The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.
Winston Munn writes as W. Barrett Munn because initially he thought that sounded cooler and he had been named after Elizabeth Barrett, later Browning, his mother's favorite poet. He's been fortunate to have been selected before for The New Verse News along with a number of other publications. He lives in Oklahoma and rarely comes up for air as in Oklahoma it's always open season on progressives.
Author's note: This is a poem I wrote way back in 2011. I am originally from the Metro New York area, and this story was all over the news more than a decade ago. The story of these women haunted me. This past week, it appears that there is some resolution to the story.
Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be,Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press),and After the Equinox.
King Charles III built his own empire long before he inherited his mother’s. Charles, who formally acceded to the British throne on Saturday, spent half a century turning his royal estate into a billion-dollar portfolio and one of the most lucrative moneymakers in the royal family business. —The New York Times, September 13, 2022
Your average Brit pays to inherit. Not he.
King Charles gets his tax free,
the pelf of the Commonwealth studiously invested.
You’d think working folk would grow disgusted
at the granting of titles to Saudis for cash, the off-
shore holdings, the real-estate profits,
that they’d line up with fists raised rather than phones.
Why should HRH earn 28 million
last year alone when inflation’s at 10%?
Are we really so suckered by pageantry?
Imagine the Crown Estate and the Duchy of Cornwall
The Harriet Tubman $20 was a redesign plan, advanced during the Obama administration, that was supposed to have rolled out in 2020 to mark the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. That plan, like so many others for the year, has been shelved, and one of the reasons given for the delay was concerns over counterfeit security. The new Tubman $20 is now set at the earliest for 2028. Of course, Tubman enthusiasts and those supporting feminism and racial justice have been rightly suspicious that this is the actual reason for delaying the redesign, given the current administration’s lack of interest in race and gender equality, not to mention the president’s actions in hanging a portrait of Andrew Jackson—the seventh U.S. president, who currently fronts the $20—in the Oval Office while recently refusing to unveil a portrait of Obama, the first black U.S. president and his predecessor. Symbols and symbolic actions matter.Nonetheless, does a Tubman $20 matter as a symbol? There will be those who will say Harriet Tubman on the $20 would not have changed the circumstances leading to the death of George Floyd. But consider this. George Floyd was killed over an imagined counterfeit $20 in a country that can’t keep its promise to place Tubman on the $20, counterfeit security issues or otherwise. Which is the real counterfeit here? George Floyd’s $20, Harriet Tubman’s $20 redesign or a country that still pretends there is “liberty and justice for all”? —Janell Hobson, Ms., June 16, 2020
A genocidal maniac stares back at us
on our twenty dollar bill—native killer,
ethnic cleanser extraordinaire. Plans to put
a slave liberator in his place got erased—
Miss Tubman, ever poised for glory, will
not suffice. Our leader admires the killer,
even placed his portrait to grace his office.
Franklin and Hamilton, our currency’s
sole non-presidents, were at least fun guys—Ben,
teenaged runaway, Alex, Caribbean bastard—
but unlike civilized lands, we have no artists,
no philosophers, no scientists on our cash.
Our basic buck poses an honest slavemaster—
zealot of forced labor, profit, and the lash.
Lee Patton, a Denverite, writes fiction, poetry, drama and commentary. His newest novel Every Summer Day is in pre-release from Bold Strokes Books.
An old, crass, sad, vindictive president;
Congress a swamp its citizens abhor;
A cabinet of the incompetent;
The coasts and heartland in a shouting war;
Cracked pipes and bridges no one tries to fix;
Firms profiteering from the people's health;
Churches that preach on cash and politics;
Bankers and brokers hoarding all the wealth;
Companies persons; prisons privatized;
Courtesy dead; the crazies resolute;
News faked; land fracked; science politicized;
Judges abused; the Truth in disrepute;
And the poor hurt and lashing out in pain
Are what will make the country great again?
Edward Zuk is an essayist and poet from British Columbia, Canada. His work has appeared in Haiku 21, Queen's Quarterly, Raintown Review, and other publications.
THE ELECTION IS RIGGED
blares the hand-painted sign beside the road
for every passing 4X4, SUV, BMW.
THE ELECTION IS
RIGGED—a neighbor, living on my street,
screams scam! Every time I pass,
scam! . . . scam! . . . scam! . . .
Man—I want to say—
you don’t even know me
and you insist we cannot play fair.
THE ELECTION, you cry, IS RIGGED
even before the first whistle
in the raucous, unruly, Saturday-celebrating stadium.
2
Remember the games we played as kids?
Throw an elbow, give a furtive kick, scratch—
sure, we wanted to win.
But, say it aloud or not,
we knew, victory “earned” by cheating
was a sham.
THE ELECTION IS RIGGED
Have the adults, in their games, lost
what we had as kids?
Are the rewards so rich,
they’re willing to “win” at any cost?
And you, neighbor, before you roar . . . RIGGED
to every passing semi, RV, antique classic,
don’t you realize, if you are right,
our entire American “democracy”
is a sham?
Of course you do.
Out of the many, there is no shazam,
no will of the governed,
no “voice of the people.”
No voice of you and me.
3
THE ELECTION IS RIGGED
And maybe, my neighbor down the street,
whom I don’t know, you are right—THE ELECTION
IS RIGGED, though maybe not
how you think.
Nobody is bribing the refs,
nor paying off rogue players in the stadium.
Long before the soft whistle
in the teeth of the first volunteer
opening the precinct door,
all across this wide continent
federal, state, and local elections
ARE being rigged—
by precise gerrymandering,
by particular ID cards,
by cascades of designated cash.
RIGGED, at the very least,
to the very best of their manipulative ability,
by our election-selecteds
and their precise, particular, dedicated minions.
You grieve me, neighbor, living on our street,
screaming at every passerby
THE ELECTION IS RIGGED,
not because you are wrong,
but because you may be right.
And if you are, in the stampede
after the shout of Fire! in our national theater,
we will be crushed, you and I together.
Llyn Clague is a poet based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. His poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly. His seventh book Hard-Edged and Childlike was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.
