HOW CAN I WRITE A LOVE POEM?

by Rose Mary Boehm

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

Do I write about poets with red holes

in their forehead? Students whose eyes

have been shot out, the mother of four

small children is rotting in a cell full of other people,

excrement, wails, the sounds of metal and wood

on flesh and bone.

 

How can I write a love poem when 

all I know is that planets no longer align,

that war has been declared on peace,

that all the crystals disintegrate into millions

of nano shards, shaken by the vibrations of hate.

 

How can I write a love poem when

I am no longer allowed to trust my eyes,

when blue is red, up is down, no means yes,

when, while I am hollow and starving

a blonde demon laughs and tells me I have riches

to look forward to. Perhaps even in this life.

All I have to do is believe.

 

And haven’t we all been taught to believe?

To believe that there is a big old man on a cloud

somewhere, an old man with a long, white beard

who has a big book and writes all your 

little misdeeds in big letters,

and who they say is love and who asks you to love

‘the other’ as you love yourself.

 

So, for many it’s easy to believe that in his name,

in the name of love, you are being hung

upside-down by your feet until you

confess how much delicious hate you feel,

and that you never had it so good.

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her work has been widely published mostly by US poetry journals. A new full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026.

GATHERING FOR OUR CAVE SOON

by Jerrice J Baptiste

"Justice in the Trump Era" by Nick Anderson

Unfettered and Unaccountable: 

How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force —ProPublica, October 18, 2025

Yesterday, the autumn wind almost blew 
me away. If I were thirty pounds lighter 
like I’ve always wanted, I would’ve joined 

leaves in the lake. I savor figs, dried plums,
mango slices we share together in the royal 
blue ceramic bowl, you gifted for my birthday

in April. And much time has passed and we need 
to gather dried berries and nuts like our friends 
the squirrels and rabbits. We will need to eat only 

one of each roasted almond, white cashew, walnut
at a time. Under the crumpled sapphire-colored 
blanket we will hide flat on our backs in the black 

onyx night, in the cave we will build. Silence, Silence 
and the goddess Artemis will protect us vulnerable 
women and children. We will quickly hush, hush
  
like kindergarteners at play with shadow puppets when 
adults enter a room. Whoever is searching won’t find 
us, when their heavy boots enter our cave, their hands 

shining light in each corner. Artemis will make us
invisible. Now the winds of autumn pick up speed. 
It is a brewing noise of citizens, and leaves. 

Can you hear what’s churning?  Do you feel 
the urgency of the people? The collective shouting, 
shouting, shouting, and not just a handful.  Let us 

gather, gather our portions soon and build our caves. 
Noise increases, increases loud firecrackers. Are you 
the poets who are not afraid of the bombs?

Jerrice J Baptiste is a poet, educator and facilitator of poetry for healing and self-expression. Her new book of prose poems is titled Coral in the Diaspora published by Abode Press (August 2024).  Her writing has been published and is forthcoming in The New Verse News, Artemis Journal, Urthona Buddhism and Art Magazine, The Dewdrop, Shambhala Times, The Yale Review, Wax Poetry & Art, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Mantis, Penumbra Literary & Art Journal, The Banyan Review, Kosmos Journal, Silver Birch Press, and many others. Her collaborative songwriting and poetry are featured on the Grammy-nominated album Many Hands Family Music for Haïti. 

BEATRICE'S TURN

by Michelle DeRose

Beatrice (a Portrait of Jane Morris) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

If poets are the unacknowledged 

legislators of our world, then may

their list come out as a sonnet,

an epic, an elegy for their lost

childhoods. They have more cause

than Dante to assign names

to descending rings. Only in dreams

and nightmares have sinners paid,

limbs frozen in impotent angles

like bent wisps of straw, forced

to face forever through lids locked

on open how their flesh partook in fraud.

Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College, where she sometimes used her specialty in epic poetry in her teaching. Every new nation/kingdom/regime established in an epic is built upon or requires the destruction of another.

ROCK CREEK

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

-for Roberta Flack

Today Roberta Flack reunites with Donny Hathaway at a Carter Barron concert among crowds of Washington’s famed cherry trees peeper frogs visiting dignitaries

Marvin Gaye in attendance an alternate inauguration out of doors among glorious birds

Ben Shahn might paint a syrinx chorus oh how the capital creek flows Amanda Gorman

Richard Blanco Robert Frost Maya Angelou read their work

 

I grew up here and I’ve strolled the park with the crows and the deer

watching winter turn to spring  

from far away its song of the public good is still softly killing me

 

Roberta Flack is about as well known among the mandarins in the Maison Blanche

as Richard Wright James Baldwin and Ralph Bunche Emmanuel Macron comes to town

and between correcting facts and straightening records he says France isn’t just a remembrance

of past things like the Somme the Ardennes and Maginot it’s also Nina Simone Josephine Baker

 

I grew up here have often wondered  

where is the love?

not among trees and flowers natives and exotics imperial gifts and the green thumbs

of Lady Birds in our quondam swamp of Camelot the Brain Trust on the Potomac

Rather within those amnesiacs who cannot see what it takes to get to be how great we already are

the ranging octaves and ingenious melodies rhapsody of a people who keep offering everything 

after every betrayal because getting my own means putting it out but as Ms. Flack asked

Compared to what?

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. His latest book is the short fiction collection, Captain's Kismet (Alien Buddha Press, 2025). You can follow him @Sandcounties on Substack.

TAX SEASON

by Jennifer M Phillips

Confess—you'd prefer the other partner, death.

Even, perhaps, the dentist, than to have joy creamed off

the top of your good or mediocre year. Stealing breath

from your lungs, so it feels, though reason scoffs

 

about social good and duty and infrastructure.

A hundred to one, poets prefer death as their topic—

the old adversary, its weapons known and sure;

grief well honed; mourning, politic.

 

 But taxes! What's to say? It's impolite,

like defecation. We may complain with a wink

and shake of the head when processes back up tight—

everyone knows what that's like. But I think

 

the tragedian may find good meat for musing

on the rectitude of civic debt and the virtue

of paying one's dues and sorting out the confusing

archival tangle of what wealth did and didn't do.

 

Unlike religion, it is no use to protest

agnosticism. Tax gives no fig for belief

or its lack, just the ignoble quest

for loopholes, exemptions and write-offs for relief.

 

Each Spring, it is the other "little death”—a ration

of dispassionate accountancy, facing the music

of peccadillos, waste, or procrastination.

We make amends with our checkbook's antiseptic.

 

A touch self-righteous, I find I'm glad to say

to myself, watching firefighters fight

a blaze, or a town hall be built, I helped to pay

for that with my puny widow's mite.

 

So of the old pairing, I think I prefer

taxes, which come with certain resolution. I admit

it's annoying the way they increase and recur,

and possibly, after all, both come with an audit,

 

and after both, our wallet may end up thinner;

but after death, we miss our own reception

while our guests enjoy a character-dissection.

After taxes, the refund could take us out to dinner.

 

Both invite us to a reckoning self-examination

but death puts paid to our chance for amelioration.

A sage once said, by inspecting your checkbook stubs

I can see at a glance what you have valued and loved.

Jennifer M Phillips is a  bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower. Two chapbooks are Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022, Phillips' work appeared in over 100 journals, and is currently twice-nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize.

NAVALNY, RAFAH

by dana yost

burning cars.

gas in the air.

navalny dead.

someone lights

a cigarette.

marley’s words.

bottle of teeth

on the vanity.

navalny dead.

arctic nights.

while we stand

aside and look.

forgive them?

not yet.

pick at the meat

with your 

squirmy fingers.

roasted logs

by the missouri.

fog in daylight,

doorways

and dust.

in rafah

women

and children

are the real

poets.

Dana Yost was a journalist for 29 years and, still, sometimes, when news happens he can’t help but comment on events as they happen. He wrote the poem in lower case to try, in some way, a mode of protest or a bit of anarchy in response to too many strongmen and would-be strongmen. We have to speak against them.

DISARMCHAIR

by David Rudd-Mitchell

AI-generated graphic for The New Verse News by Shutterstock

DisArmchair Linguists

While body counts are unconfirmed,

They view how breaking news is termed.

DisArmchair Activists

The blood is fresh,

And there’s no pause

Before the next post 

for their cause. 

DisArmchair Optimists

They hope that soon the war will cease,

And this will lead to lasting peace.

DisArmchair Hypocrites

They hate the hypocrites who stride,

To only see the other side,

Armchair Apologists

Water cut off, city bombed,

They say, “It’s how they must respond.”

Armchair Fascists

Cut all the power, cut off the phones,

Stop all the schooling, crush all the homes.

Close off the border, block every route,

Stop all the bombing, then start to shoot.

DisArmchair NeoNihilists

Watching from a safe retreat,

These optimists admit defeat.

DisArmchair Poet

A poem of protest,

angry tweets,

And yet our history

Still repeats. 

Reformed DisArmchair Poet

Words are precious,

In their way,

But it’s time to join the march

—and pray.

David Rudd-Mitchell is an occasional poet who has had work published in zines, magazines, two shared chapbooks and anthologies. 

SMALL VICTORIES

by M. Benjamin Thorne

Two Russian poets have been handed long jail sentences for taking part in a reading of anti-war poems in Moscow. A Moscow court gave Artyom Kamardin seven years and Yegor Shtovba five and a half years for "inciting hatred" against Russian troops and making "appeals against state security". Both had pleaded not guilty… A third poet who had taken part in the poetry reading, Nikolai Dayneko, was given a four-year sentence earlier this year after pleading guilty and co-operating with the investigation. —BBC, December 28, 2023. Photo: Russian poets Artyom Kamardin (L) and Yegor Shtovba (R) stand inside the defendants' glass cage as the verdict against them is announced at a court in Moscow, on December 28, 2023 [Alexander Nemenov/ AFP via AlJazeera]

Artyom Kamardin, the scuttling hands
of Putin’s comrade army clutched you away.  
Yegor Shtovba, they broke you in prison, brutally 

shoved their weakness inside you. 

Today they sought to silence freedom,
and tonight Akhmatova’s ghost screams.

 

All for the crime of poetry. A few words
that sat heavily in public, burning
like Chernobyl rubble, glowing in the dark.
What will their half-life be?
Already the rallied crowd shuffles
back into quiet anonymity.
Who bows their head lower now                  
in shame, them or Pushkin?
Where are the souls so moved
reciting Eugene Onegin from memory?
Where the fierce courageous applause
that followed Shostakovich and Yevtushenko?
Freedom is still a young and starving child,
will you like Tsvetaeva give her to the state to die?
Why grieve for fallen soldiers
when you murder them at home?

Perhaps their poems were as meaningless
as Soviet ration cards for milk past 10 am,
or victory claimed in a burned-out village.
One poem may not change the world.
But words are radioactive and once heard
can decay the most calcified mind’s
defenses. Perhaps the sense of resistance
is not to succeed, but inspire others to resist.
A poem may change the world for one person.

M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. As an historian and poet, he is interested in what—and how—societies choose to remember and forget traumatic episodes from the past. He has poems forthcoming from Topical Poetry and The Main Street Rag.

A MOUNTAINEER CAN BE A POET AND STILL FIRE A MUSKET

by Kim Malinowski

Hundreds of West Virginia University students wearing red T-shirts and bandanas to symbolize their connection to striking coal miners a century ago staged protests Monday against an administration proposal to cut 9% of majors amid a $45 million budget shortfall. —AP, August 22, 2023

I write WVU into the stars, blue and gold constellations,

my pen shimmering faculty names, even as the administration’s slash

tenure positions, promises, dreams.

I learned that my pen is a magic wand here. 

It has not been so long ago that even mountaineers could be poets

and still shoot muskets and pretend that they had a home.

I met a freshman today that I will paint as glinting diamond,

fourth day confusion, standing on the side with professors,

telling me he is the transition and the PRTs still don’t work.

But he doesn’t cower, ready to swing full into engineering and life.

My mentors are battle hardened past the traditional 10 on the Mohs scale,

fighting, worrying, fighting more. Not able to tell their stories.

I told the university’s president that I could write WVU into the skies,

either as diamonds or as coal, because each are rocks 

on their way to becoming another rock. That freshman, those faculty

can fight and worry and fight.

I can write the stories they are not allowed to.

But we have a choice if we want the story to be about diamonds or coal.

Kim Malinowski is a poet and a mountaineer. She will have six books by the end of 2024 and credits much of her success to her instructors at West Virginia University. She wore red at the August 21, 2023 Protest, lives five hours away, and fights for those that fought for her.

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.

THE BLACK HUMMINGBIRD

by Alejandro Escudé

Why all the gray skies [in Southern California]? It's a reasonable question with a fairly complex answer that we find ourselves asking yearly when they show up and stick around for a few months. Known as May Gray and June Gloom, the period’s a sign of transition from cool winter weather to scorching summer temperatures. —LAist, May 19, 2023. Photo: Ushering in June Gloom near Santa Ynez, California on June 01, 2020. | George Rose/Getty Images via KCET.

The grayness of May isn’t subtle.

It weighs on the birds too, erasing the landmarks.

I notice that my sight changes, eyes have a stalkier bond

To the naked mind—what is that about?

I exit my apartment, crossing the threshold of my door,

And the hallway is blue, chilly, despite the seventy degrees.

I need my poetry heroes to Lazarus from their graves

And deliver me back to my old selves, the dozens of poets

That came before this one who writes only gray verse.

But its always been the black hummingbird that flitted 

Through the glass of my window at the Catholic retreat 

I attended two years after my son was born.

I obeyed the order of silence. At twilight, I made my way

Past the Victorian lamp posts along the garden paths

To the dining hall. And we prayed before and after dinner.

When I returned home, the hummingbird followed.

I ask a coworker: does the gray sky affect your mood?

It is kind of dark, he says, missing the mark.

The grayness lasts so that even the darkness of night is gray.

I shift in my rocky bed, the hours graying into more hours.

You can live this way, you know, many years,

Reading between the testament folds of the colorless clouds,

Seeking something beyond the stormy horizon 

You have come to expect—that gray, prodigious god.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.