RED, WHITE, AND GREEN

Strawberry Season in Carolina


by Earl J. Wilcox


On Saturdays during strawberry season
in Carolina, the entire Gonzalez family
comes early to pick. Field owners
don’t check for green cards when red
berries ripen and quickly rot in the field
in the hot noonday sun. Local townies
also show, children in tow, gramps for
fun, uncle Dave to drive the SUV. The
Smith family comes for the fresh fruit
taste, sunshine, mixing Carolina twang
with a few Hispanic words the kids pick
up in school. During strawberry season,
when the juices flow down the arms of
pretty children, joy is the common language


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he has contributed 33 poems to the New Verse News.
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HOSTAGE

by Marcelle Kasprowicz


Lob your stone
across the border
Yes, that way

Nothing to worry over
those are cardboard cutouts
A shooting gallery
No more

If your aim is good
they will fall
That's what you want

If you've done this before
you can aim at the head
That will bring them down quick

The chest is a bigger target
easier to hit
With good results too
And the small ones
don't run as fast
That's an advantage

Don't feel bad
What may look like wounds
is really just paint

Here is the first stone

You hear cries?
Did you forget your earplugs?
Have you tried inspirational CDs?
A great one is ''Might Makes Right''

Today
the sun is shining on us
giving us strength
Tonight
when they bask in the sun
the same stones
may be lobbed at us

Hurry
Don't look into their eyes
That's where man's innocence
lies hostage
to history's shifting shadows


Marcelle Kasprowicz was born in France and lives in Austin, Texas. She writes in English and French. In 2001, her poem “House of Bones” won first prize in the AIPF Anthology. Her poems have appeared in several magazines, anthologies and on line. Her first book Organza Skies was published in 2005.
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CONFLAGRATION

by Scot Siegel

after Israel's 60th Birthday

One word worth 19 points
but so many other options on the table:

a Ratio: 5
a Ration: 6
a Nation: 5

(nearly a Generation)

and a Flag is 8 in flames...

But tonight, we choose real things:
opt out of the competition

and push
the Scrabble board aside -

I hand my daughter the matches
and fold the napkins

as she steadies the flame
and lights our Shabbat candles -


Scot Siegel is an urban planner and poet from Lake Oswego, Oregon, where he serves on the Lake Oswego City Planning Commission and Board of Trustees for the Friends of William Stafford. His poetry has previously appeared on The New Verse News, The Oregonian, Open Spaces, and Red River Review, among others.
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LET THEM EAT CAKE

by Phyllis Wax


They’ve got us over an oil barrel
and we’ve got a great solution
except it’s not really a solution,
but don’t say that too loud.

We’re turning corn into biofuel
(I’ll tell you a well-known secret:
to produce a gallon of ethanol
takes almost as much energy as
that gallon contains) and our farmers
are doing well and the oil companies
are doing well—-what a deal!

Still, every acre of corn
is an acre not growing food
and they’re starving in Africa
and they’re starving in Asia
while we’re producing fuel

for our 4,000 square foot homes
and our hungry SUVs. What the heck—
if we’ve got it why not use it
and it’s too bad about the others
but it’s not our fault, is it,
that they weren’t born American?


Phyllis Wax lives and writes in Milwaukee, WI.
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A WOMAN'S LANGUAGE OF WAR

by Mary Hamrick

"Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. [ . . .]
I stood there, trembling with fright.
And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature."
--Edvard Munch (the Scream)

Year after year,
in sleeping positions of flowered poses,
we sleep with thorns of desert-dirt
between our fingers: bodies cursed silent.

Perching,
they isolated a certain few.
Smoldering, as they sinned,
they carried mesh bags of dirty works.

Standing crowded in the line of death,
we stood on their floor
and did what we were told.
In the wooded regions of their bodies,

they’d stir things up unholy.
Heavy, diving birds
spread sad skirts wide open
like branches of a tree.

Unanesthetized, in an endless loop
of resistance, we felt bullets heckling
and knives mangling.
Necks and breasts were squeezed small.

Hands yanked us to places
where tongues of whiskey
soured our breath. Cursed silent,
this is when the body breaks.

White-hot,
the town is thirsty.
The desert and its creatures play;
they buzz about barking.


Mary Hamrick was born in New York and moved to Florida when she was a young girl. Her writing often reflects the contrast between her Northern and Southern upbringing. Current publications include Arabesques Press, Architecture Ink, Cezanne’s Carrot, Coe Review, Howling Dog Press (OMEGA 6), Lucidity Poetry Journal, Ocean Magazine, On the Page Magazine, Pemmican, Poetry Repair Shop, Poems Niederngasse, Potomac Review, Rosebud Magazine, Scrivener’s Pen, Tattoo Highway, The Barricade, The Binnacle, The Harrow, The New Verse News, The Subway Chronicles and others.
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THE EXECUTION BUS

by David Chorlton













A condemned man saw his reflection
in the sunlit flash from a Chinese sword.
This is how the guilty were executed.
This is how the innocent were executed.
Then a gunshot was the last
sound a prisoner heard, just before the family
had chance to claim his body for the price
of the bullet used, which was the same
for the guilty as for the innocent.
Now the government speaks of human rights
as a bus arrives at even the poorest village
whose inhabitants would envy the wash basin
and comfortable seats beside the stretcher
for guards and witnesses
to the injection’s administration
behind the blacked-out windows.
More humane for the guilty,
officials say, than having to ask
the prisoner to kindly hold
his mouth open to allow the bullet
to pass through
without deforming the face.
More humane for the innocent.
The country has become more civil say
its leaders who are quick
to indicate that people spit
less often than they used to. During the Olympic Games
executions will happen three, four hundred times.
Justice is swift for the guilty, swifter
for the innocent. The fine for spitting
translates into two dollars and forty-one cents.


David Chorlton has two new chapbooks posted online, The Dreaming House and Dry Heat. Both draw on life in Arizona.
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ALL GIRLS' SCHOOL

by Kobus Moolman













He works. In an all girls’ school. He makes the tea. In the all girls’ school. He is one of the only. Men. In the school. Mowatt Park. Montclair. Overlooking. The shunting-yards. Railway tracks. Factories. Workshops. Second-hand discount stores. Reduced. Hawkers welcome. The teachers call him. The teachers call him. Philemon. Philemon okay. Philemon. That’s right. Philemon. Thank you. Philemon. Philemon. Come here. But – His real name. His real name his real name his real name. Is. Mzolisi Njabulo Ntshangase. He works. In the staff room. He makes. Tea. Coffee. Hot chocolate. With or without. Black or white. For the teachers. All the teachers. Are white. At Mowatt Park. Montclair. All the teachers call him. Philemon. The girls. The girls are almost. Almost all. Black. The girls call him. Baba. Baba Ntshangase. Bab’Ntshangas. In Montclair. Mowatt Park. Overlooking. The shunting-yards. Railway tracks. Discount. Reduced.


Kobus Moolman is a South African poet and playwright. He has published three collections of poetry: Time like Stone (which received the Ingrid Jonker Prize for 2001), Feet of the Sky, and Separating the Seas. His play Full Circle won the major South African award for a new script in 2004. Last year he published a collection of radio plays, Blind Voices, including a CD of the BBC production of one of them.
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BECAUSE I AM BLACK

by Martins Iyoboyi













Because I am black greed governed our lives,
Lines, drawn for differentiation.
I possess thick lips wreathed in short nose
Short hairs with proud forehead.
In the old, manacled, abducted
In rooms inscribed with ‘A land of no return’
Tumbling the immense car in great swiftness
Making my divine home miles away
To the belabourment of foreign land.
For the many valleys dug for burial
Of black remnants of old
Unspeakable mistresses in junk cabins
Serving in servitude the rulers,
Calls for compensation.
When I go beyond the drawn radius
Reeling to crumble the opaque scenario,
The red eyes came up in the south of the continent.
Because I am black, is it a clog,
Am I a wick to light the lamp of the world?


Martins Iyoboyi was born in Nigeria. His poems have appeared in Zone, The Flask Review, 63 Channels, The Bending Spoons, Zeitschrift for the Nations, Temenos, Rhythm, Munyori, Contemporary Rhyme, Chiron Review, Poetry Cemetery and Boyne Berries.
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HOW TO FIND PEACE

by Martin Willitts, Jr.

Based on the painting, “Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks

1.

I know the glow of benevolence when I see it.
It is easily recognized by the wild animals,

so they willingly come to you without regret
trusting what they should not.

When they come to you, you do not harm them,
so they recognize this and respond.

They know your voice does not lie, so they relax,
settling down so you can smooth them.

They are easily led and they allow themselves to arrive,
permitting you to touch them, feeling tranquility

in your fingers, they forget to flee, the urge to dodge.
They let their muscles loosen and their pacing is released.

It is the same as a breeze when air is hardly moving
yet you feel it, you stretch out your arms to embrace it,

your hair tingles on your arms like light touch,
your tension leaves your jaw. This is what happens

when you remove yourself from everything. This
is what happens when you go silent and into yourself.

Something speaks inside of you, so subtle,
you have to listen closely, intently.

It is a voice telling you something. Listen.
It is telling you to let go.

All you to do is trust. You can fall back
and you will be caught. You will be alright.

This is why I trust you as the wild does.
I will be safe in your arms,

you do not have to be there for me to know this,
it is part of the trusting, it is a part of letting go.

2.

I am domesticated.
I acknowledge this now.

I was a beast until you came along.
At first, I resisted this.

I did not understand & mistrusted.
I refused to let myself be tamed.

I thought being controlled meant
losing something about myself

I was wrong
I was wrong as wrong could be.

When you took me in,
brushed me with your serene hands

I began to understand something,
something wordless,

something that needed to be felt
and unable to describe

other than I felt safe, loved,
and protected like never before

I felt something few have felt
until they let go,

and find the what is invisible
and then regret waiting so long.

3.

This calm is what I want, forever,
your hands, solid as light,

as thirst is quenched without water.
Your arms opened for all to enter

even a person like me, especially me,
although I do not understand why me,

doubting I deserve this, in spite of myself,
or perhaps because of me.

Rather than question this,
it is better to accept what is possible.

It is simpler this way.
It is what is needed and necessary.

4.

The wild and the tame lay together,
breathing a new kind of music

sighing the calm into the trembling forest,
knowing what was not before

it can be a peaceable kingdom,
only they have to be willing to change

that which was missing is returned,
finally they see what they could not

the grass shining, the hummingbird air,
the wind speaking in secret tongues.

If you listen, it will speak to you without talking
& you will hear what you need to hear

how to seek for another way to live
without craving retribution or what is not ours.

The lack of control scares us, fiercely,
needlessly throwing around destruction,

treating others as undetectable,
unwilling to consider options.

5.

We can lie down with the wicked,
or move dream-like like we already do.

We can continue to wade in the wrong direction,
or question the direction we are heading.

When it seems like only one way,
two at best, we never see more, never more.

If I lay down in the pasture with my enemy
will we discuss our differences, rationally.

If he kills me, then he destroys
his own chance at peace;

if we use a common language
can we give what the other needs,

will we realize we never really own anything,
will we hold onto our own shadows, tightly,

how can we argue over nothing we had,
how long can we hold our breath.


6.

Your hands hold what is hidden.
When your hands open, there is a small light.

I can either believe there is light
when there was no light before,

or believe it was a magic trick.
When I open my own hands, I find light.


Martin Willitts, Jr. has had publications in Big City Lit, Rattle, Pebble Lake Review, Hurricane Blues (anthology), Hotmetalpress.net, Haigaonline, Bent Pin, 5th Gear, Slow Trains, Primal Sanities (anthology) and others. He has a print chapbook Falling In and Out of Love (Pudding House Publications, 2005), an online chapbook Farewell--the journey now begins on www.languageandculture.net 2006, in archives), a full length book of poems with his art The Secret Language of the Universe (March Street Press, 2006), print chapbook Lowering Nets of Light (Pudding House Publications, 2007), online chapbook News from the Front, edited a poetry anthology about cancer, Alternatives to Surrender (Plain View Press, 2007), and an online chapbook of haiku with his artwork, Words & Paper.
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THE JANJAWEED'S WIFE

by Leslie McGrath













Who are the wives of the saint and the brute?
She who loved her husband and she who loved her husband.

Husband, you've returned to us
covered in blood and dust, covered
in bits of gore crawling with flies.
Let me wash your clothing, let our son
tend to the horse while you
scrub the battle from your sore skin
with hot water, sweet herbs.
This war, it keeps you far
from our fire; it has closed
your face; it has written
on your chest unreadable verses.
Have you no hunger? You shame me
by refusing millet from our pot.
And do you think I don't notice
the stink of another woman on your sex?
How am I to honor a man who feeds
his appetite in another village,
rests in the shade of a stranger's tree?
No rest for me. Our children wake at night
to the new voice of Sudan: screams and screaming
mortars from the dark's hundred corners;
their father making corpses out of mourners.


Leslie McGrath lives in Stonington, CT and works as an integratve health counselor. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Ireland, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2004 Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her chapbook, Toward Anguish, won the 2007 Philbrick Poetry Award and was published by The Providence Athenaeum. She is the submissions editor for Drunken Boat and a recipient of a 2007 Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. Her interview with poet Dick Allen is forthcoming in The Writers' Chronicle.
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DREAMS ABOUT TORTURE

by Marion D. Cohen













It's always things that would not really hurt.
There's rawness but no blood
moans but no screams.
And definitely no marks, never anything gross.
And when I'm the one being tortured, I'm also the one doing the torturing.
I'm at the controls in some way.
And if the dream turns lucid, I approach everybody in sight and begin to mold their faces.
I stretch, I shrink, I permute.
But I don't torture.
Once, in such a dream, I said to them, "I know you aren't real. So I can torture you if I
want to. But I don't want to.
"Besides, maybe you ARE real."
Yes, I'm still afraid it will hurt them
more than it hurts me.


Marion Cohen's latest book is Crossing the Equal Sign (Plain View Press, TX), a poetry collection about the experience of mathematics. Her previous book was Dirty Details: The Days and Nights of a Well Spouse (Temple University Press). She teaches math at Arcadia University.
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MONUMENTAL

by Roger Craik













Parched, outlandish by the sea
it stands declarative:

“The Park of Human Rights”

fresh-hewn
free

authorizing you and everyone
at liberty to saunter round its ornamental gardens,

inspect the three colossal marble blocks
white as bone

hacked to slabs of arches, each one
justified by lists of names of men

who fell in war or died
of wounds, beneath the legend chiseled there:

her insan uzgur
(“all humans are free”).

Further down the shore
you’ll see a strip of jetty, corridored

with roses, trellises, and lattice work.
There on Saturdays the wedding parties walk

down to the kiosk at the end, for hire,
and there they stand. I’ve watched them many times.

But here – you cannot miss the sight of it –
here a graphite-black gigantic spike

sling-hawsered to a sharp incline,
goes bayoneting high and deep above

the forced-in strangulated shrubs, above
the concrete walkways frozen hot in ripples, up

over the Aegean , the living sea,
torturing the winds. But if, instead, you let your eye

sidle down to where the spike begins
you’ll snag a tousled barricade of wire

installed to barb, to brand the urchin boy whose only aim
is climbing to the highest, the forbidden place, the place –

higher than his friends or anyone can climb – the place
that’s marked in red, or black – with clumsy skull and bones –

yasak

and there, with one corrugated rubbery flap
of skin, darkening

he’ll stand overreaching everything,
and point, and laugh, and mock.

No explanation’s given of the spike.
No explanation’s given of the wire.
No list of names depends on either.


Roger Craik, Associate Professor of English at Kent State University Ashtabula, has written three full-length poetry books – I Simply Stared (2002), Rhinoceros in Clumber Park (2003) and The Darkening Green (2004), and his poetry has appeared in several national poetry journals. English by birth and educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton , Craik has worked as a journalist, TV critic and chess columnist. Before coming to the USA in 1991, he worked in Turkish universities and was awarded a Beineke Fellowship to Yale in 1990. He is widely traveled, having visited North Yemen, Egypt, Tibet, Nepal, Japan, and, most recently, Bulgaria, where he taught during spring 2007 on a Fulbright Scholarship. Craik is an American citizen and is glad that he is. Poetry is his passion: he writes for at least an hour, over coffee, each morning before breakfast, and he enjoys watching the birds during all the seasons.
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MAY DAY 2008

by Bill Costley

For Dave Keefer

On May Day,
I blogged about cultivating jade-plants
& got a breathless e-mail
from Anna Hawthorne in Canada
calling the day Beltane.

Unable to march, I wrote.

3 days later,
I BARTed to Berkeley
to a mtg of the writers’union
I’d joined in Boston
when Dutch Reagan
fired the air-traffic controllers.

My union struggles; I persist.


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco chapter of the National Writers Union.
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THE CLINTON MARRIAGE

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske


They’re people we might know
vaguely fighting at a table across the restaurant.
Civilized. Seething. Giants.
I use two hands to cup jagged fragments of the ring she’s thrown
hollow as a chocolate rabbit, rich and dark inside
not cheap like a shower curtain rung
gleam clearly gold.

They stand up quickly.
He sits down.
I recognize them now
from D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths:
Hera and Zeus
(page 16).
She speaks simply with no rage;
fury compacted into smashed ring shards on our table.

He looks withered, not divine,
while she manifests an aura
(page 24).
She is pardoned anything by his infidelities.
Her torso wants to leave,
but her head and feet are rooted to him like Baucis and Philemon
(Bullfinch, Chapter VI).

Zeus begs without moving his lips.
The bags under his eyes empty,
ring reforming itself like the cop in Terminator,
remarrying her public finger.


Elizabeth Kerlikowske's fourth book of poetry Dominant Hand is now available from MayApple Press. She teaches at Kellogg Community College and runs the annual Poems That Ate Our Ears Contest in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
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A SANCTUARY NEAR THE IRRAWADDY

by Frank Joussen


Burma two weeks after Cyclone Nargis
and too few voices, too few photos coming through.
But don´t switch off, don´t turn away.
Use your imagination to face the bigger picture:
rice on the runway,
hunger in the ruined harbour of Rangoon;
medicine going to waste on the planes,
epidemics threatening the flooded delta.
And in between:
The military and its junta.

Don´t start wailing now,
“you see, there´s nothing we can do.”
When the water´s rising
you shouldn´t refuse to build an arch
only because you´re not a carpenter.
Inertia in the face of
natural and political disasters
is every dictator´s dream
is every peasant´s nightmare
come true.

I, for my part, am going to take a chance.
I´ve got a friend who´s got a friend
who knows a Burmese woman
working with the nuns and monks
of a monastery near the Irrawaddy,
a sanctuary on slightly higher ground,
a refuge for the desperate.
And if you say now,
“what a long line of people
to trust”, I agree.
But look at Christianity or Buddhism:
what a long line of religious leaders –
and what a success story.
Now, I´m not sure about
Heaven or Nirvana.
I don´t know much about the Irrawaddy, either.
But I´m going to learn – by doing.
Then we will see
if help can get through.


Editor's Note: Frank Joussen tells us he will be contributing to help the victims of Cyclone Nargis via The Australia Burma Community Development Network.


Frank Joussen is a German school teacher who actively supports NGOs in India, Brazil and Africa. His poems have appeared in numerous print publications in the U.S., Canada, Germany, G.B., Ireland, Australia and India. His ezine publications include The Pedestal Magazine, Raving Dove, Poets Against War, New Verse News (U.S.A.), Poets Against War Canada, The Stephen Gill Gazette, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), The Poetry Kit, Caught in the Net and the Measure (G.B.)
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A SIMPLE SIGN

by Becky Harblin


People First,
that’s the sign. Simple,
black with plain white letters.
It hangs on a construction trailer.
No bee, or bird, or bat in sight.

People First.
What People, all people?
People first above all else?
Pat my head and feed
some people’s pockets
today, and never mind tomorrow’s
earth. Our mother’s sons and daughters
can live elsewhere
on genetically
engineered corn or cake.

People first.
We the people?
Who do we think we are?
We are the first people
with all the claims on all the soil, all the air,
all the animals, and all the waters,
posting our simple sign,
with our motto my ‘people first’
above all else.
We are the mind, separate
and severed from our earth body.

After all, what comes first,
the money,
or the chickens with no eggs?


Becky Harblin is a sculptor who works in concrete on on her farm in upstate New York. Becky starts each day by writing haiku. Her poems have been published on New Verse News - 2007/04, 07, and 09. And in North Country Journal. Her other poems may be read on her Web site.
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A MOTHER'S DAY PROCLAMATION

by Mary Saracino


"Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have heart, whether our baptism be that of water or tears!”

--Mother's Day Proclamation, Julia Ward Howe, Boston , 1870

She couldn’t anticipate that we’d sip champagne at fancy brunches,
turn her fervor into a hallmark holiday

In the name of womanhood and of humanity

Julia Ward Howe set her soul upon a nobler task

We will not have our great questions decided by irrelevant agencies

Set her courage upon loftier aims

Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause

She spoke of blood and bone

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience

She invoked the language of the womb