GOOD NIGHT AMERICA, JANUARY 2026

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

Good night almighty oaks, good night acorns
snug in shells. Goodnight hens, asleep on perches. 
Good night good people of Minneapolis St. Paul
hanging sheets of plastic over doors broken down 
by ICE agents. Lullaby your little ones to sleep.  
Good night neighbors with cameras and whistles. 
Good night Mr. President, tweeting your fury,
slide easy into haunting dreams of disloyalty, 
 
dreams of failed plastic surgery, bad poll numbers,
dreams of not enough admirers or paying guests—
Remember the kerfuffle when caviar was served 
at Mar-a-Lago in tiny plastic spoons? Never enough! 
It’s natural to want more caviar, money and power. 
It’s natural to want kids not to be afraid or hungry
or molested or separated or zip-tied or teargassed. 

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s latest novel is The Waters, W.W. Norton, 2024.

ELECTION DAY

by Mervyn Taylor

The park outside my window
hasn't changed,  except for
the trees losing their leaves

so now I can see clear down
to the lake, the number on
a green jersey running by.

It's election day, early lines
headed to the polls. No one
knows as yet that the villain 

will win, that in spite of all
the ugliness, the terrible 
promises they intend to keep,

he and his cronies will sweep
their way back to Pennsylvania 
Avenue, will make good their

threats. But it hasn't happened
yet. It's still morning, and men
in the park are busy keeping

the leaves from spreading,
the trees having shed so 
fast, I can see someone 

curled up and crying 
alone on a bench
all the way from here.

Mervyn Taylor is the author of nine full-length collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Getting Through: New & Selected (2024) from Beltway Editions. Trinidadian by birth, and a longtime Brooklyn resident, his poems link both places, like a steel band in Prospect Park, the location of this poem. Retired from teaching, Taylor also works in assemblage, and Carnival arts. 

DATA AIN’T WISDOM

 by Anita S Pulier

Project 538, July 10, 2024

Even a perfect census will not put out the fire
burning in the Nationalist heart.

Nooses, confederate flags,
swastikas

stoke a malicious wind,
tease stray embers ablaze,

decency, fairness torched,
the dead mourned in time

to welcome
the next batch of flatliners,

school children hiding from bullets,
dead folk in synagogues, movies or concerts,

and caravans of the desperate who
wonder how close to an embryo

must one be to claim the right to life?
America, dear,

our once noble experiment
is choking on the foul air

in the autocratic wastebin of
greed and bigotry.

Sure, we will count heads,
tally up racial ancestry,

count votes,
count the dead, but will we learn

why, oh why, are so many
sucking the poison

from the orange beast’s burning breast
while Momma’s milk curdles and dries up?

Anita S Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butchers Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press.  Paradise Reexamined came out in 2023 (Kelsay Books). Her new book Leaving Brooklyn is due in Jan '25 from Kelsay Books  Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.

THE US VETOED A CEASEFIRE IN GAZA

by Bonnie Naradzay

Around noon today, December 16, 2023 a sniper of the IDF murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza, where the majority of Christian families has taken refuge since the start of the war…. Seven more people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others inside the church compound. No warning was given, no notification was provided. They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents. Earlier in the morning, a rocket fired from an IDF tank targeted the Convent of the Sisters of Mother Theresa (Missionaries of Charity). The Convent is home to over 54 disabled persons and is part of the church compound, which was signaled as a place of worship since the beginning of the war. The building’s generator (the only source of electricity) and the fuel resources were destroyed. The house was damaged by the resulting explosion and massive fire. Two more rockets, fired by an IDF tank, targeted the same Convent and rendered the home uninhabitable. The 54 disabled persons are currently displaced and without access to the respirators that some of them need to survive. —Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, December 16, 2023

The US vetoed a ceasefire in Gaza.  

                        Rushed more weapons.  

We are not allowed to use the word “genocide.”  

            In Bethlehem the nativity scene is piled 

with rocks and debris. More than 20,000 killed.  Biden is angry

about poll numbers.  Paul asked me to bring poems next time that rhyme.  

The newspaper yesterday said, “More Americans own stocks.” 

Homeowners are installing heat pumps this winter.

The US advised Israel to be more surgical.   Hospitals and schools

were targeted with precision.  Two churches, damaged.  Doctors were arrested.

An Israeli official said “There are no churches, no Christians in Gaza.”

People were sheltering in the church.  Hospitals and schools,  targeted. 

Anything that moves.  The US vetoed.  In Bethlehem. 

poems that rhyme.    not allowed.     Poll numbers.  demolished

more surgical next time.   Rocks and debris. 

The US vetoed a ceasefire in Gaza. 

 

Bonnie Naradzay's manuscript will be published by Slant Books next year.  She leads weekly poetry sessions at day shelters for homeless people and at a retirement center, all in Washington DC.  Three times nominated for a Pushcart, her poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Split This Rock, Dappled Things, and other sites. In 2010 she won the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize—a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary; there, she had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read Pound’s early poems.

I CHECK THE POLLS AT 5 AM

by Katherine Smith

I rise in the dark to check the last polls,

then wait for light to shine through

 

gold-green leaves before I lace my shoes.

Courage. The sun is shining on the most beautiful

 

leaf, which is dead, and glowing with light.

Everything is metaphor this morning.

 

Even the wind, even my sanity

even the mangled carcass of a groundhog

 

I skirt on the road, whispering please

don’t let it still be there tomorrow.

 

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

ELECTION DAY APPROACHES

by Joan Mazza

Image source: “The Never-Ending Nightmare That is This Election” by Tom Tomorrow

Anxiety is a necklace of barbed wire, ankle bracelets
shackled to a boat filling with water. We know we’re
going down. I wake gasping, unable to tell dream
from reality, my bed a rocking sea. That muffled
sound of a crying cat—locked in a closet? —
an owl on this chilly night. I open the window
to listen, but he hoots only once more. Autumn scents
drift in with the cold, heat vent blowing at my feet.
In bed, fragrance of old dog and woolen blankets,
shadows of barking. This isn’t Mineral or Richmond,
but unnamed rural Central Virginia, oak trees and crows
content in their ignorance of news and election polls,
unable to comprehend the concept of email or fraud.
No, they understand fraud, who cheats and misleads
instead of warning of danger. The crows know who’s
a friend because even birds show their true colors.

Who goes there? No one answers. Silence—
the gift of second sleep. Today, I’ll be part of a panel
of writers talking to those who want to be published
but don’t write. Hopefuls with empty notebooks ask
about agents and fees, not about craft. They could win
the Pulitzer, Booker, and Nobel for their ideas alone.
They’ll be on TV, have their own show. About what,
they don’t know. No one asks, Joan, how can I become
a better writer? What books might be instructive by example?
This trend toward magical thinking will ruin us, as if
the most bombastic white men could offer salvation,
a cure for bad judgment. I whisper, Mon Dieu! although
I don’t believe in any Dieu, not Thor or Zeus
or even Aphrodite. My old dog makes her little cough
that means, Come back to bed, and I do, wearing fleece
and flannel, not barbed wire, my mind still shackled.


Author’s Note: Based on Twenty Little Poetry Projects by Jim Simmerman.


Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Slipstream, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.

DIZZY

by Melissa Balmain

I once knew all there was to know
about the ways of vertigo:
my ear canals would cease to flow,
the ground zoomed up, the sky, below,
my guts got tossed like pizza dough,
then, after half a day or so
of rest and drinks from PepsiCo,
the ride would slow.

Today I'm well—no inner woe
has thrown me off my status quo—
and yet for weeks it's seemed as though
the world keeps flipping, top to toe,
as polls and tallies do-si-do
and voters swing from foe to foe.
Oh how I miss the vertigo
I used to know.

Melissa Balmain is the Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poems have appeared in such places as American Arts Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, and Poetry Daily; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and McSweeney’s.  Her poetry collection Walking In on People (Winner of the Able Muse Book Award), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

POLLING

by Gil Hoy

I read on the internet today, on
Get US out! of the United Nations

That Barack Obama
supposedly said

we deserved 9/11 because
we didn’t respect Islam
we should not repeat that mistake

With a photograph of our black President
with 80 shares, 178 likes

With readers comments:

This Muslim does not
speak for me and my family.
What an asshole.

  Obummer is anti-AMERICAN!!!!!

           NO more muslims!!!
All must return to their homeland!!

Trump 42% Clinton 44%

I want to bang a hammer
on the world’s noisiest can,

I want to set off the world’s
loudest alarm.

Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer currently studying poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program where he had received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Hoy received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as Brookline MA Selectman for 4 terms. Hoy's poetry appears or is upcoming in Right Hand Pointing-One Sentence Poems, The Potomac, Clark Street Review, TheNewVerse.News and The Penmen Review.

ON THE BATTLE AND THE RACE

by Rick Mullin

Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind 
and directs this Storm?—from a letter written to Thomas Jefferson by John Page, July 20, 1776,
quoted by George W. Bush in his first inaugural address, January 20, 2001.

How is the Angel in the Whirlwind fixed
for drumheads come November? Isn’t she
supposed to show us something bright betwixt
the mountain and the river? Pardon me,
but aren’t we all endowed with intuition
in our human state? The crystal liver
of the Angel in the Whirlwind waits
for a replacement on a frozen river-
bank in Pennsylvania. She hates
when she’s strung out in this position.
Once the Angel in the Whirlwind was
in charge and teleology in vogue.
But now, the latest polls get all the buzz.
The drummers and the general go rogue
and disavow the shock of recognition.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.

THE OGRE WHO PROMISED US THE WORLD

by David Spicer

Adapted from a DonkeyHotey caricature.

I denounce the day the ogre who promised
us the world arrived, disturbing the village’s
decorum. I witnessed his ancient resolve
as he scolded and attacked the town leaders
to the students’ cheers and drumbeats,
ignored the fact that the shylocks’ siege
had doomed us. He wanted those who
murmured against him imprisoned, chuckled
at and dismissed Vera—his experienced opponent
for Mayor—called her a typist for the shylocks.
He gestured like a conductor of a mad orchestra
in his speeches, pointed at his audiences like
an angry mentor, declared victory to thunderous
fanfare when defeat seemed certain. After we
expressed hope but asked how he’d fulfill his
guarantees, he twitched, paced the interview room,
beet-faced. The day I met him, I had returned
from singing hymns in German trenches,
an asthenic figure, searching for a hero
and ready to serve, and dazzled by his gruff
wail and white-haired pledges: free goldfish
for the children, higher wages for all, a jail cell
for the untouchable shylocks. But he offered no
solutions for our bombed houses without walls,
only those vows that tumbled from his mouth
like the fantasy sausages we loved, before the elders
voted for Vera, who destroyed him at the polls,
and he vanished into the sleepy hills he called home.

David Spicer has had poems in Yellow Mama, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, concis, Jersey Devil Press, The American Poetry Review, TheNewVerse.News, Ploughshares, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Pushcart, is the author of one full-length collection of poems and four chapbooks, and is the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

GENUFLECTION

by George Held

Senators Mike Lee abd Ted Cruz. Image source: Twitter/Ted Cruz.

“Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief of this country.” — Ted Cruz at the National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa, Nov. 9, 2015


Ted Cruz in Iowa courting Christian
Fundamentalists by declaring genuflection
the default prayer position
for US Presidents recalls
Abraham Lincoln (“I would neither slave
nor master be”) who would bow
his head in communion with his deity
but would not sink to his knees like a slave
nor would he rave like the Canadian-Cuban-
American even to climb in the polls
were there polls in his day when “poll”
meant “head” as in “poll tax”
or the “shaved poll” of a prisoner
and Lincoln would simply ask God
to bless this rough and unready,
agonized and striving country
as it writhed in second birth (the first
being in 1776) from 1861-1865, when
the great commander-in-chief would bow
his head and bow his neck without shamelessly
courting the fundamentalists of his day
by telling them what he thinks they want to hear.


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.