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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
Showing posts with label bad news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad news. Show all posts

Friday, January 23, 2015

AFTER THE BAD NEWS

by Laura Rodley



Image source: Loulou Downtown



I asked the angels
for something to help
carry me through the day
since I don’t yet have visible wings
and soon in front of my eyes
water flowed underneath ice
encasing a maple branch
like sap only external,
building up like a wave
then surging through
in the one eight inch space
between bark and hard clear ice
flowing to the crotch of the branch
and underneath the lumped ice there
reaching the end of the branch, dripping once,
the wave surging, cresting, flowing
down the maple’s thin arm, drip
and again, no end
to this bounty.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

DARK DAYS

by Brian Beatty





A barking stray

trying to bite the whirling wind

 

gusts that blow loose 

front pages 

 

out of those locked

newspaper machines they rattle open 

across the street  

 

then paste up

against the locked windows and doors

of our locked house

 

like so many rain-soaked shutters

made from the world’s

cruel jokes

 

the latest black-and-white bad news

we would rather ignore

right there

 

in our faces 

demanding we must pay  

for what we’ve seen 

 

— that dog 

with its hot breath


likewise tells us 

more about ourselves 

than any of us knew before.



Brian Beatty's jokes, poems and stories have appeared in numerous print and digital publications.