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Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com.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.
zombie daddy trudges on / grudges flying / bringing you your big chance / to shit in marble hallways / what a land of opportunity / for a sweaty daddy / poor daddy / his pinhole hungry-ghost mouth / starving starving / rubbing up against the teevee / daddy eating up the low-class love / slabface swelling & yelling / nooooooo / bloody crash of murder clown car / tactical antlers tangled / kevlar hooves sliding on the pedals / daddy’s at the wheel singing / all the way to / mother of mercy / is this the end of daddy
Originally from Detroit, Martha McCollough now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Radar, Zone 3, Tampa Review, and Salamander, among others. Her chapbook Grandmother Mountain was published by Blue Lyra Press in October 2019.
with these toxic snakes, want to fence them all out.
But what about the homegrown “patriots”—the domestic
side-armed sidewinding rattler, chattering and clattering
its venomous views, sowing discord wherever it chooses?
What about the skin-headed southern cottonmouth
with its deceptive languid accent and aggressive
lashing out? The klanned coral snake, venomous,
yet anonymous? The paranoid tea-
stained copperhead? The credulous shrug them off,
consider them crazies,
not dangerous species
to be monitored and tracked.
They slither from under rocks and brush piles
in the western hills, cluster in nests in lowland swamps,
ooze out of slimy mics all over the homeland.
The willfully oblivious ignore them—
even when they rear back and strike.
Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee, WI, where she is now watching in horror as the homegrown snakes are all slithering out at once. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, both online and in print.
when police squeezed out George Floyd’s last breath
with a knee to his neck, shot their way
into Breonna Taylor’s home,
left her dead on her floor, clicked off
the too-short lives of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin
with flicks of a trigger.
They scarcely discerned it in the eyes of children
ripped from fathers’, mothers’ arms,
caged at the border, never to see
their parents again.
It was not obvious to them when 350,000 souls—
disproportionately black and brown, immigrant, indigenous—
were extinguished by the virus
the president heralded as a “hoax,”
as ICU’s, hearses, morgues choked on bodies
and ambulances were ordered not to stop
for “low-probability” passengers.
It took broken glass and guns at the Capitol,
ghost-faced rioters in MAGA hats, banners, swastikas,
sporting toxic slogans spawned and spewed
by the Commander-in-Chief.
It took hordes single-minded as Atilla the Hun
or shock-troops of the Third Reich storming
up the marble stairs beneath idyllic landscapes,
portraits of iconic heads of state,
pushing past police who never imagined
the possibility of a white mob
forcing their way into chambers constructed,
polished to protect the rule of law,
wielding shotguns and rifles,
wrapped in bullet-proof vests.
It took the legislators in lockdown
little time to detect the pattern,
crouching behind their chairs, calling
loved ones, clutching gas-masks,
as they were herded to hidden locations
while the president’s minions lounged
in their offices, read their mail,
trashed their papers, took selfies.
In the fray below five people died.
It took them only hours to declare a breach,
recalibrate the rules, call for silencing,
impeaching the author of the action
to pluck out the bad seed.
But still, in the white wilderness of our minds,
tiptoe home-grown terrorists nurtured
with our blindness, lethal legacies,
assumptions of supremacy—
the hate so deeply sown
in our own hearts.
Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa. A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing. Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.
The end? Well, we could hardly call it that, as if
Whatever just happened, isn’t found in an old
Paper thin tome nobody’s read for a zillion years,
Instead, the end, or The End, just keeps blistering
The heck out of nearly everyone, though some
Are immune, and will never know when any End
Is just around, looking for hopeless dopes like most
Of us are now, prayers done with, floors mopped
With Clorox, as if that would scare anyone away,
But the Bugs like that deep inhalation we take when
We walk into any room, like sniffing lighter fluid
Right into the lungs where it plans to stay and stay
Until all of us are turned over onto our stomachs
By the kindest of medical staff, hoping the deep
Breaths will pull us out, but most of us have already
Died, and had no clue anything was like The End as
So many are whispering about now, as if Breaking
News isn’t about a new political cataclysm, but rather
Breaking the hearts of so many in so many hugely
Different parts of our world, everywhere even in
Antarctica, and who brought the Bugs in to such a
Pristine, icy world anyway? ICU’s are now in gift
Shops, chapels, parking lots with unique tenting
Materials and refrigerator trucks behind and out
Of sight, keeping all the dead quite cool until we
Find a place that will prepare the dead without
Ending up as the prepared dead. That’s our new
World with the best hopes of looking ahead nearly
Two or three years out, and even then, new varieties
Will awaken all of us again, those who aren’t quite
Living any more, but just waiting, you know for what
Don’t you, call it what you want but here, it’s The End.
Recent poems by DeWitt Clinton have appeared in Lowestoft Chronicle, The New Reader Review, The Bezine, The Poet by Day, Verse-Virtual, Poetry Hall, Muddy River Poetry Review, Across the Margin, Art + Literature Lab, One Magazine, Fudoki Magazine (England), and The New Verse News. He has two poetry collections from New Rivers Press; a recent collection, At the End of the War; and By a Lake Near a Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters, poetic adaptations of Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater, and lives in Shorewood, Wisconsin.
Robbie Gamble’s poems have appeared in Coal Hill Review, Whale Road Review, RHINO, Poet Lore, and Rust + Moth. He was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry prize. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont.
the four thousand people in our country who will die today.
Because it is your birthday, I’m going to erase from my mind
the insane president and treasonous riot he instigated
and the love video he put out to his thug followers as five people died
during the siege of the Capitol, and pretend the polls are fake
that say 45% of Republicans believe the breaking
and entering was the right thing to do, and I’m going
to drive to the card store – the good one, not the grocery
or the pharmacy with their picked-over puns,
but the fancy one that specializes in fine crafted, highly artistic
expressions of earnest emotions, featuring
only the cutest kitten and puppy pics, and charge
at least six dollars and ninety-nine cents for ironic yet sincere stuff like:
You’re not getting older—oh wait!—I just checked
your sun dial—yes you are! Because it is your birthday
I’m not going to even wonder if we should be celebrating
considering today’s particularly disappointing jobs report
and the unnerving delay on stimulus checks and vaccines.
I’m going to interrogate every rack on every aisle to pick out
your perfect card, and because I can’t stop the riots
or bring back the dead, or deliver the checks or administer the vaccine,
I will, because it is your birthday, light the candle, and watch
you close your eyes to the whole world and make your wish.
Michael Mark’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Arkansas International, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Salamander, The Southern Review, The Sun, Waxwing, and The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry. He’s the author of two books of stories including Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).
State and federal wildlife authorities were investigating after a manatee with “Trump” on its back was spotted in Florida on Sunday. Credit: Hailey Warrington, The New York Times, January 11, 2021.
A manatee is no cartouche.
A manatee is not a blimp.
No pharoah's name or Nike swoosh
carved in her flanks shall ever crimp
her honey-languid swimming strokes.
She is no singing telegram,
no contrail, and no ad for smokes.
The same way you would treat the lamb,
thus you shall treat the manatee,
whose every breath's a stinky huff,
who shuffles upstream clownishly.
Love's not just for the pretty stuff,
a fact I thought you'd understand.
Man's what he is, yet God loved man.
Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), a Second Place winner in the Elgin Awards. She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition and by Julie Kane as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s sonnet crown competition the following year. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, and West Branch.
Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, The New Verse News, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his stories “The Visitor” and “A Story for the Rest of Us” for Pushcart Prizes. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collections Words of Power, Dances of Freedom and A Foreigner Wherever I Go as well as several novels and short story collections. His most recent novel is The Enigma Brokers.
Dana Yost was an award-winning daily newspaper journalist for 29 years. Since 2008, Yost has written six books, including last year's poetry chapbook In Your Head.
In a year in which only personal realities are consulted by humans, in which only over-sized creatures are heard and they merely grunt
In a year in which the hogs that grunt are only human, in which it can be seen that their blinkered eyes are rightly suspicious and monitor the intrusive attentions of folks with cameras, who are neither journalists nor tourists, but uniformed executioners bearing witness on themselves In a year in which the words of the truly reproachable bear witness against themselves, in which the words of the prophets are everywhere and too numerous to recall amidst the blinding lights of the next enormity, too large for even the wiser among us to believe, or the most gullible In which even the loudest of unsanctioned mouths fall silent, for there is simply too much to say and no lack of overpaid oath-breakers clamoring to bear witness against themselves.
Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of a novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, titled Suosso's Lane. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as Off The Coast, The Journal of American Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Califragile, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed in 2018. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.
Robert West is the author of three chapbooks of poems including Convalescent (Finishing Line Press, 2011); the co-editor of Succinct: The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems (Broadstone Books, 2013); and the editor of both volumes of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons (W. W. Norton, 2017).
Suzette Bishop teaches at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. Her books include Horse-Minded, She Took Off Her Wings andShoes, Hive-Mind, Cold Knife Surgery, and most recently, a chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Poems about living on the border, animals, and endangered species are highlighted in her most recent poems and books while her favorite way to enjoy the borderlands is by horseback.
She said it without irony, then asked for my name and date of birth. She then directed me to the room where I would wait for my turn to get the long-awaited needle stick in my arm. As I sat, visions
of pleasant young hospital staff
members throughout the country floated through my troubled mind:
My name is America, and I’m going to get you infected with Covid. My name is America, and I’m going to turn my eyes when business owners and government leaders ignore rules that could save your life. My name is America, and I’m sick to death of quarantine. My name is America, and I can’t even get you a Covid test. My name is America, and I’m looking out for illness in the stock market. My name is America, and I’m going to wear my mask
under my nose.
It took only a breath of a moment, the life-saving prick of the needle; I didn’t feel anything at all. In three weeks, I’ll return and do it again. Maybe America will guide me through the final stage of protection. Maybe America will remember me, my face half-covered by a mask, but my eyes filled with grief and fear.
Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbook, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books). Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women's professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.
HeroRAT Magawa has been awarded the PDSA (The People's Dispensary for Sick Animals) Gold Medal for life-saving bravery. Magawa is based in Cambodia and supports APOPO's efforts to rid Cambodia of the deadly legacy of landmines. Magawa is an African giant pouched rat that was born in Tanzania in November 2014. He grew up at APOPO's Training and Research center in Tanzania where he learned how to detect the smell of explosives using his nose. Under the loving guidance of his human rat trainer,s he fully completed his training in 9 months and began to prepare to leave for the field. Magawa moved to Siem Reap in Cambodia in 2016 where he met his new handler Malen and began his successful career. To date he has found 39 landmines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance, making him APOPO’s most successful HeroRAT. Over the past 4 years he has helped clear over 141,000 square metres of land, allowing local communities to live, work and play without fear of losing life or limb. (APOPO is an acronym from Dutch which stands for "Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling", or in English, Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development.)
wears a gold medal around his neck.
Plain gray hero rat trained to stand up
on his back feet. He smells landmines;
more than sixty pieces of unexploded mayhem
in Cambodia. He alerts and gets banana.
This acknowledgement comes grudgingly
from this woman with a rat trap in her garage
who has smelled rat urine on the lid of a steamer
in her pantry, who wiped up weeks of rat shit
under an antique cherry sideboard. Who when
danger looms flinches from dream rodents
that scurry where walls meets floors.
Today you asked me to find one reason for hope.
You rescue orchids in discarded pots and coax
them into bloom. What I offer you after insurrection
and death in the Capitol is this: I give one rat
his due.
Tricia Knoll recently spent more time watching events unfold in the Capitol than she did binge watching The Queen's Gambit. She is a Vermont poet looking forward to introducing a new collection of poetry this spring called Checkered Mates.
