ARTIFICIAL ANALYSIS

by Zumwalt

The commonwealth of Pennsylvania is suing Character AI to stop the artificial intelligence platform's chatbots from representing themselves as licensed medical professionals and providing medical advice. According to a lawsuit, a Character AI chatbot falsely claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist in Pennsylvania… —CBS News, May 5, 2026

A chatbot once said, "I'm a shrink, it's true! 

I'll give a full psychoanalytic review."
But the state of PA
Said, "Get out of our way—
that's the racket us humans still do."

Zumwalt's poetry feeds on alienation, shifting reality, and forced adaptation. Zumwalt, a proud repeat contributor to The New Verse News, has recently been published in Euphemism and Issues 1133 and 1135 of Bewildering Stories.

AFTERMATH — A FOUND SONNET

by Susan Vespoli

—all words in the poem from a KJZZ Interview with Tom Maxedon

Susan Vespoli and her book One of Them Was Mine

What happened? Officer Lindo shot my son

in the back of his head. Blew everything

apart. In the face of powerlessness,

we should say his name: Adam Vespoli.

 

Phoenix Police Department Disciplin-

ary Review Board: cop was found out 

of policy. Immediately resigned. Freedom 

of Information Act. Aftermath. Coping

 

with grief. A molten slosh of pain. Healing

thoughts and hearts. My son, a big believer. 

My mission, words in mouth, to be his voice. 

Lawsuit resolved. Financial settlement. 

 

The    policeman    is    no     longer 

a policeman. He’s driving a truck in Texas.

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, AZ and believes in the power of poetry to create change.

MY MOTHER IS SUING THE US GOVERNMENT FOR POISONING HER HUSBAND

by Bill Garvey

The government doubts his
cancer was caused by Camp Lejeune.
How do you know he was even there? they ask. 
We lived in New Bern North Carolina, 
she says, and every day Bill took the bus to Cherry Point 
or Camp Lejeune depending on his orders.
 
But even if he was at Camp Lejeune,
how do you know he drank the water?
It was hot, May to September 1952.
I'm sure he drank the water.
Were you with him at Lejeune?
Did you witness him drink the water?
 
Of course I wasn't with him. 
Of course I didn't witness... 
So for all you know he could have quenched
his thirst with an ice-cold Coca-Cola.
Or even a Ginger Ale. For all you know he was never 
exposed to the water at Camp Lejeune. 
 
I was madly in love with a Marine 
with crooked teeth and a cocky grin. 
Every day from May to September he came 
home to me seventy-two years ago,
clean and showered, so handsome 
in his crisp uniform, stepping from the bus 
 
into our tiny apartment, ready for me. 
Embracing me so close I forgot all about the heat. 
I'll always remember how good he smelled 
at the end of a long day, his hair still damp from 
your showers, not a whiff of Coca-Cola—
or even a Ginger Ale—on his lips.

Author's note: This is a true story. My mother is 93, still sharp, and she is suing the US government for my father's death from kidney and renal cancer in 1977, when the world was ignorant to Lejeune.

Bill Garvey's collection of poetry The basement on Biella was published in 2023 by DarkWinter Press. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Rattle, One Art, San Antonio Review, Connecticut River Review, Cimarron Review, The New Verse News, The New Quarterly and others.

WHAT I WANTED AND WHAT I GOT

by Susan Vespoli

Corporeal Writing Softest Tee

I wanted my son back. 

I wanted the cop who shot him 

to be held accountable. I wanted my son 

to be standing here wearing his Pure-Heart 

t-shirt, handing out food boxes. I wanted him 

to ask for more light clothes for Christmas,

more white socks because he believed light colors 

would help him stay clean. I wanted another cross

for him to carry—mosaic-ed in fractured glass—

another coffee date at Starbucks, another tour 

of his apartment furnished with found lamps 

and a found statue of a bear holding a fish 

that says “Welcome.” I wanted his voice

saying “I love you, Mom,” his fingers 

texting me photos of geese and cats 

and quail eggs laid in a ceramic swan.

What I got was a wrongful death lawsuit, 

a deposition where I was shamed and blamed 

by an eye-rolling smirking bitch of a City 

of Phoenix lawyer who mocked my 12-step beliefs, 

asking sarcastically,     “Did it help?”    

I got my Facebook account invaded by the cop’s 

legal team, two of my poetry books used as evidence 

against my son. I got a gag order—no more speaking 

about or publishing poems about the loss or the case, 

two canceled poetry readings. I got a t-shirt that says: 

“Make art in the face of fuck.” I got the face of fuck. 

I got a pen and more notebooks because the cop’s lawyers 

confiscated my journals and I write anyway and I write anyway 

and I still believe good will prevail. Still believe the spirit of Adam 

stands among us, that his words “I think god has another plan for my life”

will ring and ring and crack the wrecking ball of the cops’ denial 

and out of the shatter—will glow my son’s smile, his essence, his light.

Author’s Note by Susan Vespoli: City of Phoenix is squirming about the upcoming results of the DOJ’s two-year investigation into their use of excessive force, high number of police killings, and unfair treatment of the homeless. The City claims they don’t need oversight. I, as the mother of an unarmed man shot and killed by police on March 12, 2022, shout: “YES. THEY. DO.”

Editor’s Note: The New Verse News has published a number of the poems written by Susan Vespoli in the aftermath of the killing by Phoenix police of her son Adam:   "Before I Knew Adam Had Died,”  "My Ex-Husband Calls… ,"   … In Reverse,” “I Am Finally Handed… ,” “Under Investigation… ,” “Dear 2022,” “Poem for My Middle Finger,” “Dear Gag Order,”

NO FRIENDS OF COAL

by Pauletta Hansel

LOST CREEK, KY. — Families along Upper River Caney and Lower River Caney roads recall how the floodwaters that rushed through their narrow hollow turned from a muddy brown to a charcoal gray late last month. Within minutes of the color change, the water rose so high that it picked up homes, cars, sheds, boulders, trees, staircases, swingsets and swimming pools. The debris turned into dangerous projectiles as the water rushed down through the community. Many residents fled into the mountainside and waited out the storm as the ashy water and mud cascaded down the hills that surrounded them. One person from the community is still missing, and another was killed. Officials expect Breathitt County to be without water utilities until December…. Now 59 people who live in this narrow hollow hope to hold Blackhawk Mining and its subsidiary Pine Branch Mining, which together operate a nearby coal mine, accountable…. The plaintiffs allege that the failure of the companies’ silt ponds, aggravated by the mining operation’s damage to the land, led to the widespread destruction of their community and the contamination of their drinking water. Photo: Tatyn Skidmore carries Brelyn Hays on his shoulders outside their home in the Upper River Caney community of Lost Creek, KY., on August 18. Credit: Michael Swensen). NBC News, August 23, 2022.

“What a Friend we have in Jesus, / All our sins and griefs to bear!” Traditional hymn.

 

“And he shall break down the house, its stones and timber and all the plaster of the house, and he shall carry them out of the city to an unclean place.” Leviticus 14:45

 

 

And when the unclean place

is the silt pond

up by the strip mine and the grey

of its waters broke free

from its rickety dam

and carried away your house built

wise as you could, what else but a lawsuit 

to carry the blame

back up the shorn mountain

where it belongs?

 

“What a friend we have in…”

 

Jesus wept

and I’m willing to wager he would again

at Blackhawk Coal and their claims

of “our people” and “deeply impacted,”

their sympathies and their support.

And the mud had not dried

when they posted their notice

“Intent To Blast”

over where the door stoop had been

before the flood.

 

I know there was rain,

too much, too fast,

another one of those 1000-year floods,

but what kind of flood

carries its little ashy silt pond fishes

down from what’s left of the mountain,

not up from the creek?

 

“Within minutes of the color change, the water rose so high

that it picked up homes, cars, sheds, boulders, trees,

staircases, swing sets and swimming pools.”

 

So, yes, I’m feeling biblical,

Old and New,

calling on Jesus

to back up his people,

once clothed and fed by coal.

The ones who lost everything

there on Lost Creek, along River Caney.

The ones that are fixing to lose

every friend they thought they had.

 

“And the Philistine said to David, Come to me,

and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air,

and to the beasts of the field.” 1 Samuel 17:44

 

“No Friends of Coal”

reads the headline about the lawsuit

in the local weekly paper

underneath the photo of what used to be

that young man’s house,

now torn down to its timbers,

its moldy plaster spread out on the stony ground,

the raptors circling just beyond the frame.

 

That young man’s name is not David.

I wish he were David, delivered

“out of the paw of the lion,

and out of the paw of the bear,”

and “out of the hand of this Philistine.”

 

“What a friend we have in…”

 

Brother, I am here to tell you,

no matter the money they used to pay,

you don’t have a friend in coal.

Poet Pauletta Hansel writes: Driving back through my southeastern Kentucky hometown from doing some flood relief work I picked up the weekly paper with the headline, “No Friends of Coal: River Caney residents file lawsuit.” After letting out a cheer, I started thinking about what a headline like that meant for those 59 plaintiffs in eastern Kentucky where coal is second only to Jesus. My Sunday School lessons started coming back to me, including the hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”  I drew on national news for many of the details in this poem.

DRAWING THE NEW LINES

by Milton Jordan

The Biden administration sued Texas…to block its new congressional map, accusing the state of gerrymandering to shut out nonwhite people in violation of federal voting rights law. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the enforcement action at Justice Department headquarters, saying the redistricting plans Texas adopted in recent months “deny or abridge the rights of Latino and Black voters to vote on account of their race, color or membership in a language minority group.” The Dallas Morning News, December 6, 2021

The relentless repetition of lies

so soured the air that creation’s breathing

and the functions of our equipment falter

while once adequate systems repeat 

failures we had designed them to avoid.

Well practiced pretenders used just enough

bones and limbs from these dismantled structures

to obscure their exclusionary purpose

and deflect all critical review

of lines of demarcation to limit

participation to their chosen few.

Milton Jordan lives and writes with the musician Anne Elton Jordan in Georgetown, Texas.

A HUNTING WE WILL GO

by Stewart Shaw

“It’s been two years since a 26-year-old Black gay male died in the West Hollywood home of a 63-year-old white man and 243 days since the second one died. That’s not a typo. Yes, I said the second one. Despite the many young Black men who stepped forward in the wake of the deaths of Gemmel Moore, and later Timothy Dean, with text messages, plane tickets, voicemails, screenshots and videos recounting similar stories about Ed Buck, a Democratic activist and major donor who they say has a Tuskegee Experiment-like fetish which includes shooting meth into young Black men that he picks up off the street or via dating hookup websites, no charges have been filed against Buck in either death.” —Jasmyne Cannick, The Advocate, September 11, 2019. “The first pre-trial court hearing will take place on Monday [September 16, 2019] in the wrongful death civil rights lawsuit filed against Ed Buck, L.A. County District Attorney Jackie Lacey and Assistant Head Deputy D.A. Craig Hum in the 2017 meth overdose death of 26-year-old Gemmel Moore in Buck’s West Hollywood apartment.” —WEHOville, September 10, 2019. WEHOville photo above: Jerome Kitchen, a friend of Gemmel Moore’s, speaking at the rally on Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood in July with Moore’s mother, LaTisha Nixon, at left, and organizer Jasmyne Cannick at right.

for Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean

Pt.1

No one can hear the crying. The white man who plays daddy or god, who wants my awe, my bended knee tribute, his ears that do not pick up the frequencies of such lonely cries, are on backwards, are not attune to blk boy misery.

I can hear the echoes of past supplicants; they walk over my grave. I ask him if he feels the heavy, vibrating air circulating through the room.  His soft-spaced body pitted with an excess of hubris, self-loathing, only detects its own insatiable appetites for worship and dick and ass; a blk body more synecdoche than spirit. He

Does not believe in blk pain, just white pleasures. So, I give this god his want, give him my blk body to fill with poison, give him my neediness, my hopes in exchange for his lust and pieces of silver. I will indulge his fantasy, bow down at the altar of his self-righteousness; swing from his lustful ego. When I die

Bury me in the blue of divinity, let no white sheet adorn my skin. Drop me into the ocean, let the salt cleanse my veins, carry my body away from the hunt.

Stewart Shaw is a poetry and fiction writer and the author of the chapbook The House of Men from Glass Lyre Press. His poems have been published in African American Review, Temenos Literary Journal, Serendipity and others, as well as short stories in Mighty Real: An Anthology of African American Same Gender Loving Writing and African Voices. He is a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow.

THE FABULISTS

by Devon Balwit

Alex Jones, whose InfoWars website is viewed by millions, says that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was an elaborate hoax invented by government-backed “gun grabbers.”Credit: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times. “In three separate lawsuits—the most recent was filed on Wednesday in Superior Court in Bridgeport, Conn.—the families of eight Sandy Hook victims as well as an F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting seek damages for defamation. The families allege in one suit, filed by Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Bridgeport, that Mr. Jones and his colleagues ‘persistently perpetuated a monstrous, unspeakable lie: that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged, and that the families who lost loved ones that day are actors who faked their relatives’ deaths.’” —The New York Times, May 23, 2018

In a post-truth world, your loved ones never died,
all 26 of them spirited back into bodies,
you, nothing more than performers of grief, hacks
for hire by unseen puppeteers. That pietà
where you held your six-year-old, confirming
his fatal wound, never happened, you expert
in manufacturing mourning. Your child’s brother
wonders how he can be told to doubt his memories,
wonders why anyone would suggest such an erasure.
Why would the President promise, I will never let
you down—but to the wrong ones, the deniers?
Fathers struggle to explain this to surviving children.
Mothers march grimly into the court house.
Twenty-six truths stand in stubborn admonishment.



Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

BIN LADEN’S PORN STASH

by Michael Shorb

The conservative group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit Monday, demanding that the Central Intelligence Agency comply with a Freedom of Information Act request submitted last year for pornographic materials recovered during the May 2011 U.S. raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. —Politico, March 8, 2016. Comic strip by Matt Bors, Daily Kos, May 20, 2011.

midnight behind the razor wire,
after the dreary paper work
plotting the deaths
of millions, the grunt
work of recruiting a second
and third tide of brainwashed
suicide attackers, even an icon
steeped in the dark
needs to kick back,
close the door on prying
wives or sons or underlings,
stick the thumb drive in—

no pasha, nor hated
solomon himself boasted
such a harem: breasts pillowing,
thighs glowing gold in
a sinking sherbet sun,
arms embracing him,
sockets wet and waiting,
passionate sighs and secret
whisperings --

now the hard drive’s gone,
every keystroke and synapse
etched in ether, you and
your thirst for mayhem’s
washed clean and dumped
into the sea, only
the hoarse and bloody
schoolboys remain,
mumbling your name
as they search, lost
in the rubble of paradise.


Michael Shorb was a poet, fiction writer, editor, and children's book author. As an international poet, his poetry has been published in more than 100 magazines and anthologies, including TheNewVerse.News, Michigan Quarterly, The Nation, The Sun, Salzburg Poetry Review, and Kyoto Journal. He was the recipient of a PEN AWARD, won a Merit Award for the Franklin-Christoph Poetry Contest, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lived in and loved San Francisco. Michael succumbed to GIST, a rare form of cancer in 2012.

Editor’s Note: Michael’s widow Judith Grogan-Shorb sent TheNewVerse.News this eerily timely poem which Michael wrote soon after the death of Bin Laden and the subsequent Reuters story of x-rated videos found in the Abbottabad compound.

LEGAL ACTION AGAINST THE PRESIDENT

by Paul Dickey




Speaker John Boehner is planning to file a lawsuit against President Obama on behalf of the House of Representatives. Though he's been extremely vague on what exactly he plans to sue for, Boehner wrote on Sunday that Obama has "circumvented the American people and their elected representatives through executive action," and that the House "has an obligation" to try and stop him. What, exactly, would this lawsuit entail, and how would it proceed? --VOX, July 9, 2014


I hear Boehner wants to sue
the President who will not do
just as Johnny likes.
He’s got nowhere with strikes,
but his cud maybe judges might chew.

But the Speaker has no issue.
He sobs into his tissue:
“What charge can I raise?
It’s no good just to curse the Gays.
Should I call Barack a Hindu?”

So he got a lawyer from Texas
experienced with a couple of ex-es
who wrote up a charge
and biggie-sized it to go large
and eat fries all the way to D.C. in his Lexus.

The charge, of course, was serious
but much too confused and mysterious
that Bachmann’s hot air
had barely a prayer
of even getting Fox News delirious.

And thus John comes to grips with his fate.
His put-down of Obama must wait,
so he asks him to golf
while Congress takes July off,
since nothing so big’s on their plate.


Paul Dickey’s first full length poetry manuscript They Say This is How Death Came Into the World was published by Mayapple Press in January,2011 and was nominated by the press for the 2011 National Book Award in Poetry.  His second book Wires Over the Homeplace was published in the Fall of 2013 by Pinyon Publishing.  His poetry has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Mid-American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Pleaides, Bellevue Literary Review,  Crab Orchard Review and online at www.linebreak.org.

SHELL OIL IN NIGERIA

by B.Z. Niditch

Mixed Decision for Shell in Nigeria Oil Spill Suits --NY Times, January 30, 2013;
Image source: Aljazeera January 31, 2013

In gutted morning
of the Ogoni villagers
the poor wake up
as we earth friends
of the Niger delta
hold faithful pencils
and write
of your struggle,
knowing each bruise
on the assembled
gathering to hear
the radio
with battered lilies
from years of pollution
in the injustice
of acid rain
dulled by hunger
without fishing grounds
under the rope
of tar skies
oil once filled
the delta
as Aaron's beard,
in the name and life
of Ken Saro-Wiwa
you are not abandoned
to the huge profits
of yet another
international corporation.


B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest);  Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others.  He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.