SOMETIMES IT'S HARD TO LOVE THE WORLD

by Donna Hilbert

Sometimes it’s hard to love the world 

but not the earth

not hard to love the earth

suffering through no fault

of its own

 

Sometimes it’s hard to love the world 

of humans 

who wrack the earth

as if it were their own

 

It’s not hard to love the children

of the world, but it’s hard to save them

who suffer from the failures

whose making’s not their own

 

It’s hard to love the world that doesn’t love 

its children enough to save them 

even when their heads are bowed and praying 

in their church, their school, their home.

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella from Moon Tide Press, following Threnody, Moon Tide, 2022. A second edition of Gravity: New & Selected Poems is available from Moon Tide. Work has appeared in numerous journals and broadcasts including Cultural Daily, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, Lyric Life, and anthologies including The Poetry of Presence volumes I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing. She writes and leads workshops in Long Beach, California.

HANUKKAH

by Anita S. Pulier

Sure, we know the story.

Desecration of a temple,

hopelessness, sorrow.

Short on sanctified oil

the fire and light on hand

turn out to be good enough,

darkness is defeated.

And isn’t that the point?

Things are never perfect,

never, and “good enough”

is the miracle.

As each of our children

comes into their own,

defying myth and dogma,

they create for us, the

generation of overseers,

a unique spectrum in which

to pause, inhale the holiday,

embrace imperfection

redefine terms, witness

history in the making.

Anita's latest book is Leaving Brooklyn (Kelsay Books). Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily. 

SEASON OF THE WITCH, 2025

by Laurie Rosen

Usha Vance official portrait

The straw brush of my fireplace broom broke free. I refuse 

to throw it away, someone must surely need it. I could refit it, 

attach it to a long branch. I dream of bringing it to Usha Vance, 

insisting she take the broomstick and make for a speedy escape. 

I assure her that sisters and aunties will rise to guide her and her 

children to freedom. 

I might be wrong in offering Usha more protection than I do 

Melania, who seems ruthless, caring only for herself, money 

and comfort. Who can forget: “I really don’t care, do you?”

Usha stays quiet, appears surprised by where she’s been taken 

hostage––her eyes full of terror like a deer in my meadow, 

during hunting season, who looks up from her grazing, realizes 

I’m staring at her. Nudging her fawn, they run for safety. (Though 

many men would hurt them, I never would). 

When they met, Usha was an attorney, a democrat, Vance was 

someone else too. But he’s been remaking himself from the 

beginning. He’s a master of reinvention, like Woody Allen’s Zelig 

or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, altering his name and persona 

again and again. I’m guessing he promised Usha that with him, she 

could have it all, career, kids, an opinion. Instead bit by bit, with each

change, he steals her voice then her power, leaving her unrecognizable 

even to herself.  

Usha, I say, save yourself, your children too. Take the broom, and 

fly, fly, fly away. 

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in One Art: a journal of poetry, Gyroscope Review, Oddball Magazine, The New Verse News, The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, Zig Zag Lit Mag, Minyan Magazine, and elsewhere. Laurie was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize.

A HOUSE IN GAZA

by Christopher Woods

Shutterstock file photo

In her mind is the locket

She thinks about so much.

Inside it, wrapped in blue ribbon,

A single strand of black hair.

Her firstborn.

She can’t stop thinking about it,

That hair, how it would be

To see it again, how she might hold it,

Go back to the house

That disappeared

When the bombing began.

If she could know this hair again

Her memory might rest.

 

But she won’t open the locket.

She can’t.

Maybe it’s been too long,

The hair might dissolve in the air.

Maybe birds would carry it away.

 

No matter how much she wants to

She will not open the locket.

She keeps it hidden,

Safe in a drawer, in a room,

Inside a house on a small road,

In a dusty village that no longer exists.

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show Twelve from Texas was performed in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. His monologues have also been performed at The Invisible Theatre in Tucson and the Pro English Theatre in Kiev, Ukraine. He has received residencies from The Edward Albee Foundation and The Ucross Foundation.

ANOTHER CHAPTER

by Peter A. Witt

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge to a Texas county’s removal of 17 books from its public libraries, leaving in place a lower court ruling that allowed the purge. —Newsweek, December 8, 2025

On the second Monday in December,
the Supremes sang a song
of banishment and dark days ahead,
as the Enemies of the Public Library plotted
what volumes to next remove from public view.

Gutting school libraries wasn't enough
for your local paragons of illiteracy,
who meeting in the dark corners
of McDonalds over cheap coffee
and an egg on your face McMuffin,
nominate books, one vote
enough for a frontal assault
on the collective knowledge
available for children, teens,
adults, seniors to read.

When challenged these keepers
of the gates of darkness proclaim --
you can still buy a copy, get
gifted a copy for Christmas
(there has to be some irony here),
or loaned a copy by a friend.

So goodbye Gender Queer,
All Boys Aren't Blue, The Bluest Eye,
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,
and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

Not to mention the classics:
To Kill a Mockingbird,
The Catcher in the Rye,
The Great Gatsby,
Animal Farm, and
The Grapes of Wrath.

Next year the Enemies
will switch their focus
to the Amazons
and the Walmarts,

and the year after that
to independent bookstores,

until nothing's left
but official books
of the thought police class, 
though even those
may be axed some day
as too woke.

Peter A. Witt by chance lives in Texas and is a recovering university professor who lost his adjectives in the doldrums of academic writing. Poetry has helped him recover his ability to see and describe the inner and outer world he inhabits. His work has been twice nominated for the Best of the Net award and has appeared in a variety of online and print publications. He also writes family history.  His book about his aunt was published by the Texas A&M University Press (Edith's War: Writings of a Red Cross Worker and Lifelong Champion of Social Justice). He is also an avid birder and wildlife photographer.

HANDLER'S HANDS

by Michelle DeRose

First skin shrivels

without touch. Parent's

palm to baby's back

an initial prayer

for safe-keeping, offered

in heart's rhythm.

 

How maimed the hand 

that releases the leash

on a dog trained to maul.

Strokes fur to praise puncture,

urges sic, not stay.

Fingers turned incisors

on blue fields of fifty

rip red strips

on a father's back,

pierce our beating core.

A member of a foster family for newborn wards of the state of Illinois as she grew up, Michelle DeRose witnessed first-hand how simple touches soothed some of the many infants her mother nurtured. A life-long dog-lover and -rescuer, she still wonders if she and her husband rescue dogs or they rescue them. The perversion of this most basic of communication--love and calm conveyed when one living being gently touches another--blatantly revealed in ICE's actions in Washington state against Wilmer Toledo-Martinez should repulse us all.

HAIKU

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

Lynne Schilling began writing poetry seriously when she turned 75. She has published in Quartet, The Alchemy Spoon, New Verse News, Rue Scribe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Lucky Jefferson and others. She has poems forthcoming in contemporary haibun online, Quail Eggs, Thimble Literary Magazine and Unbroken.

ICE

a Golden Shovel

after Adrienne Rich's  “What Kind of Times Are These”

by Nancy Sobanik

"We support our neighbors and we will stand with our neighbors," Leslie Carlson, a protester, said.

We are born suffused with stardust, not this
armload of crumbling charcoal. Hate isn’t
underground, it feeds on oxygen. A
tinderbox of words erupts like Russian
folk dancers. How quickly a poem
turns to men in black balaclavas. This
is our warning. Fire needs no wind, it is
fed by the pause. The wisp and spark not
stamped, and mouths bare their teeth. Somewhere
another will smother the burning, why else
would we let fire taste our own door?
But—
think of ash, think of diamonds. Grow them here.

A poet and Registered Nurse living in Maine, Nancy Sobanik (her/she) has recent work curated or forthcoming by The Orchards Poetry Journal, Mobius, Chiron Review, Jackdaw Review, Hole in The Head Review and others. A Best of The Net and Pushcart nominee, she is a three-time finalist awarded second and third place in the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest.  A manuscript screener for Alice James Books, her debut chapbook “The Unfolding”will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2026. Bluesky: nancysobanik.bsky.social

LOST HIGHWAY

by Steven Kent

It will not be an easy process [to rename streets called after Prince Andrew]. Details on residents’ bank accounts, credit cards, driving licenses, utility bills, property deeds, even pet microchips, will have to change, as will business letterheads and cards. —The Guardian, November 29, 2025

The cost is high to change a roadway's name,

But those which honor Andy (some now claim)

Should be rechristened, each and every mile,

To spare us walking single-pedophile.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, The Dirigible Balloon, Light, Lighten Up Online, The Lyric, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, The Pierian, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collections I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) (2023) and Home at Last (2025) are published by Kelsay Books.

COLOR OF THE YEAR

by Pepper Trail

“A shade of white will be the defining color of the next year.” —The New York Times, December 4, 2025

 

“A lofty white 

whose aerated 

presence acts 

as a whisper 

     of calm 

          and peace 

               in a noisy world.”

 

Let us blank

out all the noise

the alien rhythms

the clashing, chaotic colors

of the needful, striving world

 

The many shades of browns and blacks

(containing all colors, muddled, mongrel)

are too confusing to distinguish

so let them be bleached or thrown away

leaving us uniform, monotone, pure

 

This is our ideal: nothing at all 

no mark upon your page

no disturbance in your minds

the white of the vaporous clouds

of the snow, burying all in stillness

 

Do not call it blindness

it is merely the absence of anything to see

and so this is our choice for the Color of the Year

and the next, and the next, this white

ever more perfect, more perfectly… nothing

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.

A RECOLLECTION ON PEARL HARBOR DAY

by Katherine Leonard

It's blotchy the past

the silent man

in his uniforms

 

the child knows his withdrawn presence

but sometimes he would play

with her    for short bursts       when she was very little

 

he lived in a world of diesel and flame

oil and water mixed on the destroyer deck

bomb dropped where he stood 5 minutes before

 

gun turret melted metal and pieces of arm

face blood leg and black smoke

his men faceless except in his memory

 

daily    weekly            yearly the men lay 

submerged in his South Pacific 

they were with him through his submarine assignment

 

in the mouth of the River Kwai          bands of broken brothers

breaks the hearts of the survivors

breaking broken like metal shards 

 

until one day

that fragile plank holding those shiny dress

officer shoes broke

 

And he with that plank and metal splinters

sank too

consumed by the black rolling sea

 

of his mind now in command

of his hand

on the rope

 

Author's Note: Poem for my father, Commander Robert E. Leonard, USN Ret. who served in the South Pacific in WWII at a time when PTSD was unknown and silent men and women were numerous and all rejoiced mightily at the fall of fascism in Germany, in Japan and in Italy.

Katherine Leonard is the author of the chapbook Requiem for the Beekeeper (Bottlecap Press 2024). Her poems have been published in Sonora Review, Querencia Press Anthologies, Hole in the Head Review, Speckled Trout Review, FERAL, Allium and Stone Canoe among other journals and anthologies. She is a graduate of the Syracuse YMCA Writer's Voice (formerly Downtown Writers Center) Pro Program in poetry. She has been a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse/nurse practitioner. Her writing has been deeply influenced by time spent in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado for space and heat and Vermont and Maine for ice and clarity and by living in Washington, DC for lies and redemption. She is married to the woman with fire in her guitar.

LETHALITY

by Nan Meneely

His father taught him how to enclose a spider
so gently in tissues he can carry it live from his room
to a better place outdoors.
 
He grieves when a chipmunk lies mid-road, 
as exquisite as alive, forepaws stretched 
toward the brambly green safety ahead.
 
Knowing he might be too soft, he signs
with the Army to muscle up. But he didn’t bargain
for lethal, a word the recruiters never said.
 
He’s as certain of this as anything:
if he killed those named his enemies—
Venezuelans in fishing boats oceans away,
 
brown men working shop floor or field for minimum wage,
protesters armed with sandwiches shouting truth
to power, Somali immigrants fleeing hate—
 
he would kill the important part of himself,
the part he would fight for in anyone else.

Author's Note: This matter matters to me. My father, a doctor with the 10th Mountain Division in WWII, joined up enthusiastically but came home with a hatred of war and what we now know as PTSD. Eventually he killed himself. So Hegseth's lethality can be lethal in too many ways. 

Nan Meneely’s first book Letter from Italy, 1944 (Antrim House) was noted by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books by Connecticut writers in 2013. It provided the libretto for an oratorio of the same name, composed by Sarah Meneely-Kyder and performed twice by Connecticut choruses and symphony orchestras. Her second book Simple Absence (Antrim House) was nominated for The National Book Award and placed as a grand prize finalist in The Next Generation Indie Awards and the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award. She has been published and rejected by The New Verse News.

HUNTING SEASON

by Alessandra Foster

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

It starts around Thanksgiving, 

a feast of treats

focused on the corpse

of a large dead bird 

who's been gutted, re-filled, roasted.

No thanks there.

Meanwhile, fleet-footed deer

frantic and fearful,

run for dear life

across roads, across farms,

through woods,

without their normal caution,

sometimes tricked and tempted, 

stilled long enough to be killed

by a human with a gun.

Or a car with blinding lights.

So much beauty to be grateful for,

so much thriving diverse life to be part of, 

yet we offer up gratitude for the deaths

of fellow creatures who might, like us,

be thankful just to be alive.

 

Soon we segue to Peace on Earth,

greeting card words that aren't for real.

Not while our hearts and minds,

right here, right now, right at home, 

every day, every holiday,

accept violence and killing as normal, 

as celebration,

as having no season.

 

 

Author’s note: There are environments too harsh, and/or humans too poor, to sustain a non-violent diet. They may need to hunt or fish or farm a couple of domestic animals in order to survive. This poem is not for them.

Alessandra Foster - lifelong and long-lived reader and writer of poetry. Forty-three year vegan. Published: The New Verse News, Literary Veganism, Verse-Virtual, Moss Piglet, Rat's Ass Review.

DON’T MAKE ME REPEAT MYSELF

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

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

I dreamt DT was my high school government teacher. Definitely him. Had the waddle in the walk, wore the oversized blue suit (not in the cool David Byrne way), that weird long tie. He’d lecture us, shout at us, breathe like a dragon, then sit sniveling behind his desk. Feeling sorry for himself, I guess. He’d get all red in the face, jump up and down or stamp his feet, and his combover would flap. It was too scary to be funny. The grades he gave totally depended on how much you sucked up to him. I knew I needed to pass this class to graduate high school so my other three degrees would count. I was afraid of what he might do to me, but one day I just lost it. Shouted back. Shouted even louder. Spoke truth to blowhard. You’re wrong! Just plain wrong! About everything. Everything you do is wrong. The only true thing you ever said was that you’d date your daughter. Everyone decent hates you. You are a bad bad boy. People looked at me like I was crazy, fighting him, but I felt like I could finally get some air.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired psychologist, former German Lit major, and restaurant reviewer, has spent much time on both sides of the doctor-patient relationship. She is widely published. Collections include Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and Kafka’s Cat(Kattywompus Press), The Book of Knots and Their Untying (Kelsay Books), and, The Beautiful Leaves and Eve the Inventor (Bamboo Dart Press). She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a long-running poetry series in Claremont, California.