WORLD CUP BUTTERFLY

by Indran Amirthanayagam 

AI animation by Nightcafé for The New Verse News

Yes, this is a poem dribbled, crossed, headed, corner and free kicked

This is the beginning of the month that will never equal any other

period in time: The World Cup in North America, in Mexico

with families gathering to ask for news of loved ones disappeared, 

to ask for electricity, to ask for justice and to ask for tickets;

In Canada, all quiet for the moment, a tranquil backwater, a pause 

between acts.  But over there in the Great Bearish United States,

denying entry to a Somali referee, claiming an official Iraqi photographer

has ties to terrorists, and eleven US cities handed extra costs by FIFA,  

excluded from sponsorships that compete with FIFA contracts, 

and local taxes  removed from ticket prices. As the saying goes, 

FIFA takes  the loot and host cities are left  holding what? 

A bunch of memories, some extra grass in stadiums, and something 

more ineffable,  beautiful: pride in hosting teams from far away lands 

in our corner of the planet, spinning the web to capture the butterfly, 

not a bad use of taxes to be left holding the woven bag.

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

THE DYING BREATH

by Rose Mary Boehm

In a new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the dying breaths of the star at the heart of the famous Helix Nebula are exposed in wonder and radiance. —Good News Network. Photo: NASA, January 20, 2026

 

"As above, so below," the famous aphorism by a mythical teacher and a mythical text. 

In the Emerald Tablet the ancients already knew about the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm. So, as a star dies and we see its dying breath pushing outward like a cloud of seeds to form new stars when their time has come, so the humble dandelion’s delicate umbrella-equipped seeds go with the wind to settle on another meadow and become new dandelions when their time has come, the spiders die soon after producing their egg sacs, and the spiderlings disperse into the world by ballooning: using the breeze and sometimes atmospheric electric fields to travel far, settling, mating, and laying egg sacs when their time has come.

 

"As above, so below"—instead of neurons sending electrical signals through axons, stars use magnetic field lines. Trees connect through the complex mycelia network, and we have more than 86 billion neurons in the brain, and a more or less equal number of other cells. Neurons and neurotransmitters are our mycelia. 

 

When my grandfather died, I saw a small silver cloud leaving his open mouth.

 
A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her work has been widely published mostly by US poetry journals. A new full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026.

LETHALITY

by Nan Meneely

His father taught him how to enclose a spider
so gently in tissues he can carry it live from his room
to a better place outdoors.
 
He grieves when a chipmunk lies mid-road, 
as exquisite as alive, forepaws stretched 
toward the brambly green safety ahead.
 
Knowing he might be too soft, he signs
with the Army to muscle up. But he didn’t bargain
for lethal, a word the recruiters never said.
 
He’s as certain of this as anything:
if he killed those named his enemies—
Venezuelans in fishing boats oceans away,
 
brown men working shop floor or field for minimum wage,
protesters armed with sandwiches shouting truth
to power, Somali immigrants fleeing hate—
 
he would kill the important part of himself,
the part he would fight for in anyone else.

Author's Note: This matter matters to me. My father, a doctor with the 10th Mountain Division in WWII, joined up enthusiastically but came home with a hatred of war and what we now know as PTSD. Eventually he killed himself. So Hegseth's lethality can be lethal in too many ways. 

Nan Meneely’s first book Letter from Italy, 1944 (Antrim House) was noted by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books by Connecticut writers in 2013. It provided the libretto for an oratorio of the same name, composed by Sarah Meneely-Kyder and performed twice by Connecticut choruses and symphony orchestras. Her second book Simple Absence (Antrim House) was nominated for The National Book Award and placed as a grand prize finalist in The Next Generation Indie Awards and the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award. She has been published and rejected by The New Verse News.

FIVE MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION

by Rachel Landrum Crumble

It’s easy to pull weeds from damp soil, 
to power down my front steps and break
a spider’s web and not know the little guy
is hanging on me like a kid grasping 
a kite string, trying not to blow away
on a windy day. 

My point is: we should have done more,
sooner. The weeds have taken over,
yet we topple lesser kingdoms without knowing
by just walking around in the world.

In one neighbor’s house, the TV news
frets the play-by-play of a trial
that’s just concluded. In another house,
the camera’s eye bears witness to the same event, 
except the one on trial is the opposing party.
We have fashioned the media into our own ugly image. 

Truth is on trial, and must sequester
for the duration. We can’t remember whether or not
this is standard fare. We gulp the wind from giant goblets,
still parched. We are too discombobulated to know
we are lost. 

Let’s huddle together. Let’s find communion.
Sure, the wafer is thin and tasteless, but it symbolizes
something we can’t do for ourselves.

Rachel Landrum Crumble retired from twenty years of teaching high school, having previously taught kindergarten through college. She has published in The Porterhouse Review, Typishly, among others, and recently Poetry Breakfast, Humans of the World, and forthcoming in Euphony Journal. Her first poetry collection, Sister Sorrow, was published by Finishing Line Press in January 2022. She lives with her husband of 43 years, a jazz drummer, and near 2 of their 3 adult children, and two adorable grand twins with another on the way.

KINESIS

by Andrés Castro

For Julian Assange

Under a falling red sun, 

     in the stench of decomposing

leaves and muddy 

dark earth,

     He turns over a stone. See!

     Circling white centipede—

Dancing black spider—

     Tangle of worms

 scrambling.

 

Andrés Castro, a PEN member, is listed in the Directory of Poets and Writers. His work appears in the recently released anthology We are Antifa: Expressions Against Fascism, Racism and Police Violence in The United States and Beyond and he keeps a personal blog, The Practicing Poet: Dialogue to Creativity, Poetry, and Liberation. 

PERSPECTIVE

by José A. Alcántara

The bud, newly broken,
does not care.

The virus, freely spreading,
does not care.

Each of them opens
into blossom,

trying to replicate,
as we do.

What is crisis to us,
is to them being.

The black spider
on the pale rock

hunts for blood.
That is what it does.

José A. Alcántara lives in Western Colorado. He has worked as a bookseller, mailman, commercial fisherman, baker, carpenter, studio photographer, door-to-door salesman, and math teacher. His poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Rattle, and the anthologies, 99 Poems for the 99%, and America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience.

SPIDER CAUGHT IN THE ASH WEB

by Tricia Knoll

Image source: Hiveminer

Ash flakes into the new fall spider’s web
on the corn stalks. Wind ferried specks
from the wildfires raging on the cliffs,
smoke hazard on the east-west freeway,
a breathing caution. Ash on the rose petals,
fading ones facing diminishing blooms.

The Dreamers’ frail web tears,
dragged down under ash, victim
of fires hundreds of miles away.
An urge to struggle free of this
drift acknowledges the flames
of hope that kindled the work,
the time of learning to weather
seasons, grow up in storms,
and pursue the road of their lives.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet watching the ashes of burning trees fall on Portland, Oregon. Ash coating the garden flowers, tomato plants, mucking up windshields. At the same time, the news on DACA and its impact on hundreds of thousands of young people seems overwhelming.

TRAP DOOR SPIDER

by Devon Balwit

Image: windowlicker by M0L0D0Y at Deviant Art

Distraught at the news of machetes and truck bombs,
shooters and hostage-takers, scrolling through death tolls,

searching out agency, this man mutters, kill them all,
mutters round them up.  He curses and bangs, yet

flees the first splash of film carnage, protests I am too
tender, faints at the needle tugging blood.  He looks

no different than any other man, sleeps with his feet
tucked beneath his dog, goes any distance for a friend,

caresses his wife, hugs his children.  He’s a man as
ordinary as the leaf litter around the den of a trapdoor

spider, but trespass there, even lightly, and out he snaps.
What darkness in him awaits its trigger, what holds him,

palps at the ready?  He swears it isn’t bluster, but I
deny it, hoping that the humanness of his prey would

disarm him, that compassion would leave him hungry.
Surely, the cunning of his design was not made for this.

Devon Balwit wears many hats in Portland, Oregon.  Her poetry does likewise. Some homes it has found: TheNewVerse.News, Leveler, drylandlit, Birds Piled Loosely, The Fog Machine, The Fem, Dying Dahlia Review, The Yellow Chair, The Cape Rock, The Prick of the Spindle, Of(f) Course, txt objx, and 3 Elements.

TO THE SPIDER

by Jonel Abellanosa






              For Edward Snowden


In our culture of constantly buying
evolving fear greed for control sells,
you’ve been demonized.
Who doesn’t imagine
the searing bite, the poison?
Whose skin doesn’t bristle
at your absent tiptoes?
I’m in time to watch
you weave your mandala’s
inner circles counterclockwise.
You’ve more to share:
not to overreach,
to take only what strays
in your space,
to listen only to your surroundings.
As you still,
the peace-laureled dictator’s
lies echo:
More innocent men, women, children dying
as unmanned aerial warfare
perfecting technology
and doctrine won’t drone
as pesky mosquitoes into your web.

 
Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, the Philippines.  His poetry is forthcoming in Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature, Anglican Theological Review, the PEN Peace Mindanao anthology, Dirtcakes journal, and has appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Qarrtsiluni, Red River Review, Fox Chase Review, Burning Word, Barefoot Review, Philippines Free Press and Philippine Graphic magazine.