SHORTAGE

by Tara Menon

The Boston Globe states
there’s a shortage of breast biopsy needles 
in the nation, the result of a recall.
Doctors need to conserve their supply.
Breast cancer diagnoses are delayed. 
 
We mustn’t sprout cancer cells 
at least until the end of March.
Better yet, we must remain healthy 
our entire lives while science
invents ways to cure or prevent diseases.
 
What do we do about shortages
when the Strait of Hormuz closes
or when nations hoard supplies as weapons of wars
or when global warming results in more pandemics,
overwhelming hospitals to prioritize surgeries,
or when doctors are forced to turn down patients
or when the cost of insurance swells to smother us?
What then?
 
None of those scenarios have to happen, you know.
The worst enemy is the shrug of shoulders.

Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is a two-time finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award. Her latest poems are forthcoming or have appeared in AMPLIFY (Sheila-Na-Gig), The Sucharnochee Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Chaotic Merge Magazine, and Grey Sparrow Journal.

JOUSTING WINDMILLS

by Zumwalt

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

The Trump administration said Monday it is pausing leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast due to what it said were national security risks identified by the Pentagon. —NPR, December 22, 2025

Our Leader stands upon a fairway green,
Curses white-armed giants, cool and lean.
"Monstrosities!" he cries, with twisting claims,
"I spot our world's decay upon their frames!"
Such ugly things cause huge real estate declines:
"A seventy-five percent plunge," he knowingly assigns.
"Cancer, rust, rot, and ruin are all they can provide,
It's time to take them on— 
               and I will be your guide!"

"Down below the treacherous windmill's feet,
More dead birds than alive—an entire fleet!
Mills chop up our eagles, and—look like hell,
Emit toxic fumes, and sounds that kill!
And in our oceans where whales were once happy 
Damn windmills have driven them completely batty
And maybe—when time to hear my words so wise and true
Your TV won't work— 
               the wind may not blow on cue."                                                                                 

Our Leader had issued an order across the land
But a judge overruled—left-wing sleight of hand!
On Monday our leader again pursued his cause 
Five offshore leases were put on pause.  
"Rogue windmills threaten our eastern shore!
If they don't desist, we go to war!
We fear not Putin, China or 
                illegal immigrants eating up our pets,
But, if necessary— 
                we will launch our nukes —    
                more than anyone has ever launched before— 
                to stop these pesky, ugly, windmill threats!"

Zumwalt's poetry explores themes of alienation, shifting reality, and personal adaptation.

THE TIPPING POINT

by Jill Rachel Jacobs

(Ode to an Unseen Migrant During Perilous Times)

 

When evil comes a knocking, 

it may arrive with a vengeance, or 

incognito, like some 

Bible-thumping

good ol’ Joe, 

humping a flag.

 

("What we've got here is a failure to communicate")

When rage is sadness and 

sadness is rage, and it becomes

impossible to distinguish the two,

it’s not surprising we may recoil,

hidden in the shadows of the 

reality of what has become 

the new normal. 

 

("But I don’t want to go among mad people")

Like a cancer gone undetected, 

metastasized, 

cell by cell, 

dividing 

conquering,

licking wounds,

stealing secrets, 

tempted by madness,

trying to make sense of 

how we have now become 

that which we once loathed.

 

("Thank you, Sir, May I have another?")

 

When horror is contained, 

darkness has lifted, 

emerging from the underbelly,

dreams intact, 

still blinded by the 

innocence of children’s eyes, 

resting comfortably;

We wait.

 

("We have learned to see the world in gasps")

Unencumbered by reason,

justice now a luxury, 

in a world unrecognizable,

where compassion no longer prevails.

 

(How long? An hour, a year, a lifetime or two?)

 

When will we say when?

When prey becomes the predator,

When captors are held captive,

When cage doors are flung wide open.

Jill Rachel Jacobs is a New York based writer, poet whose poetry has been featured in numerous journals. Her features, commentaries, interviews have been published in The New York Times, Reuters, The Independent, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune, NPR’s Marketplace and Morning Edition.

PICTURES OF PEACE IN OUR TIME, PROTECTION IN OUR DAY

by Michelle DeRose

A paper badge held aloft over eyes

thirteen years’ wide, the funds to find

their cure cut. Texas brothers,

three and five, their mother dead

in the state’s bid to keep the unviable

alive. Women moved to men’s prisons

to prevent concussions in girls’ sports;

the study of injuries among girls removed.

Four hundred million dollars rescinded

for failure to stop campus harassment

one week after three Gentiles circled

and humiliated, pointed and shouted

to muffle the modestly dressed Jewish man’s

assertions he’s not playing that game.

This whether we like it or not.

Newly named Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michelle DeRose’s poetry won the Chancellor’s Prize in 2024 and the Faruq Z Bey Award in 2023 from the Poetry Society of Michigan. Her poetry has been published in dozens of venues, most recently The New Verse News, Sparks of Calliope, The Midwest Quarterly, and Dunes Review, and is forthcoming in Months to Years and One Hundred Poems for Hearing Dogs (anthology). She is participating in the 2025 Stafford Challenge—a cohort of poets who have committed to writing a poem a day for a year. The daily news supplies plenty of material for that effort.

DEATH CLEANING

by Melissa Balmain

“Swedish death cleaning [is the] tradition of decluttering and organizing one's life before passing away.” —The Spruce
 

My junk had piled up for years
wherever I could shove it.
Decluttering? Just not my thing—
and yet, this week, I love it.
 
So long, old pamphlets, pens, receipts,
and shirt with half a collar!
Hello, bare floors and empty drawers!
I’ve triumphed over squalor!
 
I used to think I’d never need
to death-clean like the Swedish;
no midlife ill had goosed my will
to keep my closets neatish.
 
Whose symptoms of mortality,
whose fast-approaching coffin
and crumbling bone, if not my own,
could make me tidy often?
 
Now as our nation’s vitals teem
with metastatic cancer
for which a cure is far from sure,
I’ve finally got my answer.

Melissa Balmain edits Light, America's longest-running journal of comic verse. Her latest book of poetry is Satan Talks to His Therapist (Paul Dry Books).

ON THE DEATH OF A CEO

by Lori D’Angelo

We don't trade one life for another or

a thousand. With every loss, the universe

cries out and also keeps on. Nothing, not 

yet, stops it. So, yes, whether your mother

just found out she has cancer or your father

has just entered hospice, the clock still tick

tocks, minutes go by. Every year, around this

time, we watch Dickens' A Christmas Carol

and think, Ah yes, even a miser had a soul. 

But yet when a man whose company did 

some shitty shady things dies, don't join in

the chorus of he deserved it haters. It's not 

much different to do that than it is to weigh

worth by a claim denied algorithm. If you say

all of them, mean all of them, even the maybe 

he deserved it bastards. In earth, their bones, 

our bones, all rot the same. The minute you 

forget, you become what you thought you’d

never be: callous, jaded, alive but also dead. 

Instead,                                      mourn it all. 

Lori D'Angelo is a grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a fellow at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and an alumna of the Community of Writers. Her work has appeared in various literary journals including BULL, Gargoyle, Drunken Boat, Moon City Review, and Rejection Letters. Her first book, a collection called The Monsters Are Here, was recently published by ELJ Editions. 

MY MOTHER IS SUING THE US GOVERNMENT FOR POISONING HER HUSBAND

by Bill Garvey

The government doubts his
cancer was caused by Camp Lejeune.
How do you know he was even there? they ask. 
We lived in New Bern North Carolina, 
she says, and every day Bill took the bus to Cherry Point 
or Camp Lejeune depending on his orders.
 
But even if he was at Camp Lejeune,
how do you know he drank the water?
It was hot, May to September 1952.
I'm sure he drank the water.
Were you with him at Lejeune?
Did you witness him drink the water?
 
Of course I wasn't with him. 
Of course I didn't witness... 
So for all you know he could have quenched
his thirst with an ice-cold Coca-Cola.
Or even a Ginger Ale. For all you know he was never 
exposed to the water at Camp Lejeune. 
 
I was madly in love with a Marine 
with crooked teeth and a cocky grin. 
Every day from May to September he came 
home to me seventy-two years ago,
clean and showered, so handsome 
in his crisp uniform, stepping from the bus 
 
into our tiny apartment, ready for me. 
Embracing me so close I forgot all about the heat. 
I'll always remember how good he smelled 
at the end of a long day, his hair still damp from 
your showers, not a whiff of Coca-Cola—
or even a Ginger Ale—on his lips.

Author's note: This is a true story. My mother is 93, still sharp, and she is suing the US government for my father's death from kidney and renal cancer in 1977, when the world was ignorant to Lejeune.

Bill Garvey's collection of poetry The basement on Biella was published in 2023 by DarkWinter Press. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Rattle, One Art, San Antonio Review, Connecticut River Review, Cimarron Review, The New Verse News, The New Quarterly and others.

SILENCE AFTER THE MAUI FIRE

by Christian Hanz Lozada

I deconstruct the “Santa’s Village” Lego set
and the house has been quiet all day
 
while Hawaiian Uncle with stage 4 lungs watches the news
and the house has been quiet all day
 
the county asks family of the missing to submit DNA to match ashen remains
and the house has been quiet all day
 
after the fire Hawaiian Uncle escaped by sleeping on the shore
and the house has been quiet all day
 
and by crossing an ocean and by needing his niece’s husband to clean his ass
and the house has been quiet all day
 
long enough for health insurance ones and zeroes to change Hawaii to America
and the house has been quiet all day

Christian Hanz Lozada (he/him) is the son of an immigrant Filipino and a descendent of the Southern Confederacy. He knows the shape of hope and exclusion. He authored the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not (2023) and co-authored Leave with More Than You Came With (2019). His poems have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review (Pushcart Nominee), Bamboo Ridge Press, 34 Orchard, Mud Season Review, among others. Christian has featured at the Autry Museum and Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, CA and uses his MFA to teach his neighbors and their kids at Los Angeles Harbor College.

DEAR JASON ALDEAN

by Laurie Rosen

In my little town there were

moms at home doing laundry,

schools we could walk to,

one car in every driveway, sometimes two. 

Our neighborhoods teemed with children —

kick ball or wiffle ball in the middle of the street.

There was a bowling alley, ice cream parlor

and golf driving range, 

In my little town there were teachers 

who required us to memorize poems, 

write haikus, read Icarus, Hiroshima,

Shakespeare and the Bible. 

And in my little town, a football coach taught 

health class. A young teacher who spoke

openly on the VietNam war, civil rights 

and the slaughter of indigenous people

was disappeared, replaced

by an elderly retired teacher who bored us 

with dates and white washed facts,

screamed at us to pay attention. 

Our only lake, once a summer retreat, 

was declared a Superfund waste site. 

There was rampant drug and alcohol abuse, 

breast cancer, brain tumors, overdoses and suicides. 

In my little town, mostly white and Christian,

we sang China Town is Burning down, 

during recess, to the tune of ring-around-the-rosy 

at the one Chinese American boy 

in our third grade class, who stood

off to the side, while we held hands 

and skipped round and round.

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in The Muddy River Poetry Review, Peregrine, Oddball Magazine, Gyroscope Review, The New Verse News, The Inquisitive Eater: a journal of  The New School, One Art, and elsewhere.

ALWAYS A POEM, JIMMY

by Indran Amirthanayagam 

The melanoma spread from

skin to liver to brain and

President Jimmy Carter

started to fall often, walking

in the peanut field, at church

on Sunday, at home. He wrote

Always A Reckoning. I wrote

The Elephants of Reckoning. 

We exchanged our reckonings

in 1997 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.

I was assigned to the American

Embassy and sat down with Jimmy,

Rosalynn and Chip to talk

politics, health and environment.

The President visited to gather

facts in his fight against

river blindness, one of countless

maladies and challenges 

he dedicated his life to resolve. 

These included everything 

he faced as president—

hostages, recession, first steps

to making America green

and sustainable—and every 

election after as he traveled 

the world to observe their 

conduct, to help keep them 

safe and free. Jimmy Carter,

you walk blessed, a life 

of good deeds and 

harvests and fighting 

back against the blows, 

approaching a century, 

a marvel. Godspeed. 

Thank you again 

for the poetry.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.