BORDERS

by Howie Good

Nature abhors borders. A smoky haze from Canadian wildfires blots out the sun in Columbus, Ohio. An earthquake under the Sea of Japan shakes skyscrapers in LA. The Earth shares one skin. Borders are human constructs, a kind of illusion, lines that appear on maps without appearing on corresponding landscapes. Governments speak of the sanctity of borders. The smoke from far up north has turned daylight where I live a ghostly amber. There are no borders, really, only fences and patrols and checkpoints as if there were. Men have died by the millions defending what doesn’t exist.

Howie Good's latest poetry collection True Crime was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

SEVEN-POINT-FIVE PERCENT

by Gale Naylor

after Jose Hernandez Diaz

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

Wearing a tie can reduce blood flow to the brain by seven-point-five percent. I’ve heard the percentage is higher if the tie is red. And long—with its triangular tip seeking a fly like the tongue of some metal-infatuated snake, while the tail tightens around a thick neck—carotid compression. Does lack of oxygen fill the brain’s airless void with dreams… of castles lined with gold; of consequences for thee, adoration for me? Seven-point-five percent. This one, simple fact explains so much: Why rich, suit-and-tie men still seek, long after they should be sated. Why heads—of state, of corporations, of patriarchal households—make decisions empty of heart. The simple cause: compression; the cascading effect: low brain blood-pressure, lack of oxygen, loss of compassion, community, empathy——who knew blood was so important! 

Poetry is how Gale Naylor makes sense of the world as a survivor of incest and sexual abuse; they hope their voice helps other survivors feel less alone. Gale's poems have appeared in Exposed Bone, Calliope-on-the-Web, S/He Speaks 4, Jupiter Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and the California Poet Laureate’s “Our California” website. Gale received an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2026.

AI

by Tricia Knoll

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” —Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas

Under a roof of paper lanterns strung across Jogye Temple in downtown Seoul, a group of monks from the Jogye Order, Korea's largest Buddhist sect, sat across from a postulant awaiting a precept ceremony—except that postulant was the country's first humanoid robot to take part in the ritual. —The Korea Times, May 6, 2026

Summon billionaires. Lawmakers. Researchers. Have they felt confusion?  Must I warn the senior in memory care that her lovey robot dog may not really love her when her son is grateful it does not poop on her rug. Or should I thank the robots diving in Antarctica to assess the salinity, churn, and effect of wind on disappearing sea ice., those that replace cement on the ocean floor to encourage coral building. Or the one that assists in gall bladder surgery. Do I bow beside Gabi, the robot at the South Korean Buddhist Temple, who takes his vows wearing red robes among the hanging lanterns at his initiation ceremony. Asimov’s Zeroth law, the one that says the robot may not harm humanity. Who foresees all hues of harm? The Pope? The head of cultural affairs for Gabi’s order? What hand or eye guides the robot in the war machine?  In confusion, I am not alone. What robot holds my hand? With whom do I pray? 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who lives in the woods. She read Asimov a lot many decades ago.

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.

HINGE DAY

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

So much needs exercising, soothing for the opening to beyond and next. Where applause for sun reverberates across plains and oceans to replace fumes of exhaust. Even on the balconies of apartments in my hometown. My car hides in the garage to avoid the steep price of gas. I plot where to scatter a bag of saved marigold and zinnia seed. Where mornings come unchallenged by worst-yet shock. When the bully pulpit voice, a vulgar weaving from Greenland to birthright, issues ultimatums that seem to threaten using nukes to resurrect the stone age and abuses the many names we use for god. A cardinal teeters on my fencepost listening to the oven bird. 

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Her poems appear in journals and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples (Fernwood Press) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she now writes mostly prose poems. Fernwood Press will publish her full-length poetry book, Gathering Marbles, in July 2027. Knoll serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.

BAI TASHCHIT (DO NOT DESTROY)

by Lenore Weiss

Israeli settlers and soldiers killed three Palestinians in their village near Ramallah on Saturday night, the third deadly attack in a week of surging Israeli violence across the occupied West Bank. Israeli settlers have shot dead five civilians during invasions of Palestinian olive groves, villages and grazing land, in the brief period since Israel and the US launched a new war on Iran at the end of February. —The Guardian, March 8, 2026. Photo: WAFA archive.

Deer bite off the heads of my coreopsis, yellow sunbursts of blossoms I was hoping to see every morning outside my window, but now only sad stumps are left leaning against the pavement. Every day, I go outside to encourage the plant, hoping it might grow back, sprout a few new leaves. The way olive trees are being cut, burned and poisoned, and the olive, which is more than a fruit, a symbol of resistance, buckets picked and pressed with a wooden beam, sometimes with a stone to produce golden flowing oil. Every tree which is not being harvested, is lost to the occupation. Deuteronomy 20:19-20 prohibits cutting down fruit-bearing trees during a war as they provide life-sustaining food. Isn’t this an ongoing war? Olive trees growing in the West Bank are the first to go, surrounded by settlements built high on ridges that strangle villages, and even when armed renegades desist, they return with more venom. Concentration camps and the multitude of prisons throughout the United States produce men and women who understand how physical space can be controlled, minds never. Villagers living in Burin say their olive oil is spicier because it is laced with tear gas.

Lenore Weiss’s novel Pulp into Paper and a poetry collection, Video Game Pointers were both published in 2024. Prior poetry collections form a trilogy about love, loss, and being mortal: Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island (West End Press, 2012), Two Places (Kelsay Books, 2014), and The Golem (Hakodesh Word Press, 2017). Alexandria Quarterly Press published her prize-winning flash fiction chapbook Holding on to the Fringes of Love. Lenore edited a poetry and prose anthology for Kehilla Community Synagogue entitled From the Well of Living Waters: Voices of the 21st Century. She is a member the Writers Grotto and serves as the Associate Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Editor for the Mud Season Review.

THIS IS A TEST. THIS IS A TEST.

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

 

Today on the radio the Bach fugue in B minor stands in for the emergency alert system two-tone blast before a three-tone blurt signaling end of alert. Theme, counterpoint and fragments in the coda. While missiles explode over Tel Aviv, ignite a Dubai hotel. One got the Supreme Leader. Another pulverizes a girl’s school in Iran. Kansas declares IDs of transgender people invalid. A preacher explains intergenerational trauma within the legacy of slavery. The BBC reports 72 tigers in Thailand have died recently of distemper. If it takes a minute to open a bottle, pour out a pill and take it, I have spent 456 days of my life swallowing an antidepressant. (And I thought it was lame that I have spent more than 12 weeks celebrating Christmas Days.) This is a test. This is a test. Going forward, how sad will life be?

 

Vermont poet Tricia Knoll is writing a book of poetry about sadness, The Run-on Story. Her next poetry book Gathering Marbles about aging will come out from Fernwood Press in 2027. 

FRENCH MEAT PIE

by Michelle Valois

 

 

French meat pie is a greasy wonder of pork, beef, and onion, filling a pie crust that is flaky and buttery. Some parts of French Canada add potatoes, some breadcrumbs. Either way, the additions were intended to stretch the meat, which you had to do if you were poor. My family used breadcrumbs.
 
My Mai Mai taught my mother and she taught me. These days, though, with one of my children vegan, I make a meatless meat pie, using mushrooms and lentils as a substitute for the meat. My relatives and other purists are appalled, but it’s actually not bad.

This vegan daughter of mine is also queer, and all three of my children are Jewish, as is my partner. I just found out that if you can prove that a grandparent was born in Canada you can apply for Canadian citizenship. If what is happening in Minnesota becomes the norm, we may just have to return to the motherland of meat pies, maple syrup, and ice hockey. I hope they won’t mind how I have tinkered with one of their national dishes in the three generations that my family has thrived in this so-called land of the free, but it appears that it is no longer free, which it never really was for people of color; now, though, it’s only free if you are white and MAGA.

My grandparents left their farms in Canada for a better life in the factories of New England. They could never have dreamed that their granddaughter would become a college professor, marry a woman, and be able to afford all the pork and beef she wants (but chooses mushrooms and lentils), the American dream come true.

My father fought fascists in Germany. He could never have dreamed that his children and grandchildren would have to fight them here on American soil, the American dream turned nightmare.

Meatless meat pie? You can make anything, really, without meat, but you can’t make a life without freedom.

Michelle Valois' work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Florida Review, TriQuarterly, Pank, Brevity, and others. A chapbook My Found Vocabulary was published in 2017 (Aldrich). She lives in Massachusetts and teach at a community college.

FOR THE WATCHERS

by Greg Watson

 

 

Driving my daughter to school this morning, circling the block past the long line of buses, we notice again the parents and neighbors who now stand watch on each corner, braving the sub-zero St. Paul air like half-frozen shepherds, red hearts stitched to their bright yellow vests. Some wave, some sway from side to side in puffy down jackets and snowsuits, silver whistles dangling, as if this were a dance with music only they could hear. "I'm glad they're here," my daughter says. "But I wish they didn't have to be." I nod in agreement. I miss the fourth grade crossing guards, their orange plastic flags waving up and down in sync, laughing with each other, looking each way twice. Though they have not disappeared as the others have—Amalia, Valentina, Angeles, Santiago, Liam, Diego—stolen and flown by secrecy of night to a windowless room thirteen hundred miles away. Stolen by those who call themselves the law. Last night my daughter stayed up past bedtime reading a book about the Montana grizzly attacks of 1967. I asked if was too scary, too intense, and whether it might give her nightmares. "No," she said evenly, "wild animals don't scare me, or natural disasters. Only people sometimes. Only people."

Greg Watson's work has been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Stars Unseen (Holy Cow! Press). He is also co-editor of The Road by Heart: Poems of Fatherhood (Nodin Press). His forthcoming collection, The Shape of Your Absence, will be published by One Subject Press in April. 

SYSTEM SNOW

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Elizabeth Kerlikowske pays attention, though she doesn't want to.

THE KILLERS

by Howie Good

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

You can hear the slow tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine. It’s the end of the so-called “American Century.” Conscienceless killers disguised as police prowl factories and airports and schools for new victims, and all with the sanction of a government of liars and thieves. The lamp beside the golden door has been shot out. My grandparents were poor Jews from the shtetl – in current parlance, “garbage people” from “shithole countries.” And look at me. My face, with its hollows and shadows, its worry lines and age wrinkles, is like a map, sort of, a map of a country I no longer know.

Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author.

BOARD GAME

by Tricia Knoll

Trump threatens to sideline Exxon from Venezuela’s oil: ‘They’re playing too cute’  —CNBC, January 12, 2026

Favored tokens in Monopoly are still Top Hat and Scottie Dog. Today the Battleship gets new attention. A miniature assault rifle and tankers with modifiable flags have appeared in our box thanks to wise-ass teenagers in my house. They used AI to make genius modifications to the board too. Players can build pipelines on Venezuela’s Carabobo, Intercampo, Tia Juana and Lagunillas oil fields. Rolling penalties: go to Cuba, jail or Greenland. Suffer bankruptcy. The young designers ditched the rail lines and Water Works in favor of oil companies though the Electric Company has some cachet. Plaza de la Candelaria and El Centro have replaced the outdated landings of Oriental and States Avenues. The dollar is the paper currency unless you decide to gamble, flicking a spinner to take advantage of or risk fluctuating exchange rates for Bolivars. Names of docks replace the red properties. Park Place and Boardwalk are too iconic to change. The kids kept Vermont because we live there. I dug out Miss Scarlet from Clue as my piece. A woman token. What never changes in Monopoly is the marching. Around and around, never knowing if or when the game ends. Or what the battleship will do next. 

Tricia Knoll's family had a Monopoly game set up in the basement of their Illinois house to play during times of tornado warnings. She never liked the game. After 18 years of writing free verse published in dozens of journals and nine collections, she now focuses on prose poems.

DON’T MAKE ME REPEAT MYSELF

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

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

I dreamt DT was my high school government teacher. Definitely him. Had the waddle in the walk, wore the oversized blue suit (not in the cool David Byrne way), that weird long tie. He’d lecture us, shout at us, breathe like a dragon, then sit sniveling behind his desk. Feeling sorry for himself, I guess. He’d get all red in the face, jump up and down or stamp his feet, and his combover would flap. It was too scary to be funny. The grades he gave totally depended on how much you sucked up to him. I knew I needed to pass this class to graduate high school so my other three degrees would count. I was afraid of what he might do to me, but one day I just lost it. Shouted back. Shouted even louder. Spoke truth to blowhard. You’re wrong! Just plain wrong! About everything. Everything you do is wrong. The only true thing you ever said was that you’d date your daughter. Everyone decent hates you. You are a bad bad boy. People looked at me like I was crazy, fighting him, but I felt like I could finally get some air.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired psychologist, former German Lit major, and restaurant reviewer, has spent much time on both sides of the doctor-patient relationship. She is widely published. Collections include Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and Kafka’s Cat(Kattywompus Press), The Book of Knots and Their Untying (Kelsay Books), and, The Beautiful Leaves and Eve the Inventor (Bamboo Dart Press). She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a long-running poetry series in Claremont, California.

THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN

A Prose Poem

by Howie Good

President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia concluded their summit in Alaska on Friday without declaring agreement on any issue, much less the one Mr. Trump said was at the top of his agenda, ending the war in Ukraine. —The New York Times, August 15. 2025

The other day I saw a bald eagle for only the second time in my life. It soared over the treeline on the far side of the marsh. Almost in the same instant that I recognized it from its distinctive silhouette, it was gone, our national bird, symbol of strength and freedom. We are entering the last days of summer. Some of the plants I planted in the spring never grew, and the plants that did grow have begun dying. I dread the coming winter, a hulking, red-eyed monster roving streets of blackened ruins.

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose poetry collections include The Dark and Akimbo, available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. 

I WILL MISS THE LARGE ANIMALS OF NORTH AMERICA

by Michael Brockley

Woody Guthrie in March 1943.

The bison. The grizzly bears. The jaguars that can’t leap over the wall along the border river. I will miss reading irreverent books. Novels where Jesus has a friend named Biff. Comic books where Deadpool is a hero. I will miss news reporters who know that Kansas City is in Missouri and that Benjamin Franklin never resided in the White House. I will miss the White House. The Smithsonian, the Statue of Liberty, and Yellowstone. I will wonder how Old Faithful might be disappeared. I will miss pennies. And the Beatitudes, the part of the Bible Kurt Vonnegut valued the most. I will miss voting for women. I will miss movies that tell the stories of men and women who don’t look like me. I will miss being able to see Venus and Mars on clear nights. I will miss strawberries and tomatoes and watermelons and sweet potatoes and cranberries and sunflowers and cherries. I will miss guitars with This Machine Kills Fascists scrawled across their bodies. I will miss dogs that look more like wolves than weapons of war. I will miss saying  Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weihnachten, and Mele Kalikimaka. I will miss finger-pointing songs. I will miss licorice. Yes, I will even miss licorice.

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana, His prose poems have appeared in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Red Eft Review, and Unlikely Stories Mark V. Brockley's prose poems are also forthcoming in Ley Lines Literary Review, Seat at the Table, and Alien Buddha.

RED FLAG

by Pepper Trail

This is the way now, the night helicopters orange-bellied from the flames, swallowing mouthfuls of ocean, dropping salt on the mansions, bungalows, trailers, the streets running wild with molten metal, airburst of exploding eucalyptus, every TV speaking wisely, hysterically of ember fall, windspeed, perimeters, acres, percents, containment, containment, containment, canyons, freeways, the survivors somehow calm, brave beside the ruins, char and ash, the scorched tricycle on its side, the bewildered chimneys of the cul-de-sacs, hell on earth you could say and not be wrong, the City of Angels twisting in the grasp of Santa Ana, beneath the red flags and this is the way now though maybe in your town it will be hurricane or tornado or flood or drought or heat unto death or maybe in some blessed places of sanctuary maybe only a tsunami of the desperate and displaced  but this is the everywhere now and we have made it so.

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.

SAME WEIRD SH*T

by Cody Walker

via Rolling Stone, January 20, 2025

In 2020 we got HBO so we could watch The Plot Against America. Now it’s almost five years later, and we still have HBO (now called Max). And we still have a plot against America! Except it’s not a plot; it’s an open invitation. You can even vote for it. We did vote for it.

Cody Walker is the author of three poetry collections, all from the Waywiser Press. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor.

ROTATED

by Richard Garcia

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

You will be rotated. You will be rotated in ways you did not foresee. You will be walking casually away in one direction and then find yourself walking casually away in the opposite direction. Do not be alarmed this will only be a test. If this were the real rotation you would not be able to read this because your eyes would be rotated. Do not attempt to curry favor by accepting your rotation—your acceptance will be rotated. You will find yourself in a line of concentric circles that spiral along the border. You will be rotated toward checkpoints where tall, broad-shouldered men wearing military caps and mirrored aviator sunglasses, with belts cinched below their bellies and pistols strapped to their hips are waiting to inspect your papers. You will be rotated into newly constructed barriers where bullhorns will declare, Y'all git along now, you folks gonna be rotated and all your people gonna be rotated, your children gonna be rotated and that's how it's gonna be now and forever. 

Richard Garcia's poetry books include The Other Odyssey (Dream Horse Press, 2014), The Chair (BOA 2015), and Porridge (Press 53, 2016). He has received a Pushcart Prize and been in Best American Poetry.

CANCER JEW

by Howie Good

We’re told that life, it can be a wedding or a funeral, happy or melancholy, just depends if we act like mourners or celebrants, it’s our choice, whether we dab away tears of joy or shed ones of grief, responsibility for our happiness, we’re told in podcasts and internet articles and by subliminal suggestion, is entirely ours, regardless of the colossal forces, the shifting tectonic plates of geopolitics, the self-corrections of the market, that shape and direct our lives, that hurl us through a worrying present toward a future we already regret, tumors on eyes and nose and mouth and shadows congealing into a dark mass, a Jew lying on the ground, beaten to the point of death.

 

Note: “Cancer Jew” is a Dutch anti-Semitic slur.

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.

WHAT IS LEFT?

by Peter F. Crowley

Waiting for rations from an outdoor kitchen in Khan Younis this month. Hunger is now most acute in the southern Gaza Strip.

Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times, May 24, 2024Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The NewYork Times, May 24, 2024

     The language you speak has soured, become melancholy, chokes eyelids. Its tendrils lay flaying in dusty streets near occupation crossings in the gated night. Your eyes have grown sallow, as your children's stomachs distended, swollen, as you swat flies from their brow. The streets are your anguish, running, forever running from apartment home to tent back to bombed out abode. Hope was sapped with the last morsel of cat food, finished for yesterday’s only meal, while the powerful stick their blindfolded, deaf eyes deep into the sand, purchasing bulldozers to roll over you.
     You now avoid aid trucks, should they ever appear out of shackled nothingness, to avoid getting gunned down by those fighting terror. 

As a prolific author from the Boston area, Peter F. Crowley writes in various forms, including short fiction, op-eds, poetry and academic essays. His writing can be found in 34^th Parallel, Pif Magazine, Galway Review, Digging the Fat, Adelaide’s Short Story and Poetry Award anthologies (finalist in both) and The Opiate. He is the author of the poetry books Those Who Hold Up the Earth and Empire’s End, and the short fiction collection That Night and Other Stories.