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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
Maria Lisella is the recipient of a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the American Academy of Poets and the author of Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She co-curates the Italian American Writers Association readings and is a travel writer by trade.
is not the thing with feathers bickering at the feeder
bullying the finches into flight
nor the Hallmark card, faded from decades of cliché
shoved in the back of the dollar store rack
Hope is not the white dove flying from the open hymnal
like a pop-up book, nor the blond god on
nana’s closet door smiling from his ruby throne.
It’s not the inscription on the hand-drawn
sign buried in roses at the site of the latest
black man’s murder by the men in blue
nor the Christian Covid patient emoting from
his ICU bed, hoarding oxygen and prayers
while millions of deniers chorus no,
we won’t go to vaccine clinics.
Hope is not the promised land behind
a child’s eyes when she mouths on bended knee
bless mommy and daddy and
all the creatures in the sea.
Is hope the force that pulls us from our beds
when the world seems to have given up?
Is it the hands that brew the coffee, steep the tea
debate existence with our feline friends
hands that kindle the ritual of another day
as if our time were endless here.
Sandra Anfang is a poet, editor, poetry teacher, and visual artist. She’s the author of Looking Glass Heart and Road Worrier (Finishing Line Press, 2016 and 2018) and Xylem Highway (Main Street Rag, 2019) and the founder of Rivertown Poets in Petaluma, CA. Since Covid overtook our lives, she alternates between binging on statistics and walking and writing to allay her fears.
The end? Well, we could hardly call it that, as if
Whatever just happened, isn’t found in an old
Paper thin tome nobody’s read for a zillion years,
Instead, the end, or The End, just keeps blistering
The heck out of nearly everyone, though some
Are immune, and will never know when any End
Is just around, looking for hopeless dopes like most
Of us are now, prayers done with, floors mopped
With Clorox, as if that would scare anyone away,
But the Bugs like that deep inhalation we take when
We walk into any room, like sniffing lighter fluid
Right into the lungs where it plans to stay and stay
Until all of us are turned over onto our stomachs
By the kindest of medical staff, hoping the deep
Breaths will pull us out, but most of us have already
Died, and had no clue anything was like The End as
So many are whispering about now, as if Breaking
News isn’t about a new political cataclysm, but rather
Breaking the hearts of so many in so many hugely
Different parts of our world, everywhere even in
Antarctica, and who brought the Bugs in to such a
Pristine, icy world anyway? ICU’s are now in gift
Shops, chapels, parking lots with unique tenting
Materials and refrigerator trucks behind and out
Of sight, keeping all the dead quite cool until we
Find a place that will prepare the dead without
Ending up as the prepared dead. That’s our new
World with the best hopes of looking ahead nearly
Two or three years out, and even then, new varieties
Will awaken all of us again, those who aren’t quite
Living any more, but just waiting, you know for what
Don’t you, call it what you want but here, it’s The End.
Recent poems by DeWitt Clinton have appeared in Lowestoft Chronicle, The New Reader Review, The Bezine, The Poet by Day, Verse-Virtual, Poetry Hall, Muddy River Poetry Review, Across the Margin, Art + Literature Lab, One Magazine, Fudoki Magazine (England), and The New Verse News. He has two poetry collections from New Rivers Press; a recent collection, At the End of the War; and By a Lake Near a Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters, poetic adaptations of Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater, and lives in Shorewood, Wisconsin.
Father Yaezel hovers on the veil
between this world and the next.
My mother tells me her parish priest
is in the ICU with COVID and his condition
can’t be good, as the local news put out a call
for plasma donors from survivors. That’s last ditch, my husband says, but I shush
him with my eyes: Please. He’s one of the good ones.
I see Father Yaezel, his full head of snowy hair,
crossing the street from the rectory, walking
up our driveway. I remember him standing,
head bowed, at my father’s bedside, his right hand
signing the cross in mid-air as he recited
Last Rites. My father didn’t die that day —
wouldn’t die — until Father Yaezel held
my mother in his crystal blues a week later
and gently prodded, Did you tell him it was okay to go?
Some nights, a blast of air wakes me from my dreams
and for a moment I think I am on the unit again,
my patient disconnected from the vent — but instead
of the rhythmic breath coming in waves,
the whoosh is continuous. I become aware
I’m in my bedroom, the tubing popped-off
my CPAP machine. I’ve read they try these
on COVID patients to keep them off ventilators.
I open my mouth to feel the rush of pressure
whispering breathe ...
I sigh and return to sleep.
Ellen Austin-Li is an award-winning poet published in Artemis, Writers Tribe Review, The Maine Review, Mothers Always Write, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Masque & Spectacle, Green Briar Review, Panoply, and other places. Her first poetry chapbook Firefly was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. Ellen is a student at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I danced in my house, every room, Watusied
into the cul-de-sac, in my neighbors’ yards,
driving dogs mad, setting off alarms. I Twisted
and shimmied, broke it down home-style to
the blasts, screeches, and wails for my neighbors
in their afternoon pjs, who banged on their windows,
flipped the finger, pointed pistols, semis, until
their yelling and banging turned into yodeling
and bumping and they switched on their entertainment
systems and danced in their living rooms with me
on their lawns. We danced at a safe distance, masks
on. They must’ve thought, This is kinda marvelous.
I danced on the runways and on the one plane cleared
to fly me to my sick dad. I danced for the captain
and I danced in the hospital where my 94 year old pop
was able to—to the gasps of the ICU nurses, whom I
waltzed with—raise a finger and conduct the band
in my head and we held hands so he wasn’t alone,
scared, and he felt I was a good son.
No
Here’s what really happened: I abided by the edict,
stayed in, ate canned soup, rationed toilet paper,
washed my hands with soap while I sang songs
for two full minutes, sang to make sure I didn’t skimp,
sudsing conscientiously to rub those viral germs away,
adhering to the officials, and to keep from getting bored
I danced to the song I sang in the bathroom, even while
I dried. I danced in my house, and in my neighbors’
yards. I Boogalooed in the grocery with the elderly,
the most vulnerable, like my dad, in New York, alone,
94, who I can’t be with, and we danced in the oatmeal aisle,
cookie aisle, the Depends aisle, the pet food aisle.
They knew all the steps and we wore masks and gloves
and I took them by their tiny hands and we twirled
and twirled.
Michael Mark’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salamander, Salt Hill Journal, The Southern Review, The New York Times, The Sun, Waxwing, The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily. He’s the author of two books of stories including Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). @michaelgrow
April is a viral month, breeding
Contagion out of the air, mixing
Distance and desire, streaming
Dull shows with spring pollen.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
II. A Game of Chess
The Lectern he stands at, like a burnished throne,
Glows in TV lights, where the ass
Between the flags flings his fruited lies
While gilded sycophants peep out
(And Fauci hides his eyes behind his wing),
Doubles the flames of narcissistic rage.
III. The Fire Sermon
The hospitals are broken, the last surgical masks
Fray and sink into wet piles.
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
IV. Death by Water
Phlebas the Epidemiologist, a fortnight dead,
Has missed the nurses’ cries, ironic memes,
Corpses lain in reefer trucks.
O you unmasked who shop and cough to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once healthy and hale as you.
V. What the Thunder Said
After the ICU lights on sweaty faces
After the agony in sterile places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and hospital hall
They who were living now are dead
We who are living now are dying
With a little patience Shantih shantihshantih
Eric Weil stays inside in Raleigh, NC. He's a retired English prof who has three chapbooks in print: A Horse at the Hirshhorn, Returning from Mars, and Ten Years In. Other poems have recently appeared or will soon appear in Red Planet Review, Free State Review, Pinesong, Kakalak, and Ponder Review.
A 16-year-old boy died Monday at a Border Patrol station in Texas, becoming the fifth child from Guatemala to die since December after being apprehended by US border patrol agents. —Yahoo! News, May 21, 2019. Photo: People hold a vigil for migrants who have died, have been detained and deported by US authorities, near the US-Mexico border fence in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, on May 3, 2019 (AFP Photo/Guillermo Arias via Yahoo! News).
With the name, they release
a face, a family, a story,
but not a living child.
Five dead kids in five months.
Only half the migrants
are from Guatemala,
but all the dead children are.
What are the odds?
(1/2)5 or 1 out of 32.
Are they sicker?
Poorer? More fragile?
Indigenous? Dark?
Did they beg
in Mayan tongues,
so pleas were ignored?
In the hospital.
In the ICU.
Alone in his cell.
Pneumonia. Influenza.
She died of a fever,
and no one could save her.
By Stephen Miller’s bed,
small ghosts cry
for their mothers.
Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her latest poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, December 2018) is a finalist for poetry in the Bi Book Awards. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, TheNewVerse.News, November 3 Club, Assaracus and elsewhere.
