ABORTIFACIENCE

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

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

The Trump administration has just sent $10m worth of birth control to be burned—rather than donate it as aid. The supplies, including pills and implants, have already been paid for by US taxpayers—and will cost another $167,000 to destroy. —The Independent (UK), July 29, 2025

Abortifacience is a word you may

Be unaware of: it's the use of meds

Or other agents to abort. Today

Republicans—who are at loggerheads

This week with global charities about

Incinerating contraceptive aid

For Senegal—have used the word without

Awareness of its meaning: what's unmade

Can not abort. The condom, coil or pill

Is saving lives, not ending them. The stocks

Expire not soon. America pays nil—

Not one red cent—to ship them to the docks ...

Can you explain why they'd be set alight—

Excepting that the reason is pure spite?

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic poems have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post and WestWard Quarterly.

PICTURES OF PEACE IN OUR TIME, PROTECTION IN OUR DAY

by Michelle DeRose

A paper badge held aloft over eyes

thirteen years’ wide, the funds to find

their cure cut. Texas brothers,

three and five, their mother dead

in the state’s bid to keep the unviable

alive. Women moved to men’s prisons

to prevent concussions in girls’ sports;

the study of injuries among girls removed.

Four hundred million dollars rescinded

for failure to stop campus harassment

one week after three Gentiles circled

and humiliated, pointed and shouted

to muffle the modestly dressed Jewish man’s

assertions he’s not playing that game.

This whether we like it or not.

Newly named Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michelle DeRose’s poetry won the Chancellor’s Prize in 2024 and the Faruq Z Bey Award in 2023 from the Poetry Society of Michigan. Her poetry has been published in dozens of venues, most recently The New Verse News, Sparks of Calliope, The Midwest Quarterly, and Dunes Review, and is forthcoming in Months to Years and One Hundred Poems for Hearing Dogs (anthology). She is participating in the 2025 Stafford Challenge—a cohort of poets who have committed to writing a poem a day for a year. The daily news supplies plenty of material for that effort.

MISS-SPOKE

by Adele Evershed

I Google the name of the new White House
Press Secretary—Karoline Leavitt—
and find she’s young—27,
the youngest press secretary in history.
This, and the fact she is a woman doing a difficult job,
should make me like her,
so I start to listen. 
Her manner is abrasive,
like a loofah on your ear,
rubbing my skin the wrong way.
But sometimes an album is more than its cover,
so I persevere.
She cycles through her talking points:
Egg prices—blame sleepy Joe Biden,
Trump’s visit to North Carolina—
like the hand of God.
a plane crashing—DEI policies.
Round and round,
like a malevolent Barbie News Anchor.
All the while the cross at her throat
bops about virtue signaling
like a protest outside an abortion clinic,
‘I’m only doing what Jesus wants.’ 
But on someone who has no virtue,
it’s just another fashion accessory,
the same as Madonna’s
when she sang, ‘Like a Virgin’
(and Karoline—definitely no virgin,
 married a man 32 years her senior,
 had a baby six months after the wedding—just saying). 
Her fake smile is as nauseating, 
as her ‘Make America Blonde Again' t-shirt.
Then she tweets about education— 
how it should only clothe a child
in those below the knee old fashions— 
Reading, Writing and ‘Rithmetic
AND NOTHING ELSE.
As a teacher I think—
maybe she has a point
because if she knew her ABCs,
she’d spell Karoline with a C.


Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who now lives in America. You can find some of her work in Grey Sparrow Journal, Anti Heroin Chic, Gyroscope, and Janus Lit. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press), The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press) and an upcoming chapbook, In the Belly of the Wail, with Querencia Press.

POEM TO RUMI

for my granddaughter

by Tina Williams

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

“Ken Paxton sues New York doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to Texas woman: This case sets up a legal battle between Texas’ near-total abortion ban and New York’s shield law that protects doctors from out-of-state prosecution.” —The Texas Tribune, December 13, 2024

A week before the election,

my neighbor next door overnight

posted a Women for Trump

sign and I was too incensed

the next day to wave to her

as she stood on her porch

with a smile as big as Texas

which is where we live

and where my 17-year-old

granddaughter could be raped

tomorrow and made to bear

the damage done

no questions asked.

 

Meanwhile Rumi 

calls from a wall

in my office

that out beyond 

the ideas 

of wrongdoing 

and rightdoing

there is a field

and that we should 

meet each other there

but, Rumi, my dear 

dead Sufi poet,

you never met

my neighbor's 

grab ’em 

by the pussy hero.

 

You never saw

freckles dance

on my 

granddaughter’s

cheeks.

 

In some poems 

there is a field 

too far.

Tina Williams’s poems have appeared in the San Pedro River Review, Quartet Journal, Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Stone Poetry Journal, and Green Ink Poetry.

ODE TO A MAGA FUTURE

by Peter Witt

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

I don't care if 
Ukraine ends up a satellite of Russia
Israel annexes all Palestinian lands
Poland goes the way of Ukraine
NATO goes defunct

as long as egg prices go down.

I don't care if 
all judges are Trump appointees
gay marriage is outlawed
trans individuals are discriminated against
raped women must still have their babies

as long as bread prices go down

I don't care if
rich people get huge tax breaks
oil and gas wells are drilled on pristine national lands
regulations allow polluting rivers and waterways
steps to reduce climate change are abandoned

as long as the cost of a gallon of gas goes down

I don't care if
things I buy that are made in China become more expensive
illegal immigrants are rounded up and sent home
people to harvest the nation's crops become scarce
workers who build housing and infrastructure disappear

as long as Christian nationalism becomes the law of the land

Peter Witt is a Texas poet, a frequent contributor to The New Verse News and other online poetry web-based publications.

MORAL CLARITY

by Julie Steiner

Photograph: Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters via The Guardian

    Asked by CBS News [on Friday] what he would advise a Catholic voter forced to choose between a candidate who backs abortion rights and one who has said he would have 11 million migrants deported, the pope said: “They are both against life—the one who throws away migrants and the one who kills children.” 

     ...Asked whether there were any circumstances under which it would be morally permissible for a Catholic to vote for a candidate who does support abortion rights, Francis said when considering political morality, “one must vote.”

    "One must choose the lesser of two evils," he said. "Who is the lesser of two evils, that lady or that gentleman, I do not know." 

 

One has to vote,
declared Pope Francis with a sigh.
One has to vote.
Dilemma’s horns are at one’s throat.
Abstention’s not an option. Try.
Although both options cast a “Die,”
one has two. Vote.

Choose the lesser
evil. (Both are bad, in short.)
Choose the lesser,
quoth the pontiff at his presser:
Pick either A (Deport! Deport!)
or B (Let those who could abort
choose.) “The lesser

of two evils”
assumes they’re not equatable.
Of two evils,
which brings fewer lives upheavals?
Choose the not-as-hateable —
“And which is that?” “Debatable.” —
of two evils.

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego, California. Besides The New Verse News, the venues in which Julie's poetry has appeared in the past year include Literary Matters, Light, and The Asses of Parnassus.

A BANNER DAY IN FLORIDA

by Michelle DeRose

Alan Gratz’s “Ban This Book” tells the tale of a fourth-grader’s quest to bring her favorite book back to the school library after officials had it removed. Late last month, a Florida school district banned “Ban This Book.” A parent involved in Moms for Liberty, a right-wing parents-rights group, submitted a complaint about the book in February, alleging that it depicted sexual conduct and was “teaching children to be social justice warriors.” Though a school district committee recommended that “Ban This Book” be kept on shelves, the Indian River County school board voted to ban it last month. —The Washington Post, June 13, 2024

So thin bands of women who love 
liberty (because their heads-of-households 
told them to) banned the book 
Ban This Book. If words don’t build it, 
it never happened. Scrub climate change
from state websites and Florida’s coast 
rises like Lazarus. Certain words, like loaves
and fishes, work double miracles. 
With no gender queers, some gun 
violence disappears in a pulse. 
Requiring proof of rape for abortions 
erases abortion and rape with a stranger’s
magic wand that, waved in a yard,
transforms twelve year-olds to the most noble
profession. They might wed NFL stars,
be the next to erase abuse in their world,
just a giant pink rubber in their clutch.

Michelle DeRose is Professor Emerita of English from Aquinas College. She lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

TRUMP'S ABORTION CONTORTION

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

“Trump’s abortion position” by Dave Whamond

Days after saying that abortion policies should be left to the states, former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday criticized an Arizona court ruling for upholding an 1864 law that banned nearly all abortions...Yet even as he suggested his disapproval...Mr. Trump defended the position he took in a video statement on Monday, when he said that states should weigh in on abortion through legislation. —The New York Times, April 10, 2024, Updated April 13, 2024.

 

Trump varies his stand on abortion.

If only his prospects were dim.

This country could ward off distortion

By taking a stand against him.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 280 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, The Galway Review, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had three previous poems in The New Verse News.

HEMORRHAGE BOP

by Cindy Veach

I watch three old white men on the news talking

about abortion how it’s no big deal for a woman

to get a bus ticket and travel to another state.

It’s trending on X, these old men in their suits and ties

with their limp cocks tucked away under the table

their small hands gesturing or resting on the table.

 

I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.

 

And now Arizona has upheld a draconian Civil War-era

abortion law proving that the past does come back

to haunt. I almost bled out after my daughter’s birth.

I’ve never written about this. It took a helicopter

and two D&C’s to save me. A hundred years ago

I would have died of childbirth. I marched for the right

to choose in my 20’s only to lose it in my 60’s

 

I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.

 

In the middle of yesterday the moon eclipsed the sun.

People were brought to tears as they watched

in their special protective glasses. People on both sides

of the aisle equally moved by the night of day.

The darkness I speak of is different. It digests everything

good and fattens the libidos of men.

 

I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.

Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.