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

hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.21)

Not till the god created mortal things

did time commence its ceaseless sundering.

He yearned to fracture, contradict himself,

and to contain uncounted multitudes,

all things he could not be but might beget,

all things apart from him, yet part of him.

So now to everything there is a season.

Death, life, flesh, soul, light, darkness, you and I:

all human things reside within the cracks

and interludes that formed the world’s first day.

We love, my friend, inside of those divides.

You were a burst of golden curls and song.

You were my girlhood. We were parted too,

and it was autumn when earth buried you.

R.W.

The Fibonacci series

Puts paid to all pet theories

Of a random universe

Where nature does free verse

Whorls in each shell and cone

Spell symmetries that clone

Abundance that’s averse

To inadvertent verse

The branches’ golden angle

Arranges leaves that dangle

In patterns that disperse

The daydreams of free verse

How petals are arranged

Means that you’d be deranged

Or willfully perverse

To see in them free verse

No, nature is a nurse

Whose overflowing purse

Of mysteries must converse

In meter, not free verse.

She thought she saw a waterfall

suspended from a cliff.

She looked again and found it was

an interrogative.

What if the sky were blue, it sang

What if, what if, what if?

She thought she saw a nautilus

winding round her hand.

She looked again and found it was

a swiveled ampersand.

Come here, come follow me—give up

your solitary stand.

She thought she saw a trail of crumbs

bespeckling the road.

She looked again and found that now

her sentences had slowed.

Her thoughts, her words had stopped, had dropped

ellipses in the snow…

Please don't attempt to speak to me right now.

There's courtesy in please, an interjection.

The subject (you), implied, goes without saying.

Don't: a verb contracted and negated.

Attempt: the time is trying; can't you tell?

To speak: too little sleep, too many words.

To me: it's that it's personal, this pronoun,

pushed into place, positioned and pronounced.

Demand? Request? Irked, or fragile? Absurd

to deconstruct this; buck the impulse. Quell

it. Call it both. Dichotomies are fated

to be false. Right now, a cactus facing

the window blooms. Fuchsia, the future, injects

love in the imperative, somehow.

Let me repeat myself. The emperor

wishes to know how a camel can,

in fact, pass through a needle’s eye, not if.

Because the emperor’s new priest proclaimed

a rich man passing into paradise

is like a camel passing through a needle.

Therefore, three elements must be considered:

a camel, needle, and the patent transit

of the first object through the second one.

I pondered a great needle, one so large

a camel could stroll through it easily,

but if no one can sew a stitch with it,

it isn’t plausibly a needle, is it?

Because he’s never been this ill before.

You’ve heard a version with an elephant?

Oh, gods. At least we’re spared the elephant.

I see a problem though with your proposal.

A camel simmered to a broth might drip,

though slowly, through a carpet weaver’s needle,

but all the filtered remnants—bones and hair--

would still be on the wrong side of the needle.

What? Some mush-brained prophet out of Judah.

I hadn’t pondered that, but it appears

the rich aren’t welcome in their afterlife,

which seems shortsighted and most surely wrong.

What God would favor cripples and the poor?

They don’t have anything to offer gods

but penury, disease, and supplication.

How so? A gate beside the main gate—small,

and called the Needle’s Eye? Let’s build on that.

A night gate—tiny, tight and only used

for people, but a camel might, with care,

squeeze through, but not so crooked and constricted

they’d have to break its knees and drag it through.

The camel is, in this one case, remember,

the emperor—in metaphor, I mean.

Let’s say you strip the cargo off the camel,

and ease it through, maybe a scrape or two

against the walls to make the metaphor

less metaphorical. He understands,

at least His Highness claims to understand,

no passage into paradise is painless

and free of complications. I bow my head.

Your cunning is superior to mine.

He’ll accept it. Yes? Because he must.

And I’m convinced already, thank gods. You?

No? Not yet? Don’t worry, you will be.

My fury was to eat the world

and gulp the mighty oceans.

My body was a sculptor’s dream

and model for anatomists.

The highest mountains to the east

were merely steps into the kingdoms

of the sun. But even I contracted

illness from the foreign soil

and air, and would return to hands

I trust. A Persian princess in

my bed was not the bliss I hoped

as a reward for bringing light

to continents of sorcery.

Even faithful Bucephalus

grew tired of victories repeated

like endless chains of holidays.

I languished where the waters of

the Nile taste salt and shifting tides.

Empires were my toys and kings

my pets and game. Beyond the limits

of my years I sought to conquer both

Elysium and the Underworld.

As dust I conquer ages.

In golden Tang, a nomad painter made

Handscrolls and murals for an emperor,

And his facility and grace were praised

By seers of his work—likewise the man

Was famous for devotion to the craft,

Obedience to the laws of ink and brush,

So much that over time his secret self

Became close-wed to sacred energies

Because he learned to ink—in love—all things,

And in him the delight of rule-led skill

And high rejoicing in pictorials

Were blent, and all who faced his images

Felt some uncanny sense of coming-to-be,

And those who chanced upon the painter found

No trace of worship for the gaudy new:

For years he strove to catch the spill

Of falling leaf and petal,

Studied the windings of a rill—

Here silk, and there metal.

His dragons reveled in the mountain mist,

His tigers lolled on pennywort and flowers,

His black-inked earth and heaven met and danced

Because of bell-notes in the woods and skies

That chimed with something nestled deep in him.

The evanescent mayflies wooed his eye

As much as any angled, antique pine,

The painter being like each in his way,

Content to bend and bow to destiny,

To be the maker he was meant to be,

A votary of ancient treatises

That detailed methods so minute and strict

As if to ban all quirks of character

And lead to scapes appearing methodless,

Leaping freely from the painter’s mind

Like dragons vaulting from their scrolls

And spiraling on air,

Or a dragonfly that rockets, rolls,

Alights on lacquerware…

The palace chronicles recount the night

The painter gave his emperor a wall

Of cloud and mountain, torrent, path, and cave—

His patron marveled how some undercurrent

Served to animate the scene with vigor,

Until he could have sworn the nightingales

Were caroling in princess trees that stirred

Their roots in earth and rang their bell-shaped blooms

When the flirtatious wind lord toyed with scent.

The children shooting marbles in the shade,

A coiled-up labyrinth of sleeping wyrm,

Three tigers basking on a sun-baked ledge:

All seemed procession from divinity,

A muraled miracle—the painter called

And beckoned, stepped into the breathing work

And disappeared in greenery

That died away like dreams;

The bright, immortal scenery

Fell to dust and moonbeams.

* Shortlist, The English-Speaking Union [Victoria Branch, Australia] Formal Verse Contest, 2024.

No, Virgil, no…— W.H. Auden, Secondary Epic

Anchises handled the humbled hearthgods;

Ascanius shouldered his mother’s hearthflame;

Virgil bobbled them all when he fled earth clods

to beat plowshares into Octavian’s name.

Pilate could recite the Mantuan’s tale

while scrubbing his fingers in the basin.

Dante may have trailed Virgil out of hell,

but the Schutzstaffel followed him back in.

The morning rays of dawn’s rosy light

are couplet with cries mourners raised at night.

A scythe can sigh through grass as softly as a sough

can lay the green sward over, and over the shoulder

the sword can sweetly sing the head from the soldier.

Should sterling words proceed from sterile mouths:

cough cough cough.

1. In a bar in the future

Gold drams still glow on polished oak

(Though it’s centuries since smoke).

Several regulars

Are bruiting thoughts of theirs

On our master-wishes having been fulfilled:

One need no longer die

And we’ve cracked the cosmic Why.

They’re wondering which of these

Erstwhile impossibilities

It might be deemed the greater woe

To have lived too soon to know;

Worse still, to have joined the gone

In sight of either one.

An aspect left unsaid (conceivably

Because unspeakable)?

What equity would call

The essence of these woes:

Their being but the way it goes.

Think of the pagan greats who dwell

In a multilevel hell

(Although no lower than

On level one of—ten?)

Where Dante felt doctrīnally compelled

To put them. Antiquity’s

Titans—Socrates,

Homer, Horace . . . the whole

Contingent made re-seeable

(If through a scrim of limbic mists);

Phantoms D. enlists

His powers to portray

As—how is one to say

It per their state’s equivocality—

Diaphanously damned?

Sinless souls condemned

Never to get to rise

A quarter inch towards Paradise—

And only because they lived before

A blazing meteor

Called Christ. Of all the luck . . .

Injustice run amok.

Leaving D. to ask how one installed

On as much as a bench in heaven

(Far less a throne) could even

Begin to countenance

So undeserved a circumstance.

“WHO QUESTIONS ME?”: an argument

With which D., hugely bent

On setting doubts aside,

Is wholly satisfied.

His Maker? Rather less, imaginably:

A monarch known to take

An unexpected break

From thundering commands

To cup his head within his hands.

Inferno, Canto III

Hornets stung my face until the skin

split open, releasing fluids white and clear.

Droplets drummed my pumping knees. My shins

churned through slime as maggots anchored there

twisted in the mud. Sometimes my vision

cleared, and Hell was almost beautiful:

pale and ribbed, mouths clean as incisions,

worms reached for clots of blood, then pulled

back into burrows; smooth-ribbed human forms

leaped and sprinted and arched; voices yelped

as hornets swiveled faceted eyes and flowed

across my face to sting my tongue. Years before,

a living man rushed past. I begged for help.

He flinched. He did not know. He could not know.

Kiki Smith, from the Blue Prints series, 1999. Etching and aquatint on paper.

walks a wayward track of parted

branches, still aims a smoky eye, can strike

a pose in retro dress & bonnet. Constraint or

deft disguise?—that fabric hue: sun-warmed

hydrangea-blue. Some days she hears

the echoes of another life—flower fests & meet-ups

behind the farmer’s market, mushroom morsels

of maitake & barbequed lion’s mane

before the quick kiss of a stranger.

Who can she count among her friends?

She’s fluent in fables, brushfires & fear,

a forest she dares not leave for long crossed

by footfalls & suspicions. You keep the wolf

outside your gates. To kill a wolf

will earn rewards, the wolf is an outlaw,

someone of no account…What was it the dream

raven told her outside the raptor rescue

as she neared? Wolf Girl walks a mythic route,

at home with her hunger, sounding out

the full-throated call of kin.

I must pay attention to the things I remember

this time of year, for the fairies

are at work even there,

getting into mischief

as if memory were canisters

of flour or oregano,

or spools of thread that lost their lead

in my housedress’s hidden pockets.

Once I cared for a child of theirs; they’d heard

I had a way with wind

and brought him to my stable door.

Their trust was my reward.

I portioned cures of pear syrups,

apple cider vinegar balm,

anchovy eye salve.

I sat him at a seahorse skeleton table,

bent his head down close

to a steaming walnut bowl,

and draped a handkerchief over

his coughing up:

silvery sweat, snot, spit shot into

the steeped chamomile.

And I let him sleep, and skip his fiddle lessons;

soon he breathed deep again.

After that I saw his people everywhere

for just a few days,

and understood how things go missing—

how accidents fill more

than befall us. The missing figurine;

the green glass pitcher broken

in a market tent; a pillar

of pier ready to swim; a woman

possessed by a demon begging

to drink the hottest water; another

afflicted asking for cold,

colder than the sea, she said,

looking out. My husband sails

tonight, and that is good. He’ll return

tomorrow; better. Sleeping

alone, my heart can thump so loud

I think someone’s at the door:

a neighbor with an unexpected guest

just arrived this late at night

and her pantry is bare, sorry

to ask, but could she have a loaf, please,

and I wonder, what gospel is this?
As a girl I heard tales

about those who marry fish and fishermen.

One, so tired of being poor

and smelly, left her man.

The next day, he caught a magic halibut

with one of those offers

of any wish granted: sand into gold,

a full belly bowl, a net

of never-ending catches. I’m not saying

I’m the one who’d loved him all along.

But I know how to wait.

Katie Hartsock's second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse), received the Philip H. McMath Poetry Prize and was one of Kirkus Review's Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work appears in journals such as Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, At Length, Iron Horse Literary Review, Image, and RHINO. A chapbook, Love-Gifts To Be Delivered via Subterranean Rivers, is forthcoming from Aureole Press. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.

When the last of the legions left the city

their boots rang hollow through the square

toward the longships. We waited there,

observing this last indignity,

as the soldiers marched lockstep up the ramps

of the vessels, their bellies sagging full

of plunder. They’d gleaned the city bare.

I was still a child that day. I saw

all this, but didn’t understand

how the lean years leaned in over us

with withering expectation. My hand

clung to my master’s wizened claw

of a hand—gaunt fingers stained with simples—

as if I could absorb from him

the wisdom to see out past the dim

horizons closing in on us.

Just then, just then, his ancient eyes

took on the milky distant sheen

they took whenever he prophesied

(and they might still). His voice stretched, keen

and shrill, across the clustered causeway—

The empire is folding back on itself,

withdrawing its frayed edges. The lamps

of civilization are winking out

around us, leaving darkness and

disjointed constellations. We wait

for the coming night on this windy shore,

far from the live and glowing core

of Byzantium. But there’s still a grace

that’s ours. There’s still a grace that’s ours.

We live in the land of sleeping lords.

Before the night encroaches much farther,

you’ll see one rise. Watch, watch for Arthur

in Logris—the island surrounded by stars.

The while my master spoke, his voice

was slowly overridden by

the building conflagration all

around—the longships’ ramps retracting,

the crowd dispersing out to loot

the rubble the legions left. I clasped

my muttering master’s hand, and hauled

him off, across the tilting stones

that littered the gutted public square

and into the darkening heap we called

the City of Legions (and do to this day).

And the last of the longships pulled away,

taking whatever there was to take.

They groaned down the line, as their lumbering grasp

swung clear of the ransacked city, and eddies

of fire burst through their wasted wake.

To Hyperborea we two embarked

and on our way, among the many marvels,

the floating islands and the purple palms,

the savage psalms and even stranger gods,

by foreign firelight of foreign stars,

fell very much in love. Now, she is gone.

Yet easily enough we reached the North,

the frost so white it shimmers freaked with blue,

and easily enough we found the tomb

wherefrom the silver serpent rose uncoiled

upon the word the shade Marsyas shared

to lay the skull of Aesculapius

beaten in gold and garlanded with laurel,

down at our trembling feet; that horrid relic

which you, lord hierophant, had bade us fetch,

because you wish to rot alive forever.

And in that moment, what triumphant joy!

Our quest so soon accomplished, and our love

so warm beneath sepulchral Arctic skies...

So, I forgot— just once, forgot your word.

I howled with happiness, and doomed my love.

For in that frigid silence, such loud life

could not escape unhunted. Through the mists,

we heard The Beast the Living Cannot See

wail for the blood it craves like molten rubies.

There was no time. Go, take the skull! She cried,

and even as I fought to take her place—

for once the Beast awakes, it must take life—

her conjured ravens swept me from the graves.

And there her bones shall lie, the greater relic,

and you shall have your life. And I? And I

shall sail once more for Hyperborea

and clutch her skull, and scream and scream and scream.

My spirit is too weak—or else, too strong.

You, a few years younger when you saw

that shade of death that trembled you with awe

in these time-eaten monuments. I long

to feel Philomela’s seductive song

with you, but do not have the knack: the raw

and fervid soul, the morbid streak. The flaw

is yours, I think, but wonder if I’m wrong.

The Ubi Sunt of it of course is clear:

both life and legacy are all too brief

for noble beasts in love with being here.

But being here, I feel, instead of grief,

a pride for what we do spurred on by fear:

we strive to last. We die. It’s a relief.

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Get in touch

III.

Stephanie McCarter

Creation

Dick Davis

Nature doesn't do free verse

Diasporas

Carol Light

Mad Gardener's Verses

Diagramming the Sentence

Andrew Hudgins

The Eye-of-the-Needle Problem

Robert Morgan

Alexander

Marly Youmans

The Fabled Rightnesses of Wu Tao Tzu

Seth Wieck

The Laureate's Lament

Daniel Brown

Of All the Luck

Forester McClatchey

The Opportunist

Peggy Landsman

Aubade

Rough Drafts

The Road Not Taken

Jane Satterfield

Wolf Girl

Katie Hartsock

The Fisherman's Wife

Jesse Keith Butler

The Last of the Longships

Elijah Perseus Blumov

The Young Mages

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, I Think of Keats