HERSTORY

by MaryLisa DeDomenicis

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

I was only sixteen
when my best friend’s 
father stuck his hands up
my shirt and his tongue 
down my throat.

I was terrified to tell her
yet somehow she knew 
so I didn’t have to.

After my best friend’s father 
I never went braless.
Never mind I was donned 
in a thick crewneck sweatshirt—

He saw something
He wanted.

You don’t even have to be 
beautiful.
You only have to be
a girl.

Editor’s note: The New Verse News is honored to continue to host, in the wake of the news at Cornell, a series of courageous memoir poems.

A Best of the Net and Best New Poets (2026) nominee and NJSCA fellow, MaryLisa studied poetry at Stockton University. A three-time Pushcart nominee, her poems have won two Murphywriting awards, a Toni Brown Memorial Scholarship Award, and a Stillwaters Woman’s Words Chapbook competition. She’s had work published by Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, and Mudfish, among others and her poems can be found in several anthologies including most recently Screaming Beyond Borders, a Woman Scream Series. 

MY DEAD FRIEND’S SON POSTS FROM A BOMB SHELTER IN TEL AVIV

by Laurie Kuntz

I can remember you and your dad strolling
the beach, crab hunting.
I was close by teaching my son
not to fear waves going over his head.
You were both four—friends and schoolmates.
 
As parents, we were only 
concerned with keeping
sons safe and sane.
 
When your family immigrated to Tel Aviv,
I admonished your dad for taking you 
from a melting pot into fire.
A mensch from Boston, 
bringing up a son by the beach
would be enough for most. 
 
Three decades later,
your dad is gone and you post
ramblings of war from a bomb shelter,
numbers of the missing, injured, and dead—
 
Today your post is shorter, the news is the same
the sirens—louder, the numbers—rising
while the world becomes immune
our gasps less forceful
as we scroll down giving a thumbs up 
to  blooming gardens, exotic recipes, and all 
that is coming soon to a theater near you.
Anything to alleviate the burden of responsibility.

Laurie Kuntz  has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), and three chapbooks (Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay Books, Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press, and Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Simple Gestures, won the Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, and Women at the Onsen won the Blue Light Press Chapbook Contest.  Her 6th poetry book, That Infinite Roar, will be published by Gyroscope Press at the end of 2023. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Prize. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila Na Gig, and many other literary journals.  She currently resides in Florida, where everyday is a political poem waiting to be written.

SENDING POSTCARDS

by Julia Lisella

It’s all history now,

even my walk to the mailbox

to drop the shiny cards into the blue box

little teeth at the edge of the slot – I can hear them

grinding & scraping as I push the cards in

10 at a time. Because

Covid 19 pandemic

because Breonna and George are dead

because T***p lied his ass off

we know this is true all the time, but now?

And I think this is why

I walk to the mailbox

with 50 postcards and I worry

the people who get them won’t

understand my handwriting

when they read “Dear Friend”

they’ll know we are not friends but

Friend please vote, friend

the anxiety of thinking

you won’t vote

makes my fingers ache

the anxiety of thinking

in the quiet, the basil bloom

of evening, the petulance

of late summer, the walk now

more or less guarded

Mostly anxiety I do not think

in prose but in the murmur of fear

the stuttered life of

catch in the throat

the imbalance of what can’t be

how is it now that the shiny postcards

urging

sit at the bottom of a large blue box—

what faith I once had in the box

How I once believed anything in it

would begin its great journey

Will anyone of you 50 desperate cards

released reluctantly by my fingertips

(afraid to touch the box) the confluences

of emergencies

we have acclimated to

will any one of you reach the street

the court, the place, the road, the Tampa,

the Ft. Lauderdale, the Ft. Myers so many forts

the ranch house the apartment building the PO Box

and journey how? and when if it arrives

on your counter, thrown in your car

stuck under a welcome mat?

I press the pen into the card

to make the name and wonder

will it be you, you one soul

who will get my card and lifting it

above the garbage will see and notice

the wobble of my D or F or

the note I squeezed into the left side

of the card, the funny way I write my E’s, my V’s and M’s

you can’t tell apart

you, someone will know I walked down

the quiet Covid street

I pushed the cards through the slot

dear friend released from prison who is not

a murderer or a rapist dear friend who was

desperate and forged a check dear friend who was

naïve and dated a con artist and a drug dealer

Dear friend still alive, released they say

and living in Sunny Florida, please don’t

get sick, please find a job

please vote.

Randy Hudnell raises four fingers to represent Amendment 4, which restored the right to vote to most former felons in Florida who'd completed their sentences. Credit: ALEX PENA/CBS NEWS, October 26, 2020

Julia Lisella’s books include Always (WordTech Editions, 2014), Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007), and the chapbook Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems have most recently appeared in Ploughshares, Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Exit 7, and Ocean State Review. She writes on modernist women writers, teaches American literature at Regis College and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA) Reading Series in Boston. 

MOVING GEORGE H. W. BUSH

by Tricia Knoll

I walked four miles on a gym treadmill
as the hearse moved to the airport.
I looked at Sully’s picture at the casket
and loved how his care dog loved him.
How voice-over friends said he was kind,
decent, a good man as well as a President.
I know made mistakes and told his share of lies
but not every day, not four or five or six a day.
He was faithful to his wife, a love story
that played out in public. Gentle.

I never voted for him. He signed laws
to protect people with disabilities;
he never bullied them. He befriended
people he lost to. He voted against
his party when the candidate running
shocked him. Yes, a man who owned all
the sparkles of white privilege . . . a man
who fought in World War II; a man
of that generation. The most despicable
President in history is invited to his
funeral because that seemed right
to a man who honored the office
if not the weirdo sitting in the chair.


Tricia Knoll's How I Learned to Be White is now available from Antrim House—and on Amazon. 

YOU MAY IGNORE THE DUPLICATE REQUEST TO FRIEND ME

by Devon Balwit

not that it was from a bot; it was not,
but from me after I unfriended you. (It’s true.)
Working the warp and weft of us left
me stressed. I thought it best to regress
to solitary, me alone already more than I
can handle. You (and other yous) weighed
in on myriad matters—I wanted my view
unskewed. So, rather rude than band-wagoned,
I un-cliqued. Now, riddled with regrets,
I suspect there might have been another way
to maintain center. But thus it ever is—
the act, the doubt, the retraction, the plow
of one’s furrowed brow into whether.


Devon Balwit has six chapbooks and three collections out in the world. Her individual poems can be found here or are forthcoming in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, Cultural Weekly, Triggerfish, Fifth Wednesday, The Free State Review, Rattle, Poets Reading the News, etc.

ON SHATTUCK AVENUE

by Zara Raab

Image source: The Monthly

the old homeless men say nothing
these winter nights in the city.
For months they go without speaking,
instead endlessly wandering
as if the stream of love
had stopped,
leaving only boundless pity.

Arms outspread, “Friend!” we croon to them,
when a word said simply would do
so much more to dispel a gloom.
They can’t turn off too soon
from so grand a gesture,
well meant to reassure––
hot food and warm beds––a future.

Are you ever trapped in logic
as I am—caught as if in amber––
willing to act, but no matter
where you aim, missing your target,
unable to stop
or become someone else,
your need for change urgent?

A kind word said simply would do
so much more to dispel a gloom,
an hour in our human houses
feeling out each of many rooms,
their echoes and uses.
We cannot start too soon.
The shelter we seek is human.


Zara Raab’s latest books are Fracas & Asylum and Rumpelstiltskin, finalist for the Dana Award. Earlier books, Swimming the Eel and The Book of Gretel, evoke the rainy darkness of the remote North Coast. Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in Poetry Flash, Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, The Dark Horse, and Poet Lore. She is a contributing editor to the Redwood Coast Review and Poetry Flash.