A SPERM WHALE BIRTH

by Pepper Trail

 

 

 

Unimaginable, but imagine—birth into water, but needing air

Your head emerging last, sheltered until the last moment within your mother

Then, the shock of ocean—the world—and the powerlessness

Your flukes folded, useless, body limp, the surface unreachable

 

But you are not alone, and your mother is not alone

There is a community, her old friends, and your aunties and sisters

They are there, all around, excited, anxious to welcome, to help

Their bursts of clicks your first hearing, this code meaning “belonging”

 

They balance you on their great heads, lift you into the light, and you breathe

Between their gentle bodies they squeeze you, and you breathe

They keep away the circling dolphins, and you breathe

They keep watch for sharks, and you breathe

 

At last your body stiffens, balances in the water

You take your first milk, wise with a baby’s knowledge

Your aunties drift apart, exclaiming as they go

At your mother’s side, you slowly swim, and begin to be a whale

 

Based on detailed observations of a sperm whale birth, as reported in Nature and Science.

Listen to an NPR report.

 

 

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. 

 

CHICAGO AND THE SWINE

by Ralph La Rosa

After and with Carl Sandburg

 

Trump Swine A Porky Parody Framed Print by Ingo Klotz

“Each day, it seems like the president is deciding maybe he read something in the newspaper and he’ll send troops to Portland or perhaps to New Orleans or perhaps to Chicago, so I’m always glad to know he’s not sending them to Chicago. We don’t need them. There’s not an emergency in Chicago,” [Illinois Gov. JB] Pritzker said. —WGN-TV, September 11,2025

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a man in the Chicago area who drove his car into ICE officers, a representative for the agency said on Friday, adding that the man had been resisting arrest during a vehicle stop. The man, who the authorities said was not legally in the country, dragged the officer as he fled in his vehicle, the agency representative said. The officer was severely injured and was in stable condition. —The New York Times, September 12, 2025

Hog butcher for the world
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
 
Euphoric, I recall Chicago and my strenuous birth in Mercy hospital eighty-seven years ago, 
as shaggy as an ape, they said, big shouldered like our city, and soon to be mentored
by its churning and creating twin energies of increasing good and encroaching evil—
but never like the present and deadly evil of the lurking and hulking Super Swine.
He intends to break your will with his weaponized and endlessly destructive lies. 
 
Carl, like you, I have seen the gunmen kill and then set free to kill 
again, when he, the Swine, forgave his armed and loyal mob
of treasonous thugs he ordered to overthrow democracy.
But I know Chicago is brutal: brutal enough to resist his folly, expose 
that he’s no better than another hog to butcher for the world.
 
As you chanted, Carl: Show me another city with lifted head singing so proud 
to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. 
It needs to be; for if the Swine slogs through our city, destroying lives and laws,
unmet by brutal resistance, he will make moves to widen his war throughout our land.
 
 
Ralph La Rosa has published prose on major American writers, including Emerson and Thoreau, and has placed short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film scripts. These days, he mostly writes poetry, appearing on the Internet, in print journals and anthologies. His books include the chapbook Sonnet Stanzas and full-length Ghost Trees and My Miscellaneous Muse. And he loves The New Verse News!

GIRLY BOY

by Jean Voneman Mikhail 

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

My little boy blue, 

as a child you wore 

girl-pink, not the browns 

of circus bears and puppies. 

Not the beiges of office walls. 

Who cares about colors now?

Wear what you like. 

As a girl child, my boy snakes hung 

down in braids past my fingertips.

They had a sweaty life all their own. 

They flicked ribbon tongues at me,

struck me on the back when I ran 

away, so I cut them off one day.

I stored them in a box of magic tricks,

decorated the lid with sequins, 

like moon disks sparkling in the light.

Who would see them in a dark closet? 

I eventually got my girl groove back. 

I liked the boys, their hawk heads, 

hooded. They blinked in astonishment

that I had actually caught up to them.

Eventually, I grew my braids back,

gave up the girl I used to love. 

I opened my legs to the bedposts. 

I had you on my favorite night of all.

You were born blue and little. 

I think of you now as a girly boy. 

A ghost of a boy-girl in a mirror.

Don’t rub off your eyeshadows

with the back of your hand,  

with your desert skin, so dry and soft. 

Your eyes are the valleys you’ve left 

behind in the rearview mirror, 

where the hills float away. 

The morning moves you, 

slides a mountain aside, as you 

drive through, around the twists 

and turns of your desires. 

The mountains widen, deepen 

their despair then disappear, 

the further into this self-love thing you go. 

Jean Voneman Mikhail has published in One Art: a Journal of Poetry, Sheila Na Gig Online, The New Verse News, The Northern Appalachian Review, and other journals and anthologies. She was recently nominated for “best of the net” by Eucalyptus Lit. 

NATIVITY

by Lynn White

A woman dries a baby in a towel after giving the infant a bath inside a tent at a camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Jan. 18. AFP via Getty Images via NPR, January 31, 2024

There are no Magi to adore them now,

the women giving birth 

in ramshackle sheds

or freezing tents

or in the rubble

and cold

and dirt

of what’s left.

There are no Magi to bring gifts,

no shepherds to bring succour

to the women giving birth 

in ramshackle sheds

or freezing tents

or in the rubble

and cold

and dirt

of what’s left.

Maybe artists will paint the scene

but I doubt it.

None are needed

when we can already see,

when we already know

and then we don’t see

anymore.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

EACH DEVASTATION

by Linda Conroy

“Blue Shadow” (original hand painted Acrylic painting of Blue petals in different shades) by Deepu.

 

brings blue shadow to the landscape

reminding of the weight of volatility

 

a volatility so broad that it might 

slam the farthest reach of sky.               

 

I see that the farthest reach of sky,

a place that could bring joy in its daily birth,       

 

a birth that may absolve our sins in joy,

is blurred with splashes of red dawn.          

 

A rawness of red dawn reflecting

all spilt blood, acts of a night just gone.

 

Blood this night spilled, done for now

and slunk away, not pushed by any squall.

 

No morning squall can push beyond                              

the bruised blue shadows of this day.

Linda Conroy is a retired social worker who likes to observe and comment on the human behaviors that we see around us, and on the connection between human nature and the natural world. Her work has appeared in many journals.

RE-ACQUITTED

by Imogen Arate

Dying stars burn the brightest

Europe's birth rate is falling

Italian towns offer abandoned 

homes on the cheap

Even in a COVID year

nearly 1-0-0-0 

wo/men and children

died on the Mediterranean

in pursuit of safety

The Sonoran took its biggest gulp

in 10 years

as desiccated remains are picked

from between its gritty teeth

to stage a caravan

One in five American households

speaks a language other than English

but my people can’t get in a

Best-Pic nominee

without the label “foreign”

Be grateful that you are now 

presented with a choice between 

Black and    White

Prostrate melaniferous bodies 

weave into a shroud

covering the distance between 

George Floyd and today

Be grateful for crumbs that drop

from the high table

as we scramble

and gladiate in spectacle

for droppings

Half a million seemed like 

an impossible number

Last year   Valentine’s Day

was still lonely 

but in person

Be grateful

Why aren’t we grateful

Why are we so ungrateful

We are given a choice now

Isn’t it enough

A cloth cover is the real

hindrance to liberty

The 2020 “I voted” sticker

a high-priced memorabilia

for the lives risked

to those other than minorities

forced hyphenation 

worn as a crown

trudge past other saintly feasts

lay bare the sacrifice

Be grateful for the little things

The big ones are for the rarified

the falling birth rate

the fear of extinction

I guess they always knew

Dying stars burn the brightest

Rage

rage against the dying of the light

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of the weekly poetry podcast Poets and Muses. She has written in four languages and published in two. Her work was most recently featured in the Global Poemic, Rigorous and The Hong Kong Review.

DESCENDING

The endless origination of my Black son

by Jessica M Granger

file photo

The bones of my pelvis shift like tectonic plates
to accommodate your breadth, the gap widening—
a cramping uterus expelling you in tireless
pulses, your spherical head firmly cradled
against my ischium as you peek through—
the obturator foramen at future possibilities,
but more likely pain for what I’ve made you;
the weight of you ripping my rigged pubic
symphysis in two, the way a cop may you,
you placing a foot in a notch of the iliac crest,
(but not too quickly) and heaving as you plummet—
straining as your spine slides against my sacrum,
the violence of it snapping my sacrospinous
ligament, you grabbing it with your tiny hand—
holding me together as I dislocate your shoulder;
yet you release it for your final descent, must
let me remain broken and unfixed in the bed as
you struggle to clamber in millimeters toward
your final effacement with me, your first as you—
egressing from the canal to open your aboriginal
eyes and face the predisposed world ahead of you.

Jessica M Granger is a half-Cuban, half-Portuguese writer. She holds a bilingual MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas El Paso. She is an Army veteran, divemaster, and mother who seeks to understand life by writing about it. Her work can be found in TheNewVerse.News, SHANTIH Journal, The Molotov Cocktail Magazine, As You Were, and Ruminate Magazine, among others. She currently resides in Columbus, Ohio.

THE BARD POSTS ON FACEBOOK

 by Earl J Wilcox





Spending way too much time
Counting iambs or rhyming
“thees” and “thous.” Zooks!
Running out of menopausal dames
and horny college students.
Best I put the pen down,
Take a stroll by the old stream.
Maybe I’ll be inspired to dish
Up a clever zinger for the nonce.
Hell. I’ve done it again!
Mumbling aloud like I write.
Gotta stop doing that crap.
Huzzah!

Earl J Wilcox lives in South Carolina, cooks, writes, watches baseball, contributes regularly to The New Verse News.

AFTER THE MASSACRE

by Howie Good

Photograph by Phil Armitage

1
January has been mostly absent. No need to look online for what it means. I already know what it means. It means there’s a girl at the door collecting for cancer. Alcohol intensifies the effect. Theology, too. Whoever doesn’t love incongruity doesn’t love me. The clock raises its penciled-in eyebrows. I don’t talk in my sleep; I scream.

2
I wake up to snow drifting down, dry and brittle, like the ashes of murdered six-year-olds. Hey! No problem! the weather girl assures everyone. I have become someone I never wanted to be, the way songs have become their own jingles. Hear it? The cold, dark howls of women giving birth to monsters in attics.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.

THE STORM

by Tracey Gratch

Image source: boston.com

The sea throws its weight on an unwary shore
The sand, without wisdom, changes in form
And I, as the calm in the eye of the storm,

Have survived every wound your poor body had borne
The scars, as I read them, though faded and worn,
A subtle reminder; the center, still torn.

The sea hurls white ice at my feet as I stand
At the threshold of hope, where my life had began.
Unlikely that I would endure this dire hand

To emerge from the current as strengthened and whole,
Escaping the grasp of the strong undertow;
I pretend now to learn things, that always, I've known.

The storm will disperse and the water return
To the blue, where I live, at the edge of the earth.
Awaiting a sign, I await now a birth.

I look to the sky, the clouds taking form,
A silent forewarning; prepare for the storm.


Tracey Gratch lives in Quincy, MA with her husband and their four children. Her poems have been published in various and sundry on-line and print publications. She is at home, preparing for the storm.