ENDANGERMENT

by Pepper Trail

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

The Trump administration on Thursday revoked the basis for federal climate regulations, undermining the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect the environment and public health. —Yale Climate Connections, February 12, 2026

There are always choices

 

There are measles, whooping cough, and polio, or there are vaccinations

            Measles, whooping cough, and polio

 

There is humane law enforcement, or there is brutal intimidation

            Brutal intimidation

 

There is value for public service and competence, or only for blind political loyalty

            Blind political loyalty

 

There is protection of election integrity, or there is manipulation for partisan advantage

            Manipulation for partisan advantage

 

There is respect and cooperation with allies, or there is contempt and extortion

            Contempt and extortion

 

There is the possibility of action on climate change, or there are unconstrained profits for fossil fuel corporations, drought, flooding, glacial melting, sea level rise, ocean acidification, crop failures, deadly heat domes, species extinctions, spread of tropical diseases, coral reef bleaching, extreme wildfire events, ocean current disruptions, and mass human dislocations.

Unconstrained profits for fossil fuel corporations, drought, flooding, glacial melting, sea level rise, ocean acidification, crop failures, deadly heat domes, species extinctions, spread of tropical diseases, coral reef bleaching, extreme wildfire events, ocean current disruptions, and mass human dislocations

 

There are always choices.

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

JUST ONE WORD... PLASTICS

by Steven Kent

The plastic Trump straws being sold at $15 for a 10-pack. Photograph: Official Donald J Trump Store

Trump signs order to bring back plastic straws, claiming paper ones ‘explode’ —The Guardian, February 10, 2025

Exploding straws? A liberal joke!
   The Prez says with emotion--
More plastic now for Diet Coke,
   More plastic for the ocean.
Ecology's a Commie plot,
   An antiquated notion—
More plastic now for stuff we've got,
   More plastic for the ocean.
The EPA, the Silent Spring—
   Abandoned, our devotion.
More plastic now for everything,
   More plastic for the ocean.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.

RAPE OF THE FLOCK

by Janice D. Soderling

President Donald Trump has taken historically unprecedented action to roll back a slew of environmental regulations that protect air, water, land and public health from climate change and fossil fuel pollution. The administration has targeted about 85 environmental rules, according to Harvard Law School’s rollback tracker. … However, the consequences of eliminating these regulations include more premature deaths from pollutants and higher levels of climate change-inducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to research from the NYU Law School. —CNBC, December 24, 2019. Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone.

Higgledy piggledy,
Donald J. T***p
raped Mother Nature
in meadows and parks

till she lay dead with dead
bees and dead sheeple, dead
biodiversity,
dead oligarchs.


Janice D. Soderling is a poet, writer and translator with three poetry chapbooks and another forthcoming in February. All of them include poems that first were published at TheNewVerse.News.

BETWEEN THE LINES

by Paul Smith

The Trump administration last Thursday announced the repeal of a major Obama-era clean water regulation that had placed limits on polluting chemicals that could be used near streams, wetlands and other bodies of water. The rollback of the 2015 measure, known as the Waters of the United States rule, adds to a lengthy list of environmental rules that the administration has worked to weaken or undo over the past two and a half years. … An immediate effect of the clean water repeal is that polluters will no longer need a permit to discharge potentially harmful substances into many streams and wetlands. Photo: An oil rig docked in Sabine Pass, Tex. The repeal means industrial pollution will be able to flow more freely into waterways. Credit: Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times, September 12, 2019

Overturning the US Waters rule of 2015
Betrays our country’s best instincts to preserve our
Assets – streams, creeks, rivers, waterways, but
Many of us believe this is a smokescreen, a hidden
Agenda to repeal everything that came before 2016

Paul Smith is a civil engineer who has worked in the construction racket for many years. He has traveled all over the place and met lots of people. Some have enriched his life. Others made him wish he or they were all dead. He likes writing poetry and fiction. He also likes Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one. His poetry and fiction have been published in Convergence, Packingtown Review, Literary Orphans, TheNewVerse.News, and other lit mags.

HORMESIS TRUMPS DRUG RULES

by Fran Davis

"Meet Ed Calabrese, Who Says a Little Pollution Can Be Good For You" —Mother Jones, February 19, 2019

EPA—call home—you’ve gone too far
axing toxic standards
            no exposure level safe
in favor of
hormesis?

Pollutants in low doses
induce adaptive responses
the hormetic scientist blares
bullhorn provided by big agro,
big chemical.

No exposure level safe
is such an onerous bar
when toxins can be taken in doses
to booster adaptability.

Monsanto, Syngenta and Dow are singing hallelujah.

Insecticides, fungicides, herbicides
those deadly bug killing, weed killing,
fungi killing - cides
may be good for us,

might not cause cancer, distrupt hormones,
frazzle neurons, mess with reproduction
if taken
in little whiffs, quick licks, tiny sips.

Proper dosage is the thing,
a smidgeon of Imidacloprid,
spurned by Europeans, but what do they know?
Still the most popular insecticide on earth.

Please thank Bayer Cropscience for their efforts on your behalf.

Bring on the neonics
5,000 times more toxic to bees than DDT,
no worries. Robot bees are coming soon,
haven’t you heard?

The sweet air hovering over strawberry rows,
Chloropicrin,
active ingredient in tear gas
may help us adapt to
tear gas.

Sell-out to agrochemical chimeras?
Ignore those faint cries, EPA.
The big guys have landed a scientist shill.
In the era of T***p
rules can be ditched like Roundup snuffs weeds.

Passionate about food safety, Fran Davis was so furious to learn the EPA might lower standards for toxics she had to launch a word protest. She lives and writes in coastal California. Her work has appeared in TheNewVerse.News, newspapers, magazines, travel books and print and online journals.

PRUITT’S PSYCHO FANCY

an erasure poem by James Penha
derived from Scott Pruitt’s resignation letter

It has been an honor to serve you
Truly
your confidence in me has blessed me personally
beyond what anyone anticipated
at an unprecedented pace
and I thank you for the opportunity
to achieve those ends
it is extremely difficult for me
to cease serving you
because I count it a blessing to be serving you
in service to you
to bless you serving
as President today because of God’s providence
that same providence brought me into your service
as I have served you
I have blessed you
and enabled you
Thank you again Mr. President
for the honor of serving you
in all that you put your hand to.


James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News .

THE BALLAD OF SCOTT PRUIT

by Edward Zuk

Image from “Environmental Plundering Agency by Brian McFadded at The Nib.

When health and safety threaten greed across this land of ours,
To whom do corporations turn to exercise his powers?
Who trashes standards then explains it with a bland cliché?
It is Scott Pruitt, mighty leader of the EPA!

Who scoffs at scientists and what they claim to be “the truth”?
Who likes to joke with lobbyists inside his soundproof booth?
Who flies in secret round the world in first-class all the way?
It is Scott Pruitt, jet-set madman of the EPA!

He kicks and headlocks edicts, punches rules right in the nose,
Then knocks out regulations with his well-timed body blows.
Who cares if it’s all legal or the courts demand a stay?
He is Scott Pruitt, fearless fighter of the EPA!

When nonexistent death threats make this dauntless man afraid,
Security is there so that he will not be waylaid.
It’s well-spent dollars from the taxes of the USA
To save Scott Pruitt, precious treasure of the EPA!

When streams and rivers are too clean and need some mercury,
When oil is trapped in parks without a well to set it free,
When species are endangered but somehow still hang around
Without that one more final blow to lay them in the ground,

When woodland ponds are lacking coal ash and some manganese,
When people ought to breathe in smoke and lead from factories,
What do the billionaires and massive corporations say?
We’ll call Scott Pruitt, matchless leader of the EPA!



Edward Zuk is a poet from British Columbia, Canada. His work has appeared in The Queen's Quarterly, The Raintown Review, Modern Haiku, and TheNewVerse.News. 

FOR NOW

by Lori Desrosiers

I look out my window
and it is not raining acid
my street is not flooded from erosion
the air is not filled with smog
the herons who fish from the nearby river
are alive and the trout are plentiful
honeybees drink from backyard honeysuckle
gardens grow rich with flowers and new grass
an hour away the ocean is swimmable
the astounding thing is
with one signature
the rain, the air, the soil, the fish
the birds, the flowers, the bees,
the water, and we humans,
not slowly, but quickly
perish

Lori Desrosiers’ poetry books are The Philosopher’s Daughter, Salmon Poetry, 2013, and Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak, Salmon Poetry, 2016. A chapbook Inner Sky is from Glass Lyre Press, 2015. Her poems have appeared in New Millenium Review, Contemporary American Voices, Best Indie Lit New England, String Poet, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene's Fountain, TheNewVerse.News, Mom Egg Review, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She edits Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry and WORDPEACE, an online journal dedicated to social justice. She teaches Literature and Composition at Westfield State University and Holyoke Community College, and Poetry in the Interdisciplinary Studies program for the Lesley University M.F.A. graduate program.

PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE

by Thomas R. Smith

Late afternoon sun on snow. Intense
flare concentrated in the west, skimming
cold shadows pooling below the dam.
On the path I stop a moment to commiserate
with a friend, both of us scalded by
the daily piss shower out of the White House.
Still January and the open river
hosts hundreds of ducks, geese, and swans. The new
EPA head listens to oil and coal
companies but not the community
of beings. I see my neighbors the water-
birds almost every day. I must owe them
something. Does money and power have
the right to disregard their fate? Ryan
and Pence stand smirking behind T***p while
the lit fuse sparks past their ankles.
Do they really believe that only
the President will be burned? Things can
get corrupted so inconspicuously—
a file, water, air, democracy—that we often
notice only when the screen’s gone blank.
The body politic knows it’s infected,
will the immune system mobilize?
The purveyors of “alternate facts” tried to
smear Rachel Carson too.  Heroically
she saved us from ourselves. Do we have it
in us to save us from ourselves this time?
I look out past the fliers and swimmers
at home on the river, toward the sun’s
setting splendor.  Our twilight will be
uglier, like the men at the top. To them
say, Earth first! You can’t be my government
if you won’t be the government of the geese.


Thomas R. Smith has had hundreds of poems published on three continents.  In the United States, his poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.  His poems were included in Editor's Choice II (The Spirit That Moves Us Press), a selection of the best of the American small press, and in The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner).  His work has reached wide national audiences on Garrison Keillor's public radio show Writer's Almanac and former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. His most recent book of poems is The Glory from Red Dragonfly Press.

THREE EGRETS

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

As we stand outside the bank
Holding signs
To protest profiteering
From the ravaging of our environment
Three egrets fly past just above us
And over the maniacal traffic
Of the freeway
Heading to a small marshy area
By the frontage road on the other side.
Three egrets that remind us in this moment
Of our immutable interdependence –
Animal plant stone
Earth water air.
Three egrets
Whose cells, like our own, thrum
With the ancient music of all that is.
Three egrets that know nothing
About carbon emissions and methane plumes
About melting glaciers and dying oceans.
Three egrets that know nothing
About parts per million and tipping points
And the dire predictions
Of climate scientists.
Three egrets that know nothing
About mass mobilizations
To resist the slashers and gougers and despoilers
Nothing about blockades and lock downs
And urgent uproarious disobedience
To disrupt business as usual –
But that is not the egrets' work,
It is ours.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesdayand others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.