BEATRICE'S TURN

by Michelle DeRose

Beatrice (a Portrait of Jane Morris) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

If poets are the unacknowledged 

legislators of our world, then may

their list come out as a sonnet,

an epic, an elegy for their lost

childhoods. They have more cause

than Dante to assign names

to descending rings. Only in dreams

and nightmares have sinners paid,

limbs frozen in impotent angles

like bent wisps of straw, forced

to face forever through lids locked

on open how their flesh partook in fraud.

Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College, where she sometimes used her specialty in epic poetry in her teaching. Every new nation/kingdom/regime established in an epic is built upon or requires the destruction of another.

AMERICA’S PRECIPICE

by Laura Boatner

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

It starts with one stone
      a chipping away, chiseling of sorts
      digging to China as my mother always         
      said                                        

In China it was pounded into sand
       and their people have known it
       for seven decades or so

Here, babbling brooks, once slick as silk
        have rough edges now etched
        into fifty pieces, maybe fifty-one

A carnival barker yelling;
        flushed face, eyebrows furrowed
        the color of honeydew, or more
        fluorescent than that
     
Stones and bricks in a road leading to Oz
        because this doesn’t feel quite real
        and the curtains are pulled back

Judges, legislators, 
           one at a time acquiescing 
           out of fear, reprisal
           is this really happening?
               to us of all people?
               right now?
               like we’re scarecrows or something?

In one-hundred days
               the rocks have become boulders
               on shoulders of complacency
 
David threw a rock at Goliath 
              hitting the target
              unlike we do at the strongman 

A mountain of stone
              penetrated upon and fissured
              and it’s on this precipice that 
              we now stand

Laura Boatner is a registered nurse by day and an aspiring writer by night.  She has been published in scholarly nursing journals, but finds it much more fun to write fiction.  She has been accepted into the MAPW program at Kennesaw State University in Fall 2025.  She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and her two rescue pups, Birdie and Pepper.

INVASIVE SPECIES

by Rikki Santer

Cartoon by Jack Ohman

Sometimes a jackass

is just a jackass 

a president once said

when he thought

no one was listening.

And some say

that when God

created the world 

he dispatched an angel

with a sack of fools  

to distribute 

one per town,

but the harvest of folly

seems plentiful these days

with its dangerous parable staining.

Tiny phones

in their back pockets

to showcase glowing selfies

and toothy tweets,

all these Looney Tunes legislators

who always have a guy

or know where to get one.

And they fantasize

about winning more

epic battles between

the us and them

or want-to versus should-of.  

Beneath the peels, 

so many sad bananas

vying for the pratfalls

of others.

Beneath their blindfolds, 

they swing hard

at political piñatas 

with tantrums

of taketh away.

Too late to send them

to their rooms to think

of what they’ve done

or have them vulcanized

when Mars attacks.

Their heads brim

with knuckles clenched

feverous for playing

again and again

their most favorite game—

capture the flag.

And now fat-fingered justices

join in.

In 2023, Rikki Santer was named Ohio Poet of the Year. Her forthcoming collection, Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books.