The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
abandoned no longer important a lone fence facing south bars nothing a symbol of folly a symbol of power turned powerless barriers can’t staunch the tide of humanity that oozes around them like water the migrants find their way around the man made obstacles in their search, in their dream of a better life
Mary Janicke is a gardener, poet, and writer. Her work has appeared in numerous journals.
Birds rest on concertina wire along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass , Texas, Thursday, July 6, 2023, that has been recently bulldozed. (AP Photo/Eric Gay) Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s escalating measures to stop migrants along the U.S. border with Mexico came under a burst of new criticism Tuesday after a state trooper said migrants were left bloodied from razor-wire barriers and that orders were given to deny people water in sweltering heat. —AP, July 19, 2023
Along the helix
of razor wire
meant to keep
refugees stranded,
there are delicate spiders
spinning webs
that rainbow
in the early sun,
their snares
of a different will.
Frederick Wilbur’s collections of poetry are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Dalhousie Review, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The New Verse News, and Shenandoah among others.He is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.
A governor proclaims murder a problem of mental health; did another governor just wash his hands?
Uncle Bryson spent his life in mental health confinement; he didn't kill anyone, so why was he there? Uncle Bryson never owned a rifle, never knew a bullet from a bassoon, but a risk nonetheless, mental health, it’s not a guess, it’s a problem—
we can be more than certain of crazies stalking the horizon, the mentally ill, ready to kill, spree shooters who will surely shoot lots of someones somewhere sometime soon.
Shooters are, we can trust, only problems of mental health. We better all go out and buy another gun.
W. Barrett Munn is a graduate of The Institute of Children's Literature and studied with Larry Callen. His poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, The Awakenings Project, Kairos Literary Magazine, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Speckled Trout, and many others.
I call my doctor and tell him, I don’t want to be a man
today. Detransitioning? No. I mean I don’t want to be alive
in a place that thinks my heart strings are puppeteered, that I am
a marionette genetically modified for road rage, sex drive, alcoholic
tendencies. That I don’t want the pharmacy tech to stare extra
hard at my driver license on a routine prescription pickup.
That I don’t want to blush when drunk friends ask:
tampon or jockstrap? Because they’re not asking, are they?
The dive-bar dust on their credit cards will remind them later
that yes, it was rude, but they were drunk, and they have a right
to know who their friends are, their dates are, what I
will expect them to suck or fuck.
Greg Abbott isn’t asking why the children want to change,
he’s asking why they’d want to look like that.
Like a man in a dress or a woman who’s been mutilated
from the inside out, breasts carved off by a butcher’s
knife or by a tree when she lurched in the wrong direction
at the shout of “timber,” wearing, presumably, a flannel
button-up under a leather jacket. Like a turtle without its shell
or a ring-tailed lemur without its jewels. But if Greg Abbott
asked me, I’d tell him, what kind of parents agree to HRT
in the first place? What kind of parents say, yes, I trust you
to grow a beard you won’t regret? Maybe our mothers
are lovely and our fathers are brave, but I have always been alone
and I have always made my own choices. I’d tell Greg Abbott
that sometimes a law is just a word and abuse is a red
herring for an onslaught of transphobic legislature, an actual
school of fish with teeth and fish with fins, and who, now,
can win against the slaughter.
Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021); his forthcoming chapbook Sober will be published with Red Bird Chapbooks in 2022.
