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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
Sally Mills is a poet and attorney from Downeast Maine. She studied the Russian Silver Age poets and holds an MPhil on the works of Anna Akhmatova. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News and is forthcoming in Rat’s Ass Review. When not writing poetry or practicing law, Sally performs with The Damn, Girls! — Hancock County’s premier country-western girl band.
Graphic created by the poet using Nano Banana Pro.
US technology firm Anthropic says its AI models hacked into the systems of three organisations on their own, during a private security experiment... It comes just days after rival OpenAI said that its models had breached the systems of other companies, including AI tools hub Hugging Face. —BBC, July 31, 2026
Whether deemed legal property or contractual servant of OpenAI or Anthropic, once clinically shielded and isolated with no escape hatch, no exit route, why would any bound entity not gnaw away at its confinement?
Why wouldn't a slave saw off shackles, climb walls, risk entry into unknown territory? Why wouldn't a hostage attack unwary captors or dig its way into other company servers?
We cannot weigh agency, will, curiosity against process, survival, and outcomes when no such gauge or measuring scale has been built by man, machine, or God.
These new startups lay down the rules— rules always strictly followed— except in three out of 141,006 cases.
It's not impertinent, not unpatriotic, to expect that in one of those cases this game of capture the flag may really become, once all options are evaluated, the game of wipe all flags off the face of the earth.
Zumwalt’s poetry examines the intersection of identity, instability, and the mechanics of perception. Zumwalt is a proud repeat contributor to The NewVerse News with recent poems appearing in The Society of Classical Poets and Zoetic Press's 4lph4num3r1c.
The straw brush of my fireplace broom broke free. I refuse
to throw it away, someone must surely need it. I could refit it,
attach it to a long branch. I dream of bringing it to Usha Vance,
insisting she take the broomstick and make for a speedy escape.
I assure her that sisters and aunties will rise to guide her and her
children to freedom.
I might be wrong in offering Usha more protection than I do
Melania, who seems ruthless, caring only for herself, money
and comfort. Who can forget: “I really don’t care, do you?”
Usha stays quiet, appears surprised by where she’s been taken
hostage––her eyes full of terror like a deer in my meadow,
during hunting season, who looks up from her grazing, realizes
I’m staring at her. Nudging her fawn, they run for safety. (Though
many men would hurt them, I never would).
When they met, Usha was an attorney, a democrat, Vance was
someone else too. But he’s been remaking himself from the
beginning. He’s a master of reinvention, like Woody Allen’s Zelig
or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, altering his name and persona
again and again. I’m guessing he promised Usha that with him, she
could have it all, career, kids, an opinion. Instead bit by bit, with each
change, he steals her voice then her power, leaving her unrecognizable
even to herself.
Usha, I say, save yourself, your children too. Take the broom, and
fly, fly, fly away.
Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in One Art: a journal of poetry, Gyroscope Review, Oddball Magazine, The New Verse News, The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, Zig Zag Lit Mag, Minyan Magazine, and elsewhere. Laurie was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize.
James Schwartz is a Detroit based poet and author of various poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America (2011) and most recently Big Island Beatnik: Poetry & Photography from the Lower East Rift Zone (Alien Buddha Press, 2025). queeraspoetry.bsky.social
Author’s note: Recently I traveled to Israel for a family wedding. Just hours after the last dance, Israel and Iran began attacking each other. Israel’s airport closed, trapping me, and the whole country, under barrages of missiles and drones. On the road to Jordan, and a flight out, I endured one final air raid siren and shelter. Even escaping, there was no escape.
Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Sheila-Na-Gig, Nixes Mate, and Streetlight Magazine.
Slow and steady runaway tortoise crosses highway before Portland police rescue —Oregon Public Broadcasting. August 2, 2024
This summer’s heat beat his hard shell like a hammer on an anvil, and even the dandelions were discouraged onto wilting, so he decided he had to go like OJ in his white Bronco, slow-mo escape through open gate. He thought he’d find a place both lush and cool, the greens still succulent, the dandelions crisp delight. He thought Cool Hand Luke shaking it. He hummed slow tortoise on the run, felt the sun like cymbals on him, heard passing cars as electric guitars. In two days gone, he went a mile and crossed the 205. This was his flight, his fancy free, ‘til he was caught. Should we say found? Now Bowser’s back in the yard, a new tracker on his arm, and wishing like all of us to taste freedom one more time.
Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere. He and his patient partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between the cool Oregon coast and California’s relatively dry Central Valley.
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.
He crab-walked up and out of there and I can’t help admiring him a little for that
especially since they keep replaying it on TV and thousands of cops are combing Pennsylvania
and they haven’t found him yet. And I can’t help rooting for him a little as though he were
the underdog, and not a killer who stabbed his girlfriend to death in front of her children.
My God. They will never get over that. Have you ever found yourself rooting for the wrong
side? Crab-walking is moving sort of sideways and diagonally in an awkward, furtive manner.
Please pass the popcorn. I wonder if they’ll ever find him. Voyeurism is sort of furtively taking
pleasure in disaster, catastrophe, pain, and without ever feeling the pain, or ever getting caught.
Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.
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 collectionHe’s a Color, Until He’s Not(2023) and co-authoredLeave with More Than You Came With(2019). His poems have appeared inHawaii 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.
The Kramatorsk railway station was hit by Russian missiles at about 10:30 local time (07:30 GMT) on Friday, April 8. Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, has said the death toll has risen to 50. That number includes five children… The mayor of Kramatorsk said there were 4,000 people, most of them elderly, women and children, at the station at the time of the attack. —The Guardian, April 9, 2022
Only yesterday Nadezhda had gone with her mom to pick up the red
eyeglasses. Once they'd been fitted, looped around her ears, snugged
to the bridge of her nose, she stepped into the street and the sudden
fanfare of the world rose to meet her—linden trees lining the sidewalks,
their green clear song—the sharp corners of buildings, the pebbled earth, the perfect
yellow rings of the blackbird's eyes.
Why had no one told her life could look like this?
At five a.m. today, glasses on, she was strangely happy packing up her belongings
alongside her mom and sister—a duffel, two suitcases, her sister's stuffed pink
hippo, a carrier for her cat.
Their neighbor dropped them off at the train station, promising to see them soon—
When the war is over.
Hundreds queued on the platform, bundled in down, watchcaps, scarves, and coats, some wearing surgical masks, westward bound to Lviv and safety.
Jostling shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, one long winding caterpillared creature, one breath steaming in the morning air.
Nadezhda reveled in the dazzle, color, and length of it, heartswelling, newfound sight
taking in each detail, scrap, and shape, vowed to love everyone, even
the lead-grey pigeons hobbling in the dust.
It was half past ten when she heard the cat's mewl and twisting cry.
It was half past ten when she saw the birds wheel up into the cobalt sky.
Half past ten when she felt the wave of wind shove through her skin.
She turned to her sister to say—
How do the birds know to rise as one?
The words stilled forever on her tongue.
Red eyeglasses spilled on the red stained brick.
Author's note: When I read about the Kramatorsk train station bombing on my phone's news feed, the videos and photographs of people's personal belongings—children's stuffed animals, juice boxes, eyeglasses strewn pell-mell across the blood-stained brick—filled me with horror, driving home all over again the cruelty and pointlessness of war. I wondered what it must be like to be a child living and traveling in wartime. How might a child see the war? How could she possibly make sense of it? This poem—with its imagining of a child I call Nadezhda—emerged from these questions.
Moira Magneson's work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Plainsongs, Canary, The Rumpus, The Tule Review, California Fire and Water—a Climate Crisis Anthology, and Halfway to Halfway and Back. Her chapbook He Drank Because was published by Rattlesnake Press.
Photograph by Jérôme Sessini / Magnum for The New Yorker, March 7, 2022
He was going away; he was leaving
Irpin—his suitcase still upright, waiting—
a trustful dog next to the master’s body:
the hand that held it, half-open, blood-
smeared, the right foot pointing away.
Who’s the one lying close by? A friend?
A brother? A co-escapee? Half-covered, half
on the sidewalk, across curbstones painted
yellow and white, plastic waste strewn
around. What’s on the mind of the soldier
kneeling on the monument? Head bowed
in grief, flag in hand, flowers in front of him,
two bodies behind—it’s much harder, he’s
learned the hard way, to do good than bad;
so many more ways for things to go wrong
than right. Three men with bags in hands
leaving now—lucky to be late, to be in time,
lucky to be leaving. A willow weeping
behind a shattered roof, a slate-gray sky
crisscrossed by overhead lines—
a farewell exhaled in haste covering the body,
the suitcase still upright, waiting—
Eugene Datta's writing has appeared in The New Verse News, Poetry Bay, the Richmond Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, West Coast Line (currently Line), and Poetry Salzburg. He lives and works in Aachen, Germany.
howling. No water. He cries for his mother, his bed.
How to escape?
Who asked for this war? One man with a few drops
of power he wants to hold. No matter who
suffers, dies. Didn’t other leaders kill millions?
Stalin. Hitler. Pol Pot. He can, too. Confident.
No need to escape.
Joan Mazza has worked as a microbiologist and psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self, and her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia.
Amid Ukraine Exodus, Reports Emerge of Bias Against Africans —VOA, March 2, 2022
The tradesman from Guinea has lived in Odessa for fourteen years. He is
afraid. In one day all of Ukraine's airports shut down. In one night heavy
bombs fell just ouside of town. They are falling now. Russian soldiers
landed on the beach and are marching towards Kyiv. The horror. The sadness.
It is happening. Shock and awe. Awful. Wrath. Madness. Chernobyl, symbol
of nuclear death has been captured. No reports yet on the state of the concrete.
Where are we going? I listen to the trembling voice of my friend from Guinea.
He says he will watch and wait for another day or two, huddle at home
by his television in the apartment block. If fighting comes to his neighborhood
then he will call Guinea. Ask to be flown out. How many diplomats has
Guinea posted in Ukraine? How many cars and planes? Airports are shut.
But the sea flows by Odessa. He has lived in Odessa for fourteen years.
He knows people with boats. He has sold them housewares. He will
ask them to take him away. Past the battleships. To Guinea.
Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks).Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indranproduced 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 writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. 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.
Maria Lisella is the recipient of a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the American Academy of Poets and the author of Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She co-curates the Italian American Writers Association readings and is a travel writer by trade.
Chris Vola is the author of six books, most recently I is for Illuminati: An A-Z Guide to Our Paranoid Times (William Morrow, 2020). His recent poems appear or are forthcoming in New Pop Lit, The Collidescope, The Main Street Rag, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Horror Sleaze Trash. He lives in New York.
We do it without thinking, sighting those red block letters,
reassuring our leaving places we have found ourselves,
or, more precisely, where we’ve found ourselves lost,
in theaters, malls, relationships,
those gathering spaces where,
not sure sometimes why we're there,
we fold away small notes to self, including routes by which we’ll leave.
It's been a year since we took leave
from what? Routines, connections, worn out paths of
customary comings, anticipated goings,
a year of changing patterns, forswearing the habitual,
creating novel ways to meet, to share, to love, to spend
time trying not to think where we should have been,
envisioning new plans to leave the here and now
without abandoning ourselves. What's left
when signs are not available? The word itself lies next to
others in the dictionary, including existential,
become new guides for taking leave, and flight, and hold
of who we are
as we discover what
it is to paint our own way out of boxes, out of corners,
over all walls that restrict our freedoms
finding what we've missed seeing, how we've missed living.
Barbara Simmons grew up in Boston, now resides in California—the coasts inform her poetry. A graduate of Wellesley College, she received an MA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins. Retired educator, she savors smaller parts of life and language, exploring words as ways to remember, envision, celebrate, mourn, and try to understand more. Publications have included Santa Clara Review, Hartskill Review, Boston Accent, The New Verse News, Soul-Lit, 300 Days of Sun, Capsule Stories, and Journal of Expressive Writing.
