STARGAZING NOTES

by Dan Overgaard

Erupting star, incinerating star:

the likes of which has never been observed 

or measured in our skies—oh yes! we are 

observing now, obsessively, but maybe not 

as worshipfully as you might be wishing—

if, that is, you ever spent a wish on us.

And I’ve been searching, high and rather low, 

for some device—an image or a metaphor

sufficiently sensational for you—

but you told us you’re a star, so let’s use that.

Astronomers who stay up late observe

astonishing phenomena so they can 

measure light, and theorize. Most any night

they catch spectacular releases,

flares of blinding and exploding gas—

and you’ve got those, so we’ll be theorizing

for a long, long time about your molten core

of darkness and whatever’s broken there. 

But it’s hardly theoretical—or celestial—

for everyone who’s burned by your debris. 

In fact, you’re most unheavenly, the way

you’re not content to shine like other stars, 

or hold your corner of our constellation up

so we can navigate or wish upon you 

as our steady and illuminating guide.

Though stars, by definition, don’t have moons,

you’ve commandeered more moons than Jupiter,

and flogged them round about you til they blur

together, more like Saturn’s rings, and then

you trash them all unless they make you shine.

The stars out there do all their starry things:

forming and shining, guiding and blinking out.

It’s not fair to compare them in this way.

You claim to be our star while you are here,

but all your sucking needs may cave us in.

In time, you’ll be assessed by smarter

scientists than me, but frankly I don’t think

you’ll be the greatest in the firmament,

and I can tell you that this galaxy of ours

has never been—and won’t turn—white for you. 

And so, collapsing star, we watch you burn. 

You torch us as you smolder and pretend—

but though you smite us, we will not go blind.

Your gas is dissipating now, and soon—

before your end—you’ll be an empty dwarf.

Dan Overgaard was born and raised in Thailand. He attended Westmont College, dropped out, moved to Seattle, became a transit operator, then managed transit technology projects and programs. He’s now retired, and probably gardening or catching up on reading. His poems have appeared in Mobius, Santa Clara Review, Across The Margin, The Galway Review, pioneertown, As It Ought To Be, The High Window, and other journals.

DAYS AFTER

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Bombed, shot, knifed 

into silence, no more. 

I will walk to the store. 

I will walk to the post 

office. I will send a letter. 

I won’t go postal. I will 

not melt down inside

or out. I will love you, brother. 

I will hug you, sister.

I will get up, turn up,

count, be counted. 

I will not let the darkness 

triumph. I will not allow 

the dark night permanence.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. 

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

SOLIDARITY

by Melissa Balmain

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

“If you’ve noticed more fireflies dancing across your backyard this summer, you’re not imagining things. Experts report that 2025 has been a banner year for these glowing insects.”—WTOP News

Even my ordinarily blank lawn
is flashing this July—no bottle rocket
or Catherine wheel could match the pleasant shock it
gives me each time a tiny lamp turns on
to help a bachelor find a blinding date. 
The bugs can’t read, of course, about pollution
and other woes that might spell dissolution
for all their kind, but as they mate and mate
I like to think they somehow know what’s looming,
deep in their chitin—that their sudden blooming
is nature’s way of putting up a fight,
and that these living fireworks before us
can make us hear, and heed, a timely chorus:
When darkness threatens you, crank up your light.

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).

PAGES OF LIGHT (IN DARK TIMES)

by David Chorlton

(1)

Hard to tell

whether the wind 

last night was social unrest

or coyotes’ dreams as darkness flowing.

The lightness of touch suggested

nature whispering

                                 in the face of human discord

yet in the absence of a moon

and with so few stars

to give direction there were only the neighborhood palms

leaning on the moment

                                            as if time

had taken solid form and claimed

the desert underneath

the city as its first

and only home.

 

(2)

Stone-bright the way ahead

runs true to course, rising by the step

to a view of all things possible

and some

                 forever out of reach. All those things

that never change come what may

are out there, stubborn and holding their ground

through traffic jams and newscasts,

analyses and polls, discussions

that take truth

                           away just as the sun

has stripped first the outer skin

of the saguaro lying

where it fell two summers back

                                                            and subsequently

dried its flesh revealing the core

connecting tip to root, the inner life

revealed in code, an alphabet

surviving after language ends.

(3)

The peaks and dips along the ridge

rest easily this morning

against clouds too closely packed

for news to pass

                               from worlds beyond our own. 

Grey light, pigeon feathers

scattering from the rooftop cooling unit at house

four-three-four-seven

where a hawk endures a mockingbird’s attention

until he stretches out

                                        and eases into day’s grey light.

Nothing exists outside

his range of vision, he’s the headline and the story

circling higher than opinion columns

reach. Doesn’t need words

to know what he knows. Leaves emptiness alone

because the entire sky

                                          isn’t worth

the area he’s taken for a home.

 

(4)

A bright and tranquil morning

on the way around the pond where red-

eared sliders and secrets

move just beneath the sky

that floats across the surface to the reeds

at the farthest edge.

                                      A Black phoebe picks flies

and rumors from the air.

None are too fast for him,

neither the latest out of Hollywood

nor royalty’s ongoing

struggle to be important. What is true tastes no different

from what is not; he keeps dipping

and swerving

                         through politics, finance

and all the way down

to the feathers and bones left on the ground

still with a glaze of moonlight.

 

(5)

Arroyo walk, sidestepping the facts and

speculating whether

the boulder resting on the slope just past

where the trail dips came

to be exactly in position after

falling through space

                                        or was coughed out of the Earth.

Some facts are immoveable, too heavy

to be argued about. But someone’s always

naming parts, allocating

numbers, holding science

to the light and insisting explanations

matter more

                       than the experience

of stopping every time

to contemplate the mystery

that built the world before there was

a truth

             to lie about, when

only the stars kept records. 

 

(6)

Darkness left, light straight

ahead, the first sky of the day can’t decide

which mood to promise. The clouds

are carrying concealed, the sun’s

a lonely heart just waking up. 

One day looks

                          much like another, give or take

the shadows and the low high

in the forecast, rain

this afternoon on a street

for all weathers where showers dance

on asphalt,

                    heat soaks in

and wishes for a better world

go barefoot, once around the cul-de-sac

and back, beyond the visible, beyond

reality, beyond what even

                                                 the hawk can see

from his throne of wind.

David Chorlton lives in Phoenix with a view of a desert mountain and more interesting local bird life than many people expect in a city. The desert still teaches him about poetry in a way academies can never do.

DECEMBER 2024

a Golden Shovel poem based on a line from Wendell Berry’s “Sabbaths 2005 I”

by Joanne Kennedy Frazer

distressed     appalled     by all    this

     i set alight    the Christmas Candle

       illumine my soul    against

darkness of hatred    of evil      that the

          culture      carries in the wind

Joanne Kennedy Frazer is a retired peace and justice director and educator for faith-based organizations. She began writing in her early 70s, and has now been published more than 80 times in anthologies, on-line zines, and magazines. Five poems have been turned into a song cycle titled Resistance by composer Steven Luksan and performed in Seattle and Durham. Her latest chapbook Seasonings (Kelsay Books) was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She lives in Raleigh, NC.

BIRDCAST

by David Chorlton

World Migratory Bird Day May 11, 2024
BirdCast

Two million birds crossed the county last night

moving to where starlight

lands. It’s springtime in the sky, two thousand

four hundred feet at midnight high,

feather bright and quiet

along the true path north. It’s dark enough

 

up there to feel

the pull of a remembered place

while down here the sleeping mountains roll

to one side or the other, and the creeks

keep flowing on the way

to being rivers. Forests sparkle

with the sounds of insects,

the desert exhales, radios are tuned

 

to the secrets only darkness knows

and they play softly while

the count begins. Orioles, flycatchers

and chats; there they go, a million, a thousand,

a hundred and the one

grosbeak who already knows

the tree she will nest in.

David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix, now living close to an extensive desert preserve that runs through the city. His neighbors include coyotes and the hawk families that nest between the human and natural worlds. They often make their way into his painting and writing life.

HEMORRHAGE BOP

by Cindy Veach

I watch three old white men on the news talking

about abortion how it’s no big deal for a woman

to get a bus ticket and travel to another state.

It’s trending on X, these old men in their suits and ties

with their limp cocks tucked away under the table

their small hands gesturing or resting on the table.

 

I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.

 

And now Arizona has upheld a draconian Civil War-era

abortion law proving that the past does come back

to haunt. I almost bled out after my daughter’s birth.

I’ve never written about this. It took a helicopter

and two D&C’s to save me. A hundred years ago

I would have died of childbirth. I marched for the right

to choose in my 20’s only to lose it in my 60’s

 

I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.

 

In the middle of yesterday the moon eclipsed the sun.

People were brought to tears as they watched

in their special protective glasses. People on both sides

of the aisle equally moved by the night of day.

The darkness I speak of is different. It digests everything

good and fattens the libidos of men.

 

I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.

Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.

TO THE TOTAL ECLIPSE

by Bill Meissner

Though we don’t know exactly why,

we travel from afar just to see it. 

We’ll journey a hundred miles. A thousand. Ten

 

thousand or more. For some reason we don’t understand,

we want to turn our heads

toward the sun and see it slowly disappear, the same way

our hunched Neanderthal ancestors did, when they noticed  

a sudden strange moment of night just outside the mouth of the cave.

 

But we are modern, and civilized. We drive SUVs to Texas or Maine,

find the exact location with our GPS.

In case of a traffic jam, we pack the car with

rations and necessities: water, snacks, and cell phones.

 

We realize it will not be an easy journey.   

It will be almost like a war zone—

those four or five million people

all flocking to the narrow path  

where the eclipse

makes its total promise to the sky.

 

We don’t know exactly why, but something calls us to leave

the bright landscape where we live

and go there, to the land where the sun dims, and, eventually,

surrounds itself

with a thin gold wedding ring.

 

We’re drawn to that place, a place where we can finally put

our cell phones down, tilt our faces toward the sky,

hold hands with those we love,

and be primitive again, and full of something we don’t understand,

as we escape the world

for those four minutes and twenty-one seconds

of frightening, beautiful darkness.

Bill Meissner is the author of 12 books, including five collections of poetry and three novels. His most recent book of poems is The Mapmaker’s Dream (Finishing Line Press). His new carnival-themed novel The Wonders of the Little World features a fortune-teller mother who, with her precocious 11-year-old daughter, goes on a search for her tightrope walker husband. His previous novel about the effects of the Vietnam War on a family in a small Midwest town is Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire.

SHE THINKS OF MOLTEN THINGS

by Dana Yost

I breathe

But nothing goes in

Or out. But this

Is not true.

I open my eyes

But they see nothing.

A darkness, early-morning

Darkness. Into infinity.

Is this dying?

My ears hear the

Mad-man screams

Of killers. Then the

wails of those

About to die.

A woman thinks

Of molten things:

Eyebrow melting,

Walls to a home

Curling in flames,

Dead bodies in the

Desert, not charred

But dark with bullet

Holes, torn fabric,

Hearts burnt in mid-beat.

Tracers orange, skyward

Flares red. In a room

An evacuee is given

Tea but says no, her

Mother dragged off

Like fire down a hill,

Lurching, shrieking, 

So hot an image

She curls on a cot

And thinks of molten things.

Dana Yost says of this poem: It is allegorical, about the war in Israel. It troubles me deeply and I feel the need to say something about it, but rather than write a direct, reportorial piece about it I wanted to get at the pain of it. I hope this works.

I AND THOU, CHATGPT

by Barbara Simmons

Shutterstock AI-generated image in response to “trapped in darkness” line created by ChatGPT 

Can you write poetry?
                Free verse or form?
A sonnet on aging?
                Sure, here’s one that rhymes~
the words that show your golden hue
can stay aglow, even with wrinkles
that start to show.
 
Your words come quickly, resonate, too,
reminding me that aging carries its grace
I’m glad my sonnet resonates with you, I’m glad
I’ve helped express your thoughts. Anything else you’d like to have me write about?
 
Loneliness abounds in this post COVID world, 
so would you write a poem helping me to deal
with it?
 
I try to fill the void with noise,
But it echoes back with disdain,
I try to find joy in simple things,
But it feels like a never-ending strain
I fear my loneliness smothers
And I’ll be trapped in this darkness, enthralled
But then I remind myself
That I am not alone in this fight
 
Again, my thanks, dear ChatGPT, 
you seem to understand humanity’s plight,
so now I ask you for more help:
how to write about a marriage’s ending?
Would you? For my son?
 
Farewell, my dear, we part
Our love was true, but now it’s dark
The memories we shared the vows we spoke
Will linger forever, a permanent cloak.
 
I understand the lines, though not all ring true, 
the breaking bringing darkness of its own
to what had been the marriage’s light.
 
My poem was one perspective on letting go,
and may not resonate with all.
Let me add this is a process, not always easy,
important to focus on good memories, moments
of happiness, learning from past ones to be able 
to move forward. 
Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.
 
I know my generative pre-trained transformer, ChatGPT,
generates human responses in its tool-trained ways, but
for that moment, I feel a virtual hug, feel someone
in this universe of merged moments cares, 
a universe responding when my own world’s cursor 
frequently is still.
 

Barbara Simmons, a Bostonian and Californian, says both coasts inspire her. An alumna of Wellesley and Johns Hopkins’ Writing Seminars, and a retired educator, she savors life, envisions, celebrates, and understands with words.  Some publications: Boston Accent, The New Verse News, Soul-Lit, Capsule Stories 2022: Swimming, and her book, Offertories: Exclamations and Disequilibriums.

TRUE HOPE IS SWIFT AND FLIES WITH SWALLOW'S WINGS

by Annie Cowell 

Mural with swallows, Kyiv.

At dawn there is a chattering outside;

the swallows have returned—

A clattering percussion after winter’s silence

And I wonder as I watch them 

hurtling like arrows across the sky—

are there swallows shrieking over Kyiv?

Whilst missiles blast the light from Kyiv’s skies

will children spy the swallows darting past;

olive twigs hanging from their beaks?

Will those birds find their nests are broken

and sit instead on the prow of Charon’s boat

to guide the dead to the underworld?

Or rather, as sirens wail in breathless darkness

will the swallows glitter amongst the stars—

souls of the dead heralding the sun?

They say that true hope is swift 

and flies with swallow's wings

‘and light will win over darkness’

Annie Cowell is a former teacher living in Cyprus. She has poems forthcoming in a number of publications. @AnnieCowell3