AMERICAN BEEF

by Darrell Petska

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

In the coming months, when you bite down on a government-subsidized burger made with meat of questionable origin, you’ll have Glorious Leader Donald J. Trump to thank. On Aug. 21, the president who loves to call other people communists enraged American cattle ranchers by announcing plans to “allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.” Trump posted news of the deal on social media, but of course gave no specific details about who the deal is with, where the meat is coming from or why he’s suddenly admitting that waiving tariffs will, in fact, lower prices for consumers. It’s a turducken of hypocrisy. —Rex Huppke, USA Today, August 23, 2026

I sing burgers
made of American beef,
not of “mystery meat”
imported from Botswana or Brazil,
Namibia or the moon’s dark side.

I sing American cows
raised by hard-working ranchers
living just down the road.
Their methods and products
I can see and trust—

unlike Trump’s dubious meat
bound to depress prices paid
to American cattle growers
needing incentives to rebuild
drought-ravaged herds.

A Trump burger? No way.
There aren’t enough condiments
to mask the foul taste
of midterm connivery
tucked clumsily into a bun.

Darrell Petska grew up on a cattle farm bordering the Nebraska Sandhills, where ranching is a revered but increasingly threatened way of life. Prairie winds still strum his heartstrings, though he now lives and writes poetry in Wisconsin.

AMAZON FIRE MONEY

by Kristin Yates






We’re consumed by the beef
we’re broiling
Earth’s lungs
to farm more cattle
we are burning every
minute the size of a football
field to breed, slit

over 40 million
throats

Lungs, logged

$Indigenous persons, the Mura tribe Jaguar Cashapona tree, the Barrigona tree
Pataxó tribe Giant Armadillo, the Parintintin tribe Harpy Eagle Strangler Fig tree

are the change
ranchers gain
but do not count

as if they own the forest

charred, already spent


Kristin Yates hopes more than space can see the price of our consumption. #ActForAmazonia

BIOGRAPHY/MALHEUR

by Amy Eisner

Cattle at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge wait out the fog of a cold, winter morning January 11, 2016. Image source: Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Her childhood cards said interested, alert, and eager to learn.
In her twenties she was an associative thinker and loved
to work numbers, fold them like origami in a spread
sheet. But she has no head for numbers, they slip through.
Her boyfriend said it was obnoxious to put him on a list
after laundry, and eventually he slipped through too.
In her thirties she had babies, became a thing of many:
mouths, wakings, -pieced toys. By her forties she is simply
scattered. "Get your [ship] together" reads the tote bag
in the store. (She has become a shopper, provisioning being
the only news she can solve.) This week she thinks often
of white men in the cold, in the bird refuge
they have claimed as their own. If they stay long enough
will we come look at them through binoculars, mark them
by the particular scruff on their duck canvas chests?
On so much land the fog must roll in layers: blue, sooty,
breathy, tinged with sun, filling secret baskets in secret
Paiute graves, filling the bunchgrass and the people squatting
in it--new arrivals with binoculars in their mitts watching
us watch the tribe watch the birders watch the ranchers
(oh, the ranger and the cowman should be friends)
and the vision of what you can own in a glance
multiplies to a power, like Galileo's scope, devised
to make a man on a ship fifty miles away appear five.
You can see the ship, you can see the man,
but what can you own but what you admit?


Amy Eisner teaches writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her poems have appeared in Confrontation, Fence, Valparaiso, and other journals.