CALLING OUT THE NUMBERS

by Sharon Olson

DOGE Has Decimated the Institute of Museum and Library Services —artnet, March 31, 2025

In some retellings the Library of Alexandria
was burned by Julius Caesar, accidentally,
a casualty of war.

No accident the flashlights of the Doge,
peering with damning light, threatening
the rolled-up scrolls sitting pretty
next to 21st-century flash drives.

I can think of Dewey numbers 
the Great Leader would not like: 
sexual relations both gay and straight, 
301.424, public measures to prevent 
disease, 614.5, the library as refuge 
for the homeless, 362.5, Palestine 
and Israel shelved together, 956.94, 
even something so benign
as 351.1, federal jobs.

Not a bad idea to digitize, lest the temperature
rise to Fahrenheit 451, and only an AI librarian
available to operate the hose.


Sharon Olson is a retired California librarian who now lives in Annapolis, Maryland. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.

WE STILL CALL IT FREEDOM

by Phyllis Frakt

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

Do you still believe 
your world is real?
How medieval! So passé!
Abandon all hope,
enter our new reality—
facts are what we say.
 
We control the news,
can change it at our whim.
Technology will comply,
repeat the truth of every lie
in a thick mix of duplicity
on Fox, Facebook, X, AI.
 
We flood the zone,
you can't catch up.
Chaos is our game!
We still call it freedom.
But when something goes awry,
Joe Biden is to blame.

Phyllis Frakt writes poetry in New Jersey. She has published six previous poems in The New Verse News.

SUBJUNCTIVE

by Adrienne Pilon

Source: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee at Instagram

If I write we are going to the sea if I write
shall be free if I write Palestine if I write 
protest or encampment or salaam
my brother if I write Allah if I write 
genocide if I write bombing or Gaza  
or Hamas if I write Zionist if I write
apartheid or war crimes if I write 
nearly 50,000 dead or children are dying
or ceasefire now these words may 
rise up from the text, flagged and marked 
by a force that gives no quarter 
to what it does not care to understand.
The ink of my pen draws a target 
on my back on the back of my mother 
my father my wife my husband 
my daughter my son my sister 
my brother salaam my brother 
salaam salaam salaam salaam

Adrienne Pilon is a writer, educator, and activist. Recent and forthcoming work appears in The Tiger Moth Review; Room; Tendon Magazine and elsewhere.

A TrOcitieZ

by Abby Caplin

AI slips into my personal emails, a spying  
Big Brother, peering over my shoulder. Last fall, money
circled  
down the drain, in what might be our last election.
Eight years, I guzzled the news. Now I sip and worry how “Dt” might get 
flagged by Em’s tentacles, if not weirdly written. 
Google renames the Gulph.of.MeXicoh to the Gulph.of.AmeRikaH, our maps  
hijacked by data centers in Dallas. Institutions, 
international alliances, even lowly pennies have not been spared. My neighbor 
Jenna, a vibrant woman with twin two-year-olds, was laid off last Friday by Dt/Em’s  
kangaroo government. AI sums up what’s inside my email: 
Letter of Rejection from The New Yorker; Ruth had surgery; Abby offers advice on 
medications. My mother always told me to   
never underestimate the stupidity of the American people. 
Oh, how she was right! I rewatch 
Pride and Prejudice where a wealthy man learns from a strong female lead, so 
quaint, and You’ve Got Mail, where a 
revenue-oriented man’s heart is softened by a trusting,
spirited woman, but not enough to not destroy her livelihood.  
Tr 
Ump will someday be laid out, like Savonarola, upon his bonfire of the 
vanities. But for now, I should watch 
what I write, for the mighty egos, 
extracted from the ashes of the Third Reich, are celebrating their carnage,  
yucking it up in private jets. Congratulations, Na 
Zis, though you too will fail. 


Abby Caplin's poems have appeared in AGNI, Moon City Review, Mudlark Flash, Pennsylvania English, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, and a nominee for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of A Doctor Only Pretends: poems about illness, death, and in-between (2022). Abby is a physician in San Francisco, California.

AI SHANTY

by Joel Glover

LA Wildfires and AI’s Data Center Water Drain: The explosion of data center demand for AI use is draining water resources. Even with efforts to mitigate cooling demands, municipalities and companies struggle to find a balance. —Information Week, January 17, 2025. 

[Refrain]

Oh, the sea was wide, the sun is high

The land is parched, the soil is dry

And clouds swirl over cooling stacks

And soothing rain is what we lack

[Verse 1]

There’s vapour in the atmosphere

And bubbles form, that much is clear

Pyramids and Ponzi schemes

Built on algorithmic dreams

[Refrain]

Oh, the sea was wide, the sun is high

The land is parched, the soil is dry

And clouds swirl over cooling stacks

And the cooling rain is what we lack

[Verse 2]

Profits for some, for us the loss

Ice caps melted, no more frost

Towns in rolling blackout pall

No showers, storms, or thunder squall

[Refrain]

Oh, the sea was wide, the sun is high

The land is parched, the soil is dry

And clouds swirl over cooling stacks

And the cooling rain is what we lack

Former waiter in a Love Boat themed restaurant, reformed mandarin, and extroverted accountant, Joel Glover lives in the woods of Hertfordshire with two boys, one wife, and not nearly enough coffee. His poetry has appeared in oddball magazine, Little Old Lady Comedy, Radon Journal, 5-7-5 Journal, Epistemic Literary, Pulp Lit Mag, and As It Ought To Be. He published a chapbook Untimely Poetry, taking a cockeyed view at the news of 2024.

BEHIND THE SCENE

by Gordon Gilbert

Acknowledging the good use of A.I. for imagery in New Verse News, 

I will not even try to submit an A.I. image, but simply describe it, 

to accompany my words, which are a parody of the motto of three 

characters in a classic novel:   

Donald Trump's image hovering above a traditional image 

of the Three Musketeers, swords pointed upwards, points touching, 

whose faces are those of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.  

The title above is "Donald Trump and the Three Musk-eteers.”

The caption underneath is two lines, the first in French, the 2nd, English: 

"Tous pour un, aucun pour tous." 

"All for one, none for all.”

Editor’s note: En garde. We tried.

Gordon Gilbert is a writer living in the west village in NYC, who finds solace in walks along the Hudson River, even while contemplating with trepidation another new year of climate change and political mayhem.  

KRONOS EATS HIS CHILDREN

by Susan McLean

Kronos rules a golden age.
A.I. fulfills his every whim.
He fracks to fuel his leverage.
He won't let regulations trim
his profits or his privilege.

Kronos drives an SUV:
it's comfortable; he needs his room.
When there's a place he wants to be,
his private jet can save him time,
and time is money, naturally.

You can't eat money, though, so when
the ice caps melt, the oceans warm,
droughts, floods, and hurricanes pile on,
and all the crops dry up or drown,

his kids will find he's eaten them.

Susan McLean, a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University, taught a course in Greek myth and literature for thirty years, and finds that those myths continue to resonate with what's happening now.

AI

by Katy Scrogin

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

let it do our loving for us
take it finally from our hands,
this vital stock of small gestures,
all these living little impositions
and bear them in our place

anything

anything

to keep us from those efforts
that made us who we were

Katy Scrogin is a Chicago-based writer and editor who also hosts the Plain Reading podcast. A Best of the Net nominee, her most recent work is featured at Divot, Variety Pack, and The Fictional Café. She can also be found at zwieblein.bearblog.dev and katyscrogin.wordpress.com.

TRUMP AI GENERATES HIS SECOND INAUGURATION

by Chad Parenteau

Holding, staring at open bible
with no words. He knew it.
God’s law is whatever you want.
 
Behind him, swiftboat Swifties
dressed in handmaiden style,
coats, blouses buttoned to nape.
 
Harem of doting daughters, 
great grab bags of grabbables, 
whole cabinet of nondisclosures.
 
Blonde broken up by added spots
of colored faces, hands in gnarled
prayer, proof they weren’t paid.
 
He swears off to imagined duties 
under a dome of glass as strong
as his faith in this divine design. 

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His latest collection is The Collapsed Bookshelf. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and anthologies such as French Connections and Reimagine America. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. Chad generated these AI graphics on behalf of the former guy.

WAY TO START THE DAY

by Jim Murdoch

This artwork was created with the help of Artificial Intelligence using NightCafe Creator.

My Facebook feed is

full of AI’d jpegs of

Scarlett Johansson.

 

There are worse things to

wake up to in the morning.

So. Many. Worse. Things.

Jim Murdoch lives down the road from where they filmed Gregory’s Girl which, for some odd reason, pleases him no end. He’s been writing poetry for fifty years for which he blames Larkin. Who probably blamed Hardy. Jim has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.

THE ENGLISH TEACHER PENS A LETTER TO TECH CEOS

by Alejandro Escudé

An afternoon grading on the internet, I walk out

To the November skies of Los Angeles, warm,

A day moon more orb-like than usual in the east.

The sun a shining lake behind fair weather clouds.

I’m thinking of you. How you stalked us in our 

Classrooms for years, removing first our books.

Taking our grades and popping them on screens

That would never time out, even on vacations.

It’s you I blame whenever I can’t direct students

To a specific page, numbers eliminated long ago,

The corners, dog-eared, the scanning of the hand

Across print to mark a quote, to seize an argument.

But I’m a gnat on a remote beach of the economic

Planet to you staring at a sea of adolescents with 

Endless passwords tattooed on their brains. Strolling,

I spot a Yellow-rumped Warbler shadowing me along 

The side of the road. An intelligence, a god, birthed

Of the moon and sun. Buffering, my human hopes.

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.

POST-APPOINTMENT FEEDBACK FOR MY AI GYNECOLOGIST

by Jennifer Hambrick

when a woman lies in stirrups maybe leave 
your camera eye closed until she paper-scoots
 
to table’s end, and wait until the crinkling stops 
to open it. you might try to deamplify
 
your autogenerated voice to a fiberoptic hum 
when you tell her to relax and let her knees fall
 
away from each other. glide your speculum- 
arm slowly and decisively and when you ask
 
if the pressure’s okay back away if she creaks 
yes in a falsetto that means no or if the room
 
fills with silence pregnant with fluorescent 
buzz. dynamize your algorithm to streamline
 
scraping. transmit the cells to your built-in 
lab. then reach a cold chrome tentacle into her
 
paper gown and ask with lossy upspeak if 
she’s noticed any changes. leverage your
 
endless bandwidth for an instant mammo- 
gram. and once you’ve read her breast
 
scan confirm in airless, chest-squeezed 
boilerplate the absence of tumors, calcifi-
 
cations, architectural abnormalities then 
take care to say her flesh could be hiding
 
tumors, calcifications, architectural ab-
normalities but you can’t be sure because
 
you can’t see through it. and thanks for that 
report, the one the human doc, who will
 
never be able to pay off her med school
loans, can't process because she’s on hold
 
trying to get your tests covered by the 
insurance company, whose virtual ass-
 
istant will notify the patient as soon as 
a decision has been made.

Six-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee Jennifer Hambrick is the author of the collections In the High Weeds (NFSPS Press), winner of the Stevens Prize; the Joyride (Red Moon Press), winner of the 2022 Marianne Bluger Book Award; and Unscathed (NightBallet Press). Hambrick was featured by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry and has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Sheila-Na-Gig Press Poetry Prize, First Prize in the HSA Haibun Award Competition, First Prize in the Martin Lucas Haiku Award Competition (U.K.), and many others. Hambrick’s poems appear in The Columbia Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Santa Clara Review, Maryland Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, POEM, NOON: the journal of the short poem, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Contemporary Haibun Online, The Haibun Journal, Heliosparrow Poetry Journal, and in dozens of other journals and invited anthologies. A classical musician, public radio broadcaster, multimedia producer, and cultural journalist, Jennifer Hambrick lives in Columbus, Ohio.