OH BEAUTIFUL

by Chris Reed

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

For the country’s 250th birthday celebration

my sister texts a collage of photos of our mother

in her last years before dying at 100.

At first it seems a strange birthday message

for the nation, until I start looking at the photos.

In my mother’s face, her seated posture, 

often holding flowers or her cat on her lap,

I see the inevitable wear of years, time’s destruction,

a loss of elasticity and nimbleness, 

a loss of focus, purpose and endless energy,

a loss of fitting in to how things work and get done.

 

Yet in her eyes and smile in photo after photo,

I see acceptance and memories of past joys

and loves, her ocean sailings, mountain climbs, 

her shore walks, and dance among multitudes.

I see a hint of denial, pretending that her place

in the family of things is not coming to an end,

only her eyes betraying her knowledge 

that the journey has already started.

Her face tells me all this, but also tells me 

that amid her brokenness and joys and losses,

ever courageous, she is finding new love

and meaning in this, her season of endings.

 

With no flowers for you, let me still say,

Happy Birthday America.

Chris Reed cared for her mother in her last two years of life and found beauty in her mother's decline in health and purpose.  Finishing Line Press recently published a chapbook of Reed's poems about this time, Two Years and Two Months.

O BEAUTIFUL

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

 

Just before her 250th birthday

America, sweet land 

of checks and balances, 

has died in anguish.

So we must ignore

mixed martial arts fights,

the Marine Band, fireworks 

aimed at the moon.

A despot blocked the birth canal

of oil and gas.  

While conducting state business, 

he's gold-plated his family’s progeny.

Critics who think he’s broken laws,

say he should be held accountable—

he hunts down.

Since America has flatlined, honey, cancel 

the sticky lemonade, the red, white and blue 

sheet cake. 

On July 4, play taps.

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY, and Williamsburg, VA. Her poems have appeared in The New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Macrame Literary Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, Nixes Mate, and Streetlight Magazine. Her chapbook mansucript The Losing has been longlisted for The Headlight Review’s Annual Poetry Chapbook Contest 2026.

AT YOUR GRAVE

by Martha Landman

Arthur Rimbaud 20 October 1854 - 10 November 1891

I’m the only visitor today,  
small cemetery, speechless graves,
Your mailbox at the gate is full of fan-letters,
as if you’re the tooth fairy or some god.
 
It is wet and cold and my shoes 
gave me hell on the walk here.
Tomorrow I’ll wear my sandals, rain or not.
There’s lots I could ask you, but not here,
not today where you lie helplessly dead
on a peaceful summer’s afternoon, 
violet eyes shrouded in eternal sleep,
in the same plot with your mother 
and seventeen-year-old Vitalie.
 
Come to the cobbled square with me tonight.
Let’s dine and dance and have a quiet beer,
no absinthe, no hashish. Afterwards we’ll walk 
along the river Meuse under chestnut trees, 
past the mill, step into the tanner’s little boat
at the quay. Let’s sail into the flimsy air, 
set the night on fire, our reflections on the water,
you melding into me, the moon our lamp. 
Let’s write formless verse about our years in Africa,
mine as a child, yours as a merchant, explorer. 
I promise I won’t ask what I know you won’t tell
           —why did you give up poetry?


Martha Landman writes in Adelaide, South Australia on unceded Kaurna land. Her first single collection like scavenger birds was published by ICOE press, June 2023. Her poem “Girl From the Underground” (for Arthur Rimbaud) was highly commended in the WA Poetry d’Amour contest in August 2024.

SONNET TO KEROUAC

on his centennial

by Bradley McIlwain

Kerouac@100: The Jack Kerouac Centennial Celebration in Lowell
The Jack Kerouac Foundation

The road narrows 

And widens again—

The horizon heroes 

Fill their flasks with zen;

Poet bums 

Seeking dharma 

In mountain slums—

Wisdom that Brahma 

Bore from the beating

Beautiful pavement of the road;

Slick syllables of sweat beading

From the body scroll:

When spirit meets sole

On the dusty paperback of the globe

Bradley McIlwain is a poet who seeks to capture the chorus and consciousness of the human experience. His work has most recently appeared in The New Verse News and the Origami Poems Project. In 2021, he edited the Arthurian literary anthology New Tales of the Round Table (2021). He is the founder of the independent  coffee project Roasted Poet Press. When not drinking coffee, he is hard at work on his first novel, an American motorcycle odyssey across the midwestern US. 

FOR GERTRUDE STEIN

On the Occasion of Her Birthday. Born February 3, 1874

by Earl J Wilcox

Dear Ms. Stein, Ms.Stein:

After all these yearly years,

(148 to be exactly exact)

We still adore, do adore

Your overdone style style

Especially the way you gave

Us the glory of the rose,

(is a rose, is a rose, is a rose).

A rose is still a rose. And

To you, Ms. Stein, we deeply

Appreciate, still appreciate,

Your honest eye, strict

Causes for literary finesse,

Always and forever, and

Ever after, this Rose for you

On your One Hundred Forty-Eighth

Birthday.

 

 

Writing in South Carolina, Earl Wilcox recently published some baseball poetry, plus poems relating to his memoir, and the weather. He has about 60 years left to catch Gertrude Stein. 

WILD ABOUT WHITE

by Jen Schneider

FIND AN ANIMAL SHELTER IN YOUR AREA

sets on. lights bright. everyone wild. wild about white. all bets on betty. betty always on. leg of hose & humor on tap. eyes of blue & berry sparkle. body & mind of pure spunk. cameras click. lights blind while white binds. folks of television lands. card hands & foreign tongues. tongues click. vocal cords clack. white cures airs of silence. heir to all. syllables stream. smiles crack. baby blues sparkle. betty curates & creates. aches of bellies & bent backs arc. laughter always on the menu. dial in. dial on. of/with/at your back. always streaming. of decades. of then. of now. flashes of brilliance. beltways of brightness. of dolls & decades. of danes, dances & daily documentation. of golden girls & mary tyler moore. everyone always eager for more. regimens & irregularities. broads on main. saturday night brilliance. live on stage (& social). expert at both crafting & creating a life. time to mourn. time to adorn. under the lights. lights bright. sets on. everyone wild. wild about white.

99 (by three) ways to make (live) (transform) a life

1.     Entertain all people, possibilities, & permutations. Ration sarcasm.

2.     Track consumption not weight. Weigh options. Seize opportunity.

3.     Track actions, not time. Treasure time & tunes of many types (& transcripts / scripts).

4.     Experience & experiment with life, love, laughter. Liquid humor, too.

5.     Season all sauces. Secure all seasons (& reasons).

6.     Breed offspring of original lines. Converse (& traverse) lines of unoriginal origin.

7.     Maximize sauciness. Minimize saltiness.

8.     Memorize scripts regularly. Make new memories daily.

9.     Prime personalities & timing. Always of/on prime time.

10.  Improvise finales. Rehearse final lines.

11.  Glow (like a Golden Girl). Emulate (like a multi-Emmy winner).

12.  Collect & create (a life on high definition). (re)Create. Juxtapose. Pose often.

13.  Patron (not patronize) all personalities. Puree peculiarities & ponderings.

14.  Befriend & pet creatures of many paws. Pause often. Inhale. Glow. Regale.

15.  Pen recipes of craft & creation. Greet consumers of/on/in People & Parade.

16.  Serenade serendipity. Harmonize habits. Habituate harmony.

17.  Entertain all possibilities. Entertain all people. Populate screens. Screen popularity.

18.  Track actions. Not time. Treasure time & tunes of many types.

19.  Experience & experiment with life, love, & laughter. Favor foods of familiar roots.

20.  Embrace final words & works. Take action & agency. Work finales.

21.  Grace plates, tubes, & presents. Maintain presence of mind and manners.

22.  Practice gratitude. Tether caution. For/of/in/at duties. Projects, too.  

23.  Be of homegrown grains & household grime.

24.  Assess all situations. Situate all communications. Savor sitcoms.

25.  Twinkle under stars, in eyes, of curtseys. make light of most makings.

26.  Stroll across stages. Put pen to paper. Pamper pets in pens.

27.  Add a dose of sass to all sensations (& creations)

28.  Be curious. Be courageous. Be(t) on/of/for betty.

29.  Mix & mingle. Sip sweet & salty. Stir trouble. Add dashes of umph.

30.  Blanket newsstands. Blanket screens. Fill in (all) blanks.

31.  Run series. Run bits. Run betty.

32.  Plan jokes of spontaneous & unpredictable possibility. Do not plan. Be.

33.  Be (dedicated to thee) betty.

Sources:

https://people.com/tv/betty-white-died-peacefully-in-her-sleep-at-home-agent-says/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/arts/television/betty-white-dead.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/16/entertainment/betty-white-100/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/12/31/betty-white-appreciation-tribute/

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She is a Best of the Net nominee, with stories, poems, and essays published in a wide variety of literary and scholarly journals. She is the author of A Collection of Recollections (Next Chapter), Invisible Ink (Toho Pub), On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility (forthcoming, Moonstone Press), and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups (forthcoming Atmosphere Press).

PEOPLE LIKE US AND THE DAY YOU WERE BORN

by John Hodgen

Heading in to the Quickie Mart I can tell right away something’s wrong, 

the kid behind the counter with the plexi-glass wrap-around going at it  

with a customer, giving him a piece of her mind, or more. I think perhaps  

she caught him stealing, or worse, but he’s a business guy, gray suit, gray tie,  

and when I open the door it’s not anger at all, it’s passion I’m hearing,   

passion in a Quickie Mart. She’s just a kid, early 20’s or so, hair pulled back,  

masked, oversized glasses fogged up. She’s saying, …when even we can see  

what’s going on, us average people, people like us, then you know something’s wrong.  

And the man doesn’t speak, just nods and turns away, goes past me  

like a broken ghost, back to the world again. And I turn to her in this  

tiny temple where we all come and go for milk and tickets and cigarettes  

and gas, and ask her what it is that all of us should know, all us average people  

who gas and gulp and come and go. She says, …the Capitol, what those people did. 

And I tell her I agree, it’s a sacred place, that they call it the People’s House, 

that Lincoln ended slavery there with the 13^th Amendment in the Capitol,  

that when you’re actually there it feels more like a church. And then I can’t stop.  

I tell her it’s good what you did, speaking up like that. I tell her Siddhartha  

says your birthday isn’t really the day that you’re born. It’s the first time  

you stand up to your parents, to anyone with power over you, and tell them  

the truth. That’s the day when you’re truly born, when you first come alive.  

I want to say she was smiling, gleaming like a newborn held up to the light,  

but she was wearing a mask. I gave her a twenty for pump number five. 

John Hodgen, Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University, won the AWP Prize for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press). His new book is The Lord of Everywhere (Lynx House/University of Washington Press).

THIS DAY WILL NOT JUST LIVE IN INFAMY

by Michael Mark

Shutterstock

For Lolo

 

Because it is your birthday, I’m going to ignore 

the four thousand people in our country who will die today. 

 

Because it is your birthday, I’m going to erase from my mind 

the insane president and treasonous riot he instigated

                                 

and the love video he put out to his thug followers as five people died 

during the siege of the Capitol, and pretend the polls are fake 

 

that say 45% of Republicans believe the breaking 

and entering was the right thing to do, and I’m going 

 

to drive to the card store – the good one, not the grocery

or the pharmacy with their picked-over puns,

 

but the fancy one that specializes in fine crafted, highly artistic 

expressions of earnest emotions, featuring 

 

only the cutest kitten and puppy pics, and charge 

at least six dollars and ninety-nine cents for ironic yet sincere stuff like: 

 

You’re not getting older—oh wait!—I just checked 

your sun dial—yes you are! Because it is your birthday 

 

I’m not going to even wonder if we should be celebrating 

considering today’s particularly disappointing jobs report

 

and the unnerving delay on stimulus checks and vaccines. 

I’m going to interrogate every rack on every aisle to pick out 

 

your perfect card, and because I can’t stop the riots 

or bring back the dead, or deliver the checks or administer the vaccine, 

 

I will, because it is your birthday, light the candle, and watch 

you close your eyes to the whole world and make your wish. 

 

Michael Mark’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Arkansas International, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Salamander, The Southern Review, The Sun, Waxwing, and The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry. He’s the author of two books of stories including Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).

BEETHOVEN

by Richard Meyer

  

For Beethoven’s 250th birthday: “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Beethoven—Listen to the best of the stormy, tender work of the composer who changed music” at The New York Times, December 17, 2020. GIF by Angie Wang for The New York Times.

A lot of dash, a lot of flash.

     Sublime. Serene. Bold and brash.

          The maestro with the biggest splash.

Richard Meyer’s poems have appeared in various publications, including Able Muse, The Raintown Review, Think, Measure, Light, TheNewVerse.News, Alabama Literary Review, and The Evansville Review. He was awarded the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize for his poem “Fieldstone” and was the recipient of the 2014 String Poet Prize for his poem “The Autumn Way.” A book of his collected poems, Orbital Paths was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

FULL CENTURY

by Howard Winn

In honor of Lawrence Ferlinghetti at one hundred years.

has receded into history
and the beat goes on
although by now all his disciples
have passed out of the San
Francisco air of what was
once the unfashionable district
until the boys and girls of
the computer culture in the
Silicon Valley began seeking
sophistication and superiority
leaving the famous bookstore
where world changing verse
and fiction issued forth
brightening the shop window
of that literary cradle of the hip
and the mind of the rebels who
have along with the city itself turned
on the lights of sensation and
changed the very character of culture
way beyond the aura of sophistication
that made the city at the top
of that green peninsula the center
of the new culture that swept
both state and country and the world
never to be forgotten or erased


Howard Winn's poetry has been published most recently in Evening Street Review and Adelaide Literary Journal.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, BORN 450 YEARS AGO TODAY

by Earl J. Wilcox

Image source: Elephant

. . . Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!
But soft! but soft! aside: here comes the king.
                                            --Hamlet 5.1

Rapper from Avon:
Yo, you stun our souls, our mate.
Sing on, man, sing on.


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.

BILL GATES AND THE POET

by Earl J. Wilcox

For Richard Wilbur
Born March 1, 1921
Image source: Bluedragonfly10

In his Frost-country cottage, the poet
and his trusty L. C. Smith typewriter
labor in clear harmony this morning.
The machine does its clacking act
when the writer pounds the keys.

Only one whose finger muscles
are still strong enough to clutch
an axe handle or milk a cow, if need be,
can muster strength to strike with
force worn-down letters like y or z,
and others when pressed into action.

Here there is no angst or desire
for the ease which a chichi computer
keyboard could offer to curtail
the constant pain in the right hand
or the left one, too, for that matter.
Poet and typewriter conspire, create
a new song amid the view from the
open cottage window, where Bill Gates
seems irrelevant, does not intrude.


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

by Rhiannon Thorne

"This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter, and we'll tell them that we love them, and we'll remind each other how deeply we love one another. But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight . . ."

Next year I will wrap you presents
and you will not understand the need for bows,
but will reach towards them for days
in anticipation.

I will fret my wardrobe decision: do I dress you
for photographs or in a pattern that will hide
your smudgy fingerprints?  Or maybe the floral one
your grandmother, your father's mother,
will surely buy you to match her couch.

You'll have to wear it sometime, anyways,
to appease her.

You will laugh, pressing slobbered fingers
into sticky cake, and scowl at the flash while I sing you
Happy Birthday; whisper in your ear:
it was the happiest day of my life.

In Connecticut, a former mother will spend the week crying.
She will wonder what flowers
she should order for your birthday: White roses
or something with color?

She will sink down to her knees on a fresh wound
with well established grass.

I love you, she will say; it was the worst day
of my life.


Rhiannon Thorne’s work has appeared/is forthcoming in Gr@wl!x, Surreal Grotesque, The Legendary, Ditch, The Junk Lot Review, Vox Poetica, Zygote in my Coffee, e-Fiction, and Fried Chicken and Coffee. She also co-edits the online publication cahoodaloodaling.

REVIEW: FALL CONCERT 2010

by Robert Farmer

 

To the piano in his own sweet way
on the arm of the conductor,
while the packed-house crowd stood,
sang Happy Birthday through tears.
On his ninetieth, not just another gig.

He pulled us back to festivals
and the 50’s college stands,
our youth now gray throughout,
old ladies in dress circle
dancing again to Take Five.

His chops still simple, straight, lyrical,
no pyrotechnical improvisation.
Our age ordered silence on the solos
as we grazed back through lives
to sounds once lost,
now avengefully heralded
by today’s Downbeat recognition.

The Cleveland Symphony played backup,
then stood and cheered.

 
Robert Farmer is a retired professor of forest ecology who lives in Cleveland. He occasionally publishes poems in various journals, including New Verse News.