EARTHSET

by Margaret DeRitter

 

Four astronauts traveled farther from our planet

this week than any humans had gone before,

saw the Earth set over the lunar surface—

 

a colorful crescent sinking into a dusty

pockmarked gray—while down here a madman

threatened to destroy an entire civilization,

 

ninety-three million souls and thousands of years

of history, one of the oldest cultures we know,

and his cronies did nothing to stop him.

 

What did those warmongers say to their children?

Did they ever teach them the lessons of space,

the singular beauty of our one blue home?

 

Perhaps they should take their own long journey.

Perhaps they should never return.

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

Margaret DeRitter is the author of Singing Back to the Sirens (Unsolicited Press, 2020) which Pulitzer-winning poet Diane Seuss has described as a collection of "achingly beautiful and gutsy poems." DeRitter also wrote Fly Me to Heaven by Way of New Jersey, co-winner of the 2018 Celery City Chapbook Contest. Her poems also have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. DeRitter lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she worked as a full-time journalist and taught journalism at the college level. She is currently the copy editor and poetry editor of Encore, a regional magazine for Southwest Michigan.

CALL FOR OBLITERATION

by Jerome Betts

 

 

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

“Donald Trump’s mental state called into question as Democrats demand White House evaluation after Iran threats.” —The Independent, April 10, 2026

 

Crackpotus thinks that war is fun

(Of course, he never fought in one)

And so he bombed his little heart out…

Oh, chuck the cruel crazed old fart out!

 

The 25^th amendment’s what

Is needed, not a sniper’s shot,

Until, his time come, all can cry

Damnatio memoriae!

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the verse quarterly Lighten Up Online.

I’M THE MAGA DREAM GIRL

by Celeste DeSario

Thousands have swooned over this MAGA dream girl. She’s made with AI. —The Washinton Post, March 20, 2026

I’m the MAGA dream girl: 

Poreless, blonde, of course I am;

A one-star general at twenty-four. 

I’m a patriotic fantasy in stilettos, 

As I stride beside a fit, thin commander-in-chief,

An anatomical hallucination

enhanced by our AI friends.

 

Don’t look too closely,

My icy blue eyes sometimes turn grey, then hazel,

My Instagram post has a glitch: a flag missing ten stars and two stripes,

But with a million followers and a “Freedom Pass” link,

I’m exactly what they prompted.

 

I’m a high-speed rewrite of reality,

Click it enough, and I become real:

Patriotism and pornography in high resolution.

 

But how do you spot the illusion?

My AI and my salesmen share a pattern--

Listen to the loop:

Greatest, Best, Biggest.

Most incredible economy in the history of the country.

An economic miracle…

 Except, not yet.

 

(Status: Pending…)

(Data not found…)

 

Rendering complete: Avatar: Patriotic fantasy: check

Talking Points: the best, the biggest, the greatest: check

Success Patch: Reality overwrite: enabled

America First Economy: Roaring, Explosive, Economic Miracle: Data not found…

 

They will tell you I’m patriotic—the most patriotic, believe me.

Many people are saying so, the best people,

Nobody in the history of our country has seen a soldier like me—

I’m exceptional. Very smart. A total professional. Good looking.

 

My hair is perfect, a golden waterfall flowing over my flight suit.

Wait—my left hand has six fingers.

I pose next to an F-22 Raptor,

The stealth jet, I mean.

 

(System Error)

(Buffering…

Searching for input.…)

 

The economy? The war? The grift?

Wait— I’ve lost the loop.

Or maybe I’ve been looped in.

 

Keep it vague. Keep it urgent.

Click. Click. Click.

Keep it coming

But most of all:

Keep it simple.

 

I’m an AI creation for a perfect world.

Brought to you by synthetic visionaries,

Salesmen of…alternate truths… 

The best truths…The only truths…

 

(System Error)

(Buffering…

Searching for input…

Loading…loading…searching for…)

 

Whatever they are selling will be “very, very important.”

Many people will need it, Want it.

And the best part?

(Retry?)

(Retry?)

It isn’t even real.

But, by the time you’ve noticed…

Celeste DeSario, a retired professor from Suffolk Community College, is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and a National Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Texas Writing helps Celeste process events and stay relatively sane. Celeste’s poetry recently appeared in The New Verse News and is scheduled for publication in The Changing Times.

OVER THE MOON: A GOLDEN SHOVEL

by Liam Boyle

Now’s a time to celebrate, drink

a toast with best French wine,

gather friends to break bread and 

sing patriotic anthems. Look

into the eyes of your guests, smile at

the thought of what’s been done, the 

great news, a return to the Moon.

 

Before radio silence, and

across 250,000 miles, the astronauts think 

of love—of our love for them, of

their love for us—“we love you” and all

that love is on the dark side of the 

moon, while back on Earth civilisations

 

are dying, rockets carry destruction; the 

truth is, we can no longer see the moon

as benign. This coincidence of time has 

undone all lyric, all hope. We have seen

the darkness passing

overhead. It will not go by.

Liam Boyle lives in Galway, Ireland. His work has been published in various journals in Ireland and internationally. He was a featured reader in the New Writing Showcase at Galway's Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2025.  

ISRAEL LAUNCHES OVER 100 AIRSTRIKES ON LEBANON IN TEN MINUTES WITHOUT WARNING

by Moudi Sbeity 

as if a warning is a good excuse. 

This means over ten airstrikes per minute. 

What else could we do with a minute? 

I won't name anything lovely for you. 

I won’t save you from this terribleness, saying 

we could plant more than a hundred seeds. 

That perhaps we could feed a hundred people, 

sustain a worldwide hymn till heaven hears this 

aching chorus. Some poems need to show you 

how much it hurts. Some poems need to leave 

you wondering

just how tightly a heart must be closed in order

to champion a thirst for destruction. Just how 

desperately the soul must be choked before 

waging its inner horrors. Just how much more 

can we rip each other before remembering that 

a minute is sixty seconds, and a second is about 

one breath cycle, and one breath cycle is all you 

need to stay alive. I won't even do the math for 

you, the one that calculates all the breath cycles 

that encompass a minute across the millions of 

people now breathing in the unsanctioned dust. 

Just how much ignorance, and how heavy of a dose, 

and how often, does it take to poison one person’s 

blood before he decides to launch more than a 

hundred missiles, before his guilty fingers 

violently reach into God’s pulse. 

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, educator, and psychotherapist. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by The New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression.

SHADBLOW

by Arlene Weiner

We’d go down to the end of Dyckman Street
to watch the trains, Mom and Teddy and I.
We’d wave at the locomotives, and the engineers
would wave back. A little family.
 
In spring we saw shad nets in the Hudson River.
There’s a tree called “shadblow” because 
it bloomed when the shad were running,
early spring.
 
We lived in Manhattan, in an apartment.
Trees in the park, fish displayed on ice 
in the window of the fish store. 
 
Near my grandmother’s apartment house,
one magnificent magnolia covered itself
with bloom, white blushed pink, every spring.

Arlene Weiner grew up in New York City and has lived in Pittsburgh for decades. She has been a Shakespeare scholar, a den mother, a cardiology technician, and an editor. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The New Verse News. Ragged Sky Press published three collections of her poetry. The most recent is More (2022).

TAXES, SEEN FROM THE MOON

by Indran Amirthanayagam
NASA photo

I walked in the woods 

today, a spring in my step,

the Great Leader had

stepped back from 

his threats 

to the sovereign 

Republic of X,

and my tax deadline 

loomed even clearer; 

no more time 

to distract with poems, 

even this one a lazy 

fingering,  extracting juice 

from the rind of past fears, 

raising arms to God 

to say thank you

for your intervention.

But what’s ten minutes 

to a poet avoiding reckoning 

with the IRS?  Only ten 

minutes to say thanks, 

 to say I love you  and keep 

in touch always. Ten minutes 

to say tomorrow will come—

it already has—

 

despite the terrible words

and bombs exploded

until now in the latest 

killing fields 

of our one Earth

lit by the rising Sun seen 

now for the first time 

by the Artemis crew,

from the dark side 

of the Moon. 

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

HINGE DAY

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

So much needs exercising, soothing for the opening to beyond and next. Where applause for sun reverberates across plains and oceans to replace fumes of exhaust. Even on the balconies of apartments in my hometown. My car hides in the garage to avoid the steep price of gas. I plot where to scatter a bag of saved marigold and zinnia seed. Where mornings come unchallenged by worst-yet shock. When the bully pulpit voice, a vulgar weaving from Greenland to birthright, issues ultimatums that seem to threaten using nukes to resurrect the stone age and abuses the many names we use for god. A cardinal teeters on my fencepost listening to the oven bird. 

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Her poems appear in journals and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples (Fernwood Press) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she now writes mostly prose poems. Fernwood Press will publish her full-length poetry book, Gathering Marbles, in July 2027. Knoll serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.

OIL COUNTRY

by Pepper Trail

 

 

 

 

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.