WHERE NOW

by Lynn White

Photos of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor crouching over a woman were taken in Jeffrey Epstein's New York City mansion, while an image of Peter Mandelson in his underwear was taken in the paedophile financier's Paris flat, a Sky News analysis has found.

Where do we go now

after we’ve seen a lord

in his knickers

and a prince

on his knees,

where now 

from that place

where no crimes 

were committed,

“don’t you know.”

Do you know

where now?

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.

THE LONGEST MILE

by Laura Rodley

Coyote reaches Alcatraz via Instagram

Escaping the prison of civilization,

to Alcatraz, the desperadoes prison

that’s now a tourist site,

a lone coyote swam

one and a half miles

to land on the rocky beach,

emaciated and shivering.

Despite predictions of his demise,

the coyote, now named Floyd,

has gained weight.

How did he survive the swim?

Though San Francisco Bay

has warmed in increments,

the coyote swam in temps

similar to those

on December 17, 1962

when escaped prisoner John Paul Scott

swam in the other direction,

away from Alcatraz.

Suffering from hypothermia,

Scott was captured, and returned

to serve out his sentence.

Perhaps his ghost whispers now

into the coyote Floyd’s ears.

Perhaps Floyd whispers of his own escape,

while rangers plot to capture him

and bring him back.

Pushcart Prize winner Laura Rodley’s latest books are Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Press, and Counter Point, Legacy Award finalist. Her Ribbons and Moths: Poems for Children by Kelsay Books was selected as a finalist in the “Animals/Pets/Nature” Category in the 2025 Independent Author Network (IAN) Book of the Year Awards, won the 2024 International Book Award for Children's Nonfiction, eon the 2025 Bookfest for Nonfiction Outdoors, and Bronze in the Moonbeam Book Awards.

MILLER IS TOO GOOD A NAME

by Leonore Hildebrandt

When waxing philosophical 
about the older days, 
a good miller has no reason to say 

it’s been a Western aberration
to grant rights to foreign workers. 
But this one does?

After colonizing, 
this miller wants to decolorize, 
to remake the country 

pallid, blanched, white.
To keep the lowest caste,
a dispensable underclass. 

There’s no life in it. 
A young boy blenches in fear. 
These mean words will be milled–– 

crushed and ground.
Washed out, they'll be left to fade

like the bones bleaching in the desert.

Leonore Hildebrandt has published four collections of poetry: Somewhere the Day Begins, The Work at Hand, The Next Unknown, and Where You Happen to Be. Her poems and translations appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Cafe Review, Cerise Press, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, New Letters, Plant Human Quarterly, Poetry Daily, Poetry Salzburg Review, Rhino, and Sugar House Review among other journals. Nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, she was a finalist for the Maine Writers and Publishers Award in Poetry in 2024. Originally from Germany, Leonore is an editor, gardener, song-writer, and musician, spending her time in Harrington, Maine, and Silver City, NM.

TAX THE RICH

by Virginia Aronson

Legislators and governors in many blue states are preparing a range of new taxes on the wealthy. At the same time, many red states continue to cut or eliminate income taxes. —CNBC, January 30, 2026

Why is the sky
the limit for them
the gold bars
the shiny cars
the luxury this
exclusive that

starts with a penny
turns into a pound
of toys 
of gold 
of flesh
accumulation
without constraint
changing character
dirtying hands
using up resources
polluting our cities
changing our climate
socializing risks
privatizing rewards
paying for leadership
to hoard their gains:
it's socialism 
for the rich
and capitalism 
for the poor
it's golden visas 
for the rich
and deportations 
for the poor
it's cold streets 
for the homeless
shivering in misery
while the rich sleep well
on their beds of money
while the world burns down
under a blackened sky.

Virginia Aronson is the director of Food and Nutrition Resources Foundation and the author of many published books. New poetry collections include Collateral Damage(Clare Songbirds Publishing), Whiskey Island and Whiskey Straight Women (Cyberwit Press).

AS THE WORLD BURNS

by Moudi Sbeity

the child who is not embraced by 

the village will burn it down to feel 

its warmth —African proverb

Who didn't love you 

the way you needed to be loved

is what I would ask the men 

in their custom suits, pampered 

and coddled, as they are,

by their kindling of dollars.

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American author, poet, and transpersonal 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, Moudi is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. Their first poetry collection, Alhamdulillah Anyway, and their memoir, Habibi Means Beloved, are set to be published in 2026.

BEATING UP THE POOR

by Dale Jacobson

Trump’s thugs come wearing masks 
like the KKK would hide their faces 
to not be known by the honest light of day.

To be surprised by American fascism 
is to forget to ask what the country has been 
for the poorest of the poor from the beginning, 
or how the worst of the worst made their law 
bright with fire, whips and murder.

You think reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in school 
ever meant justice for all? Or for the poor 
a just country ever existed? And the hatred 
and terror Trump now brings to the cities 
is a new law of a land that once was free?

Yes, they are paid to break families apart, 
they are colder than the deepest cold of 

Minnesota winter. The past also has its allegiances, 

cold-blooded and brutal.

And what do these thugs get from the mayhem 
they generously offer as their vision of America?  
What do they take home for their supper of dreams? 
Their bribe is what they take.  
What is the moldy crust they want the nation to eat? 
They don’t care. They never did.

Dale Jacobson is a poet from Minnesota. He has published ten books of poetry and appeared in a number of journals, including APR, Great River Review, and Another Chicago Magazine.

POLITICAL ARS POETICA

by Susan Cohen

Liam Conejo Ramos

Jupiter is smaller than we thought,

the way that human beings turn out 

to be smaller than we thought. But what use 

is lamentation? Sometimes it’s the smallest

who can nibble their way into the darkest

fastened cupboard of a heart. Sometimes

it’s a boy of five, his Spider-Man backpack, 

that blue bunny hat.

Susan Cohen is the author of three collections, mostly recently Democracy of Fire (Broadstone; 2022). Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Southern Review. She’s received the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, Terrain Annual Poetry Prize, and a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology, among other honors. A former journalist, she lives in Northern California.

LETTER FOM A BESEIGED CITY IN AMERICA

by Margaret Hasse

So alone, each of hundreds in our north

star state––beings sniffed out, run 

down, dragged, tied up, shoved 

in, head-cracked, driven, dumped 

in dark places, disappeared.

So alone, the rest of us snugged at home 

hearing news of atrocities, watching 

videos of masked men in our home-

town toting machine-like guns, grabbing, 

kicking, shooting, and we who knew

not or actually knew the taken, first feel 

unbelief, numbing fear, geysers of inward 

anger and sorrow for the numberless hurt 

and the named dead.

We became roused and risen to 

outward acts: deliver food, guard 

school children, record kidnappings with 

eyes and cameras as on the boy in 

a blue bunny hat, send money, join

groups, trail black cars, shriek alerts

with whistles, light vigil candles, wield signs, 

march, lay flowers on the bloody snow, say no.

A whole community besieged becomes 

a whole community of care, protest and 

resistance, a testing ground for whether 

kindness and the Constitution can hold up

against the battering ram of govern-

ment run amok as we gather in our cold time,

our beautiful city under attack, to hold 

hands with neighbors whether citizens or 

citizens-to-be while spokespeople for

the outrage name-call and hob-gobble truth.

We here know what we saw and see, 

and gradually then all at once, people 

across the country are paying attention, 

posting their support, writing the wrongs 

to their leaders while Springsteen 

sings his “Streets of Minneapolis,” a song 

like a flag to carry, and Judge Biery near

the southern border in the lone star state

frees from detention a man and his young 

son stolen from Minnesota, noting in 

his order that “the case has its genesis 

in the ill-conceived and incompetently-

implemented government pursuit

of daily deportation quotas... ”–– all 

just and sympathetic action from all

over the country eases our city’s 

isolation and bolsters hope 

our democracy will endure. 

Margaret Hasse is a poet living and working in the Twin Cities. She has published nine books of poetry, and has received many honors, such as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

CHOSEN

by Linda Parsons

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

You, yes, you. On the porch glider of memory, 

thinking again of your grandmother’s grease-

stained kitchen and how she saved you. You, 

in the first snow of the year, the burdened photinia 

limbs, the night’s blue note. I mean you. You 

who’ve been griping and gnashing your teeth 

in the constant upheaval—not just our country’s 

bruised fist, but the world entire, its tectonics adrift. 

It was your idea, when the roll was called up yonder, 

to take up your pallet, to rise like Lazurus, 

his winding sheet of myrrh and aloe trailing behind. 

To say, Me, I’ll go. I’ll go to that time, that cliff 

and split sky, that rage of brother against brother 

against sister, unfriending right and left. 

Left from right. It’s my time. My time to be 

a lighthouse, to shine far and wide over veined 

stones and broken vows alike, though my heels 

bleed, my steps falter. My time to march 

on the winter streets and hold high my sign: 

God is watching you kill.

 

Remember 

your Ecclesiastes: Time and chance happen 

to us all. And what will you do with this time, 

this chance to sweep your beam along the rocky 

shoreline, to pull whoever outlasted the nor’easter 

back to breath? This is your time—to spend 

like a wastrel or shower the heavens with a gracious 

plenty. You engine of steam and plow. You 

shoulder to the squeaky wheel. You asked for it. 

You volunteered to help turn the tide 

and guide this mother home. 

 

Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville. 

NEW CHEERS FROM THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

by Cecil Morris

Get a load of this: Columbia, Breakside unveil beer made from bear poop" —Oregon Public Broadcasting, January 28, 2026.

Bear scat—that’s bear crap 

to those of us not naturalists 
or bearded survivalists wise 
in the euphemisms of nature 
(or ursinus faeces if you 
prefer the snooty gloss of Latin 
or Pooh poop if you’re still child-like 
and delighted by certain sounds). 
Bear scat beer—a new lager called 
Nature Calls—is a wild brew infused 
with—dare I say it—shit collected 
in Montana, the big sky state, 
where a new breed of ranchers scour 
the land for the not-quite-gold gold 
and sell it to be fermented. 
I suppose the USDA 
does not inspect or certify 
for purity the scat in vats 
of yellow lager so you might 
be getting a foragers blend 
of deer droppings or raccoon turds. 
Does that matter? The real question: 
Would Norm drink it were it on tap?

Norm superimposed on Breakside.com screenshot.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025.  He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

THE REVOLUTION IS BEING TELEVISED

by Alex Stolis

after Gil Scott-Heron

You cannot escape it by staying home 

the revolution is alive

the revolution is a nuclear sun melting black ice

the revolution will not let you rest.

There are no news highlights

there is no news, only revolution,

no memes, no theme song, no uniforms,

no military-industrial complexion.

The revolution is being televised

in B&W

in Technicolor

in IMAX 3D.

The revolution is being televised as you read this

the revolution does not care about talking heads,

doesn’t believe in DHS or FBI or ATF or 

any other alphabet-despotic soup.

The revolution is being televised

while you eat, sleep, make love, 

while you want to believe things are normal,

ignore the revolution at your own peril.

The revolution is being televised

coast to coast, station to station

a commercial free telethon streaming 24/7

it is Bot-proof, cleared of influencers.

This revolution takes no prisoners

it names names & kicks ass, it spins 

spin back to truth, it’s a Springsteen song 

written & recorded in 48 hours.

There will be no taping or film at 11:00

no reruns,

tune in or turn out

the revolution is being televised.

There will be no ctrl-alt-delete

lock screen, reboot

this revolution is being televised

is being televised live.

Author’s note: Last week, Bruce Springsteen wrote a song in protest of the ICE actions in my hometown, Minneapolis. It brought to mind Public Enemy's song "Revolution" which brought to mind Gil Scott-Heron's song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" which, in turn, brought this poem to me. I am reminded of how art is connected, the power of words and how we, the people, do have the power to direct history.

Alex Stolis has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections, Pop. 1280 and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Ekphrastic Review, Louisiana Literature Review, Burningwood Literary Journal, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife was released by Louisiana Literature Press, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres in by Bottlecap Press. He lives in upstate New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra.