LIKE WHEN THEY TRY TO SLASH MEDICAID, ETC

by Lynne Schilling

          After Al Ortolani

Representative Eric Burlison, Republican of Missouri and a member of the Freedom Caucus, said it was “inappropriate” for Republicans to say that they “aren’t going to touch” Medicaid — a phrase that Mr. Trump has used — and then “leave all that fraud in the system.” He suggested that provider taxes, which states use to offset their portion of the cost of Medicaid, were a form of “fraud” that he would want to eliminate. —The New York Times, May 29, 2025. AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

Protected by the roof of the porch, a robin has tucked her
nest on top of the artificial spring wreath hung on the front 
door, with easy access to grass and flowers and oak tress—
 
showing she knows something about location, location, location
in picking real estate. But when the door swings open, she flies
flustered from the nest, fussing nearby until the door closes.
 
It’s like finding the foundation underneath the kids’ bedroom 
is cracked. Like attempting to eat cherry ice cream on a steamy 
afternoon in a cone that has a hole in the bottom, or trying 
 
to drink a cup of scalding coffee on a train when it lurches. 
It’s like believing your child is safe because she is American 
born, only to see her swept up by ICE and sent to Honduras. 
 
Mothers need to be flexible, but there are so many openings 
to peril, so many teeth in the mouth of despair. They might tie 
themselves in knots, but even the most agile can’t block it all.

Lynne Schilling has published poems in Quartet, The Alchemy Spoon, Rue Scribe, Braided Way Magazine and others. She won Honorable Mention in the 2024 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Contest for her poem, “Prayers I Wish I’d Uttered When Forced to Pray Aloud in Fifth Grade.”

IN THE THORN BUSHES

by Lois Rosen

One day last week, a call came in to the sheriff’s office shortly before 10 a.m. Border Patrol agents had found the body of a woman in the back corner of a ranch. Credit Brooks County Sheriff’s Office via The New York Times.

After the “Crossing the Border Newsletter” 

by Manny Fernandez and Nubia Reyna in The New York Times, April 18, 2019

Migrants have been dying in the South Texas brush.
“Many, many are dying. That was what surprised me.”
The president insists he’s shocked. But now that he
knows for sure, do you see him rushing from a private
dinner to order humanitarian convoys of water and food?
8 bodies were found this year, and it’s only mid-April.
Among the cactus, mesquite, sage, oak, thorn bushes,
the lost, frozen, dazed, sick men and women collapse
from heatstroke, hypothermia, dehydration. A sheriff
today found a female skeleton face down, in dirt,
U.S., Mexican, and Honduran cash around her, prayer
cards in the pockets of her jeans. A male body, face up,
a Honduran I.D. in his wallet, he’s discovered to be
the father of a three-year-old girl. There’s a selfie of
the two of them on his Facebook page. In Spanish, he
called her my princess. The sheriff runs out of body bags.
How does someone get used to bagging up the dead?


Lois Rosen’s poems have appeared twice before in TheNewVerse.News. She enjoys leading the Trillium Writers and the ICL Writing Group at Willamette University. Her published poetry books are Pigeons (Traprock Books, 2005) and Nice and Loud (Tebot Bach, 2015).

BLIGHT

by Katherine Smith

I was born for the same journey as the birds,
the poem about the poem, the pure lyric
of the ovenbird in the wood
calling for a mate to end its solitude
from the top of the American chestnut tree.
I learned to distinguish the American chestnut
from the oak chestnut by the serrated edge,
from the beech by the clasp at the hooked tip.
I learned to recognize my kind by its serrated song.

I step into the woods this morning,
chasing the ovenbird, stepping around a pile
of mating dung beetles. Pure lyric
was once mine. I woke this morning

to fungus on the radio: sixty Palestinians
shot at the border the day the embassy opened
in Jerusalem, the president’s Indonesian resort
paid for by China, and the Russian oil company sold
to Qataris to pay off the president for lifting sanctions.

Pure lyric was once my everyday speech.
The ovenbird calls in the tree canopy
of hickory and oak.
All winter I taught writing
to teenagers from Honduras
now scheduled for deportation.

I’m part of a vast experiment
like the Lego experiment
in which people are given Legos
and told to build, then watch
as their creations are destroyed
while their despair is measured
and recorded for eternity.

I fantasize about what I’d do
if an ICE officer came to the classroom door.
The sweeps never happen
where I can see them.
One by one my students—
Transito, Luis, Fernanda—
will be dropped off at the border
with their English composition skills,
their aspirations and their associates degrees.

Now it’s May and I’m mildly depressed.
Pure lyric hasn’t been my style for twenty years.
The ovenbird calls deliriously from the top
of the American Chestnut tree.

Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

CARAVAN OF HONDURANS

by Ben White

After days of walking from Mexico’s southern border, the caravan of hundreds of migrants that has drawn President Trump’s Twitter ire has now halted on a brown-grass soccer field, its participants unsure and anxious about the way forward. —The Washington Post, April 3, 2018

There is a caravan of Hondurans
Gypsying its way
Through Mexico
                                    And headed north
To the border
Of milk and honey
Where there’s nothing funny
About the fear
                                    Of American values
Holding tight to beliefs
That have lost anything
To believe in
                                    As the caravan grows
In numbers to become
A mythological beast
Ready to feast
                                    On the benevolence
Of citizens
Who stopped
Demonstrating benevolence
Sometime around 1776
                                    And who now hide
Their truest attitudes behind
Stacks of dead, rifle-shot children,
Prison walls full of minorities,
And credit cards stacked high
                                    With dream-debt
And yet,
The people remain
Hypocritical enough
To claim a national perfection
That has never existed,
                                    So as much
As honesty
Has been resisted,
It is not a surprise
To see the disguise
Of greatness
                                    Fading and falling
From the face
Of patriotic
Ideologies and ironies
                                    While preparing
                                    A hate-filled response
Against the all-destructive
Caravan rolling closer
To the closed communities
Unwilling and unable
                                    To practice
The righteousness
Of strength
                                    And virtue.

The author of Buddha Bastinado Blues and The Kill Gene, Ben White was convinced he was a poet only to find out he is not a poet at all—he is a witness.  What he writes is testimony.

LITTLE THINGS AND BIG THINGS

by John Kotula

A terrible, terribly damaged boy nearly bleeds to death in a boat, under a tarp, in somebody’s back yard. Yes, he has blood on his hands and worse. How have we let this happen to one of our boys? But no one will say they are broken hearted. They will only say they are strong. “You picked the wrong city this time,” they say. I just want to cry for a while and hold each other.

My granddaughter is fussing in her car seat. I corkscrew my arm back and grope around for her blinky. I help her get it to her mouth. My beautiful daughter smiles at her beautiful daughter in the rearview mirror. The baby grabs my index finger in her damp, four month old fist and goes back to sleep. Something to suck on, the purr of the motor, someone within reach who loves her, is all she needs for contentment.

Way up in the mountains of Honduras there are plans to build a dam that no one needs or wants. It will make rich Hondurans richer. They will siphon off their share. It will make rich Americans richer. They will sell unsustainable technology to the rich Honduras. Some how the Chinese are involved. Some rich Chinese will get richer, too. The thatched roof houses of the poor people who live along the river will be thirty feet under water.

There is a young man who trusts me to give him advice. His mother is suddenly in the intensive care unit at the hospital. He is ashamed that he doesn’t understand her condition and doesn’t know how to make things better for her. I take the young man to the hospital and help him talk to the social worker. I joke with his mother in my bad Spanish and make her laugh. He feels a little better. I would be proud to be this young man’s father.

Automatic weapon fire blows apart a whole school full of tiny, fragile bodies. Even with the knowledge that they will never hold their own children again, the parents go to Washington and say please don’t let this happen to some one else. But the Republicans have so blatantly sold their souls, you got to wonder why God doesn’t strike them down. Hey God, where is the fire? Where is the brimstone? Where are the frogs and boils?

I am three floors above sea level in an old, old building. Looking out through wavy glass I can see the beach curve away to the north. A poet is reading about her memories of living in Alaska. I know many people in the room. Some of them I’ve known for forty years. In that moment, The New York Times and National Public Radio are far away. I don’t think so much about the little things. The big things are more important.

John Kotula is a writer and artist who lives in Peace Dale, Rhode Island.