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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic World edited by Lorette Luzajic, The Plague Papers edited by Robbi Nester, The Memory Palace, edited by Lorette Luzajic and Clare MacQueen, and recent issues of Gyroscope, 3rd Wednesday, Caustic Frolic, Inscribe, the Storyteller Review, and Verse Virtual. Her collection How to Become Invisible chronicles a bipolar journey and is now available from Kelsay Books.
No one wants to be the last woman down before the cure.
So everyone is staring at computer screens, leaning into
laptops, cradling cell phones. Legions of faithful vaccine
seekers are as determined as El Camino de Santiago pilgrims.
Or would-be buyers of Hamilton tickets back when Broadway
was still open. There are waiting lists, rumors, promises.
Appointments made, then cancelled. Lines form, disband.
Recorded messages say don’t call us, we’ll call you.
Everyone is at risk. But not enough to be advanced to more
fortunate categories. We reside in data bases far and wide.
We’ve filled out forms as if they were lottery tickets, sent
every scrap of personal data to would-be hackers around
the globe, called doctors we’ve not seen in years, even searched
for fake college IDs that might jump us to new age brackets.
Some neighbors raced to appointments in neighborhoods they
had never seen, forgetting who the odds had already disfavored.
As usual, the privileged see serendipity. Everyone else
knows how often the game is rigged. Kismet is a figment.
The carnival barker is gone but his fabrications linger
like smoke from a cheap cigar. Even as chilled vials traverse
the highways like pilgrim caravans, new viral strains mutate,
shapeshift. Before all our waiting arms are raised, half a million
will likely die. So we click and call and cry for our chance
at good fortune. Once again, Lady Luck smiles, then disappoints.
Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY. Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.
Morning greetings spill through speakers, one per room - affixed to paint chipped ceilings – Good day, All - beside a single ceiling fan - in each of our building’s fifty-three rooms. Stocked with metal chairs on rusted legs, boxes of No. 2s, and books – many Requirements, more Favorites. Ferdinand and Potter. Mice and Men and Huckleberry Finn. Rosa, Ruby Bridges, and Malala, too. Most passed down for generations of classes before. Don’t consume. Critique, Ms. B. said, as she’d stock our stacks with book swap finds. Ms. B. fought hard – her 4 feet 11 inches - alerting officials – in formations six yards wide and six feet tall - at evening school board meetings – monthly. For years. Fifteen and counting. Until the counting stopped. Teach us to fight for what’s right – through the written word, library research, and careful fact-finding.
I want to be a Teacher. And a Writer. And a Reader, Ms. B. Uncover injustice. Just like you.
Chuckling over inside jokes of hidden closets and earlier versions of ourselves from classes prior. Missing room No. 54. Did you see…? Misplaced backpacks, clear by compliance – it’s regulation. Did you hear…? Uninhabited chairs that squeak. Each room, a relic from the 1920s. Ms. B.’s magic made each home to no less than thirty-four warm bodies of all shapes and shades.
Principal – Ms. B. - shares updates on weather – cloudy with a chance of rain – isn’t it always the case? – and schedules – extended time for third period – stomachs flutter, mandated tests, extra review – Algebra, U.S. History – with Ms. B.’s extra readings, so that we learn the truth – cells away, pencils out - no options for pass-permitted bathroom breaks – I’d rather not say why.
Always closing with words – the reason I - We – all eighteen hundred plus of us, united by zip code and respect for Ms. B. – show each day and on time.
No matter what, Remember, you are loved. Ms. B.
Static. Click. Now done. Silence. A single chair squeaks. Rubber-soled shoes shuffle. Someone coughs. With nothing more to say, we do as Ms. B. would. With space between us, we write.
Adjust elastic around ears. Reset cloth masks. Watch silent tears drop. Pick up broken No. 2s.
We love you, too, Ms. B.
Rip sheets of lined paper from spiral notebook. Crumple, tight. Place in right front pocket. Wash.
For fifteen years and counting, kids like me would know the voice of kindness. Syllables streamed through pie-shaped speakers – tone of warm blueberry cobbler and savory chicken soup. In servings and portions perfect for all. Never too hot. Never too cold. Always just right.
Always Ms. B.
Until now. Last week’s Board meeting was Ms. B’s final chapter. She set down her glasses, capped her blue inked pen, and returned her key. Want only to Unlock Lives and Unleash Learning, she spoke clearly. Lose No One, she continued. No One. Through tears. Confidently. With Conviction. Just like she taught us. Want only to pile on Love.
Cannot police young bodies. Cannot risk more lives.
Microphone off. Static. Then Silence.
Good night, Ms. B. Good night, all. Jen Schneider is an educator, attorney, and writer. She lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Philadelphia. Her work appears in The Popular Culture Studies Journal, unstamatic, Zingara Poetry Review, Streetlight Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, LSE Review of Books, and other literary and scholarly journals.
I forget the name of the first boy who kissed me,
which books I read by Jane Austen during that summer
the l7-year locusts made their outbreak, the names
of most of the horses I’ve ridden except for Daisy—
the bay mare who galloped me to a win in a quarter-mile
race against a field of adolescents on dude ranch mounts.
I remember ear infections as a child with no medicines
because my parents believed in faith healing.
I remember my first polio shot at the age of 18, more
than a decade after everyone I knew had theirs.
Forgotten? The word, sir, blasphemes the dead
and those denied funerals and family mourning.
Those struggling to recover and keep family safe.
The worn out first responders and medical teams.
I fear for a grandson born in this year, a wee boy
for whom immunity is uncertain. I have staged
my will where my family can find it. I have
family who sit home from their jobs. We know
those risks for people of color from old,
old inequities, wonder why those who jobs
are critical to our survival as a people
work for minimum wage, without masks.
You may forget. At your peril and ours.
Are you counting your investments
in the medicine you hawk? Open
will not mean the way the world was.
Open will mean masks, tests, shots,
sanitizers, worry, strategies, research,
and consequences. New normal
will not forget what we have endured
and what we learn about the way
the world’s fate is tied up as one.
We have seen our Enemy.
Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet hunkered in the deep woods. Her recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry.
In the land of fake plenty
there’s a road paved with money.
If you’re something enough,
you can get on this road
but mostly you cannot.
Unless you can pull yourself up
on the straps of those boots
they stole from you.
Listen when the robot drones speak
from two sides of their mouth.
Do what you can to learn that language.
Try our six-week, no money back guaranteed language immersion experience Time is running out. Send your first-born child. Or give us your planet. We can work with you on this. Payment plans are available, but you must act now.
Each day is an equivocation
of that which they said
they did not say the day before.
Who can imagine? Look here, look there, look away, they say, And do not do what I would not do.
Or do it, at your own risk.
Advice is cheap. Money
is expensive. Walls are being built
as we speak.
The poems of Lisa Vihos have appeared in numerous journals, both print and online. Her fourth chapbook Fan Mail from Some Flounder was published by Main Street Rag Publishing in 2018. She is the poetry and arts editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal and the Sheboygan organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change.
Imagine a rabbit, running, late.
Imagine a rabbit no earlier
on the ground than under.
Alice locked out of the garden
too big, too small, never right
as much on the ground as under,
uncertain of direction,
advised only to take the road
that gets her where she wants to go,
as if she knew, either on the ground or under.
Even at tea, her place changes,
is changed, exchanged, until
she’s displaced, no rhyme nor reason
either on the ground or under.
At the queen’s command an unruly hand
of insubstantial and un-gamely subjects.
At risk anyone, everyone’s head,
no less on these grounds than under.
What time is this, what times are these,
rude, rough, incomprehensible
how a rabbit’s world surfaced,
and calm picnic grounds went under.
Alice, you just dreamed you fell and didn’t
know when, how, or where you’d stop.
Now that dream is playing out
on our ground,
not under.
Margaret Rozga is a poet, essayist, and author of a play, March On Milwaukee: A Memoir of the Open Housing Protests. Her new manuscript of poems focuses on Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902), who actively campaigned in 1856 for her husband John Charles Frémont, the first Republican candidate for president on an anti-slavery platform.
You start by just ignoring there’s a brake,
or anything that might intrude to take
your mind off never thinking how to make
a final, saving, unexpected snake-
like motion; but instead remain opaque
within your fierce intensity and stake
that rubber to the center line, forsake
eye contact, floor the monster – see them quake –
and watch it all become a piece of cake,
the coward’s headlights sure to bow and shake
because they realize it’s not a fake –
you’re in your zone, your mind is set, you ache
to see them crawl and beg to compromise.
And if they don’t? Well that’s the risk we take.
Michael Cantor’s full-length collection, Life in the Second Circle (Able Muse Press, 2012), was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry. A chapbook, The Performer, was published in 2007; his work has appeared in The Dark Horse, Measure, Raintown Review, SCR, Chimaera, The Flea, and he has won the New England Poetry Club Gretchen Warren and Erika Mumford prizes. A native New Yorker, he has lived and worked in Japan, Latin America and Europe, and presently divides his time between hurricane-threatened Plum Island, MA, and drought-threatened Santa Fe, NM.
(Reuters, February 7, 2015) - Iran's foreign minister has warned the United States that failure to agree a nuclear deal would likely herald the political demise of pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani, Iranian officials said, raising the stakes as the decade-old stand-off nears its end-game.
The card game here
Was rigged, they said
But all paid to get in
And ante up for the small blind
Or the big one
It was the Jakarta Kid
Who said
‘Watch out for whoever’s not here’
When the turbaned gentleman
Dealt the only hand
It was aces and eights
The gents in smocks guffawed
The Jakarta Kid haw-hawed
The Brussels Sprouts all shouted
But it was the turbaned gent
Who just stared
At the two pairs
In front of him
Dealt by someone behind
Who wasn’t there
There were no winners
They all went to play
Another game somewhere
Save the turbaned gentleman
Who vanished in thin air
Paul Smith lives near Chicago. He writes fiction & poetry. He likes Hemingway, really likes Bukowski, the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Kinks and Slim Harpo. He can play James Jamerson's bass solo for 'Home Cookin' by Junior Walker & the Allstars.
