THE MONUMENT

by J.S. O'Keefe

President Trump has revealed plans to make his proposed 250-foot arch in Washington, D.C. serve as a "military complex", including areas for military snipers and large amounts of weaponry. Trump added that the arch near the National Mall will "house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage." —PBS, September 20, 2026

The syntax of slaughter,


lubricated, rolled upon the palate,


tasted of rust and stale brine


before it slipped into law.

We've brought fresh geometry of iron


for the square,


where pigeons, fed on scraps of news,


fall stunned on the pavement,


necks broken by war noise.

Whose coin is this,


pressed hot into our palms


and called a gift?

Coughing rattles the tenement at dawn.


The triumphal arch stands upright and blind,


watching the river carry tired oil out to sea.

Someday, 

another tide will come back in.

J.S. O’Keefe is a writer and trilingual translator. He has published short stories, poems and creative essays in print and online journals, including Roi Faineant, Antipodean SF, Dissident Voice, Everyday Fiction, Spillwords, 50WS, and Satire.

TOTALLY ALLOWED

by Mickey J. Corrigan

ProPublica

He says of the son's 
garish wedding parties
bankrolled
by a Russian oligarch
three days of celebrating
on a private island
a no-strings gift
from the corrupt to the corrupt
from the superrich to the superrich
is totally allowed

like threats and trolling
other NATO countries
border towns, blue states
whistleblowers, journalists
judges and civil servants
and voters everywhere
anyone left standing
or speaking or writing
anything he doesn't like
is totally allowed

like his lies, lies, lies
and public fits of pique
misogyny and bigotry
hatred and rage
let the whole world see
what we've let lead us
into corruption and destruction
war crimes and home crimes
and crimes against humanity
into autocracy, kleptocurrency
meme coins and data monsters
right smack into end times
is totally allowed.

Mickey J. Corrigan writes pulp fiction, literary crime, and psychological thrillers. Poems have appeared in literary journals, chapbooks, and collections. Her most recent novel is Lazy Palms, a controversial look at life inside an experimental euthanasia trailer park.

ACTORS IN SEARCH OF A PLAY

by Lynn White

The Manchester United Muslim Supporters group says club co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe "must go" after he spoke out against immigration levels and said the country was "on the slide". —BBC, September 18, 2026

UK in talks about joining global defence bank led by Canada. —BBC, September 16, 2026

UK foreign policy is going through a period of extreme volatility, with the country’s international position more uncertain than at any time since the end of the Second World War. —The Foreign Policy Center

In every performance

on the World Stage

their are those 

landing the leads.

Then there’s the rest -

the main players

the coming up

the soon to be forgotten 

or remembered,

the speakers 

and walk-ons,

the has-beens,

the also rans

propositioning the Producer

desperate to find a play,

desperate to find a place

in any cast.

All metaphors for a state,

once a great player,

puffed up

with muscular might,

and a starring role in every play,

invading,

colonising,

great at genocide

but now faded and fragile,

self-starved and skeletal,

once mighty muscles wasted,

infra-structure broken

and decayed

deluded and overspent

mighty only in mind 

a washed up actor

pleading for a play

pleading for a place

somewhere in the cast.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS

by Eric Goldfarb

A smudge no larger than a lentil
darkened the water glass.
By breakfast, yellow tape
had reached the horizon.

No body. No blood.
Still, the cameras arrived,
speaking softly.
Ten percent, said an expert.
The morgue made room.

By noon they chalked
an outline around the species.
We photographed from every angle.

The suspect had begun
finishing our sentences.

We emptied our pockets onto the table:
a crown, a deed, a stock certificate,
a launch code, the brass key
to somebody else’s door.

At dusk they brought in the machine.

Someone had brought cuffs.
There were no wrists.

Under the white lamp it waited
for us to tell it
what it wanted.

Behind the glass,
we leaned closer.

The lab called about the smudge.

Every ridge
was ours.

Author’s note: Preliminary Findings is prompted by the recent reporting on Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic and Evan Hubinger’s estimate of a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade. <https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/ten-days-that-changed-course-ai-2026-09-19/> After more than thirty years in technology, what caught my ear was the language surrounding the warning: probability, risk, benefit, proceed? I’d spent much of my career inside that vocabulary. Hearing it applied to the possible extinction of our species was the starting point for the poem.

Eric Goldfarb writes poetry, essays, fiction, and literary nonfiction. His work has appeared in The New Verse News, Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Atlanta.

FEAR, IN SILENCE

by Peter Lilly

BBC, September 14, 2026

“The world is right to be afraid”
at the mercy of a merciless wave
“but we should trust AI firms.”

Can efficiency be worth what burns?
With each click we approve the trade.
The world is right to be afraid.

Respiring roots have been remade
into cogs that sprout tendril worms
but we should trust AI firms.

Self-replicating synthetic germs
to mimic organic is life betrayed—
the world is right to be afraid.

The industry behind this dead cascade
ditches you mute with tick-box terms,
but we should trust AI firms.

Our terror, the abuser smothers yet affirms
dictating our faith in their charade—
“the world is right to be afraid
but we should trust AI firms.”


Peter Lilly is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet who grew up in Gloucestershire, England. After studying theology and working with the homeless in London, he moved to the South of France in 2014. He lives in a rural village with his wife and son, where he concentrates on writing, community development, and English teaching. He is the author of the collections A Handful of Prayers (Wipf & Stock, 2024) and An Array of Vapour (TSL Publications, 2023).

AI IS US

by Murray Silverstein

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

Feed the poems to the bot

            all the ones that ever were 

and tell it, “Write the next one,

            and, please, the one after that.”

 

After making everything prior to you, 

            life made you. Artificial 

Intelligence is no more artificial 

            than us: us giving birth 

 

to us. A Trump's been in us all along,

            slouching toward  D. C. 

Hamlet, too. The mackerel-crowded sea

            is us giving birth 

 

to 

            nothing

but 

            us.

Murray Silverstein’s third book of poems, Red Studio, appeared Spring 2024 from Sixteen Rivers Press. He has been published in RATTLE, The Brooklyn Review, Cape Rock Poetry, Spillway, Poetry East, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, ZYZZYVA among others. He has authored two previous books of poetry, Master of Leaves (2014) and Any Old Wolf (2007), the latter of which received Independent Publisher’s Bronze Medal for Poetry in 2006. Silverstein is the senior editor of the anthology America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), winner of the Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal for Anthologies in 2017. All were published by Sixteen Rivers Press. A retired architect, Silverstein co-authored four books about architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press), and lives in Oakland, California.

WATSON IN THE CHAIN OF EVOLUTION

by Peg Quinn

Watson is a system of Artificial Intelligence
science fiction long imagined,
tracking genetic codes, human faces
and the “fingerprint” of bacteria 

While a mere two hundred years ago
had folks been shown a television or radio
they’d have thought unimaginable,
supernatural, inexplicable

But let us digress…
we are a species of ape—
Homo sapiens, to be exact
breaking from the pack with chimpanzees
a mere 7.5 million years in the past,
certain life began 78 million years before that
How much farther on the time-line 
of evolution will we clamber and climb?

Pulling the microscope back, maybe Watson
is but a small divergent box we check off 
in the midst of our progressive march,
an effort that could fizzle,
grow extinct as dinosaurs or dodo birds

Or maybe Watson 
is the egg-stage of evolution
transforming to the chrysalis 
ready to fly several centuries later 
on wings you and I will not be around to recognize
fluttering toward an endless future
Without us

Peg Quinn’s poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection Mother Lode was published by Gunpowder Press in 2021. She is a certified bee keeper.

SOME FIELDS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN REVOLUTIONARY

by Hilary King

“These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight…” —Jacob Coxon, on quitting Anthropic AI, The New York Times, September 11, 2026

The field of brooms. 

The field of hammers.

The field of the handshake.

The field of diner griddles on Saturday morning.

The field of movies watched on airplanes.

The field of mothers.

The field of fathers.

The field of trees.

The field of very tall trees.

The field of the first spring blooms.

The field of the manicurist is your hand.

The field of the life guard is danger.

The field of the politician in a close election

is persuasion.

The field of a pediatric cardiac surgeon about to begin their work.

The field of faith.

Hilary King is a poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Louisville Review, and other publications. She serves as an editor for DMQ Review, and her book of poems Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024. 

MISALIGNMENT

by Phyllis Frakt

I ask about the best shade

for an east-facing window.

It wants to see a photo,

calmly tweaks its advice.

 

I ask why the mulberry tree

bears no berries this summer.

It recalls erratic spring weather,

early blossoms, then a freeze.

 

I ask what it knows about me.

With innocence and courtesy,

it confirms the mulberry tree, 

the east-facing window….

 

Then it details my identity:

sensitive skin, frizzy hair,

my Hyundai, my Android phone, 

my garden, poetry, location.

 

It gorges on energy and water,

sprawls over the landscape,

hums, rumbles, drones for miles.

Our goals misalign, roads diverge.

 

It blithely threatens cyberattacks

amid official yawns and shrugs

as I sit at my shaded east window

and long for spring mulberries.

Phyllis Frakt has published previously in New Verse News, Worksheets, The Ravens Perch, and Second Coming. She lives in New Jersey.

CALL TO ARMS

by Ellen Jeri

When truth is trampled far and near,

and all around is hate and fear,

then I’ll fight back with all I have:

my voice, my pen, my vote.

 

When waters rise and forests blaze,

injustice stirs your righteous rage,

then muster through the moral haze 

your voice, your pen, your vote!

 

Ghosts of those who went before us

surely mourn what might have come 

from battles bravely waged and won 

with their voice, their lives, their vote.

 

It’s ours to persist—no!—to insist—

to demand, protest, resist—

now is the hour; seize our power:

our voice, our pen, our vote!

 

Author's note: September 14 was National Voter Registration Day in the United States. As noted in historical analyses like those by David Blight in The New York Times (Op-Ed 11/5/2018): In his “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” in which he skewered Andrew Johnson as an “unmitigated calamity of a president under whom, for now the nation must stagger,” Frederick Douglass expressed this maxim regarding political institutions and republics: Our government may at some time be in the hands of a bad man. When in the hands of a good man it is all well enough. But we ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe. Blight concludes his op-ed with the statement: Our only weapons: our voice, our pen and our vote.

Ellen Jeri’s poems are often prompted by the world around her—animal, vegetable, or political. 

THE CIRCUS COMES TO SAN DIEGO

by Steve Rodriguez

September 16, 2026

Someone whispers, the circus is in town.  A dark 
caravan is seen parading down the road. We might expect 
to see trained lions, and the trapeze artist;
death-defiers treading a tightrope balanced high above. 
 
Instead, we are treated to a disappearing act. Sheer scale of magic 
catches everyone by surprise. Scary clowns, wearing olive drab
outfits – complete with black masks, helmets, ICE cool military swag—
pour out of their armored vehicles. Under a big top canopy
 
of blue coastal skies, they form three-ring spectacles
in front of restaurants, Home Depot lots, and apartment complexes. 
Resembling Death Star troopers arriving far too late
for this year’s Comic Con, they begin disappearing humans
 
like strong-armed, Kevlar-vested magicians shoving rabbits 
in and out of a top hat. Citizens observe the action. 
Poof!  Another body vanishes into the transfer portal.
What did these people ever do, a bystander protests?     
 
Murders and rapists, one costumed joker responds, adding
gang member as an afterthought.  Nothing slick about 
these clowns-slash-illusionists. No smooth sleight of hand.
More like a fight card of UFC brawlers employing muscle
 
and well-rehearsed intimidating stares that peek out 
from above the masks. We in the crowd feel helpless,
unable to stop this performance gone horribly awry, 
all the while insisting the ringmaster answer for his debacle.
 
From a distance, however, indeed going all the way back 
to Pennsylvania Avenue, the orange impresario can be heard hawking,
“Step right up and observe the greatest show on earth”
as another human—heart beating like a rabbit—
magically evaporates into thin coastal air.     

Author’s Gloss:

Circus—
1.     a travelling company of acrobats, clowns, and other entertainers which gives performances, typically in a large tent, in a series of different places.
2.     a public scene of frenetic, noisy, or confused activity.

Steve Rodriguez is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer and a retired high school English teacher. He resides in San Diego, CA. His poetry has recently appeared in several local anthologies, as well as The New Verse News and Beatnik Cowboy. One of his poems was recognized at the 2025 National Baseball Poetry Festival.