The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. His publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.
in over twenty years.
Hair intertwined with bristles
resting on the bathroom windowsill
next to the porcupine plant.
The shower still smells of Irish
Spring soap bathing your body.
You thought you would be late to protect
two sky scrapers.
Blue striped sheets pushed aside
on your futon fitted your body each night.
That September
morning, running late you grabbed
a pair of un-matching socks.
One grey sock hid from you under your bed.
You looked confident
in your grey uniform,
deep pockets for hiding notes,
ready to stop crime in the towers.
Today, I peek outside the oval bedroom window
seeing the view of early Autumn that you had
that last morning. Leaves beginning to change
colors, red, yellow, violet, hugging branches
before they fell in the yard.
Jerrice J. Baptiste is a poet, educator and facilitator of poetry for healing and self-expression. Her new book of prose poems is titled Coral in the Diaspora published by Abode Press (August 2024). Her writing has been published and is forthcoming in The New Verse News, Artemis Journal, Urthona Buddhism and Art Magazine, The Dewdrop, Shambhala Times, The Yale Review, Wax Poetry & Art, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Mantis, Penumbra Literary & Art Journal, The Banyan Review, Kosmos Journal, Silver Birch Press, and many others. Her collaborative songwriting and poetry are featured on the Grammy-nominated album Many Hands Family Music for Haïti.
An agreement by countries to phase out fossil fuels would be “one of the most significant events in the history of humanity,” according to Al Gore, amid wrangling by governments at Cop28. “If there were a decision here to surprise the world to say ‘OK we get it now, we’ve made enough money, we will get on with what needs to be done to give young people a sense of hope again and stop as much as suffering as possible and start the phase-out of fossil fuels,’ it would be one of the most significant events in the history of humanity,” the former US vice-president said. —The Guardian, December 4, 2023
I sometimes have a Gorey moment
wondering what could have been
if the hanging chads
hadn’t hung,
or if Gore had hung up
his gentleman’s suit
and cried “Fraud”
as loudly as Trump was to do.
No hate to fuel 9/11,
no war in Iraq,
perhaps
the end
of history
would be nigh
as Fukuyama predicated,
existing divisions becoming
historic
and no new ones
created.
With more Gore less blood
would be spilled.
There would be no Bushfires burning
the sun would be shining
but without its intensity,
the storms would be still
and the world would be stable.
It was hanging by a thread
and we missed it
missed the chance
to grasp those chads
hanging.
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. Find Lynn on Facebook.
Parade-master & poet-in-residence at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival, Art Goodtimes served fives terms as Colorado’s only Green county commissioner. He is currently represented in Congress by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Rifle).
Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.
Darcie Whelan-Kortan has published in Motherwell and wrote the column Beyond Broken for Literary Mama. She is a featured writer on Medium. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College.
The captain of Afghanistan’s women's wheelchair basketball team Nilofar Bayat and her husband Ramish disembark from the second Spanish evacuation airplane, carrying Afghan collaborators and their families, that landed at the Torrejon de Ardoz air base, 30 kilometers away from Madrid, on August 20, 2021. (Mariscal / POOL / AFP via Getty Images) via The Nation.
We are Americans even after 9/11, or Afghanistan, Vietnam for
its generation, which makes me think that we tempt history too
much, are poor students, never learn. So here we go again,
in helicopters and planes with just a handbag, a couple of
documents, and lives of those we can evacuate before the deadline,
and the country shutters up, and we return to insidious inside
operations because we will never learn, war being diplomacy
by other means, revenge always percolating on the stove, politicians
gnashing teeth to spit out America will be great again, under
their blinkered tutelage, investing in heavy tanks, precision bombers
and strategic plans only to realize that none of these can defeat the rebel
with a cause, who knows the land's dips and rises, who can melt into
the crowd, before springing back in the finest and most colorful robes,
to say bye bye American pie, get back by midnight to your promised land.
Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including Blue Window/ Ventana Azultranslated by Jennifer Rathbun (Lavender Ink/Diálogos Books, 2021),The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020), and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). In music, Indran recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.
Across the river in D.C., tourists
come from all over the country
to touch walls honoring
soldiers who died
in Vietnam, Korea,
Europe, and other places
far from American soil.
But here in this sacred place
built beside a structure
still standing in spite of attack,
I read the name of a three-year-old
seated on a plane with her parents
and older sister.
Here, water flows in shallow pools
as I walk with silent steps
between 184 benches
made of stainless steel and granite,
each one positioned to preserve
the last moments of someone
who died in a ball of fire
on a clear September morning.
Here, I stand beside
young trees planted in the hope
visitors will value their shade
as they come from all over
to remember the lives lost here,
not somewhere else, far away.
Jacqueline Jules is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field Trip to the Museum, Stronger Than Cleopatra, and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including TheNewVerse.News, The Rising Phoenix Review, What Rough Beast, Public Pool, Rise Up Review and Gargoyle. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Couldn’t he have moved to Ecuador? Surrounded by parrots and monkeys, and colonial era churches? Instead, bearded, he was ushered
into a police van in London, and I pictured Sherlock Holmes standing off to one side, a grin on his pointy face, pipe in hand, uttering something cheeky.
How else to process this 9/11 man? This walking man-virus who somehow snatched the biggest governments on Earth
like a father might snatch his little son by the ear, dragging them to their perspective rooms.
White-haired wizard now, Assange protested his apprehension,
London traffic like a street scene in Thomas the Train;
because this time is…and was…a cave full of glittering fossils, mandibles of early hominids, skulls or skull fragments, roaring time signatures, blue birds oozing from fissures in the once-dark ceilings.
Ecuadorians said Assange's residence was no longer tenable. A tree, alabaster white,
growing in his room, the roots digging deep, reaching for the planetary pole, emailed enigmas, evil conspiracies,
a G-Man in Dealey Plaza, bullets screaming past, halting mid-air, like satellites approaching the black hole of history,
and there, Assange, naked, albino, crucified on a hill outside the city’s firewalls. I want to ask him what was the ultimate secret he was searching for? I want to stroll over the glassy Thames with him, like a heavenly correspondent
interviewing an implacable terrorist, the devil made flesh, a fiberoptic alien,
and just listen to the diatribe of his breathing,
and feast on what he sought, and probe as to what he’d embezzled from the pressing otherness of our voiceless governments.
Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
Never forget 9/11.
Never forget Trayvon Martin.
Never forget climate change.
Never forget to tell someone you love "I love you."
Never forget Emmet Till.
Never forget the Holocaust.
Never forget Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
Never forget not all cops are good cops.
Never forget not all cops are bad cops.
Never forget to be kind.
Never forget to say thank you.
Never forget it's an athlete's constitutional right to sit during the national anthem.
Never forget to fight against fascists.
Never forget to seek shelter during a hurricane.
Never forget the United States is a country founded by and for immigrants.
Never forget the lives of soldiers lost fighting for our country.
Never forget a homeless vet.
Never forget our children are watching.
Never forget we're all in this together.
Never forget, never forget, never forget.
Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, dad, husband, son, and dream weaver. Google 'scott kaestner poetry' to peruse his musings and doings.
I'm in bed with America.
America is writhing and moaning in her sleep,
twisting the bed sheets around her
as if coiled in the grip of a giant boa constrictor.
America whimpers in her sleep
and turns her head to the left and to the right.
America is having a nightmare.
America is dreaming that the Inquisition
is back with its old, unimproved tortures.
America is dreaming that the British won
the Revolutionary War and that Franklin,
Washington and Jefferson were hanged at Valley Forge.
America is dreaming that she must increase
her nuclear arsenal because being able
to destroy the world 5,000 times over isn¹t enough
if Russia can destroy the world 6,000 times over.
America is dreaming that the southern plantations
have risen from the dust, and the whips and manacles
the torch and the hood and the noose.
America is dreaming that water is rising
around her house and she can't get out
because the EPA has boarded up the doors and windows.
America is dreaming that drinking melted polar ice
has changed her children into Syrian refugees.
America is dreaming that her babysitter
is a registered sex offender.
America is dreaming that her real parents
are dead and impostor parents are forcing
her into the family business of carnival geeking.
America is dreaming that Lincoln has just
shot everyone in Ford's Theater.
America is dreaming that she¹s feeling faint
after drinking the cup handed to her by Putin.
America is dreaming that she has nothing left
to eat but the money dragged from the vaults
after the last billionaire committed suicide.
America is dreaming that Whitman and Emerson
have pulled up their grave plots and
relocated them to Ontario.
America is dreaming that all the blood shed by patriots
in her wars has congealed into a malignant tumor
kept in a secret room in the White House.
America is dreaming that Henry Ford has
returned from the dead to help the President
rewrite the Constitution in 144 characters.
America is dreaming that when the Pilgrims
go out to the woods for the first Thanksgiving
all they can find to shoot are skeletons.
America is dreaming that the Italians and Irish
and Poles have been sent back where they came from
across the Atlantic in individual wooden washtubs.
America is dreaming that beneath the site of the World Trade Center
are anti-towers deep underground where
the real masterminds of September 11th
are plotting a new attack.
America is dreaming that the President has hacked
Jesus's twitter account
and is repealing the Sermon on the Mount.
America is dreaming that a tiny severed hand
is creeping along the floor like a pale spider
toward the Button.
America is dreaming that a vast stone head
from an exploded planet's Mount Rushmore
is hurtling toward Indiana.
America is dreaming—STOP!
America, can you hear me?
(I'm shaking you by the shoulders.)
I wouldn't be in bed with you if I didn't love you.
Spare yourself this nightmare.
It doesn't have to be this way.
There is still time.
America, dear America, please wake up!
Thomas R. Smith is a poet and teacher living in River Falls, Wisconsin. He teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His most recent poetry collection is The Glory (Red Dragonfly Press).
Steve Rannazzisi, during a panel for the “The League” in August, apologized on Tuesday for fabricating a story about escaping from the south tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.Credit NY Times, September 16, 2015
I was in the building when the first plane
crashed but escaped before the second
fireballed into offices and the hallways
down the many stairs fleeing from the
stock brokers’ cubicles as if escaping
the devils suddenly released upon
the Big Apple in a story told over and
over again even though I knew it was
all a lie of self-aggrandizement so
often I began to believe the falsehood
myself as if creating a forged memory
could make it into the truth although
now caught out in this counterfeit
story I will humbly acknowledge
my dishonest story and beg forgiveness
so that I may continue my lucrative
career in endorsing well-paying products
and pointless services where truth
can be so inconvenient in the market place.
Howard Winn’s fiction and poetry, has been published recently by such journals as Dalhousie Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), The Long Story, Cold Mountain Review, Antigonish Review, New Verse News, Chaffin Review, Thin Air Literary Journal, and Whirlwind. His B. A. is from Vassar College. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at N. Y. U. He has been a social worker in California and currently is a faculty member of SUNY as Professor of English.
evicted the widow and roasted her children his giant proboscis gleeful his lips smacking as lovers parted as he slithered into the marshlands of stories taradiddles flowing from his cup whetting tongues of hopeful ears and disappeared in darkness and memories of cultural gray matter dumping grounds Cry for our villains the Joker had an abusive father Lex Luthor was unloved Dracula was only defending his home the cop who murders innocent Black boys on empty streets cares for his sick father the boy stole cigars you know the terrorist is disaffected the racists had his cattle confiscated by jackbooted government agents wearing black designer Hollywood costumes hear the sirens City of Compton nine bullets the investigation was closed before it opened our poisoned food employs fracking geo-techs belching coal soot to keep Kentucky happy while polar ice caps burn in the San Gabriel Mountains above jungles of Starbucks and trees of In and Outs but we must understand why the father beat his daughter to forgive the priest who raped his son why the cop shot that unarmed boy and the 19 bodies in the backyard Because our hero is a serial killer or meth dealer or convict or Drax the Destroyer because Hitler made the trains run on time and Mussolini did it for the glory of Italy and Franco did it for himself and the Glenda mistreated the Wicked Witch
vigilantes walked through Roman streets with fasces beating Black boys in hoodies with candy in their pockets and Batman is a vigilante and TV cops shoot but cut to commercial before Castle sees the body and the Badoon invade the panel shows collapsed buildings but the streets are clean as the Towers fell I saw no bodies General Zod wiped out half of Metropolis but no bodies were seen a blood-free massacre as all our massacres are because Marcellus Wallace is cool and Coke is the real thing (never mind the diabetes) I want my
archetypes
sympathy is for the devil and forgiveness is mine sayeth the Lord.
Man plants evil.
Waters it weeds the garden and hoes the row stories myths teach us the night and day of morality so we can see it in the diminishing sun of twilight the hero understands the hero is compassionate and God-like in his forgiveness but knows that evil is not marginalized or homogenized or realized Evil is not ambiguous.
Malus malo est
Pantalone
Image: Pantalone costume design by Serge Sudeikin (1925) for Stravinsky’s Petrushka at the Metropolitan Opera, NY. Image source: WikiArt Scott Jessop lives in the 135-year old, haunted Midland Railroad station in Manitou Springs, Colorado with his daughter, Kathleen and his cat, Jack Kerouac. He is a corporate video and TV commercial producer, poet, spoken word performer, and Pushcart Prize nominee for Penduline Press for his short story "Mephisto".
