ABORTIFACIENCE

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

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

The Trump administration has just sent $10m worth of birth control to be burned—rather than donate it as aid. The supplies, including pills and implants, have already been paid for by US taxpayers—and will cost another $167,000 to destroy. —The Independent (UK), July 29, 2025

Abortifacience is a word you may

Be unaware of: it's the use of meds

Or other agents to abort. Today

Republicans—who are at loggerheads

This week with global charities about

Incinerating contraceptive aid

For Senegal—have used the word without

Awareness of its meaning: what's unmade

Can not abort. The condom, coil or pill

Is saving lives, not ending them. The stocks

Expire not soon. America pays nil—

Not one red cent—to ship them to the docks ...

Can you explain why they'd be set alight—

Excepting that the reason is pure spite?

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic poems have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post and WestWard Quarterly.

AT EIGHTY-SIX HE LIVES ALONE

A PANDEMIC A.M. POST
by Earl J Wilcox




When he awakens—eyes too full of macular
to see any clock—Alexa, his roommate,
tells him the hour, temperature, date, begins
their day with Adagio for Strings. It’s 6:30.
Robed, peeing done, doddering, wobbling,
he shuffles down a hall, toward his kitchen.
Morning meds taken, coffee perking, he
strolls into his sun room; late, white
azaleas wave in a Carolina breeze. Two
squirrels scamper, a red bird flies away.

The NYT headlines on his ancient Windows
screen blur. Numbers of new cases, deaths,
something about masks, T***P fibs again.
He glances at the theater section. Fun.
Performers posting happy videos. This early
Monday too young—he feels—to count as
another day just yet as the sun is still hiding
behind lush dogwoods, cherry trees. His coffee
smells better than it tastes. His macular eyes focus
slowly. Spring pollen clogs ears and throat from
clearing properly until mid-morning. Abetted
by coughing he could sound to some is if the virus
found him overnight. Until time for the women
on The View to take up their verbal cudgels exactly
where they left off yesterday, the TV is silent.

Online the local rag counts case and death numbers
on page Two. He avoids noting too closely how
many who die are near his age, though the papers seem
to equivocate or just don’t report for some reason
the causes of death among some elderly folks.
People in pictures atop obits are smiling. Why not—
he sighs—since the snaps were made thirty
years ago. His ancient computer is now fully
engaged as is he ready to surf. He avoids all accounts
of the virus. About ten pages of an EXTRA
section of the newspaper are devoted to almost
every nuance of the disease. The online news has
run the same section for several days. There is
no lack of news about COVID-19. In the
Sports section, more reports of games canceled.
Are the NFL, MLB, NBA going defunct?
He gives a mental “thumbs up” to ball-playing
millionaires helping raise funds for needy families.
Seems the NFL draft is the spring sporting event.

His puny small stocks made modest gains
yesterday, and the weather will let the azalea blossoms
hold their blaze another day. The morning
meds taste funny without food. He eats a banana.

Sinus clogging and sneezes are common. It is not
the virus season after all. A classical radio station
plays Bach and soothing, nostalgic olden goldies—
Brahms’ How Lovely Are Thy Tabernacles by Mormon
Choir. In his best dulcet tones, the radio announcer
avoids mentioning COVID-19 until the end of his
shift. It is good to have four hours of music
uninterrupted by updates on cases and deaths
and prospects for future. At his age, some of these
projections have been in his profile for a decade.

Earl Wilcox is reopening his back yard to squirrels, robins, and cotton tail rabbits. Early worms show up at their own risk.

VET'S HALLOWEEN

by Linda J. Himot

Image source: Shopsafe

Halloween and all those kids in skeletal black,
glow-in-the-dark green and purple –
no fairy princess pink Mama, please –
roam the streets for candy treats while my neighbor,

secreted behind his kitchen counter – shades drawn,
lights out, hides trembling.  Fears ghouls and worse –
gooks –rise – like ghosts – from steamy jungle floor –
every night – silent, stealthy –  then melt away –

before first light.  Dead bodies left to mark their trail.
He made it back – except his mind – to live alone –
on duty, dusk to dawn.  Forty two years he’s kept watch,
high alert, rifle steel slick with sweat – ready,

mission unchanged – protect his buddies, kill
or be killed.  Sees sallow, shiny, enemy faces creeping
through his front yard swampy grass.  Hears mortar
in the back fire of passing trucks, cruising motorcycles.

Fears he will kill a kid if one should knock.
So takes a double dose of meds, stuffs his ears
with cotton, repeats Hail Mary’s aloud until
the fire horn sounds the end of trick or treat.


After many years as a psychiatrist, Linda J. Himot began writing poetry in 2005.  Her poems have been published in a variety of journals such as The MacGuffin, River Poets, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. 

COLUMBINE, SANDY HOOK, TUCSON, AURORA, LITTLETON, BLACKSBURG, DECATUR (ALMOST), AND NOW THE D.C. NAVY YARD, ON AND ON

by Judy Kronenfeld

We've all seen, or heard of it--
some chemical  sparked by pain
does a crazed dance
in the brain, and the geek nephew
everyone thought a natural, can’t
face another year in school and
come September, comes unglued, almost froths
at the mouth by the breakfast bar,
spittle roping from his lips,
violently throws off the arms
that try to comfort him, and who knows
what next; the co-worker not yet
in the news, who’s had it up to here
plus, with more work and a benefits
cut, rampages in the Men’s,
pulling sinks from the wall
and smashing them, or goes home
where his wife mysteriously falls
and breaks her arm. O.K. they’ve always
had a tendency, drank too much,
yelled at their wives or parents,
bullied their classmates or younger
brothers, locked themselves
in their rooms; O.K. some of us
tried, we really did, got them
to counselors, it’s not our fault,
is it, if they refused to go,
or quit their meds? And some of us
closed our eyes because familial
ties make anything familiar,
and the desire to protect can blind,
and some of us sternly disallowed
the inappropriate—“Pull up those
bootstaps, kid! Right-face!”—
and some of us kicked the fellow
to the side of the road. And some of us—
lots of us—have no way to recognize
what goes awry, ourselves already brutalized,
and so many of us have no way
to guide, no knowledge, no resources,
not a dime to spare to soothe
a crazy head. We don’t help
these people—we give them
guns.


Judy Kronenfeld's most recent collections of poetry are Shimmer (WordTech Editions, 2012) and the second edition of  Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of The Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize for 2007 (Antrim House, 2012). Recent anthology appearances include Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse Press, 2012) and Love over 60: An Anthology of Women's Poems (Mayapple Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in many print and online journals such as Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Fox Chase Review,  Foundling Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Hiram Poetry Review, Natural Bridge, New Verse News, The Pedestal, Poetry International, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stirring, and The Women’s Review of Books.