PAPILLON

by Lynn White

France plans to build a maximum-security prison wing for drug traffickers and Islamic militants near a former penal colony in French Guiana, sparking an outcry among residents and local officials. The wing would form part of a $450 million prison announced in 2017 that is expected to be completed by 2028 and hold 500 inmates. The prison would be built in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, a town bordering Suriname that once received prisoners shipped by Napoleon III in the 1800s, some of whom were sent to the notorious Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana… It was once an infamous colony known for holding French political prisoners, including Captain Alfred Dreyfus (above left), who was wrongly convicted of being a spy and spent five years on Devil's Island, from 1894-1899. —Le Monde, May 20, 2025. Henri Charrière was convicted of murder in 1931 by the French courts and pardoned in 1970. He wrote the 1969 novel Papillon, a memoir of his incarceration in French Guiana.

The butterfly knows no death
in its metamorphosis.

It knows it will rise again
with the certainty
of Papillon now.

And as he rises to tell his story
history
repeats again.

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.

ENDANGERED

by Penelope Moffet

AI-generated image by NightCafé for The New Verse News

A large orange butterfly

flits through a break in traffic

from one side of the street

to the median, one line of

sign-holding people chanting

"No monarchs! No kings!"

to another. No, goddammit, no.

Don't be such a fucking poet.

Don't focus on the butterfly.

The handmade poster the poet will be carrying at today's march.

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems appear in Eclectica, ONE ART, Calyx and other literary journals. A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2026. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives in Southern California.

THERE ARE STILL WONDERFUL THINGS AWAITING DISCOVERY

by Joan Leotta

A new butterfly was recently discovered in Italy. It was identified in the woods of the province of Cosenza in Calabria by researchers from CREA, the Council for Agricultural Research and Analysis of Agricultural Economics. The scholars decided to dedicate their discovery to Giulio Regeni, the young researcher from Friuli who was tortured and killed in Egypt in 2016 by christening the insect with the name Diplodoma giulioregenii. —La Voce di New York, February 18, 2025

In Calabria, in a forest my  grandfather might have once explored, scientists are touting the discovery of a previously unknown species  of butterfly—dappled as if its golden wings were brushed by forest shadows, like today’s  shadows of poverty, of war. But still, the creature’s alive,  beautiful, and new to us,  its dappled color  perhaps the very reason this unique dna specimen was not noticed earlier. The scientists named it for a young Italian researcher cut down by violence in Cairo in 2016. This butterfly both new life, and momento mori, named for,  reminding us of a young man whose joy was in  discovering new things, reminding us that the thrill of the discovery of new beauty of gentle creatures like this  butterfly whose wings can fan the warm calm air  of love over us, if only we open our eyes to search for them. Welcome, we salute you, “Diplodoma giulioregenii” Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She’s been published as essayist, poet, short story writer, novelist, and a two-time nominee for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her poetry and stories have appeared in Spillwords,  One Art, The Ekphrastic Review, The Lake, and many others. She performs folktale programs most often highlighting  food, family, and strong women and has just debuted a one-woman show, “Meet Louisa May Alcott, Nurse and a Force in Healing America post Civil War.” Contact joanleotta[at]gmail[dot]com .

DEER

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

These words will name the one 
dragged out of the woods by two men 

to the dirt road I walk on, how the day 
before I had startled one in our field, 

& all I saw was the white flag of its leaving, 
& today I see a long, limp tongue hanging out 

from the quiet mouth as the men lift it
into the back of a truck, the sagging 

body, four hooves held by their hands. 
Hands. Hooves. How a bullet leaves a body 

still & stained, & now every day I will look on the edge 
of the road for signs of blood & write 

this poem over & over. In every death
sloughed skin to become again. 

That settling of death right next to you,

how you move over, make room for it.


Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has four poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera(2019), and Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2023). Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO.

WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON

by Gail White

Explosions in Kyiv heard live on air https://t.co/JGLvh4k8tX

— HectorM (@JaguarVer) February 24, 2022

All times are times of impending doom,

If one knows how to read the signs.

But old gods walk through the living room

And lay down nets and fishing lines.

Clutching the mesh, I begin to seek

Wonders and signs I’ve let slip by:

The fish impaled on the heron’s beak

Miraculous as the butterfly.

Between war and depression the end will come.

With plague and famine we take our chance.

But the cat moves her kittens one last time,

And the sandhill crane does a mating dance.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

THE BOOTLEG FIRE IS CREATING ITS OWN WEATHER

by Francine Witte

As the Bootleg fire in Southern Oregon rages on, the massive wildfire is creating its own weather systems. "The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it's changing the weather. Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do," Marcus Kauffman, a spokesman for the state forestry department, told The New York Times. —EcoWatch. Photo: A pyrocumulus cloud from the Bootleg Fire drifts into the air near Bly, Oregon on July 16, 2021. PAYTON BRUNI / AFP via Getty Images via EcoWatch.

Smokedrift and sunblot

from the fire spreading

like deathpain, the heat

so hot it spins the wind,

pinches lightning out

of the sky. Used to be

the wind would tell

the fire where to go.

 

Here in the east, we watch

the fire on TV. The silhouettes

of houses falling cardlike,

the bare hands of trees reaching up

in useless prayer. The weatherman

tells us the clouds we see

in the New York sky aren’t clouds

but smoke from out west.

 

It makes me think of other weathers,

the ones that weren’t weathers,

the storm of my father leaving so fast

the windows quaked, and then, the quiver

 

of hospitals filling up again, the rain

in the eyes of the left-behind.

The quiet drought of a man,

somewhere, shaking his head

sending the word “hoax” into the

air like a butterfly.

 

Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press), The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction), and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books). Her chapbook The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) will be published by ELJ in Fall 2021. She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in NYC.

APERTURE

by Erin Murphy

Embed from Getty Images

November 2020  

 

The cloud bank is a mountain— 

no, a continent—in the gun metal                               

 

sky and beneath it a cavalry  

of trees, mostly oak, limbs rhyming  

 

in Vs. Look closer to see the anarchy  

of leaves—some refusing                                

 

to surrender even after three nights  

of frost. What will it take? 

 

Remember the film in which  

the boys were cloned from evil DNA. 

 

Remember half your neighbors 

voted for—and from—hate. 

 

Who has won? Who has lost? 

Zoom in to the tip of a twig  

 

where a caterpillar—backlit  

by sunlight—stakes its claim,  

 

chrysalis of history spooled tight  

as a movie plot. Inside: maybe  

 

a monarch. Maybe a tiger 

moth. 

Erin Murphy’s eighth book of poems, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Field, Southern Humanities Review, Glass, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review. 

ALI

by Skaidrite Stelzer

Skaidrite Stelzer is a Toledo, Ohio poet whose work has appeared in many literary journals including previously in TheNewVerse.News.