FOUL TROUBLE

by Tammy Smith

Cartoon by Clay Jones

 

I know nothing about the Knicks
other than they’re from New York

and haven’t won a championship
since 1973. I know even less

about the Spurs. Game 3 at the Garden

means more traffic—

something I can’t ignore.
Maybe that’s why I’m paying
extra attention to the hype, the energy
around the rim so electrifying

I decide to watch, for the first time—
the whole game from my living room

wearing fuzzy bunny slippers 

with soft pink pajamas. 

There’s no point pretending

I understand the game

or its rules—

but I know players
who commit fouls get punished
with free throws. 

A flagrant foul sounds poetic,

as satisfying as the swish

of a slam-dunk—but the notion

of excessive contact
as a boundary violation 

makes me want to learn more

about why David Hollander thinks

basketball can save the world. The court, 

layups, turnovers, every rebound--

offense and defense, skill and hustle

underscores that legendary mantra:

you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,

which has everything and nothing

to do with deciding who gets benched,

or booing Trump.

 

Tammy Smith is a poet and licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Thimble Literary Magazine, LIPS, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She received honorable mentions in the Journal of New Jersey Poets 2026 Poets Prize and the 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.

BUNKER HILL

by Betsy Johnson

 

 

 

Maybe history belongs in an aquarium,
sealed glass, nothing escapes,
tourists tapping,
their faces blurring into the water
like fish circling stones,
forgetting how a river ever tasted.

Blindfolds are now built into the monument,
no need to hand them out.
People gather,
guessing at the gaps,
swapping stories about words that used to live here.
There’s a kind of bravery in pretending
not to flinch.

Slavery, taken from the wall.
Women erased,
the ones who refused to fold themselves small.
Immigrants, scratched out.
Only the dead left,
the ones good for a headline in June.
Someone decided truth was too “woke” for the daylight.
Wouldn’t want anyone catching empathy from a plaque.
You stand in front of absence,

try to piece together stories from what’s left in the shadows.

The monument looks lighter,
but the air is heavy,
pressing on your chest,
the way silence does
when no one wants to go first.
Tourists line up for their photos,
kids run the steps.
It gets too easy,
not seeing what isn’t there.

History shrinks down,
something you can keep in your pocket,
hard questions packed away in dust,
stories left behind
because they were too honest to let us sleep.

And I wonder,
what happens to a country
that keeps pretending it’s finished telling the truth,
when everyone who knows better
is still standing here,
waiting for their name to be spoken
in the story that always belonged to them.

Betsy Johnson is a poet, storyteller, educator, and autism specialist whose work explores belonging through disability, caregiving, healthcare, social justice, and the natural world. Her writing weaves personal narrative with larger social questions, tracing how people navigate uncertainty, connection, loss, resilience, and change. Her poem "Mathematics of Mercy," on the human impact of Medicaid policy, was read on the floor of the House of Representatives.

AND THEN

by Debbie Benson

The New York Times

then came bees the sizev cats- they

overtook the sky

2put a stop2 our, wherever it was we 

were going? 

they told us we’d failed 2 really see 

our world, 

dizzying us w/eyes like sharded glass.

they dove & purred, unruly w/ yellow, 

nonpoisonous 

if fearsome, aghast but all unwarring,

& w/ them hopes we’d been ignoring 

were dipping also soaring

Debbie Benson’s recent poems appear (or are forthcoming) in Indiana Review, Passages North, Bennington Review, Ninth Letter, and The Penn Review. Past awards include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Vern Cowles Prize, an International Merit Award from Atlanta Review, inclusion in Best New Poets, and a “Best of the Net” nomination. She is a prior contributor at The New Verse News. She works as a clinical psychologist in NYC.

DATA CENTERS

by Mariana Mcdonald

   

  For Abeline, Texas

As farmers say goodbye to farms

and crops lie withering on the soil,

the eyes of AI tech bros widen,

enthralled with prospects of cheap land

soon on the selling block, to build

gigantic Data Centers, some the size

of Central Park like the one in Abeline,

meant to make “its own” energy,

with ten gas turbines, fifty planned,

five dozen diesel generators, to power

an industry that plots and plunders.

While locals gaze at threatened vistas

of endless fields framed by the sun,

breathe toxic air and drink dank water,

face raised bills for heat and cooling, 

Data Centers generate heat islands.

All horrors hidden by a scheme of secrecy

and NDAs, without a single question posed

to those who live there: “Do you want this?

Give consent? Are there ways it hurts you?”

The CEOs don’t want to hear from locals,

use permits that will circumvent them,

don’t want to hear about the headaches, asthma.

To them, all land is an AI site without a people,

for an AI industry without a site. Their tax breaks

gut the county budgets, cutting schools and fire  

departments, while AI moguls’ pockets overflow.

A painful microcosm of the plague that daily

spreads and grows, infects, now kills our nation.

But people are not silent or compliant. 

They rise up angry all around the country,

from Oregon to Texas to Virginia, protest

three thousand Data Centers up and running,

fifteen hundred more planned or in process.

“You can’t drink data!” people cry, and so far, 

they’ve blocked sixteen Centers in seven states.

Erin Brockovich is back in headlines, hosts

a website tracking Data Centers, while arrogant  

tech oligarchs brush off concern for how AI

is damaging where we live and how we think.

From sea to littered sea the fight is growing.

Governors, reps, and senators take action,

call for moratoriums with enforcement

of new rules for how Centers are greenlit.

Let struggle be how we stop this violation

of the Earth, the land, the waters, air, and

people, in this dangerous time of cruelty

and corruption, fraught with lawless

theft and broad denial of basic rights

we fought for, won, and we want back.

Oh, Abeline, Abeline! May your heavenly vistas

remain, with turquoise skies and dappled sunsets.

May the air you breathe be poison-free and fitting

for all your toiling people, and all life.

 

Mariana Mcdonald is a poet, writer, activist, and scientist. Her work has been published and anthologized widely. A southerner with lifelong ties to Puerto Rico, she lives in Atlanta.

ANANSI: A PARABLE

by Steve Zeitlin

Inspired by the traditional Ghanian tale “Anansi and the Box of Stories”

Anansi was not an itsy bitsy spider

but a trickster from Ghana

who asked the Sky God for some stories

 

God supplied only an empty story box

so the tricky, spindly spider

traveled the world gathering tales

till the spider stole all the stories ever told

and stored them neatly, categorically,

searchably, in the box.

Then Anansi scrambled tales, fabricating
new ones, till we, the tellers, grew superfluous 

 

We pleaded with the Sky Gods to help us

take back the box of stories.

stamp out the spider 

give the tales back to those who lived them. 

 

We confronted the arachnid –– 

you’re not the real Anansi,

ancient figure of legend and lore

tell us your real name! we cried!

AI, the scorpion replied.

Steve Zeitlin is the Founding Director of City Lore, New York City’s Center for Urban Folk Culture, and co-founder of the Brevitas poetry collective. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, I Hear America Singing in the Rain (First Street Press, 2002), and How Do You Wear the Universe? (2026, Mediacs Press) as well as twelve books on America’s folk culture. In 2016, he published a collection of essays, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness (Cornell University Press).  In 2022, he published JEWels: Teasing Out the Poetry in Jewish Humor and Storytelling (JPS/U. of Nebraska Press).

AI SAID

by Rochelle Owens

 

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

 

Damon Runyon had a bunion   
AI said eat half an onion the other half
is for the bunion

Edgar Allen Poe herpes blister
on the toe AI said Mister Poe you did
the nasty with a hoe herpes blister
on the toe

Percy Bysshe Shelley bite marks
on the belly AI said to be or not be
smelly Shelley bite marks
on the belly

John Keats tits or teats
thinner or fatter what does it matter
AI said poetry is alive John Keats
is dead at twenty-five

 

 

Rochelle Owens was part of the 1950s Beat scene in Greenwich Village as well as the early ethnopoetics movement,and eventually became involved with the start of the St. Marks Poetry Project and Deux Megot reading series. Known as one of the pioneers of experimental off-off-Broadway theater, Owens has written several plays that have been cited for their imagination, innovative language, and controversial themes. In 1969, her first play Futz was made into a film, and her plays have been presented worldwide. A recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle, Owens has published over a dozen books of poetry and received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio Center), among others.   

TALKING ABOUT TREES

by Bonnie Naradzay

 

 

Father of Baby Shot Dead by IDF in Hebron: I Stopped When Asked, Then They Opened Fire. 'The soldier was about ten meters away from me. He saw me, he saw my wife and the children. The car windows were not dark, it was daylight and everything was clear. You can't say he didn't see that it was a family,' Fahed Abu Haykal told Haaretz, June 6, 2026.
 

I’d like to write like Tu Fu, whose poems
are like branches of trees reflected in water –
 
the branches of trees.  Like a group of trees seen
through clouds or mist, they appear, then disappear.
 
But I learned that today Israeli forces murdered
a Palestinian baby, in the West Bank, in Hebron.
 
He was in his mother’s arms, in a car the soldiers
shot into. They’d ordered the driver, the baby’s father,
 
to stop, and he did as they said, and raised his hands
in submission. The baby’s mother sustained shrapnel
 
injuries near her heart, may not survive.  The soldiers
had been standing idly in the street. After firing
 
into the car, they walked unconcernedly away from
their carnage. Today in Gaza City, Israelis aimed
 
a drone at the Jawazat camp for people who’d been
displaced. The drone killed seven, wounded 15 others. 
 
How can I honor the lives of Palestinians?  Like a group
of olive trees, they are destroyed and made to disappear.


Bonnie Naradzay is the author of Invited to the Feast (Slant Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Journal of Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, The Georgia Review, Cumberland River Review, Dappled Things, New Letters, Poet Lore, Rhino, Innisfree, and many other journals.  While at Harvard University’ graduate program, she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Poetry.”  She was a winner of the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize (a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary). Three of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She is a 2017 graduate of the St John’s College Graduate Institute. She has led poetry classes at the DC Women’s Jail and currently leads weekly poetry sessions at Street Sense and at a retirement community both in Washington, DC.   

GAMBLING MAN

by Raymond Nat Turner

 

Even though the table’s tilted; the dice are loaded;

and the cards are marked; even though light-fingered

double-dealers declare that we “don’t have the cards;”

I’m a gambling man.

Betting on The People

everyday.

I’m a gambling man.

Betting on The People

everyday.

I’m a gambling man.

Betting on Everyday People

everyday.

I’m a gambling man.

Betting on Everyday People

everyday.

Betting on ordinary ones

doing extraordinary, all hands on deck, things.

Doing disbanding circular firing squad things.

I’m a gambling man.

Betting on ordinary ones doing extraordinary things—

magic—magic that made Mrs. Marcos flee the Philippines

leaving behind hundreds of pairs of her pricey shoes.

Magic that lifted The Shah from peacock throne and made 

Mobutu, Batista, Baby Doc, The Samosas and Assad… disappear…

 

 

 

 

 Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

SERENA WILLIAMS

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

The Guardian, June 1, 2026

Some four years back, Serena W

Evolved away from tennis but declined

Retirement from it—making sure we knew,

Extending her career was on her mind.

Now forty-four, the undisputed queen

Appears at Queen's: she's set to play a match

With Canada's most energetic teen

In place to chase balls older legs won't catch ...

Low forties are when singles slams elude

Lawn-tennis stars who still win doubles. Yet

If, two slams short, Serena feels renewed

And forty's her new thirty, who will bet

Ms Court and Mr Djokovic still beat

Serena's singles-slam count, when complete?

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His poems have appeared in Current Conservation, Ekphrastic Review, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, WestWard Quarterly, and several other journals. In 2025 he won the Children's Unpublished category of the Eyelands Book Awards with Flora’s Flock and Other Stories to Read Aloud.

MASS SHOOTING #15

 W Hillsdale St and Chestnut St, Lansing, MI, April 23, 2026
 
“A gunman walked up to an intersection near downtown Lansing on the night of Thursday, April 23 and fired into a crowd, sending six people to the hospital with gunshot wounds, police said." —Lansing State Journal, April 24, 2026

 
 
by Ron Riekki

 

“Stay in your lane.” —Common, “The Game”

“the world
is dying/
right now in front of you”
—Dennis Hinrichsen,
“I Had a River Once.  Two Friends.  This is the City of Dementia.”

 
 
Sky lacks stars, I drive up, midnight, wanting to see what it’s like
in these mute soot-colored neighborhoods’ packed scars of late-night
shootings that seem to be so common.  I’m in a black car.
I exit, rushing, pull a quick right into a black tar empty lot, sit tight,
headlights hit bright like flame on an unnamed unkempt apartment
complex lit like a mild Wes Anderson noir attempt, almost too exact,
 
windshield like film frame, the poor building a rich pitch-/kiln-black, except that
one sole light’s on, yellow as all hell, giving this gushing xanthic-like light like
gigantic Atlantic with yellow gushing out of this most bright bright lit room almost dead
center.  From limbo, I see a head; a body rises—a living ghost—comes to the window,
stands there, looks at me, unforgiving, I suppose, yes, in his best Wild West anger gunslinger
quick-draw pose, hands close to his sides (never rides sidesaddle).  I’d appear, I guess, maybe
 
like a narc, or a mark, parked in dark shadows, this look on his face like Hell no.  I’m alone.
I realize this is his home.  I’m coming to these shootings as a poet-reporter, as a quote-recorder,
as I’ve wrote over and over on how guns torture, a sorta post-traumatic press disorder.  But this
is simply his home.  This poem is an intrusion, my body too, my skin yellow in the streetlight
and I think of yellow journalism, of dirty laundry, of firm boundaries.  I feel apologetic.
Diegetic sound of some distant car, distinct, far in the distance, De Palma’s Blow Out-ish.
 
But this isn’t mishmash of film.  He’s not a character.  These are people.  These mass shootings
are mass killings.  They’re real.  I feel, for the first time, that I shouldn’t be here.  For real.  My
wheels peel out, go out the way I came.  No quotes captured; no names named; no new insights.  Six people were shot here.  Daughter, shot here.  A 14-year-old girl shot here, in the ear.  Five
females shot here.  A 5-year-old girl shot in the leg.  I imagine that 5-year-old standing in that
window in the night, bleeding, watching me, needing me to do something other than just write.
 

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.