TESTtosterone

by Darcy Grabenstein 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that he is rolling out a new screening program for “testosterone deficiency” among troops, calling it necessary to allow them to operate at their “absolute best.” ...In the video, Hegseth simply refers to troops, though it appears he is talking about only testing men in uniform for hormone irregularities. AP, July 16, 2026

Pete HEgseth is proving 

that he’s a manly man, a HE-man
for he’s questioning the virility
of our men in uniform

After all, isn’t the true test of masculinity
taking advantage of under-age girls
or throwing punches in a UFC fight
or ICE goons slaughtering citizens?

Those in the good ole boys’ club
probably think that those with ‘low T’ 
would rather have high tea, pinkies raised
than shove a gun in the enemy’s face

Test for testosterone? Preposterous!

Here’s what and who we should be testing:
the IQ of our nation’s leaders
to determine whether they’re fit for office
not whether our troops are fit to serve

Excuse me. I’m about to have a fit.

A marketing writer by profession, Darcy Grabenstein turns to poetry as a creative and cathartic outlet. The theme of social (in)justice runs through many of her poems, and she longs for the day where her page will finally be blank.

THEY

by Jim Hanson

Cartoon by Ann Telnaes

They’re running it, ruining it
off the rails, in the ditch
sell the wreckage, get rich.

Truth killed, collateral causality
lies arise, as reality
deftly made, as cool aide.

Dollar inflated, debt escalated
hyper crypto, value to go
assets bereft, nothing left.

Empire today, for USA
Greenland now, Canada then
Ukraine to lose, Russia to win.

Love incarnate, just for the lust
Epstein teens, Trump playboy queens
sex for pay, with NDA.

Immigrants, detention camps
hit squads, brown shirts worn black
dream children here, sent back.

Justice ignored, polls soared
guilty of crime, no time
impeachment twice made, still stayed.

Troops march, mayors watch
cities, occupied
politics, on wrong side.

Money sought, elections bought
billionaires gave, taxes to waive
offices for sale, free from jail.

Republicans scared, of primary loss
all bow down, to the MAGA boss
funny money, from dark accounts.

Legacy seen, power absolute
pride resolute, for life to be
none than, the presidency.

Jim Hanson is a retired university researcher and sociologist who lives in the St. Louis area. He has published four poetry collections, also some thirty single poems, and is a member of the St. Louis Poetry Center and Illinois State Poetry Society Southern Chapter.

WE GET TO CHOOSE

by Cecil Morris

Art by Luis Ricardo

Many people, of course, feel America is broken. You can hear about the country’s many troubles—its ideological divides, its anger, its lack of civility—from conservatives and liberals, from socialist firebrands and evangelical preachers, from Democrats and Republicans. It is, perhaps, one of the few beliefs that unites Americans right now. So many seem to genuinely want those divides to be mended, for the country to be knitted back together. But the question of why America is broken, and who is to blame, and how to repair it? That’s where things get complicated. —Tim Sullivan, AP, September 13, 2025

In the choose-your-own-adventure America, 
you get to choose which expert to believe, 
which news source delivers the truth to eyes and ears, 
which problem needs solution and which solution 
you like best and think will work and ought, therefore, 
be funded beyond your wildest ability 
to count the cents one by one in your little life. 
So close your eyes and jump to page 47, 
the just say no, the walls and cages, the answer 
that puts ever more troops and officers and masks 
on your streets, the security of surveillance, 
of armed patrols—here, there, and everywhere. Or jump 
to page 76 and guns for everyone 
and self-defense in every hand and every home. 
Or turn to page 2021: the moment 
we decide which police we must obey 
and which we must overrun to guarantee our rights. 
Or, maybe, see what happens when we choose that page 
where we realize that schools and social services 
are less expensive than prisons or where we build 
villages of tiny homes for our veterans 
unhoused and struggling instead of casting them, 
so much chaff, to streets and parks, to make-shift tents, 
where they like dandelions can sprout in the cracks. 
Which America will we choose for our families?

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025.  He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

EVERYWHERE FRACTURED BONE/IT SEEMS

by Al Ortolani

los angeles is in the air/a few

acres of protest within five hundred 

 

miles of city/stretched/tendons

in the streets/now

 

muscled by federal policy/bent 

to hyperextension/bone

 

in socket grinding: a home

for some/a charnel house

 

for others/this America 

not the America we learned

 

to love/the disruption/

the disunity/the distemper/

 

troops in riot gear/rubber bullets

a bicep flex/

 

the fist/well-knuckled

in the face of the weak:

 

this new scapegoat of migration

is shaken in our faces/blinding us

 

to the Samaritan within:

all the while/a sleight of hand

 

finger tipping through the

streets as planned

Al Ortolani, a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. He was the recipient of the Bill Hickok Humor Award from I-70 Review. He’s a contributing editor to the Chiron Review.

CHESS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

by Claire Matturro

We ran and jumped and bounced

over monkey bars in sandy school yards

then raced inside at the bell’s

shrill scream and covered our heads

as we crouched beneath wooden

desks that smelled of crayons and

fruit punch while outside

the open jalousie windows

cardinals and mockingbirds sang

their sweet wild songs

as soulless men hid

missiles in Cuban silos and

played chess with the end of the world

but we didn’t worry

because we were seven

and our mothers stockpiled

food and juice in pantries

and our fathers turned

the TV low so not to wake us.

 

We ran and jumped and lobbed

volley balls in sandy school yards

and the slap of leather against

our hands made us laugh

while soulless men

tested nuclear bombs and

played chess with the end of the world

but we didn’t care

because we were thirteen

and besides one of us had

a left-over bomb shelter

in her broad backyard where

we once played dolls and drank

canned juices from stockpiles

hidden behind concrete and steel.

 

I no longer run or jump and

the sandy school yard is silent

with pandemic and children gone

inside and the bomb shelter

long traded for a swimming pool

and its stockpiled juices tossed

into landfills yet soulless men still

play chess with the end of the world

as troops mass at borders and

the hurricane which will find

me in my glass house

breeds silently in melting ice

and the oil keeps flowing and

the coal keeps burning and

the missiles stockpiled in places

where children hide

their heads under thin arms

guarantee the collateral damage

we’ve learned to turn away from

as cardinals and mockingbirds

go quiet in the world outside my windows.

Claire Matturro has been a journalist, a lawyer, and a legal writing teacher at Florida State University and University of Oregon. She is the author of seven novels, including a legal thriller series published by HarperCollins, and is the co-author of a recent novel. She is an associate editor at Southern Literary Review and lives in Florida.

TWENTY-ONE WORDS ON A WINDY NIGHT

by Penelope Scambly Schott

BBC Graphic January 26, 2022

Empty bird feeder

starts banging,

keeps banging

against my window.

News report:

troops at borders.

Birds and I

share bad dreams.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

ACCOUNTABILITY

by Michaela Mayer

See also yesterday’s New York Times report: “The Civilian Casualty Files.”

if you slip through the thin curtain between 

this world and another, you will see him:

Ahmadi lifting jugs of clean water to the lips

of children gulping thirstily in the Afghan

heat. not standard procedure, but then,

these things are allowed those blown to bits

by American payload. or so I like to imagine.

the real Ahmadi is red mist and sharp shards

of bone on the tarmac in Kabul, and the children

too. all we get of them are a few dark pixels

on our news sites. meanwhile, the men

whose game condemned them lean back,

hands behind heads, and acquit themselves:

a righteous strike. pay the families a few 

dollars for their grief. slaps on the back,

handshakes. America, our carnivorous country, 

feeds on remains—flesh hanging from

its ghastly mouth, and us behind our screens,

gaping at scraps wedged in its teeth—our minds

slipping back and forth between the two worlds.

Michaela Mayer (she/her) is a 26-year-old elementary school teacher and poet from Virginia. Her works have been previously published in Feral, Barren Magazine, Perhappened, Claw & Blossom, and others. She has forthcoming poems with Olit, Monstering Mag, MAYDAY, and The Lickety~Split, and can be found on Twitter@mswannmayer5.

A NIGHT AT THE RNC

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

Oh, say can you see, by dusk’s dimming light, fake news spewing from the worst on the right, from the Senate’s blind mice, ignoring all vice, the children in cages, the jobless... no wages, federal troops, crushing protest groups, voters’ hopes flailing, domestic terror prevailing.  Oh say, can you see, by dawn’s angry red glare, pollution and hatred on the air, in praise of T***p’s props and photo ops, truth denying, the sick and dying, our worst fears rearing, Kent State reappearing.

Aging rapidly, alternately sad, and depressed, Lucille Gang Shulklapper is at other times the fortunate author of numerous poems (a dozen or so published in TheNewVerse.News since 2008)and stories, as well as five poetry chapbooks and a picture book. She recently started a program in her residential community titled Edgewater Poets, giving seniors a voice on a community channel as well as the staff employed there. 

FINAL JEOPARDY

by Darrell Petska

Zellyart

The formerly democratic
North American republic
despoiled by an authoritarian regime
that ruled through extrajudicial measures
typified by deploying masked,
heavily armed federal agents
to suppress violently
civil protest and political expression,
consequently instilling a sense of fear

as in the bureaucratic authoritarianism
of Pinochet’s Chile
where federally dispatched agents
violently swept citizens away
to unknown locations
for intimidation, humiliation,
interrogation, and abuse—
acts later adjudged to be
crimes against humanity.

What was America?


Darrell Petska is a Middleton, Wisconsin writer.

THE BALLAD OF 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

by Peter Nohrnberg

Illustration by Chris Riddell, The Guardian, June 6, 2020

Now gather round ye faithful Folk
For I have a tale to tell
About a righteous POTUS who
Like Jesus harrowed Hell!

When terrorists (Antifa trained)
Assembled in the Park
And cast a shadow on his House
Of White with all their Dark

He gathered up his Family
(They helped with his Election)
And said without a trace of fear
“It’s time for an Inspection!”

Down and down, far underground
Where mole rats make their home:
He ventured to an Underworld
deep within Earth’s loam.

Fathoms below The People’s House,
A Bunker built for crisis:
With plumbing, air con, freezers full
Of tea and cake and ices;

Clocks, computers, radios,
Guns and knives and tasers,
flashlights, nightlights, bowling balls,
and triple-bladed razors.

One musty room was full of shelves
That held strange leather things.
The President took one of them
And ruffled its mottled wings.

“Now what the hell is this thing here?”
He asked with scornful look.
Quoth the Secret Service Man,
“Sir, it’s called a Book.”

Behind a shelf then stepped an Aide
Whom none recalled descending:
His face obscured by sunglasses,
His jerkin needing mending.

“Some say strange powers Books possess,
Hold wisdom of the ages:
Tales of the past for future use
Contained within their pages.”

The President just gave a shrug
And dropped it on the floor.
He walked right out and asked to see
If there was anything more.

He passed through many well stocked rooms
All suitably provisioned
For the year-long nuclear Winter that
Dr. Strangelove had envisioned.

A Room much vaster than the rest
held medical supplies.
And when He spied a Ventilator
The scales fell from his eyes.

“This shithole bunker is the pits,
It’s ugly and it’s dim,
I wouldn’t put Kim Jung-un up here
Let alone my next of kin.

No Twitter, Big Macs, tanning beds:
How could I have a life?
The pornos in the home theater
Are older than my wife!”

And so with that the President
Ascended from the Cave.
He rose up from that deathly place  
Like our Savior from the Grave!

He claimed a tax deduction on
The bunker’s cancelled lease,
Then heard ten thousand Citizens
All protesting in Peace.

“What the hell? They’re still here?
I thought they had gone home!
Bring me General William Barr
It’s time to flood the zone!”

Out of a pond in Garden Rose
Hopped forth a wondrous sight:
A Bullfrog clad in Brooks Brothers,
Croaked he, “Unite the Right!”

His toady eyes betrayed no shame
From out his tortoiseshell glasses.
He whispered into the Joint Chief’s ear
“It’s time to kick some asses!

For all those gathered fail to see
Our Savior Has Arisen!
Bring me our Proud Boys with batons
From the Texas Bureau of Prisons!”

Then from Ivanka’s ruby Lips
These honeyed words did drop:
“O Big Daddy ain’t it time
For an upbeat photo op?”

Another mayonnaise-faced Damsel
(She was yclept Hope Hicks)
Recalled a hallowed Church nearby
To help Him in His fix.

The Photographer urged getting there
before the sun had set;
So they smoked and gassed those uppity Folks
In the Park of Lafayette.

Once the acrid air had cleared
The President took his stroll:
O what a wonderous thing to see
An upright walking Troll!

He stood before the ancient Kirk
In a suit that did not fit;
Ivanka from Max Mara Purse
Pulled out the Holy Writ.

She handed Him the booky thing
He did not know its function.
He held it high above His Head
Like a bidder at an auction.

He did not read a single Verse,
Nor recite a Psalm.
The cameras clicked and no one spoke;
There was an eerie calm.

The Nation watched the scene unfold
From start to finish brief.
Those who could breathe, they held their breath
In total disbelief.

POTUS tried to find his groove,
He tweeted “Law and Order!”
Around His Keep He built a Wall
Just like at the Border.

His House of White He made a Jail,
Himself its Detainee:
Like a Castaway on a desert Isle,
Or a Strongman wannabee.

But He had been a Prisoner
Before this tale was told.
His mindforged Manacles were wrought
Of twenty-four carat Gold.

The White House dark, the Streets alive;
The Pundits have their answer.
Come November our Prisoner-in-Chief
Will be awaiting transfer…

A scholar of literary modernism specializing in James Joyce, Peter Nohrnberg also writes poetry and satire. He has served as poetry ambassador to the City of Cambridge, MA, and his poems have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Wisconsin Review, Oxford Poetry, and Oberon, among other journals. He currently vents his spleen on satirely.com .

BELLS & WHISTLES

by Paul Smith

I love a parade
with all the bells and whistles
tanks and cannons and ICBM’s
and, of course,
Sidewinder missiles
I love to watch the men march
and hear their stomping feet
all pound as one in unison
thudding down the street
I love to see the beamish boys
cheering for the troops
waving at their gravity
with manxome jaws outstuck
I love to see the young girls
swept up by fervor true
swooning at platoons festooned
in khaki, white and blue
as the marchers pass the graveyard
their drums and bugles cease
their toots and tweets
a still salute to fallen men
who now lie still
and march no more
the lull is brief
just a moment
a semi-quaver of relief
then right on cue
the band strikes up
Hail to the Chief!


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.

MEMORIAL DAY

by William Cullen Jr.

Relative places flowers at one of the tombstones in the Los Angeles National Cemetery (then the Sawtelle Veterans Cemetery), where flags were posted for Memorial Day, 1940. This photo was published in the May 30, 1977 Los Angeles Times.

We walk down the rows
in a Civil War cemetery
like we were inspecting the troops
looking for one particularly
outstanding soldier
to pin a medal onto
instead of laying down flowers
in the pouring rain
on a great-great uncle whose name
escapes both us and his headstone.

William Cullen Jr. is a veteran and works at a social services non-profit in Brooklyn, NY. His poetry has appeared in *82Review, Canary, Gulf Stream, Right Hand Pointing, Spillway and Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics.

AT A CONCERT BEFORE THANKSGIVING

by David Chorlton

Security forces stood guard on Rue des Bouchers, a street famous for its restaurants, on Monday in Brussels. Credit Stephanie Lecocq/European Pressphoto Agency via NY Times, Nov. 23, 2015

What happens far away
is audible in the pause
between movements:
                  the silence
of a transit system stilled, the rustling
curtains when somebody looks out
at troops in the street, asking
       does anyone appear suspicious?
              does anyone not?
The world stretched taut as a wire
ready to snap,
            ready to snap,
with cities shut down
and the news ticker telling us
to stay calm,
           stay calm,
the bomb is in our minds,
and it is,
      where nobody knows
               how to defuse it.


David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications on- and off-line, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His most recent book, A Field Guide to Fire, is his contribution to the 2015 Fires of Change exhibition in Flagstaff, Arizona.

NO BOOTS

by Marilyn Peretti

Source: Danziger Cartoons

No boots on the ground—
peacetime nomenclature.
Now 450 more troops
will take their vacation
in Iraq—
just training the natives.

You Sunnis and Shias,
hundreds of years
is a long time to hate,
to hide behind your battling
perceptions of the Caliphate.

Now the ISIS crisis
threatens you all!
Well armed and clever
this monster will decide
if you let it, the reigning
Cyber Caliphate to beat
all Caliphates.

But who needs
more friendly fire,
collateral damage, drones
playing in the sky,
spying to target the enemy,
the single leader of a group
in the headquarters,
the family home, where
children dreamily count
their fingers and toes,
and sing.


Marilyn Peretti lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She has been published on The New Verse News, Christian Science Monitor, Journal of Modern Poetry, Talking River, and others. She has published several books on blurb.com . She takes interest in international politics, the conflict, the violence, losses and sadness.

AND SPLINTER

by Mark Danowsky

Image source: CNN, September 22, 2014

Obama Says Airstrikes Go Beyond ISIS --NY Times, September 23, 2014

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! -- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"

History is a lesson in repetition.
I know I’ve heard that said before.
Just like I’ve heard about us arming
and training rebel groups before.

Later, it almost goes without saying,
we will be forced to send more troops,
our troops, guns to combat guns
we sent the rebels we trained
since now they’re in charge
and causing us problems
because they will not give up
guns or beliefs
for our idea of democracy.

Look, we do what we have to
for others, in a well-known exchange
of autonomy, independence, hell
even free temptation
to be insular, given the dynamic
nature of our global community.

It’s an exponential market out there.
No one wants to be picked on
today, check out foreign policy
in Switzerland and France.
Most of us want greater good
in spite of mistakes made
and made again
in pursuit of good.

Evil cares little for mistakes
finding factious home
among the fractures
becoming legion
as we must in desperation
to eradicate this menace
by division.

Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Apiary, Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red River Review, Right Hand Pointing, Snow Monkey and The New Verse News.  His poem "5am Summer Storm"won Imitation Fruit’s “Animals and Their Human’s” Contest, in 2013. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mark currently lives in a van down by the Susquehanna River. He works for a private detective agency and is assistant copy editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.