The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
The finale of the Israeli award-winning documentary NAZA, a Hebrew acronym for "collateral damage," captures a father trapped in a furnace of grief. Heat radiates from the tangled grid of collapsed iron and melted plastic. Coughing through blinding smoke, he drags broken blocks of drywall away, his cries echoing off the smoldering rubble that traps his children.
calm between fireballs
an armless girl gazing
heavenward, yet…
Chen-ou Liu is the author of five books, including Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize, 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and A Life in Transition and Translation (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial Haiku Chapbook Competition). His tanka and haiku have been honored with many awards.
India Cut 130 Million From Voter Roll, Fueling Protests Against Modi: Public anger is growing over an exercise that critics say undermines the world’s largest democracy, particularly disenfranchising Muslims under the Hindu nationalist government. —The New York Times, October 6, 2026
Someone went looking for his name.
It had been there before— among thousands of other names, quietly printed, waiting for a finger to find it.
This time, the finger moved down the page and stopped.
Nothing.
He looked again, then once more, as if another reading might put the name back.
Outside, something was changing across the country.
Young people had begun to gather in the streets.
What had been spoken quietly inside drawing rooms was now moving towards the road.
People who had watched in silence were finding one another, coming together in numbers that could no longer be ignored.
Questions that once stayed indoors were now being carried outside.
Who decides whose name remains?
Who checks the list before the list becomes the truth?
In some places, victory and defeat stood closer than expected, while the list had grown shorter.
Numbers that once fitted quietly into a column now carried the weight of people.
Petitions reached the court. Dates were fixed, then moved.
An election waited for an answer that had not yet arrived.
The anger spread.
People who had stood apart were now filling the streets, thousands upon thousands, no longer willing to remain apart.
Barricades went up. Roads were closed. Notices appeared.
The crowd was asked to turn back.
But the streets kept filling.
Not everyone agreed on what had happened.
Still, too many people had begun to ask whether the institutions they had trusted were still listening.
For years, trust needed no proof.
You entered a polling booth, pressed a button, and went home.
Now people were looking more closely at what happened before a vote became a number, and who was responsible for what came after.
Something once taken for granted was becoming visible:
the distance between a citizen's faith and the institution that asks for it.
He folded the paper.
His name was still missing.
There was no way to know who had taken it away.
For the first time, he understood that finding it again might require more than going to the polling booth.
Rajat Chandra Sarmah is a writer from Assam, India, and the author of eight books. His poetry and prose have appeared in literary journals and publications in India and internationally. He is a previously published contributor to The New Verse News and has received several literary awards and recognitions.
Three years since the massacre— short but long enough to remember the horrors of captivity, being stripped of safety at home and abroad, in our houses of worship, on stinky subway platforms, afraid to wear a yarmulke, hang a mezuzah, slipping a Jewish star on a gold chain beneath a business suit.
Hope is harder to find standing among crowds of hostile strangers blocking the closing doors.
Tammy Smith is a licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Thimble, ONE ART, Bending Genres, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. She received honorable mentions in the Journal of New Jersey Poets 2026 Poets Prize and the 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.
Is it this ticking brightness? Some take it all in.
Some resist. Others look down and away. Sky
anchors in cobalt, erases this dawn reflection
of our autumn world riddled with fire.
Cheryl Martone lives in Rhode Island, where she works as a grant writer for a food rescue and hunger relief nonprofit. Her work has been published in Still Point Arts Quarterly, River Heron Review, Gyroscope Review, Drifting Sands Haibun, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Unlost, among other publications.
AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.
I was only sixteen when my best friend’s father stuck his hands up my shirt and his tongue down my throat.
I was terrified to tell her yet somehow she knew so I didn’t have to.
After my best friend’s father I never went braless. Never mind I was donned in a thick crewneck sweatshirt—
He saw something He wanted.
You don’t even have to be beautiful. You only have to be a girl.
Editor’s note: The New Verse News is honored to continue to host, in the wake of the news at Cornell, a series of courageous memoir poems.
A Best of the Net and Best New Poets (2026) nominee and NJSCA fellow, MaryLisa studied poetry at Stockton University. A three-time Pushcart nominee, her poems have won two Murphywriting awards, a Toni Brown Memorial Scholarship Award, and a Stillwaters Woman’s Words Chapbook competition. She’s had work published by Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, and Mudfish, among others and her poems can be found in several anthologies including most recently Screaming Beyond Borders, a Woman Scream Series.
A tiny grain with teeth. Yet too small to cast a shadow.
Then a lung. A room. A locked door.
Someone says nothing is confirmed.
No one moves.
Morning slips beneath the door in one thin blade, bright enough to touch every shoe.
For a moment, that is enough.
We turn uncertainty into innocence.
Eric Goldfarb's work has appeared in The New Verse News, Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Atlanta.
toward that more perfect union inside an imperfect world.
Narcissism is a destabilizing force every time it rises.
We must find a way to tame it firmly, kindly,
if we want humanity to survive.
Please, let us reach out, hold each other tight
in these fast-moving, precarious days.
Are we on a rocket ship to the moon,
or are we going down for the third time?
Or are we somewhere in-between?
Let us come together in an arena of cool, calm love
and try to figure this out, beyond the bluster,
the name-calling, the violence.
Let us go deeply into our best selves,
reach out from our other-hoods
with civil compassion,
invite and honor
empathic conversation.
We are loving family and dear old friends.
We can do this.
Lynne Barnes is a retired psychiatric nurse and librarian who has lived in San Francisco since 1969. Her poetry memoir Falling into Flowers (Blue Light Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award.
A 4.2 magnitude earthquake hit Wauna, a town near Port Orchard, Tuesday afternoon. Shaking was reported in Seattle, Bremerton, Tacoma, Olympia, and Issaquah, among other cities. —MyNorthwest, September 28, 2026
On the neighborhood listserv that afternoon,
someone posted there had just been
a 4.2 earthquake in the region, and
wanted to know if anyone had felt it.
He hit Reply, and wrote that “my girlfriend
and I were in bed at the time, but
that usually a 4.2 in our room is not
considered newsworthy.” Then he shook
off the impulse, hit Delete,deciding instead
to share this with The New Verse News.
Joel Savishinsky shakes himself awake each morning in Seattle. His poetry and political commentary have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Consequence, Dissident Voice, The New Verse News, and The New York Times. He is the author, most recently, of Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging. In 2027, The Poetry Box will publish his collection Bones Beneath the Plow: Poems on Injustice.
for all victims of recent U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific
The ghosts of the fishermen and their living wives file in, filling every seat. The judge, old uncle of a murdered man, enters, pulling on a red jacket. The prosecutor, a murdered man’s wife, calls the roll of the 234, the order in which they will testify, the order in which they died. The ghosts tell what fell from the skies, each blood-thirsty, exploding surprise, tell, too, of their cries for help, answered by more fire. Evidence is presented: bomb fragments, charred boards, limbs skimmed from the sea. Hours pass. Lunch is served in the corridors. Night comes. Blankets are spread on the floor. One afternoon, two weeks in, the children enter, hand in hand, take turns stepping into the witness box to describe crying mothers, cramping stomachs, empty places their fathers used to be. No one sits beside the defendant and, because this is a nightmare, no one permits him to speak. On the last day, a jury of grandmothers finds him guilty. The judge sentences him to a solitary life at sea, fishing, his catch to be surrendered daily. The ghosts are permitted to toss bombs at him periodically and may almost let him drown. But they must haul him up again, place the net back in his hands, this killer who is so confused about what it means to be a man.
Christine Sikorski’s work has appeared in The New Verse News, coastlines review, Waterstone, Little Patuxent Review, Quartet, One Art, This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant and Academy of American Poets Prizes. She has taught at two universities, the Loft Literary Center, a homeless shelter, a community center, and other venues. She lives with her family in Minneapolis.
AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.
I don’t care if Lincoln’s nose fell off!
It’s not getting fixed until it’s renamed
the Trump Lincoln Memorial.
And if that damn obelisk cracks again,
it’s not getting another head job until it’s renamed
the Trump Washington Monument.
And build it bigger because mine is bigger.
And the Iwo Jima Memorial—
my hand should be at the top of the flagpole.
Hey, ever see the statue in Trump Jefferson Memorial?
Tom looks like a fairy with that hair.
(They say Sally Hemings was a total hoax.)
Send my stylist, colorist too.
That Vietnam Veteran Memorial
is never getting polished again
until my name is on it. You know,
I was itching to fight, but they
said my heel had bone spurs.
And what the fuck is that Korean War…thing?
Losers in ponchos marching in the rain?
Nobody remembers Korea.
Give it to Kim Jung Il.
Now. The Vietnam Girls Veteran Memorial.
Put my face on the wounded soldier,
and make it the nurse’s hand on my crotch, not my own.
Christ! Masturbating in public is unpresidential.
Hey, hurry up with my arch
before the Supreme Court catches up!
Pegi Deitz Sheais a two-time winner of the Connecticut Book Award and the President of the CT Council of Poets Laureate. Her new book TiCK TiCKTiCKTiCK is a humorous hybrid of poetry and prose inspired by the author’s ongoing 28+ years of hell with Lyme disease. Her forthcoming novel-in-verse Uncharted: The Odyssey of Jeanne Barret, the First Woman to Circumnavigate the World is due out next month.
Where i grew up, there was an old man in a long black coat and a derby hat. He slumped, slouched along streets and hallways. A church warden, but not a creep, though, There to make sure we kids did the right thing—that we acted with decency, respect, that we cared about the small town where we lived. A role model, if dressed a bit weirdly. Now, i read about a judge making threats against little boys—threatening to ruin their lives, to split them from families, to ship them to countries where they know no one, where it’s possible they will be trafficked or killed. It’s true. I’ve read the courthouse transcripts. This time, creep is the right word. I think about the class I took my freshman year in college: a study of the Nazi regime, the guts of it, how men became desensitiezed to the plight of others, how the lives of others became as disposable as my mother’s empty lighter. Have we slid into that sort of nation, letting judges tell kids they have the power to destroy them? The old man in the long coat of my childhood would gather children, give them shovels and hoes, have them clean a patch of weedy sidewalk, scrape bird shit off the side of the church. We’d know it was the right thing to do: to make the place look better, because it was our home. He spoke gently to us, but he’d take this judge in Texas by the throat, push him to his knees and say, here, pull the weeds from the cracks of the sidewalk, leave the children alone. Is that true? or is it what I want to be true? Let’s say it’s both, Let’s say there is still some adult who cares about morality, the moral high ground in this country of fast money and power-grubbers, and if that sounds preachy, then I guess it does. His name was Buck Klein it was it was it was. Maybe I’ll drive to Texas and start a spray-painting campaign on the bridges and roads and sides of courthouses: Buck Klein lives, he does, he does, and judges who do not know this should lose their jobs, should be sentenced to 40 days on a playground, learning to care what becomes of the children.
Dana Yost is a former daily newspaper editor and writer. He has had 10 books published since 2008 and is a three-time Pushcart nominee. He lives in Sioux Falls, S.D., trying to stay blue in a very red state.
Would it have made her day easier, the day she scrolled Instagram during Chem II, during lunch, during AP Lang, during band, the day she read the news of a gang rape two years ago, would she have been prepared had we sat her down—and at what age, 3, 7, 13?— and told her of men who do not consider her body her own, of men who fly planes into towers, of men who tie bombs to railroad tracks, of powerful men who launch missiles into girls schools, of men who believe her body to be the plane, the towers, the train, the school and her life potential charred debris to be forgotten amidst their boasting? But she already knew of these men, the Epsteins, Weinsteins, the boys sitting next to her in class who might grow into them. And she wasn’t prepared—how could she have been? As I tucked her in that night, she said, “I hate school,” said, “I want to go home,” and of course she was home. But I knew what she meant.
L. Roger Owens teaches spirituality, ministry, and creative writing at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He is an MFA student at Ashland University.
