BIG CRUNCH

by Sally Zakariya

Dark energy, the mysterious force powering the expansion of the universe, appears to be weakening, according to a survey that could “overthrow” scientists’ current understanding of the fate of the cosmos. If confirmed, the results from the dark energy spectroscopic instrument (Desi) team at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona would have profound implications for theories about the evolution of the universe, opening up the possibility that its current expansion could eventually go into reverse in a “big crunch”. —The Guardian, March 19, 2025

Maybe we’ve all just had enough.

Raging wildfires… melting icebergs…
rising temperatures… falling birth rates…
whispers of war… growing fascism…
divided nation…

Where will it all end?

And now scientists are worried—
it looks like the universe itself
has had enough and has stopped
expanding.

Before you know it, those lady telescopes
(Nancy Grace Roman and Vera C. Rubin)
will huddle on a star, drinking tea
and tut-tutting about the end of it all.

But don’t worry.

Whether the universe starts expanding again
or—gulp—does a cosmic 180 and contracts
in a big crunch some billions of years from now,
we’ll still have plenty of time to destroy our own
little part of it in the meanwhile.

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 100 publications and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table, and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

NO ROOF, NO DOOR

by Paul Burgess

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

To get the house of which I'd dreamed,
The fastest route, or so it seemed, 
Was knocking down each door and wall, 
Destroying ceiling, den, and hall.
With wrecking ball, I'd swiftly smash
And relish every violent crash. 
 
The pile of rubble where I stand 
Was all I'd thought about or planned. 
Rebuilding seemed the easy part, 
But now I wonder where to start. 
I'd barely planned the building's frame, 
But bragged I'd surely put to shame 
The house in which I'd lived before,
Yet now, I've got no roof, no door, 
No wires, no pipes, but just a heap
Of rubble where I'll have to sleep. 

Paul Burgess lives in Lexington, Kentucky. He is the sole proprietor of a business that offers ESL, translation, and interpretation services. He speaks several languages fluently. When not writing strange poems, he enjoys playing guitar, reading, and hiking. He has contributed poems to Blue Unicorn, The Orchards, Parody, Lighten Up Online, Dirigible Balloon, The New Verse News, OEDILF, and other poetry publications.

BETTING AGAINST THE HOUSE

by Rick Ehling

Almost overnight an entire 

country reeks of three AM 

in Las Vegas’ seediest casino

Few truly smiling, everything feigned

All that fatigued desperation

Smoke and sweat settling heavy 

in dayless, temperature controlled space

Coin cups and wallets emptier

Perhaps a bit drunk  Bleary eyed 

Certainly sleepy  Blinking, 

yawning  Or were those sighs

Remembering prior buffet

A feathered line of showgirls

Well past joy’s equinox 

This crash after faux sugar 

Clinks and flashes finally 

overwhelming  Triggering 

a headache or tinnitus  Most 

clinging to whatever chance 

they no longer believe in

Many wishing they counted cards

Rick Ehling is a physician living in the SF Bay Area, working in what was once called a “safety net clinic.” He writes most mornings when he can’t sleep; this started after a family illness but has continued for much of the last decade.

SHE KNOWS HOW TO MAKE A U-TURN

by Beth Fox

Photo by Kevin Bermingham at Dreamstime.

She’s black, she’s white—
she’s a white-throated swift
moving so quickly I barely see
the male on her back as 
she barrels toward earth
in a courtship spin—
swerving at the point 
of impact, then 
hurtling upward 
again to become 
a speck in the sky.
(Black and white,
           dark and light—)
The nest—
a cup of moss and twigs
glued to the side of a sheer cliff
with saliva.
 
(I was once convinced
    that dark news 
          was really light—)
Fifty trips a day to care for chicks, 
feeding them balls of insects… instincts
as true as their flight.
 
Before dark times, I could tell
black from white… I will again, when
I can see through these reddened eyes…
    Will I/will we turn back in time   
          to see
     the brilliant blue sky?


A lover of the outdoors, Beth Fox was a finalist in four New England poetry contests and is widely published in New England. She helped seniors publish their work in an anthology, Other Voices, Other Lives. Her chapbook Reaching for the Nightingale is available at Finishing Line Press. Beth lives in Wolfeboro, NH.

SILENCE, A CROW

by Francis Opila

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Listen
to silence at dawn
the night still holds

you by candlelight
one poem wakes you
compels you to unravel

thread by thread
in breath, out breath
harmony in this moment

your 9 AM appointment
laundry, your next hike
bombs in the Middle East

until from a nearby maple
a crow cackles
arrested for free speech

yet he calls over & over
howls of a distant train
now a dozen crows

in breath, out breath
tapping of gentle rain

Francis Opila is a rain-struck, sun-loving poet who lives in the Pacific Northwest.  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Wayfinding, Windfall, and other journals. His poetry collection Conference of the Crows was published in 2023. He enjoys performing poetry, combining recitation and playing North American wooden flutes.

HER CENTENNIAL

by Courtney Hitson

For Flannery O’Connor,  born March 25, 2025

 

You watch from inside my poems, 
especially the ones that try
to dislodge a light beyond the page. You,
so schooled in charming goodness
from a garden snake.
 
Your hands clench these serifs
and spectate another freakshow
of a decade: our three-headed
trillionaire, realities prone
to the warp of beeping boxes,
and a bankrupt, orange business
man leading the way.
 
We’ve grown much too big
for these britches, but storms
this epic? They call for shrunken inseams
and egos. I still wish
that sixty-one years’ worth of spiral
staircase didn’t divide us.
I know you’d hurl God
as if a grenade, hot and hungry
for freedom from your hands. 

Courtney Hitson teaches English at the College of the Florida Keys. As of March, 2025, she has work forthcoming in Kestrel Review, Eunoia, Qu, Sequestrum, and Eastern Iowa Review. In 2024, her poetry received three Pushcart nominations. Outside of writing, she enjoys scuba-diving, freestyle unicycling, and philosophy. Courtney and her husband, Tom (also a poet), reside in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with their two cats.

TRAFFIC JAM TRYING TO REACH THE “FIGHT OLIGARCHY TOUR”

by Susan Vespoli

Photo by Kanishka Chinnaraj, The Daily Wildcat,  March 24, 2025

“Don’t become a monster fighting monsters.”  —paraphrased Nietzsche quote

Stuck on the Mill Avenue Bridge in Tempe

a mile (Siri says an hour) from the stadium 

Bernie and AOC fill to capacity with voters

in tee-shirts that say “Resist,” “Tax the Rich,” 

“Hope Persists,” and 1000s more line up outside,

circle the arena, live stream speeches on their phones;

us trapped in the car, the woman behind us melting 

down, honking, gesturing through her windshield

for us to MOVE and my date is the kind of driver

who smiles, waves other motorists into the flow,

but she is blasting her horn, mouthing epithets,

as his jaw clenches, middle finger twitching to flip,

and I get it, but we’re gridlocked here.

My granddaughter once said, if we had a flying car, 

this wouldn’t happen, but we don’t,

so I unbuckle my seatbelt, turn around and rise

so she can see me and I give her the peace sign 

and the namaste hands, and then shrug, what can we do?

And her face looks like it might explode off her neck—

until eventually the logjam loosens and she zooms 

into the next lane, passes us, her back bumper 

stickered with peace signs.

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, AZ and believes in the power of writing to stay sane. Her work has been published in The New Verse News, ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She is the author of four poetry books.

I-89 FROM VERMONT TO CANADA IN WINTER

by Tricia Knoll

The Canadian border is less than an hour north.
Our countries have history. Good neighbors, 
borrow and offer. Fight side by side. 
I get my power through Hydro-Quebec.
Canadians come to shop, ski, hike
icefish, and mountain bike. I drive north
for museums and botanical gardens. Maple sap
runs both ways. Sugar shacks boil
here and there. I love the maple leaf flag 
as much as the blue and yellow of Ukraine. 
We share shock and a blood moon.
So close now
 
to winter’s big thaw. My eyes downcast. 
As if every winter pothole 
might eat me, vomit me out. 
Black slush banks the highway, 
a salt road gleams white. 
Once fleeing to Canada seemed
like an escape-hatch. Love
your neighbor. Don’t beggar them.
Will Canadians forgive? 
The border is less than an hour away.
We are so very close. 

Tricia Knoll lives in Vermont near the Canadian border. Her 2024 collection Wild Apples documents her downsizing and move seven years ago from Oregon to Vermont. The taste of maple is sweet; the anger of neighbors is not.

HELL

by Clyde Always

Eight measly months remain until
the climate summit’s here.
So, highway builders of Brazil,
we’ve got a path to clear!
 
Go raze that swath of jungle there!
Knock down that açai!
How deeply, for the Earth, we care
the summiteers shall see.
 
We’ll labor on it, night and day—
our dying world be saved!
This road will be, it’s safe to say,
with good intentions paved.

Clyde Always is an accomplished cartoonist, poet, painter, novelist and entertainer. His writings and/or illustrations have been featured in Light Poetry Magazine, Freaky, Jokes Review, etc.  Visitors to Bay City are invited to enjoy his carnavalesque sidewalk show: a tall tale extravaganza known as the Surreal San Francisco Walking Tour.

LAZARUS RISES AGAIN

by Royal Rhodes

remembering “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

White House says it will not return the Statue of Liberty to France. A French politician said the U.S. no longer deserved the legendary monument. —Politico, March 17, 2025

The White House sense of what we owe to France

forgets why we are not a monarchy.

This "mighty woman with a torch," perchance,

shows with her flame its dark autocracy.

Yorktown and the sword of Lafayette

have been suppressed in its new made-up tales.

Will God forget us, if we too forget?

As "world-wide welcome" in our marrow fails?

Exiles sought for freedom like fresh air.

America was built by diverse hands,

ignored by a self-centered billionaire.

A golden door was open to all lands.

For wealth, new tyrants rule by greedy whim.

Can someone teach this statue how to swim?

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Royal Rhodes is a descendent of migrants here in the 17th century from England, and in the 19th century from Ireland.

COLUMBIA, THE GEM OF THE CENSORS

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

“The Thinker” on Columbia’s campus. Photo by Jason Zhao at Unsplash.

Academia Confronts a Watershed Moment at Columbia, and the Right Revels. Threatened with losing $400 million in federal funding, the university agreed to overhaul its protest policies and security practices. —The New York Times, March 22, 2025

Seeing all the force you wield,
Thinking we had better yield,
Letting politicians rule,
Why pretend we're still a school?

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has around 335 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), Politics/Letters, The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had eleven previous poems in The New Verse News.

TORN

by Thomas R. Smith

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Though our little lives go on, we’re aware
of a massive tearing—a fabric
we’d thought sturdy is being ripped by
unseen hands, cruel, immensely powerful.
This was not supposed to happen in our
country. The rent is pulling apart
the graves of those who died for a proud
ideal. My high school Memorial Days
in the band playing trombone at the cemetery
are torn down the middle, every
school morning that began with the Pledge
of Allegiance in shreds, and the history
book pages of our defeat of fascism
fallen to the ground like shotgunned birds.
Sit with it a moment and you’ll hear it
loud and close, a chainsaw biting into
our soul. Where are our old Scout masters,
our civics teachers who elevated
the virtues of our form of government? 
Where are the leaders we were taught to respect?
Where are the generals sworn to uphold
the Constitution while the demented
king wages war on his own people? Where
is Betsy Ross with her needle to drive
into the hole in our nation’s heart
and stitch back together this wounded cloth?

Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.

MEDEA ALSO KILLED HER CHILDREN

by Kathy Gilbert

Medea on her golden chariot, by Germán Hernández Amores

I need to write a poem
But
413 people who were alive
Yesterday are dead
 
I need to write a poem…
Bombed without warning
In the night
167 children killed
 
I need to write a poem?
What happened
To the ceasefire?
 
The poem I thought I’d write
Was how yesterday
I saw ravens collecting
Stout twigs and branches
To build and fortify their nests
Home for their future children
 
The poem I thought I’d write
Was about spring and new life
But
It’s winter all over the world
 
I need to write a poem
 
Only love can save us
Love of action. Gathering twigs
To protect new life
Of spring/ offspring
Those babies in Gaza are
our children we have murdered.

 
Kathy Gilbert resides in the Bay Area and received her MFA from SFSU. She is retired, has written two books and practices tai chi.

EQUINOX

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

AI-generated image by Evgeniatretyakova56 via Dreamstime

Let’s deep six the hatchet and the chainsaw

Bury the guns, ground the bombers

And honor this day of balance

From pole to pole

 

Equal light, equal dark

Overspreading inequity

A banquet where all are welcome

All can eat

 

Tomorrow the hemispheres will

Tilt toward spring or fall

Today earth and sun proffer balance

Let us align

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a Washington, DC naturalist and award-winning author of eight nature books, including Wild Walking—A Guide to Forest Bathing Through the Seasons, City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, and Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island. She has had several previous poems published in the The New Verse News and many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice, including four that have won “Moon Prizes.” Her poetry has also been featured on nature-oriented websites.