WORTHLESS

by B. Fulton Jennes

ID 10587676 © trekandshoot | Dreamstime.com

 

November 12, 2025 – U.S. Mint strikes final circulating one-cent coins.

 

At 10, I culled pennies from my plastic purse, 

dropped them into the bathroom’s metal trash can,

savored each clang. Their removal made room

for worthier coins—those with a silver sheen. 

 

Did my mother scold or slap at the discovery? 

I don’t recall. But her lesson stung and stuck: 

No small thing is worthless. A penny was more 

than a piece of comic-wrapped bubble gum,

more than a fiery cinnamon ball or palmful 

of chiclets spit from a vending machine.

It was copper—the metal that cloaked 

the Statue of Liberty. It bore Lincoln’s profile. 

It had history. It had value. It should be saved. 

 

Years later, still penny-obsessed, I scanned 

city sidewalks for coppery discs, bowed before

a speeding cab on 14th Street to pry one

from hot tar, banged heads with a woman who, 

likewise possessed, bent to snatch one from

the marble floor of Grand Central at rush hour, 

beat me to the grab, glared. I chided a teen who 

dumped a handful at a Madison Avenue bus stop,

gathered their discards from the pavement, 

added them to a five-gallon water jug at home.

 

Once I called in sick, boarded Amtrak south 

to the Philadelphia mint, watched behemoth

machines blank, anneal, strike pennies by the ton, 

a shimmering sea of copper, conveyed by forklifts, 

guided by back-braced men—such an earth-shaking, 

deafening to-do for something so small, so—what?—

 

worthless?

 

Today a two-century cascade of coins grows still.

Dignitaries make speeches, promise to auction the last

pennies struck on Earth. How foolish to spend 

2.7 cents to make something worth only a third as much. 

Even my mother would agree with those economies. 

Even my mother would hold her penurious hand, 

her sharp tongue, and see the wisdom of throwing 

such spendthrift things away.

The award-winning poems of B. Fulton Jennes are widely published. Her chapbook Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award; another chapbook FLOWN was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. A third chapbook Dirty Bird & Myrt will be published by Dancing Girl Press in the spring of 2026. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer.

LAZARUS RISES AGAIN

by Royal Rhodes

remembering “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

White House says it will not return the Statue of Liberty to France. A French politician said the U.S. no longer deserved the legendary monument. —Politico, March 17, 2025

The White House sense of what we owe to France

forgets why we are not a monarchy.

This "mighty woman with a torch," perchance,

shows with her flame its dark autocracy.

Yorktown and the sword of Lafayette

have been suppressed in its new made-up tales.

Will God forget us, if we too forget?

As "world-wide welcome" in our marrow fails?

Exiles sought for freedom like fresh air.

America was built by diverse hands,

ignored by a self-centered billionaire.

A golden door was open to all lands.

For wealth, new tyrants rule by greedy whim.

Can someone teach this statue how to swim?

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Royal Rhodes is a descendent of migrants here in the 17th century from England, and in the 19th century from Ireland.

CHRISTMAS EVE: NEARING MIDNIGHT IN NEW YORK

by Langston Hughes 

The Christmas trees are almost all sold
And the ones that are left go cheap
The children almost all over town
Have almost gone to sleep.
The skyscraper lights on Christmas Eve
Have almost all gone out
There’s very little traffic
Almost no one about.
Our town’s almost as quiet
As Bethlehem must have been
Before a sudden angel chorus
Sang PEACE ON EARTH
GOOD WILL TO MEN!
Our old Statue of Liberty
Looks down almost with a smile
As the Island of Manhattan
Awaits the morning of the Child.

Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes wrote “Christmas Eve: Nearing Midnight in New York” in 1914.

THE OLD COLOSSUS CLARIFIES HER SONNET

by Prince Bush





Oxidized, and stronger with patina, Libertas
Repeats herself, white supremacy is a storied

Pomp, dull-headedness, not welcome
In my country, but where I’m from—

The sea: Let prejudice sink beside that skin
Purported as porcelain, yet in any light, soft-paste—

A white clay and ground glass heart. I hope I am clear;
I hope this will end the fallacy, unnative white

Persons who trespassed & raped & carried cannons &
Smirkers & pigs & criminals & drugs & odious slavery.

Admittedly, older now and more of a sophist,
I want the door of gold to lead to anywhere:

I want to consolidate my lamp with the sun, console
Every soul, except those who publicly charge hate.

Prince Bush is a poet in Nashville TN with poetry in *82 Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Ghost City Press, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Pleides: Literature in Context, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. He was a 2019 Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets Fellow.

TELL ME THE AMERICA WE WANTED NEVER EXISTED

by Dwain Wilder

Tell me about Jim Crow and I will read you chapters from "Huckleberry Finn."

Tell me about slavery and I will tell you about Harriet Tubman, John Fairfield, Levi Coffin and a host of hidden hands, and the Underground Railroad.

Tell me about overweening power and I will tell you about the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Seneca Falls Convention, and Frederick Douglas.

Tell me about the worst of racism and I will tell you about a white man, John Brown, losing his life to spark a slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry.

Tell me about oppression and I will ring the rafters with Wendell Phillips,
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!
—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…"

Tell me the America we always wanted has never existed,
that people the world over, desperate for refuge
and yearning for it here
are but glamoured and I will show you a gift.

I will show you a present from another people’s dream of liberty,
a lady standing at a harbor raising a torch,
Holding a tablet inscribed with the day we called ourselves free;
at her feet, a few lines from a poem

and point out to you an endless procession of people who rely on her,
the gift of her,
rely on the torch,
rely on the tablet’s date, rely
on the fragment of the poem
and weep bitter gladness at first sight of the harbor.

The public anguish as our President and his henchmen
treat destitute people and their children like criminals,
little more than so much dirt,
for seeking asylum at our borders
—the existence of the America the humble of the world need
is proven by that anguish, its mass, its inevitability.

Your anguish. All it takes is yours. All of it.

Dwain Wilder is a Buddhist activist, editor of The Banner, an online weekly newsletter for grass roots activists working to get our country to acknowledge and respond to the current climate emergency. Dwain has taught meditation at Attica Prison, New York. He is a member of the Rochester poetry community, and builds stringed musical instruments for a living. He lives with his wife, their dog and cat, and a large rowdy macaw, in a quaint cottage beside a large dark forest.

WILLIE THE SHAKE'S BEEN SHOOK AWAKE!

by Alan Soffin

To be, or not to be?
That is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the House
To suffer the Tweets and Falsehoods of our great misfortune
Or to take votes against the See of troubles
And by opposing, end him? To cry, to weep,
No more, and by that weeping say we end
The heartache and the endless verbal schlock
That citizens are heir to. ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To cry, to weep;
To weep: perchance to scream; Oy, there’s the schlub;
For while we weep near death, what schemes may come
When we have shuffled off his rotten coil,
Must give us pause; there’s the respect
That makes calamity of public life;
For who would bear the whips of K street crime,
The T***pish wrongs, the constant contumely,
The pangs of threatened healthcare, the GOP’s delay,
The soullessness of Mitch and the spurns
That patient merit of the greedy takes,
When we ourselves might our withdrawal make
With a bare ballot. Who would injustice bear,
But that the dread of something after T***p,
The undiscovered source from whose bourn
The ruthless right returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those crooks we have,
Than fly to Pence and those we know not of ?
Thus conscience doth make outcasts on the Mall
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with stale cant that’s bought,
And legislation of great pith and moment
With this regard await a better day
Beyond the grasp of faction—Soft you now!
The Statue Liberty, in all thy orisons
Please be democracy remembered!

Alan Soffin, Ph.D., has taught at Michigan State and Temple. His Rethinking Religion: Beyond Scientism, Theism and Philosophic Doubt is published by Cascadia Press. His essays have appeared in Images of Youth (Peter Wang) and DreamSeeker magazine. His photography has been exhibited at the Tubac Center for the Arts. His avant-garde film Confessor (1968) was funded in part by the American Film Institute.

TO EMMA LAZARUS IN THE WAKE OF 45

by Gail Thomas

Art by Dow Phumiruk.

    
The mother of exiles is pissed, her lips
no longer silent. Her beacon hand
sputters against the brazen lout
who threatens to bolt the door.
When a mother is pissed,
you’d better watch out.
When a mother is tired
of your bullshit,
you’d  better watch out.
When a mother is backed
into a corner, she will use
her teeth and voice to protect
the weak, the huddled, the hurt.
Her name is Queen of Heaven,
Empress of Hell, Demeter,
Fatima, Kali, Yemaya,
Ptesan-Wi, Asasa Ya,
Gaia
Lady of All the World.



Art via Pinterest.

Gail Thomas has published four books of poetry, and her work appears in many journals and anthologies. Her chapbook Odd Mercy was chosen by Ellen Bass for the Charlotte Mew Prize of Headmistress Press, and Waving Back was named a Must Read for 2016 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.  She lives in Northampton, MA. Her last poem for TheNewVerse.News was published in 2012.

IN THE MOURNING

by Robert S. King

Detail of a cartoon by Edel Rodriguez used as the cover of Der Spiegel, February 4, 2017.

Some swear this country is not lost.
Not lost but dead, others say.
If the lost can be found
and the dead resurrected,
the climate will heal itself,
and deus ex machina
will shout down the storm.

Lockjaw keeps my mouth shut,
though sometimes liberal booze
can pry it open; sometimes
I’d like to be a meaner drunk.
If my coffee were stronger,
I might have the nerve
for a cup of coup d’etat.
Anything addictive, prescribed or not,
keeps me from doing the right thing,
keeps me half awake, tossing and turning,
knowing why the wind howls.

After storms of nightmares,
I awake to visions of  uninsured corpses
in the street and melted polar icecaps
flooding my front yard, of our lady
of liberty staggering drunk,
of soulless suits having their way with her.

Robert S. King lives in Athens, GA, where he serves on the board of FutureCycle Press and edits Good Works Review. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Negative Capability, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth (Sybaritic Press 2014) and Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014).

RENOVATIONS, THIRTY YEARS LATER

by Harold Oberman 

“The poet Emma Lazarus, moved by this unique symbol of the love of liberty, wrote a very special dedication 100 years ago.” —Ronald Reagan, in his Remarks on the Lighting of the Torch of the Statue of Liberty in New York, New York, July 3, 1986

We coated your flame in 24 carat gold
Pointed our spotlights at it and moved on,
A gilded reflection, not a beacon.

Mother of Exiles, we never enlightened you:

Now in our dark night
A man denied light makes fire
And that light concentrated on a point no longer illuminates.
It ignites.

Harold Oberman is a lawyer working and writing in Charleston, SC. He went to the University of Virginia where he took full advantage of the poets teaching in the English Department. The poems he wrote as an undergraduate that were deemed too political are now, in retrospect, not political enough.

RESISTANCE

by Joan Colby



You learn to build strength
By resistance. Hoisting the 10 pound weight
With your shattered wrist,
Screwed and bolted into a titanium plate
Inscribed with a disaster you’re
Overcoming.

If passive resistance means folding
Your hands in the semblance of prayer,
The resistance you are practicing
Is one of cold steel clutched
In your fist and lifted
Like the torch of liberty.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

PROTEST AT UNION SQUARE, NOVEMBER 12, 2016

by Sarah Stern

A woman holds a poster regarding safety pins as a sign of solidarity against intolerance during a protest against US President-elect Donald Trump at Union Square on November 12, 2016, in New York. Americans spilled into the streets Saturday for a new day of protests against Donald Trump, even as the president-elect appeared to back away from the fiery rhetoric that propelled him to the White House. AFP via Inquirerer.Net

This is what democracy looks like
                Radishes, scallions and brown bread
No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here
                Emma Lazarus, let's please have lunch today

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free
                You wrote that poem already
A prayer for our country
                Emma Lazarus, come with me to shul today

Sit with me by Lady Liberty
                The New York Harbor, Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah
The little girl on her dad's shoulders down 16th street
                Holding on with me.

Sarah Stern is the author of But Today Is Different (Wipf and Stock) and Another Word for Love (Finishing Line Press). She is Associate Director of Communications at Bank Street College of Education and lives in New York City.

SAFE HARBOR

by Louisa Calio

Maria Luisa Catrambone and her parents Christopher and Regina, founders of Migrant Offshore aId Station (MOAS). The BBC interview with Maria Luisa Catrambone is available here.

The same year I took my first cruise
and looked out at the dark blue fathomless sea
recalling all those seafarers’ stories
Ulysses, the dangers he passed, before reaching home
as well as my ancestral journeys by ship from Italy to America

Was the same year my eyes burned with tears
watching scores of migrants flee the Port of Libya
across the dark blue Mediterranean
in over-crowed inflatable dinghies
barely able to move or breathe
some drowning during the passage

Hoping to escape war, death and misery
men, women and children
risked everything for the hope of something better
Taken by traffickers, reminiscent of slave traders
profiteers of human misery

While nations debated
willing to spend millions on vessels to stop them
and not a dollar to take them in.
Just when my heart was a dark ocean of grief
about to consume me
I turned on the BBC and heard the voice of Maria Luisa Catrambone.

Daughter of an American father and Italian mother
who left college to relocate to Malta
to rescue migrants with her family
Offering food, water and medicine
to the lonely, lost and suffering
through tender open hands

Filled my heart again
Compassion turned to action.
Having known the greater purpose
beyond comfort and security
The trust that fills you with a knowing
that any resource you may need will appear
as if offered by the hand of God

The people with no Statute of Liberty or Ellis Island
to welcome them in
Have a Ship, the Phoenix,
offering safe harbor to the tired, the hungry, the poor
reminding us once more, “No man is an Island”
There is room at the Inn!


Louisa Calio is an internationally published, award winning author, whose work has been translated into Italian, Sicilian and Korean. Winner of first prize for her poem “Bhari” City of Messina, finalist for Poet Laureate of Nassau County, Director of the Poet’s Piazza at Hofstra University’s Italian Experience for 12 years, her latest book, Journey to the Heart Waters was published by Legas Press in 2014.

A MIGHTY WOMAN WITH A TORCH

by Donna Barkman

MADISON, WI (WKOW August 27, 2013) -- Capitol Police have been arresting the Solidarity Singers for gathering without a permit since late July.  But for the first time on Monday, those arrests turned violent.

Lady Liberty on Lake Mendota.

They forced me to my knees—the censors
and the haters of your speech, no longer free.
The cost of congregating: a strong fence
and the punishment for protest songs, a fee
or jail time— length to be decided.
My mouth is gagged, I gasp for breath
since they wrapped me, thickly iced,
strait-jacketed, to await my death.
But my tablet bears the law of freedom—
still!—and dated Independence Day,
so legislators are forewarned we’ll come
to march and sing, and have our say.
Imprisoned lightning – my torch – will thaw
our frozen rights:  reclaim our law!

          
Author's note: Text in italics from "The New Colossus" (1883) by Emma Lazarus, engraved on The Statue of Liberty.

Donna Barkman lived in Madison in the 70s and watched Miss Liberty on ice from her office window in Helen C. White Hall.  Since then, she continued as a librarian and added the job titles of performer, writer and teacher.