WHILE TAPPING MY FOOT

by Mark Hendrickson

Rothko Style Art at Etsy

AI slop tops Billboard and Spotify charts as synthetic music spreads —The Guardian, November 13, 2025

MIT Invents Injectable Brain Chips —Futurism, November 16, 2025

While tapping my foot

to the AI-generated 

number one song 

on the billboard charts

that I asked Siri to play,

I abandon my Kindle book 

and switch to my iPhone 

to shop for paintings 

in the style of Rothko on Etsy,

but I become distracted 

by automated news summaries

reporting that computer chips can now 

be injected directly into our brains,

and how many jobs will be lost

to AI and automation,

and an article saying 

that one day soon 

robots will replace or kill us all.

I laugh to myself and say, 

“Never gonna happen” 

as I click the Buy Now button

because I decide 

I like the reproduction

better than the original.

Mark Hendrickson (he/him/his) is a poet and writer in the Des Moines area navigating the Sturm und Drang of daily life through wordcraft. His words appear in The Ekphrastic Review, The New Verse News, and Modern Haiku. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or at https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/mhendrickson .

MASS SHOOTING #6

14201 2nd Ave, Gabrielle Apartments & Townhomes, Highland Park, MI, Sep 28 2025

by Ron Riekki

“the war speaks at night

with its lips of shredded children,”

—Tyehimba Jess,

“Mercy”

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

I ask where he’s working.  He says, “Illegally.”

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

 

He says he can’t move his hand, he’s doing poorly.

Says, “We need more jobs.”  Leaves, says I’m too “cop-vibe”-y.

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

 

Inside a car, a man crying.  Not quite payday.

Says it’s been a long day, his face all teary.

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

 

2 adults, 2 teens shot on this property

2 days ago—foot, foot, shoulder, chest injury.

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

 

I ask if he’s OK.  He says, “yeah,” politely.

He says the problem’s “gun stores.”  They’re making money.

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

 

White community’s answer is to “pray.”

I worry I can only think binary.

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

HOW TO SPOT A FASCIST

by Helen Jones

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

Don’t think they come with jackboots in the dawn
Or kick your door in on a freezing night.
Now fascists take control with Facebook ads
And Tik-Tok videos to make you laugh,
Let you believe that facts can just be changed,
Decide reality is just a trick.
 
Then suddenly your job has disappeared
Raw work-experience kids have wiped you out,
Universities are threatened, books are banned,
Medicaid blown apart and foreigners locked up,
Poor people die and old alliances break.
 
          Fascists begin with elections
          When you are not paying attention.

Helen Jones was born in Chester, U.K. She gained a degree in English, many years ago from University College London and later an M.Ed. from the University of Liverpool. She is now happily retired and spends a lot of her time writing and making a new garden. Her poetry has been published in several journals in the U.K., and she is currently working on a novel set in fifth century Deva.

ANOTHER LION MEETS WINTER

by Jennifer M Phillips

Time to step back from your long labors, Joe,
and let the eager young ones try their hands.
You've kept the long watch safe all night, we know,
and spared the ship of state from bergs and sands.
Heed the prophet's words, predicting, at his finish,
"another will increase, and I must diminish."
 
Your whole career you've served the working jack,
walked the union picket-line, yanked foreign jobs home,
foreseen future industries, retooled the work,
and understood such tasks are never done.
How it pains the industrious will to step away
before well-laid plans arrive at light of day.
 
It goes against your conscientious grain
to leave unfinished what's urgently needed
for this time of tempestuous fire and intemperate rain,
but the ground is prepared and a good harvest seeded.
Trust our resilient future, its competent folk,
to find new pathways for new repairing work.
 
You've fought for justice, remedy, and franchise
on an uphill slope and seen strong weapons shattered,
and though, as always, demons and enemies rise,
you've braced to hold the line when it has mattered.
Now there is a rank of fresh supply behind.
Fall back with honor. Trust the guiding Mind.
 
Democracy feels a fragile edifice
that monks must sweep away when prayers are done
like a painting in sand that time and wind erase.
One God-breathed moment: hearts are not the same.
See: the fresh art commences, the template resurrects;
renewed hope finds voice, as the Spirit directs.
 
O world-sorrow always with us, wars that never end,
but flurry like grackle flocks from one tree to another;
Many losses borne; retirement's one more to mend.
Your back is strong, your loves close by, your  team calls you brother.
you've led us by your best lights, and now will lead in this.
Believe that a gallant soul is never purposeless.

Jennifer M Phillips is a bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower, with two chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (Blurb, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Phillips' work has appeared in over 100 journals, and is currently twice-nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize.

IMMIGRANTS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS

by Robert Wildwood

When Lever Alejos of Venezuela arrived at the southern border penniless in July, he gladly accepted a free bus ride to Washington, D.C., courtesy of the state of Texas. He had no family or friends to receive him, and spent one night in the plaza across from Union Station. He soon settled into a homeless shelter. “I have nothing,” Mr. Alejos, 29, said on his third day in the city, “but I have the will to work and succeed.” Two months later, Mr. Alejos is making between $600 to $700 a week, saving up to buy a used car and planning to move out of the shelter. “There is so much opportunity here,” he said on Thursday, at the end of a day’s work. “You just have to take advantage of it.” —The New York Times, September 18, 2022

“Immigrants are taking our jobs”

after he said that to me

I wondered how it could be true

that a person with little capital and

only the possessions they carried

was so powerful that

they could “Take” a job from someone.

   Everytime I ever got a job

I had to ask for it

and a job was offered to me.

   Talk about the capitalists who

are giving jobs away to

desperate people willing to accept lower pay

Inside our country or worldwide.

   Talk about the capitalists who

turned their back on you and your family

to exploit a vulnerable working class population

the immigrants.

   Follow the money and see 

who is the real thief

Robert Wildwood, a poet from Duluth, Minnesota, makes his living as a nurse.

THE HEARTS NEAR TROUBLESOME CREEK

by Sarah Mackey Kirby

Eastern Kentucky has long been neglected. After recent floods, locals are relying on each other yet again. —CNN, August 9, 2022

beat loss,

beat wood slat rubble,

beat morning Appalachia.

 

It’s patch-up and fix-up

and clean-up and move-on

time again. The mountains

know these folks. The ones

in old boats, still combing

flooded neighborhoods

with their own homes in shambles.

Teachers without classrooms and

workers taking charge throughout the night.

 

Sorting clothes and preparing supply

boxes in shelters. Manning the grills.

Handing out water bottles.

Somehow landing on their feet

 

as they know to do. The coal mine jobs

lost but the sickness those wrought.

The lack of work to replace them.

The stubborn terrain. Two parties that’ve

fought to be the one who gets to use them.

Same generations of neglect. Different name.

Humble people, caricatured through time,

whose character shows despite their pain.

 

Nurses care for patients. Art and music bring

the light. The breeze blows through soaring pines.

And when the world tires and the cameras leave

and the mud dries and the current-event poems

become current only for them, they’ll keep asking

their neighbors, “Y’all need somethin’?”

Talking distinct Eastern Kentucky, offering help.

Saying, “Bless your heart” to those who’ve never

once tried to understand. Picking up what’s left of

family pictures and damaged front porch swings.

Together. Always rebuilding.

Sarah Mackey Kirby grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of the poetry collection The Taste of Your Music (Impspired, 2021). Her work appears in Chiron Review, Impspired Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, The New Verse News, Ploughshares, Third Wednesday Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds an MA in Teaching and a BA in Political Science from the University of Louisville. She and her husband spend their time in Kentucky and Ohio.

FEARFUL FOR MY GOVERNMENT JOB

DREAMING OF RETIREMENT
I THINK OF DU FU

by Maryann Corbett

NPR Headline, June 27, 2017: “President Trump Looks to Slash Nearly 4000 Interior Department Jobs”

Tell me, venerable poet, how did you cope
with changes of regime?

Did you hear, in the gardens of Chang’an,
when men in new silk robes
spoke your name and snickered?

Did they practice, in their graceful calligraphy,
the characters for cutting the fat?
For starving the beast?

Did you watch as others suffered,
like you, demotion and disgrace?

You, too, longed for peace,
for a farm, a thatched cottage, the sound of a stream.

Teach me how you mastered yourself
so as to leave us poems of a thousand years
of rivers, moonlight, compassion.

Teach me how you knew it was time at last
to flee before the barbarians.

Video by the Bureau of Land Management published on Nov 10, 2016. In June 2017, T***p's Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told lawmakers . . .  "that he plans to shrink his department’s sprawling workforce by 4,000 employees—about 8 percent of the full-time staff—as part of budget cuts to downsize the government’s largest public lands agency. . . . 1,000 jobs would be lost at the Bureau of Land Management—which manages hundreds of wilderness areas, two dozen national monuments and other protected lands in addition to issuing leases for livestock grazing and oil and gas extraction —according to an email its acting director sent to employees last Friday." —The Washington Post, June 21, 2017

Maryann Corbett is grateful that in fact she's already retired from almost 35 years of work with the Minnesota Legislature. Her newest book Street View: Poems is available from Able Muse Press.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT OR BOTH

by Ron Riekki

When we saw the body being dragged down the aisle,
no one was concerned because it was only the fifth body
that day murdered by the flight crew.  The country was over-
booked, just too many people, and so a little genocide never hurt
anyone.  The blood smeared along the floor just meant jobs—
someone has to clean up all the lungs and livers and specks
of the underemployed from the thousand-dollar seat human pipeline
with no food, no movies, nothing but a seat, or part of a seat anyway,
the elbow of the person next to me in my lap, literally, the rest of the person
gone now; I suppose I should discard it, but there’s no garbage cans anymore.
I mean, not even on the ground.  We just litter, everywhere—there is no difference
between a junkyard and a national park.  Who needs difference?  We’re all the same.
We’re all basically from Africa, all of us, especially our President who is making

the American red hat great again.  When I think of our powerful and wise President,
I think of two words: hat & red.  It’s His symbol, our symbol.  Hat red.  The word
makes me feel proud.  I mean words.  Who cares about spelling or grammar anymore?
It’s all about moneymoneymoney.  A corpse these days can fetch you a hundred
           dollars.
To get on the flight, TSA rapes you.  It’s for your own safety.  I know that
when I was raped for my safety, I thanked the man with his perfect English.
He held my penis in his hand and I said thank you for making me not have to worry
about being abused on the flight.  He gave me a little hug, which caught my attention
and told me I had a thirteen-percent chance of living.  He gave me a little tiny package
of pretzels.  It was so small that I needed tweezers.  I just prayed that they didn’t know
I had Middle Eastern on my mother’s side of the family. I mean I prayed
           metaphorically.
I wouldn’t really pray.  I mean not unless I was doing it properly, patriotically, scared.
I mean sacred.  Sacred as hell.


Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Sewanee Writers Series and Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book from the Library of Michigan and finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award/Grand Prize shortlist, Midwest Book Award, Foreword Book of the Year, and Next Generation Indie Book Award), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 IPPY/Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Great Lakes—Best Regional Fiction and Next Generation Indie Book Award—Short Story finalist), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017).

THE PARK CLOSES AT DUSK

by CL Bledsoe & Michael Gushue

The problem is bears in the classroom.
The problem is bears who don't know
which utensil is for the pâté, which
is for olives.
The problem is that I'm right.
The problem is our tax dollars at work.
Ask all the questions you want. Questions are free.
Answers require donations.
The problem is bears who don't speak proper English.
The problem is bears stealing jobs.
The problem is union bears.
The problem is the lack of bear vouchers.
Bears should be left up to the states,
the largest donors.
Bears eating pâté. Bears who can spell their government
representatives' names and use a touch-tone phone.
The problem is bears who don't know how to stitch
their own wounds.
The problem is bears on death panels,
bears running internment camps.
The problem is bears as Uber drivers.
Bears want to take away our pâté knives.
The problem is bears don't eat pâté
and the ones who do don't vote.
The problem is bears taking our guns and making them into backscratchers.
Russian bears who've invaded our classrooms after the arctic ice melted.
The problem is what's going on behind the bears' backs
while we're watching their teeth.

CL Bledsoe is the assistant editor for The Dead Mule and author of fourteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love. He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

Michael Gushue is co-founder with Dan Vera of Poetry Mutual and Poetry Mutual Press. He co-curates the intermittent reading series Poetry at the Watergate with Deborah Ager. His chapbooks are Gathering Down Women, Conrad, and Pachinko Mouth. He lives Washington, D.C.

WHITE MAN'S BLUES

by James McKee

Musician and Trump supporter Kraig Moss sings and plays his guitar as South Carolina voters line —WNYC

Well I’m walking down the street,
There’s no English to be heard;
Yeah, I’m walking down my street,
Ain’t no English, not one word.
I was born in the First World;
Looks like I’ll be buried in the Third.


First they take away your job,
Send the factory off to Mexico;
Then they go after your woman;
Where she’s got to, I ain’t know;
Now they’re coming for what’s left,
Time for another Alamo.


I hear them say white man
With that look on they face;
Everybody saying white man
Like it have some nasty taste;
Seems like they forget
Who it was built this place.


Our daddies had it good,
Everybody knew God was white;
Our daddies kept it simple,
You were black if you weren’t white;
If that means they done wrong,
I got no use for doing right.


Prisons are full and getting fuller,
Because the law is the law.
How come we got so many prisons?
And who is it makes up the law?
Ask too many questions,
You find out what prison’s for.


In New York they call me racist,
Mock my accent and my state;
To L.A. I’m just a redneck,
Love two things, guns and hate;
But I’m the first to get a call
When there’s a war that can’t wait.


Had a dream last night:
A river of strangers rushing by;
No one hears me or sees me,
And then that flood, it runs dry.
I knew when I woke up
Nothing changes till I die.

James McKee and his wife live in New York City, in a neighborhood where the 1% seldom go.  A New Yorker by birth (and likely by death), he enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Manhattan.  After taking a degree in English & Philosophy, he held a number of ludicrously unsuitable jobs before spending over a decade as a teacher and administrator at a small special-needs high school. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Raintown Review, Saranac Review, The South Carolina Review, THINK, Mobius, The Road Not Taken, The Worcester Review, The Lyric, The Rotary Dial, and elsewhere; one of his poems recently won the Sow’s Ear Review Poetry Contest, another is a finalist for the Dana Award for Poetry, and a third has been nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize. He currently works as a private tutor and spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.

WALKER MANIA

by David Southward

Image source: DonkeyHotey

Amazing, what a guy like me
can do for voters who can’t see
what’s good for them. I’ve hatched a plan
to make their state a wonderland!

I broke the unions, stripped their rights—
and though it sparked some ugly fights,      
the squawking’s dwindled to a peep
and labor now comes oh-so-cheap.

I turned the federal money down
that would’ve linked up town to town
with light rail. Jobs were lost, but hey,
it kept the socialists away.

Natural gas? Now that I’d tap.
It’s ours if we just frack the crap
out of Wisconsin’s woods (though first
her residents must be coerced).

The jobs report still sucks, the budget
can’t be balanced. Hell, let’s fudge it:
keep the taxes low by raping
schools, the poor, and park landscaping.

I passed a law that welfare queens
must view their fetuses on screens
before aborting. God will care
for those unwanted babes, I swear.

With cuts in funding, it’s a breeze
to gut state universities.
They nurture liberals, stir up minds
and threaten us with picket lines.

I’m loved by all the billionaires,
which may explain why no one dares
to question me.  If someone tries,
I’ll stare him down with my dead eyes.

If I could gain complete control,
I’d sell the public sector whole
to the highest-bidding financier—
and run it like an overseer.

It seems to me we’ve turned a page:
I’ve ushered in a bold new age
in which a scoundrel goes scot free.
An age of proud cupidity.


David Southward teaches literature in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His poems have appeared in The New Verse News, The Lyric, and Voices on the Wind.

DEPORT YOURSELF, IT'S GREATER THAN YOU THINK

by Joseph Pacheco

A decision from the federal district court in Brownsville, Texas, has thrown the U.S. immigration system into chaos. As the Obama administration prepares an appeal in order to carry out its plan to grant a legal status to some four million undocumented immigrants, a close look at the opinion by Judge Andrew S. Hanen reveals some ... misleading or ill-informed passages. These might not have much bearing on the legal dispute in court, but they're worth addressing. If a federal judge has these misconceptions about immigration, plenty of ordinary Americans probably do too. --Max Ehrenfreund, “Wonkblog,” The Washington Post, February 19, 2015

to the tune of:




Deport yourself, it’s greater than you think,
Deport yourself, or you’ll end up in the clink.
The year’s gone by, economy’s on the blink
Deport yourself, deport yourself, it’s greater than you think.

You’ve worked at jobs no gringos want, you’re always on the go,
To make enough for your family here and the one in Mexico,
But every time you settle down and think you’ve got it made,
You lose your latest job again to another Migra* raid.

Deport yourself, it’s easier than you think,
Deport yourself, stop standing on the brink,
When you’re back home, your life will be in synch,
Deport yourself, deport yourself, have a tequila drink.

You’ll let our tomatoes go unpicked and rot upon the vine,
There won’t be places cheap enough where we can sit and dine,
Our lawns and grounds will go ungroomed, our beds will be unmade,
But you’ll be rich in your home town where no one’s ever paid.

Deport yourself, your green card’s long extinct,
Deport yourself, get back into the pink,
Your wife and kids will either swim or sink,
Deport yourself, deport yourself, it’s greater than you think.
                                               
*Immigration authorities


Joseph Pacheco is a retired New York City superintendent  living on Sanibel Island.  His  poetry has been featured several times on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Latino USA and WGCU. He has performed his poetry with David Amram’s jazz quartet at the Bowery Poets Café and Cornelia Street Café in New York City.  He writes a poetry column for the Sanibel Islander and his poetry has appeared in English and Spanish in the News-Press.  In 2008 he received the Literary Artist of the  Year award from Alliance for the Arts.  He has published three books of poetry, The First of the Nuyoricans/Sailing to  Sanibel, Alligator in the Sky and most recently in June, Sanibel Joe’s Songbook.