CONSTRUCTIONS

by Tricia Knoll

AI video created by Nightcafé for The New Verse News.

Bowerbirds do it. Paper wasps. The beaver’s mound accessible from under water.  Such a soft spot we hold for nest builders, from weavings to cups and knot-hole drillers. My two grandsons built two forts of fallen limbs leaned up against beech tree trunks. I can stand up in the bigger one to admire the couch dragged into one corner, a broken log. In the hands of the ultra-rich, the opposable thumb demands grandiose. Outrageous and expensive. Palaces. A home with its own power plant. Walled compounds. Cliff-top villas. Gilded mansions. Subject to the whims of time, rot, fire, and penury. Shelley on the narcissist’s build: “Nothing besides remains.” Prince Prospero’s ballroom could not withstand the contagion of the red death. Vanity and striving after the wind. What happened to the angel who saved three men who refused to bow down to King Nebuchadnezzar’s gold statue. She chastised the sneer of cold command known as retribution. The artifice of blue-tinged pools. As for the Arch, what words carved there would memorialize war, lies, inflation, tears of the hungry, sick and veterans betrayed. Good people disappeared. Such lone and level sands stretch far away. 

Most poets have memorized many of their favorite poems. Tricia Knoll is sort of stuck with Shelley's Ozymandias. In recent months she has moved from free verse to prose poetry. Her chapbook The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club Chapbook contest. Wild Apples details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. She is a Contributing Editor to Verse Virtual.

USAID

by Lynne Barnes

Cleveland Clinic

(Understanding Unloved-Unloving, Untreated, Up-thrust Sociopaths Always Injure & Destroy)

 

1.

U and I have been

Sending

Aid to

Individuals

Destitute around the world, for

Decades.

 

Donald is now at the helm of our ship of state,

Doing away with our helping hand, and the

Death toll is hundreds of thousands so far.

Destined to reach 14 million over what will be the next

Dreadful ten years if we don’t resist, re-find and restore our

Democracy’s humanitarian kindness.

 

Unless we persist, prevent this, we are

Sliding into

An era of 

Intense, horrific

Destruction and death around our globe.

 

2.

Dark Triad is not a diagnosis,

            but a poem, penned by psychologists—

            a metaphor for a group of traits.

 

Dark Triad humans—

Deny

Devalue

Distract

Dominate

Deviate, fall into

Dysfunction.

Dark Triad is narcissism, psychopathy, and

            Machiavellianism intertwined.

 

Dark Tetrad adds a verse to the poem—

            Sadism— pleasure at the suffering of others.

 

            We must

 

Disarm Donald, our fellow damaged,

        handicapped human, remove him from his

            legal and military commands, and

 

            pray that we never allow a

Dark triad/tetrad human, incapable of empathy, to

Dump shit on us ever again.

Lynne Barnes is a retired psychiatric nurse and librarian living in San Francisco, honored that her poems have appeared in past months in The New Verse News. Her poetry memoir, Falling Into Flowers (Blue Light Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award.

I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE IDIOCRACY

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Sign at Women's March, January 21, 2017 via diggit

"God grant that men of principle be our principal men."

—Thomas Jefferson

Idiocracy is claiming you are the king
of reality, seeking only ratings
while the rest of us
let the show go on.

Idiocracy is becoming your own smoke-
filled room, your attraction
to wrong-doing unabated
as supporters compromise
integrity on demand.

Idiocracy is having thousands of points of entry
to you
through your businesses
and no one sticks a finger
in that holey dike.

Idiocracy is allowing a transactional businessman
to run the country like a mafia state
while the rest of us watch reruns
of The Sopranos.

Idiocracy is riding the rollercoaster
of presidential whims
ignoring the vast scope
of your childish unruliness.

Idiocracy is standing by
while you self-ignite
self-inflicted crises
daily, glorified
babysitters for the biggest
crybaby in the history
of our crumbling world.

We live in an idiocracy
our government run by loyalists
where narcissism and hegemony,
hateful groupthink,
one-size-fits-all cowardice,
dangerous stupidity
and the end of democracy
being neither
indictable crime nor
impeachable offense
are okay with us.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes Florida noir with a dark humor. Her books have been released by publishers in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.  Project XX, a satirical crime novel, was released in 2017 by Salt Publishing in the UK. What I Did for Love was released by Bloodhound Books in October. Kelsay Books is publishing the poetry chapbook the disappearing self in 2020. 

PRIVILEGE CONFERRED

by James Hamby

Graphic by Jesse Draxler for The Atlantic from a photo by David Hume Kennerly / Getty

What happens to privilege conferred?

Does it swell up
in narcissistic pride?
Does it demonize everyone
not on its side?
Does it trample to the ground
everyone who is poor,
female, or brown?

Maybe it’s too inept,
too incompetent?

Or does it become President?​

James Hamby is the Associate Director of the Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University. He has been a finalist for the XJ Kennedy Parody Award and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize. 

GYRATIONS ON THE NATION-STATE: A MOVEMENT IN STRINGS

by Diane Raptosh


 

Any man who stands

                  near a place the U.S. bombs

                                    is straight off

                                                      Enemy Combatant :

                                                                        One might call this

                                                                                          standing while war.

                                    Still I have yet to speak

                                                       of this in any classroom, yet to speak

                                                                        of nature recently freshened

to Brand: Wilderness™

                  as new world currency;

                                    I’ve yet to point

                                                      to the system

                                                                        of criminal justice

                                                                                          as so many schemas

                                    evolving in tandem;

                                              yet to point

                                                          to higher ed as host

to new mall cities,

                  not to mention

                                    the privatization

                                                      of all that used to be part

                                                                        of the Commons :

                                                                                          schools, public works

                                    parks, fire

                                                      departments  :   soon enough

                                                                        the postal and ambulance service,

Medicare / Medicaid.

                  The making public

                                    of the formerly private :  the orderly

                                                      outsource of chi

                                                                        to handheld devices,

                                                                                          the offshore of memory

                                    to the machine—

                                                      the shower, last bastion of solitude.

                                                                        They don’t have ears

and yet spiders

                  will shake

                                    their strings, reframing

                                                                        vibrations other

                                                                                          arachnids feel

                                                                                                            when leaves

                                                      they’re standing

                                                                           on quiver.  Whatever :

                                                                                         Thoughts glide in

on rhythmic pulses,

                  nothing like

                                    linear-sequence flows

                                                                        we’ve been taught

                                                                                           to instill   drill in   construct

                                                                                                            and there’s something

                                                      mugged about all

                                                                        the states’ answers—somehow

                                                                                          violence-airbrushed,

thesis statements sticking

                  to their guns.

                                    To take in scenes

                                                                        like stands

                                                                                    of weeping birch trees

                                                                                                      asks for a wholeness-synthesis-

                                                         simultaneity, so here

                                                                          I’ll smuggle in

                                                                                          a smithied image:

 pinnate leaves—

                  ridged like vaginal walls

                                      to fetch the attention

                                                                        of winds. Still listening?

                                                                                          I’m a little down

                                                                                                            about every system

                                                         of ranking, down on

                                                                        the quantification

                                                                                          of no end of thing     ~~    quick

name the quotient

                  of a cubed human squeeze  ~~

                                    down about

                                                                        the billionaires’ balls-out-incursion

                                                                                    into food/earth. Water/air.

                                                                                                      Furrowed vaginas. Against that

                                                      junta of generals

                                                                        hunched in power’s tower

                                                                                          graphing the next class war/

world war what-have-you.

                     And while I’m on a roll,

                                    might I gently suggest

                                                      the conscious uncoupling

                                                                                          of market from self? Of big-league

                                                                                          fake from the real?

                                                      This is to say that if over all

                                                                        I seem at a hard bloodboil

                                                                                                      against most scenes like state

-by-state financial cleansing, or floored

                        by the foreground status

                                    of the mock-up self—the world-scale

                                                                        rape of hallowed, heaving truth;

                                                                                          the statutory frack

                                                                                                            of commonplace terms

                                                like entitlement,

                                                                        political correctness   liberal bias;

                                                                                          states’ rights   law and order

sexual preference;

                      Shariah Law   illegal alien

                                     and food stamps  ~~ as if welfare

                                                        meant actual transfer

                                                                        of wealth to minorities. It’s mostly due

                                                                                          to the ways reigning narcissists

                                                      vivisect language

                                                                        to more or less moon you.

                                                                                          This sort of act’s

moral errancy actually lifts them,

                  how the Fed early

                                    this month huddled in

                                                                        to hoick up its rates.

                                                                                          Which brings us

                                                                                                            to the housing crisis,

                                                      the files of rank poverties

                                                                        birthed by nation-state’s neglect,

                                                                                          the Reichwing crew busy

blading their hands in a bid

                  to remake Magnate Nation more openly

                                    vampire-wan. I think

                                                                        I was saying that if I seem

                                                                                          not entirely myself

                                                                                                            you’ll have to forgive.

                                                      I’m pretty sure

                                                                        my sole choice now

                                                                                      is to become an expat

                  of the exterior.

                                    Step into here.

Diane Raptosh’s fourth book of poetry American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press) was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016), the highest literary honor in the state. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Canada. A highly active ambassador for poetry, she has given poetry workshops everywhere from riverbanks to maximum security prisons. She teaches creative writing and runs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at The College of Idaho. Her most recent collection of poems Human Directional was released by Etruscan Press in Fall 2016.