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.

LAUGHTER

by Joanne Durham

            in honor of Kamala Harris

 

Laughter floats across borders.
Laughter releases bitterness from my tongue.
Is it a crazy laugh or laughter for a crazy world? 
You can tell a lot by a laugh*.
 
Laughter doesn’t need to sit at the head of the table.
You can’t bulldoze laughter.
Laughter loosens clenched fists.
Laugh me into your fear. Who laughs alone?
 
Infinite peals of laughter fit on the head of a pin.
Rain of laughter bathes a breathless sky.     
Belly laughter lightens the mind.
Children aching from laughter never forget that joy.
 
A woman’s laughter sings, I am more than sorrow.
If laughter is a cackle, please, bewitch us.

 
*Comment by Harris’s Republican opponent in the 2024 Presidential election. 

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). She lives in the swing state of North Carolina where laughter is an important part of keeping up the fight.  

LAUGH

by Ken Purscell

I heard his laugh before I heard the news,

But recognized who made that laugh and why:

He'd overcome their power to refuse

His ballot. Now his laugh could finally fly

Unhindered. Yes, there still was all the pain

Of truth to face. And reconciliation?

Never easy. Yet gentle as the rain,

He worked to foster healing to a nation.

But that one moment, joy sprang out in laughter

Because he’d laughed a thousand times before–

Despite the past behind, what might come after–

Holding tight the faith that was his core:

Christ’s mercy conquers every evil thing,

So even before the news arrives, we sing!

Ken Purscell is a retired retail cashier, adjunct professor, and preacher. He and his wife Koni live in the suburbs of Chicago. He still claims his greatest accomplishment is that he once made Victor Borge laugh.

DELIVERED

by Julian Matthews

“Dinner With Friends” Painting by Victoria Coleman

A poem on our first meeting after being in a writing workshop on Zoom for six weeks, and in various lockdowns for a year and ten months.

And so we sit at the table partaking of a meal,

the home-made, home-cooked, home-delivered

a gathering of friends, new and old,

unmuted, unzoomed, live, in-person, fully embodied,

greeting each other like refugees

meeting on the dock, our boats having survived

the treacherous crossing of middle class suburbia

and stepping back onto the shores of human connection again, 

wetting our cold feet and lapping up warm chatter about pets, 

pasta, pastries, prices, politics and the pandemic, always the 

     pandemic,

and, thankfully, of our common love of books, and writing and 

     poetry

and missing sitting in darkened theatres with strangers, to watch 

     a movie,

or a play or just chilling with a warm-up, pre-concert cocktail, 

     perhaps a long island tea, 

or two, before listening to an orchestra, fingers fondling keys, 

     bows caressing strings,

lips pressed against mouthpieces, hugging tubas, the tsk-chizz 

     of sticks on cymbals, 

being enveloped by the sensurround sounds of music played by 

     real, in-the-flesh humans...

And in the end there is laughter, ribbing and the teasing out

of each other's backgrounds, our reasons for being, why the 

     need to put words

on rectangular screens, this unboxing of the isolation inside us, 

     this shedding of thickened skins,

double-vaxxed, immunized, and unmasked, fully ensconced in 

     that most singular of human acts,

the Art of Conversation, manifesting our ancestral DNA of 

     gathering around the embers of dying

fires under stars, trading stories, sharing opinions and yes, even 

     gossiping,

just to know we are alive, 

we are still alive.

Julian Matthews is a former journalist finding new ways to express himself in the pandemic through poetry, short stories and essays. He is published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Nine Cloud Journal, Poor Yorick Journal, Borderless Journal, Second Chance Lit, Poetry and Covid, the anthology Unmasked: Reflections on Virus-time (curated by Shamini Flint), cc&d magazine, a Scars Publication, and forthcoming in the American Journal of Poetry. He is based in Malaysia.

ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE

by Mark Spicknall

The carny artist makes black scribbles,
laughing, a good game, a show.
He can do us in a minute,
the fastest ever, he says,
his lines a rusty sideshow ride
careening through funnel cake fog.
We are there somewhere,
points on a line we’ve fallen into,
rising, screaming, then falling
into a bell-shaped dead silence.

     He laughs and laughs.

Author’s note:  On the feeling that too often creeps in watching the daily White House coronavirus briefings.


Mark Spicknall is a manufacturing and business consultant, a sailor settled in the mountains, who writes to try to make sense of the tides, the climbs, storms and the stars.

THE STAIRS, THE BED, THE LAUGHTER

by Jennifer Davis Michael

Drawing by Ann Telnaes, The Washington Post, December 5, 2017 

The stairs, the bed, the laughter,
the hand over her mouth.
The silence that came after
the stairs, the bed, the laughter;
the faces that looked past her.
The mockery, the doubt.
The stairs, the bed, the laughter.
Fifty hands over her mouth.

Jennifer Davis Michael is Professor and Chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Mezzo Cammin, Southern Poetry Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, Leaping Clear, and previously in TheNewVerse.News.

CIRCUS

by Nicole Caruso Garcia

Simpler times by Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune, UT 

For Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 27 September 2018


“We can't allow more time for new smears to damage Judge Kavanaugh, his family, his reputation, the reputation of the court, and of course, the reputation of the country…. it's time to end the circus.” —Senator Orrin Hatch (R) Utah


That’s what they heckle when a woman dares
To place her head inside the lion’s chops.           
(Drumroll…there are so few volunteers.)
You gird yourself and leap through flaming hoops

Of memory. As did Anita Hill,
You helmet-up and light the cannon’s fuse.
You swan dive, pray there’s water in the pail,
Become a Tattooed Lady inked in news.       

The men who pound the tent-stakes shake the high wire.
One-piece swimsuit, terrified, you list
Details: two guys, locked door, tunes loud, cries dire,
His hand upon your mouth. You don’t resist

But willingly subject yourself to groping
Questions. This appointment is for life.
Fifteen, you palmed no key but luck, escaping
His drunken weight as water filled the safe.

You’re poised, hang by your hair and strength of jaw.
The big cats roar. One sniffs he’ll never quit.
Your risk respects the gravity of law,
And cold hard truth is not so soft a net.

The crowd goes home. The clowns and beasts will slumber.
You still can hear two crude young men, their laughter.

Nicole Caruso Garcia is Assistant Poetry Editor of Able Muse and a Board member of Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Measure, PANK, Mezzo Cammin, Crab Orchard Review, Light, Modern Haiku, The Orchards, The Raintown Review, Antiphon, and elsewhere. She resides in Connecticut.

APOCALYPTIC LULLABY

by Richard O'Connell

After the Portuguese of Domingos Carvalho Da Silva

Because the moon is bright and the night

Is simply announcing the dawn

And because the sea is hardly the sea

And the hose doesn't weep on the lawn

And because we've fouled the water and air

In this best of all possible hells

And because the light is simply a vibration

That excites our nervous cells

And because rock music hurts our ears

And the wind plays an aeolian harp

And because the earth breeds plenty of snakes

And goldfish are only carp

And because the plane is about to depart

And the raven repeats nevermore

And because we have to sit here and smile

Before the final big encore

And because yesterday does not exist

And the future will never come

And because we are doing a ballet

On the pin of the Hydrogen Bomb

Let's not rush to the wall and weep

And tear our hair and bewail our fate

We did as well as anyone could

Given our love and hate

And because we are pathetic clowns

Confronting the Apocalypse

Caught in the ruins of a collapsing world

Between earthquake and eclipse

Let's dance high on the hurricane deck

Before the ship slopes under our feet

Let's soak up the wealth of the sun

Before it loses its light and heat

Let's laugh at the whole wide universe

In our eyes reflected

When we close our lids it will be

As if it never existed

Let our laughter crackle across the cosmos

Where galaxies scatter and dim

Since win or lose we only leave

A trace of ash on the wind

Richard O’Connell lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Texas Review, Acumen, The Paris Review, Trinacria, The Formalist, Light, etc. His most recent collections are Dawn Crossing and Waiting for the Terrorists.

BELATED

by Megan Collins

I’ll admit I did it, too—loved a lion
I’d never heard of until he was dead.
Scrolling through photographs, I fell
for his amber eyes. I even noted how—
in some poses—he seemed as benign
as my golden retriever, asleep at my feet.
When I read of the arrow in this lion’s side,
the forty hours he suffered, I felt my throat
stiffen like cooling wax, felt my eyes
sting as if exposed to flame.

For days, I said his name—Cecil, Cecil—
but I had to Google the woman (Sandra!)
who died in a jail cell, who’d been dragged
from her car, pulled by her collar like a dog.
I loved her, then, too—how she fought
in ways I’ve never had to, how her smile
in photographs made me want to smile back.
Her laughter, I imagined, would sound like a song.

But—how easy it is to love a victim.
How easy to love what’s already gone.


Megan Collins holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. She teaches creative writing and literature in Connecticut, and is also an editor of 3Elements Review. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Compose, Linebreak, Rattle, Spillway, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal.