THE BOG

by Karen Marker

responding to The New Verse News poem “Daily” by Sarah Dickenson Snyder who was responding to the podcast When AI Comes for Your Purpose in Life 

also responding to what’s been happening all around the SF Bay Area:

The Guardian, October 27, 2036

It’s not really a bog but it’s spongy and weirdly 

acidic—this soil lacking oxygen, gasping  

waterlogged, quaking with layers of torn down 

trees, redone flipped houses, luxury high rise 

senior living. A whole storm’s come through 

and left my neighborhood full of debris without  

the air it needs to decay. A slew of AI billionaires 

spend their wealth jacking up real estate prices

while the unhoused veterans camp out next door 

in collapsing cars, collecting wood to cook, 

old folks sleep in ruined tents. Even the rock 

of the moon’s become something else now we know 

it’s got the gold of frozen water for data centers. 

Tonight I can’t find a ladder to climb my way out

or a solid plank under my feet to stop me 

from sinking.    I keep thinking about my father.

His whirling brain never stopped solving problems 

with numbers—the most vital part of his life—

 

but he’s been gone ten years already and I have 

no valid way to measure what’s been lost 

when the whole history of human knowledge,

including every math problem, has been eaten up 

by AI, and answers get spouted out in a second. 

On a The Daily podcast a math professor cries 

confessing his love of numbers and teaching, 

telling of a crazy old genius mathematician

and a child math prodigy come together to work

at what they do best.  Now all that’s left, Ecclesiastes.  

Even if you’re an atheist and don’t believe in

anything but the eloquence of solving problems

there’s still this turning we do in time to die—

this moment when it all clicks in place. 

 

The hole of the loss, the sorrow, my father’s death.

The Dreams.  Questions coming again 

that can’t be stolen. So much inside me 

I still haven’t uncovered—air, and somewhere 

a plank laid out like my father so I can stop, 

 and step out over the rubble.

Karen Marker writes protest poetry and prose  from Oakland,  California where she finds inspiration by  reading the news as seen through the eyes of the wonderful poets that NVN features. She is honored that her work has been included here as well as in a number of other places like The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, WordPeace, Calul, and the  Kent State University May 4 Special Collections and Archives. Her book of flash memoir and poetry Beneath the Blue Umbrella is available through Finishing Line Press and explores resilience in face of family trauma.  

AMERICAN BEEF

by Darrell Petska

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

In the coming months, when you bite down on a government-subsidized burger made with meat of questionable origin, you’ll have Glorious Leader Donald J. Trump to thank. On Aug. 21, the president who loves to call other people communists enraged American cattle ranchers by announcing plans to “allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.” Trump posted news of the deal on social media, but of course gave no specific details about who the deal is with, where the meat is coming from or why he’s suddenly admitting that waiving tariffs will, in fact, lower prices for consumers. It’s a turducken of hypocrisy. —Rex Huppke, USA Today, August 23, 2026

I sing burgers
made of American beef,
not of “mystery meat”
imported from Botswana or Brazil,
Namibia or the moon’s dark side.

I sing American cows
raised by hard-working ranchers
living just down the road.
Their methods and products
I can see and trust—

unlike Trump’s dubious meat
bound to depress prices paid
to American cattle growers
needing incentives to rebuild
drought-ravaged herds.

A Trump burger? No way.
There aren’t enough condiments
to mask the foul taste
of midterm connivery
tucked clumsily into a bun.

Darrell Petska grew up on a cattle farm bordering the Nebraska Sandhills, where ranching is a revered but increasingly threatened way of life. Prairie winds still strum his heartstrings, though he now lives and writes poetry in Wisconsin.

AND YOU, WHAT DO YOU NEED?

by Janet Ruth

after Mary Oishi’s poem “I Need Poems”

 

These days I need the sun,
            because it gives us light,
            whether blazing, or watery,
            or obscured by clouds,
and the words to share it with you.

These days I need the moon,
            because it’s a reflection of light,
            whether new & invisible, or waxing,
            or waning, or full,
and the words to share it with you.

These days I need all the flowers,
            because they each provide food
            for some creature and our hearts,
            whether tiny prickly flowers of tumbleweed
            or galaxies of sunflowers,
and the words to share them with you.

These days I need all the world’s creatures
            because if they disappear none of us will ever
            be the same, whether the tiger that padded past
            our jeep in India without a glance, or the black widow
            spider spinning a web by our back door,
and the words to share them with you.

These days I need all the recipes I can collect
            because they feed us, whether my ancestors’
            pfeffernuessen and kringel, sauerkraut and pickled eggs
            or my adopted state’s tamales, posole and biscochitos,
and the words to share them with you.

These days I need all the stories of standing up to say NO!
            because they show us the way
            and the price we must be willing to pay,
            whether Dad’s stories of being
            a conscientious objector in WWII
            or people today carrying signs that say “No Kings,”
and the words to share them with you.

These days I need all of your hearts,
            whether bruised and broken,
            or fibrillating, or full of joy,
            to hold them up to the light with words,
            because they are
                        the heartBEAT            heartBEAT
                                                heartBEAT
            of the real America.

  

Janet Ruth is a NM ornithologist and poet. Her writing focuses on connections to the natural world. She has recent poems in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Ekphrastic Review, The Lyric and anthologies including The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press, 2025). Her sonnet “A World That Shimmers” won the inaugural True Concord Poetry Contest, was set to music and performed by True Concord Voices and Orchestra in Tucson, October 2023. Her book,Feathered Dreams: celebrating birds in poems, stories & images (Mercury HeartLink, 2018) was a Finalist for the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards. 

THE ART OF THE DEAL

by Steve Deutsch

 

 

Cartoon by José Alberto Rodríguez Avila

My cousin Bobby

tells me

the ultra rich

 

are negotiating

for more sunshine

on their compounds.

 

He reasons

that will mean

less sunshine

 

for the rest of us.

“They also want

a full moon

 

every night of the year.”

Bobby’s the nicest guy,

but thinks 2+2 is advanced math.

 

He read about the sunlight

in several feeds

on the internet

 

and now he owns it.

I ask him

who they are negotiating with

 

and he gives me

his poor dumb cousin look.

I drive home past

 

what we know as “the castle on the hill,”

and it seems to me

the hill has gotten higher.

 

The sun sets at my house

at 7:41 tonight—

it’s supposed to set at eight.

 

And I have to wonder

what else they might

be bargaining for.

Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. He has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes multiple times. He has six volumes of Poetry. One, Brooklyn won the Sinclair Poetry Prize.

EARTHSET

by Margaret DeRitter

 

Four astronauts traveled farther from our planet

this week than any humans had gone before,

saw the Earth set over the lunar surface—

 

a colorful crescent sinking into a dusty

pockmarked gray—while down here a madman

threatened to destroy an entire civilization,

 

ninety-three million souls and thousands of years

of history, one of the oldest cultures we know,

and his cronies did nothing to stop him.

 

What did those warmongers say to their children?

Did they ever teach them the lessons of space,

the singular beauty of our one blue home?

 

Perhaps they should take their own long journey.

Perhaps they should never return.

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

Margaret DeRitter is the author of Singing Back to the Sirens (Unsolicited Press, 2020) which Pulitzer-winning poet Diane Seuss has described as a collection of "achingly beautiful and gutsy poems." DeRitter also wrote Fly Me to Heaven by Way of New Jersey, co-winner of the 2018 Celery City Chapbook Contest. Her poems also have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. DeRitter lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she worked as a full-time journalist and taught journalism at the college level. She is currently the copy editor and poetry editor of Encore, a regional magazine for Southwest Michigan.

OVER THE MOON: A GOLDEN SHOVEL

by Liam Boyle

Now’s a time to celebrate, drink

a toast with best French wine,

gather friends to break bread and 

sing patriotic anthems. Look

into the eyes of your guests, smile at

the thought of what’s been done, the 

great news, a return to the Moon.

 

Before radio silence, and

across 250,000 miles, the astronauts think 

of love—of our love for them, of

their love for us—“we love you” and all

that love is on the dark side of the 

moon, while back on Earth civilisations

 

are dying, rockets carry destruction; the 

truth is, we can no longer see the moon

as benign. This coincidence of time has 

undone all lyric, all hope. We have seen

the darkness passing

overhead. It will not go by.

Liam Boyle lives in Galway, Ireland. His work has been published in various journals in Ireland and internationally. He was a featured reader in the New Writing Showcase at Galway's Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2025.  

TAXES, SEEN FROM THE MOON

by Indran Amirthanayagam
NASA photo

I walked in the woods 

today, a spring in my step,

the Great Leader had

stepped back from 

his threats 

to the sovereign 

Republic of X,

and my tax deadline 

loomed even clearer; 

no more time 

to distract with poems, 

even this one a lazy 

fingering,  extracting juice 

from the rind of past fears, 

raising arms to God 

to say thank you

for your intervention.

But what’s ten minutes 

to a poet avoiding reckoning 

with the IRS?  Only ten 

minutes to say thanks, 

 to say I love you  and keep 

in touch always. Ten minutes 

to say tomorrow will come—

it already has—

 

despite the terrible words

and bombs exploded

until now in the latest 

killing fields 

of our one Earth

lit by the rising Sun seen 

now for the first time 

by the Artemis crew,

from the dark side 

of the Moon. 

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

THE MOMENT OF CLOSEST APPROACH

by Theta Pavis

Using an inflatable Moon globe, [the Artemis II crew] practiced seeing how the angle of the sun changed the colors and textures of the lunar surface, honing their observation and note-taking skills for the big moment. —France 24, April 4, 2026. Above: An inflatable moon ball for sale at ebay.

Before the Artemis II Crew blasted off,
they had to practice looking at the moon.
Back on Earth, researchers would want to know
what each astronaut saw out there, in-between
the greys and dusty browns. What craters and colors,
what rocks and rockets. To prepare the voyagers,
the Science Flight Operations Lead hung a giant
inflatable moon globe from a crane and packed
the four fragile humans into a mock capsule.
She told them all to rehearse looking at the moon.
Funny no one thought to hire a poet to help with this part.

 

Theta Pavis is poet and editor. A former reporter, she spent years teaching journalism to first-generation college students. Her writing has appeared in The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Lilith magazine, The Red Wheelbarrow, Mom Egg Review and others. She’s received residencies from Bethany Arts Center and Arts By the People. Her chapbook The Red Strobe was published in 2025 by Finishing Line Press.

FLIPPING BACK AND FORTH

Between the Artemis II Launch Live Stream and the Live Stream of the Supreme Court Hearing Arguments Regarding Birthright Citizenship

by Liz Ahl

 

Someday, humans may be born on the moon.

Whose moon may or may not be in dispute

in that future I imagine, as I flip from laptop tab

to tab on April Fool’s Day, feeling a little foolish

with the thrill-flutter summoned by the fully-fueled

rocket; feeling also a little edgy with my Gen X

rocket-gone-wrong memory. But thrill wins out

and I don’t look away as the biggest rocket

we’ve sent up since I was a toddler burns skyward,

moonward. As the nation burns deathward—

a rocket-spitting machine both fueled

and made rickety by insatiable greed, a sadistic

hybrid of automation and a deeply human cruelty.

I was born in the wing of a Naval hospital

that’s torn down now; the people who

conceived me in the moon-foolish summer

of 1969 and parented me for decades

are dead, and I’m feeling a little adrift,

a little nationless. A little unsure of my name,

my place. As if I’d been born on the moon.

Liz Ahl is the author of A Case for Solace (2022), winner of the 2023 New Hampshire Literary Award for Poetry. Her other collections include Beating the Bounds (2017) and a number of chapbooks, the most recent of which is A Stanza is a Place to Stand, published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2023. Poems have appeared recently in Rogue Agent, Cherry Tree, and River Heron Review. She lives in New Hampshire.