The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
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by the enormity of earth’s physical deterioration,
insist on triage priority for our fading planet
when environmentalists warn and warn
and the politicians do nothing to change course,
to save, here and now, the blue ball we call home
when other celestial bodies are beyond
reach, dreams of a better future fade,
and hope washes away with the latest flood
when words fall on the deaf ears of deniers
and our earth collapses on its wobbly legs,
it might be helpful to offer a steadying hand.
Ronald J. Pelias has spent his career working with the fusion of performance, literature, and qualitative research methods. His most recent books are The Creative Qualitative Researcher (Routledge), Lessons on Aging and Dying (Routledge) and Writing and Other Familiar Things (Routledge).
The plastic Trump straws being sold at $15 for a 10-pack. Photograph: Official Donald J Trump Store
Trump signs order to bring back plastic straws, claiming paper ones ‘explode’ —The Guardian, February 10, 2025
Exploding straws? A liberal joke! The Prez says with emotion-- More plastic now for Diet Coke, More plastic for the ocean. Ecology's a Commie plot, An antiquated notion— More plastic now for stuff we've got, More plastic for the ocean. The EPA, the Silent Spring— Abandoned, our devotion. More plastic now for everything, More plastic for the ocean.
Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.
Tupperware Brands, whose name became synonymous with plastic food containers in kitchens across America, filed for bankruptcy protection on Tuesday after struggling for years with declining sales and increasing competition. —The New York Times, September 18, 2024
I was a Tupperware Lady,
stepped down in ’86,
turned in my company car
after years of demonstrating
how to burp a seal,
handing out tiny keychain bowls
to guests who brought a friend.
I worked mostly at night,
came home to sleeping children.
During the day my kids played
in giant cardboard boxes
once full of wares
that I bagged up and delivered
to the women who helped me
make a living.
One year I sold
$30,000 worth of the stuff.
It kept us in groceries,
paid the bills.
Now I have a drawer
full of incompatible
bottoms and tops
from a company no one
wants to support.
Plastic is out, parties take
too much time.
Women have better
things to do.
Jan Chronister splits her year between the far North and South. She gardens and writes poetry in both places. Her most recent book is Duluth: Zenith City & Beyond (Poetry Harbor).
Dangerous air today they say, as if i could hold my breath or turn back the industrial revolution.
Dangerous air today. Forests burn all around us old growth turned sunlight into sugars a strange alchemy now turning sugars into a carbon haze and air quality alerts.
Dangerous air today. An “I-told-you-so moment” if only I could catch my breath. Ed Abbey laughing– he tried to warn us– that we were falling and not flying.
Our fears lulled by PR firms and impossibly cheap plastic baubles. “Please put your seat and tray into the full and upright positions.” Falling not flying. Dangerous air today. Red flag warning, no burns, red-eyes impossible heat.
Dangerous air today. Can’t see the mountains– might as well live in Kansas– a long nothing. Without mountains how can one tell which way is north? The cardinal directions are all mashed potatoes– featureless like a cartoon heaven– a special kind of hell.
Dangerous air today. People breath it in and hate– as if that will clear the skies.
Jacob Richards is a writer, editor, activist, and wilderness guide in Western Colorado.
What would Emily say? The driveway to her brother Edward’s home
is gated, the property surrounded with orange crisscrossed plastic
fencing, plastic not yet invented in her time, nor the cure for her kidney
ailments. Today her condition would have been aggravated by the chlorine
and other astringent agents the town uses to clean the water pumped
to the homes. She would have drunk water from an artesian well
in her Victorian home, writing poems at two a.m., loving someone
she could not have, not from the future, but from her own time period.
Was she ever pregnant as some suggest? Was she virginal as her white
dresses? Did she actually suffer from hypertension? Was she able
to see the future? Her poems crossed realms of time and space.
Would she have cut the crisscrossed orange fence, crushed it down,
or felt more secure to be enclosed, secure in her hermitage
peopled with family, cooks, and Irish workmen, six of whom carried
her casket to her grave in West Cemetery, where she walked in the evenings.
She was nourished by a garden that is no longer open to the public
due to Covid. A garden that fed her, kept her poetry
alive, already passed through the gates into other’s hands through letters.
Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Pointby Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.
NEOWISE—your one-size-fits-all comet,
or call me C/2020 F3—
I’m hardly striving for the poetic,
named for an infrared telescope. Find me
booming near the northwestern horizon,
gassing off through the zigzag stars of Lynx,
zooming to the Great Bear, and on
to you, dear Earthlings, to be your Jumbo Jinx.
A survivor—I’m back from the far side,
SOHO’s tracking my line; ATLAS and SWAN
are steam, their bodies disintegrated...
It’s enough to make a messenger wan.
Darlings, though I’m unpredictable,
I do my utmost to be a spectacle.
I’ll do my utmost to be a spectacle,
an astral show before I dissipate,
though it’s not under my control...
To miss me would be rather unfortunate.
If I die, I’ll light up your skies; if not,
see you in 8786!
Catch me chilling in Auriga’s chariot,
conscious of my mission to transfix –
that’s why I’m here, after all, to wake
you Homo sapiens from your dopey state.
A Sign to break crass rhythms, wipe this slick
of insolence from your brows, conflate
your problems with my stellar viewpoint,
at risk of putting all your noses out of joint.
Risking putting all your noses out of joint,
I really must make clear to you, the heat
is on—for you, not just for me. Climate
is a touchy subject, isn’t it?
Excuse me? What about your right
to holidays and international travel? Of course!
But from where I’m flying the desperate plight
of islanders is difficult to ignore:
I see grandmothers planting mangroves,
their bare feet sinking into deep water,
bushfires out of control, great de-frosts
and fry-ups, dwindling groundwater...
Hence, my humble attempt to purify
your thoughts with a brief, erratic fly-by.
Your thoughts. With a brief, erratic fly-by,
I’m unlikely to change your perspective.
You’re far too set in your ways by now; I
doubt I’ll get your attention. Forgive
my cynicism... But I’m no sungrazer,
no ice crystal who doesn’t give two hoots,
no bolide or passionless trailblazer,
no sympathetic meteor content to shoot
your wish. I am, please, apocalyptic.
Dears, don’t take this badly, but if I were
to stray from my elliptic,
and plunge into your globe, the saboteur
of your finest achievements... What calamity!
What tsunami of plastic debris!
What a tsunami of plastic debris
would wash up on your greasy sardined shores!
Breathe easy, the laws of physics constrain me,
and, of course, I obey the first cause –
a humble servant, not for me to preempt
the misfortunes of the Anthropocene:
I’m merely omen, harbinger, event –
though I’ve been around since Pleistocene.
Excuse me, my humor is misguided.
A world reeling from a harrowing plague,
you’re surely feeling a little jaded
and I fear my message is somewhat vague...
I shall try to be perfectly clear:
get your shit together or the end is near.
Get your shit together or the end is near.
It bears repeating, for you haven’t listened
to scientist or teenager—
instead, you surgically scrub your hands
from guilt. So here I am, NEO—your herald
in a modern guise, your two-tailed flare;
WISE—your perspicacious portent, errand
sent from heaven against your laissez-faire.
Doomsday. What a negative word that is.
Better to leave it to Hollywood,
enjoy it in a bucket seat, drinking cherry fizz.
We comets are misunderstood!
Does this seem like a game or a riddle?
While your ley lines warm up like a griddle?
While your ley lines warm up like a griddle,
you dream of investing in cooler climes,
treat my warning as tarradiddle,
for there’s no one to punish your eco-crimes.
Before I return to the depths of space,
please think of how you consume and pollute...
you’re an odium to the human race
and your energy drive just won’t compute.
Or else, I shall assume a death wish.
I’ve seen it many times on many rounds.
Celestial destroyers are not squeamish,
and sadly pale blue dots aren’t out of bounds.
For your cataclysm, I’m on it:
I’m NEOWISE—your one-size-fits-all comet.
Lee Nash writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in diverse journals and anthologies, including Acorn, Ambit, Angle, Magma, Mezzo Cammin, Slice, and The Best Small Fictions 2019. Her first poetry chapbook Ash Keys was published by Flutter Press. She was a 2018 Bath Flash Fiction Award prizewinner, joint winner of the 2019 Princemere Poetry Prize, and is First Prize winner in Fish Publishing’s 2020 The Lockdown Prize (haiku and senryu category).
Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.
A sperm whale found dead in southern Spain was killed after ingesting 64 pounds of mostly plastic garbage, a necropsy of the marine mammal recently revealed. The 6-ton, 33-foot-long juvenile male beached near a lighthouse in Cabo de Palos in the region of Murcia in February. An examination of its digestive tract uncovered items such as plastic bags, raffia sacks, ropes, pieces of nets and even a plastic jerry can, authorities said Friday. Experts at Murcia's El Valle Wildlife Recovery Center, which carried out the necropsy, said the whale was unable to expel or digest the trash, causing it to die from peritonitis, or an infection of the abdomen. —EcoWatch, April 10, 2018
After the sperm whale
choked to death on plastic waste
(sixty-four pounds' worth),
I swore off all things plastic:
forks, tea stirrers, me, free verse
Jenna Le is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018; 1st edition published by Anchor & Plume Press, 2016), which won 2nd Place in the 2017 Elgin Awards. Her poems have also appeared in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and West Branch.
Banal attempts at re-creation fail.
What minds would mold me, plastic, sweet and frail?
I’ve eclipsed your constructs, circumvented your ideal;
My likeness etched in psyches, read like braille.
Though capitalistic plots may garner some appeal—
I muse at this pale folly; truth lies in detail.
Tracey Gratch lives just south of Boston with her husband and their four children. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in publications including Post Road, Mezzo Cammin, The Literary Bohemian, Annals of Internal Medicine, Boston Literary Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Her poem "Strong Woman" is included in On Being A Doctor, Volume 4, from the American College of Physicians.
