A NEW BEGINNING

by Ron Shapiro

Step back from lies, greed

and corruption if only for

an afternoon in Chicago

for the opening of Obama’s

center on the south side.

Feast your eyes 

on an alternate

amerikan reality

where character,

kindness, community,

and truth matter. 

 

Listen to diverse voices

speak of the amerikan promise:

life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

 

Hear words and songs

that elevate our country.

 

No need for a violent spectacle

on the lawn of the people’s

house. No need to reshape

and destroy this nation’s

original sins of slavery

and indigenous genocide.

No need to hide your gender,

skin color or faith. 

 

You are welcome in this place.

 

Come bring your children to

learn of the struggles for

equality, justice, and freedom.

 

Join hands with a stranger,

dance in the moonlight,

sing of hope and change,

believe in this country again. 

Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, has published over 20 poems in publications including Nova Bards 24 & 25, Virginia Writers Project, The New Verse News, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine, Zest of the Lemon and two chapbooks: Sacred Spaces, Wonderings and Understory, a collection of nature poetry.  

THE SIREN SONG OF TRUTH

by Robin Stevens Payes

Believe women. Believe girls.

The women, the girls know.
Our story ancient. Our voices new.

They make us believe
The crime is our fault.
Men take our bodies,
Unable to resist the siren
Song of our bodies.

The song of our bodies
Does not belong to us.
Girls whom men called sirens,
Children wounded into silence,
Sing their bodies.

Sing their truths aloud.
Strongmen claim they are victims
Of the song of our bodies.
Weak men whose bodies
Are out of control.

Bodies anatomically ungoverned.
Bluster out of control.
Vanquishing other bodies—
Seas, straits, oil fields,
Mines, minds.

Strap yourselves tighter to the mast.
Now the bindings break.
Your strength offers no protection
Against the siren song of Truth.
The women. The girls. Know.

Mother Earth sings Her body,
Raped by weak men
Whose strength is measured
In violence. Did their mothers
Teach them this was fair game?

We sing our truths aloud,
Sirens flashing red:
Pull over now. Stop raping
Our minds, our bodies,
Our mothers, our daughters.

Ourselves. Loudly we sing
Our bodies to wholeness.
Weak men are broken,
No fault of ours.
Blame your wounds, not our anatomy.

Our siren song strengthens.
Our story ancient.
Our voices new.

Believe us.

Robin Stevens Payes is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, storyteller, and cultural steward whose work braids ancestral memory, science, myth, and moral imagination. She is the author of the YA time-travel adventure series Edge of Yesterday and creator of [re]member the world, a multi-genre project retrieving and reweaving the silenced history of her grandmother’s flight from Ukraine’s Pale of Settlement. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards, Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She writes about creative ethics, generational healing, and cultural repair on her Substack, Releasing Memory. 

HOW CAN I WRITE A LOVE POEM?

by Rose Mary Boehm

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

Do I write about poets with red holes

in their forehead? Students whose eyes

have been shot out, the mother of four

small children is rotting in a cell full of other people,

excrement, wails, the sounds of metal and wood

on flesh and bone.

 

How can I write a love poem when 

all I know is that planets no longer align,

that war has been declared on peace,

that all the crystals disintegrate into millions

of nano shards, shaken by the vibrations of hate.

 

How can I write a love poem when

I am no longer allowed to trust my eyes,

when blue is red, up is down, no means yes,

when, while I am hollow and starving

a blonde demon laughs and tells me I have riches

to look forward to. Perhaps even in this life.

All I have to do is believe.

 

And haven’t we all been taught to believe?

To believe that there is a big old man on a cloud

somewhere, an old man with a long, white beard

who has a big book and writes all your 

little misdeeds in big letters,

and who they say is love and who asks you to love

‘the other’ as you love yourself.

 

So, for many it’s easy to believe that in his name,

in the name of love, you are being hung

upside-down by your feet until you

confess how much delicious hate you feel,

and that you never had it so good.

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her work has been widely published mostly by US poetry journals. A new full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026.

DO NOT

by Devon Balwit

after Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Cartoon by Custodio.

Do not
 
check the box saying I agree when you haven’t
read the terms, nor put an I believe sign in the front
yard while the yardless are being hauled out the back,
nor assume threat ugly rather than urbane and slick,
nor think one must sloganize to fight (for a lone wag
can be sufficiently ironical to shake the dog),
wor forget the power of art to move unfettered
by a common style, nor worry you must do it better
even to begin, nor avert from sure embarrassment—
for nothing embarrasses more than the human predicament—
our minds in compostable bodies, seeking the light
in the brief blip between birth and night.
Do not obey evil in advance, die
before you’re dead, or—worst of all—refuse to try.

 

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

MY WIFE SENDS ME A VIDEO OF ISRAELI ARABS AND JEWS SINGING “SOMEWHERE” FROM WEST SIDE STORY AND ASKS ME TO WRITE A POEM

by Dick Westheimer

The song sung in three tongues

swells and descends with the beat 

Bernstein intended, “Someday”

in English the tenors hold every note 

as they would hope. In Hebrew, 

full throated soprano voices sing,  

“We'll find a new way of living,”

followed in muted harmony, 

Arabic singers whisper about “a way 

of forgiving.” The music fills me

with the stuff of hope, of a 

new way of living and then 

I remember the plot, 

the Sharks and the Jets

didn’t make their lousy world

and Tony always had to die.

And as the the music fades

Tony rasps, “I didn’t believe 

hard enough.” But then 

I remember Maria’s 

final note was sung 

over the top 

of a major chord.

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, OneArt, Abandon Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Minyan. His chapbook A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine is published by SheilaNaGig.

WINNING THE WORLD CUP

by Margaret Rozga

Hooray Spain!

Hooray soft kick,

hooray edge into the goal,

hooray England so close.

Hooray women!

 

I want to believe in my health,

the health of the sport, the health

of the word, the health of the world

at play on the field for all of us.

 

See the women cross field pass,

see the women head goalward,

see the women strong legs.

 

I play the we, play into the we.

If we can win, the win is for the we.     

If we lose, the loss swept into the win.

Spain is not my country, nor England.

 

What in the world, a win—

what for the world, a win—rejoice!

Here, where, how, and why for the world,

for the game, for women, whoever,

wherever, this world moment, believe.

Margaret Rozga served as the 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate and the 2021 inaugural artist/scholar in residence at the UW Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station. Her fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press 2021). Cornerstone Press will also publish her 2024 forthcoming book, Restoring Prairie.

AMERICAN DREAM ‘22

by Scott C. Kaestner

The American Dream Art Print by cindy nguyen

We have to unlearn everything 

we’ve come to know.

Forget the past so as not to

forsake the future.

Be the change coming.

Believe it’s possible.

The Milky Way understands.

Asteroids do slam into planets.

And dinosaurs will disappear.

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, writer, dad, husband, and deadbeat dreamer extraordinaire. Google ‘scott kaestner poetry’ to peruse his musings and doings.

LAST CHANCE TO REMEMBER

by KP Liles

United States Post Office, Miami FL, 1922 Photo by William Arthur Fishbaugh,1873-1950

You could vote

and laugh

with dragonfire force.

You could mail letters, 

medicine, the Hope Diamond,

at the Post Office.

You could dine out

indoors. You could visit

splendid national parks.

You could chat

or argue with neighbors

then shake hands afterward.

You could travel

anywhere you could afford.

If you were Black,

Muslim, or loved someone

counter to expectations, 

you could

prove greater joy.

You could imagine. 

You could hear more

than one voice, one name

night and day, in print, 

onscreen, on-air 

or in dreams.

You could feel

faith’s traction.

We had global foods.

Unlimited entertainment.

Such glorious sport—

you’d start cheering

at “land of the free...”

That crowd’s roar!

You could give children

roof, ice cream, ambition

and sleep well for it.

More or less everything

was possible

if you could believe.

KP Liles has penned two poetry collections, Singing Back the Darkness (NYQ Books) and Spring Hunger (Plain View Press). He currently lives in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

ALLAHU AKBAR, GOD IS GREAT

by Zeina Azzam

A group that said it was affiliated with Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks on the two mosques in San’a, where suicide bombers detonated explosives just after noon as people gathered for midday prayers, local security officials said. When survivors fled, a second pair of bombs exploded outside the mosques, killing more people. By evening, the official death toll had risen to 135. —WSJ, March 20, 2015



They've made it so there is no room for me,

she said defeatedly, like an old building
about to be torn down.



The spectrum of Greatness is now a narrow alleyway
in ancient San'a or Kabul. Few may pass.

Guns the price.



They've elbowed out the ones
whose crescent shines on the courts and libraries,

schools and shelters.



How do we make room in this crazy world.
How do we make the world believe that this is not

what we believe.


Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian-American educator and writer. She works as executive director of The Jerusalem Fund in Washington, DC.