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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.

Wednesday, July 09, 2025

A DRY SPELL IN UTAH

by Susan J. Wurtzburg


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


Statewide drought, evaporating lakes, whirlwinds, catastrophe; 
amidst this mess, our Governor pleads “Pray for rain.” Angels,
witches, devils descend from the sky to the chosen, but no blessed water.
 
My garden meadow browns to wasteland, crisp crackle underfoot,
hummingbird departs. Has he expended all his heartbeats in July’s
harsh heat? Warm colors of swallowtails, monarchs—gone. 
Finches, sparrows silent, beaks gape wide, throats too dry for song.
 
City residents stop sprinklers, while farmers, and our Governor
grow water-hungry alfalfa—drain rivers and aquifers. Spinning drops
irrigation-spread, artificial rainbows brighten verdant fields. Cloudbursts 
transformed to feed chug across the ocean, as our lakes recede. 


Susan J. Wurtzburg has won or placed in several poetry competitions. She is a Commissioned Artist in Sidewalk Poetry: Senses of Salt Lake City, 2024, and an Associate Poetry Editor at Poets Reading the News. Her book, Ravenous Words, with Lisa Lucas was published in spring, 2025.

CAMP MYSTIC

by Karen Marker


With no advance warning 

the San Antonio National Weather Service

had already been reduced to rubble

missing meteorologist, hydrologist, 

staff forecaster.

 

Frantic parents pray for their children 

caught off guard by the flooding

Guadalupe. No more have been found alive

clinging to trees.  

 

The governor signs a declaration. 

The search and rescue in Central Texas

will continue looking.

 

In this state while water spills over 

the banks of rivers in another 

water’s gone missing. The Great 

Salt Lake is starved to death. 

 

Protestors speak like sybils, prophets, seers.

And still the senators, the governor claim 

climate change a hoax.They can’t see 

through their frozen hearts the melting ice,

can’t smell the noxious gases, admit what 

this means for our survival.

 

It costs them nothing to offer their prayers

 

We all feel haunted like Hamlet did 

in Elsinore.  Perfumes can’t cover over 

the smell of what’s rotten—a shriveled lake

with its dead fish, a bloated river where children 

float downstream like Ophelia.

 

 

Karen Marker is an Oakland, CA. poet activist who has committed to writing a poem a day of protest and hope in response  to current events. Her first poetry book Beneath the Blue Umbrella came out recently with Finishing Line Press and explores family mental illness, stigma and healing. 

LIVES SWEPT AWAY

by Philip Kitcher



“A flood”, he says, “once in a hundred years”:
            unwilling to concede
            our planet’s urgent need,
he shows no true engagement with their tears.
 
Disdaining loss of human life, he stokes
            the storms, the fires that burn.
            This willful child won’t learn
the truth: that climate change is not “a hoax”.
 
Because of his refusal to believe,
how many future families will grieve?


Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His new book The Rich and the Poor (Polity Press) is all about the costs of abandoning morality in politics and public life. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.

OLD TESTAMENT TEXAS

by Laurence Musgrove


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


And our Lord God released his anger

upon the innocent, saying, “Perhaps,

I will gain their attention on the day

they celebrate their independence

from logic with a big horrible flood,

a punishment for their blasphemies

against the creation I have gifted

them for their salvation, while they

instead, continue to burn it all down,

drowning their children in Satan’s oil.”



Laurence Musgrove teaches English at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. He also edits the online poetry journal Texas Poetry Assignment. 

Tuesday, July 08, 2025

THEN THEY WERE MINE

by Corey Weinstein


Witnesses say that the IDF is deliberately killing Palestinians at aid distribution centres in Gaza run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Cartoon by Muzaffar Yulchiboev.


Israeli plan for forced transfer of Gaza’s population ‘a blueprint for crimes against humanity’ —The Guardian, July 7, 2025


Hear it right here. The past is now,
but wrong place, wrong people.
Last time they were mine, desperate,
last gasp assault in Spring of ’43.
 
Wrong place, the Mideast, wronged Palestinians.
Is there dignity not victory for a vanquished people?
In ’43 we yelled into the Nazi tornado,
death throes of the Warsaw Ghetto 300,000.
 
Feeble return fire from a vanquished people.
As Gaza starves, the West Bank terrorized,
famine, genocide of Gaza’s ghetto of two million.
Will the end game be the same weak thrust and slaughter?
 
Tanks fire on the hungry, settlers smash homes, olive groves.
In Warsaw they were mine, Jews to the very last bullet.
Will the world let the endgame be the same last bullet,
can our ears bear to hear the past in this terrible now?
 
As for me, I will never forget, Never Again
no matter who, no matter where or when.


Corey Weinstein’s poetry has been published in Haight Asbury Literary Journal, Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Our California 2024, The Ekphrastic Review, Forum (City College of San Francisco), California State Poetry Society, Visitant, Abandoned Mine, Speak Poetry of San Mateo County, California State Poetry Society and Jewish Currents, and he wrote and performed a singspiel called Erased: Babi Yar, the SS and Me. He is a retired physician and has been an advocate for prisoner rights, founded California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he hosts San Francisco OLLI’s Poetry Workshop Circle and plays the clarinet in his local jazz band, Tandem, his synagogue choir and woodwind ensembles.

Monday, July 07, 2025

PURPLE HEART ARMY VETERAN SELF-DEPORTS

by Morrow Dowdle




The quiet girl I’d admired on the playground

defended me against a boy with rough grasp  

and bad breath. Ended with her knee scraped, 

 

dark with embedded mulch. The boy 

ran, exiled from swing and slide.

That spring, I gave her a locket 

 

from the five and ten, real sterling plate. 

Not a partial heart, with zig-zag edges, 

I trusted her to take the whole. And wasn’t she 

 

the bearer of some universal principle:

What you shed for someone incurred a debt.

In the military, I spilled not one red drop—

 

still, the discharge, honorable. Still, years later, 

thanked by strangers. What did I do? 

Sat in the clinic. Tried to save the wounded 

 

from an aftermath I could hardly fathom. 

There is a man, now, up in the air. 

A slick plane flung between continents.

 

My friend and I pricked our thumbs with a needle, 

pressed them together. Citizens then, of each other. 

Not enough to make a man homeless,

 

he must be motherless, childless as well.

His body belongs to no country.

His body gone, with its generous blood.



Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and has work appearing or forthcoming from New York QuarterlyRATTLEONE ART, and Southeast Review. They run a performance series which features historically marginalized voices and are an MFA candidate at Pacific University.

Sunday, July 06, 2025

TWELVE DAYS

by Shirrin Jabalameli




There was no sound.

But the walls struggled to breathe,

and flecks of plaster rained down like strands of an old woman’s hair who could no longer sleep.

 

The woman came up from the basement.

Not out of fear,

but to see a sky that could no longer be seen.

 

She was a painter.

There was no paint.

No coffee left.

A voice in her head whispered: Paint. Even with ash.

 

The calendar flipped forward,

like an endless explosion bursting through seconds.

And the clock froze 

at 3:20 AM.

 

Day One

 

A dragon leapt out of a painting.

A dome cracked open.

Silently.

With a tremor only she felt.

Something broke beneath her feet,

and she polished the shoes she hadn’t worn.

 

Day Two

 

A message arrived.

The number wasn't saved.

It read: “Are you alive?”

She didn’t reply.

She just sat there, stared at the cracked photo frame, and said:

“How did you know I should be dead?”

The city emptied.

 

Day Three

 

No smell of bread.

No scent of blood either.

Only the thud of words pounding the walls.

The tiles recorded the blast.

She wrote: “We are still words.”

Then she drew the letter “N” backwards,

added two diacritics beneath the “K.”

A man saw it,

and ran.

 

Day Four

 

A child found a seashell on the ground.

He asked his mother: “Is this the sea?”

She said nothing.

The woman picked up the shell and answered:

“No. It’s the last remnant of listening.”

An old man’s cane began to calligraph across the stones.

 

Day Five

 

The mirror cracked.

But its reflection didn’t cry.

The woman inside the mirror was no longer her.

One of them was asleep.

The other,

awake and fighting.

And in that same dawn,

a verse trembled.

 

Day Six

 

The phone rang.

No name saved.

A voice said: “Remember that mountain you climbed as a kid?”

She laughed: “You saw me?”

The voice replied: “Still stubborn. Still painting.”

 

Chopin’s notes tangled with the roar of an explosion.

 

Day Seven

 

The alleyways had fallen asleep.

In their dreams,

they swallowed the lead.

A crow asked: “Why are you still awake?”

Sejjil interpreted the dream.

  

Day Eight

 

Someone on the other side of the wall was talking to himself.

Half of his words were Persian.

The other half—screams.

She didn’t hear it through the window.

She heard it through the wall’s skin

in the precise place where sound no longer existed.

But her skin did.

 

Day Nine

 

A man shouted: “Enough!”

His voice echoed back into him.

The painter woman said:

“No. We’re not there yet. You must go all the way.”

 

Day Ten

 

Rain didn’t fall,

but the ground was wet.

The air had wept.

Someone wrote:

“You’re alive. Do it.”

 

Day Eleven

 

She painted a piece that smelled of burned coffee.

The one-legged goat said:

“I’m not the way back?”

 

She replied:

“You’re the reason I stayed, though you may never understand.”

 

Day Twelve

 

Everything was just as it had always been.

But nothing was in its place.

She looked at the word she had written on the wall.

It hadn't been erased.

Just slightly more ... upside-down.

 

The End?

No.

These were just twelve chapters

of a book not written in blood,

but in the color of resistance, 

resistance that could still be seen,

even through smoke.


Shirrin Jabalameli is an Iranian writer, painter, photographer, and storyteller. She is currently working on a poetry-photo hybrid collection reflecting on memory and witness.There was no sound.

Saturday, July 05, 2025

DISPATCH FROM GAZA, JUNE 2025

by Carolyn Martin

With thanks to Yasser Abu Rida


Maria


From inside a desert tent––how I do not know––
he posts comments on my Facebook page.
“Lovely”: the Easter lilies bursting in my yard.
“Always creative”: his response to my latest poetry.
 
While I sit in the luxury of blossoms and words,
he messages me Khuza’a, his village, is gone.
What’s left: a wife, three kids, and the courage to survive.
“Endless displacements”: he calls his current address
and “Like zombies,” he says, “who don’t look 
left or right, people run toward flour trucks.”
Famine weakens hope.
 
Yet, he asks me to celebrate Maria’s birthday.
“Two,” he wrote, “and she has never seen
anything beautiful in this world.”
I ask him to give her a kiss and show her 
that Easter lilies exist somewhere 
on this tattered Earth.

 
Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired in Clackamas, OR, where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. Her poems have appeared in more than 200 publications around the world.

Friday, July 04, 2025

I SUPPORT THE CONSTITUTION

by Indran Amirthanayagam

I had a community read last night. Yes, a good old 

sharing of verse and opinions about the state 

of things, society, government, the neighbor laying 

a pillow outside the Martin Luther King library 

on G Street in the capital, to spend the night 

al aire libre, in the free air, on the eve of 

the 4th of July. Hey, buddy, do you want 

a dollar? How can I get you to the shelter?

Are the shelters disappearing with the ticker tape

after the Big Bloated Butchery Bill? Oh, how 

easy to go after MAGA, just twist the words 

and support the appointments of former 

insurrectionists to the Department of Injustice, 

to the Uncivil Rights Division, to the god-forsaken 

Black House. How unfortunate colors and 

their associations. Let’s change the popular 

perception. When I from black and he from 

white cloud freeBlake said it almost 

two hundred and forty years ago, 

during  the English campaign against 

slavery then. Now we see ourselves

shackled by the police state, surveilled,

our social security numbers sold to Palantir. 

This is rotten, my friends And yet we 

bring out hot dogs and coca cola today 

to feast the 249th anniversary of 

our independence. How sweet it is. 

How bitter. To say Goodbye to All That

To say, hello concentration camps 

in every hamlet. To say, NO. NO. NO. 

And yes I pledged my allegiance 

to the Constitution when I naturalized 

in 1988. I did not sing God Save the King.



Indran Amirthanayagam has just published El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores). Other recent publications include his translation of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books, 2025), Seer (Hanging Loose Press), and The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil). He is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.