DUAL-CLASS PURGATORY

by Mostofa Sarwar

Caricature at Pinterest

SpaceX shares come in two main types: Class A and Class B (although the company has the option to issue nonvoting Class C shares in the future). The Class A shares are the ones being offered for sale to the public in the IPO, and are subject to the usual "one vote per share" rule for voting on company matters. But the Class B shares, which ordinary investors can't buy, confer 10 votes per share, and Elon Musk owns 93.6% of those Class B shares. That gives Musk 85.1% of the combined voting power of the company. Generally speaking, it's good for a CEO to be a major shareholder of their company, because it means their goals are aligned with those of other shareholders. But when a CEO controls a supermajority of the entire company's voting power, their vote is the only shareholder vote that matters. All other shareholders are basically just along for the ride. —Yahoo Finance, June 5, 2026

See also “Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme” by Paul Krugman.

The Class B shares are held

by a singular phantom,

ten votes for every dead soul

                           trapped in the machinery.

 

Down in the valley,

the river still runs cold and silver,

unbothered by the governance of the super-voting elite.

We bought into the future

                           at an inflated premium,

only to find ourselves locked

              in a Class C silence,

watching the billionaire steer his iron chariot toward Mars

with the capital drained

              from our pension pots

                           and collective dreams.

 

The fireflies still blink in the hedgerows—

a fragile, democratic light

that requires no underwriters.

 

 

Dr. Mostofa Sarwar is a professor emeritus of geophysics and former associate provost at the University of New Orleans, as well as the dean and former vice chancellor and provost of Delgado Community College. His opinion essays were published in The Daily Star, New Age, Dhaka Tribune, and Bdnews24.com of Bangladesh, The Straits Times of Singapore, The Statesman of India, Phuket News of Thailand, The Times Picayune of New Orleans, The Advocate of Baton Rouge, The Acadiana Advocate of Lafayette, The Daily Advent and The Opera News of New York. Recently, his English poetry has appeared in the Sangam literary magazine, The Seattle Star, The New Verse News, Ellipsis, and other publications, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Sarwar published three books of Bengali poems. His book His book Sunflower Wounds, a collection of English poems about the war in Ukraine, has been accepted for publication by the University of New Orleans Press.

LAZARUS RISES AGAIN

by Royal Rhodes

remembering “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

White House says it will not return the Statue of Liberty to France. A French politician said the U.S. no longer deserved the legendary monument. —Politico, March 17, 2025

The White House sense of what we owe to France

forgets why we are not a monarchy.

This "mighty woman with a torch," perchance,

shows with her flame its dark autocracy.

Yorktown and the sword of Lafayette

have been suppressed in its new made-up tales.

Will God forget us, if we too forget?

As "world-wide welcome" in our marrow fails?

Exiles sought for freedom like fresh air.

America was built by diverse hands,

ignored by a self-centered billionaire.

A golden door was open to all lands.

For wealth, new tyrants rule by greedy whim.

Can someone teach this statue how to swim?

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

Royal Rhodes is a descendent of migrants here in the 17th century from England, and in the 19th century from Ireland.

HOW TO BE A BILLIONAIRE (TAYLOR’S VERSION)

by Diane Elayne Dees

Taylor Swift attends the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards. PHOTO: 

JAMIE MCCARTHY/WIREIMAGE

Publicly acknowledge your peers
and show pleasure in their creations.
Make little girls happy at every opportunity.
Everywhere you go, stock the food bank 
for a year, and send emergency money
to our states before the government 
can even fill out the forms.
Show women and girls how to take 
ownership of their own lives.
Show little girls that tears and rage
and poetry and making money
and red lipstick and ass-kicking
are all feminine pursuits.

Don’t cheat your vendors, defraud
your customers, or insult your fans.
Don’t incite violence wherever you go,
and don’t endanger the lives of others
because they are black, brown, female,
government officials, or journalists.
Don’t sexually abuse anyone,
don’t pretend you don’t know
anyone or anything connected to you,
don’t threaten people.

And do whatever it takes to guide 
us out of this Cruel Summer.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books), The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press), and The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press). Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.

PRIME REAL ESTATE

by Emmie Christie

Sphecius speciosus, often simply referred to as the cicada killer or the cicada hawk, is a large digger wasp species. —iNaturalist

The cicada killers drone in the park

Small rockets,

A display of gold in the sky.

I glare. I stare them down,

But billionaire buoyancy keeps them

Flying. A confidence fueled by concepts,

On stinger stock options,

Keeping me inside my cardboard home

But even that’s Prime real estate,

This box someone threw out.

And I shouldn’t be sleeping here, no,

Because that nearby bush has a plaque.

Where can I go to sleep?

I guess it’s a crime to have bad luck,

To lose my savings to a fire truck.

Where can I go

When the wealthy claim even the sky,

And I am not allowed to dream?

The cicada killers drone in the park.

Emmie Christie’s work tends to hover around the topics of feminism, mental health, cats, and the speculative such as unicorns and affordable healthcare. She has been published in Flash Fiction Online and Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and she graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2013. She also enjoys narrating audiobooks for Audible. You can find her on Twitter @EmmieChristie33.

NEW SHEPARD

by Monica Mills

the billionaire space race

is one without a finish line.

space tourists auction star

costs, haggle down heaven,

as latitude chokes the poor.

on supersonic joyrides white

collars pray greed into hemisphere.

on Earth oceans thrash aflame.

souls without homes look for sky.

find smog. find dollar signs

disguised as constellations.

the shepherd is a wolf. steals the herd.

no scapegoats are leashed

in fields of crumbling infrastructure.

rampant thistles, dandelions,

leeches of the grain root deep

into soil and call themselves farmers. 

Monica Mills is a Jamaican-American writer and poet. She is from Maplewood, New Jersey and has a bachelor’s degree in political science and English from Rutgers University. Monica’s work appears in journals such as The West Trade Review, The Anthologist, The Normal Review, and The Quiver Review among others. She enjoys rainy days and ginger tea. 

THE PARK CLOSES AT DUSK

by CL Bledsoe & Michael Gushue

The problem is bears in the classroom.
The problem is bears who don't know
which utensil is for the pâté, which
is for olives.
The problem is that I'm right.
The problem is our tax dollars at work.
Ask all the questions you want. Questions are free.
Answers require donations.
The problem is bears who don't speak proper English.
The problem is bears stealing jobs.
The problem is union bears.
The problem is the lack of bear vouchers.
Bears should be left up to the states,
the largest donors.
Bears eating pâté. Bears who can spell their government
representatives' names and use a touch-tone phone.
The problem is bears who don't know how to stitch
their own wounds.
The problem is bears on death panels,
bears running internment camps.
The problem is bears as Uber drivers.
Bears want to take away our pâté knives.
The problem is bears don't eat pâté
and the ones who do don't vote.
The problem is bears taking our guns and making them into backscratchers.
Russian bears who've invaded our classrooms after the arctic ice melted.
The problem is what's going on behind the bears' backs
while we're watching their teeth.

CL Bledsoe is the assistant editor for The Dead Mule and author of fourteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love. He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

Michael Gushue is co-founder with Dan Vera of Poetry Mutual and Poetry Mutual Press. He co-curates the intermittent reading series Poetry at the Watergate with Deborah Ager. His chapbooks are Gathering Down Women, Conrad, and Pachinko Mouth. He lives Washington, D.C.

FIVE EXPLANATIONS

by Gilbert Allen

Kudzu kills or damages other plants by smothering them under a solid blanket of leaves, encircling woody stems and tree trunks, and breaking branches or uprooting entire trees and shrubs. Once established, kudzu grows at a rate of one foot per day; mature vines can be 100 feet long. Kudzu was introduced into the U.S. at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. From 1935 to the mid-1950s, farmers in the South were encouraged to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion. Kudzu is spread by vines that root at the nodes to form new plants. To successfully control kudzu, its extensive root system must be completely eradicated by cutting vines just above the ground and mowing every month for two growing seasons—all cut material must be destroyed. The U.S. Forest Service is searching for biological control agents for kudzu. —The Nature Conservancy

1. Next to that red American clay, bare
and beckoning as a billionaire’s
baseball cap, it seemed
like a giant green blessing.

2. What else to eat in Nagasaki
in September, 1945,
but its white
indestructible roots?

3. Without kudzu, April in South Carolina
would be too full of blue
skies, flowering dogwoods, azaleas
and itself.

4. Men planted it.
Pigs love it.
Why can’t men be pigs?

5. After the first cold Tuesday in November
it still gives death
a good name.


Gilbert Allen has lived in South Carolina for forty years. His most recent books are Catma and The Final Days of Great American Shopping.

OUR BROTHERS WHO ARE IN

by Howard Winn

"Jane Mayer’s Dark Money—a detailed accounting of rise and rise [of the Koch Brothers]—is absolutely necessary reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics. Lay aside the endless punditry about Donald’s belligerence or Hillary’s ambition; Mayer is telling the epic story of America in our time. It is a triumph of investigative reporting, perhaps not surprising for a journalist who has won most of the awards her profession has to offer. But she had to cut through the secrecy that these men have carefully cultivated, unraveling an endless list of front groups. And she had to do it despite real intimidation; apparently an arm of what some have called 'the Kochtopus' hired private investigators to try to dig up dirt on her personal and professional life, a tactic that failed because there wasn’t any. She’s a pro, and she’s given the world a full accounting of what had been a shadowy and largely unseen force." —Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2016 issue. Image source: DonkeyHotey

not exactly Heaven but
the billionaire’s equivalent
as they answer the prayers
of a certain kind of Koch-loving
politician such as runs the
state of Wisconsin or represents
Texas in the U. S. Senate
although both have been dumped
as too low in the polls when
there is still the Cuban kid
with the fresh face and the
fresh tongue hydrated often
taking unlimited largess from
the family fortune that has
its foundation in partnership
connections with Adolph Hitler
and the Nazi Political Party
without worry because it
was after all a good business
deal and all that counts is the
bottom line and why do some
people talk of morality in
the context of industrial success
and the accumulation of profits
to use in self-glorification and
many mansions yachts and personal
jets even if the innocents are dying
in death camps dividends are all
important for the trinity to
some consists of two brothers
and the holy ghost of profit
also known as dark money


Howard Winn’s fiction and poetry, has been published recently by such journals as Dalhousie Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), Galway Review (Ireland), Antigonish Review, Literature Today, The Long Story, Pennsylvania Literary Review, Blueline, Chaffin Review, Thin Air Literary Journal, and TheNewVerse.News . His B. A. is from Vassar College. His M.A. is from the Stanford University Writing Program. His doctoral work was done at N.Y.U. He has been a social worker in California and currently is a faculty member of SUNY-Dutchess as Professor of English.