I am a line switcher
I am very pleased to announce that Silver Birch Press has published Zumwalt’s “I am a line switcher.”
Please visit and leave a comment if you like the poem. Please leave two comments if you don’t.
Posts tagged ‘Poems’
Macabre Intrusions
I am pleased to announce that four of Zumwalt’s poems have just been published this afternoon in Muse Press’s Fib Review!
Please visit their website!
Here are the four poems — each uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine syllable count. The fourth poem takes a cumulative approach to revealing the Fibonacci Sequence one value at a time. It starts with the first value “1” for the first stanza, with each subsequent stanza adding the next value, so that the second stanza is “1,1” and the third is “1,1,2” and so on.
Artifact: https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/zumwalt1.html
Headlands: https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/zumwalt2.html
Discovery Feats and Flops: https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/zumwalt3.html
Macabre Intrusions: https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/zumwalt4.html
around and Handcrafted
I am pleased to announce that two of Zumwalt poems, “around” and “Handcrafted” have been published in Bronze Bird Review, Issue III. The book includes twenty-six poets and thirty-seven poems. The theme of one of Zumwalt’s poems is mentioned on the back cover.
It’s available now on Amazon:
and on the publisher’s site at https://bronzebirdbooks.com/books
After some time passes, if I get permission from Zumwalt, I plan to include these two poems on this website.
Monday Musings: Poetry sites to visit or submit your work to
As noted in previous posts, there are plenty of great poetry sites out there to browse, get ideas from, or submit your own material to: https://zumpoems.com/2025/10/14/poetry-publications/ I have also mentioned Chill Subs and Duotrope as easy-to-use resources to discover poetry journals.
I want to call out one site I have not mentioned previously — great for browsing, sparking creative ideas for your own poems, and submitting poems that would be thoughtfully reviewed and not automatically rejected because they don’t align with current MFA biases. This site effectively curates material to provide a good dose of optimism, focusing on “exploring themes of joy, healing, and the sacred in everyday life.” The editor of the site has been voted one of the top ten editors by users of Chill Subs: https://www.chillsubs.com/lists/great-editors-2025, and Duotrope has also featured an interview with this editor: https://duotrope.com/interview/editor/38154/feed-the-holy. The editor also has other duties (editor of Masticadores USA), which she excels at.
The site is Feed the Holly, located at https://feedthehol.blogspot.com/ and edited by Barbara Leonhard. Feed the Holly currently accepts reprints and poems previously shared on blogs. Back in 2024, Barbara provided some useful insight on her launch of Feed the Holy: https://extraordinarysunshineweaver.blog/2024/11/13/feed-the-holy-a-new-literary-ezine/
Another site that focuses on positive poetry and accepts reprints and blog posts is Euonia Review founded and edited by Ian Chung: https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/
For those that write in or love to read contemporary formal verse, I highly recommend The Society of Classical Poets whose chief editor is Evan Mantyk
Still another website that accepts blog posts and reprints is Edge of Humanity Magazine: https://edgeofhumanity.com/ Editor and curator extraordinaire Joelcy Kay takes this one step further and uses this journal to promote individual contributors’ websites. All of these sites include a link to your website (what is termed backlinks and which help visibility of your site in search engine and AI queries), but Edge of Humanity includes other information that will help drive traffic to your website, including listing published books and additional website links.
I also want to mention an example of Light Verse with substance, Celeste DeSario’s latest poem at New Verse News: https://thenewversenews.substack.com/p/nvn-monday-im-sorry-dave-im-afraid. This piece digs deep into the essence of the risk of AI — risk not driven by ill intent, or any other emotion, but by just executing an objective and sometimes inadvertently becoming a “math equation gone wild.”
I have previously mentioned New Verse News multiple times here, but glad to mention it again — it’s a great journal for poets of all backgrounds and poetic preferences to submit their work, knowing it will be judged on merit and not because it strictly follows any particular style favored or expected by the editor. James Penha is the New Verse News editor and, as is the case with each of the editors mentioned earlier, deserves high praise for his selection of material and for providing readers an engaging reading experience; also, as is the case with the other editors mentioned, he will welcome your submissions with the respect and consideration they deserve.
Impact
Very pleased to announce that Zumwalt’s poem, Impact, was just published at Eunoia Review: https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2026/09/25/impact-2/
Please visit and subscribe to Eunioia Review!
Heidegger’s Stopwatch
I am pleased to announce that Zumwalt’s topical poem, Heidegger’s Stopwatch, has been published today at New Verse News.
You can see it on their website or on their Substack feed. Please visit the either if you have a moment.
red meat
Red Meat
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool,
The President Donald J. Trump $1 Coin,
The Arc de Trump,
The White House State Ballroom —
All feats of greatness!
The Iran War,
The loss of life
And limb of U.S. Troops,
Of Iranian civilians,
Of Ukrainians and Russians,
Soaring gas prices,
Economically destructive tariffs,
Separating innocent children from parents,
Ignoring due process, ignoring Federal law —
All small potatoes
— zumwalt (Sept. 2026)
Monday Musings
As many of you know, I am a big fan of New Verse News. Few journals match them in variety, vitality, and relevance. Many MFA-correct journals and online sites sites filter out poems that break spoken and unspoken academic rules, filtering out poems that may even have rough edges but say something important or say something in an interesting way, but even for those journals that don’t, few offer the enjoyment I get from reading the poems shared on WordPress blogs or New Verse News.
I read this poem this morning and found it particularly resonant: https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2026/08/when-next-deluge-comes.html
New Verse News also provides important historical value. It captures the thoughts from a wide range of poets, some never before published online and some that have been published in top-tier journals or are poetry contest winners. It’s a great site for historians to visit, twenty years from now, or twenty-two hundred years from now.
Please visit!
The Sassoon Collection: x. Particle Show
Here is the tenth of Zumwalt’s revisions to his set of ten poems in his Sassoon Collection.
x. Particle Show
And still they come and go: and this is all I know—
That in my mind I watch an endless particle-show,
Where wild and listless forces flicker on their way,
With charged and uncharged parts from tangled strands
Because all spin so fast, and they’ve no place to stay
Beyond the frozen image of imagined lands.
And still, between the shadow and the image made,
The first desire of all of us flings onward, now betrayed
As in those stubborn years that weight them, and have passed:
All minds must grasp such particles dancing much too fast.
— zumwalt (2011, revised 2026)
Admin’s Note: This is the tenth and final piece in Zumwalt’s ten-poem tribute to poet Siegfried Sassoon, The Sassoon Collection, originally written in 2011, recently revised. Particle Show is based on Sassoon’s Picture Show. This last entry of the set parallels the title poem of Sassoon’s 1919 collection, shrinking Sassoon’s haunting cinematic metaphor (“And still they come and go: and this is all I know— / That from the gloom I watch an endless picture-show”) to a microscopic, scientific scale, wrapping up the set by firmly establishing that we are in the modern era, but with none of the problems of Sassoon’s times seemingly resolved, and with all the “endless” challenges of the age of information overload heavily added on top.
The Sassoon Collection: ix. Fight to our Finish
Here is the ninth of Zumwalt’s revisions to his set of ten poems in his Sassoon Collection.
ix. Fight to our Finish
The bums came back. Pundits played and bites were flying.
The yearning journalists threshed the backlit words
To trash the bickering brutes who’d refrained from agreeing
And hear the shuffled music of fizzled-out accords.
Of all the waste and nonsense they have brought
This moment is the lowest. (So we thought.)
Thumbing their noses across the aisle
Shunning those who break rank to deal,
Making consent plainly futile.
I heard the yammering journalists grunt and squeal;
And with their trusting viewers turned and went
To spew harmless venom at our government
— zumwalt (2011, revised 2026)
Admin’s Note: This is the ninth piece in Zumwalt’s ten-poem tribute to poet Siegfried Sassoon, The Sassoon Collection, originally written in 2011, recently revised. Fight to our Finish is based on Sassoon’s Fight to a Finish. In this transformation, Zumwalt swaps Sassoon’s returning soldiers and jingoistic press (“The boys came back. Bands played and flags were flying. / And Yellow-Pressmen thronged the sunlit street”) for combative politicians and pundits (“The bums came back. Pundits played and bites were flying”), adding in a few unkind words for the press out of general fairness.
