Open for Halloween Subs/Best of the Net Nominations
Congrats to BoN nominees Sally Thomas, Jenna Le, Midge Goldberg, Steven Searcy, Alice Allan, and T.O. Brandon
I have two exciting NVR news items to share with you today. First, we are open for submissions to our Halloween special issue. Second, we have nominated six poems for this year’s Best of the Net awards.
Open for Halloween Subs
New Verse Review is open for submissions to its 2025 Halloween mini-issue from September 1 through September 19. Submit up to five creepy, gothic, and/or autumnal poems through NVR’s Duosuma page.
Poems can also be about the fall season and its holidays: Halloween, All Souls, All Saints, Día de los Muertos. We are interested in poems that range from the horrific to the hilarious, from the macabre to the moving. While we are primarily interested in metrical poetry, we are open to well-crafted free verse.
You may want to take a look at last year's Halloween issue.
Some other guidelines:
Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please send a prompt follow-up message if a submitted poem is accepted elsewhere.
We are not interested in AI forgeries of human poems. AI should not be used in any way in the writing of poems submitted to NVR.
This year’s issue will be edited by
andThank you for sharing your work with us!
Best of the Net Nominees
New Verse Review is honored to nominate the following six poems for the Best of the Net awards for work published between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025.
Midge Goldberg, “Trail Markers” (Winter 2025)
Alice Allan, “Bad Boys for Life” (Winter 2025)
Steven Searcy, “Too Easy to Remember” (Winter 2025)
T.O. Brandon, “The Bell Witch” (Halloween 2024)
Jenna Le, “Apotheosis” (Summer 2024)
Sally Thomas, “Aubade with Grackle” (Summer 2024)
Midge Goldberg, “Trail Markers”
The wooden sign, carved with yellow letters, starts the fairy tale, naming the path into the woods, telling the story—how far to go to Emerald Falls, to Eagle’s Dome, to home. Blue painted blazes hail you as you pass, mark the trees along the sunlit trail, attend your swift ascent. But then the trees crowd in and down, shadows black as crow; rocks grow as you scramble up their sides. The blazes glow like lanterns now—keep going, eyes down on the roots and rocks as the path knots up the mountain— companions as you find your way uphill until like breadcrumbs beasts have eaten, they are gone. Freeze. Look forward, back. A step, a turn, but nothing. Vanished, and you’ve lost the trail. Tendrils clutch your throat—green grasping fear, am I here, where am I? No. Don’t. Go backwards. There, on the rock, the bent blaze crooking its blue finger— come here, come here. Someone’s been by before, leaving the message—this way, this way through, yes, you.
Midge Goldberg is the editor of Outer Space: 100 Poems, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her third collection of poetry, To Be Opened After My Death, was published by Kelsay Books in 2021. Her book Snowman’s Code received the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award, and she received the 2016 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the poet Robert W. Crawford.
Alice Allan, “Bad Boys for Life”
None of us escaped the snap-to-grid. Money’s nag, its organising force, the itch for real estate, another kid, a compromise that might delay divorce, more hazy resolutions to do better. All stale and obvious as what we did— house party hand job, weed with someone’s brother, carpark tequila—every nervous first diminished by the mild suburban smother. Naïve, thin-skinned, I felt your careless worst, ignored it for your best, and glamourised the way you losers lost, and loved each other. Nostalgia builds a shrine from the debris of everything that’s wrecked and pissed away, attended by some tragic devotee convinced there’s something more she needs to say. My sweet bad boys, your faces looked like home. Ordinary. Precious. Part of me.
Alice Allan lives in Melbourne, Australia, where she produces the podcast Poetry Says. She is the author of The Empty Show (Rabbit Poets, 2019) and the chapbook Blanks (Slow Loris, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Literary Matters, Australian Book Review, and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, among others.
Steven Searcy, “Too Easy to Remember”
When my son says, “It’s too easy to remember,” he doesn’t mean he’s going to ace a test or there’s no need to write a grocery list because it’s short and simple. In the amber centers of his eyes there is no swagger, no calm—this is a helpless plea to make the terror go away. In panic he woke and called, and now I’m here, but still the dagger is lodged—the heart pulses. Evil came coiling only in a dream, and yet it isn’t willing to release its grip. Days and years will follow—it’s the same— it shadows, even when we aren’t asleep— so much that isn’t easy to forget.
Steven Searcy is the author of Below the Brightness (Solum Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Commonweal, The Windhover, UCity Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and four sons in Georgia.
T.O. Brandon, “The Bell Witch”
Adams, Tennessee
November 1837
Lucy Bell:
It started with the noises in the walls:
The rats’ paws and the bats and nameless beings
That groped, and clawed, and sometimes cried aloud,
Or tapped the windows like a hand of sleet.
But when John grabbed his gun and looked around
The house, he found no men or creatures there,
Just twisting forms of darkness in the trees.
In time, there came a cold, slow, grinding sound,
As if each night the nearby caves crept close
And pressed their lidless eyes against the house
Until ten thousand blind and broken things
Crawled out to gnaw the studs and rafter beams.
Then, over weeks, the sounds grew louder, nearer:
We felt the rats were teething at our beds,
And heard some hell-spawned dog come scratching up
The floor, as if to drag a carcass out
And crack marrow from its bones.
Then she came.
One day that spring, our Betsy took a walk
Into the woods and found a girl there, hanging
From a tree. The girl’s face above the noose
Was cold, and yet, as Betsy watched, one eyelid
Split, then one flat black eyeball slid around
Like something wriggling from a fetid pond,
And then her parched lips stretched into a smile,
As if her hanging was a kind of joke
We wouldn’t understand—at least not yet,
We wouldn’t. Betsy screamed and ran, yet when
We came back to the grove, the girl was gone.
But maybe I had left our door ajar
Because we found out later that she’d come
Into the house and settled down, as if
Our fear invited her, or if not fear,
Then maybe something else.
And so she stayed.
She hated John and sought to torment him.
She said “he’d earned a killing” for some sin
She never named. Each night when he would eat,
She’d drive hot iron wedges in his mouth,
Which no one at the table felt or saw,
And held them there until he gasped with pain
And fear, and couldn’t eat or speak. I watched
Him fade in time, and saw how thin he grew,
How what had been that vital force in him
Was spent on sputtering and useless rage.
But still, there was some cussedness that kept
Him fighting on for three more years before
The witch in all her hatred wore him down.
They say she poisoned him. I know they tell
A lie: there was no poison in the witch—
Her power wasn’t of that kind. He died
In fear and pain for what he always was,
As maybe all folks do when it’s their time.
The witch was at his funeral and sang
Loud drinking songs, and carried on and spat
While others there who knew him tried to mourn.
Could be she thought she had some cause, and yet
It was unkindness and it wasn’t right
To keep the neighbors’ prayers from finding him.
She hated Betsy too—I don’t know why—
I guess she saw herself too much in her.
She pulled her hair, and pinched her arms, and screamed,
And showed her horrid face inside the mirror
Till Betsy lived in terror for her life.
And when the Gardner boy came courting, she
Made loud how she objected to the match:
She sang, “Please, Betsy, please, don’t marry Josh,”
And sang it just like that for months on end
Until our Betsy, broken, called it off.
The stories say it was a jealousy
And meant to hurt the girl, but I’m not sure:
I wonder if perhaps she hadn’t seen
Some cruelty in Josh, as I had seen—
Like I had seen in John, but hadn’t known
Back then just what those glimpses should have meant.
She was like that, then. It was strange. At times,
She almost seemed a friend, if friends are those
Who do you kindness that you never asked.
She knew my love of grapes, and in that winter
When I nearly died of pleurisy, she brought
Me dark black muscadine, and smoothed my hair
And spoke soft words and sang, and held cool hands
Across my forehead while I slept. The grapes
Were sweet and cold, so sweet and out of season.
She must have traveled world or time to find
Them sweet like that, those months of dark and snow.
She called me, “That most perfect woman, Lucy”—
The kind of thing that John had used to say,
Or maybe John had said to someone else.
She left the grapes out on my bed, and when
I woke, the sheets were stained, my dress was stained
From crushing them.
And then she left for good.
I guess when John was dead she dropped the game:
She lost all interest in the rest of us,
And left us there alone with nothing more
Than dark, and woods, and all that frontier space
I’d hated since the day John brought us here.
We spread her story round. I think with pride
How Jackson’s men came down to clear the cave,
With all their guns and pretty uniforms,
But when they heard the stories we could tell,
They turned and ran before the evening fell.
We never ran. We stayed and bore the witch,
For she was ours as much as we were hers.
That priest who came from England said the witch
Was like those demons Paul cast out, the ones
That told dark secrets in the temple halls.
He wasn’t wrong, or I don’t think he was.
Like demons, she could promise kingdoms more
Than all this little world our lives had made.
If every spirit is an intercourse
With something more, perhaps it doesn’t matter
How we find our way. Or perhaps it does,
And I did wrong. It doesn’t matter now.
Last night I almost felt that she’d come back.
I went out in the wildness of the moon,
And found the cave some people say is hers,
A hole as wet and ragged as a wound.
I stared into that darkness like a glass,
And said—as you’re supposed to say—her name
Three times (I know her name, and John knows why):
I said, “Kate Batts, Kate Batts, come out, Kate Batts,
You have a lot to answer for. You know
It isn’t right for all that pain to mean
So little now, to steal our names and break
Our only crossing with that other world.
It isn’t right to change a life and leave
Like that—at least, I cannot think it right.”
I heard those old stones echo as I left:
They said, “It isn’t right… It isn’t right…”
Some things are everything until they’re not.
Now John is dead, and all the boys are gone,
And Betsy married to some other fool.
Sometimes I think I made her up, or that
I conjured her, as if there was a witchery
In what we want that changes everything.
It doesn’t matter now. So little’s left
Of me, a husk too spare to draw a witch.
I let it go. I cannot own her now.
It won’t be long—a month or two—before
I lie with John and let the story lie.T. O. Brandon lives in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, where he teaches literature and rhetoric.
Jenna Le, “Apotheosis”
When I was five or six, I wore one of those white ribbed undershirts to bed, and since my weight and height were tiny for my age, it reached down to mid-thigh, and I used to pretend this tank top was a high- style mermaid gown, so when I wormed beneath the covers, sleep’s tide would bear me to a vine-decked hall where lovers dance waltzes until dawn, and in my swanny dress I, crowned belle of the ball, all night would opalesce.
Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, voted on by the international membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. A daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she has a B.A. in math and an M.D. and works as a physician and educator in New York City.
Sally Thomas, “Aubade with Grackle”
A grackle called from the greening backyard oak, One long derisive note. The sky hung white Above the house. Inside, still half-awake, I listened to the neighborhood. The quiet Gave way to dogs and hens, the first rough stroke Of someone’s pickup engine. Rising light Seeped in like water through the plastic blind. The day stepped forward, meaning to be kind. The day stepped forward, meaning to be kind, I thought, because I liked the thought. Preferred The time to have intent, the world a mind Attuned to goodness. Still the new leaves stirred In random patterns, each leaf like one hand That clapped itself on air and never heard What sound it made. The grackle’s taunting call Said, This is it. There’s nothing else. That’s all. So this is it. There’s nothing else. That’s all, The grackle said. But what do grackles know Except the wind that chuffs them, every squall An up-thrust wave they breast and surf and row? Alive, sleek, shining-dark, all rudder-tail And hollow bone, they don’t ask where to go, Or how. What time they have suffices them. I don’t remember now the day that came— I don’t remember now the day that came To me. I lay in bed and heard the quiet, That one note piercing it. The waking dream Of memory loses focus there. The light Remains, that rose so grayly in that room To bring me news of other things in flight, And waken me to my own life, although What kindness that day wrought I do not know.
Author of two poetry collections—Motherland, which appeared from Able Muse Press in 2020, and the forthcoming Among the Living—Sally Thomas is co-writer for the Substack newsletter Poems Ancient and Modern, which features a classic poem with a short introductory essay every weekday. Her novel Works of Mercy was published by Wiseblood Books in 2022, as was Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology. A short-story collection, The Blackbird, is due out in August 2024.