PRIVATE ALTAR TRUMPS

by J. Alan Nelson

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

 

You can buy one for the mantel
or the corner of the kitchen table
where the bills used to go.

 

A golden Trump, small enough
to fit in the palm,
heavy enough to feel like something
earned.

 

For those who have decided
science is a rumor
and most other people
are an inconvenience,
except the ones who write checks
large enough to keep the foundries running,
the molds poured, the gilt applied.

 

Facts are only obstacles
on the way to the next order.
Denmark is a minor interruption
between here and Greenland.
Democracy is a temporary arrangement
that can be redirected,
like a pension check,
toward the manufacture of more golden figures
for the home altar, the office shrine.

 

Iran will be humiliated
in the proper sequence,
and a prize for peace
will follow as naturally
as the next shipment arrives.

 

Women and children may speak,
but their voices do not alter
the shine on the hair,
the tilt of the chin,
the fixed, triumphant gaze.

 

Place him where the light hits.
He does not require belief,
only space.

J. Alan Nelson is a poet, journalist, lawyer, actor, and nominee for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net and Best Microfiction. He played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay,” the verbose “Silent Al” in HBO’s Emmy-winning SXSWestworld, and narrated New York Times videos on AIDS programs in Africa.

HINGE DAY

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

So much needs exercising, soothing for the opening to beyond and next. Where applause for sun reverberates across plains and oceans to replace fumes of exhaust. Even on the balconies of apartments in my hometown. My car hides in the garage to avoid the steep price of gas. I plot where to scatter a bag of saved marigold and zinnia seed. Where mornings come unchallenged by worst-yet shock. When the bully pulpit voice, a vulgar weaving from Greenland to birthright, issues ultimatums that seem to threaten using nukes to resurrect the stone age and abuses the many names we use for god. A cardinal teeters on my fencepost listening to the oven bird. 

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Her poems appear in journals and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples (Fernwood Press) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she now writes mostly prose poems. Fernwood Press will publish her full-length poetry book, Gathering Marbles, in July 2027. Knoll serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.

MY COUNTRY FOR A MEDAL

by Anne Herrick

Partially based on lines from Shakespeare's Richard III, Act 5

Cartoon by Ann Telnaes

My medal, 

            my medal!  

                        America undone for my medal.

 

            Forsooth, sire, I will assist you

            in claiming this precious gold

 

Loyalist, I have lain my life upon this medal

I have set seven squabbles to peace—

Nay—I have in fact settled eight.

I must therefore have my medal.  

I will, I must, doom America for my medal.

 

Courageous Sire, it is Norway 

which has undone your gold,

I must find the wretch 

that decreed the providence of this prize

 

Great God of Heaven, say amen to all!

I will usurp, I will slay, this Danish bloody dog

which hath denied what has always been my due.

I will pluck this traitor’s foreign Greenland

and put its gold upon my oval mantelpiece.

 

            On bended knee I needs say, my Gracious Sire 

            that Denmark is not quite where is Norway —

            it is avowedly smallest, in the cold North Sea.

 

Oh, Slave, I will choose who is to blame.

I will push Denmark to weep in streams of blood.

I will save Greenland from Denmark’s yoke of tyranny,

dig far into the bowels of its land,

will cast its destiny with the doomed dome of America.

I know that true hope flies with swallow’s wings,
that it is the meaner creatures that make kings.

Anne Herrick has published a few poems and prose in the US and UK.

GRĒNLAND UNFÆST (GREENLAND OFF-BALANCE)

by Zumwalt

Cartoon by Anne Derenne

President Trump announced in a social media post on Saturday morning his latest strategy to get control of Greenland: He is slapping new tariffs on a bloc of European nations until they come to the negotiating table to sell Greenland. —The New York Times, January 17, 2026

“Greedy for Greenland,” the great leader uttered,

Musing on military modes of grabbing.

“Shale and shield,” he shouted out loud,

White House words woke up the world!

Old World earls offered their swords,

Rallying round the Realm of the Danes.

Pushing back promptly against pressure and might,

Frederiksen fierce, flashed her reply:

“If force is flaunted on frozen shores,

Strikes from the States shatter our league;

Broken the bridges of brotherhood built,

NATO is nuked—if neighbors clash!”

Damning the Danes in deep standoff,

“Lay down the law!” the leader swore.

Taxing with tariffs those tribes that balk:

"Gobble up Greenland, get all we can;

If that game goes bad, go grab Iceland!"

Zumwalt's poetry explores themes of alienation, shifting reality, and personal adaptation. Recent work has appeared at Ink Sweat and Tears.

O GREENLAND! MY GREENLAND!

by Anne Gruner

Global AI race makes Greenland's critical minerals a tempting target —NBC News, January 17, 2026

Frozen for millennia,

your ice melts faster and faster,

the shiny shield that protects you

from the sun, reflecting its rays,

like armor deflecting spears, arrows,

and swords but not outrageous fortune.

 

Invulnerable for ages, your permafrost

softens, disgorging its methane and carbon

to fuel the global bonfire of the vanities.

Ancient microbes, freed from glacial captivity

create black holes of “giant” viruses,

standing ready for missions of good or evil.

Fresh and cold, your newly born meltwater

floods the warm salty ocean,

and like a hormonal imbalance,

it slows the sea's circulation,

a fateful harbinger.

 

As your ice bids its long farewell,

you say hello to a new peril,

one from humanity, which may transmogrify

your beauty into toxic mountains of sludge, acid,

dust, and runoff from crushing, grinding,

and chemical bleaching for coveted minerals

and a cesspool of data centers, accelerating

your blackening, melting, warming,

and death. 

 

For the first time in human memory

you have shed tears on your highest peak,

weeping for the Earth.

Anne Gruner is a two-time Pushcart nominee whose poetry has appeared in numerous print and on-line publications including Amsterdam Quarterly Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Honeyguide Literary Magazine, The New Verse News, Humans of the World, Spillwords, and Written Tales. Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in Dogwood, Rhapsody of the Spheres, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, Hippocampus, and others. A former CIA analyst, Anne lives in McLean, Virginia with her husband and two golden retrievers.

JANUARY 2026

by Richard Collins

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

Crossing the Rainbow Bridge to Canada,

it’s a bumpy ride over the dry Niagara, 

only a trickle of red from the wound below,

flags flying overhead, the Maple Leaf 

at half mast on one side, twin U.S. banners

on the other: Stars and Stripes, and the McDonald’s 

Arch redacted to add the eight stolen

Venezuelan stars in cheap gold leaf

from Home Depot. 

         And the quickly setting sun:

a leering orange troll with an oily glow

screaming like nails on a virtual chalkboard,

“GREENLAND UBER ALLES!” 

Author’s Note: This poem evolved from the logic of a dream. Like others whose sleep has been disrupted by the Venezuelan violation, I found sleep subconsciously interpreting the ruptures being perpetrated against our allies. Thus the wound at the border with our northern neighbors, the flag of economic imperialism now adding the Venezuelan arch of eight stars, the threats against Greenland. The leering orange troll that keeps torching the bridges to our allies with inflammatory midnight texts will be recognized worldwide. The one hope: that that doomed sun is setting.

Richard Collins, abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple, lives in Sewanee, Tennessee. His books include In Search of the Hermaphrodite (Tough Poets Press, 2024), and Stone Nest (Shanti Arts, 2025). His forthcoming book of poetry, Cartoons for the Chaos (Shanti Arts) contains his political poem, "November 2024," which was published in Clockhouse and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

AND SO IT BEGINS

by Imogen Arate

Art by Ann Telnaes

I.
The video stunned
The spin followed

An award-winning poet
has been silenced
by the shrill bullets from a
21st-century fast-drawing
cowboy on the man-made
frontiers of the new wild West

Yet we’re subjected 
to the lies of a rapist

Another man trying 
to justify violence
against women

A bad remake
of another family 
forced into mourning

another community
thrown into chaos

II.
Yet we still think in terms
of elephants and donkeys

while neither will draw down
on the military budget

sunset high-tech toys
hardware for the police and

other testosterone-charged 

angst-driven angry boys

tear down boundaries
that gate-check
investments in decency
beyond the borders
of “me and my”

Repulsive successive local waves 
reinforce the national and the 
global of political expedience 
and small and large lies stack 
upon one another to enrage
as the bodies of the sacrificed
emit the noxious gas
of corruption to explode
in a tsunami of grief and fury

III.
He who became
a millionaire at eight
nursed on government subsidies
bailouts and tax breaks
feeds us the fast-food diet of rancor 
while he grabs a pussy a plane 
a tanker a president oil fields 
Greenland and lusts after resort money
built on a still-hemorrhaging mass grave

But he’s just another opportunist
a symptom mushrooming on the 
advantages of Eugenicist 
elitism ripened by everyday
brand ambassadors gladiating
for a piece of the imaginary pie

IV.
Our pens may ink mighty words
but their impressions are paper thin 
against the hurried tunneling
of semi-automatic street artillery
bump-stocked by the political will
of fuel-guzzling AI overtaking human 
value as they peel away with the 
breeze blasé over endless shootings
grown accustomed to washing away 
anguish with yet more agony while 
prayers whistling show tunes 
to soundtrack the cha-ching
of firearms outstripping humans

V.
But she was a white citizen
Why should that be the red line
when we don’t let spilt blood
rust before sacrificing more lives
to our inane judgement of worth 

This social engineering
was never meant to end well
when chaos has no red line
maelstrom cannot be reined in

The hunger of greed 
self-perpetuates
in unchecked growth
to unleash the pandemonium
of a self-fulfilling prophecy

Imogen Arate is an Asian-American poet in search of hope: that humanity will overcome our self-destructive tendencies to work together against the onslaught of the climate crisis. She's also the Executive Director of Poets and Muses, an award-winning multimedia artist platform that has featured diverse contemporary poetic voices from around the globe. She believes that we will only be able to value lives equally when we lend our ears and hearts to the life stories of those we don't readily recognize as our kin and stop requiring the presence of certain socioeconomic trappings to recognize people's right to a dignified existence.

SPIT IN A TUBE

by Roberta Batorsky

As soon as the genetic testing company 23andMe filed for bankruptcy on March 23, 2025, concerns about what would happen to the personal information contained in its massive genetic and health information database were swift and widespread. A few days after, a U.S. judge ruled that the company could sell its consumer data as part of the bankruptcy. —Gizmodo, April 7, 2025.

23andme is out of cash
but they have all my DNA
Boy, would I like to settle their hash
get my stuff back from them today

Someone could cook a clone of me
build a murderer or pedophile
I could turn out more horrible
morphed into a raptor or reptile 

Would they use my letters
to cause harm to me and mine?
Or, could it work out for the better
to improve the basic design

A version thinner prettier funnier
someone proud to wear my name
Or, the duplicate only in veneer,
my identity would claim

So, if they have people’s recipes
a new world could they create 
of peace, tolerance tranquility
a universe free of hate

Where Trump and his minions
Bannon Rubio Musk Vance and Waltz
are on a garbage scow due north of Greenland
ice-bound ‘til they express remorse

23andme is out of cash
but they have all my DNA
Boy would I like to settle their hash
get my stuff back from them TODAY

Roberta Batorsky is a Biology teacher, poet and freelance science writer. She has published poems in Fine-lines and Heron Clan and is working on her first poetry book. Her science blog is https://solipsistssoiree.blogspot.com and her instagram is RobertaBatorsky_poetry.

ON THE AFTERMATH OF A CONSEQUENTIAL ELECTION

by Peter Nohrnberg

Art by Soybeing at Michael Moore Substack

Outraged and exhausted, we make our choice
guided by billions that masquerade as voice.
Like good consumers, we were well apprised; 
knew the cost of eggs, if not of lies.
Fever dreams of unruly immigration 
return to T---p the frayed reigns of the nation.
Sworn in under the Capitol’s Rotunda—
a cold snap turns DC to arctic tundra—
the colossus takes his oath on Lincoln’s Bible.
(Who but Abe or Jesus can claim libel?) 
Fearing his dark promise of retribution 
Silicon Valley makes a contribution. 
Bureaucrats begin to take their leave 
as Musk and DOGE descend like drones on Kyiv.
Among those given the algorithmic axe:
employees who fend off nuclear attacks. 
Less government reform than “shock and awe,” 
cutting of red tape, and rule of law. 
T---p wields his blunt Sharpie like a machete,
shreds the Constitution to confetti.
Vital public info goes up in smoke,
sacrificed on the altar of “anti-woke.”
An able four-star general gets the sack,
replaced by one with three-stars who’s not black.  
POTUS’s pen claims there’s but two genders;
and those born intersex? return to sender!
Like King David who forgave his half-brother, 
Trump pardons both rioter and traitor. 
The Senate coddles his menagerie of weasels 
while unvaxed kids in Texas contract measles.  
The keys to New York City pass to ICE
while Don Junior cavorts on Greenland’s ice.
Deported “illegals” are dealt a dismal fate:
and on the return flight? The brothers Tate. 
Statecraft becomes T---p’s Art of the Self-Deal,
while folks in Gaza scavenge for a meal. 
(One day they’ll all be served a ten-course feast 
at the “Riviera of the Middle East”;
but first they must go on a long vacation 
while Gaza undergoes renovation). 
Back in the Oval Office on his knees 
Zelenskyy begs, but stops at “pretty please”:
desperately in need of guns and tanks,  
dressed down for not dressing up, not saying “thanks.” 
 
Does the arc of history bend toward justice;
Or does history simply bend and break us? 
Does democracy die in darkness, or blinding light? 
How should we view this spectacle, our plight? 
Will art and culture help us ride out the storm,
or did they bring about this new abnorm?  
Did treating blue collar folks as ignore-ables 
help gather MAGA’s “basket of deplorables”?
Or were their grievances, self-pity
what drove them to become so proudly sh---y? 
Perhaps there’s something deep within us all 
that answers to the con man’s siren call.   
Devotion to another’s certainty 
distracts us from the world’s contingency.  
How easy to blame DEI, the border;
easier still to make disorder out of order.
 
When power controls the future and the past, 
can even the written word persist, outlast?  
Yet words, like insects tend to stick around;
gone for years, they emerge from underground:
can sting or float, be bee or butterfly,
little strong things to pinch an ugly lie.   

A poet, cultural critic, and a scholar of literary modernism, Peter Nohrnberg has had his poetry published by Southwest Review, Notre Dame Review, The Wisconsin Review, and Oxford Poetry, among other journals. His poem “Pantoum After a School Shooting” was awarded second place in the 2020 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. 

NO JOKES

by Peter Witt

Tee shirt detail

The White House Correspondents' Association announced Saturday that its annual dinner will not feature comedian Amber Ruffin, nearly two months after it announced her as its selection. In fact, this year's show won't have any comedic performances at all. —ABC News, March 30, 2025

There’ll be no humor at this year’s
White House Correspondents Dinner,
no jokes to remind the trumpster that 
sometimes he seems more buffoonish
than presidential, no attempts to rib 
the VP for discovering
that Greenland is f’ing cold, 
 
no jokes about butt letting the editor
of the Atlantic into a war plan call
while he sat astonished in a Safeway
parking lot,
 
no jokes about the hint of musk
in the white house, and efforts
to unplug Tesla sales, and no hint
that the president has spent
more money on golfing weekends
than the dogers have saved
through their court contested dismissals. 
 
There’ll be no jokes about Jan 6th
invaders getting pardons, or 
failed efforts to settle the wars
in Gaza and Ukraine on the promised
first day in office, or how Canada
has scored a hat trick as the
president can’t remember
if today he raised or lowered tariffs.
 
The newspeople will gather, eat
drink their cocktails, eat their shrimp,
talk about who will be banned
from next week’s press conference,
listen while the master of ceremonies
talks longingly about freedom of the press,
as the crowd whispers what the jokes
might have been if their leadership
hadn’t cowed to the jokester in chief
who is still out there somewhere 
on the 18th green.

Peter Witt is a Texas poet, a frequent contributor to The New Verse News and other online poetry web-based publications.

ANTHROPOCENE ANXIETY

by Steven Croft

Illustration from The Guardian, October 23, 2021

As the beehive of news stories grew,

scientists reporting back from Greenland's

shrinking ice sheet, coral reefs in Australia, the Florida Keys,

the feedback loops of forests lost and wildfire,

a beehive building like the global sauna our

drowsy governments offer an impossible treaty to slake,

suddenly a question rose before me:

why are we losing our grip on our world's biggest problem?

Because it is too far gone to hold?

Because floodwater and crabgrass want our cities?

Miners complain about the earth's heat

as they dig lower for coal to send to the surface.

Metaphor become metamorphosis.

Today, I can't look at a dome of beautiful October sky

without my mind's eye seeing a blue-lit jail

for a fevered planet, without my mind's ear hearing

buffalo herds of wind speaking in tongues

of shrieks across this doomed green land.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.