OUR PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINEES

The New Verse News is proud to announce its nominees for the next series of the Pushcart Prize.

Click on a title below to read the poem..

Published January 13, 2025

TO THE ASHES IN L.A. by Alexis Krasilovsky

Published March 7, 2025

WOMEN’S HISTORY 2025: SAY HER NAME by Robin Stevens Payes

Published August 27, 2025

GREEN by John Minczeski

Published September 23, 2025

DAUGHTERS by Clare Richardson-Barlow

Published October 12, 2025

2025 by Susan Vespoli

Published November 5, 2025

BJÖRN IN VENICE by Julia Griffin

GREEN

by John Minczeski

On the news feed this morning,

on my phone’s small screen, two

children shot dead at morning Mass

before school. Others wounded

before the shooter turned the gun

on himself. Pardon me, readers,

this is not a poem, 

I must follow Adorno’s 

dictum. And yet, how refuse 

the poem, however prosaic

and filled with reportage. How,

gentle reader, can I look at the tree

in my front window, the one 

thinking of turning yellow,

that just yesterday made me think

life and beauty fill the same page.

This is not a poem, it is an outrage.

Twenty minutes from here,

maybe twenty five from my toast

and eggs sunny side up, the dead

and wounded children. Like ones

I taught in my career, whose eyes 

brightened with poems. 

A few clouds punctuate the sky. 

My younger brother has arrived

in Wyoming to drive my reclusive

older brother to California.

This is not a poem, it is a window

to my older brother so taken

with the beauty of the Tetons

he tried killing himself. At the end

of King Kong, a guy says it was

beauty that killed the beast. 

Therefore two brothers are in a car

driving west to a new normal,

and children with head wounds

are being treated at Hennepin General.

This is not a poem, this is a treatise

on teaching theodicy to six year olds.

This is me looking out the window

watching wind flip the leaves.

The green, the verde, que te quiero

verde of Lorca. Green leaves,

green children, que te quiero.

 

John Minczeski is the author of five collections as well as several chapbooks. His poems have appeared  previously in NVN as well as The New Yorker, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Minczeski worked as a poet in the schools for many years, and has taught at various colleges and universities around the Twin Cities. He served as president of the board for The Loft Literary Center when it was on the second floor of a bookshop in the Dinkytown area of Minneapolis.

MULCHING LEAVES

by John Minczeski 

It’s an asterisk in the middle of the day; 

it’s the dust filtering through the mower’s bag, 
the shimmer I wade through that collects 
on my jeans, in my lungs; it’s me piling 
the partially digested leaves on raised beds, 
next July’s harvest a universe away.  
I want to say grass storm and 
rain delay over red maple leaves 
like a priest giving benedictions.  
Every day it’s the coming elections.  
Ads warn of the worst. I’ve come to  
expect the worst. It’s the mower  
spitting leaves into the bag, 
leaving a widening strip of green.  
Such a solemn inhalation, this dust.  
Incense, and a threat of silence.  

John Minczeski is the author of "A Letter to Serafin" and other collections. Poems have appeared in The New Verse News, One Art, Tampa Review, Harvard Review, and The Saint Paul Almanac. Minczeski, who lives in St. Paul, has taught in poets in the schools, at The Loft Literary Center, and at various colleges around the Twin Cities.

RIFFS ON "POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN"

by John Minczeski

"poetry makes nothing happen"

—W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

Some nights, like this one, something  

thuds against the house, a tennis ball or branch  

from the shrub below our bedroom window.  

  

Poetry makes nothing happen.  

I mean, we lie awake   

as a bitter wind slashes at the house.   

  

We have no need to shelter in a mosque or subway,   

but still my heart aches. Poetry makes nothing   

happen. It could be a deer  

  

that got into fermented crabapples.  

It could be a deer gnawing the shrub  

below the window. Some windows  

  

crack from the cold. Some explode.  

Poetry makes nothing happen  

and life goes on as if there’s no bounty  

  

on our ordinary world. Remember when the oracle  

said a great general would win the battle?   

The moon continues its unhurried changes  

  

as it has in the small forever of my life.  

It makes nothing happen, poetry. Skin cracks  

in the cold, like a tax on breathing.  

  

Stepping inside to instant warmth  

from the wind, we tell each other  

what we already know about brutality   

  

and winter. Once again poetry has made   

nothing happen. People go on dying daily  

for lack/ of what is found there.   

John Minczeski is the author of A Letter to Serafin and other collections. Recent poems have appeared in Tampa Review, The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Cider Press Review, Bear Review, North Dakota Review, and elsewhere.