NEW YORK MAYORAL RACE LIMERICK

by Paul A. Freeman

Ass Kicking by Nick Anderson

The Donald was made to take note

(when Mamdani sank Cuomo’s boat)

that normal folk weather

a storm when together,

while billionaires just have one vote.

Paul A. Freeman is an English teacher. He is the author of The Movement, a dystopia-Americana novel set in a future United States. It is available from Amazon as an ebook download and as a paperback. He works and resides in Mauritania, Africa.

BJÖRN IN VENICE

by Julia Griffin

Björn Andrésen, Swedish actor who starred in Death in Venice, dies aged 70: Actor who also starred in Midsommar and became a musician was nicknamed ‘the most beautiful boy in the world’–a title he struggled with all his life. —The Guardian, October 27, 2025

"He is very frail, he is sickly," Aschenbach thought. "In all probability he will not grow old." And he refused to reckon with the feeling of gratification or reassurance which accompanied this notion. — Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912)

The man wanted him dead. That was the truth

Beyond the mere unspeakable, the shame,

The furtive stalking, the pretence at youth:

To have him die, this moonbeam boy whose name

He never knew, whose voice he never heard:

Blue eyelids closed, flesh drained to marble, cold

Child’s spirit thinned to air. The man incurred,

Thereby, his own death, endlessly retold; 

The boy survived, to manhood, middle age,

Seventy years. He did his best to grow:

He bristled out, became a white-haired sage,

Outlived the man, but not the mythic glow

That doomed them both. Behold the boy, love’s prey,

Who died, at last, but never got away.

Julia Griffin has published in several online poetry  magazines; lives with a socially-engaged basset hound, a regular on local demonstrations.

INTO THE DARKNESS

by Karen Marker

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

If this isn’t the end, I don’t know what is.

I didn’t always wake up feeling this weary, 

feeling the pain of the wound in my chest

like I held a dead child. Like someone 

had stolen my sword and the light

of the grail was gone. I used to sleep 

through the night, trusted the widening gyre 

was leading me out of the dark.

 

If this isn’t the end, I don’t know what is 

after he flat out said he’s sending the military 

into our cities because he’s sick of the mentally ill, 

addicted, disabled, veterans, the hungry, unhoused, 

that he’s sick of those who come in needing shelter, 

jobs, a better life, that he’s sick of protestors.

 

I didn’t always wake up this worried

that if the Department of War blows up ships 

in the Caribbean they say are carrying drugs,  

ignoring all laws, it won’t be long before 

they’re waging war on us to make the world safer 

for the billionaires, sending off the unwanted

to concentration camps in the desert.

 

If this isn’t the end, I don’t know what is 

after the government shut down goes on and on

while the thugs on the streets get paid

to carry out “the Lords’ work.”

 

If this isn’t the end, I don’t know what is

except a comet coming straight at the Earth 

and all of it exploding.

Karen Marker is an Oakland, CA. poet activist who has committed to  writing a poem a day of protest and hope in response  to current events. Her first poetry book Beneath the Blue Umbrella came out recently with Finishing Line Press and explores family mental illness, stigma and healing. 

THE POPPY PANDEMIC

by Lynn White

A display featuring 8,000 individually knitted and crocheted poppies has been unveiled at St John's Church in Worcester. It has been created by the local Knit and Knatter group which has worked with the Royal British Legion (RBL) to bring the project to life. —BBC, October 20, 2025

November approached

and a pandemic loomed

of bleeding red poppies

to honour those killed

all victims un-glorious 

in blood red shrouds

with no thanks owing

for peace then or now.

The wake hardly over

the war virus was live

with the slapping of backs

and the drinking of toasts

and the giving of thanks

to the Masters of War

standing masked or unmasked

in the gold and the gore

with the medals and poppies

spread by war after war.

And now we all wait.

And now we still wait.

Wait 

for a white poppied wasteland 

to grow.

White poppies are worn every year by thousands of people across the UK and beyond. They were first produced in 1933 in the aftermath of the First World War, by members of the Co-operative Women's Guild. Many of these women had lost family and friends in the First World War. They wanted to hold on to the key message of Remembrance Day, 'never again'. —Peace Pledge Union.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

LIFE IN THE SUBURBS

by Alan Walowitz

I head off to pick up my meds,  

how I stay steady these uneasy days: 

Children going without. 

The Court implies he can shoot at will  

on the seas—and maybe where I walk?  

In time, he’ll get around to us. 

It’s warm enough these mid-Autumn days, 

but the early dark reminds the cold to come.  

 

When she sees my sunken countenance, 

the second time this week,  

the clerk says, beneath her breath, as is her way,  

A Higher Power will make it better soon. 

I suppose she means God, or the pharmacist, her boss, 

who doesn’t care or hear so much. 

Listen, she says to make herself clear,  

her forefinger waggling like a broken metronome:  

A bullet doesn’t graze someone’s ear 

not to make this world a better place.  

 

I tell her, gently, he’s still a crook, 

while she packs my pills.   

Everybody steals, she says,  

as if she gets the inside dope, 

dispensing meds to old guys like me. 

She reminds me, You live another day,  

it’s pretty much the same as stealing. 

Then, hands me my change and says, 

See you soon. Dismissal as wisdom.   

but I hope, this time, exactly what she means.  

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook  Exactly Like Love  comes from Osedax Press.   The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems  is available from Truth Serum Press.  From Arroyo Seco Press,  In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars.  The chapbook The Poems of the Air is from Red Wolf Editions and is free for downloading. 

WE WERE, WE ARE, AWAKE

by Jennifer M Phillips

The papyrus PHerc. 1018. Credit: Biblioteca Nazionale “Vittorio Emanuele III,” Napoli–Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale

We’re finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum’s lost library: A whole library’s worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Nearly 2000 years later, we can at last read these lost treasures. —New Scientist, October 14, 2025

We were here. We saw. We remember.

Some of us even write down what unfolds

and teach our children unerasable stories.

We are awake enough to discern

canes and walkers supporting grandmothers

from flagpoles used as battering rams and spears;

to tell rioters from tourists. Our hearing is keen

enough to hear death-chants, curses and threats

not mistaking them for cheers or exclamations of joy.

We know when a phony rendition

is substituted for fact and blared out to the world.

We recognized a gallows set up on the stairway,

a guard being crushed, from a simple push-and-shove.

We can tell sexual assault from a too-forward pass,

and incitement to violence from a rousing speech,

and even recorded these things on our thousand screens

and continue to share them, and store them for history.

Nothing can be covered up for ever. In an X-ray lab, 

in a particle collider, means has been found

to decipher carbonized scrolls in Herculaneum's

two-thousand-year-old library, roasted by heat

of Vesuvius's eruption, philosophy

not quite incinerated. Do not think

that you can now obliterate the past

you deem inconvenient. Great-grand-children will know

what has happened in our time and who has wrought it,

and sort true from fake and good from evil.

January 6, 2021 and what has come after—

the war on our values and democracy—

we will remember, and keep telling the story.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (Wipf & Stock).

THE THEOLOGY OF ICE

by Stuart Broughton

A protester carries a US flag through teargas launched to clear protesters outside the Broadview immigration processing centre in Chicago. —The Guardian, October 3, 2025

NBC Chicago's investigative team reports at least 3,000 jailed immigrants have vanished from federal records, according to human rights attorneys and organizations. 

All across America
people are 
disappearing.
One minute
they're here
and the next
they're gone. 
Disappeared,
dissolved,
dematerialised.
Deported.
Detained.

It's an American
Rapture. 
The Rapture,
but only in
America.

Those of us
brought up
on such theological
dogmas
know that this 
expulsion of the
saints will
usher in
a tribulation.
As if things
could get
worse.

The thing we got wrong
was that instead of the angels
doing the Lord’s work,
it’s the agents 
doing the Devil’s.

As my old pastor
used to say,
“Fuck”.

Stuart Broughton. Gen-something. Library-adjacent. Tangata Tiriti. Libra. From  Aotearoa | New Zealand. Trying to work it out.