LETTER FROM A POET TO AI

by Terri Kirby Erickson 

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

What do you know of heartache?

How it feels to watch your father die 

gasping for air like a fish in a bucket, 

or to find your comatose mother in her 

front yard, dying alone in the dirt? 

My brother bled to death in front 

of my eyes when he was twenty. Can 

you even imagine it? Of course, you 

can’t. You have no imagination, no 

feelings, only data, data, data that you 

spit out like pits from fruit you’ve

never tasted. And what about the good 

stuff? That first kiss from a guy who 

means it? Holding your newborn baby 

in your arms, astonished by how much 

love one person can bear? Have you 

strolled down the Champs-Élysées in 

the rain? Laughed at a joke or made 

love by an open window to the sound

of Italian doves? Tasted a chocolate 

milkshake or pumpkin risotto? Have 

you thrown a softball or climbed a tree? 

Ridden a Merry-Go-Round or a bicycle, 

seen Mick Jagger strut like a rooster 

across a stage or watched the Rockettes

kick their way to Christmas? So you can

write a semblance of a poem or a story

or a novel, so what? Your creations are 

rickety scaffolding, Hollywood sets that 

will never be the Swiss Alps or even

a human home, which is better, even if it 

sucks, than anyplace you could generate 

because you are nothing but a vending 

machine, AI—stocked with empty words.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including The Light that Follows Us Home (Autumn, 2026, Press 53). Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize, International Book Award for Poetry, and the Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina, USA.

SCENES FROM A CHALICE OF WATERS/VICTORY

by Dick Altman

Through “Field Work,” farmers and ranchers in rural parts of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming were eligible for up to $10,000 to implement creative water projects on their land (think: improved water efficiency, water reliability, water quality, crop yield or crop diversification, and labor efficiency). Nearly 80 producers applied and 12 projects were selected this year, totaling more than $95,000 of investment into research led by farmers and ranchers. These folks are the experimenters, tinkerers, innovators, and iterators who—while Western states agonize over how to resolve antiquated water compacts—have been finding ways to eke out a living from the land. They’re people who have a vested interest in finding ways to use water more effectively—for their own operations and for the good of the West. —LOR Foundation

Southern Colorado

While born a stream,
you gave way to a dam,
then a lake swimming
with impressionistic clouds,
clouds coalescing above me,
clouds inscribed with geese,
I watch scout  
for new nesting grounds
your rush-plated periphery.
 
While a thousand feet below,
a pair of herons,
as I approach,
loft pterodactyl-like wings,
to seek another cove,
while a lone seagull,
a thousand miles
from ocean’s home,
alights
on your boulder-strewn shore,
to fill their void.
 
While a horned-toad,
no bigger than my thumb,
streaks across the path,
to escape
my cleated feet,
as a swallowtail
samples fresh crowns
of Chamisa,
into whose stems
the pebbled form
disappears.
 
While in the water,
trout eye me warily,
before finning
into shadows
and out of sight—
but not beyond
eyes of the bald eagle,
whose outstretched talons
I last see loft
a limp figure that broke,
in death,
the surface,
to snatch
a damsel fly
emergent.
 
While my eyes shift
to observe you,
barefooted,
clamber over rocks
defending the shore,
a route I fear to test.
 
While you look,
from above,
as if queen of waves,
standing amid formations,
submerged,
whose gray elongations,
boulders immobile
of another age,
evoke a pod of whales,
newly calved,
in waters
of imagination.
  
While above you.
beyond vermillion cliffs,
ascend the Silver peaks,
whose walls
of white-enameled concavity
return to our eyes
sun’s luminescence,
as from facets
of cloud-high broken glass.
 
While wind’s pulse unfurls
in a tidal whisper
against the shore,
I’m reminded
of decades’ voices
alloyed to conjure
a mountain valley, 
untrammeled,
into a victory chalice,
embracing a lake
called Nighthorse—
final scene in a dream
to solace warring thirsts,
farm or factory,
Ute Indian or not,
whose perfected comity
our spirits bow to
each time
we tread its rim.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work appears in the first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry published this year by the New Mexico Museum Press. 

PONDERING SPACE TRAVEL 2021

by Mary K O’Melveny

Jeff Bezos will soon soar out to deep space.

Someone with thirty million to spare

will join him in that endless place

we all struggle to comprehend, stare

at as if we could know it, trace

its contours, fix its borders. Where

does it end, this endless cash some chase?

 

As workers sweat and toil in nightmare

warehouses, such wealth will outpace

most whose dreams must rest elsewhere,

whose week’s small paycheck is embraced,

then quickly dispersed. Some might declare

the super-rich have every right to showcase

their successes. Others will despair

our grave inequities—just in case

one missed them—say it is quite unfair

to celebrate when most of the human race

struggles, starves, resides in threadbare

dwellings with no breathing space,

much less leisure time or medical care.

 

For most, three jobs won’t outpace

the bills. Yet, our daily news fare

carries front page tales without a trace

of irony about travels of billionaires,

as if their exploits might displace

raw fears, needs, demands, the wear

and tear of days grounded in place.

 

Still, our imaginations can take us there

even without cash for shuttle fares to space.

We can visit vast black holes that appear

to consume all light, marvel at defaced

meteorites, search long dead stars where

memories lie fallow waiting to be traced.

We can follow spurts of sunspots, the flare

of celestial meteor showers. There’s grace

in that truth. Almost like an answered prayer.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

BLACK HOLES

by Rick Mullin

The Quantum Black Hole by John Baez

I liked the way they looked in my imagination.
Huge aortas in the midnight sky
devouring time and space and light,
demolishing the errant satellite.

I like subjective characterization
and not forever asking why.

But here comes a received and peer-reviewed design,
a doughnut over-lit and over-glazed.
The hole’s too small for all that stuff
and overall not black enough.

I liked the black holes more when they were mine,
when I was curious, confused and dazed.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.

FOURTH ASTRONAUT

by Rick Mullin

Painting by Alan Bean, the fourth astronaut (Apollo 12) to have walked on the moon. He died on May 26, 2018. 

“I think of myself not as an astronaut who paints,
 but as an artist who was once an astronaut” —Alan Bean, Apollo


His name connoting photosynthesis
in pods on earth, he traveled to the moon
and stood in fields of cobalt dust and darkness.
No one saw it in his way—the dune
of oxidates, the earthrise glinting fire
on the helmet of his mate. The silent night.
He gathered specimens of stone and scraps
of wreckage from an unmanned satellite.
He worked for seven hours, drawing maps
in his imagination to a higher
landscape in a timeless super 8
depicting the recurrent astral mystery.
The dream. While others met a common fate
in business, he resolved on painting history,
unpacking samples to a canvas of desire.

Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Transom.

WHO'S IT FROM? WHAT'S INSIDE?

by Melisa "Misha" Cahnmann-Taylor

You Receive A Present From Someone You Haven’t Seen In A Long Time. 

Who’s It From? What’s Inside?

---Writing prompt at Jubilee Partners ESOL Program

for Refugees, Comer, Ga.

This Congolese boy describes hide and seek with a twist.  The Finder must shoot the Found with a “to-PI-co.”   I draw the sling’s “Y” shot, and we review adjectives: playful, violent.  They use seeds, not rocks. He swears it’s not a violent game he’s missing with his friends.  Maybe just the culture of boys playing.  Already a man at 17, mothered by his sister while the split family grieves over a sibling’s typhoid, a missing father.  A mother in Texas grieves.  She let her boy play with neighbors whose chambers held loaded handguns.  The yellow tape.  The no return.  She preaches we ask before sending children on playdates to unsafe houses.  Foam swords.  Squirt guns.  Games that allow the player to spell bomb so one appears and blows holes through a virtual wall.  A boy-almost-a-man, 21, rented our house while we lived in Mexico.  I didn’t know he hunted.  He demanded his full deposit though he’d punched a hole through my son’s door.  I patched it, he argued.  It better be good enough.  Slight threat as he insisted I search for his lost fishing hooks. It’s better to withdraw where there are bullets.  But what do you do when your village is burned? Do you get the deposit back? Do you offer a limb? A daughter or son? While one remembers a war-toy, another girl conjures a pair of green shoes.  Imagination’s tucked into every child like a hidden coin or buried like a sandbox in concrete.  This boy has 2 months before he’s to pay rent, find a job, buy his own shoes in this confusing and green country. The Christian volunteers were to bury a Death Row inmate and the Salvadorans insisted they’d shovel better. Unable to bury their own, they moved earth for our discarded men. Éste por mi mama.  Éste por mi papa. They slung red clay in the rhythms of a clapping game.

Melisa "Misha" Cahnmann-Taylor is Professor of Language and Literacy Education and Program Chair of TESOL & World Language Education at the University of Georgia. She is the winner of Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes and a Leeway Poetry Grant, and has co-authored two books, Teachers Act Up: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre and Arts-Based Research in Education.  She has published numerous articles, and poetry about language learning and teacher education.  Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Women’s Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Barrow Street, Puerto Del Sol, Mom Egg, and many other literary homes.  She judges the annual Anthropology & Humanism poetry contest.

THE JOY OF SCIENCE

by Tricia Knoll

The Voyager-1 spacecraft has become the first manmade object to leave the Solar System. "This is really a key milestone that we'd been hoping we would reach when we started this project over 40 years ago - that we would get a spacecraft into interstellar space," said Prof Ed Stone, the chief scientist on the venture. "Scientifically it's a major milestone, but also historically - this is one of those journeys of exploration like circumnavigating the globe for the first time or having a footprint on the Moon for the first time. This is the first time we've begun to explore the space between the stars," he told BBC News.

They deserve a dance
of joy, a cheer, a beer
these people who tracked
that small ship into the outer

limit of imagination, the caffeine,
the endless nights brought home
when science goes further,
goes better, does beyond

into the interstellar cloud
of stardust, the dark where
both goatherds and villains
have stared, wondering. 


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet. The night sky in western Oregon is frequently obscured by cloud cover. When it's not, she too stares, wondering.