THE STINGLESS BEE, RECOGNIZED

by Martin Elster

Stingless bees from the Amazon have become the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world, in a breakthrough supporters hope will be a catalyst for similar moves to protect bees elsewhere. —The Guardian, December 29, 2025

We’ve been here since Cretaceous times,

predating all your categories.

Now, as in some horror stories,

killer bees have come with crimes.

 

The forest shrinking, climate drift,

chemicals—how can we cope?

But now your courts declare there’s hope.

We’re “recognized.” A gift—a shift

 

in ethics? We have gained the right

to live. We have our age-old laws,

and we enforce them without flaws.

Will you now do the same to fight

 

and show up for what you regard

as vital, enforce the words you’ve penned

to make sure this is not the end?

Guarding us from yourselves is hard!

The winner of the 2022 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, Martin Elster comes from Hartford, CT, where he studied percussion and composition at the Hartt School of Music and performed with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Martin, whose poetry has been strongly influenced by his musical sensibilities, has written two books, the latest of which is From Pawprints to Flight Paths: Animal Lives in Verse (Kelsay Books)..

LULA WINS!

by Indran Amirthanayagam

We have a chance

 

to reduce the burning and looting of the Amazon.

 

We have a chance

 

to support green technologies in one of the world's ten largest economies.

 

We have a chance

 

that the poor, the left out and the abused will have a champion again in the Alvorada Palace.

 

We have a chance

 

that a reasonable, negotiating left-of-center government will join hands with its neighbors and work towards climate justice and advancing human rights worldwide.

 

We have a chance

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

 

FIRST ROUND, BRAZIL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

The former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, speaking after election results were announced on Sunday. Mr. da Silva and President Jair Bolsonaro will face each other in a runoff later this month. Photo Credit: Victor Moriyama for The New York Times

Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times

It's a long night with strong emotion,
the whole world is listening to the results,
and after seventy percent counted
Lula finally has a slight advantage.
I am tranquil now, the world quiet. 
It's like the dice game between 
the Pandavas and the Kauravas, 
or between Putin and the allies,
 
or it's just an election. We must 
not let our fears get out. We 
will see tomorrow. Let's go 
to work for the Amazon 
 
rainforest, for humble workers 
who appreciate the labor of 
one of their own. Lula, my 
brother, even though I live 
 
far from Brazil, today and 
always, I join the community 
of the left, of human and animal 
rights, of plant, forest and land 
 
rights. of rights that are going
with you to the Alvorada Palace.

***

É uma longa noite com uma emoção forte,

todo o mundo está escutando os resultados
e depois de setenta por cento contado
Lula tem finalmente uma leve vantagem.
 
Estou tranquilo agora. O mundo 
é tranquilo. É como o jogo de dados 
entre os Pandavas e os Kauravas, 
o entre Putin e os aliados,
 
o é uma simples eleição. Não 
devemos deixar que os medos saiam. 
Veremos amanhã. Vamos 
a trabalhar para a Mata Amazonas, 
 
para os trabalhadores humildes 
que apreciam o labor dum deles, 
Lula, meu irmão. Ainda 
que moro longe da Brasil
 
hoje e sempre me uno 
a comunidade da esquerda, 
dos direitos humanos e animais, 
de direitos de plantas e de floresta, 
 
de direitos da terra, de direitos 
que vão com você ao Palácio da Alvorada.

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

I WANT TO MEET THE OWNER OF THE FIRST BOOKSTORE BROUGHT DOWN BY AMAZON

Confession of a UPS Driver

by T. R. Poulson

Amazon opens up Prime delivery service to other retailers in its latest move to compete with FedEx and UPS. —CNBC, April 21, 2022

I want to find a bar on a dark street

with a strange name, tucked in a city

I’ve never visited. I want to meet

the bankrupt bookstore owner, and make witty 

conversation only two passionate lovers

of books would understand. I’d order wine

and tell her I’ve punched gate codes, delivered

books from Amazon to folks off Skyline

Boulevard.  I’d say I’m sorry.  We would joke

about Anne Sexton, Dr. Seuss, and obscure 

heroes, villains. We’d share more wine, poke

fun at Hamlet, digress to Joshua, to a hooker

named Rahab, who once hung a red ribbon   

to save herself when foreigners toppled 

the walls of Jericho. We’d talk about hidden

twists and plots and dialog, hobbled

horses lipping grain from hands. We’d tell

secrets about who fucks whom and for how

much money. At two AM, we’d say farewell.

I’d pay the tab. I’d mingle, flirt, allow

a sleazy drunk to take me home, pretend

that everything he did to me felt good. 

T. R. Poulson, a University of Nevada alum and proud Wolf Pack fan, lives in San Mateo, California.  Her work has appeared in various journals, including Rattle, Mezzo Cammin, Booth, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, and previously in The New Verse News.  She supports her poetry habit by working as a UPS driver.

AMAZON

by Donna Katzin

On Friday [April 1, Christian Smalls] won the first successful unionization effort at any Amazon warehouse in the United States, one of the most significant labor victories in a generation. The company’s response to his tiny initial protest may haunt it for years to come. —The New York Times, April 2, 2022. Photo: Members of the new union celebrated in Brooklyn on Friday night. Credit: Eduardo Munoz Avarez/Associated Press

At the fulfillment center in Staten Island,      

every day a marathon, she logs 30 miles

in 12 hours on the warehouse floor,

wearing worn-out shoes she cannot afford to replace,

picking, packing boxes on dollies and hand trucks

before she clocks out.

Jeff Bezos, back from outer space,

could not finish one of her shifts.

 

Beneath fluorescent lights that never sleep,

during precious seconds between packages,

when her mind fights to focus,

she thinks of little ones

she left before breakfast,

not knowing whether she would

make it home to feed them dinner

or kiss them goodnight.

 

Computers track how fast she picks and packs

on the human conveyor belt,                               

evaluate her by algorithm,

feed back seconds per task,

pieces per minute, numbers to hit,           

speed up without notice or reason,

threaten to dismiss her                    

for missing her target rates.

 

Knees buckle, back rebels,                       

wrists and elbows numb, cramp.          

Stress takes its inner toll,   

presses veins and arteries,                                        

hangs heavy on her heart.

She reports to Amcare,                                  

is given an aspirin,                                           

sent back to the floor.                                       

 

But quietly, between shifts, 

as summer sweats and winter gnaws her weary bones,

she joins coworkers, shares indignities and injuries

by telephone and text, Twitter and Instagram,

in parking lots, food pantries and pews,

dares to tiptoe to a meeting,

whispers the word

union.

 

Donna Katzin is the founding and previous executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

ODDS AND ENDS

by Gil Hoy

Dan Hudson. "Garbage Can" (1992), oil on panel, 24×34 inches.

On Wednesdays, 

I take my trash down to the curb. 

There's a blue bin for recyclables, 

a black bin for regular trash

and a brown bin for yard waste. 

You can tell a lot about a man 

from the contents of his trash. 

 

Our neighbor is obsessed with Covid 

and now buys most of her things 

on Amazon. Her son got sick a year ago, 

was in intensive care for three weeks 

and then died. Her blue bin is filled 

with broken down boxes every week. 

 

Her husband stays inside and has started 

drinking again. There are three or four

empty wine or bourbon bottles 

in their blue bin every week. 

 

A divorcee a few houses down  

worries about getting old. Her black bin 

holds the week's trash from products 

promising to make her gray hair brown again 

and remove the wrinkles from her face. 

She's put on weight since her husband left her 

for a younger woman five years ago. 

There are often three or four 

empty pizza boxes in her black bin. 

 

You can tell a lot about a woman

from the contents of her trash. 

 

Another neighbor has three birch trees 

next to his driveway. His yard waste bin 

is filled with grass the yard boy cut 

and birch tree branches that once encroached 

upon his driveway. His shiny Mercedes 

can now get in and out again without a scratch. 

His regular trash bin has empty pill bottles 

used to keep his blood pressure down. He bought 

the Mercedes and keeps his yard carefully 

manicured to keep up with his neighbors.

 

A house up the road has two recyclable bins 

that are always full. The house's black bin 

never has much trash at all. The owner works 

for a company that reduces greenhouse gases 

and makes our water cleaner. The owner 

attends political events most nights 

focusing on climate change. 

 

You can tell a lot about people 

from the trash they don't have.

 

A neighbor on the next street over 

is an accountant. His blue bin is filled 

with shredded paper: tax schedules, 

financial statements and old tax returns. 

By the time April 15 comes around, 

he has three blue bins that are overflowing.

 

Another one of my neighbors 

doesn't play by the rules.  

He puts his trash out early most weeks. 

And then he's fined by our Town. 

He was arrested a while back 

for stealing money from his clients 

and had to spend a few years 

away from his family. 

 

You can tell a lot about a person  

from how they handle their trash.

  

And as for me, my trash is not 

what it used to be. My wife passed away 

suddenly and the kids have all grown up 

and moved away. I don't talk with them 

or see them much anymore. 

 

I miss the deflated balloons from birthday parties 

and worn out hockey skates that used to be 

in my black bin. And the leaves that filled 

my yard waste bin when I could sometimes 

get the boys to rake. I miss my wife's 

empty fancy shampoo bottles 

I used to put in my blue bin.

 

On a good week, when I'm eating well, 

my bins may be as much as a quarter full. 

But most weeks, they're as empty 

as an old man's broken heart.  

 

You can tell a lot about a man 

from the contents of his trash. 

Editor's note: The losses mentioned in the final four stanzas of the poem are suffered by the poem's Speaker and not, thankfully, by its author. 

 

 

Gil Hoy is a widely published Boston poet and writer who studied poetry and writing at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. While at BU, Hoy was on the wrestling team and finished in second place in the New England University Wrestling Championships at 177 lbs. He served as an elected Brookline, Massachusetts Select Board Member for four terms. Hoy is a semi-retired trial lawyer. His work has recently appeared in Best Poetry Online, Muddy River Poetry Review,  Tipton Poetry Journal, Rusty Truck,  Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Penmen Review, Misfit Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, Chiron Review, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. Hoy was nominated for a Best of the Net award last year.

PONDERING SPACE TRAVEL 2021

by Mary K O’Melveny

Jeff Bezos will soon soar out to deep space.

Someone with thirty million to spare

will join him in that endless place

we all struggle to comprehend, stare

at as if we could know it, trace

its contours, fix its borders. Where

does it end, this endless cash some chase?

 

As workers sweat and toil in nightmare

warehouses, such wealth will outpace

most whose dreams must rest elsewhere,

whose week’s small paycheck is embraced,

then quickly dispersed. Some might declare

the super-rich have every right to showcase

their successes. Others will despair

our grave inequities—just in case

one missed them—say it is quite unfair

to celebrate when most of the human race

struggles, starves, resides in threadbare

dwellings with no breathing space,

much less leisure time or medical care.

 

For most, three jobs won’t outpace

the bills. Yet, our daily news fare

carries front page tales without a trace

of irony about travels of billionaires,

as if their exploits might displace

raw fears, needs, demands, the wear

and tear of days grounded in place.

 

Still, our imaginations can take us there

even without cash for shuttle fares to space.

We can visit vast black holes that appear

to consume all light, marvel at defaced

meteorites, search long dead stars where

memories lie fallow waiting to be traced.

We can follow spurts of sunspots, the flare

of celestial meteor showers. There’s grace

in that truth. Almost like an answered prayer.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

RING

by Alejandro Escudé




A Motherboard report found Ring lacking basic security measures for preventing hackers from hijacking the devices. —threatpost, December 18, 2019


In the family of moments, there are unique
and strong passwords—living, bobbing like
ripe apples on the Tree of Knowledge, no snakes
coiled, ready to speak to you, to impersonate
God. The voice that comes at us from the ether
demanding we “Wake up!” like Mayakovsky’s sun.
We know better than to repeat our usernames,
passwords strung around our lives like
the rings around Saturn—a tall pot boiling,
a crackle from the device, and it is someone
talking to our daughter from the beyond.
The Ghost of Christmas Past? A horrible clown?
But why urge the child to destroy her room?
What a pinch one feels from this new reality.
Isn’t funny the things people will bring into
their house? A discarded needle, a live mine,
a tiger, a splintered chair, a vial of cyanide.
Once someone speaks to you from a device,
you cannot wash that out of your hair. It’smore
than an experience, it’s a like an experience
turned object; one you buy for the holidays
for instance, a device on which to order
a pizza or a Nintendo Switch box filled with
condoms and soda caps. All of human life
reduced to a child’s bedroom, liquified
on a small screen, the pinks pinker than pink
and the dark voice darker than darkness.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

MUSEUM OF IMPEACHMENT

by Anna M. Evans

After W.H. Auden

About the Republic, they were never wrong,
the Founding Fathers: how well they understood
Its vulnerability: how it could be taken down
While the people are ordering off Amazon or streaming Netflix dully along;
How, when the activists are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous vote, there always must be
Young people who did not specially want it to happen, eating
Avocado toast in a trendy new brunch place:
They never forgot
That probably the dreadful presidency must run its course
Anyhow on Fox News, the unlikely spot
Where the talk show hosts deny all facts (which is torture)
And then cut to a story about a horse.

In this Impeachment, for instance: how everyone turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the Republicans may
Have read the "transcript," considered forsaken Ukraine,
But for them it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the House Articles disappearing into the biased
Senate, and the expensive, delicate congressmen that must have seen
Something amazing, a president abusing his powers,
Had an election to get to and sailed calmly on.


Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her new collection Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection Sisters & Courtesans is available from White Violet Press.

ON THE AMAZON FIRES

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

As the Amazon burned and the world faced an ecological disaster, President Emmanuel Macron of France bluntly criticized Brazil’s leader this week and threatened to kill a major trade deal between Europe and Brazil. President Trump, on the other hand, posted a tweet only Friday evening, saying that the United States was ready to help contain the fires, but adding that “future trade prospects” between the United States and Brazil “are very exciting.” Photo: Under increasing international pressure to contain fires sweeping parts of the Amazon, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil on Friday authorized use of the military to battle the massive blazes. Credit:Leo Correa/Associated Press via The New York Times, August 24, 2019

                                i

                        my arms  scorched
                        with solidarity’s fire
                        ask   is this the world’s misplaced rage  
                                             or
                                                        is there some unknown  unseen  monster
                                             that feeds on our anger, fear, and hate
                                             that spews back flames
                                             to consume the earth's primal green breathing

                                                     ii

                                            the media question blares
                                            what can you do to help
                                            let your skin also burn
                                            with solidarity’s fire


Author’s note: I had a severe psoriasis flareup that began approximately the same time the Amazon fires began.


Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S. is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and TheNewVerse.News as well as in the anthologies The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannnan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker, and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recover for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published by Press 53 in 2015.

THE BIG PICTURE

by Devon Balwit

The destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil has increased rapidly since the nation’s new far-right president took over and his government scaled back efforts to fight illegal logging, ranching and mining. —The New York Times, July 28, 2019. Photo: Deforestation in the Western Amazon region of Brazil.CreditCarl De Souza/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times

The Amazon is ours, not yours, he says,
as if our fates could remain distinct, as if
his clearcutting didn’t squeeze
the air from our lungs, as if the surf

didn’t tumble trash from all continents
into the same vortex, as if our reefs
could keep their brightness despite vents
elsewhere off-gassing. It’s grief

I feel as he smiles and shakes hands with
his environmental minister. So happy
they seem to defraud the children of both
hemispheres of green. His economy

will rise but briefly before it fails,
as our shared earth sears and pales.


Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found in here as well as in Jet Fuel, The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt (long-form issue), Tule Review, Grist, and Rattle among others.

INTERSTITIUM

by Harold Oberman

With all that’s known about human anatomy, you wouldn’t expect doctors to discover a new body part in this day and age. But now, researchers say they’ve done just that: They’ve found a network of fluid-filled spaces in tissue that hadn’t been seen before. These fluid-filled spaces were discovered in connective tissues all over the body, including below the skin’s surface; lining the digestive tract, lungs and urinary systems; and surrounding muscles, according to a new study detailing the findings, published today (March 27) in the journal Scientific Reports. Image source: Getty Images via Scientific American, March 27, 2018.

The hidden waterway beneath our skin
Flows freely.  For the moment
It's an organ unburdened by metaphor, unlike the heart.

Undiscovered rivers in the modern age are rare.
Deep in the Amazon perhaps, hidden from satellites
By tree cover and a murky flow
That mimics the surrounding underbrush,
Banked by birds so exotic they were indexed one time and forgotten,
There is a tributary no one has seen.

It hid in plain sight, the interstitium.
The chemicals used to study the skin
Destroyed it.  Dissected, it collapsed from the weight of its discovery.


Harold Oberman is a lawyer and poet living and writing in Charleston, S.C.

THE THIRTEENTH MORNING AFTER

by Lyndi O'Laughlin

Image source: Loyal White Knights

Someone put an Amazon box
with a dirty bomb
under the Wizard of Oz’s throne,
blowing millions of barefaced replicas
into a blameless wind,

some lined-up right now
outside the local tattoo parlor,
needles buzzing over the raw flesh
of “Stars and Stripes Forever”.

The Victory Klavalkade Klan Parade is
planned for December, pale guys
and the women who love them
will wave from the beds of
pick-up trucks slithering down
a slick shiny boulevard in
North Carolina, and light will try to glint
off the gun metal barrels of dusty rifles
hanging on racks in back windows;
confetti and balloons will thrill
the children of the children and
maple trees along the parade route
will blow backwards into
the indifferent faces of crows,

and there is so much joy
around me that I turn away,
walk myself into the ocean,
breath salt water and fish scales,
stroll by anemones and sea stars
hiding under vast islands of
Huggies, Big Mac wrappers,
condoms and water bottles.

I’ll nap in a kelp bed, wake to
my own whimpers and howls
bubbling forth like the bays of
a three-legged red bone hound
tethered underwater to a coral reef,
head straight back, mouth an open gash,
seven billion balls of air bubbling forth.

It’s a comfortable enough seat,
this rocky outcrop, and I hardly
have to crane my neck at all
to see the soft underbelly
of that great white shark,
circling the shipwreck on my left.

Nothing to be done today
but keen bad poems,
let them rise in bubbles that
break the surface with a feeble crack
like the chipped edge
of a flat oar,
knowing I will never again
have to wonder—
how the Holocaust was
able to happen in the first place.

Lyndi O'Laughlin has a degree in nursing, but spends her time writing poetry from her home in Kaycee, Wyoming. As a progressive living in a rural, conservative area, poetry has become her way of expressing views that question the status quo. 

KEEP CALM

by Chris O’Carroll

Retail giant Amazon was asked to make a "substantial donation" to a woman's refuge on Saturday night after its UK website offered T-shirts for sale promoting rape and violence against women. The T-shirts, which were also manufactured and sold in the U.S., included slogans were spun off the phrase, "Keep Calm and Carry On", a famous British propaganda slogan and included shirts that read: "Keep Calm and Hit Her", "Keep Calm and Rape a Lot" and "Keep Calm and Rape Them" for $23–$26. --Elise Solé, Shine from Yahoo! Staff | Healthy Living, Mar 4, 2013


Hey, wanna read my shirt?
It leaves some folks agape a lot,
But c’mon, who gets hurt?
It says, “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot.”

That’s one of several jests --
“. . . Hit Her,” “. . . Rape Them,” “. . .  Rape Me” --
Emblazoned across chests
Clad in hilarity.

Some chicks don’t get the jokes.
Who cares, guys?  My advice:
Just do a few keystrokes
And grab the merchandise.

Solid Gold Bomb (no kidding),
That’s the firm that makes the raiment.
Keep calm, girls.  Do our bidding
As they strike gold with each payment.

Zeus was a badass swan;
Now any guy can be.
Log onto Amazon
And buy a pro-rape T.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in BigCityLit, The Chimaera, 14 by 14, Umbrella, and The Cantab Lounge Anthology.