The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
The New Verse News is proud to announce its Pushcart Prize nominees for poems published in 2023, and it invites you to click on the links below to (re)read them:
I don’t start to cry until I see Hannah’s name and a quote from her at 10:57 p.m. on the New York Times feed—which means at least this one’s alive, this last-semester student with the pink hair and the big laugh, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath for hours, for these hours of not-knowing. I keep looking at the same images: the streets, the sidewalks, the doorways, the windows, the diagonals of the museum turned blue and red, blue and red with lights from ambulances-firetrucks-police. Every intersection closed, students fleeing, huddling, wearing clothes they wear to class each day, and I search the images, blurred by distance and dark, for faces I know. The sounds of helicopters overhead are transferred through the microphone of a reporter who seems at a loss loss loss for what to say. Time and again this happens, beads on a broken rosary, but this time it’s here—the place I’ve called home for twenty-five years. These students are still children, and these are the buildings we’ve met in, sidewalks we’ve walked, sometimes in celebration, sometimes in protest, sometimes in snow or rain, sometimes under star-bright skies, but never on a night like this. A colleague writes, Part of me is hoping that none of the deceased students were in my classes these past years. A selfish hope, indeed and while I’d like to disagree, she’s right. Of course it’s selfish; tell me, how can we not be selfish, praying that the ones we love are safe—though no one’s safe— knowing that each silence, each not-answering is someone’s student, someone’s roommate, someone’s best friend, someone’s child. How many more?
Author’s note: This poem was written in response to the first message that appeared on the MSU Rock and before the names of the students who were killed (Arielle Anderson, Brian Fraser, Alexandria Verner) had been released.
Laura Apol is a faculty member at Michigan State University, where she teaches poetry, literature and women's studies. From 2019-2021 she served as the Lansing-area poet laureate.
