New Verse Review Issue 3.1, Winter 2026, Poetry Part One

Back to the door, the open door, one foot

Out in the wallop of a winter storm

And one foot in the inn’s lit room, I know

Only to hold it open,

To call out in the night and find the cold

Lost travelers who might be searching

For somewhere warm; and standing

Bisected in this doorway,

Half of me not uncozy, half half-frozen,

Stationed so close

To all the cheers I can’t but feel impatient,

I don’t know why it has become my job

To hold this door and feel the winter air

Scraping my face except that I’m not sure

The room is really there,

And that means I can never really enter,

Only stand and call

As I’ve been called to do, the one who holds

Open the door he can’t himself walk through—

(And who’s to say he wastes his time

Who faithfully devotes

His life to standing on the threshold, holding

The door for others while his arms

Ache, cradling their long discarded coats?) . . .

I shiver. Through the frosted window, I

can see the narrow path into the woods.

Behind my house, beyond the trees, the dusk

begins to settle as two girls go by,

taking turns pulling one another on

a bright red sled. I have known teens to take

the trail, their bootprints sunk in snow betraying

the place they went astray. And men on snow-

mobiles, racing toward their wives who stir

deep pots of something warm and meaty, stoking

the fire. Snowshoes and skis, rabbits and bears:

All do their part to wear the path down well.

My breath expands the clearing at the window

just as the last warm glimpse of light burns out.

My unattended pot of soup boils over.

Water sizzles at the flame. And Time,

shy, drags his body bag into the woods.

Didn’t your studio once hold blocks of ice

sawed from a pond beneath Mohawk Mountain?

Today wind hums through mildewed eaves

and a bent stove pipe. Behind a loose pane

in your one window, a chestnut branch

shadows the keys on your Royal typewriter,

pages of onionskin smudged with corrections,

books in ash spilling through holes

in your rusted woodstove. I walk back

to my car on the path you wore down to dirt

for 50 years. High in a maple by your house

bought by a New Yorker, a woodpecker hits

a dead branch like a pick chipping an ice block

or your typewriter tapping out another story.

Galanthus nivalis

With razored hori-hori knives we cut

into the gentle earth beneath the trunks

of aging oaks, although we knew the ground

was made of graves. Between the clods of clay

that fly like anvil-sparks, we find a shard

of pottery, a rose-head nail, a button

broken in half. They seem like seeds that failed

to germinate, like words that disappear

from dictionaries, never being said.

Tacit admission, Jefferson forgot

to mention where some several hundred souls

were born, lived life, and had their bodies buried.

In all the papers, notes, and records that

he kept, he didn’t care to write their names.

Forgetfulness excuses most abuse.

At first, the weeds grow over like a scab.

That empty space becomes a parking lot

for tourists’ cars.

A softer age unearths

the graves and catalogues the dead within,

preserving them with newer, nicer forms

of negligence. And when the snowdrop bulbs

came up within the burial ground, we thought

we’d dig some up.

“How nice to see the white

fill up the oval beds, against the brick,”

we said.

“How nice,” they thought, “a flower to

memorialize our dead.” Because who else

remembered slaves except their families,

except the mothers, daughters, nephews, sons

who keenly felt the knifing of their loss?

One autumn burial, they must have placed

those snowdrop bulbs within the crumbled clay.

Come February, grief would bleach the ground

with ghosts, commemorating vanished life.

Each shoot burst up, defying death’s decay.

Then, giving in to grief, the snowdrops bloomed.

Lachrymal petals pealed in winter wind.

This year, we dropped the exhumed bulbs into

a plastic bucket, carting them to where

the ghost of Jefferson could see them from

his study window. Guests would ask about

the flower and be told their origins,

the way museum curators explain

a dusty mummy stolen from its tomb.

As pretty as the snowdrops are, their charm

can hide old scars. They knit the ground together,

roots waiting for the mend of Judgment Day.

They hope that, through the natural mending of

the earth, all death and grief would find rebirth.

Instead, we thieves came, thinking pain a prize,

and wrenched the falling teardrops from their eyes.

He described some yellow birds he loved

and from the description,

I figured goldfinches. He said those birds–

only thinking about how they looked,

well, it helped him sleep. Sometimes at night,

his mom and her boyfriend

could be pretty noisy. I wondered why

he was sharing all of this with me.

One cheek showed a small white scar. “There’s times,

Mom and you know”–

he jerked his head at the truck behind us–

“sounds like they’re breaking stuff downstairs.”

He’d just turned nine, he said, and why

was he moved to tell me

what he told me next? “I never seen nothin’!

The ocean or some big town or nothin’!”

We stood in an inland hillside village.

We each had trash

for bins at the transfer station. Behind us

the man who sat in his beater pickup

cracked a window so we could hear

a song by George Jones:

“If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me.” He thumped his horn

and roughly barked at the boy, “Hey, Howie!”

So the kid picked up his sack and went on

to the row of containers.

The man stared at me and, grimacing, grunted

“We ain’t here to play.” He was young and burly,

I’m an old man. The morning was windy.

Clouds galloped by.

I looked upward as if something bright might be flying

to lighten up a sullen sky.

A former Pulitzer finalist in poetry, Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. In 2021, he was presented with his home state’s highest distinction of its kind, The Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published twenty-four books: two novels, six volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and sixteen poetry collections, most recently What Shines (Four Way Books, NYC, 2023). His latest book of personal essays, Such Dancing as We Can, is now available from The Humble Essayist Press, and his second novel, Now Look, has recently been published by Downeast Books.

Maantaurqaqina unuamek; tang, ella ayaganailnguq

[Trans. from Yup’ik: Stay put today—look, the weather is not good for traveling.]

All day the mountains come and go—

sun, then snow, then a blue bowl

of sky before another mini-blizzard.

When I was young, my family lived in a village

by the Bering Sea where the word ella

meant weather and world and awareness.

Ellakegciuq: The weather is nice and He is in

a pleasant frame of mind.

Ellaculnguuq: He is feeling poorly.

Here on the East Coast, we are not used

to sudden swings. There’s a proper place

for everything—our keys, our gloves,

our feelings. Mother Nature is schiz—

I start to say but stop myself. This condition

has afflicted so many I’ve known, mostly men

just old enough to grow beards. In their prime,

as if they’re steaks or real estate.

I watched the windows of a student’s

hazel eyes shutter in one semester. I watched

my father. So I say fickle. I say capricious.

I say volatile. Outside, the flakes

are nickel-sized. Someone has gutted

a down coat and sifts its innards,

feather by feather. I stay put, at home

with the mind’s dark weather.

Cumberland Falls State Park, Kentucky

A wisp of spectral light, its unsure presence

Tremulous as a small bird in a hand;

Utterly subject to the coincidence

Of full moon, crystalline night sky, and pace

Of flow that lets the Falls churn up a spray

To suit refraction of these pale moonbeams.

Best viewed at midnight in late winter’s slant

Moon point, so mostly seen in bitter cold,

After the half-mile trail to the viewing deck—

An easy jaunt made trepid by the dark.

The crowd, assembled early on, will dwindle,

Shivering cold, boredom, and sleep’s allure

Combining to cull out the less determined.

All you can tender to entice the moonbow forth

Are sturdy perseverance, watchfulness,

And the fond graces of that lady, Luck.

And even so, some requisite may fail,

And all the best of efforts come to nought.

But—if the elements align in favor,

The moonbow all at once will just be there

Before your eyes, a tuft of lost sunlight

The moon has recast through a bank of mist

To form a lucent beauty, mysterious,

Transient, and a wonder to behold.

Mildred and Richard Loving,

before the U.S. Supreme Court, 1967

The scene: Virginia’s high court has proclaimed

The Loving couple must serve prison time

For marrying while black and white; and named

This sacrament a grave, immoral crime.

Our highest Court, though, viewed it differently;

In reasoned phrases named the marriage ban

A blatant “incident to slavery,”

And ruled the racial metric could not stand.

And so—this time, great statesmen held steadfast;

And so, this time, love triumphed over hate.

But one clear shining moment can’t foretell

A next; the fiefs of hate may just outlast

Great statesmanship, ‘til poison dominate—

As past and present times show all too well.

[after Gontran de Poncins]

Out on the glacier, I am worse than useless—

unable to read even the deepest tracks,

the direction of the wind, the thickness

of the ice. The natives marvel that I lack

all skill and yet survive. How does my family

bear such a burden? I hoist my pack

along with their judgment. Poetry

is a luxury of the soft. At night, I fall into sleep

like one clubbed, my journal empty.

The time to make sense of these days

will be later. Now is a novitiate of humble

silence, me staying out of the way

and hoping to move beyond fumble.

On the horizon, the returning sun trembles.

I sit at the table in front of a chipped plate,

alone and only half awake.

The sun goes down too early, and I'm going

down too. My eyelashes alight on my cheeks

and build nests. Why not let them rest

there for a while? Food can wait.

I haven't been hungry in years.

But this fruit is more friend than food,

my first food: a cut half on a highchair tray

to play with. I only had four teeth,

but I put my face down upon its face

and a quiet hour later— a scraped bowl

of cottony peel. I've craved bitter brightness ever since.

Now, when I peek, it's not merely ruby

but incarnadine, like salmon meat,

with spiderweb spokes from a white navel,

fuzzy with lint and a drop of dew.

I lower my tongue to touch the drop—

the scent stings my jaw and provokes

saliva in a tingling spring.

Resurrection is too strong a word

for what is simply caring a little again,

when you haven't for a long time.

But it's almost a new life,

isn't it—to look at the world and to want it again?

And even to write it down?

I wish we wished like six-year-olds;

for frogs that sing and ice cream rain—

as if the world could ever be controlled

anyway; another rainbow lollipop to hold.

A mother laughed confetti; called me insane

to wish. But I know we wished like six-year-olds

when the latest news was barely a breeze, untold

to us. Silent bruises. But I could jump on any plane,

as if the white-chocolate wings could be controlled

when the hurricane brings so many toads and trolls—

how age flips our wishes for to wishes against. Train

us again to rattle off wishes like six-year-olds, to ride

a unicorn to the castle; to never blame the old

for what is new. To let the snow swirl; champagne.

We drink as if the world could ever be controlled.

But the moon is still ours to toothpick; to hold

on a cocktail napkin. Love the sprinkles, love the rain.

Love the candles, all aflame. Now, we wish like six-year-olds;

we make the words the world. How we love the uncontrolled.

A rainy winter left the pasture chill

and boggy over hardpan two feet down.

Far from prime, impossible to till,

at least it wasn’t deep enough to drown

the wobbly April calves. The grass grew dense

and, no small matter to our father, free,

but in that undrained soil the shallow fence

blew flat and tangled in spring’s first southerly:

an invitation to the herd to stray.

In a downpour we two brothers set it right.

We drove the posts through mud and stony clay,

then ratcheted the wires and cinched them tight.

A long, slow chore. Wet through, knee-deep in muck,

we slogged from dawn to dinner, then afternoon

to supper, and not a post we drove but struck

a rock and rang a loud metallic tune

to our frustrated curses. No cattle lost,

our father nodded when the job was done.

We figured by our teenage lights it cost

as much as sweet alfalfa by the ton.

I wonder if the old man could explain

his deeper need to keep the pasture fenced --

that cows, unruly boys, and wind and rain

are things a farm must hold the line against.

Like hounds that bark

when harrowing prey—

The hare in its den

hunkered with fear—

The stars on the silver

seem to be howling

Above the old barn

abandoned and shredded

By wind and foul weather,

by washings in frost.

Gone are the barn-guests

who grazed in the pasture.

Long culled are the cattle.

The cows and the steers

are taken to market.

The tractor is rusted.

The kids, all grown,

cannot be bothered

To help with the homestead

or hold down the land.

The man I remember

was midlife or past,

A friend of my father.

Farming for pay,

I saw him one summer

in searing June heat

Hawing and shooing

his Herefords to run

Up ramps to a trailer

for the ride to the sale.

One steer misstepped

to the side of the ramp

And rolled on the rancher

right there beside me.

The steer on its feet,

he stood up, that farmer,

Spit blood and tobacco

by his boots in the dirt,

Then loaded the laggers

lacked from the herd.

Fence building for years,

forcing posts into dirt,

Will make a man

all muscle and wire,

Barely breakable,

though battered as prairie.

Yet seasons of raising

and selling his cattle

Will skin a man slowly,

slim him until

He’s down to a dried up

and derelict thing,

Suddenly something

self doesn’t know.

Then fields hit foreclosure,

a foregone conclusion.

The pasture is cut

into parcels and sold

For ranch houses built

for raising of nothing

But tons of new taxes

for town and for state.

By highway a facility

houses the aged,

They stare while they spoon

applesauce and they wait

For someone to come,

to stop for a visit.

And outside the heavens

through air that is frozen

Howl in the stillness

like hounds maddened

By the presence of something

that’s prey to the stars.

The church stood silent, there, a century,

While all the houses ranged across the street

Rose to prosperity, let forth to play

The children they had sheltered, sent them off

To worse or better places, and then sank

Again, unfashionable, outworn, and shabby.

In later years, the hippies and the cranks

Moved in. They hung out rainbow flags from drooping

Gutters or posted signs for some new cause,

As if to stare the church’s steeple down

And preach to it another sort of gospel.

Everyone noticed, to be sure: dog walkers

With earbuds leaking out a tinny rhythm;

The college students on their way downtown;

To them it was just one of many clues

The neighborhood was hip but on the slide.

And those who came to pray within the church

Would read those signs and sigh or shake their head,

And pass within. That was the way the world

Was headed, they would think: paint chips, wood rots,

And sidewalks spiderweb with cracks; so all things

Find in the end they were not built to last.

There’s nothing, really, anyone can do.

The church had lasted, true, although the park

Adjoining it lay overgrown in thistle,

Its fields turned patchy from the stale of dogs;

Its swings left squeaking only for the wind

And slide, a wobbly rusted sheet of steel

That mirrored vaguely what passed overhead.

The church’s brick endured, but mortar cracked.

Rainwater ferreted its way within

And left the starry ceiling stained and blistered;

One darkened corner drew the eye from prayer.

It was to such a place the old still came

With quaking limbs; the idiots with their smiles,

The sick, the idle came, and those who, after,

Would disappear into the skirt of woods

Behind the park to fetch their vagrant treasures.

It was the place where I had found myself,

That Friday in the early spring, the sky

A pewter plate of low-borne clouds, the ground

Raw mud, save for a few stray crocuses.

How could I, staring at the stripped bare cross

Before that altar stripped and bare, believe

That there is any path a thing may take

Besides the graveled road that slopes to nothing?

Even the ones who’d walk beside us there

Will fade into the branching web of shadows

That make their slow descent before and after.

But there, the naked wood and naked stone,

Those silent, stubborn means of sacrifice,

Splintered and cracked in shards of forenoon light,

Conceded nothing to my questioning.

It is not nature that directs our ends.

If you ask me, a house’s magic

is in its not-quite-cupboards—

clothes chutes and dumbwaiters.

Its magic and its beseeching:

trust me, that I won’t lose

what I vanish. Trust me,

to this trick there’s a second act.

A house’s magic is in its milk door—

I mean, in opening it,

the repeated proof of divine order,

the bottle back and full again—

and its beseeching

is in its truth windows.

Mira writes, This kind of thing

is meat and drink. The break

in the plaster, an attestation

of straw, a door fit for a porthole

or grandfather clock.

It used to be like this, a parley

of sincerities. Once we built

reassurance into our walls.

Inscrutable tangle
of fir and thicket, almost

concealing the barn

across the field, those greens

and golds of nearly summer

and the single door, barely

visible—here,

she’s partway out

the window, half-

way to the world

beyond the sill. She reclines

headfirst into the green,

one thick leg

braced upon the chair, good

and bare for climbing up and out

and running far . . .

But no,

most of her remains

in here, cramped

and cool and gray, so gray

it dulls the blouse, the hair.

Why linger in a room

so cold and narrow?

Outside the window

grows a world resinous

and evergreen, deepening

its roots, the shrubbery

with its newly yellow

shoots, the tumultuous

thicket, virtually unseen—oh

let it be my own, the distant barn,

the waiting door, leave

off this patient, unnatural

wondering.

Slide Title

Slide Title

Slide Title

Get in touch

I.

Stephen Kampa

Who Only Stand and Wait

Maya Venters

Clockwork

Jared Carter

Time

Space

Students

Snowfall

Henry Hart

My Grandfather's Ice House

Marie Burdett

Snowdrops

Sydney Lea

December Incident

Erin Murphy

Ella

David Leightty

The Moonbow of Cumberland River Falls

Loving v. Virginia

Devon Balwit

Kabloona

Mary Giudice

Winter Solstice with Grapefruit

Katie Dozier

New Year

Richard Wakefield

Fence Mending

Benjamin Myers

Retirement

James Matthew Wilson

Good Friday

Jane Zwart

Truth Windows

Lenore M. Myers

At the Window