The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.
Maia Justine Storm is a 78-year-old woman living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has been an immigration attorney for 25 years and has returned to her adolescent dream of being a poet.Most recently, she has been published in Poetry Superhighway where she was a Poet of the Week, haikuniverse, Antifa Lit Journal, The Mersey Review, and in forthcoming issues of Procrastinating Writers United and Thema.
My friend texts: It was great. But today I got a terrible news from Ukraine. My best best friend was killed by Russian soldiers. So, all my good memories about graduating just disappeared I call her. She says she doesn’t want to talk. I call her the next day, she says she still doesn’t want to talk. I don’t know how to write a poem right now. Another friend calls. She was a refugee from Iraq. Her house was burned down there. She says it’s hard to talk about, that forever she’s felt silenced. I feel the need to write poetry. I cannot handle history. I don’t know how to cope other than through poetry. I had a meeting recently where I talked about what happened to us in the military. I told the woman sitting in front of me that I couldn’t talk about it for decades I’d get aphasia. I couldn’t speak. I’d want to speak, but I couldn’t speak. During those decades, I wrote poems. Not enough people read poems. Poems sometimes are the silenced trying to speak when their voice is being choked, when their words are being taken by history. Like now.
Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has around 340 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, and The New York Times. She has also had twelve previous poems inThe New Verse News.
The Trump administration laid off thousands of federal health workers, dismissing senior leaders and top scientists in a purge that outside experts and former officials said would cause an immeasurable loss of expertise. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suggested the layoffs could tame his department’s $1.8 trillion budget, but less than 1 percent of its spending goes to staff. —The New York Times, April 2, 2025
Let us raise our voices to those who think no one deserves anything they can’t afford, not water, not air, not dirt.
Let us raise our voices to those who think the only good trapeze act is one performed with no net, one with danger, real risk of possible disaster to focus the performance.
Let us raise our voices to those who think we weaken ourselves, our community, our country by subsidizing the refugee, the halt, the blind, the ill, the poor and their children, and farmers.
Let us raise our voices to those who think the egregiously wealthy need shelters and protections, need tax breaks and subsidies, too, who think their wealth will trickle down, a golden shower on the poor.
Let us raise our voices to those who think that only the fittest should survive, who really think that God gives to each what they have earned, who think they know the will of God and understand the covenant of just desserts.
Let us raise our voices.
Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, TheNew Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) will come out in 2025. He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.
So he called you a toilet, you called him a turd you could flush. You talked so fast the court reporter couldn’t keep up. You were made out to be rough, a body made for rough treatment. Then you proved a slut is a spy in the world of men, a refugee who threads the mountain pass through snow, barefoot. She wears the veil turned inside out to expose its scarlet lining, floats her soul upon the ceiling. She is smart as the whip he asks her to use on his sorry ass, his little-boy mouth. She is his punisher, he her power. They are connected by a belt of gold in a tug-of-war, an umbilical cord of blood smeared to dry on paper. And you weren’t meant to be funny but couldn’t be stopped when he and the law were served official notice of your humor.
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Live Encounters, Notre Dame Review, Forge, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and in anthologies including Support Ukraine, Grabbed, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She works in a company that slows the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate.
Bisan, a Palestinian journalist popped into my Facebook feed
one morning during this latest Mideast roil,
her fresh, round face full of promise
her troubled brown eyes alert as she posted
cell phone videos of the wreckage of Palestine, the slaughter of the people.
The videos are raw, wound the eyes, sear the soul.
She posts each time she must flee, relocate,
so many displacements now she’s lost count.
One day she shows us her favorite flower
the passionate poppy, Hannoun, red, alive
pushing forth in the spring air,
another day she videos a small boy selling homemade potato chips.
“Delicious, tasty!” she says, almost smiling,
boys flying kites on the beach behind her.
These moments are her sustenance
as she shares pictures of her home in the Gaza ruins,
a video of the day a bomb at Al-Shifa hospital just missed her
by two minutes,
her refugee life in Rafah,
stories of others spit out by this war
hundreds of thousands with no safe place to go,
their way home stalled, like the peace talks.
Bisan is 27.
She is forthright, emotional, outraged,
bewildered.
She wonders, "Where is help? Why is this allowed to go on?"
Seven months now.
She looks into the phone’s lens. Begs, “Don’t get used to
what is happening in Gaza!”
She is searching for rationality, for assistance.
I will keep searching for her,
pray she can send more videos of children flying their kites,
sending up wishes,
pray that those wishes get answered.
Karen Warinskyis the author of three collections: Gold in Autumn (2020), Sunrise Ruby (2022 Human Error Publishing), and Dining with War (2023 Alien Buddha Press); a former finalist of the Montreal International Poetry Contest; a Best of the Net nominee; and runs Poets at Large.
On May 20, Dmytro Kozatskyi, a soldier of the #Azov Regiment posted his photos of the defenders of #Mariupol, calling on the world media and those who can help to distribute them. "Well, that's all. Thank you for the shelter; Azovstal is the place of my death and life. See you".
I.
I hear the drums of war banging
as recruits shoulder their weapons,
while merchants of arms pray
half-heartedly for peace knowing
money is to be made
off the mayhem and suffering.
II.
Somewhere safe and hidden,
a barely 19 year old guides
a drone capturing images
of hospitals, schools, that
will soon smolder with
the aftermath of airborne
mechanized chaos...silently
he offers a prayer for the living
and soon to be dead.
III.
Mother with teething child,
walker propelled grandparent,
and shivering family dog
board a train that chugs
its way to the western border,
rails singing "pray with me,
pray with me."
IV.
Someday, when bodies
are counted, refugees
and soldiers hobble home,
there'll be an annual day
of remembrance of victory
and defeat, speeches made,
loved ones honored,
as the priest asks
the assembled to bow
their heads and pray.
Peter Witt lives in Texas. His poetry has appeared in a variety of online and print publications.
Marilyn Peretti from near Chicago has been published in various journals over the years, including The New Verse News, Kyoto Journal, Gray Sparrow Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Highland Park Poetry, Snowy Egret. Her most recent book is Behind the Mask in 2020... 2021... .
Joe Biden and Major in 2018, at the Delaware Humane Association. Credit: Stephanie Gomez/Delaware Humane Association, via Associated Press and The New York Times.
the White House
announces
its first-ever
pound puppy
and I
wonder
if this
proclamation
is an
indication
of more
major
changes to
come—
that our
president
has himself
declared,
on America’s
behalf,
‘we will
shelter
every kind
refugee
seeking a
shepherd.’
Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum is a writer and teacher from Wasilla, Alaska. She has published several books through her company, Red Sweater Press, and has work featured in Alaska Women Speak, The Daily Drunk, The Ekphrastic Review, and Verse-Virtual, among others. She currently serves as the Mat-Su Vice President of Alaska Writers Guild.
and buy their baby plants instead, planted in plastic
Cages but at least they’re sturdy, survivable.
Most have small, hopeful flowers already laughing
and practicing their dance moves in the light wind.
Bearing flowers, doesn’t that mean they’ve come of age?
I’m told to pick off the early blooms to make the plant stronger.
I can be tough but I can’t manage that.
This year is different.
Out of two packs of seeds, a dozen nasturtium and cosmos
have come up. A dozen all together. A small victory.
I’ll wait out the nursery and nurse these seedlings
with their too thin stems, frail, spindly,
roots thin as cobweb strands unable to soak up
the water I’ve poured with too generous a hand.
This morning when I roll up the shades to let in the sun,
a mushroom stands upright it the pot,
its thin stem strong enough to hold its gill upright.
Gray, with a perfect helmet head, erect posture, a soldier
Standing his ground. I can’t allow it. It speaks of decay,
ruin, dank. The seedlings are impervious and lean into the sun.
I should be like them, happy with their square inch,
no begrudging or fear of encroachment. Instead,
I look for a plastic spoon to dig out, to disembody.
But I don’t go through with it. It’s not me to determine
Who will live and who will die.
Karen Mandell’s short story “Goddess of Mercy” is forthcoming from Notre Dame Review. She has written Clicking, interconnected short stories, and Rose Has a New Walker, a book of poetry. She has taught writing at the high school and college levels and literature at community senior centers.
Last night a woman crossed the Southern border—
heat haze and scrub, to armed men with blank faces
and rumors of a presidential order.
She had a baby with her who adored her
and sang him lullabies of safer spaces
last night. This woman crossed the Southern border
leaving her town of ruin and disorder
because she trusted others knew what grace is,
and hadn't heard the presidential order.
She didn't fear the men who came toward her,
explaining she would be one of their cases
last night. This woman crossed the Southern border
and begged asylum. First, the men ignored her,
then warned the women to stay in their places
while they enforced the presidential order.
No mi hijo! the refugee implored, her
stricken mind confused by legal phrases.
Last night a mother crossed our Southern border.
We took her son by presidential order.
Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her new collection Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection Sisters & Courtesansis available from White Violet Press.
As if no one notices yet. Falling in places, with
Brexit like a planet aligning as the latest. As if
Coincidence is still the most observable. No
Doors for fleers from carnage, no asylums for
Escapers. They’d rather say no and risk Europe’s
Fragmentation than be part of the solution, the
Greatest refugee crisis as if orbiting, our only
Home heating up like the fever of nationalism.
In my country Human Rights will be hanged, extra-
judicial exclusivity for the poor and powerless. We
Keep divining stars as mankind, rising among us
Leaders with iron hands, lifted to power as
Messiahs, Impunity summarily executing, murder
Negating the promised change, whim from
One man the only law. In the land of the free, where
Power is Jupiter, the worst of human nature
Quickly gains followers. In the home of the brave,
Return to a Dark Age cheers a Demagogue. It will
Shock me if, with this planetary pattern, the
Truest Racist won’t be enthroned in November.
Understand – not underestimate – The Cosmic
Verity, Which (or Who) guarantees The Karmic
Whirligig. Mars should perhaps be walled for
Xenophobes, our nostalgia for the strongman rule
Yoked to our willingness, history with the same
Zeal as the Universe granting our careful wishes
Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, The Philippines. A number of his poems have previously appeared on TheNewVerse.News.
And raise a clone.
We might dictate
Morals of old
But none do hold,
The messiah
Willing to pry a life
From the mouth
Of god.
I gaze at
My bloody feet,
The dust, having wandered
The desert,
A rueful act.
One traitor equals
One billion
With minds set
To explode or be
Appeased.
Holding a shadow
Should be
A harrowing thing,
To feel the body
There, only to witness
The darkness.
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.
A Kalamazoo woman facing a deportation to war torn Nigeria breathed a sigh of relief Monday as immigration officials decided to extend her order of supervision until May 4, 2016. The hearing in Detroit was the last chance for Rejoice Musa and Frederick, her 3 year old, American-born son. She had exhausted every other appeal to stay in the country, but this time came with the names of hundreds of people who signed a petition over the weekend and the support of Michigan Senators Peters and Stabenow. Now Musa will wait with millions of other undocumented parents in the US as the Supreme Court rules on the President’s action to help immigrants in her position. —Michigan United, Nov. 24, 2015
Suppose
that Rejoice didn’t have an electronic tether slapped on
by immigration agents whose best advice was to get married
and prevent deportation to Nigeria.
Her family’s arms are not open to her.
What if
three-year-old son Frederick born out of wedlock wasn’t a US citizen.
Nothing about him resembles “anchor baby.”
This gregarious child loved by all carries a death sentence.
Mother’s indiscretion and Western education are condemned.
And
that Rejoice wasn’t admitted to a graduate aviation program
that she didn’t have family-supporting employment
that the job anticipated through her high-ranking uncle now comes
with a calling card from Boko Haram’s midnight murder squads.
Suppose
that she wasn’t trying to abide by US law pleading for asylum.
Now she must report for detention and deportation
rampant under US policy she’s dispassionately told.
Tonight she sits with a bottle of Tylenol wondering is this is an answer.
Consider
that tomorrow she might approach a casual acquaintance
with a marriage proposal. Please, she will beg, I’ll support you.
Yes, I am using you. You can use me.
So contrary to her Christian faith.
Suppose
that she would be successful in saving their lives,
that her birth name is prophetic,
that their future could mean joy.
Just suppose.
Carolyn Dack Maki is a resident of Southwest Michigan. A retired speech/language pathologist she is passionate about politics and public discourse. She studies poetry at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art.
A Syrian boy stands with food he collected from tables after Turkish people break their fasting on July 4, 2014, at Taksim square during the holy month of Ramadan in Istanbul. AFP Photo via Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey.
He tossed and turned, shifted and twisted, and fell asleep in the sea.
Small, puffed men with slim cigars sliced up the pies of the land.
White stucco walls and red scalloped roofs. Gulls cried, hidden in the sun.
Buy this thingee. Look, it glitters. Listen, it whirrs. Buy it now.
Where are the holy? Psychics don't buy tickets for the lottery.
The current circled, hungry, patient, strong. The coils reached out.
Uniformed functionaries gather and tally the data.
He is a father. She is an aunt. Children shoot hoops in driveways.
Visions of sugar plums clot to sea weed bangled with flies.
J.B. Mulligan notes that the form of this poem is a three-part sijo, Korean in origin.
“Nearly 60 million people have been driven from their homes by war and persecution, an unprecedented global exodus that has burdened fragile countries with waves of newcomers and littered deserts and seas with the bodies of those who died trying to reach safety.” —New York Times, June 18, 2015
Their fleeing
is from these times
mired in apocalyptic struggle
spread through and by power
coated with ancient enmities and beliefs
brought up to slaughter and stagnation.
Safely sequestered, we trace the ways to today,
tracking back through old empires
and all manner of community
to rest in those imaginary ages
ruled by honored sages who left us
with stories of Tang poet-governors gathered
round wine and evening composition,
calm in the certainty of their world
and accepted sureness
of suffering and death.
Yet even they flaunted rants
on injustice of their times,
satire buried in language
which led them to exile
in far provinces.
Robert Farmer is a retired forester who lives in Cleveland and occasionally publishes poems in small journals.
I don't know who I'm betraying, my TV doesn't work,
but I must confess I saw Ed Snowden yesterday
on Chicken Street in Kabul.
It was only a glimpse
from the cracked, glaring window of a coughing taxi
near a dangling, pine-scented Quranic quote
but I'm certain it was him.
He was clutching a naked chicken over a laptop
and had the hunted look of a refugee
sort of like everyone in town
sort of like me
maybe that's why I couldn't help waving
and maybe that's why he nodded back
in the secretive, American way of those
gone to ground
and searching for a cheap hotel room
to spend the rest of your life
not going crazy in.
You've been a bad boy, Ed.
Me too, though in a less Boozy way.
So when all this toxic dust settles
which you will soon learn the UN calls "fecal matter"
let's get together at an undisclosed location and
shoot the shit.
I encourage you to let the postmodern goatee grow primitive,
and ditch those glasses. They are as deadly here as a square Humvee.
I'll teach you everything like a big brother
though you probably don't like Big Brother
call me whatever you want
I'm just another one who fell
between the new, prismatic cracks
and am searching for the old rainbow of
friendship untapped.
Rick Gray served in the Peace Corps in Kenya
and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in
Kabul. He was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie, and has an essay that will be appearing in the forthcoming book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. When not in Kabul, he lives with his wife Ghizlane and twin daughters Rania and Maria in Florida.
