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Thursday, May 22, 2025

EMPTY SPACES

by Adam Bagdasarian

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

There is no pill or drink for this

No pill for the rubble of home

for the dust of flesh

the ash of bone

No drink for the season-less years—

for the trees, for the water

the sunlight one cannot feel

or the empty plate of the evening meal

Each new day comes D.O.A.

rewound, somehow and replayed

rewound and played

rewound, replayed

Adam Bagdasarian’s Forgotten Fire was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. In 2002, First French Kiss and Other Traumas was a finalist for the ALA Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults.

Saturday, June 17, 2023

WHILE STILL I STAY IN WONDERLAND

by Royal Rhodes

Companies Agree to Pay $19B in Opioid Settlement.

—BioSpace, June 12, 2023

One pill

makes me lighter—

ether from Elysium—

seeing the world in pixels.

One pill

makes me forget.

Did I take this pill

already and even yesterday?

One pill

lets me blink

and conjure unicorns,
feeling sweat on my hide.

One pill

when I awake

projects old photos

of poets stifling words.

One pill

lifts me, another

drags me headlong.

Fear makes my mouth dry.

One pill,

the last, bestows

on me all I desire

most: a glimpse of nothingness.

Royal Rhodes is a retired educator. His poems have appeared in Ekstasis Poetry, Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge, Foreshadow Poetry, and other literary journals.

Emails to The New Verse News that do not follow the guidelines printed at the top of this page and in this column will be deleted. Poets are reminded, therefore, NOT to send attachments unless specifically requested to do so.

Although the editors and audience of The New Verse News have a politically progressive bias, we welcome well-written verses of various visions and viewpoints.

In any event, opinions expressed in The New Verse News are those of the poems' writers (or, perhaps, only of the poems' speakers) and not necessarily those of the editors, the audience, or other contributors to the site.

TheNewVerse.News walks a fine line between News and Literature. We choose not to publish poems that merely restate what one finds in a news article. On the other hand, we dare not offer verse that misleads our audience into thinking that an invented scenario actually happened in reality. In some cases, therefore, we request an author to add a note to explain how a poem veers from documented facts.

We do not accept work that exhibits racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, ageism, classism, religious prejudice, ableism, or hatred of any marginalized group or individual.

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The editor typically introduces a poem on site with an illustration borrowed from news stories or photo collections. Although we reject any AI-created or AI-enhanced poetry, we do use graphics generated using AI applications at Shutterstock and NightCafé. We understand the ethical dilemmas: https://nightcafe.studio/blogs/info/ethical-concerns-in-using-ai-generated-images and https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/ethical-ai-for-good . If you are uncomfortable with our using AI graphics, you might refrain from submitting your work to us.

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The writer retains all other rights to her/his/their work. The writer of a poem accepted by the editors will be informed of that acceptance simultaneously with the posting of the poem on site. The editors try to respond to submissions within a fortnight.

The New Verse News accepts multiple, but NOT simultaneous submissions. In general, the editors of The New Verse News try not to post the work of any one poet more than once in ten days.

Please create a new email thread for each submission (i.e.: if you’ve submitted to us before, please don’t reply to a previous submission’s email thread).

The editors do not have the time to comment on poems submitted to The New Verse News. Even had we the time, we have found from unhappy experiences in the past that editorial feedback is too often the prompt for argument and too infrequently accepted as constructive. Decisions are based on the needs of the journal on any given day and are not at all meant to be judgements on the quality of submitted poems. Many poems rejected by The New Verse News have been eagerly accepted and published by other fine journals.

Poems published in The New Verse News generally remain available in the site's archives eternally or until a writer requests that her/his/their work be deleted.

The Managing Editor of The New Verse News is James Penha. Interviews with him regarding the editorial policies of the journal are available at:
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Thursday, May 22, 2025

EMPTY SPACES

Saturday, June 17, 2023

WHILE STILL I STAY IN WONDERLAND