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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
Not sure where that is, sometimes, my room, my home,
but this west coast city has too many zip codes,
and too many faces that turn away
don’t look at you, sometimes beyond, afraid connecting might mean
you want something and here there are too many
whose wants aren’t being met
whose needs go unwatched whose backs we don’t have.
Sounds on this hot Sunday rise like hot air sending gospel notes
beyond the outdoors stage, lifting words that catch up with my feet
so I am walking keeping time
walking and watching and walking and listening and walking and hearing “Give me your arms for the broken hearted and San Jose cried with Dayton and El Paso and Gilroy. Give me your heart for the ones forgotten and San Jose cries for all who don’t have refuge. Give me your eyes so I can see” and I cry until my tears clear my eyes, and I hear
the words on your t-shirt sing to me of Ali, you walking towards me, me looking at you with you. Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth
My room here on earth—so many rooms where I’ve slept and risen
loved, been lost, saved, often still looking for redemption, my many lives
spent trying to understand words we wear, words we feel, words I say.
I stop to mouth the words to you, to all of you, that yes I’ll have your back
I’ll read and listen and watch and hear and see and see and see.
Barbara Simmons grew up in Boston and lives in California; her dual environment—shapes, skylines, even color wheels—informs her poetry, as do her families of origin and extended. She graduated from Wellesley College, received an MA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA in Educational Administration from Santa Clara University. As a secondary school English teacher, she was able to revisit texts she loved with students who inspired her to think more about how we communicate with each other on pages/screens as well as face-to-face. Retired, Simmins savors the smaller parts of life and language, exploring the communion of words as ways to remember and to envision and to heal. Publications have included Santa Clara Review, Hartskill Review, Boston Accent, Soul Lit, Hamline Review, Oasis Anthology, Writing it Real and Common Ground, among others, as well as short Perspectives on NPR affiliate.
You cannot sow leaves back to a tree,
unpluck the plume of an eagle.
When words begin to rot the tongue,
those words cannot be swallowed back.
There is a dish to hold the sea,
a brassiere to hold the sun,
a compass for the galaxy,
a voice to wake the dead.
But this is the silence between us.
And this is why there will be no nest.
Because this is a relationship
between a bird & a gun.
Shots burst out into a crowd;
and, we saw the red-hot glint,
watching & crying & asking
that question over again.
Talons fall from the sky,
settle, & turn to rust. I hate you,
I think, as you shoot me
to death with a rifle in my face:
Born to pull the trigger.
Born to light the match.
Born to see the blood.
Born to steal the hope.
You feel rage & there are bodies
on the floor, me, dying,
almost dead, knees stuck
together with feathers & blood.
One gun to hold the bullets;
one finger to pull the trigger.
Truth wears everyday clothes.
Tufts crimson as sunset pass us by.
Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, including Wayward Lines (RawArt Press, 2015), the chapbooks Forgetting Aesop (Bandini Books, 2011), Naked Animal (Flutter Press, 2012), My Father Had a Daughter (Alabaster Leaves Publishing, 2013), Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014), On Coming of Age and Stitches(Origami Poems Project, 2014), On This and That (Bitterzoet Press, 2015), Strangest Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015), Unsent (Origami Poems Project, 2015), The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Knee Deep in Bone (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015), Birds Never Sing in Caves (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), Cutting Eyes from Ghosts (Blood Pudding Press, 2017), Scars are Memories Bleeding Through (Yavanika Press, 2018), A Bridge of You (Origami Poems Project, 2019), Even the Statue Weeps (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2019), and Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Between Where Birds Collide with Windows (Ghost City Press, forthcoming 2019). She is also the author of three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.
to serve as tourniquets or crucibles of patriotism.
Let's just kneel together every time our banner waves for these days we share— collecting grief like debt.
Let's mourn the self-destruction of a nation.
Let there be rage for the addict we can't save who shoots up skin that isn't his triggered by . . . it doesn't matter why.
As long as he's fed as long as we're willing to yield more dead as long as we keep loading the chamber let's just leave it down— as a shroud—
star-spangled
and red.
Lisa J. Rocklin is a writer, facilitator, community builder, and associate director of Women Writing for (a) Change, a nonprofit organization in Cincinnati, OH, that offers supportive writing circles to nurture and celebrate the individual voice.
Someday all poems will have to be
about shootings and killing sprees
It seems that's all that happens these
days and if we do not change our ways
there will be no time to write about things
like the first light of dawn that kisses the
treetops aflame against a carmine sky or
waves that wash dancing silver
fish across shell-flecked sand
No, there will be no time for that only
blood and fear and hate and tears
the sick sweet smell of gunpowder
that hangs in the air like incense
at some perverse Church of Holy Guns
while mothers kiss cold lips and
bleach washes crimson stains
from shell-shocked floors and walls
Who needs poems about nature
and love when there are elegies
and laments to be written thoughts
and prayers to be mouthed
and promises to be made
and forgotten until the next time
which will probably be the day
after tomorrow
A natural history photo editor by day, John Kaprielian has been writing poetry for over 35 years. In 2012 he challenged himself to write a poem a day for a year and self-published the poems in a book 366 Poems: My Year in Verse available on Amazon. His poems have been published in The Five-Two Poetry Blog, Down in the Dirt Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, Naturewriting.com, The Blue Nib, The Blue Mountain Review, and Minute Magazine. He lives in Putnam County, NY with his wife, teenage son, and assorted pets. He is thoroughly sick of writing poems like this.
The garden blooms again in profusion,
offers snow peas and sugar snaps,
lettuces green and crisp. The tomatoes
have never tasted so good. Maybe
the heavy spring rain kept the ground
moist during a critical window, maybe
it’s the usual cycle of the earth. Hands
in the dirt provide distraction,
the sense of doing something useful,
healthy, with an outcome you can eat—
most basic feeling of security. Logs
on the wood pile cure for winter
while you can tomatoes, pickle cukes.
Without TV or radio, without knowledge
of the height of children, you’d never know
the year. Gardens’ bountiful vegetables
are an annual constant, a salve.
In Dayton and El Paso, the experts
are closing out crime scenes, taking
photos, mopping up blood, notifying
next of kin. When you hear the number
of injured victims along with the dead,
you won’t know how their lives have been
altered to live with chronic pain and fear.
How many young men are cleaning their
guns and counting their bullets today?
Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and has taught workshops nationally with a focus on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her work has appeared in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia, where she writes a poem every day and is working on a memoir.
This time folks in a Walmart in El Paso are unlucky
I listen to the hourly recap while I wrap my ankle—seems I rolled it
in the process of loading the U-Haul
Tomorrow I’ll drive the 15’ truck 300 miles from West Virginia to almost safe
suburbs 9 miles outside Philadelphia
9 miles is the space I’ve been driving strangers all over this mad college town
more than a year now
I’ll drive strangers in the new space, too, though I hope to avoid airport staging
in spite of the possibility for decent fares
While packing, I called the $20 Walmart coffee table and the $8 Walmart shoe rack
my “staging area”
We carried that staging area to the trash earlier
Now on NPR they’re talking about a staging area outside Walmart—
families trying to find each other after the terror
forced upon them by an active shooter
I don’t know if they’re still putting children in cages at our southern border but
the images I’m conjuring are horrific enough
A man with a gun enters a public space to disrupt as many lives as he can
Another man with a gun takes a child from his father’s arms because
he says the father failed to properly change a diaper on their endless journey
Remember when we started to build that bridge to nowhere? It’s hard
to think badly of a bridge when for years now there’s been so much talk of walls
After unloading the U-Haul at the new place I’m going to get a few necessities
at the local Walmart
I’m going to go because America gets back on the horse
even if we forget what caused us to fall
I’m going to go to Walmart because it can’t be like Aurora
when the cashier at the A-Plus says I look a little like the shooter and I don’t
enter a movie theater for the next four years
I’m going to go to Walmart because sometimes
going to Walmart isn’t about class or flag-waving or quality or luxury
Sometimes Walmart means America and we just have to nod and take a knee
Mark Danowsky is a writer from Philadelphia and author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees(NightBallet Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Eunoia Review, Gargoyle, The Healing Muse, Kestrel, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. He’s Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.
