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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
Showing posts with label elves. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elves. Show all posts

Friday, January 11, 2019

MEANWHILE IN MIDDLE EARTH

by Matt Quinn


"Going Medieval" by Matt Bors at TheNib


Down in the valley’s toxic murk
wild gangs of rapey goblins lurk.
All shifty-eyed with evil smirks
and unbesmirched by honest work,

they lust for trinkets they don’t need,
like fifty-inch plasma TVs,
and get mashed up on meth-laced mead,
and spread diseases when they breed.

Not one can read or use a quill,
they have no useful trades or skills
and never ever pay their bills,
but peer with envy up the hill

to where the air is pure and clean
and sparkles with a silver sheen,
where no one does a thing that’s mean,
and all are blond and tall and lean

and bathe in crystal waterfalls
as lute-strings fill the shopping malls
with songs of liberty for all.
And so we built this great steel wall

(which also helps keep out the smell)
to shield our sacred citadel
from those who do not mean us well,
inscribed it with this ancient spell:

Don’t fuck with us, for we are elves.
We want to keep this for ourselves.


Matt Quinn lives in Brighton, England in a hobbit hole a short walk from the sea. His poems can be found online in Rattle, The Morning Star, The Deaf Poets Society, TheNewVerse.News and various other places.

Saturday, December 15, 2018

A DRAFT OF SANTAS

by Leslie Prosterman



NYC SantaCon


last Saturday afternoon bands of roving santas started appearing near
Washington Square Park, santas in groups of 3,4,7, isolated santas,
santas packed in taxis, reindeer hoisting santas, santas encamped
in Penn Station with paper bags and bottles, downtown santas
waiting in line for Pearl  Oyster Bar to open, low-bellied boy santas,
santas with cleavage, singing santas, santas arguing about film theory,
as the evening wore on, partial santas,


a few elves


Leslie Prosterman is the author of Snapshots and Dances (Garden District Press, 2011) and poems in journals and collections, most recently in Fourth River’s “Displacement” issue, as well as in From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream; Pa'lante A La Luz: Charge Into The Light; and FluteBone Song, set to Charley Gerard’s music, now out on CD (Songs of Love and Passion). A former tenured academic, now community teacher of poetry, cultural activist, and dancer, she is also a sometime student of trapeze.