The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
Sandy Hook parents' lawyer says Alex Jones' phone leak contains 'intimate messages with Roger Stone' —Business Insider, August 5, 2022
Though “intimate” (you naughty thing)
need not mean "prurient,"
that word makes certain thoughts take wing
along a vulgar bent.
Your conscience frowns and shakes her head.
Although she’s tsked and clucked,
you hope these bad boys’ texts, when read,
show both completely fucked.
Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego, California. Besides The New Verse News, the venues in which Julie's poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, Rattle, Light, and The Asses of Parnassus.
Alex Jones, whose InfoWars website is viewed by millions, says that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was an elaborate hoax invented by government-backed “gun grabbers.”Credit: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times. “In three separate lawsuits—the most recent was filed on Wednesday in Superior Court in Bridgeport, Conn.—the families of eight Sandy Hook victims as well as an F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting seek damages for defamation. The families allege in one suit, filed by Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Bridgeport, that Mr. Jones and his colleagues ‘persistently perpetuated a monstrous, unspeakable lie: that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged, and that the families who lost loved ones that day are actors who faked their relatives’ deaths.’” —The New York Times, May 23, 2018
In a post-truth world, your loved ones never died,
all 26 of them spirited back into bodies,
you, nothing more than performers of grief, hacks
for hire by unseen puppeteers. That pietà
where you held your six-year-old, confirming
his fatal wound, never happened, you expert
in manufacturing mourning. Your child’s brother
wonders how he can be told to doubt his memories,
wonders why anyone would suggest such an erasure.
Why would the President promise, I will never let you down—but to the wrong ones, the deniers?
Fathers struggle to explain this to surviving children.
Mothers march grimly into the court house.
Twenty-six truths stand in stubborn admonishment.
Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.
Watchin' their heads in the toilet bowl Don't see supremacist hate Right wing dicks in their boiler suits Picking out who to annihilate —David Bowie, “Under the God,” Tin Machine (1989)
Forgive us our Confederate bedsheets & the flag above the headboard.
Forgive us the need to be right.
Forgive us the Civil War was never really about slavery.
Forgive us Emmett Till we love our heritage.
Forgive us a matter of pride carrying torches through your campus.
Forgive us blood & soil.
Forgive us fashionable alt-right haircuts & Duck Dynasty beards.
Forgive us whatever will get us laid.
Forgive us fuck the immigrants & Muslims what’s wrong with America.
Forgive us Alex Jones says.
Forgive us it’s Black Lives Matter who’s racist.
Forgive us T***p’s sending a message.
Forgive us whatever pisses off the liberal snowflakes.
Forgive us George Lincoln Rockwell didn’t buy evolution either.
Forgive us Michael Brown & Trayvon Martin were thugs.
Forgive us it’s in our economic interest.
Forgive us our First Amendment rights.
Forgive us & leave the statue.
Forgive us our white fathers never did anything wrong.
Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.'s poems have appeared most recently in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cutbank, Numero Cinq, and Verse Daily.
