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

Crystals are known to refract sounds as well as lights,

hence chandeliers are a part of the symphony.

These were my thoughts as the aircraft swayed,

cleaving the sky, which, thanks to other flights,

was filled with convolutions that we couldn’t see—

a shaken sense that I was being played.

It’s something, that an edifice so sensitively built

would hold every sound accountable. The air trembled;

you could hear a tear fall, on some ellipsoid principle

of Pythagorean acoustics. Was there no scintilla of guilt

when he bought me a solo ticket? The music hall resembled

this Boeing: tolerances were small, the seats were full.

Ayia Napa, autumn. One wandered

from pool to beach like a dazed wasp,

tasting the new coldness with a gasp,

the village dwindled as a herd.

One drifter on the island had by way

of introduction a sea horse on one calf,

a tentacled medusa gone astray

across a bicep, eloquent as a paragraph.

Over the mountain ridge, toward the west,

was Aphrodite’s birthplace, where a shrine

decked in shells and wrack met the sea crest

head-on. Foam dispersed in purple wine

amid shadowed rocks and algae, snails

that leaked an ancient dye from heads or tails.

In winter the cyclamen blooms, leaves

in flat rosettes like a patterned carpet.

Rainclouds skim across the Med on winds

with antique names, wetting the aromatic fennel

bursting out in feather fronds that cast a spell

on battered Mercs negotiating bends

of road that turns to rutted stone and grit.

Through abandoned wrecks the sorrel weaves.

At monastery ruins, feral cats provide

occasion to snap and gawk. A ragged man

with his sons puts up a stall of Evil Eyes,

Hands of Fatima, jars of honey. Who decried

the Turks’ incursions now complain

that tourists blacken holy places. Like flies.

Ange Mlinko is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Foxglovewise, and a book of lyric criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets. A new chapbook, Darkroom, is forthcoming from Foolscap Press in Nashville. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books, and has received the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism as well as the Frederick Bock Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and residencies at Hawthornden Castle and Civitella Ranieri. She currently teaches poetry at the University of Florida, where she directs the MFA program.

In Zion, the striations of the rock

stripe maroon, moon-gold, meteor-crash pink,

undulate across miles and do not relent

the rigidity breaks and falls, the cracks uneven,

streaks of scars to scramble and I shamble

through the tests and trials of tripping

on the trail of many pools water pocks the rock

and I follow the basins like stars, as if punctures

from your hand—

in my hand a stone, heart-shaped,

rust-colored, broken at the edges, why

do I carry it except the shade sings

secret red notes slicing strangely across the rock-

cropped puddles, the phrasing of a cosmic

to plunge to the murky bottom and rest,

the cliff a pitiless grit of tripwire, a tightrope—

when I sent my hardened cry across canyons:

Mary Grace called this the night of the spirit—when

I threw my sandstone into the barren pool

it left an emptiness, barely rippling

Naples, 1948

Sophia smiles a shadowed grin

That people say leads men to sin;

Those liquid eyes, that coiling hair

Are beauty’s promise and its snare

As near as breath upon the skin.

Despite her heartbreak borne within,

She grins. The man adjusts, zooms in.

His cautious fingers reach with care.

Sophia smiles.

Unsure, she stands dead still. He grins

And winks, then has her lift her chin.

He seems to care and smooths her hair,

then compliments her dress, its flair.

Seen under lights too bright for sin,

Sophia smiles.

Your first glimpse of a stranger you will later love

is even stranger – perplexingly new, and yet a déjà vu,

a slight thread of hostility perhaps,

because the danger of adventure can usurp

the cosy numbness you’ve grown accustomed to.

And you seek reasons for going back to sleep –

you’re tired, disenchanted, and far too old now

for this kind of thing.

But your soul begins to sing

because he wears a short-sleeved shirt, and the blood

in his arm throbs next to yours, and the wine

you are sipping ferments as the glimpse

becomes a stare at the hair on his skin

living a life of its own, golden and spare, while he,

discussing something of supreme importance with a friend,

isn’t even aware you’re there.

If your first glimpse of a stranger wakes you

and shakes you and stays with you when he’s gone,

it’s for that you will love him, later on.

Maria Grech Ganado (b.1943) was born and lives in Malta. She has won National Book Prizes for four of her eight poetry collections in Maltese or English, has been published in English in the USA, UK, Australia, and Cyprus, as well as in translation in 15 other languages. In 2005, she co-organised an international seminar (RE-VISIONS) with LAF (Literature Across Frontiers) and Inizjamed in Malta. She has been given awards by the State (including the first Poet Laureate award), the University of Malta, and her hometown, Floriana. Maria has three children and three grandchildren.

That afternoon I pulled my gun on you,

you didn’t flinch. You barely looked surprised.

The bullet did what it was made to do.

Pressed up against the blood, I recognised

the trap my idiot heart had led me to.

A boy, with all the beauty he’s been given,

can charm your life, can hold it by the throat.

He doesn’t need to ask to be forgiven.

The days distort as reason disappears,

and ordinary warmth becomes remote.

They’ll tell our little history of tears,

each repetition deepening your mark.

These memories have rotted out the years.

I close my eyes. You’re waiting in the dark.

I am all the daughters of my father’s house,

& all the brothers too, since the like-

lihood of blindness blossoming again

in the next child came in at 30%,

& my parents are logical people, are risk

averse & stringent: & above all, kind

to the unborn who ghost against that stretched

pond-film of possibility which scrims

their murky & unrealized world from ours.

It is a subtle kindness, which demands

a certain taut, trapeze-imagining: think

of them vaguely & their possible-faces blur

to pure statistics; but give each blank dark eyes,

a smile: & you have seen a picture of the missing.

The bus is a rickety piece of something made more of rust than metal

And I am seated precariously in its stomach, like something on the edge

of something, always almost falling. Something hangs loosely from

the overhead board, swinging back and forth, slow and steady, a pendulum.

The window beside me is something of its own, and with every halt

we take, every juddering stop, something crawls over its glass face.

Everywhere around me I see something journeying, like us — something driving,

walking, flying towards something else. To move on is to leave something behind,

someone once told me. We were both under a certain tree, under a certain sky,

and we had never been so certain, like that day, of our uncertain futures.

Understand this, he told me, something has to end for something else to begin;

day for night, light for darkness, consuming love for simmering hatred;

it's the way life gives way into death and today passes the baton unto tomorrow.

And when we talk of tomorrow, I mean I will be something I do not know.

The bus reaches the final park and everyone must alight. There is a small flurry.

The woman on the next seat mutters something that sounded like a prayer

of gratitude as she rises. Something sways inside me. In the last seat of the

third row, someone has abandoned something and that thing has caused my

heart to quake.

The best definition of mother I’ve heard

is the one where the name isn’t earned

from squeezing out a squat body; actually,

it’s when you catch (ungloved) some nastiness

oozing from the little one. I’m not a mother

but I offer the name to those on the other

end, receivers of my horrors, my ingratitude

spewed from an unclean tongue. You’d

know if you were one. I hesitate to babysit

my stepson, but I try it, taste the helplessness

of faking someone else’s job. Mother is another

way of saying saint. To say Saint Mother

Theresa feels embarrassing, redundant,

doesn't it? I wouldn’t say I have abundant

faith. I feel a little like I'm in a play, clapping

frantically for Tinkerbell. After his nap,

my stepson asked to color a gory scene in crayon,

the one of Mary cradling dead Jesus, the pietà.

I catch myself explaining crucifixion. Mother Theresa’s

journal was riddled with doubts, terrible depressions.

She never witnessed any intersessions from God

in the slums of Calcutta. Still, she pushed on

with her thankless mission. Years ago in Europe

I trekked through the town of her birth: Skopje.

In her parents’ house, I stared at the beat-up

Bible. These days I don’t wonder at the retreat of

everything holy, but I help my stepson shake

the dust from his butt when we head inside, take

off his shoes. Mother Theresa let the kids choose

from donated shoes, then kicked into pairs that would

bruise her. Mother—short of fucker—is a word

I thought was hurled in sacrifice, a fetal curl.

So it comes as a surprise—this gift.

I even start to like the word, the sound of it.

Through the cotton-colored silence,

of box fan blades and treadmill-muted steps,

I hear the honey-gold of song swell up

beneath my feet and coat the stairwell

in my youngest brother's voice, sticky

with late breakfast, half-hesitant but sweet

and syrupy in search of clear acoustics

as he dries the dishes.

One wrong word, one cracked note, a verse starts over;

brown-bone hands reach for ivory plates

which clang like humble church bells as he bends

to send a line of deep, deliberate breaths to dip

his thin-ribbed lungs in wells of resonance

and come up with hymns; his voice drips

with variations of a tune a century old,

straining like a sunrise through his adolescent chest,

a wound like a chrysalis of new wings

that open while he sings and puts away a spoon.

The podcast tells me how fast the hummingbird’s heart beats

and I think that’s nothing. My heart beats faster than that

when my two children, fledgling adults, go out at night.

It tells me a child could stand upright and walk without

bumping his head in the chambers of the blue whale’s

capacious heart, could, by bending slightly, step through

the blue whale’s giant valves as if they were those doors

on a submarine. Big deal, I think. My children,

even now, even grown, still stand in my human heart,

that tired fist clenching and clenching inside my rib cage

still knock at and sometimes slam the doors of my heart’s valves.

It tells me earthworms have five pairs of pseudo hearts—

that’s 10 aortic arches, 10 hearts, pumping blood

through its dark body in its dark world, and I think

that’s what I need, some back up hearts, some hearts on stand by

for those days my children accidentally break my heart.

Like a character on sabbatical from a finished story,

she appears some nights, on an old, completed errand,

retracing a path she took in life, not quite friend,

but something more, a blurred category

never clarified that now seems an allegory

for nameless regret. She returns, but to what end?

And I follow, trying to catch up, to amend

the past, bend it toward another story.

We stood on this street decades ago,

and she said, “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?”

Two question mark figures in bituminous shadow.

She turns, and is lost to my moonlit

forever. I don’t know whether it’s now or then,

or if I’ll ever see her again.

Everyone’s helical. You can pretend

you’re a sealed package, reflective, hard,

separate from those other boxes, free.

Yet secretly (involute as space-time) people

gape open at one end, whirling and shining,

absorbing ghost-scents they then can’t shake.

Imagine resin at the back of your throat—

pine-bark sharp, a sticky, lingering threat.

When death hits the body’s emergency brake,

energy spins off, the way twining

winds (tornado-mouthed) spit out bicycles

or decayed farmhouses, centrifugally.

But ghosts aren’t whirlpools; the living are.

So call it nightmare. Best to believe we end.

•

So call me a liar. (Nightmares can be doors.)

For half my life, I chose to emulate

my father, the god of skeptical martinis

and ice-slick cash. I used his powers to

escape his power and learned that braininess

is the skeleton key. All feelings, sham.

Meanwhile, impossible voices murmured

into my ear’s coiled vestibule. I heard

the dead, including him. I felt such shame

at becoming my mother: powerless

despite my cash, a woman beholden to

underlove; immobilized in memories

of her locked cabinet life, an ill-lit

(spiral) four-score span—though she endures.

•

She’s settling scores with a spiral hand,

touching the back of my scalp with a tingle

as bright as a shrilling phone. Why didn’t

I call to her that uncanny night when a dead

man grabbed hold, tripped and shook me, followed

me, sick and braceleted by bruises, home?

(Trapped in parentheses.) But I believe

in spirits now (my mother always believed).

Why was I slow? You can’t cast out your shame

before uncloseting it. Salt at the crossroad.

Ask a shimmer for directions when the red

needle of your compass jitters. Hidden

windows. No one’s alone; we have people.

Repeat it: you’re a helix, open-ended.

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Get in touch

II.

Ange Mlinko

The 'Tragic' Symphony

Postcards from the Karpas Peninsula, 2010

Laura Reece Hogan

Trail of Many Pools

Sarah Cortez

Black and White Photograph, Sophia Loren

Maria Grech Ganado

Stranger

Alice Allan

Verlaine, years later

Cameron Clark

Blank-Verse Sonnet Beginning with a Line & a Half of Shakespeare

Timothy Sandefur

Undelivered Letters

Alaga Unwomanumu

Something

Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Mother

Caleb Hill

My Younger Brother Doing Chores

Cecil Morris

This Morning's Podcast Teaches Me about the Heart

K. E. Duffin

My Revenant, My Other Self

Lesley Wheeler

Ghost Triskelion