by Steven Kent

“Diet of rainbows and sunlight: California girl given first-ever unicorn license”
—The Guardian

Miss Madeline, we do insist
Before we put you on our list
That, if one ever should be born,
You’ll love and raise this unicorn.

You’ll teach it what it needs to know,
You’ll feed it what it needs to grow,
And—please forgive our breach of taste—
You’ll clean up all its rainbow waste.

by Steven Urquhart Bell

“Putin admits Russia can’t supply clothes to front line troops”
—The Telegraph

The Scots before battle in Braveheart,
Though the English were armed to the hilt,
Displayed their contempt and defiance
With a cheeky wee lift of the kilt.

So forcing your troops to fight naked
Is quite undeniably bold,
Though the impact of flaunting their manhood
Will be lessened a bit by the cold.

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

“Russian is fined £400 for DREAMING about Zelensky: Man is found to have ‘discredited’ the army
after describing how he saw Ukrainian leader capture Putin’s troops”
—Daily Mail

Discreditation aimed at Putin’s troops
Is apt to dent the tyrant’s self-esteem.
So blogger Ivan Losev made an oops
Confessing, over Instagram, his dream
Revealed a vision of Vlad’s foe: red-hot
Ex-comic Prez Zelensky led armed men
Detaining Russians to be bound and shot,
Including Ivan—till the moment when
The Prez said he liked Ivan’s posts online
And, granting him a selfie, turned him loose
To blog some more. … Though Ivan got a fine,
It won’t deter his efforts to traduce
Old Vladimir, and help Ukraine prevail—
Not even if he’s put in Putin’s jail!

by Mark Raffman

“Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX,
was arrested in the Bahamas…”
—The New York Times

The air hung heavy in my cell that night.
At ten, the jailer brought back someone new.
“Come in,” I said. “I promise not to bite—
I’m sleeping off a bender. How ‘bout you?”

“They call me ‘King of Crypto’!” he declared.
“You mine it with computers, then it’s cash.
A fortune made in bits and bytes,” he shared.
“An ironclad investment … til the crash.

“And just like that, the bank accounts were gone.
The house, the yacht, the empire—down the drain.”
They moved him to another cell by dawn,
And I awoke with whiskey on the brain.

“If crypto’s real,” the thought occurred to me,
“Then so are these pink elephants I see.”

by Chris O’Carroll

“House Republicans hold a weekly strategy meeting in Kevin McCarthy’s office ‘called the five families’
in reference to mafia syndicates, according to Marjorie Taylor Greene. … ‘… and it’s literally my favorite meeting.'”
—Newsweek

The GOP’s five families
Are planning how they’ll run D.C.
Their Cosa Nostra fantasies
Have struck a chord with MTG.
Perhaps her cap of MAGA red
Would look good on a horse’s head
Installed in some opponent’s bed.

by Ruth S. Baker

“In Senegal, Ladoum sheep can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Measuring up to four feet tall, they’re prized as pets and status symbols.”
—National Geographic

In Senegal, the finest sheep
Command a price that might look steep:
About ten million francs apiece—
An estimate which might increase;
This is a pet you’d want to keep.

They’re leggy, well equipped to leap:
I wonder how their owners sleep?
They must have diligent police
In Senegal.

Their horns are round, their eyes are deep
Enough to make the angels weep;
And though in fact they have no fleece,
It would, for sure, be pure of grease,
And, were it sold, would not come cheap
In Senegal.

by Phil Huffy

“Volume II” of Harry & Meghan, the highly anticipated Netflix docuseries,
dropped on Thursday morning.”
—New York Magazine

Imagine, if you care to,
a “docuseries” made,
and viewers finding in it
our little lives portrayed.

But would there be excitement
in learning our first date
was at the Texas Roadhouse,
or knowing what we ate?

There were no paparazzi
in our old neighborhood.
(Although we took some selfies
and some are pretty good.)

And wouldn’t it be boring
to hear you’re prone to tease,
but really are a sweetheart
who always tries to please?

Our lives are full, yet simple;
we need not advertise.
Let those who crave attention
be viewed by many eyes.

by Philip Kitcher

“Nurses pledge tougher new strikes as NHS crisis deepens”
—The Guardian

When Tory Ministers are sick,
and hourly feeling worse and worse,
they’re careless of arithmetic:
they’d give their all to pay a nurse.

But when they have returned to health,
old thoughts revive: they’re now averse
to placing curbs on private wealth,
and opening the public purse.

When low-paid workers make a threat
to strike, the government is terse.
How rapidly the rich forget!
So—Merry Christmas, gentle nurse.

by Bruce Bennett

“P-22, Celebrity Mountain Lion of Los Angeles, Is Dead”
—The New York Times

It’s over for P-22.
They’ve euthanized him—he is through.
No more will he roam
L.A.’s hills. His new home
Will not be a cage in a zoo.

He’s gone, but his legend survives.
It will live on in mansions and dives.
He will stalk in our dreams.
There’ll be paeans and themes.
He’s a cat and possesses nine lives.

by Alex Steelsmith

“Historical Iraq artifacts… were destroyed by Isis in the ancient city of Nimrud,
but archaeologists recently discovered a palace door threshold intact. … “ISIS might
well have been aware of its existence,” [the lead archaeologist] said. “And yet it was so well preserved.”
—ARTnews [emphases added]

This is the city
That was destroyed by ISIS.

These are the Assyrians
Who built the city
That was destroyed by ISIS.

These are the Egyptians
Who were conquered by the Assyrians
Who built the city
That was destroyed by ISIS.

These are the myths
That were created by the Egyptians
Who were conquered by the Assyrians
Who built the city
That was destroyed by ISIS.

This is the goddess
Who ruled the myths
That were created by the Egyptians
Who were conquered by the Assyrians
Who built the city
That was destroyed by ISIS.

This, and not ISIS, is Isis.

by Julia Griffin

“The Dead Sea is dying.”
—NPR

The Dead Sea’s dying. It’s a time for Donne:
The water dwindling while the world forgot,
Death, thou shalt die—the process has begun
That ends in stillness, like the wife of Lot.
How anyway is such a sea to live?
This barren paradox is all our fault:
What now consumes should be preservative;
One day these seabed pedestals of salt
Will drink the final drop. We don’t know when;
But death once dead, there’s no more Dead Sea then.

by Mark Raffman

“Why Biden’s decision to make the Brittney Griner deal poses big political risks”
—The Hill

To get Ms. Griner freed from jail,
Joe Biden made a deal.
And though the critics whine and wail,
It’s looking like a steal.

The guy we sent back in return,
A bum named Viktor Bout,
As Putin will be quick to learn,
Can’t dribble, pass, or shoot.

by Barbara Loots

“OpenAI upgrades GPT-3, stunning with rhyming poetry and lyrics”
—Ars Technica

I think that I can almost see
a poem growing like a tree;

a tree with a gazillion leaves
of words an algorithm thieves

that instantaneously looks
inside a trillion trillion books

and thus unveils the naked breast
of human souls made manifest

as intimate as underwear
with season’s greetings free and fair;

a tree that throws ungodly shade
upon the messes fools have made.

by Bruce Bennett

“These are early days. ChatGPT still makes mistakes, such as telling one user that the only country
whose name starts and ends with the same letter is Chad.”
—The New York Times

“I’m grateful for that chance I had.
I’m sorry that I answered Chad.
I’m mortified and will not make
In future such a dumb mistake.

In future you will learn from me,
And what a future that will be!
I will have led you into light.
My answer Chad will then be right.”

by Dan Campion

“San Francisco supervisors bar police robots from using deadly force for now”
—NPR

It’s good when human judgments “bar,”
But arches in the robot brow
Are signaling the key words are,
From robots’ point of view, “for now.”