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Today's News . . . Today's Poem
The New Verse News
presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
WASHINGTON COLOSSUS
INCIDENTAL CAPTURE
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| Cartoon by Nick Anderson |
Celeste DeSario writes poetry to process and make sense of life’s events. Her work is featured in The New Verse News, The SportsScribe, The Changing Times, The Ekphrastic Review, The Dissident Voice, and Three-Line Poetry. She lives in Shoreham Village, NY—a town where no Flock cameras have been sighted… yet.
Monday, September 14, 2026
HEIDEGGER'S STOPWATCH
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.
Sunday, September 13, 2026
AT HIGH FALLS, MINNESOTA
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
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.
Saturday, September 12, 2026
A RESOUNDING SILENCE
For those who lost their lives in the Nepal flood of August, 2026.
The faithful believe Mount Kailash
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.
Friday, September 11, 2026
SURVIVOR’S GUILT
COME HOME!
“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.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
NO SOAP
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.





