TREMONT, MAINE REVERSES 100-YEAR-OLD BAN ON DEER HUNTING

by Marianne Gambaro

The Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Advisory Council (IFW) approved the Town of Tremont’s special deer hunt today despite one member hoping for written assurances from the Maine Attorney General’s office that the move is legal. Tremont will be the only town on Mount Desert Island where hunters can legally shoot deer. The deer hunt begins November 2026 and runs for three seasons. Any deer killed in the town will not count toward the hunter’s state bag limit. —Bar Harbor Story, August 11, 2026.

The rising sun casts a golden hue on two fawns and five does

who peacefully graze a meadow beside Blue Hill Bay unaware 

local humans deliberate their fate

with euphemisms like “balance habitat.”

 

Under July’s buck moon while male deer

grow new velvet-covered antlers

gardeners and farmers kvetch at the post office

about ornamentals leveled and crops decimated.

 

At dusk locals drive more cautiously expecting to encounter

one or more standing in the road around the next bend.

Proponents cite an increase in traffic accidents, ignoring

that it might be a function of the overall increase in traffic.

 

Seeing an upsurge at the local clinic,

the spike in Lyme disease is blamed

on the deer rather than white-footed mice,

the real culprits.

 

In August the Maine Inland Fisheries

and Wildlife Advisory Council

approved the execution order

to be carried out in November. 

Retired journalist Marianne Gambaro is a writer and cat enrichment volunteer who lives in Western Massachusetts. Her poems and essays have been published in numerous journals. She is the author of the chapbook, Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers (Finishing Line Press), and an upcoming collection, Stuffed Monkeys (Kelsay Books).

THE CANADIAN CURRY PEOPLE

by Ain Khan

I try to explain to my coworker

the concept of a Pakistani auntie—

an older woman in the community 

who knows everyone’s business,

opines on every right & wrong, 

wonders why you’re not married 

& whose sword of judgment 

can cause your extradition from society.

 

Jamil raises a hand to interrupt me.

Jamaicans have aunties too. Really, all cultures do.  

Auntie is not a person—it’s a state of mind,

attained by anyone, at any age.

 

I throw my head back in laughter. Victor settles

across us, sets down his warmed curry, scenting

the lunchroom. All the curry people at work—          

South Asians, Filipinos, Jamaicans & Trinis—

tried his Ghanaian goat curry last Christmas 

& GOATed it unanimously. He nods vehemently 

at Jamil’s definition of an auntie.

 

Around us, TV screens are blaring scenes 

from Minneapolis. Our all-glass building 

backs into the woods. Some days a doe emerges.

Today she steps close to the clear walls 

under the flurrying sky, the sun glinting

in her calm brown eyes, the fawn

brawn of her body soft in a state of repose –

a privilege to exist, knowing she is what she is,

knowing she is not hunted. 

Ain Khan is an emerging Pakistani-Canadian poet and writer based in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Thimble, DarkWinter Lit, Republic of Letters and is forthcoming in CV2.

HATE IS LEARNED, THEY SAY

by D. R. Goodman

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

Hate is learned, they say. I say it’s born
and hunting for a target from within,
coiled like a cat and patient, weapons worn
 
in secret, sheathed and still. As claw, or thorn,
it catches what comes close and pulls it in.
Hate is learned, they say. I say it’s born:
 
a hollow place the world must fill with sworn
invented enemies. Beneath the skin,
coiled like a cat, impatient, weapons worn
 
in fancied self-defense, it levies scorn
against whatever hapless prey strays in.
They say that hate is learned. I say it’s born,
 
innate and natural. We cannot warn
away what lives inside us, burrowed in
and cat-like, coiled and patient, weapons worn
 
then sharpened once again—keen claw, spike-thorn.
Our work is to expose love’s mirror-twin.
They say that hate is learned. I say it’s born.
It coils like a cat within us, weapon-worn.
 

D. R. Goodman is the author of Greed: A Confession from Able Muse Press, a past winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and twice winner of the Able Muse Write Prize for poetry. Her poems have appeared in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, as well as in many other journals and anthologies. She is founder and chief instructor at a martial arts school.

DEER

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

These words will name the one 
dragged out of the woods by two men 

to the dirt road I walk on, how the day 
before I had startled one in our field, 

& all I saw was the white flag of its leaving, 
& today I see a long, limp tongue hanging out 

from the quiet mouth as the men lift it
into the back of a truck, the sagging 

body, four hooves held by their hands. 
Hands. Hooves. How a bullet leaves a body 

still & stained, & now every day I will look on the edge 
of the road for signs of blood & write 

this poem over & over. In every death
sloughed skin to become again. 

That settling of death right next to you,

how you move over, make room for it.


Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has four poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera(2019), and Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2023). Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO.

HARES ON THE MOUNTAIN

by Gail White

Families connected to a Nashville school that experienced a fatal shooting earlier this year have created nonprofits to not only promote school safety and mental health resources, but also to form an action fund to push legislative policy changes. The Independent (UK), July 21, 2023

If all the young women were hares on the mountain,

Then all the young men would turn hounds and go hunting.

—“Hares on the Mountain”

Why is your gun so hot, my son,

have you hunted the deer today?

No, mother, the deer were safe from me.

I have hunted another prey.

Is it your father’s gun you found,

that he kept on a shelf so high?

No, mother, this gun is all my own,

for guns are easy to buy.

No one bothered to ask my age,

or how much I could understand,

and it’s easy enough to find the prey

on a tracker in my hand.

I may go hunting along the beach,

or down by the hidden pool,

but the deer are all as safe from me

as the children are safe in school.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Paper Cuts, Asperity Street, and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

THE USUAL AMERICAN ELEGY

by William Doreski

In Michigan, another school

shot up by vain disgruntlement.

The freshly dead were tossed aside

by the rush of unbridled history.

I’ve never fondled a gun

with the affection that’s its due.

 

I’ve never savored the death

of a twelve-point white-tail stag

or even a rabbit hopping

toward its fate in a tasty stew.

The boy who fired that pistol

wanted to kill for reasons

 

I probably shared at his age.

But the guns my great-uncles gave me

to make a man of me remained

unloaded, unloved in my closet.

Later I gave them to an aunt

who liked to kill small animals.

 

Today the wind ruffles the pines

with affection absent from life.

The cold challenges my parka

with its warped and stubborn zipper.

I should wander deep in the woods

with orange safety vest averting

 

bullets from careless hunters.

A hundred people shot to death

every day in our enchanted world.

I keep an empty brass cartridge

on my desk to remind me that

like Mayakovski I could shoot

 

myself anytime I wish.

I don’t wish. The blowing dawn

brings a pale layer of blue,

and the ruined families of the dead

face another day of absence

indifferent to the winter sun. 

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

OUTLIER

by Bonnie Proudfoot

Cartoon by Clay Jones

Outside, the chirping of birds is erased

by sirens and the latest newsfeed delivers

the latest news, the camera goes back

to school for this one, what a bitch,

some shy 15-year-old, his heart tethered

to his gun, uses lead for his brand of graffiti,

he wants to be a daredevil, a showstopper,

a level up in the (anti-) social strata

Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland,

new codes for manhood. Maybe

he was always an outlier,

maybe instead of a pet ocelot,

his dad bought him a Black Friday pistol,

he posts his picture on Facebook the next day

some ephemeral way to prove that

someone loves him.

 

In the hallway, the slaughter.

Bullets crisscross the walls,

Bodies left to bleed out on the floor,

outside a classroom door,

a voice calls, It’s ok, bro,

it’s the police you can come out now,

But the other students

have too much skin in the game,

stagger out the back window, shake. We

see the flowers, a few more crosses

on the roadway, messages of what’s

at stake. Meanwhile in America,

Kyle Rittenhouse walks free,

Parkland students protested,

but some in the US Congress denied

that shooting even happened. We

will see gun sales spike before Christmas,

Today, it’s hunting season in Ohio,

shots ring out in the woods,

the birds become silent. Sometimes I

can’t tell where the shots are coming from,

where they are headed.

Bonnie Proudfoot is a recipient of a Fellowship for the Arts in Creative Writing from the West Virginia department of Culture and History, and has had fiction and poetry published in The Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Sheila-Na-Gig, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and other journals. Her first novel, Goshen Road, was published by Swallow Press in January of 2020, and was selected by the Women’s National Book Association for one of its Great Group Reads for 2020.  The novel was also long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway award for debut fiction.

SAVAGE AND IGNORANT DELIGHT

by Pepper Trail

In this photo provided by Adam Messer is a gray wolf, a member of the Nez Perce pack, seen north of Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo., on March 31, 2002. Wolf hunting policies in some U.S. states are taking an aggressive turn as Republican lawmakers and conservative hunting groups push to curb their numbers. Antipathy toward wolves for killing livestock and big game dates to when early European immigrants settled the American West in the 1800s. (Adam Messer via AP)

Wolf takes one step, one step wrong. The jaws of the trap snap.

In three days, three short days of permission, the men of Wisconsin, 

with hounds and traps and guns, have killed two hundred wolves.

 

Oh great Aldo, Dr. Leopold, what would you say

to the "Hunter Nation," these men of your beloved state 

who went to court to secure those days of death?

 

Your words are there to read in "Thinking Like a Mountain"—  

how you mourned the wolf killing that you did, 

mourned the fierce green fire dying in her eyes.

 

Young then, and full of trigger-itch, you came at last

to hear the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf,

to see that wildness is the salvation of the world.

 

You grew up, but not all men do.

You lived to see, too clear, the wilderness gone,

the waiting swarms of deer, the disease of appetite.

 

You taught the good that wolves do, that hunters can share,

but too few learned.  Two hundred wolves dead is not hunt,

but slaughter, the most savage and ignorant delight.

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

HUNTING SEASON, JANUARY 2020

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness, performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov, and teaches seasonal poetry workshops that revolve around "wilderness writing."  She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, and TheNewVerse.News  which recently nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize.