HEIDEGGER'S STOPWATCH

by Zumwalt

AI-generated video created by Nightcafé for The New Verse News

The chief executive of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. —The New York Times, September 12, 2026 Sunday dinner in Billings, Montana—
Mr. Smith set fire to four generations
just one day after a quintuple homicide bonfire
in Forest Grove, Oregon
incinerated three generations
and a few terrified pets.

No AI assistance required.

In Lebanon, under de-escalation,
27 dead, 69 wounded in 70 hours.
In Iran, an errant missile
crashed a wedding,
wiping out two children,
destroying and injuring many more.

No AI assistance required.

Iranians compiled open-source data
to create effective targeting handbooks
against American naval positions
while Yemen-based Houthi cells
developed software for
ballistic missiles and guided rockets.

AI assistance required
and provided effectively by Claude AI.

We do our best to teach little Lucas
right and wrong, and how to cross the street.
We put in the hours at jobs that
fray our nerves, and when we feel like
arguing, one of us takes a walk outside
to ensure Lucas never hears us fight.

No AI assistance required.

I read that Jacob Coxon
(previously employed by competitor OpenAI)
left Anthropic and upcoming IPO riches
to tell us that he and colleagues
believe that AI could kill us all
by the end of the decade.

I asked Grok, this Saturday morning,
to fill me in: it tried to reassure me,
telling me such rumors have circulated for years.
"No AI system has wiped out
(or is currently wiping out) humanity."
My shoulders and neck tensed and shuddered.

I scrolled the news on my smartphone.
Anthropic's CEO published 3800 words,
one paragraph about AI curing disease,
the next several dozen paragraphs detailing
some of AI's destructive skills and the CEO's proposals—
steps to slow down AI and apply theoretical safeguards.

Some AI assistance may be required.
Assistance from corporations and world leaders required.

I prayed and remembered my grandmother's words

that God always answers prayers: "yes" or "no" or "maybe."

Sounded like this was a maybe.

Zumwalt’s poetry examines the intersection of identity, instability, and the mechanics of perception. Recent work has appeared or will appear in The New Verse News, Heavy Feather, San Diego Poetry Annual, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Society of Classical Poets, Light, and additional journals.

AT HIGH FALLS, MINNESOTA

by Maxine Susman

 

I look across the gorge to Ontario—

same wilderness on the other side.

The great Falls plunge, three separate chutes,

over the bowl of ragged basalt cliffs

into the river flowing to Lake Superior.

Pounding roar, wall of spray, impassible—

here the voyageurs, bearing on their backs

more than their weight in beaver pelts,

slung their birch canoes onto their shoulders

and made le grand portage.

 

Wilderness ranges along the gorge

farther than the eye can travel.

United States / Canada / Gichi Onigamiig,

The narrow bed of Pigeon River

now the border between nations

that share the same terrain:

Falls, thick forest, gray cliffs of diabase.

I could almost hurl a rock across—

it would reach another country,

shared bedrock of Laurentian Shield.

 

Wilderness joins both sides together.

My father / myself,

his native land / and mine,

his parents' native land / and his,

our family river flowing over borders

from Belarus to Montreal,

from Ontario to New York.

I won't cross through Customs this time,

I'm close enough to know my father's laugh

inside the space inside the water

same on both sides of the Falls

my father's homeland a stone's throw away.

Maxine Susman, Highland Park, NJ, has published six chapbooks and two full-length books of poetry, most recently Northern Swim (Ragged Sky Press, 2024). Her work concerns the environment and natural world, history, art, people and other creatures. She has been leading poetry workshops for many years and she teaches poetry-writing at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Rutgers University, earning the Distinguished Teaching Award. A Ginsberg Award finalist and multiple Pushcart nominee, her work has appeared in dozens of publications including Paterson Literary Review, Fourth River, Canary, Blueline, Slant, Earth’s Daughters, and Crab Orchard Review.

A RESOUNDING SILENCE

by Valentina Gnup

For those who lost their lives in the Nepal flood of August, 2026.

The faithful believe Mount Kailash 

is the center of the world—
the most sacred peak, the ultimate abode of Lord Shiva.
 —Hindol Sengupta, religious historian


   Over rocky ground and icy rivers, believers walk 
to honor whichever God they trust to answer their prayers.
   We still don’t know how many of the faithful lost
their lives in flash floods on their final pilgrimage. 
   Some called them foolish, though don’t we all hope
for glimpses of wonder, a spare house key to heaven?
   Early this morning, I lay in bed listening to the rain 
ticking in the drainpipe and wondering if I’ll ever 
   kiss anyone again. No need to tell me, my spinster 
sorrow has no place in this elegy for the drowned.
   Sengupta said, Gods walk among men in these mountains,
but the pilgrims circling Mount Kailash are forbidden 
   to climb its sacred slopes. Perhaps God craves privacy, 
or maybe he’s as hungry for kisses as I am.
   Although these gray clouds look more like November,
it’s still August, the world on fire. I won’t lament
   our frightening climate, I won’t condemn pretend kings. 
I’ll ask you to consider the grass—it’s already greener 
   than it was last night. If I ever visit the holy mountain, 
I'll pray, God, let the world recover quickly as grass.

Valentina Gnup's poetry collection Ruined Music was published by Grayson Books in 2024. She has won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry, the Lascaux Prize in Poetry, the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award, and the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including Palette Poetry, December, Brooklyn Review, Nimrod, and The New Guard. She has chapbooks published by Mille Grazie Press and the North Carolina Writers' Network. She lives in Mill Valley, CA.

SURVIVOR’S GUILT

by Sarah Fitzpatrick

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

8:47 a.m., the world is a siren. The train folds down its newspapers in unison. A thousand dominos clack to impossible silence. Playbills flutter into ash. Billboards tie themselves into prayer flags screaming past a capsule sealed against the miasma of falling towers. A new infant surfaces to gasp blue light. Mother’s breasts engorge with the fair-weather clouds beyond the cesarean drape. Someone is screaming down the hall. The willows of Central Park shudder the sign language of calamity. The molten core of Earth constricts. The trees understand it as music. 

Saved by a teacher conference, your feet give way. You’ve stayed an enormous golden pendulum, its wire dusted with powdered glass. Enraged muscles conspire to squeeze until your tender hand is empty of blood. It runs to colorize the sidewalks of a ghastly silent movie screened only in Manhattan. The city as monolith, a scientist’s constant. The pendulum is a false prophet. You become the fixed point. Transfuse time back into the veins of every paramedic, every finance worker, every new mother, every suicide bomber. Steal back all that is magnetized by the core. Give back the seasons to the trees.

Sara Fitzpatrick works in animal welfare in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her poetry and fiction have been published in places like Merion West, Jet Fuel Review, X-R-A-Y, and Tampa Review. A collection, Bury me in the Sky, was published in 2020 by Nixes Mate Books.

COME HOME!

by Ana Doina

“Come home, my love, come home!” I beg

on the phone. “Where are the kids?” you ask 

hurriedly. “Phil is at school, Al was 

late for class again, and is now stuck

in traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel

on the Jersey side.”

“Thank God for that,” you sigh. 

 

On William Street, your office’s windows 

three blocks from the Towers, allow you 

a full view of the conflagration. “I see them,”

you whisper mournfully, “burning 

like two Roman Candles. Last year this time,” 

you say, “I was there, on the ninetieth floor, 

meeting with a client.” I grip my cell phone 

and try to keep my wits, but tears are streaming 

on my face, and my mind is racing to find

a way to get you home. 

 

“The South Tower is struggling,” you say.

“I don’t think it can stand much longer.” 

The certainty in your voice makes me realize

yours is not a guess but the professional opinion

of an engineer. “Lord, there could be over 

fifty thousand people there. I can see flames 

going floor by floor, charring everything. 

 

The building trembles; glass is busting out, 

concrete, pulverized, cascades from it, 

and fragments float away like flakes. It sputters 

smoke and sparks. It’s going to pancake.”

 

“Come home! Get out of there,” I sob. 

All of a sudden, there is a tremendous boom, 

and the phone line goes dead. 

Author’s note: The phone lines in that part of Manhattan were destroyed at that exact time. My husband made it home that day. It took him many hours walking through the singed streets, the clouds of soot, and falling debris, frightened and angry like the rest of us. The poem’s dialogue is almost word by word the conversation I had with my husband at the time the towers were burning.

Ana Doina’s work has appeared in numerous national and international print and online magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. Her chapbook, The Later Generation, published by Kelsay Books, and her full-length book of poems, Legend of Bread, published by Legacy Press Books, were released in 2024. Her book Coming to America: Stories and Essays, to be published by Histria Books, is scheduled for release in October 2026. 

NO SOAP

by Thomas R. Smith

There is nothing in nature comparable to soap. —Francis Ponge, “Soap” trans. Lane Dunlop 

What a filthy Presidentiad! —Walt Whitman, “To the States”

In August 2026 several sailors aboard the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, despondent over deteriorating conditions of hygiene on the ship after nearly nine months deployed without relief in the Arabian Sea in President Trump’s war on Iran, were reported to have attempted suicide.

1.

In 1943 France, during

the Nazi occupation, the poet

Francis Ponge began his book-length poem

in praise of soap.  Awakening to the beauty,

not to mention necessity, of that

familiar cleansing agent by wartime

shortages he and his fellow resistance

fighters experienced at their rural

hideouts, Ponge hailed the humble bar of soap

as “Magic stone” and thoroughly, lovingly

detailed its dissolution through use

down to its voluble finish.  Thus he made

his little book a shrine to the gift of

cleanliness we tend to take for granted.

2.

We may ask ourselves, what if there was a poet, 

a Ponge on board the USS Abraham

Lincoln likewise honoring the objects

of that crew’s deprivations over months without

leave stationed in the Arabian Sea?  

Running out of soap, deodorant, toothpaste, 

enduring moldy showers and backed-up toilets

among the miseries that pushed a handful 

of the five-thousand-plus men jammed into

that floating prison to literally jump ship

to end it, having also reached Ponge’s

conviction that there is nothing in nature

comparable to soap, would he have turned in

despair to the unsuds’d water of the sea?

3.

Ponge’s soap shortage came as a sacrifice

in the fight against German fascism, while

the sailors of the Abraham Lincoln suffered

only for a war of choice the president

engineered to distract from his other

crimes.  In this he was surely following

the playbook of the fascists Ponge’s

generation paid so dearly to defeat,

of waging war against one’s own people.  

No doubt the real injury to the men of

the Abraham Lincoln was the shortage of meaning

in their ordeal.  Ship of shame left in neglect

by a president so filthy there’s not

enough soap on earth to scrub clean his name.

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.

FINE LINES

by Kathryn Spratt 

My husband hates the Lindsay Clancy case.

Why must I bring it up again?

It's not like

I'm her.

I take one

pill to keep me sweeping up cheerios

when they fall on the floor. 

It's not like

I thought my friend was her

when I said

You drop off your baby girl

anytime.

No judgement.

No questions asked.

I need him to help me carry the horror

like he might a bag of dog food.

Open this can of peaches, please.

Reach the top shelf

of my heartsick disbelief.

That’s it, isn’t it?

It's not like

I feel an urge to kill the infant-

ilization of my kind,

to be the woman’s voice

in a tired man’s head

hissing, We can be killers like

we can be astronauts, engineers,

mothers, doctors,

and even

circus tightrope walkers.

We can murder.

Otherwise, we’re all

little girls

tiptoeing on exercise bands

spread flat on basement floors.

Kathryn Spratt teaches and writes in a quiet corner of the Western United States. Her poetry has appeared in Eunoia Review, Rat's Ass Review, and elsewhere. She has been honored with a first place Brilliant Poetry competition award and an Eleanore B. North Poetry Award. 

I WILL SPEAK FOR YOU, MY DEAR

by Judy Juanita

I will speak for you, my dear

since nobody seems to have heard of you 

even now that Gloria Steinem is dead

I see you trembling as he punched you with his fist

I see you hit the kitchen floor after he knocked you down

in front of us, his children

I hear him curse you over and over

when he lost at the racetrack

I feel the broomstick on my back 

when his fury at his losing horse boiled over

I will speak for you, my mother

since nobody has heard of you 

even now that Gloria Steinem is dead

I see that faint scar on your lip 

that he put there with a fireplace tong

I cannot unsee him knocking you down 

for hitchhiking to get the laundry done

I cannot delete the moment you woke up 

being raped in the marital bed

As Luenell said of Bill Cosby, that’s like fucking a corpse

I will speak for you, my dear

since nobody seems to hear you 

I hear him berate you for 20 minutes when he thought I had hung up

I hear his son tell him not to talk to his mother that way

Who will speak for you now that Gloria Steinem is dead?

I see him raping your young niece while you commute to work everyday

I read my Malaysian student’s essay on constant rape by her brother

I hear my Burmese/Chinese student tell of being raped repeatedly by the older brother 

who now berates her for being too woke

I will speak for you, my sisters

since nobody has heard of you 

and Gloria Steinem has died

I will speak for you, my sister in Savannah

who never grew your hair after the boy cuzzin raped you 

and cut off your long braid

An apology is a keloid 

after the fact

after the act

this ain’t apology

Gloria Steinem, the pretty white girl

In aviator glasses posing as a playboy bunny

never apologized

So I will speak for you, my dears

as we stand in woundedness

more than pretty in our unprettiness

brave in our cancerous bodies

solemn in our widow black wool

standing up to our lessers

who lie taller even in coffins or wrapped in Muslim cloth

finally apologetic

but still more respected 

more mourned 

more listened to

I have to speak for those who have borne the lash

otherwise our cries will be treated as complaint 

and shouts of aggression

I have to speak for those who have suffered the most

because Gloria Steinem and every single white woman 

who defied the patriarchy were buffers

Their grace served all and served well

Being beaten, being murdered, being swindled out of money or emotion, 

being harangued, serving prison time for any of these grievous acts,

are the grimmer, graceless realities that women of color face

I will speak for you, my dears

Judy Juanita’s latest books are California Fever Dream: A Memoir (Willow) and a pro-choice look at abortion, Abortion (or Woman as Threefold Murderess). Her poetry collection Manhattan my ass, you’re in Oakland won the American Book Award in 2021. In her semi-autobiographical novel Virgin Soul, (Viking, 2013), the protagonist joins the Black Panther Party in the sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her collection of short stories The High Price of Freeways won the 2021 Tartt Fiction Award (Livingston, 2022). Her latest book of poetry GAWDZILLA equates the filmic Godzilla to US imperialism, racism, and sexism. Her collection of essays DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland came out in 2016.