NO GUNS LEFT BEHIND

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Where are the parents
their kids running wild
down dark city streets
shooting each other
with fireworks, handguns
fighting and flocking
in one huge roiling mass
of raging hormonal insanity
preteens to twenty-somethings
alerted online, on phones
to create havoc together
a youth wilding
a teen takeover
flash crowds run amok
in Orlando, DC, Pensacola
a fatality on the 4th
ten kids shot and 
where are the parents
now that their children
are hospitalized
or dead?

Mickey J. Corrigan writes about death. A lot. It's kind of her thing. Poetry chapbooks include Days' End (Main Street Rag) which takes place in a fictional Florida suicide parlor, and Final Arrangements, a series of poems about burial practices around the world (Prolific Press). No Guns Left Behind (Cyberwit) shares a chronology of school shootings in poetic form. Mickey lives in the Sunshine State, where crime and bad deaths abound. Her latest novel is Lazy Palms (Cyberwit, 2026) about an experimental euthanasia trailer park.

JUST A COOKOUT WITHOUT HISTORY

a glosa with a nod to Jemar Tisby 

by Rachel Landrum Crumble

AI graphic created by Nightcafé for The New Verse News

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.   
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.   
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.   
—Czeslaw Milosz from "Dedication"

If I could write history with sparklers
in the newly dark air, light cherry bombs of truth, send bottle rockets
of lament to arc the unbelieving sky,

the sky that says: "Not this again!

​​Can't we just have a nice family meal without politics?"​
​​​I wonder, "Whose politics?" For the sake of 'peace', I cave.

​"The hotdogs are ready. Who wants a hamburger?

​Let's give thanks for the Founding Fathers' faith."
​​​If God is holy, why did they enslave?
​​You whom I could not save.

​​​I'm still the youngest, so experience doesn't count

​​​though I've been married to a Black man for forty-five years.
​​What about 300 years of slavery?
​​Then decades of terror and Jim Crow?
​​Where does all that sorrow and anger go?

​​​It bleeds into the bank accounts of Industry.

​​​Broken Black and brown bodies pave the way.
"Now that's all behind us. Our future is bright."​
​​​"Yeah, for the land of the rich where some arefree."

​​Listen to me.

​​Silenced by inattention, 

​​I am again the youngest at the family table.

"Did anyone bring that peach cobbler I crave?"​

​​Why blame the victims with a little wave   
​​so the flies of understanding never find landing?

A voice canonizes the Founding Fathers--it's my brother.
​​​Most were slave holders, 

​​​who wrote that "all men were created equal."
​My siblings channel the politics of my blue-blood mother,
​Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.

​By now, I'd settle for cap-gun sparks of recognition. 
​My husband, veteran of fireworks, stayed home from this failed mission. 
​He is a tired conscientious objector in this war.
​Weary of the White noise of indifference, my grown children won't engage.
​​I write with sparklers, but I need a torch.
"Fireworks are beautiful, but they kill birds."

Land of the free. ​But how free, and who are 'we'?"
Heads together, they discuss the State of Things.

​​I love them, but this feels absurd. 

​I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words. 

Rachel Landrum Crumble 

is a life-long poet and a retired teacher. She has published in The Porter House Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Common Ground Review, among others. Sister Sorrow (2022 Finishing Line Press) is her first book of poetry. Her second is In Praise of Detours (2025 Main Street Rag). She is working on a novel. She lives with her husband of 45 years, a jazz drummer. Find her on http://substack.com/rachellandrumcrumble or at poetteachermom.com.

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).

THE EARRING

by Heather H. Thomas

Hamas fighters stormed the Nova festival on 7 October and killed hundreds.

The evening river is gray jade, 

the tree line charred pink. 

 

Rose quartz earring

rescued from the roadside, 

shelters in my palm.

 

I remember Jerusalem—the golden

Dome of the Rock hazed out

in dust storms, random stabbings 

 

canceling my trip 

to the Temple Mount

also called Al-Aqsa Mosque. 

 

Different people worship the same places, 

sometimes under different names.

 

Red alert on D’s phone—incoming 

missile—D says she leapt

from her car into a ditch. 

 

My birthday, I sit alone in a Tel Aviv café, 

alarm shrieking—yet none move

to shelter, everyone chatting, trusting 

 

the Iron Dome to intercept.

 

Few can speak of it now: 

trance music, dawn cocktails, 

missile light mistaken for fireworks, 

 

then sudden noises of death—

 

After, women’s bodies mutilated, 

some missing the bottom half—

 

Survivors almost not 

here—eyes hollow, 

speechless they shake                         

                                                

with the silence of living.

 

The darkness you saw, we’re going to bring back 

the light, therapists tell them. 

 

Sometimes only a small body 

part remains, a finger, a foot, a hand, 

                                                                  

trace of mascara on eyelashes, 

an earring she put on that morning.

Author’s Note: The poem blends details, which were reported in The New York Times and BBC, of the violence at the Nova festival with memories of my 2015 visit to Israel. The detail of the earring was reported by the BBC as an example of tiny objects, along with actual body parts, which were all that remained of some victims.  

Heather H. Thomas is a poet from Reading, Pennsylvania, the author of Vortex Street(FutureCycle Press) and five other poetry collections. Recent work has been published in Barrow Street, Cutthroat, New Verse News, Pedestal Magazine, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. Her work is translated into six languages, including Arabic.

6 HAIKU ABOUT 4 JULY

by Jeffrey Bryant

The signing of the Declaration of Independence, depicted here in a lithograph published by Nathaniel Currier. Photograph: Corbis/Hulton via The Guardian.

Fifty-six wigged men

Conceived the United States

On land that they stole.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Complained about tyranny

After whipping slaves.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Scribbled out their grievances

Without irony.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Used the word equal without

Having looked it up.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Lived liberty in pursuit

Of more native land.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Need no pyrotechnics now

Down where they reside.

Jeffrey Bryant lives in Los Angeles.  He has been published in the L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Poetic Diversity Literary Journal and in the anthologies The Coiled Serpent from Tia Chucha/Northwestern University Press, the 2020 Altadena Literary Review from Shabda Press, and Shadowplay from the University of Arkansas.

CAROLINA CALLING

by Earl J Wilcox

Around noon

A balloon

Not from a party

Not from a parade

In full sunlight, it made

Our Carolina palmetto

Shade its eyes,

Smile in surprise:

Chinese February

Fireworks.

 

Earl Wilcox lives in upstate South Carolina where the Chinese balloon was visible from his balcony on February 4.

A PERILOUS YEAR

by Tom Bauer

What fireworks are good enough on any
nation’s holiday? What illumination
is light enough? The light of sweet relief
is the light most creatures seem to love the best.
Where do we find it? Shooting in the streets
and yelling for our rights? Can we ever,
can anyone find peace in war and hate?
How can we feel our best? Ignore the worst?
Paint flowers in the mind? Sell hopes and smiles?
Bring on delightful lies and praise our kind?
It happens, and we never even knew
a flash of light could take it all away.
The long night’s fireworks scream at us all.
We cannot do this anymore. No more.


Tom Bauer's an old coot who lives in Montreal and plays a lot of board games.

SPACE-TIME DESIRE

by Art Goodtimes

Tweeted by @SciencepornPics

More than the spark

of the 4th’s faux bombardments

 

it’s the dark

with its slow burn

of thousands of nuclear fires

 

that makes me appreciate

the exploding population of stars

that we imitate

 

That all nature mimics

 

This space-time desire

to expand beyond all limits

 

That colors our lives

vermillion and gold

and speeds our demise

as a billionaire species

 

Beautiful

Deadly

Perplexing

 

Art Goodtimes was an Earth First! poetry editor before getting elected to five terms as a Green county commissioner in Southwestern Colorado, where U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Rifle) now represents the Third Congressional district in Congress. Art is co-director of Talking Gourds, a local and regional poetry program under the non-profit aegis of the Telluride Institute.

THE ROAD HOME

by Tricia Knoll

“Road Home Through Chaos,” Mixed Media Photo Collage with acrylic paint on museum standard stretched canvas by Kim Vergil.

Stop by the school; yellow crosswalk on the road. 

Road kill skunk. 

Stop light at the mini-mall. Squad car in the lot. 

Right turn lane to airport. Go straight. 

Over the freeway bridge, past the corn field on the left, 

  gravel pit on the right. 

Fleet of foot fox crosses the road. 

Half moon overhead. 

Up with the bright beams

to catch the RBG lace

I hung on the mailbox

to remind me

 

that going home

is not just a road, 

it’s a piece of mind. 

 

Slow for the turn 

to the gravel road

we’ll plow as needed. 

Peace of mind

in a moon cycle 

studded with stars

like the drones they flew

in the fireworks. 

 

Road home. 

Road home. 

I made it home. 

Tricia Knoll upgraded to cable news shows two months ago to watch election coverage. After a tense week post-election, the headline finally changed. A new President and Vice President. Whatever comes next, she feels at home again for the first time in years.

UNTITLED FOURTH OF JULY POEM

by Roberta Santlofer

Full "Buck" Moon and penumbral eclipse July 4-5, 2020.

It is after midnight
But I wouldn’t know it here
For staying stuck in my apartment
In bed with depression

Bus went –––––
I was just glancing out
My half-open bathroom window
After a warm July day

I often glance out at night
See into the towers along my street
See the low room stuck in
Behind my neighbor’s fallen tree
The branches dividing the light

Yet the brightness
Even more important
& personal
Being low

A lantern
Put up in
The air party
Maybe the moon
Did come down
Stayed in
Helped branches
Avoid the night’s blasting
Bright skies
Lit with Fourth of July fireworks

The moon feeling a little
Tame / timid / small
Among the blasting spectrum
Of color

But the true story of light—
The moon has discreetly mastered it

Roberta “Bobby” Santlofer (1943-2020) was a mother of sons, an avid reader, and a poet. A posthumous collection of her poetry is forthcoming.

YOU DON'T

by Laura Rodley

The roll call of deceased unit members, which included 10 men killed in action, was an emotional time for Vietnam veterans who reunited in Berea, Ohio on August 9, 2019. "Even though we have had some sleepless nights, some dreams we want to forget, the remembrance of PTSD, and Agent Orange that just won't let go, we continue to be grateful and to stand for our flag," said the Chaplain. Photo credit: Beth Mlady/Special to cleveland.com, August 17, 2019

You don’t know him, he doesn’t
ask to be known, he won
a bronze star for valor
in Vietnam, he shops
on senior discount Tuesdays
at Big Y, at least he used to.
He doesn’t go out anymore,
even outside. You wouldn’t
recognize him, he’s just an
average Joe in a linen shirt,
rhythm of helicopters whirring
in his head. The Fourth of July,
Friday night fireworks in Ocean Park?
He’s seen enough fireworks, mortar
shell explosions, lights exploding,
himself exploding, he doesn’t want
any reminders. But ask for recognition,
no, valor of Vietnam vets unspoken,
stationed in Da Nang, ground zero for Agent Orange,
his early heart attack just a fluke
the doctor said, hearing loss due to age.
He slept next to a mortar shell field.
They blew up all the time.
He’s not asking anything
from his country that he served,
just to be left alone.

He only has to be as tall
as the ceiling of his livingroom,
where he chomps Fritos, swallows Cokes,
he doesn’t have to see behind him,
beside him, below him as the chopper
brings him base to base to allocate
and release funds, he doesn’t
have to see through forests, they
were denuded by Agent Orange,
someone could drop down on him
from above, but not while
he’s in front of the T.V. The front
door is locked, a cheap remedy
against machine gun fire.
He only has to manage the space
of the couch, the clicker, even
the screened-in porch reveals
too much green, someone could
be hiding in those maples, oaks,
kudzu, and that’s not paranoia,
it was real for him for two tours,
someone hiding to do him harm,
annihilate him and nothing but
his dog tags to know his name.
He would not call this being afraid,
nor is he: he is aware, hyper-aware
of leave rustle, door closing, pop-top
of the can breaking open, the fizzle
of foam. Everything he does saves
his life and those of the men he
served with- not one of them taught
to act alone but as a unit, always
aware of his buddy, aware of combat
boots squishing in the mud of rice paddies
beside him. Hyper-aware of
everything outside of him to save
them all, but nothing but his finessed reaction
for shooting or readiness to bail out of the chopper
of his own internal life. He
lived outside himself, his body, and
having survived when so many
he knew did not, he brought
it all home with him, where
it breathes in the livingroom
with him, he can’t close his eyes,
it’s inside him now, it won’t get out,
won’t let him go.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee, and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Publisher Finishing Line Press nominated her Your Left Front Wheel Is Coming Loose for a PEN L.L.Winship Award and Mass Book Award. FLP also nominated her Rappelling Blue Light for a Mass Book Award. Former co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, Rodley teaches the As You Write It memoir class and has edited and published As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology volumes I-VI, also nominated for a Mass Book Award. She was accepted at Martha’s Vineyard’s NOEPC and has been a participant in the 30 poems in November fundraiser for the Literacy Project of the Center for New Americans. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point by Prolific Press.

FLAGS, BARBEQUES, AND FIREWORKS

by Gil Hoy

He strode
into America’s
Birthday Party

with an air
of power
and privilege

befitting
a nobleman
who had learned

a thing or two
about governing,

a thing or two
about the strengths

and weaknesses
of Republics.

He looked up—
approvingly—

at America’s
Stars and Stripes:

a more sophisticated,
but equally treasured
and defended

symbol for
a democratic state

as the vexillum
his armies
had used.

He smelled
the meat
grilling,

inhaled
the intoxicating
smoke—

and again saw
the happy
smiling faces

of a nation’s
citizenry.

Like victorious
feasts on great
battlefields,

in days of old
long since
vanished,

after glorious battles
had been waged,
fought and won.

He cringed a bit
when he heard
the strange sounds

of fireworks
exploding overhead,

fearing that his legions

might again
be under attack.

He had already
seen and knew
too much

about destruction
and death—

about the destruction
and death
of Republics.

Upon learning
it was America’s 243’rd,

He paused
for a moment,
in earnest,

and then declared:

"She will meet
the same fate
as my own,

if her leaders
are not wise
and not true.

Democracies,
like their leaders,
are fragile,

and do not
last forever.

They’ve flown
and are fleeting.”

….

And, with that,
He was gone.

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and semi-retired trial lawyer studying poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared most recently in Chiron Review, Ariel Chart, TheNewVerse.News, Social Justice Poetry, The Potomac, The Penmen Review and elsewhere.

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE ON INDEPENDENCE DAY

by Michael Mark

"Oh, Say, Can You See (but Not Hear) Those Fireworks?"

—The New York Times, June 30, 2016

We are jamming ourselves under the couch,
far as we can. Until another blast and Jessie
crawls even deeper; her massive paws scar
the wood floor. I don’t care. Jessie’s square
head is twice as big as mine; she’s a hundred
and forty pound Newfoundland. And because
she hates fireworks I hate them more. I’d ban
the Roman candles’ machine gun bursts, wipe
out the whistle and bang of bottle rockets, defuse
all firecrackers: they celebrate war, children blow
fingers off, their stringy guts leave a mess over
our trees and lawns. Truthfully, I could live with
all of these if their noise didn’t upset Jess. I’m
with the dogs in every corner of our country tonight,
beneath dining room tables, behind winter coats
in closets, tails between our legs in hot toxic
garages. Even a juicy burger couldn’t bribe us out.
Jess hears the onslaught before me – her dozen
extra doggy ear bones picking up the frequency
of the matchsticks’ phosphorus red heads scraping
three blocks down, the flares’ whooshes, flames
climbing filaments to the climatic celebration
that makes the rest of my family, her family, ooh
and ahh and my BFF whine, burrow towards dust
bunnies, my daughter’s missing sock, MIA potato
chips. I lean into her furry heaviness, kiss her silky
ear, apologize, It’s a human thing. Her giant breed’s
heart is near bursting now—M80s shaking windows—
our quiet cul-de-sac life is under attack by enemy
artillery but I do nothing to stop it. Don’t even hush
my own kids’ screaming racket. Won’t take on the
neighborhood dads in about-faced ball caps, flag t-shirts—
grab their bics, rip their match books. I’m not as brave
as any dog, that includes yappy lap puppets—nowhere
near courageous as Jess. She’d tear into anyone who
bared their teeth at me, take apart a pack of circling
coyotes, and if a Ford F-150 was turning the corner
faster than the15mph speed limit, radio pounding kick-
ass hillbilly, she’d hurl herself between me and that All
American made in Mexico truck, leave it a smoking heap,
sidle up beside my leg and waddle me back home. No big
bad bragging bark. Just a fluffy tail in the air, like a flag, kinda.

Michael Mark is a hospice volunteer. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Cutthroat Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Rattle, Spillway, Sugar House Review and TheNewVerse.News. His poetry has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. 

JULY 5th

by Marjorie Maddox

All the flag-clad oohs and ahhs fizzle
just past midnight, a slight singe of burn
hovering over today: patriotic hangover
with stars and stripes banging about in brains
that never Ok’d reciting names and dates
in 4th grade History. Such a dazzling,
distracting explosion: all that reality behind
the pomp, so ceremoniously like that other
season’s parade: winter’s green/red (the frigid
red/white/blue) pa-rum-pa-pum-pummed
into “Little Drummer Boy” with only tepid recognition
of the day’s conviction. Holy Mother
of Jefferson, the fireworks’ dizzy outbursts
of Me! Me! Me! reveal our belief in nothing
but the day’s commemoration, the morning after’s
leftover hot dogs or eggnog a hodge-podge of forgotten births:
nation and God piped-in patriotically
as afterthought for the background.


Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has 9 books of poetry, most recently Local News from Someplace Else Wipf & Stock 2013), which focuses on living in an unsafe world, and an ebook of Perpendicular As I, winner of the 1994 Sandstone Book Award.