THIS YEAR, WE MARCH ON MY BIRTHDAY

by Ann E. Wallace

I was born in a springtime blizzard. 

     I know to expect storms that run roughshod 

over delicate crocuses poking their stubby 

 

buds from the hard, freeze-weary earth. 

     I read the news each day—of men trafficking 

in children with bluster and impunity,

 

of blue butterfly girls detained in cells, 

    out of sight, where they learn to withstand 

the cold sting of humanity’s turned back 

 

and our leaders’ smug shrugged shoulders. 

    This is the way winter is, they say. 

But seasons change. And I know, 

 

in my small, weathered body, we are built 

   to stand up to gales and thunder, to the old 

guard of winter’s flailing bravado.

These storms, we will ride them out. We stretch 

   and yawn, gather force under hostile conditions. 

Today, we call forth a new season.

Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey and the author of Keeping Room(Nixes Mate, 2026), Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID's Long Haul (Kelsay Books, 2024) and Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019). You can follow her on Instagram @annwallace409.

WALKING THE DOG IN OCTOBER WITH POLICE SIRENS

by Al Ortolani

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

See how the past is not finished

here in the present

                             —WS Merwin

 

Dog, it is not a good time to run off leash.

There is an air of crises behind the wind.

 

Masked agents rip a former student from her children.

She disappears into phone calls from Guatemala. 

 

The President dumps imaginary shit from a jet fighter

and calls it humor. Tonight, 

 

there are more questions than answers.

We listen to the sirens beyond the rooftops, 

 

behind the strip malls and blinking stop lights.

The oaks gasp in the change of seasons.

 

Some nights I imagine the leaves wailing

as they lose their grip and fall.

Al Ortolani, a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, has been featured in the Writer’s Almanac, the American Life in Poetry, and Poetry Town. He’s a contributing editor to the Chiron Review. Recently, his poems have appeared in Rattle, The Midwest Quarterly, One Art, and the Pithead Chapel.

PLAY FOR THE TEAM

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

“Why Summers May Never Be the Same” The globe’s warmest months on record redefined summer for many Americans. —Julie Bosman reporting from Chicago, where it is 84 degrees in October, for The New York Times, October 5, 2023

Even though summer heat

Has stopped by to remind us

That we are living in precarious times,

Autumn is unmistakably upon us.

The light is liquid gold,

Long, lanky afternoon shadows 

Are sprawling all over 

The houses and gardens and lawns

Up and down the block,

And there is something about

The taste and smell of the air,

Something leafy and loamy 

And earthily aromatic.

Even though summer heat

Has stopped by to remind us

That we don’t have a whole lot of time left

To flip the climate narrative,

To turn the dire story on its head.

Seasons do still come and go

And will keep doing so

If we are smart enough

And brave enough

And passionate enough

And organized enough

To resist the despoilers of earth and air,

Confiscate their piggy banks,

And stick the spoiled kids back

In their play houses and their little red wagons

Until they can learn

To get with the program

And play for the team.

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s latest book is And What Will We Sing? (Kelsay Books). He podcasts at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife Cynthia in northern California.

OH, MALCONTENT CHANGING CLIMATE

by Earl J. Wilcox

All the great ones say something about it.

Poets speak of climate because it’s nearby

While they write or sleep or laugh, weep.

Snow, rain, sunshine, hail—even blustery

Tornadoes may flourish in dramatic lines.

In thrall of climate change—like poems—

our weather evolves not just by seasons

but by an hour or day, from lovely, cum

placid, toward splendid feverish havoc.

Myopic romantic writers—like climate

Naysayers-- still focus on sunshine

And blue skies, cloudless balmy days,

Like times we cherish in spring or summer.

It seems fair and realistic to believe

our climate hunches, predictions, history,

great climate-driven works of art and literature

will forever evolve as human cycles change

perhaps subdue even poets, the last and most

Changeless chroniclers of life on this planet

Await nature’s next course, whither we go.

Earl Wilcox awaits nature's next course in South Carolina. 

I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR FOR THE APOCALYPSE

by Jessica Ginting

Photo: Noah Dillon/courtesy NRDC via Fast Company

There is something terrifying about reaching the end of a season
in this age of climate change.

Perhaps this will be the last time it will be like this
and every coming year will be the first time again.

How do we recall moments, or periods, in time without patterns?
Our tapestry needs to be redone, reworked
into a garment fit for wear; our seasonal clothes, replaced
with a wardrobe organized by survival needs.

A coat for the snowstorm, scarves for the haze, hard hats for the quakes,
sturdy boots for the floods & fashionable oxygen masks
for when we’re really at the end of all available seasons.

There is something terrifying about reaching the end of this season,
and not knowing what to wear for the next one.

Jessica Ginting, a writer from Jakarta currently residing in London, has completed a Master's degree in Publishing. Her poetry has been published in Anak Sastra, a South East Asian literary magazine, as well as other publications such as The Bristol Poetry Anthology 2018 and That's What She Said Magazine. Her debut poetry collection Moon Petals was launched at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali in 2017. She is also the writer and creator of the Indonesian superhero comic,  ROSANA!

I VOTED TODAY

by Kathy Conway

Walked wearily to the polling place at town hall
ignoring the peak foliage bursting color
in every direction on a fall day here in southern
New England.

I returned home on a street lush with trees -
maples, birches, elms, chestnuts, sumacs.
Windy yesterday yet warm and drizzling today,
I tread on a magic carpet of leafy shapes and colors.

Bright yellow birch leaves cover the sidewalk,
gradually changing to intense reds, then amber,
deep gold and rust.  I strolled wet-faced beneath trees
hanging heavily with colorful offerings.

Looking up, awed by a crimson Japanese Maple,
wet-black limbs foil to the beauty of its ruby red -
a canopy fit for a bride or a queen.  And I remembered that
change is the only constant; that this too shall pass.

The seasons come, go; heat and cold begetting
winter snow, spring green, summer blossoms, fall stipples.
Buoyed by the brilliance and brisk walk, I return hopeful that
my fellow Americans vote to effect change.

Kathy Conway splits her time between a cottage on the coast of Maine and her home outside of Boston. She's taught memoir poetry in Maine and Florida. Besides her chapbook Bacon Street about growing up in a large family, she has poems in themed collaborations.

FOR MATTHEW SHEPARD

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

On October 26, 2018 at 10:00 am Washington National Cathedral hosts a Service of Thanksgiving and Remembrance for Matthew Shepard, whose brutal death in 1998 shocked the world, grieved the Church and mobilized the LGBTQ movement. The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, and the Right Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man elected a bishop in The Episcopal Church, will preside. The service is free and open to the public, and passes are not required. Following the public service, the Shepard family will attend private interment service in the Cathedral crypt. Watch live online: https://youtu.be/FSXtHMXuaPI

                                finally 
                                     you will rest
                after the weight of some twenty years
                                     as God’s light scatters color
                through hallowed glass
                  within the cycle of other calendared events
                future festivals will frame your ashes
                liturgy will celebrate each change of season
                morning prayer and even song will hinge the hours . . .
                from now on
                                     how many visitors will walk among the silences
                          and finding your name     will pause to remember your life,
                                    your costly pain
                and death
                with its unanswerable why
                                     yet    under its ashen skin
                                     there still pulses that fragile thing we call hope . . .
                          matthew
                                     today this sacred space welcomes you home

Sister Lou Ella Hickman is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and TheNewVerse.News as well as in the anthologies The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannnan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recover for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. Last year she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published by Press 53 in 2015.

THE WRECKED SEASON

by George Held

Florence left a trail of flooded roads, broken trees and downed power lines across Leland, N.C. (Ken Blevins/The Star-News via AP via The Washington Post)

              As I walked down to Rotten Lake I remembered
              the wrecked season, haunted by plans of salvage…
                             —Muriel Rukeyser, “First Elegy. Rotten Lake”


Snow & cold in the Northeast
Show your breath on May Day;
This spring will be short –
A wrecked season.

Every rare warm day overwelcomed
As halcyon, a resurrection,
Citizens worshiping the sun
Bare legs & shoulders to welcome warmth.

No one mentions the global warming
Behind each wrecked season,
& few foresee the advent
Of a wrecked planet,

Its seawalls overtopped, lowlands swamped,
Sea wrack & sea foam decorating
Flooded floors & warped siding,
A civilization sliding by on mud.

Cry, the beloved Earth
& cry, the drenched citizens;
Leave your belongings behind:
Flee upland or drown.

George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, writes from New York. His twentieth collection is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle, 2017). Under the Escalator, his dark fantasy for children, will be released later this month.

DONALD TRUMP, KATE MCKINNON, LEONARD COHEN

by Jaimee Hills





Are people safe? You've struck a chord
as we become an angry horde.
Appreciate the optics, now you’ve stopped her.
With painted signs, they chant, they sing,
the minor crowd, assembling,
as cloudy skies compose a helicopter.

A vote inside a vote machine
meaningless but for what it could mean
felt like gambling in a bankrupted casino.
The votes rolled in, in waves like water;
the careless don’t care about my daughter,
heat rising like the shock of jalapeño.

Though someone else's dream is you,
dream on we do, dream on we do,
hardy as the gardens of Pompeiians.
The flowers find the seasons strange,
there’s a changing to their change,
squalled shorelines and the stooping Himalayans.

It’s not illegal just to breathe.
We’ve always struggled. Always seethe.
It feels the wind is howling, blowing through you.
Within the ocean's current form
a shifting rage, a stirring storm,
the bitter burning tongue of Hallelujah.


Jaimee Hills is the author of How to Avoid Speaking, winner of the 2014 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She has been a featured reader in the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She teaches at Marquette University and lives in Milwaukee, WI.

MS. D AND THE FINAL THREE

by Lee Patton

She’s alone as usual at the far table in the teachers’ lunch room--
I stall, holding my tray, wondering if today will be the day
I join Ms. D, but Cheryl Sitkow groans at the rain-snow mix
through the staff room window, hoping to lure me into her tale.
“Reminds me of this time last year, Spring break, when we took
our kids to Poland.  Mist and fog and chilly rain every day.
We could barely tell the cathedrals of Krakow from the barracks
at Auschwitz, honestly.  All a gray blur. The kids were so bored.
My sisters kept asking if we could abandon the tour
and catch a  southbound train to the Riviera beaches.”

“What you get, Sitkow, trying to have an educational vacation,”
says Gary Schmidt, brown-bagging it with the other guys from PE.
“Geez, you’re such a history nerd.”  Gary turns to suffer
over his brackets, ratcheting down his hopes for the Final Four.
“If Kentucky doesn’t do any better next time, I’m personally flying
over there to kick their bluegrass asses.  That goes double
for my brother, who’s got double the money on the semi-finals.”

Fawn Lopez, the new Spanish teacher, joins Cheryl, despondent
at the window.  “My grandma says all this moisture means one thing.
Lawns to mow. Weeds to pluck.  Mud.  Can we put a stop to spring?”

Que lastima, I mutter, moving past. I bring my lunch tray to Ms. D’s
vicinity.  She smiles her slow, sad smile, nodding toward a chair.
 “I know why you avoid us, Ms. D,” I say, “all we do is kvetch.”

“It’s not so bad,” she says. “We’re all just stressed, blowing steam.
What about you?  Do you have grand plans for Spring Break?”

“Family stuff,” I sigh. “My cousins and I are driving my godmother
to Palm Springs to escape the rain.  Not real exciting, I’m afraid.”

“Sounds nice,” says Ms. D.  “Maybe you and your cousins can party
while she’s asleep.  And the desert sun is going to be heavenly.”
I warm up, dreaming about the margaritas we plan to blend
the minute we get there.  Then I ask her what she’d be up to.
“I’ll just stay close by my folks, as usual.”  I ask why, stunned
when she opens up to me at last.  She didn’t really have any one
besides her parents. No siblings, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles.
No grandparents.  “Just we three.”  Her folks, she says, were still babies
when they were hatched in separate camps, the only survivors
hung on each family tree. “A relief program brought them
to the States.  All they had were each other, and then me.”  

I remember all the times I’d seen Ms. D staring out, days
like this, to these chilly drizzles that follow blitzkrieg blizzards,
when March cedes to April’s peace, days the earth seems to yearn
for a treaty. She barely touches the Tuna Surprise on her cafeteria tray.
Granting her abashed smiles and polite hellos to us, drifted
to the farthest corner, Ms. D always abides the nearby noise,
this endless griping about all of our gifts.

Lee Patton, a Denverite, writes fiction, poetry, drama and commentary.   Quarterlies that have published his work include Best New Writing 2012, The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The California Quarterly,  Poetry Quarterly, Ellipsis, Hawaii-Pacific Review, Adirondack Review and Memoir Journal. His third novel, My Aim Is True, was launched in 2015 from Dreamspinner Press.

SUMMER'S HEAT

by F.I. Goldhaber

Pele. Image source: Dragons Faeries Elves & the Unseen

In the Pacific Northwest we've a
love-hate relationship with the sun.
While we treasure our short summer for
blue skies and joyous celebrations,
the natives sigh with relief when Fall's
first rain brings water to thirsty plants.

Though winter skies are ever dreary,
Spring's vibrant colors compensate for
months of precipitation. Here we
know the difference between drizzles
and sprinkles, cloudbursts and showers;
applaud brief sun break appearances.

But now summers last too long. Spring rains
refuse to fall. Winter's snow pack shrinks
every year, cutting skiing time short.
Fire season starts earlier and lasts
longer, kills more firefighters, burns more
acres, and destroys more homes each year.

Perhaps we should beg Lono to cross
the ocean and join Pele whose fire
rumbles under our feet, threatening
to burst from the peaks surrounding us,
and tear asunder the land on which
we build houses and cultivate food.

Maybe if we welcome the old gods,
eschew worshiping the trinity
of money, power, and oil,
we can avoid inclusion among
the species eliminated in
the planet's sixth wave of extinction.


As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, F.I. Goldhaber produced news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now, her poems, short stories, novelettes, essays, and reviews appear in paper, electronic, and audio magazines, ezines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies.  Her newest book of poetry Subversive Verse collects poems about corporate cruelty, gender grievances, supreme shambles, political perversion, and race relations. 

BATTERS UP

by Laura Rodley

Even the translucent luna’s clock is
off, her June flight transcribed to May, the fizz
of Summer already cloning the air;
she came early to our door, here to share
the beckoning porch light with other moths
who wear green, beige and gold as altar cloths
laying their linen on wooden doorways
blessing our entrance, the very short phase
of their life a prayer for afterlife
how their subtle greens, their thin wings’ hard strife
will live on in our warm adoration
wanting to touch them at this way station,
but you can’t touch a luna’s light green wings
the dust of their being rubs off, clings.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

SLINKY – SLANKY – SLUNKY

by The Bangkok Bards Saknarin Chinayote & Charles Frederickson

Four seasons almost perfect harmony
Classic movement symphony left unfinished
Predictably never skipping its turn
Annual rejuvenated hope weeds overgrown

One eye sees the other
Feel lost touch sensually regained
Breathlessly inhaling exhaling deeply again
Awakening passionate urges lust yawning

Wondering why you were born
Celebrating revived roots coming alive
Patiently awaiting final snowflake meltdown
Spring sprang sprung tightly wound

Unmistakable scent stale dirt clumps
Seedlings poking through frostbite bitten
Prickly rosebuds arise spirit risen
Barefoot miracle right on schedule

Turning shiny countenance toward sun
Warm embrace hugging droopy lids
Faithfully planting seedpods reaps harvest
At least one more time

Pre-compressed helical spring stretching gravitation
Toying with divine levitation tension
Reforming itself under own momentum
Flowing curves regaining original shape

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .