. They shoot the boy
then act as if they want to save him.
A few days later he’s dead.
His father’s in a Palestinian hospital bed.
What is life to him now?
The story was, the IDF said,
that the bullets were shot by Palestinians.
This is how the narrative always starts.
Then the word “crossfire” is used.
But eyewitnesses said there was no other gunfire.
Then the IDF admits they shot the father and his son
and “regrets harm to noncombatants. Doing everything
in its power to prevent…” The case is closed.
Bonnie Naradzay’s poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review online, Tampa Review, Florida Review online, EPOCH, Dappled Things, The Birmingham Poetry Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Miscellany, and other places. In 2010 she was awarded the New Orleans MFA program’s poetry prize: a month’s stay in the castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary. For many years, she has led regular poetry sessions at day shelters for the homeless and also at a retirement center, all in Washington, DC.
Wednesday, June 07, 2023
A POEM IN THE STYLE OF…
by Samantha Pious
ChatGPT, I’m running out of time—
at 5 PM submissions will be due.
I need an adverb to fill out the line
and so, reluctantly, I turn to you.
ChatGPT, this stanza doesn’t rhyme.
I need your help! What ends in -angeroo?
Hmm. Nothing else? I’m really in a bind—
maybe you could write this next one too?
ChatGPT, there’s so much on my mind
and writing’s hard. So give me just a few
new poems for this manuscript of mine.
If somebody—lol, who?—decides to sue,
I’ll say it’s a conceptual design.
Brilliant, eh? Five books, and twenty-two
thousand copies sold on Nook and Prime!
Life is good. There’s so much left to do.
ChatGPT, I’m running out of time.
Samantha Pious is a poet, translator, editor, and medievalist with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her translations of Renée Vivien are available as A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2017); her translation of Christine de Pizan's One Hundred Ballades of a Lover and His Lady is forthcoming.
Tuesday, June 06, 2023
THE WIND SWEPT AWAY
The wind swept away
father’s humming
mother’s crooning
her cleared throat soft lullabies
her rosaries and prayers.
The wind swept away
babies’ babbling
children’s puzzled cries
scalded and scarred hopes
wheat fields turned to blackened earth.
The wind swept away
unfinished stories
hushed words secrets
that once wormed their way
into corners of rooms.
The wind swept away
mud planked floors foundations
cracked plaster walls
shattered window panes
bombs exploding like falling comets
In a fierce whirl of fire and ash
the wind swept away
histories, memories, time
present or to be known unfettered dreams
Only voices of survivors remain
asking in garbled tongues:
What is the difference between
dying and living? Where do our shadows take us?
Editor’s Note: This poem arrived at The New Verse News just as we heard news of the dangerous breaching of the dam near Kherson. Although the poem’s central image is wind, it might just as well, we fear, be water.
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at SUNY New Paltz where she taught creative writing, memoir, creative nonfiction courses as well as American Literature, Women’s Literature, the Literature of Witnessing, and Holocaust Literature. Her poetry has been published in over one hundred journals including The Cream City Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Phoebe, The Chiron Review, Memoir(and), The Vassar Review, The Westchester Review, and Wind. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000). Her chapbook The Earth Was Still was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, by Word Temple Press. Her volume of poetry, Foraging for Light, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019.
Monday, June 05, 2023
ORLANDO GOES SHOPPING AT TARGET
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AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The “tuck-friendly” swimsuits are only offered in adult sizes, according to a spokesperson for the company and Target’s website. Kids’ swimsuits in the collection do not feature this label.
He was young, rich, handsome.
Exiled from court,
robbed of his coronet
and robes of the garter,
he left the rancid nodding mass
of stiff lace and ceremony—
the Lady Purity,
the Lady Modesty,
the Lady Chastity,
terrifying diadems of lightning and ice.
There was no truth in their dreadful den.
Avant. Begone.
While Orlando slept
the scarlet trumpeters circled and blared
TRUTH
and she awoke naked, unashamed
in the dressing room of the Nicollet Mall Target
among scattered plastic hangers
and clothing of every color cast
on common grey carpet.
With the money left from
the sale of her pearls
she procured vivid dresses, paper fans,
butterfly socks, even a tuck suit.
Ecstasy, ecstasy,
wild plumed goose loading rainbows
into a red plastic cart,
on her way to the self-serve checkout.
Sunday, June 04, 2023
THE BLACK HUMMINGBIRD
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Why all the gray skies [in Southern California]? It's a reasonable question with a fairly complex answer that we find ourselves asking yearly when they show up and stick around for a few months. Known as May Gray and June Gloom, the period’s a sign of transition from cool winter weather to scorching summer temperatures. —LAist, May 19, 2023. Photo: Ushering in June Gloom near Santa Ynez, California on June 01, 2020. | George Rose/Getty Images via KCET. |
Saturday, June 03, 2023
NOT IN OUR STAR…
entire worlds gassed, doomed,
consumed in its stellar belly.
They say our sun will do the same
and swallow the Earth in the “deep future”
five billion years from now.
While we wait, let’s celebrate spring,
a season in love with the sun,
carefree and heedless of remote catastrophe.
But humans bring peril five billion years early
Our planet gobbled up, not from afar,
but from us, under our benevolent star.
Phyllis Frakt began writing poems in 2021. Her previous poems in The New Verse News are "Teach to the Test" and "Caught in Between." She lives in New Jersey.
Friday, June 02, 2023
DEMO
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Jeff Koterba / Cagle Cartoons |
In the House
there’s treachery afoot.
A leader sandwiched by volleys
of red sensation
and
what formerly was known
as consensus.
And the price to be paid:
parliamentary
demo-
li-tion.
I move that the Country
Avert economic infanticide
By installing cold showers
That spray the margins where
Passion plays like theatre
To astound the outer rings.
Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and he litigates. His poems have appeared in Sierra Nevada Review, Jerry Jazz, Whistling Shade, St. Paul Almanac, Liquid Imagination, Blue Mountain Review, Portside, New Verse News, JMWW, Cagibi, Silver Blade, Crack the Spine, Dash, Mikrokosmos, North Dakota Quarterly, Eclectica, Writers Resist, Sheepshead, Mizmor Anthology, Poets Reading the News, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven's Perch, Main Street Rag and Brooklyn Review. His collection Jazz at the International Festival of Despair is scheduled for publication by Broadstone Books, in the spring, 2024.
Thursday, June 01, 2023
THINGS EASIER THAN MARRIAGE TO IKE
Sprinting across the I-30
in the dead of night
the leggy legend
with infectious charm
turned trauma into triumph,
swapped bloodied and beaten
for surviving and thriving
in an act of self-preservation.
She dared to be the needle
that pricked the heady
Love Team balloon,
indestructible Tina
in leather and denim
scrubbed toilets
scaled the Eiffel Tower in heels
unearthed her pain
instead of maintaining
her 16-year limelight lie,
transforming thirty-six cents
and inconceivable drive
into the Queen of Rock,
self-love, that second-hand emotion
had everything to do with it,
Buddha offered nirvana.
When the shine was off the penny
she was at peace slowing down,
asking her devoted public
not to disturb her before noon.
Elaine Sorrentino has been published in Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Ekphrastic Review, Writing in a Women’s Voice, Global Poemic, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Agape Review, Haiku Universe, Sparks of Calliope, Muddy River Poetry Review, Your Daily Poem, Panoplyzine, Etched Onyx Magazine, and at wildamorris.blogspot.com. She was featured on a poetry podcast at Onyx Publications.
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
LETZTE GENERATION
A scream circumnavigates the world.
Is anybody listening
when the police arrive to sweep away
those for whom the last resort
is blocking traffic
to impress upon their fellow citizens
the planet is on life support
and the drivers only have a mile to go
before the ground opens up
and swallows them.
Does anybody care?
Call it Freedom; say Democracy
until it hurts; write to the highest authority
and the mail comes back
as undeliverable.
The future’s not the future
anymore. And yet it is still beautiful
when a day begins with a mountain
spreading its wings
and the sun breaking into song.
David Chorlton lives in Phoenix where he writes and occasionally paints watercolors. While his writing is usually poetry, his newest book is a true life account of a murder story from 1960s Vienna (where he lived for several years) in which one of his cousins was wrongly convicted: The Long White Glove published by New Meridian Arts.
Editor’s Note: Listen to David talk about his new book on the Word podcast (about 10 minutes in) from WJZZ.