The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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“The world is right to be afraid” at the mercy of a merciless wave “but we should trust AI firms.”
Can efficiency be worth what burns? With each click we approve the trade. The world is right to be afraid.
Respiring roots have been remade into cogs that sprout tendril worms but we should trust AI firms.
Self-replicating synthetic germs to mimic organic is life betrayed— the world is right to be afraid.
The industry behind this dead cascade ditches you mute with tick-box terms, but we should trust AI firms.
Our terror, the abuser smothers yet affirms dictating our faith in their charade— “the world is right to be afraid but we should trust AI firms.”
Peter Lilly is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet who grew up in Gloucestershire, England. After studying theology and working with the homeless in London, he moved to the South of France in 2014. He lives in a rural village with his wife and son, where he concentrates on writing, community development, and English teaching. He is the author of the collections A Handful of Prayers (Wipf & Stock, 2024) and An Array of Vapour (TSL Publications, 2023).
ICE Detention Center in North Carolina to Be Among Largest on East Coast: The new complex near the Virginia border signals that even as ICE has retreated from its plan to buy warehouses, the agency remains determined to increase its detention capacity. —The New York Times, July 23, 2026
“Allegory” (1948) by Ben Shahn (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX)
Tomorrow’s art, if it is to be at all stirring, will no doubt be performed upon today’s forbidden territory. —The Shape of Contentby Ben Shahn (1898-1969)
What will he paint to make the terror stop?
This red kettle bell ringer whose blotted,
stuttered
lines contoured a lifetime for social justice.
In this circuit of fatelines, it is those whose
lines
of flight crossed an administration’s line
into cruelty. To make detention so bad
they’ll want to deport. So
it’s not a formal
visit because they don’t know who he is
and artists are damned liars anyway.
Will his palimpsest of thrashing marks show
what’s behind locked doors and spirals
of barbed wire? Tiny holding cells
with insects crawling, scant food, water,
medical care or contact with family or
lawyers,
sewage bubbling up from shower drains, cold
nights that some wear socks on their arms,
other nights some in suicide surrender. With
currency of pictorial language, will he
paint
another raging, demonic chimera with flaming
mane, refusing to suckle its children,
leaving
their lifelesss bodies beneath its udder
in a heap of time-tested allegory?
Rikki Santer’s
poetry collection, Resurrection Letter was
grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize
from Lily Poetry Review Books. In 2023, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year and
currently serves as Artist-in-Residence at the Fran Ryan Center in Columbus,
Ohio and a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council. Her
fifteenth poetry collection, Could Be, was
published this spring by Sheila-Na-Gig Press.
A preliminary review by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s internal watchdog office found that Alex Pretti was shot by two federal officers after resisting arrest, but did not indicate that he brandished a weapon during the encounter, according to an email sent to Congress and reviewed by The New York Times [January 27, 2026].
We were both
ten years old,
and best friends,
the colonel’s
daughter
across the street
and I,
when he said
I think
you’re old enough
to see these
army newsreels,
from my days
back
in World War II.
Down into
the basement
we went.
Before he turned
out the lights,
we watched
as he took out
a giant reel
of sixteen millimeter
black and white film,
he fitted
to his old army
projector.
The two of us
watched in terror,
as people were
dragged from shops
and apartment
buildings,
thrown
to the ground,
and beaten.
With the same
fright in our voices,
we asked
what they
did wrong.
The colonel
stopped the film
and turned
on the lights.
What did they
do wrong,
he repeated.
Hitler—
a name
we knew barely
at a distance—
hated Jews,
he said.
The people
pictured here
were Jews.
In that quiet
fatherly tone,
I knew so well,
he looked at me
and said,
you’re Jewish,
aren’t you.
The next images,
forever fixed
in my mind,
showed mounds
of dead bodies
being bulldozed
into trenches,
at what he called
“the camps”.
A vile end,
I later thought,
for a people
doing nothing
wrong,
but approaching
their god,
in the Fuhrer’s eyes,
from the wrong
testament.
***
I can’t pick up a paper,
or see a newscast,
that doesn’t remind me—
as ICE grabs individuals
off the street,
or wades into crowds
with smoke bombs,
to break up protests—
of those images
the colonel
shared with us,
that day long ago.
We were still
too young
to understand
when he told,
how Hitler came
to control the truth
proclaimed
by print
and radio.
As truth today
seems to reincarnate
with each sunrise,
the colonel’s films
begin to feel
eerily familiar.
Have America’s
once welcome
immigrants,
incarcerated now
at every turn,
I ask myself,
become
yesterday’s
vilified Jews,
our government
more Hitlerian
by the hour?
And more
terrifying?
Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, and others here and abroad. His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored over 290 poems, published on four continents.
AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.
My assignment—oranges and limes—As much or as little as you’re able to bring—the emailed instructions specified. Food and supplies collected for people afraid to leave their homes during the ICE invasion of Minnesota. Operation Metro Surge. Thousands of uniformed, masked agents carrying weapons—now a common sight on the streets of my city. Agents of fear acting erratically. Lying in face of facts. Spreading terror and chaos across my State—land of ten thousand lakes, surging rivers, roaring waterfalls. In the church parking lot, volunteers load carts—boxes of diapers, canned goods, packaged products and produce. A middle-aged man wheels a cart to the side of my car. I pull out two large reusable bags, empty contents. Five, six pound bags of oranges, five, three pound bags of limes. Small offering considering—68, 400 people, rounded and roughed up, interrogated, arrested. In the name of searching for illegal, criminal aliens, citizens and legal residents—seized—two Americans murdered by ICE agents. Their real agenda—to breed uncertainly, fear, and chaos. Every little bit counts my friend tells me. I’m desperate today to believe in something. Has the produce I dropped off reached its destinations? During this unfathomable crisis, is someone, somewhere being nourished?
Dusk display—turkey vulture
soars, swoops down. Curved beak
grasps carcass, carries rat skyward.
Miriam Weinstein completed a two year apprenticeship program at the Loft Literary Center in 2013. She has two chapbooks published by Finishing Line Press: Twenty Ways of Looking and How to Thread a Needle. Her poems are in several anthologies and journals including A 21st Century Plague, Rocked by the Waters, Poems of Hope and Reassurance, The Heart of All That Is, Survivor Lit, The New Verse News, Plum Tree Tavern, Vita Brevis Press, St. Paul Almanac, and American Jewish World. Her manuscript Here. Between. Beyond. was a finalist for the Concrete Wolf Press Louis Award. Miriam Weinstein is an avid birdwatcher and environmentalist. She lives in Minneapolis, MN.
Pointing finger jabbing at the air knees pumping agitated body up and down jerking, frenzied feet stomping commanding follow the line of the arm a furious digit directing to the target.
Growling desperate to deflect attention from the real locus of terror, anger rooted in fear.
Weak eyes follow the trajectory of missiles, while courageous eyes remain fixed on the one intent on causing pain and mass casualty.
What fearless soul will step into the path holding a mirror returning the pointing finger to its rightful owner?
Ellen D.B. Riggle is an award- and prize-winning author and educator. Their essays and poems appear in numerous publications; their essay about their gay great-grandfather was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Does it Have Pockets. They are also author of over 100 academic articles and five non-fiction and fiction books, and executive producer of the short documentary “Becoming Myself: Positive Trans & Nonbinary Identities.”
A cancer-ridden toddler and his mother disappear. The video follows the mother, struggling to free her child from the chains that bind them to “others,” to the brutal and inhumane soldiers, deaf to sorrow, prodding them toward a military plane, after searching naked bodies with naked hatred as prodding guns torture the nameless, bent and broken, then pack them in tortured positions, until the engines roar, the plane lifts, and America disappears. Activists march in the streets, carrying signs of protest, searching, their eyes and ears alert to the danger of their neighbors. Children and strangers in their midst, yet unaware of pain and sorrow, might be kidnapped, handcuffed, and thrown into cars with “others.” As if on cue, masked men swoop down upon “others,” targets of skin and color, a mother and three daughters, tortured by HSI in their own home, left with smashed lives of fear and sorrow, shivering in their underwear, in the rain, until the men with guns disappear, leaving terror, and trauma cut with razor blades, on the backs of children looking for meaning in sleep, and awaken to desperate searching. Is there no end to a life whose desperate searching leaves scars and barriers to block all “others,” grieving as ICE hunts men, women, and children.? The loss of deported loved ones enduring torture affects human beings who mourn their disappearance, and pursue justice in community and legal searches.? Today, a Vermont man was not deported. Released from sorrow, returning to his community which made, rehearsed, and researched plans to release him, they acted to assure his reappearance. Hope returns with him, to all of us in helping “others” escape the lawlessness of criminals in their acts of torturing “Illegal aliens”, the name given to adults and innocent children. How much longer can children endure grief, sorrow, and torture? Who will name these children? Why are they the “others”? Has justice disappeared?
Lucille Gang Shulklapper is the published author of five chapbooks of poetry, short stories, and picture books. Her work appears in journals, magazines, and online. She has taught reading from K-college, made recordings for the blind, and led workshops for The Florida Center for the Book, and others. Though she wrote from the age of six, she was never published until the age of 60. Three decades later, she has started an Open Mic Poetry Program for her residential, and assisted living fellow retirees. She lives in Boca Raton, Florida.
Waiting for rations from an outdoor kitchen in Khan Younis this month. Hunger is now most acute in the southern Gaza Strip.
Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times, May 24, 2024Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The NewYork Times, May 24, 2024
The language you speak has soured, become melancholy, chokes eyelids. Its tendrils lay flaying in dusty streets near occupation crossings in the gated night. Your eyes have grown sallow, as your children's stomachs distended, swollen, as you swat flies from their brow. The streets are your anguish, running, forever running from apartment home to tent back to bombed out abode. Hope was sapped with the last morsel of cat food, finished for yesterday’s only meal, while the powerful stick their blindfolded, deaf eyes deep into the sand, purchasing bulldozers to roll over you. You now avoid aid trucks, should they ever appear out of shackled nothingness, to avoid getting gunned down by those fighting terror.
As a prolific author from the Boston area, Peter F. Crowley writes in various forms, including short fiction, op-eds, poetry and academic essays. His writing can be found in 34th Parallel,Pif Magazine, Galway Review, Digging the Fat, Adelaide’s Short Story and Poetry Award anthologies (finalist in both) and The Opiate. He is the author of the poetry books Those Who Hold Up the Earth and Empire’s End, and the short fiction collection That Night and Other Stories.
