WHAT DOESN’T VANISH IF DENIED

by Devon Balwit

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

Department of Commerce announces the end of $4 million in funding of climate risk projects at Princeton. —Daily Princetonian, April 9, 2025

The prevailing wisdom used to be to hide 

the ailment from the ailing and, in so euphemizing,

ease their dying, like a fringe of trees beside

the road used to mask clear-cutting.

 

But the patient, intimate with tumors and waning powers, 

knew, and felt the greater pain for all 

the smiling, for all the cheery cards and flowers,

and wondered at the falsehood, and was appalled.

 

And we, too, as we hear our current leaders

asking scholars to deny how far gone

we are so we mightn’t worry—as if our rivers

weren’t in flood or our homes burned to the lawns.

 

As if insisting there’s no such thing as gravity,

makes the times we’re living in less heavy.

Devon Balwit edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

NOT TODAY, PINKO!

by Steven Kent

"Rightwingers say 'pink-haired liberals' are killing New York pizza"

—The Guardian, 29 June 2023

A plot, a plot, a plot's afoot;

   These commies can't deny it.

They claim they want to cut down soot,

   But patriots don't buy it!

Our ovens they will never take

   And leave us in the lurch here.

Clean air's a ruse, a hoax, a fake—

  We did our own research here!

Editor’s note: Here’s what’s really happening.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer, musician, and Oxford comma enthusiast Kent Burnside. His work appears in Light, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, and OEDILF, among others.

HOW LIVING WITH A CHIPMUNK IN MY HOUSE IN WHITE RIVER JUNCTION IS LIKE LIVING WITH T***P IN THE WHITE HOUSE

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

I’m scared. Something from another world
has entered the place I thought was safe.
I am nervous every time I open
a door, feel trepidation turning
corners. I have trouble
going to sleep. I think
about taking sleeping pills
so that I don’t have to think
about the intruder—seeing him
over and over again sitting on his haunches
in front of the refrigerator,
scurrying across the wooden floors,
(lying to news reporters,
his hair fur rustled by wind).
My house seems over-
taken—I walk gently
or at times stomp
with a new anger, a new
sadness, never know
what I will see or hear.
I look down all the time,
not up at the sky or at the art
on the walls of my house
that I love to see. I research
incessantly—how can I get rid of him—
open an outside door,
so eager for him to leave,
I am open for others to enter.
I bought a Have-a-Heart trap,
because I have a heart. I bait him
with things he likes to eat,
wait for the two metal doors to clang,
imagine driving him in the back of my car
to a faraway place where he cannot
ruin a human home. Or maybe
just chuck him & his trap
in the White River, see if they’ll survive
in that water world.
But he’s still here. Somewhere.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.

LIFE AFTER THE DECREE

by William Aarnes

“I Have a List of Replacements for the CDC’s 7 Banned Words” —Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, December 15, 2017

The first weekend after the decree
that public norms and preferences
should determine what we know,
my wife and I jokingly wondered
what we should call
the life she’d been carrying
(the sonogram doesn’t show
much of anything).

That Sunday my gleeful parents
skyped to ask us to fly down
to celebrate how the country
was returning to its senses.
They were overjoyed to think
that those unwarranted Social Security
deposits could finally stop
(the wealth that Mom inherited
is just the coolest thing).

By that Wednesday I’d concluded
that my—what would be the right word?—
changeling research assistant  
had stopped coming in to work
(not that I minded,
since any fool could see
that the data we’d been collecting
on the social causes of indigence
didn’t prove a thing).

Now, on the subway, on the streets,
in the building corridors,
on TV, at the gym,
at the construction sites,
in all the classrooms,
even in the military,
everybody’s become a white heterosexual
(thank goodness my DNA test
and particularly my father’s
don’t mean a thing).


William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.