NO JOKES

by Peter Witt

Tee shirt detail

The White House Correspondents' Association announced Saturday that its annual dinner will not feature comedian Amber Ruffin, nearly two months after it announced her as its selection. In fact, this year's show won't have any comedic performances at all. —ABC News, March 30, 2025

There’ll be no humor at this year’s
White House Correspondents Dinner,
no jokes to remind the trumpster that 
sometimes he seems more buffoonish
than presidential, no attempts to rib 
the VP for discovering
that Greenland is f’ing cold, 
 
no jokes about butt letting the editor
of the Atlantic into a war plan call
while he sat astonished in a Safeway
parking lot,
 
no jokes about the hint of musk
in the white house, and efforts
to unplug Tesla sales, and no hint
that the president has spent
more money on golfing weekends
than the dogers have saved
through their court contested dismissals. 
 
There’ll be no jokes about Jan 6th
invaders getting pardons, or 
failed efforts to settle the wars
in Gaza and Ukraine on the promised
first day in office, or how Canada
has scored a hat trick as the
president can’t remember
if today he raised or lowered tariffs.
 
The newspeople will gather, eat
drink their cocktails, eat their shrimp,
talk about who will be banned
from next week’s press conference,
listen while the master of ceremonies
talks longingly about freedom of the press,
as the crowd whispers what the jokes
might have been if their leadership
hadn’t cowed to the jokester in chief
who is still out there somewhere 
on the 18th green.

Peter Witt is a Texas poet, a frequent contributor to The New Verse News and other online poetry web-based publications.

GENESIS 2025

by Michael Dorian

Source: Seattle Times

In the beginning

He pardoned all the seditionists.

Now the nation was barren and shapeless,

darkness was upon the land

and He said, “Let there be lies,”

and there were lies.

He saw the lies were good

and He separated the lies from the truth.

He called the lies “truth”

and He called the truth “lies.”

And there was evening 

and there was morning—

the first day

And He said, "Let me stop the wildfires

scorching the pretty landscaping

and those expensive houses. 

I know some people in L.A., some 

very wealthy, well-connected people."

And He released with almighty force

from his gullet a torrent of water pressure

the likes of which no man had beheld.

And the fires stopped burning.

And He saw this was good

and there was evening 

and there was morning—

the second day

And He said, "Let the illegal immigrants

in the land be returned whence they came."

So with a gust of His great breath

He swept them all up in a glorious gale

and blew back to homelands the vermin, 

scattered like so much feed.

And He saw this was good

and there was evening 

and there was morning—

the third day.

And He said, "Let me build a big beautiful wall

And He saw it was a good wall,

a great wall, better than China’s,

The Greatest Wall Of All Time

that anyone has ever seen anywhere

on Earth or any planet in our 

Solar System or even in all of Space,"

and there was evening 

and there was morning—

the fourth day.

And He said, "Let me stop the war in Ukraine."

And a great swathe of his carefully—

coiffed hair sent all the soldiers

toppling like toys back into their

respective sovereign countries

(with Russia gaining great areas

of formerly Ukrainian land)

and the bloodshed ceased 

like the last lilting notes 

of cherubs’ trumpeted fanfare.

And He saw this was good

(for Putin and Himself, anyway)

and there was evening 

and there was morning—

the fifth day.

And He said, "Let me drill, baby, drill!"

So with tremendous huffing and puffing

He had an angel, a female one, fluff

His manhood until it stood,

a tower of steel shining in the sun,

and He poked it in and pulled it out

with enduring virility

until he had poked 

many a holy hole 

deep into the Earth’s womb

and into 625 million acres

of preserved coastal seawaters

and the nation became richer with crude.

And the land and great numbers

of its people were crude.

And He saw this was good

and there was evening 

and there was morning—

the sixth day.

And on the 7th day

He played golf and he cheated.

Once upon a time, Michael Dorian had a collection of poems and a play in one act published by Silk City Press entitled "The Nektonic Facteur.”  He likes to think that when the going gets tough, the tough write poems. 

HUBRIS

by Robbie Gamble

News item: scientists are jubilant

as a golf cart-sized hunk of space

payload pulled up and T-boned

a minor asteroid a touch more

massive than Fenway Park—

a veritable bullseye—our first

home entry into the extraterrestrial

demolition derby. Newsfeeds showed

grainy shots of an apparent pumice

stone looming in the void, then

a blank screen, followed by polo-

shirted Mission Control engineers

high-fiving and avowing “This one’s

for the dinosaurs!” as if they

might have changed the course

of paleontology had NASA been

operational back at the end

of the Cretaceous Era. Today

we are watching as Hurricane

Ian, a Cat 4 beast, is slamming

into the Florida Gulf Coast, and I

bet there’s a whole bunch of golf

carts being swept inland with

the storm surge, while the governor

hunkers behind hasty barricades

of banned books, and the Red Sox

might have to relocate for next

spring training. A certain president

floated the notion of nuking hurricanes

back out into open water. Hmm. And

there was also that business of beating

a virus back with bleach. In space,

no one can hear you tee off.

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Lunch Ticket, RHINO, Salamander, and The Sun. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont. 

HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON

by Suzette Bishop

Go ahead and come on down to Alamo, Texas

To admire me, the wall at the border,

Go ahead and come on down to brag

About building me to keep the country safe,

Go ahead and come on down to praise me

And yourself,

How strong we are,

How big and beautiful we are,

How much we cost taxpayers,

How no one can scale us,

How we keep out criminals,

How we cage children but keep them warm

With foil blankets.

Let me help you have a photo op

Before you leave office,

A mic, a platform,

Since you were walled out

After breaking down the doors

And smashing the windows of the Capitol.

As you know, I may be incomplete,

But I’m great,

So great that at night under the stars

This section of me coils

Into a circle,

Tighter and tighter

Around you and your golf cart,

The ocelots staring at you

As they run from one border to the next,

Walling you in,

Keeping the country safe again.

Suzette Bishop teaches at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. Her books include Horse-Minded, She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes, Hive-Mind, Cold Knife Surgery, and most recently, a chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead.  Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Poems about living on the border, animals, and endangered species are highlighted in her most recent poems and books while her favorite way to enjoy the borderlands is by horseback. 

THE CHOKER-IN-CHIEF

by Jack Powers





The virus is just like hitting a few bad shots. It happens. You just have to keep your head down, you know, stay positive, play through it. Suddenly you'll be hittin' beautiful drives again.

People dying from the virus is like losing golf balls. You're gonna lose a few! Everybody does. Everybody. I mean, you can't waste time hunting for 'em. You gotta play on!

And these protesters! A bunch of punks leaving their divots and driving their carts on the green! Not raking the traps. No respect for property. They're ruining our beautiful course! Where are the rangers? Where are my rangers?

All these marchers chanting Equality! don't get it. You've got golfers. You've got caddies. The golfers are doing the caddies a favor, really.

The stock market is just like the scorecard. Everybody hits a couple of bad shots. You miss a putt or two. But did you make the big ones? Did you win?

All I'm asking for is a mulligan. One mulligan! What have you got to lose?


Jack Powers is the author of Everybody's Vaguely Familiar. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere.

TROMPE L'OEIL

by David Thoreen

Pere Borrell del Caso’s most famous work, "Escaping Criticism" (1874), uses trompe l'oeil to blur the boundary between real and fictitious space. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons via BBC).

after "Escaping Criticism"

Historians say it began in Pompeii,
with murals artfully deceiving the eye
into believing that beyond a wall lay
another room, or a garden and blue sky.

Dutch painters polished the ploy: a display
of totems owned by the powerful; often, a sly
reminder of death—the candle burned partway...
or there, at rest on the painted frame, a fly.

Pere Borrell del Caso’s barefoot boy will not stay
in his painting. Forget this gilt frame. Escape or die
trying. Enough posing. Why can’t he just play golf
or fillet a minion, parlay Kellyanne with her con of the day,
send Pence off to pray, pay somebody something to make it all go away?
Your pronunciation is fine:  T***p lie, T***p lie, T***p lie.


Editor's Note: 


David Thoreen teaches literature and writing at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts.  His poems have appeared in Natural Bridge, Slate, Seneca Review, New Letters, TheNewVerse.News, and elsewhere.

NOTES FROM THE WEEKLY MEETING OF THE 75-YEAR-OLD ANTIFA PROVOCATEURS

by John Hodgen

Welcome back, Martin. How’s the noggin?
(Laughter.) (Applause.)
You really used your head this time, big fella. Careful when you log in.
Taking one for the team, Martin. Way to go. One for the cause.
And great job with the Fake Blood Pellet in the Ear trick.
And the old Backwards Trip and Fall Stutter Step. Worked like a charm.
All that practice paid off. A perfect 10 from the Russian judge. Terrific.
Wall to wall on OANN. And you got the CNN and MSNBC crowd alarmed.
You’re a meme now. More people have seen you fall than watched the Towers.
Score one for ANTIFA. Talk about defunding the police. Fight the power.
And you even got all the police scanner info with your secret decoder ring.
Proud of you, big guy. Let’s get started now for your next gig.
Mar-a-Lago. The old swan dive under the golf cart. Do your thing.
This is going to be big.

Editor's Note: The 75-year-old man hospitalized after he was pushed by a police officer during a peaceful protest last week in Buffalo, New York, suffered a brain injury as a result of the incident, his lawyer revealed Thursday. Kelly Zarcone said her client, activist Martin Gugino, "is starting physical therapy," which Zarcone called "a step in the right direction. As heartbreaking as it is, his brain is injured and he is well aware of that now," Zarcone said in a statement. "He feels encouraged and uplifted by the outpouring of support which he has received from so many people all over the globe. It helps. He is looking forward to healing and determining what his ‘new normal’ might look like." The New Verse News offers this poem to cheer him and those who have come to know and love Martin for his work and sacrifice. We wish him all the best.

John Hodgen is the Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University in Worcester, MA.  Hodgen won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).  His fifth book The Lord of Everywhere is out from Lynx House/University of Washington Press.

FLORIDA MAN MAKES AMERICA HATE AGAIN

by Mickey J. Corrigan

"Florida man gropes woman on flight, tells police Trump 'says it's OK': A Florida man is accused of groping a female passenger while on a flight Sunday from Houston to Albuquerque and later telling authorities that the president of the United States says it's OK to grab women by their private parts." —AP, October 22, 2018

Florida Man:
he's any race or creed
the redneck black man
Jewish anti-Semite
woman-hating womanizer
alt-right progressive
an everywhere monster
never apprehended
always on the loose
in a dark alley
in your bushes, waiting
in the parking garage
at your desk
at work, at school
there
to offend again.

You know Florida Man:
your quiet neighbor
the one in the media
the shy fellow
with the big mouth
hard-drinking
teetotaler
with expensive shoes
riding a dented three-wheeler
living in an exclusive suite
at the pink sand country club.

Florida Man golfs hard
swims naked
eats flesh
passes laws
breaks laws
does drugs, injects
levity or ire
into any
conversation
about what's wrong
with the state
of the state
of everything
in America.

Florida Man:
indestructible
and coming
to a nightmare
near you.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan lives in South Florida and writes noir with a dark humor. Books have been released by publishers in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Poetry chapbooks include The Art of Bars (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and Days' End (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2017). Project XX, a novel about a school shooting, was published in 2017 by Salt Publishing in the UK. 

LITTLE THINKING

by Kathleen A. Lawrence

Source: Boedaq Lieur



Little boy man
with hair of straw
and bubble gum cheeks
hollers at the crack of dawn
for not coming when he called,
orders the morning plans changed
so he can ride his Flintstone car
for 9 holes of golf instead of work,
but pouts if the clouds don't shade
his eyes from happy, babbling brooks.
(he hates the sound of laughing water,
“stop laughing at me” he bellows)

Little big shot
with sticky hands
in ill-fitted Brooks Brothers suit
snaps at the afternoon sun
for not shining bright enough
to polish his dull and tarnished lies,
screeching at the nap time hour
refusing to quiet down
to let the world sleep.
(“shut up” he squawks like a magpie
awake and wanting attention
through the autumn air)

Little baby boss
with sleep in eyes
red helicopter cap
wails at the Man-in-the-moon
calling him names, mocking his craters
blaming him for not casting
a longer shadow
on his tiny little form,
turning his back on the North Star
for stealing his limelight.
(“Damn, stupid moon”
who said it could orbit his earth?)

Little brat-in-chief
with mouth full of teeth
to chew his candy lips
stomps around the penthouse
screeching to the shimmering stars
for sparkling too much,
cursing out the rotating planets
for moving too quickly
and without his permission,
“I get to sign the documents.”
(Swatting at the constellations
like he was bringing down
pesky spider webs that had startled him)

Little monster boy
with orange mask
concealing scary supervillan
who rages at the grass
for growing too soft and green,
and screams against the mountains
for looming tall, purple, and majestic
and breaking the view
from his expensive toy plane.
(in a tantrum he insists that
“everybody sit down, sit down,
so I’m the tallest!”)

Little baby man
with giant demands
snaps his tiny, itty-bitty fingers
demanding the help clean up
his messes while fixing more food,
gobbling treats and tonguing
disapproval he claims his greatness
“I’m big— really, really big”
and the rest of us are just losers.
(he folds his arms and turns away
saying "you're fired" and “dumb,
really really dumb”)

Kathleen A. Lawrence likes the idea of writing poetry under a Cortland apple tree on a crisp afternoon, lifted by a scented autumnal breeze. She longs to write of love and beauty inspired by the loveliness of the world. However, she typically is compelled to write while watching the news explode reality across her flat screen, in her small suburban bungalow, painted an optimistic shade of periwinkle blue. 

TRADING FLESH FOR METAL

by Austin Davis

On Monday, police said [Matthew] Edwards shot and killed his wife and their three children — Jacob, 6; Brinley, 4; and Paxton, 3—before turning the gun on himself. The family instantly became five of the 1,200-some people killed that way each year in the United States. —delaware online, July 12, 2018


House Republican appropriators Wednesday rejected a proposal to designate millions of dollars for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for gun violence research, voting 32-20 to keep the language out of a fiscal 2019 spending bill. —Politico, July 11, 2018

I.

I realized that poems nowadays
are measured by the lull between bullets
instead of a lover’s heartbeat
after I got my haircut at Supercuts
by a woman with a Pink Lady Handgun
staring me down from her hip.
The woman looked as if
she’d been attacked on her way to work
by the bubblegum monster
I used to draw on all my math homework
but she had a smile on her face,
something that was missing from me.

It’s SO CHIC—
my husband makes me take it
with me wherever I go
and at first I was against it
but then I got used to it
and now I feel SOOOOOO
safe and protected
and are you okay
because you look a little bit like
a skydiver wearing a paper parachute
who just noticed
he was a foot from the ground.

II.

Well, last year I had a vase
thrown at my head in Greer, Arizona
after I told a white man in white pants
that he was cleaning his assault rifle
as if it was a porcelain doll
because he felt naked without it,
not because of his OCD.
I told him that keeping
his bullets in a different room
could never stop them from crawling
under his pillow every night

and if I wasn’t holding his gun right then,
the man would have shot me
and ended my life right there.
One moment would have shattered
into a million, but instead,
there was a silence
deeper than any grave.

The crickets outside
went back to their small talk,
the trees held back their laughter,
and the scared old man
cried with his head on my shoulder
until morning.

III.

During March for Our Lives
almost a month ago
I watched Donald T***p
ride his motorcycle
to his Palm Beach Golf Course
and complain about
those young, idiot protesters
over a little wine and cheese
when just four years ago,
T***p had accused Obama
of “playing golf on the job.”

IV.

If saving 600 women
from being killed every year
because their insecure boyfriends
are overcompensating
isn’t “part of the job,”
then I think we need to change
T***p’s job description
from ‘President’ to ‘orange cement.’

If standing between 2,555 children
and the bullet their fathers
forgot was in the rifle
isn’t “part of the job,”
then I think someone better add
“20% chance of death”
to the weather forecast
on the school announcements
every morning.

If preventing 13,000 homicides
and giving more than 35,000
Americans another day
to tell their girlfriends and boyfriends,
wives and husbands, sisters and brothers,
and mothers and fathers
that they love them
isn’t “part of the job,”
then I think we’re just letting
those who are malnourished of power
but are the least suited to hold it
trade our human flesh for metal.

Austin Davis is a poet, writer, and spoken word artist from Mesa, Arizona. Austin's poetry has been widely published in literary journals and magazines, both in print and online. Most recently, Austin's work can be found in Pif Magazine, Ink in Thirds, Folded Word, The Poetry Shed, In Between Hangovers, One Sentence Poems, and Tuck Magazine. Austin’s first chapbook The Moon and Her Ocean was published in 2017 by Fowlpox Press. Cloudy Days, Still Nights, Austin’s first full length book of poetry, was published in May, 2018 by Moran Press.

SWAMP CREATURE

by Howard Winn

Emerging from the slime
accumulated over past time
it rears its frightening head
licking its lips preparatory
to swinging its massive
posterior shaking off the
gunk which never the less
clings as if a growth on
this beast of the slime
out of the past seeking
a future in the muck of
self-satisfaction at being
an organism that knows
without knowing that it
is the future unless we
eradicate it in its present moment
as it rises out of the self-
serving stinking quagmire








Howard Winn has just had a novel Acropolis published by Propertius Press as well as poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

THERE'S SOMETHING DYING IN MY BRAIN

by Gil Hoy

Why, in wealthy America

must the beggared sick
lay ill in their beds

While a well-to-do
privileged white man

Dines on fine rich foods,
swings at a little white ball

at his country club
in warm sunny Florida.

While a smiling young girl
skips along the beach in her
wildly carefree exuberance

While an inquisitive circling
seagull soars overhead,

Searching for something
fresh to eat in the sea’s puddles.

Gil Hoy is a personal injury lawyer in Boston, Massachusetts, a former Town Selectman, and a regular contributor to TheNewVerse.News. His poetry has appeared in numerous print and online journals.

DOMESTIC GODDESS

by Katherine Smith

I do my best to ignore the news
vacuuming carpets, scrubbing goo
from microwave and screen.
I polish floors, un-tarnish green

copper tea kettles, pots that gleam.
I pay the bills, and bake a cake,
greet some evangelists, even take
a pamphlet from their little boy.

Though I’m a Jew and they are goy,
I wish the family Easter joy.
They spread across the neighborhood
this day that I devote to chores.

They preach good news from door to door
this Sunday the cable journalists
report to work, for T***p has pissed
off in a single week, the globe

from loving pope to xenophobe,
Syria, Russia, Britain, North Korea,
Christian, Jew, Sunni, Shia.
While North Korea serenades

an anniversary with grim parades
of weapons, and democracy devolves,
T***p relaxes with a game of golf.
I cook and clean with half my ego

adrift through Seoul, Aleppo, Mar-a-lago.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. My second book Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014.

MANDATORY PRESIDENTIAL VACATIONS

by Mark Danowsky

Parents are getting a lot of flack
for penciling structured down time
into otherwise jampacked schedules
for children barely able to walk.

Presidents are forever taken to task
for taking vacations in hard times
since times are always hard
for Americans who never get vacations.

We want to have a beer with the President
or play a game of golf with him
or see selfies of him with celebrities
or have him take a time out from national affairs
because there is a sinkhole in my backyard.

We are mad the President isn't working
through the night. How does he have time
to drink a beer. Why is he playing basketball
or shaking hands or hugging or smiling
in a photograph with that jackass? They stand for
everything I despise. And he has not fulfilled
his promises to me. Where is my change?

They explain the President needs time with his family.
Needs time to unwind. That he has not forgotten
his job, his country, your country, our world
or your wants and needs and fears and loves
the price of milk or American lives.


Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Apiary, Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red River Review, Right Hand Pointing, Snow Monkey and The New Verse News.  His poem "5am Summer Storm"won Imitation Fruit’s “Animals and Their Human’s” Contest, in 2013. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mark currently lives in a van down by the Susquehanna River. He works for a private detective agency and is assistant copy editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.