AI

by Tricia Knoll

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” —Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas

Under a roof of paper lanterns strung across Jogye Temple in downtown Seoul, a group of monks from the Jogye Order, Korea's largest Buddhist sect, sat across from a postulant awaiting a precept ceremony—except that postulant was the country's first humanoid robot to take part in the ritual. —The Korea Times, May 6, 2026

Summon billionaires. Lawmakers. Researchers. Have they felt confusion?  Must I warn the senior in memory care that her lovey robot dog may not really love her when her son is grateful it does not poop on her rug. Or should I thank the robots diving in Antarctica to assess the salinity, churn, and effect of wind on disappearing sea ice., those that replace cement on the ocean floor to encourage coral building. Or the one that assists in gall bladder surgery. Do I bow beside Gabi, the robot at the South Korean Buddhist Temple, who takes his vows wearing red robes among the hanging lanterns at his initiation ceremony. Asimov’s Zeroth law, the one that says the robot may not harm humanity. Who foresees all hues of harm? The Pope? The head of cultural affairs for Gabi’s order? What hand or eye guides the robot in the war machine?  In confusion, I am not alone. What robot holds my hand? With whom do I pray? 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who lives in the woods. She read Asimov a lot many decades ago.

CONSTRUCTIONS

by Tricia Knoll

AI video created by Nightcafé for The New Verse News.

Bowerbirds do it. Paper wasps. The beaver’s mound accessible from under water.  Such a soft spot we hold for nest builders, from weavings to cups and knot-hole drillers. My two grandsons built two forts of fallen limbs leaned up against beech tree trunks. I can stand up in the bigger one to admire the couch dragged into one corner, a broken log. In the hands of the ultra-rich, the opposable thumb demands grandiose. Outrageous and expensive. Palaces. A home with its own power plant. Walled compounds. Cliff-top villas. Gilded mansions. Subject to the whims of time, rot, fire, and penury. Shelley on the narcissist’s build: “Nothing besides remains.” Prince Prospero’s ballroom could not withstand the contagion of the red death. Vanity and striving after the wind. What happened to the angel who saved three men who refused to bow down to King Nebuchadnezzar’s gold statue. She chastised the sneer of cold command known as retribution. The artifice of blue-tinged pools. As for the Arch, what words carved there would memorialize war, lies, inflation, tears of the hungry, sick and veterans betrayed. Good people disappeared. Such lone and level sands stretch far away. 

Most poets have memorized many of their favorite poems. Tricia Knoll is sort of stuck with Shelley's Ozymandias. In recent months she has moved from free verse to prose poetry. Her chapbook The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club Chapbook contest. Wild Apples details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. She is a Contributing Editor to Verse Virtual.

HINGE DAY

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

So much needs exercising, soothing for the opening to beyond and next. Where applause for sun reverberates across plains and oceans to replace fumes of exhaust. Even on the balconies of apartments in my hometown. My car hides in the garage to avoid the steep price of gas. I plot where to scatter a bag of saved marigold and zinnia seed. Where mornings come unchallenged by worst-yet shock. When the bully pulpit voice, a vulgar weaving from Greenland to birthright, issues ultimatums that seem to threaten using nukes to resurrect the stone age and abuses the many names we use for god. A cardinal teeters on my fencepost listening to the oven bird. 

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Her poems appear in journals and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples (Fernwood Press) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she now writes mostly prose poems. Fernwood Press will publish her full-length poetry book, Gathering Marbles, in July 2027. Knoll serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.

THIS IS A TEST. THIS IS A TEST.

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

 

Today on the radio the Bach fugue in B minor stands in for the emergency alert system two-tone blast before a three-tone blurt signaling end of alert. Theme, counterpoint and fragments in the coda. While missiles explode over Tel Aviv, ignite a Dubai hotel. One got the Supreme Leader. Another pulverizes a girl’s school in Iran. Kansas declares IDs of transgender people invalid. A preacher explains intergenerational trauma within the legacy of slavery. The BBC reports 72 tigers in Thailand have died recently of distemper. If it takes a minute to open a bottle, pour out a pill and take it, I have spent 456 days of my life swallowing an antidepressant. (And I thought it was lame that I have spent more than 12 weeks celebrating Christmas Days.) This is a test. This is a test. Going forward, how sad will life be?

 

Vermont poet Tricia Knoll is writing a book of poetry about sadness, The Run-on Story. Her next poetry book Gathering Marbles about aging will come out from Fernwood Press in 2027. 

BOARD GAME

by Tricia Knoll

Trump threatens to sideline Exxon from Venezuela’s oil: ‘They’re playing too cute’  —CNBC, January 12, 2026

Favored tokens in Monopoly are still Top Hat and Scottie Dog. Today the Battleship gets new attention. A miniature assault rifle and tankers with modifiable flags have appeared in our box thanks to wise-ass teenagers in my house. They used AI to make genius modifications to the board too. Players can build pipelines on Venezuela’s Carabobo, Intercampo, Tia Juana and Lagunillas oil fields. Rolling penalties: go to Cuba, jail or Greenland. Suffer bankruptcy. The young designers ditched the rail lines and Water Works in favor of oil companies though the Electric Company has some cachet. Plaza de la Candelaria and El Centro have replaced the outdated landings of Oriental and States Avenues. The dollar is the paper currency unless you decide to gamble, flicking a spinner to take advantage of or risk fluctuating exchange rates for Bolivars. Names of docks replace the red properties. Park Place and Boardwalk are too iconic to change. The kids kept Vermont because we live there. I dug out Miss Scarlet from Clue as my piece. A woman token. What never changes in Monopoly is the marching. Around and around, never knowing if or when the game ends. Or what the battleship will do next. 

Tricia Knoll's family had a Monopoly game set up in the basement of their Illinois house to play during times of tornado warnings. She never liked the game. After 18 years of writing free verse published in dozens of journals and nine collections, she now focuses on prose poems.

DROPPING OFF THE NATIVITY

by Tricia Knoll

For the community of Winooski [Vermont], the week following Thanksgiving began with a disturbing absence: a second-grade student’s desk was empty. What followed was a rapid-fire sequence of press releases, emotional pleas, and contradictory reports that have left many Vermonters confused about how a seven-year-old boy went from a holiday road trip to a federal detention center in Texas. —Compass Vermont, December 7, 2025

Handmade of painted paper mâché, the figures of the old nativity scene rest in the tattered box I pick up at the church bazaar for $2. Baby Jesus. A goat. Two men with lambs on their shoulders. Mary. Joseph. Five wise men bearing gifts. Two identical angels hinting this might be a combination from two original sets. A blue angel who cannot stand up. A flimsy barn and dry grass. I leave it on the doorstep where my favorite children live, hoping someone might tell the children the story of outcasts, love and humble housing. How Christmas got its name. Even if they use pagan filters. A text arrives: their house doesn’t do nativity. It’s going to Goodwill. I ask for it back. The news: ICE pulled over a seven-year-old and his mother in Illinois. Originally from Ecuador, they live in the town just upriver from me. The child’s school was the first declared sanctuary school in Vermont. The mother and child are now in detention in Texas. The superintendent of schools works to raise money for legal aid, to help the father contact them. Inside me sounds like sanctuary, mercy, peace, star of hope and love reverberate like the striking of a distant temple bell. 

Tricia Knoll's hometown of Williston, Vermont is the center of ICE's national data collection and the place scouring social media to find evidence of immigrants without citizenship. She is a poet currently writing in prose. Her chapbook The Unknown Daughter was recently a finalist in the New England Poetry Club chapbook contest.

WHY I SHOW UP ON WEDNESDAY AT 4:30 PM ON THE CURB ACROSS FROM 188 HARVEST LANE IN MY HOMETOWN

by Tricia Knoll

Google Maps photo of 188 Harvest Lane, Williston. It houses the "Law Enforcement Support Center," ie the ICE national data collection facility.

Because I can carry a chair to sit in for one hour

Because I remember what sit in means

Because they will not let us be on their side of the street

Because workers inside need a gated parking lot 

Because the building has only mirror windows

Because we can’t see inside but know enough

Because workers inside can see out

Because they shuffle national data about who will be deported from where and when

Because they maneuver to disappear people 

Because they refuse to share information

Because on this side of the street, we are 13, a jury plus one

Because we vow silence, meditate, stare back at their mirror glass

Because fear brings me back 

Because where else will my tears go

Tricia Knoll lives not far from this ICE national data collection facility in Williston, Vermont. She has joined a group of people to sit across the street from this facility on Wednesday afternoons to remind ourselves and others driving by that the machinations of ICE are continuous, ongoing.

BLESSED BE THE CHEESEMAKERS

by Tricia Knoll

May Day Rally, 2025 in Williston, Vermont organized by Green Mountain Democratic Socialists of America one of 12 in the state

 

We showed up to listen and march to the ICE Law Enforcement Support Center. Seniors carried signs about social security, flaming images of President Trump, and due process. Palestinian flags waved. Folk singers warmed us up. The Nonviolent Medicaid Army handed out invitations to events featuring soup and healthcare stories. We received playbills printed with the chants for the marching. 

                  Workers united will never be defeated. 

                  Show me what democracy looks look

                  This is what democracy looks like. 

 

Handbills from the activists for migrant justice and labor rights: 

From the fight for the eight-hour day to the Civil Rights Revolution…

the decisive factor that turns the impossible into the inevitable. 

 

We walked for eight dairy farm workers, ages 22 to 41, from the Pleasant Valley Farm in Berkshire, Vermont. A farm whose owners are relatives of Elle St. Pierre, the Olympic 3,000 meter runner that all of Vermont cheered for – including Senator Bernie Sanders (who ran the mile in high school and college) and called Elle “Vermont’s Proud Dairy Farmer.” These men have names – Jesus, Juan, Luis, Urillas, Diblaim, Adiran, Jose, and Dani. In Vermont dairy farming is the primary source of agricultural income. We like our cheddar white. We mourn the ongoing loss of family dairy farms. 

At the head of the march, a drumming band. Banners and signs.  Old folks with walkers and canes. Babies in strollers. We stood outside the ICE center where three white cars with Homeland signs parked. Three stout officers stood in the driveway. We chanted as if walking gave us new breath. As if we could blow the house down. 

Our prayer: Blessed be the cheesemakers. 

Tricia Knoll lives in Vermont, the state with the second smallest population. She likes her cheddar white.

TO THE ERASER

by Tricia Knoll

after Elon Musk’s posting on Xwitter the video of Milton Friedman’s use of a pencil to explain world trade.

Erasing seems obsolete. We delete,
Seldom switch away rubbery debris.
(Some poets cross-hatch
the words they want to keep
but know should go,
gimmick-choice.)
 
To mistakes with no reminders.
Paper without blemishes. 
 
School bus yellow
and shades of graphite
smog on a very hard day 
 
but the pencil has come of age—
icon of interdependence, 
cedar and rubber, metal tourniquet
 
around tariffs in supply chains
that bind rebounding erasures 
of migrants, protestors, equity, 
inclusion, earned retirement security,
health care and the welfare
of children. 

The pencil writes Chinese

as well as English. 

Tricia Knoll grimaces at the Trumpian erasures of truth, of people, of traditions, and promises. She writes dozens of postcards to elected officials using pens so as not to be completely erased.

DARK TIMES

by Tricia Knoll

“CPAC speech transcript aka Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before” by Jesse Duquette

We talk about now as if ominous shadows smear our thinking toward inevitable end times. Balance the probabilities of the asteroid coming too close with betting on the Super Bowl coverage of who will get more time on the camera: the girlfriend or the President. Trying to understand the ferocious truth of half-time rapper lyrics while dancers recombine the colors of the American flag to taunt a black Uncle Sam. Race. Religion. War. Lies. Impossible alliances. Obsequious sort-of-leaders speak mumbly words. Babies starve inside aid tents flapping in the wind until the tents disappear.  No one is sure where their food is tied up on a dock. We look askance at neighborly birds and ask if we are expected to laugh at a man who would be king. A poet says this is when we sing the dark songs. Few people, not enough for a loud chorus, seem to have learned the words. There are so many dark songs. Another says this is the time to rise. Maybe it is, but the planes are crashing. And I am snow blind. 

Poet Tricia Knoll has four-foot icicles hanging from the eaves of her house in Vermont. She shatters them with shovels as panacea for the angst of these days. She had measles as a child and knows it is no joke. Links to her nine books and dozens of published poems some of which are songs to the dark times at https://triciaknoll.com

FINE PRINT

by Tricia Knoll

Corporations make it so small you don’t

    read a word of it as if they save paper

    by cramming everything together 

what privacy you give up

hidden costs

contraindications, side effects –

one decreases cognitive abilities

on a drug doctors said I needed

as I age. Getting old

brings out glasses,

prescription or straight 

from the pharmacy rack. 

Woe: when it isn’t 8-point 

type, when it’s spelled out big

with a flaunty signature 

of a President who hates they, them

pronouns, turns the tables on being born

on safe soil, pardons killers, changes

the name of the highest mountain 

on the continent—the Great One. 

And on and on, writ large.  

Might as well be billboards

his words that make

my heart ache—what irony

I can’t even read his floozy signature. 

 

Tricia Knoll is an aging Vermont poet and feminist who hasn't yet conquered the heartache for women of losing the write to choose health care in so many states. She has nine collections in print, both full-length books and chapbooks. She is a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual. She wonders how liberal folks will move forward in the coming years. 

LAND MINES

by Tricia Knoll

The Biden administration has approved supplying Ukraine with American anti-personnel mines to bolster defenses against Russian attacks as Ukrainian front lines in the country’s east have buckled, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday. —The New York Times, November 20, 2024

I hear those words and think of Diana

in head gear walking in Angola,

 

facing pitfalls and explosives

as she walked for peace. 

 

I hear those words and remember that rat

Magawa who won a gold medal for sniffing,

 

alerting and the giant Gambian pouch rats

that followed, searching for buried armaments, 

 

whom handlers named Harry Potter and Godiva. Rats

that live nine years, a good training investment. 

 

Battlefields laced with mines to remove legs and end lives,

in places distant from me – Iran, Iraq, Sudan,

 

Syria, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, and more

My country never a signatory to the treaty

 

to prohibit them. The cost to make a mine

one hundredth of the cost to remove. 

 

I thought of land mines and never thought

my people would plant them 

 

in fields sowed for sunflowers.  

Tricia Knoll has no great love for rats, having lived with a few, but respects the capabilities of  pouched rats. Her work appears widely in journals and nine publications, either full-length books or chapbooks. She is a Contributing Editor to the online poetry journal Verse Virtual. She is grateful to The New Verse News for allowing her to write feelings that the news of today sparks.

OCTOBER 31

by Tricia Knoll

Photo by Nathaniel Kelly at Flickr.

Halloween scares her. That surprises me—

she is sixty, sexy and beautiful. Would make

a glamorous witch. Barbie’s mother. 

 

Perhaps it’s plastic skeletons two stories tall,

memories of falling in a puddle in a ballerina costume

on the way to a neighbor’s door, gauze ghosts

dangling from naked limbs, costume party

shootings. Zombie and Yorick skulls on leafy lawns. 

Or family feuds over dividing her dead 

father’s assets. Her brother’s cleaver. 

 

Or porches and lanterns doused in acrylic webs

and jack o’ lanterns whose smiles sag in mold.

TV images of fractured concrete in bombed out enclaves. 

Forty-two million tons of rubble, 36 cubic feet each ton, 

a grave takes 120 cubic feet. Flinch. The dead walk

starved, confused. Hamlet’s father’s ghost refuses

to speak. A revived corpse never asks

for a Kiss or Snickers. 

 

Maybe it’s money. Twelve billion

on starbursts, skittles, candy corn, and twix.

You could buy half an island with a fog bell

in San Francisco Bay. Climate chaos 

balloons the cost of chocolate. 

 

Days narrow. Clocks reset and whack rhythms.

Lively green folds into loam. We hear carols. 

Ads run for books of evangelical horror 

and Amish romance. Stuffed Santas 

line pharmacy shelves beside pumpkin

plastic pails of high fructose corn syrup.

Flimsy polyester dinosaur suits crawl

to landfills. Few believe in reasons

to wear masks. What am I to do? 

Write another starlight promise

poem? Light the bonfire? 

Hug her? Kiss her cheek?

Tricia Knoll has usually enjoyed the Halloween season, but not so much this year. Too much angst about election weirdness. She can't stop from thinking about all the money spent on the holiday and how much is needed in war zones. Her poetry is published in nine either full-length books or chapbooks with information at triciaknoll.com

REQUIEM FOR THE CANADA WELL

by Tricia Knoll

in memory of Rachel Corrie

Lying semi-conscious… is nine-year-old Yunis Jumaa, who has cerebral palsy… His mother Ghanima says eight months of war have dramatically worsened his health. "When he developed this malnutrition and dehydration, he became as you see him now," she says. "There is no bottled water. The children walk a long distance—when they get water it reaches us contaminated," she adds. —BBC, June 21, 2024

On Friday, I discovered a video posted on Instagram by an Israeli soldier from the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, showing the calculated demolition of a chief water facility in Rafah…The water facility, also known as the Canada Well, is situated in Tel Sultan Neighborhood, in the western part of Rafah city. U.S. human rights activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to prevent demolitions in the city, spent much of her time during the last month of her life helping to protect the municipality workers at the Canada Well. The workers were repairing damage done to the well due to the Israeli military bulldozers in the area, according to Gordon Murray, one of her fellow activists. —Younis Tirawi, Portside, July 29, 2024

To know the land, dig for water.
An angel found Hagar at the well.
Stories told of Rebekah and the women
coming together where the pool stills,
the well fills in slow rising. To find
stillness and life. Safe haven. Give me
something cool to drink. I will love you.
Be my oasis. Honor the flow of vows. 
This is the spirit of life. 
 
And now, quiet municipal services:
no sirens. No flashing lights. Backhoes
attending to unanticipated main breaks,
diggers repairing the aftermath 
of earthquakes. Repair. Filter. Deliver. 
 
Villains poison the well.
Cruelty blows it up—
we are told from old times
women gather
to carry water home
again and again
going to the well. 

Tricia Knoll worked for a municipal water utility for fifteen years, including emergency response to New Orleans following Katrina to help restore drinking water service. In 2024, two new poetry books were published: Wild Apples (poems of downsizing and moving 3,000 miles to Vermont) and The Unknown Daughter (27 poems of voiced personas responding to a Tomb of the Unknown Daughter).

JULY NIGHT AFTER THE SHOT AT TRUMP

by Tricia Knoll

I open a fortune cookie with my take-out 
egg fu young from Men at Wok. No fortune. 
 
Fewer fireflies than last week light up
this humid July night.
 
The grass needs mowing. Jewel weed
takes over the woods.
 
The first bitternut hickory falls from
the trees looming over my skylights. 
 
My shy dog flinches like the nut
is a bullet aimed at her easy life. 
 
I read a list of assassinations.
Kids learned about Lincoln.
 
I remember Kennedys, King,
and Milk. One King, a Mayor,
 
of Mt Pleasant, Iowa shot
when a citizen’s sewage backed up. 
 
Of course, the gun was an AR 15, 
what the  NRA calls America’s gun.
 
A long night unrolls with drips
of information. The names of the dead
 
withheld. Lamentations in the fairground
field. Endless replays of a bloody ear. 
 
I swat at the mosquito buzzing in mine. 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet old enough to vividly remember the shooting of President Kennedy announced to her high school over a public address system while she took a French test. Her most recent chapbook The Unknown Daughter contains persona poems linked to reactions in a community that houses the Tomb of the Unknown Daughter.

A LOOK BACK FROM AGING

by Tricia Knoll

I wore a peace symbol bandana on my arm

when I received a professional degree 

from the Yale graduate school in 1970. 

I marched with candles in California,

put my butt down in an administrator’s office

at Stanford. I did not know then the extent

of my privilege. 

 

We walked. We assembled, chanted

simple words to a drumbeat. We saw

villages destroyed, lives ripped from

ancestral homes. Some of our parents

agreed with what we were doing, but

not all. Not mine. Despite the deaths,

the endlessness of destruction,

hopelessness, despair. 

 

I began to teach high school and met 

refugees. The first to arrive spoke

French, English and Vietnamese. 

A teen described the airlift from the embassy.

How he left his white dog behind. Later

I met Hmong and Mien whose lives

started harder.  

 

I cannot assume that to be pro-Palestinian

is to be an anti-Semite. I’m old enough

to know that flinging slurs gets us nowhere. 

I cry over young children starving to death

in Gaza, mothers giving birth in rubble. 

The clashing words of our leaders seem weak.

Money speaks, what must say do not kill

any more innocents. Insist money be spent

for humans wrapped inside carnage to live, 

eat, shelter, sleep, learn, grow. Open

the walls to food, good food.  

 

Arresting the protesting young enflames.

Horses, soldiers in camo, zip ties. Gaza

is filled with tent cities. Torn tents. 

 

I live in Vermont. My electeds oppose spending

more money for lethal weapons for Israel.

I thank them. When we hear support for Israel

is ironclad—that must not mean only bombs

and guns, the weapons of metal. Our mettle

must stand for the children, the men and women

who have nowhere to go, yet hear threats

that more and worse is yet to come.

Tricia Knoll, an aging Vermont poet, understands what drives campus protests. Her poetry collections often focus on eco-poetry (One Bent Twig) or personal responses to feminism and privilege (How I Learned to be White and The Unknown Daughter).