The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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As reports come out across the country of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining Native Americans, a couple dozen New Mexico lawmakers are pushing a bill that would allow tribal citizens to update their state-issued IDs to reflect their enrollment status. House Bill 20 would give people enrolled in a federally recognized tribe the option to request a “distinguishing mark” identifying them as Native American on their driver’s license or other identification cards. A similar law passed in Arizona last year went into effect in January. On a sample license posted online by that state’s Motor Vehicle Division, “Native American” is written on the bottom left side of the card. —New Mexico In Depth, February 12, 2026
Northern New Mexico
In my mind
it begins,
a Pow Wow
of dance,
chant,
drum,
lofting
my Anglo dreams
to heights
of ritual
more ancient
than Columbus.
Despite the festive air,
masked figures,
I don’t
recognize as Native,
badged and holstered,
lurk in the shadows,
beyond
the drum circle—
waiting.
*
I try to sense,
living as I do,
in Indian Country,
what you,
a Native American,
feel like
awakening now
to a face
in the mirror,
that greets
morning’s light,
not with a smile,
but fear
your complexion,
perhaps only a shade
darker than mine,
might find you
in ICE’s
angry grasp,
two steps away
from expulsion.
*
Identity docs,
once sacred sources
of pride,
and connection,
sat vaulted
in your tribal home,
rarely,
if ever,
in need
of exposure,
to the world
outside.
Now,
I’m told,
you dare not leave
the reservation,
without
your paper shields
of origin.
*
Your biggest fear—
how could I not feel
the same—
likely separation
from your children,
an old fear,
dating back
to early last
century,
when federal agents,
as if yesterday,
drag off
Native offspring
to attend
schools,
to acquire
more “whiteness”.
A curriculum
leading often
to forced labor
and early death,
as history’s
numerous
graves attest.
*
I hesitate,
these days,
to stroll
the town square,
birthed
and sustained
by Puebloans
like yourself,
long before
the arrival
of Europeans.
I reel,
with broken heart,
as ICE grabs you
off the street,
to challenge
your sovereign right,
stretching back
a thousand years,
to call America
home.
Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, and others here and abroad. His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored over 290 poems, published on four continents.
on His behalf that to children, parents, even if one
of them is God, are only accidents of fate.
No child asks to be born or arrives knowing
its name. All are divine. The rest is learned.
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in a wide range of journals, including The New Verse News, Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and The Orchards Poetry Journal, and in anthologies including Support Ukraine, in plein air, and Rumors, Secrets and Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She works in a business that seeks to lower the rate of global warming.
We read books by candlelight whenever power is out after air raids
We hold candles in the prohibited vigil
for those nameless students killed
more than three decades ago
In the underground shelter we take turns to recite stories for one another
At the park we mourn anonymously
in order to protect one another
We are in a war for our dignified identity
We are in a war against
the deprivation of memories
By candlelight we relay ancestors' stories in our language
By candlelight we pass on the history
the regime is forcibly erasing
We are in a war for hard-earned sovereignty
We are in a war
against thought control
After the air raid alarm we briefly go home and our stories are to be continued
As police approach we disperse into the night
and our struggles drag on
Reading, mourning, hiding and remembering with different forms of resistance we are in a war
Author’s Notes: The publishing industry in Ukraine experienced significant growth after the outbreak of the war, as reading became one of the few activities people could engage in during power outages caused by bombardments. Additionally, the invasion led the Ukrainian public to value their own culture, history, and language more deeply. On June 4th each year, people in Hong Kong used to hold a candle vigil at Victoria Park for those who died during the Tiananmen Square Crackdown in 1989. However, since the implementation of the National Security Law by China in 2020, any event commemorating the slaughter of June 4th has become illegal. Several pro-democracy activists who persisted in continuing the vigil have been arrested and imprisoned without due process of law.
C.J. Anderson-Wu (吳介禎) is a Taiwanese writer who has published two collections about Taiwan's military dictatorship (1949–1987), known as the White Terror: Impossible to Swallow (2017) and The Surveillance (2020). Currently she is working on her third book Endangered Youth—to Hong Kong. Her works have been shortlisted for a number of international literary awards including the Art of Unity Creative Award by the International Human Rights Art Festival. She also won the Strands Lit International Flash Fiction Competition, the Invisible City Blurred Genre Literature Competition, and the Wordweavers Literature Contest.
The platforms won’t let you. You’ve been shut out.
Meta doesn’t believe it’s you. How do you prove
you’re you to software programs that don’t
recognize passwords, or codes sent
directly to your phone to verify your identity?
Finally, you hear others are having issues
logging into Facebook and all related platforms.
Your next thought—we’re under attack.
Some nefarious group or country has taken control—
then like a miracle, we’re allowed back in.
It’s as if nothing happened at all, no real harm.
Except how pathetic we are
when we collectively have a panic attack
over social media, forcing us to face reality—
we rely too much on Meta to connect.
Lylanne Musselman is an award-winning poet, playwright, and visual artist. Her work has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, Poetry Breakfast, and The Ekphrastic Review, among many others, in addition to many anthologies. Her seventh chapbook Staring Dementia in the Face (Finishing Line Press) became available in 2023.
The poet's now-deceased grandparents Edna and Irv.
Our olive tree when I was growing up:
an icon in our Jewish neighborhood,
easily a hundred years old,
with rough-barked branches shading the entire yard.
Women in modest dress
stopped to harvest the olives,
not so much to save money
as to remind them of home.
Under this tree of life
passed my Jewish grandparents
when each came to visit.
Ida was old country,
her parents from Poland,
her old smells and
old Yiddish expressions
foreign to my growing interest in
The Twist,
Mr. Tambourine Man,
and protests against The War.
Edna and Irv had left their heritage behind,
hosting us on Christmas,
not Hanukkah,
and wearing hippie beads to
a “happening” in the park.
One morning I walked the family dog
past a neighbor’s lawn.
A cross had been burned
into the grass the night before.
It stared at me every day
until new seeds grew in the spaces.
Soon after, I sat under our olive tree
filling out a college application
that asked my religion.
“Should I mark ‘none’?”
I asked my mother.
“You have to put ‘Jewish’,”
she said.
“Put Jewish, or else
people will think you are
trying to hide it.”
Matt Witt is a writer and photographer who lives in Talent, Oregon. He was recently selected a Writer in Residence at Mesa Refuge in California and has been selected an Artist in Residence at Crater Lake National Park, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, and PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon. His writing has been published in the The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the literary journal Cirque, and many other publications.
Could there be a kind of moral astigmatism?
The misshapen soul, perhaps? An oval moon,
a flat Earth, lightning horizontal like a miser’s
chicken scratch? The identity of this person,
a missing profile on a dating search. Pundits,
linguists, pouring out to decipher the op-ed’s
content, the newly discovered wall in the tomb
of a pharaoh. How much can be spilled forth?
What secrets can be unearthed? A facile ghost,
the remnants of a Southern rebel. One sheet
to hide a thousand sheets, cataracts, so that
one is a bed of trees on which an infant lies.
We shall prepare to say our tender goodbyes
to the land that was. Red, green, white, blue.
Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
LLAPALLAPANI, Bolivia — The water receded and the fish died. They surfaced by the tens of thousands, belly-up, and the stench drifted in the air for weeks. The birds that had fed on the fish had little choice but to abandon Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second-largest but now just a dry, salty expanse. Many of the Uru-Murato people, who had lived off its waters for generations, left as well, joining a new global march of refugees fleeing not war or persecution, but climate change. “The lake was our mother and our father,” said Adrián Quispe, one of five brothers who were working as fishermen and raising families here in Llapallapani. “Without this lake, where do we go?” —“Climate Change Claims a Lake, and an Identity,” The New York Times, July 7, 2016
Take from the albatross all air,
from the worm the lived loam.
On dust farms, on salt flats,
on what used to be the shore
of all that made a here of there,
leave the wingspread, the blindcurve,
leave one liftless, one unburrowed.
“I am living in someone else’s home.”
Drain all that was from all that is,
forget remembering.
Forget to float.
The past is this shrunken husk of a boat,
a souvenir woven from straw,
an orphan for sale in the marketplace.
The future’s this salt we grind and gather.
“The lake was our mother and our father.”
Take all the waters taught of tilt,
take lilt, take lap and swell and spill.
Take from the wave all that wets—
then time will harden as it crests,
our season stilled.
We could not wake one small swift fish from its stench,
or raise one bright flamingo feather from its fossil.
“We threw out our nets, there was nothing for us.”
R. Nemo Hill is the author, in collaboration with painter Jeanne Hedstrom, of an illustrated novel, Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002); a poem based upon a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004); a chapbook, Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics, 2006); and two collections of poems, When Men Bow Down (Dos Madres Press, 2012 ) and In No Man’s Ear (Dos Madres, 2016). He is editor & publisher of Exot Books.
Barbara A Taylor’s free verse poems, renku, haiga, haibun, haiku, tanka, and other Japanese short form poetry appear in many international journals and anthologies on line and in print. She lives in the Rainbow Region, Northern NSW, Australia.
