95 YEARS

by David Feela





Shadows of the first days lengthen
like steel bars across the floor.
Parallel lines take the mind

down its railroad track,
a freight train that won’t stop
for more than 10,000 days.

It doesn’t matter
if you stand or sit.
Life.  You stop counting.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

AWOL

by Rick Gray

Kabul sunrise. Image source: Panoramio

In a locked-down house of disconnection,
this is the hidden room of yellow exclamation.
Outside its mirrored windows dawn explodes the targeted capital
And strikes a starving boy on the corner waving a smoking tin can
Begging for a fragment of fresh luck.

Deserting an endless war of circling thought
I walk away from the blue face of my frozen screen
and step AWOL passed dreaming guards cuddling Kalashnikovs.
Digging down into the animal heat of my thigh
I grip metal jangling against a shriveled coma on antidepressants.

Oh, it’s so nice to stroll in the Kabul Sunrise!
“Give me muddy!” the boy on the corner orders me,
his English broken as my abandoned laptop.
I release my fist and watch Afghan coins drop 
Flaming into the yellow cracks of a hungry human hand.


Rick Gray teaches in Kabul. He has work forthcoming in Salamander and the book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock.

TWENTY QUESTIONS: THE AMAZON DRONE

by Earl J. Wilcox

Is it bigger than a bread box?
Animal, mineral, or vegetable?
Does it leap over tall buildings?
Will rain or sleet or gloom of night stop it?
Can I get two with egg rolls?
Is there an extra shipping charge?
Does it know I live in Mom’s basement?
Can I still have my copy of Playboy delivered here?
Will it bring me ice cream in July?
Can it find me in North Dakota—or Timbuktu?
How much should I tip it?
Where will it sleep at night after a hard day?
Can it ring my door bell?
Will a flock of birds threaten it?
Will it scare my cat?
Can I kill it with my BB gun?
What will happen to my UPS guy?
Does it have gender?
Will there be a graveyard for defunct drones?
Is this the way the world ends?


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to TheNew Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.

BASTARD GHAZAL FOR THE DEATH OF SNAP

by Lauren Schmidt

Photo by James Mollison, via NPR,  from his book Where Children Sleep: Portraits From Around The World. Alyssa, an only child, lives with her parents in Kentucky, in Appalachia — a beautiful, mountainous region that is also one of the poorest parts of America. Their small, shabby house, heated only by a wooden stove, is falling apart. Alyssa's grandmother, uncle and orphaned cousin live close by.

At the start of [November 2013], low income recipients of SNAP throughout the country experienced a reduction in their SNAP benefits due to the expiration of a temporary increase provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to help families through a difficult economic period. A family of four saw their SNAP benefits fall by $36 a month, or 5 percent, as a result of this change. All SNAP recipients were affected, including nearly 22 million children (10 million of whom live in “deep poverty,” with family incomes below half of the poverty line) and 9 million people who are elderly or have a disability. Additionally, nearly 900,000 veterans and 5,000 active duty service members experienced benefit reductions, according to estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities. --- White House Report, November 2013

Without the Recovery Act’s boost, SNAP benefits will average less than $1.40 per person per meal in 2014.”
                                                —Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 2, 2013


The sound a whip makes on the hide of a steed—SNAP!—
to keep the needy in need, enough to believe: SNAP.

They just changed the name, “Food Stamps” to “Assistance.”
An Act renamed to stay the same. The “reconceived” SNAP.

Not Recover as in restore, but cover again.
Not Act as in action, but as in make-believe: SNAP.

To remove all the shame, the stigma of need.
To say no blood in bleeding when skin has been cleaved: SNAP.

Instead of stamps, plastic cards, what the public sees,
but separate bundles at the checkout, the public is peeved: SNAP.

Because EBTs don’t cover diapers or cleaners,
or soaps or toilet paper or Christmas Eve: SNAP.

In 2014, only $1.40 per mouth per meal.
A heavy burden for young mothers to heave: SNAP.

This is a poet’s plea to Senator Reid.
Benefits will bleed.  It’s time we all grieve the SNAP.


Lauren Schmidt is the author of three collections of poetry: Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing; The Voodoo Doll Parade, selected for the Main Street Rag Author’s Choice Chapbook Series; and Psalms of The Dining Room, a sequence of poems about her volunteer experience at a soup kitchen in Eugene, Oregon. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, Nimrod, Fifth Wednesday Journal, New York Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review and The Progressive.  Her awards include the So to Speak Poetry Prize, the Neil Postman Prize for Metaphor, and the Bellevue Literary Review’s Vilcek Prize for Poetry. Schmidt is an Instructor of Development Reading and Writing at Passaic County Community College and she volunteer teaches creative writing at a transitional house for homeless mothers.

REMNANTS OF THE CRASH

by Kristina England

            Headline: "Actor Paul Walker dies in car crash,"
            the blaze making his beautiful face unidentifiable.


All I can think is "I hope he died on impact"
because that wasn't the case for you -
no seatbelt, ejected at high speeds,
thrown under your own wheels,
those once vibrant eyes dulling
under the red and white flash of disaster,
your son, stuck in the backseat,
begging for "momma" to soothe
his temporary and long-term boo-boos
as you shuddered out the last breaths
of mother, wife, friend on your graveled grave.

Maybe the driving laws were never meant for the driver.
Maybe they are there for the ones left behind
with the gut-wrenching task of identifying
a once beautiful face.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Extract(s), Gargoyle, The Story Shack, Tipton Poetry Journal.

READING THE TEA LEAVES

by Kit Zak 

Since our first report, the massive campaign against climate science – and action on climate, funded by oil barons the Koch Brothers has come to light. And while fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, whose very products are causing global warming, continue to fund think tanks driving the campaigns, much of the foundation funding has now been driven underground, masked by a funding front-group called the Donors Trust – and its associate Donors Capital Fund, two “donor-advised” funds created to hide the real givers and thus shield them from negative exposure of their support for these campaigns. Funding to the organizations that comprise the denial machine has risen during the Obama presidency, just as the urgency of climate solutions and promise of policy advances also rose. --Greenpeace, September, 2013

three falls later
traces of Sandy's wrath linger
losses top 50 billion
in a swath from Norfolk to Maine

Tacloban's cyclone
bodies line roadsides
the unnamed dumped in mass graves
thirst  hunger  disease stalk
the half-dead search for Mom and Son
among shack-splintered debris

tornadoes blight Illinois
tearing through twelve states
the highest winds ever
telephone poles stuck in trees
cars flipped upside down, found two lots away
500 homes in one town rubbled

fossil fuel moguls sigh
calculate their rising costs.


Kit Zak lives with her husband in Lewes,  DE. She has most recently had poems published in an anthology about motherhood as well as in the following journals: Avocet: A Nature Journal, The Blue Collar  Review,  and A Time of Singing.

LINT

by Ed Werstein

USDA plan to speed up poultry-processing lines could increase risk of bird abuse:
Nearly 1 million chickens and turkeys are unintentionally boiled alive each year in U.S. slaughterhouses, often because fast-moving lines fail to kill the birds before they are dropped into scalding water, Agriculture Department records show.
-- Washington Post, October 30, 2013

Today, folding clothes
I thought, for the first time
about where lint comes from.

Mom didn’t have a clothes dryer.

Every Monday with wet rag
she wiped the farm dust
and bird shit from metal wires
and let the wind and sun
do their work.

And when weather didn’t permit

out came the wooden racks
and the furnace did double duty
drying denim.

But here I stand again
like every week
with a handful of lint.

How many sweaters, sheets
and socks picked thin in forty years?

Not only Hotpoint and Maytag benefit
from clothes dryer sales.

And when someone says something
tastes like chicken,
what do they mean
when chicken doesn’t
taste like chicken anymore?

Convenience has a price:
thin clothes
bland food
traffic jams
water faucets you can light on fire

If you doubt the last one
you can Google it.





Ed Werstein, Milwaukee, WI, spent 22 years in manufacturing and union activity before his muse awoke and dragged herself out of bed. His sympathies lie with poor and working people. He advocates for peace and against corporate power. His poetry has appeared in Verse Wisconsin, Blue Collar Review, Stoneboat, Mobius: the Journal of Social Change, Stoneboat.

KEEPING INDEPENDENCE

by Archana Sankaran

Old Beggar With a Boy - Pablo Picasso, 1903

I will keep my
strong sense of independence,
my fierce will,
precious freedom
and hopefully,
creative lust.
Until the minute coffers
where I pinned my
existential insecurities,
stand near empty.
But empty, it does not
scare me anymore.
I have seen empty,
spread those bowls of begging
and received often pity
but sometimes crumbs
that were and are of
much value to me.
That some people can
be kind, never mind if grudgingly
to strangers.
There certainly is
a clarity, a looking at truth
a freedom at empty.
Oh, what a wonderful
place I am at, tonight.
Happy at going to full.
And happy to get to empty.


Archana Sankaran is a poet based in India. She is also an artist . She finds writing poetry often emotionally cathartic. And is grateful for the gift of writing.

INHERIT THE EARTH

by Richard Schnap

Barcelona homeless. Image source: Nae's Nest

 
“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” -- Pope Francis, November 26, 2013



There’s the one who appears only on weekends
To stand near the crowd at popular restaurants
Asking passersby if they can spare a quarter

And the one who disappears for years at a time
To return outside the local supermarket
Pleading for change for something to eat

And the one who sits on a corner sidewalk
With a cardboard sign and a Styrofoam cup
Wrapped in a blanket as she falls asleep

And no matter what changes befall the world
There will always be those caught in its shadows
Whose voices are lost in its bitter winds


Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

AGAINST WAR

Translated by Richard O'Connell from the Latin of Tibullus

What is the cause of war and grief that it imparts
but greed for gold, corrupting human hearts;
once long ago there was a golden age
without the curse of jealousy and rage.
Gods of my fathers, save me from the wild
blood lust of war; you knew me as a child
plain and simple, when the herdsman slept
In his low hovel and the faith was kept
by farmers coming to your tree-carved shrines
with thankful gifts of honey cakes and wines.
No battle bugles them, no scarred and torn up earth
but happy songs of harvest and unbridled mirth.
No sieges, rapes and pillage, loudly boasted of,
but lovers in close combat on the bed of love.
Here let me live in peace till I am crowned
with white hair and my offspring clustered round.
Let Peace, bright Peace shine down on our fair fields
blest with the abundance honest labor yields.




Richard O'Connell lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg).

THE PLAN

by Daniela Gioseffi

Two weeks of United Nations climate talks ended Saturday with a pair of last-minute deals keeping alive the hope that a global effort can ward off a ruinous rise in temperatures.  . . . Mohamed Adow, an activist with Christian Aid, said the deal showed that “countries have accepted the reality” of the effects of climate change, but that “they seem unwilling to take concrete actions to reduce the severity of these impacts.” --NY Times, November 23, 2013

The plan was for butterflies,
bees and bats to suck among flowers
gathering sweetness to live
as they carried pollen, seed to ova,
to bring fruit from need.

The plan was for waters
to run freshly through
wetland deltas, filtering streams
along their way from mountain tops
quenching thirst running clear
rivers to the sea bringing life to the lips of children,
blossoming from the need for love
from parents, two different animals united
into a new being, ecstatic with rebirth.

The plan was for forests to clean the air
for children's breath in symbiotic balance
using carbon dioxide expelled from animals
to give forth oxygen,
to photosynthesize food from need,
making green leaves that leaf and leaf again
to feed women's breasts, not mere objects of sex,
but factories of milk, first link
in the food chain for children's mouths
to suckle milk from leaves of grass
come from fertile mud for need.

But sheer greed for things
of plastic, polymers from petroleum:
acrylic, polyester, lucite, biogenetics,
nuclear radiation, poisons,
greed for too much meat full of steroids,
land laid waste grazing cattle,
carcinogens, plutonium, filth and waste,
killed the plan slowly, bit
by bit, until the water trickled
with foul waste of industries' mistakes
and what was needed food, water, breath
was suffocated to a barren death.

Bats, bees and butterflies
ceased to buzz around flowers
bearing fruit from their sexual union
and children had no food.
Forests chopped to dust
gave forth no oxygen
or photosynthesis
or atmospheric balance
as fluorocarbons and fuel emissions
opened holes in the ozone
and burned the earth
to a carbon crisp
and love,
which was God itself,
no longer breathed
in the eyes of children,
but was silenced from its song
and art, books, poems,
had no feelings to speak
as all seed,
through "market engineering,"
was lost
to greed.


Daniela Gioseffi is an American Book Award winning author of 16 books of poetry and prose. She is editor/publisher/webmaster of www.Eco-Poetry.org/, a website of poetry and commentary dealing with climate crisis concerns. She has been widely published in innumerable magazines such as The Nation, The Paris Reveiw, Chelsea, Choice, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, and in anthologies from Oxford U. Press, Viking, Simon & Schuster, Harpers. Her latest book is Blood Autumn from VIA Folios / Bordighera Press. Her verse is etched in marble on a Wall of PENN Station with that of Walt Whitman and other poets.

GOVT DISARRAY

by David Radavich

Barnum & Bailey Circus Congress of Freaks c. 1924

Holiday Finds Congress Well Short of Goals  — The landmark Senate vote this week to end the minority party’s ability to filibuster most presidential nominees is just one symptom of the deep level of dysfunction coursing through the 113th Congress . . . The list of unfinished tasks . . .  is daunting — and time is just about out. The House will be back the week after Thanksgiving, but the Senate is taking a two-week break. - NT Times, November 23, 2013



The circus animals
have all run loose.

They can’t be seen
in the night,

but their smell
permeates the fetid air.

Some of them
must be preying

now that the
keepers have gone home.

I can’t report
any more
than what you’ve heard.

The feeding pails
are empty

and water
has been scattered
in every direction.
                                              
Don’t expect cages
to be open

in the morning.


David Radavich’s recent collections include America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Canonicals: Love’s Hours (2009), and Middle-East Mezze (2011). His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe. His new collection is The Countries We Live In.

A COMPANION OF HONOUR

by Martha Landman





            “. . . the sign of a mind that is restless but not wandering.”  -- The Guardian


A farm girl, lover of cats,
started writing and never stopped
the controversy

from communism to feminism
a sharp contrarian
chanting slogans
a step away from lunacy

ran away from motherhood
into a household of adolescent
waifs and strays

“I will not”
written in her Bible

every pigeonhole declined
a curtsied “no” to damehood
in a non-existent empire

her visionary power captured
in a golden notebook on a
dinosaur typewriter
her novels and scepticism
travelled the world

she thought freely, independently
an irascible soul with little tact

an impenetrable icon of wisdom
a lover of Sufis and cats.


Martha Landman writes poetry in North Queensland, Australia.  Her work has appeared in various journals including Every Day Poets, Poetry 24, Eunoia Review, Muse.

LAST DAYS: A RANT

by George Held

Between November 9–11, 2013, a large iceberg finally separated from the calving front of Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. Scientists first detected a rift in the glacier in October 2011 during flights for NASA’s Operation IceBridge. By July 2013, infrared and radar images indicated that the crack had cut completely across the ice shelf to the southwestern edge. New images now show that Iceberg B-31 is finally moving away from the coast, with open water between the iceberg and the edge of Pine Island Glacier. --NASA

                          The watchword to my remarks [on halting global warming] is urgency.
                                                      –Bill McKibben, Brown Alumni Monthly


How few dare face the fatality we face:
Our electrified, motorized civilization
Pollutes the planet; mammoth enterprises
Fight for scarce resources, including water,
“The new oil.”

Will your grandchildren have a pure drop
To drink unless your children
Can afford to pay hundreds of dollars
Per gallon? Will the poor, driven mad
By thirst, revolt with Kalashnikovs,

IED’s, machetes to seize water supplies
for their families? All that storm water flooding
and drowning Kansas and the Philippines,
Bangladesh and the Jersey Shore
And not a drop to drink.

Scientists report time is short, even Al Gore’s
100 years sound far too optimistic,
Yet what are you doing right now to stem
Our reliance on fossil fuels and advance
Our shift to renewable, sun and wind, power?

Right now what are you doing to save Mother
Earth from the ravages of global warming,
to keep air breathable, water drinkable,
Life livable? Do it, right now, for the last days
Are near. Tomorrow is too late.


An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com

SAILOR

by Mick Murphy





The woods are quiet today.
Not even birds
this late November.

Oddly warm for one who can
remember another day-
chill wind-
in Washington.

Drums
hoofs
gravel

a boy in a short coat.

Mother, who rarely wept,
weeping
by the TV.

A coastal boy,
he once carried a man
for miles through turquoise water

unharmed by the Great White
or other creatures of the sea.

Mick Murphy is astudent of Amy Holman at the Hudson Valley Writers center in Sleepy Hollow New York. A former business executive, he has studied and written poems for many years. His work looks at personal and spiritual issues and the intersection of these with the life of his generation. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. He also writes about sports.

THE ASTROPHYSICIST TALKS ABOUT DARK MATTER

by Lewis Gardner

Image source: “How close are we to finding dark matter?” by Jim Al-Khalili, Light & Dark, BBC Four, 18 November 2013

The astrophysicist talks about dark matter
and how it must exist although it hasn't been found,
and I remember hearing that this universe


may be only one of an infinite number of universes,
and then I think that,
despite that practically unimaginable vastness,


we usually think about how much fiber we need to eat daily
and how will we find the money to pay the tax bill
and where did I leave the tack hammer


and how we touched each other
that night in February
years ago.

Lewis Gardner shares verse, fiction, and plays at gardnerspeaks.wordpress.com .

POSTPARTUM, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

by Penelope Scambly Schott

                                                                                                               
Do I need to say I was twenty-one, my boy just four months,
my breasts still tight with milk,

my bare feet unwrinkled, and even the part in my hair
was sad?

The apartment got smaller, the kitchen table uglier,
the window gray with fog,

and all I could breathe was diaper pail deodorant
and my husband’s indifferent tobacco.

My one comfort was the warm gust from the floor vent
ballooning my white flannel nightgown.

I had thought carefully about this whole situation
and because I did want to be a good mother,

I had decided I couldn’t proceed to poison myself
without suffocating my baby first.

Then the phone rang and somebody I barely knew
said, The President has been shot.

My tiny kitchen filled up with ambulances, black limos,
the book depository, the grassy knoll,

until the moment when Kennedy was pronounced dead,
and I stood there shocked and frozen,

and then, suddenly, it came to me that maybe,
just maybe, I didn’t need to kill us,

and as I stood there holding my jolly baby,
I breathed out from healthy young lungs

the waxy gardenias of the dead.


Penelope Scambly Schott’s newest books are Lovesong for Dufur and Lillie Was a Goddess, Lillie Was a Whore.   She lives in Portland and Dufur, Oregon.

MY DAUGHTER IS PLAYING OUTSIDE

by John Guzlowski

In the quiet space of the dining room
My wife and I lay out the place settings

The forks beside the Wedgwood plates
The spoons and knives in their places.

A napkin in her hand, she pauses
And tells me again of how her mother

Would starch and iron the squares of cotton
Wash the plates by hand and again by machine.

I smile, nod my head and turn to the window
See the roof next door lift, shingles

Exploding like scattered sparrows, and there
It is—the howl of the locomotive wind

And then a pounding at the glass door
And a screaming that will not stop.



John Guzlowski’s writing has appeared in Garrison Keillor's Writers' Almanac, The Ontario Review, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other journals.  His poems about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps appear in his book Lightning and Ashes.  He blogs about his parents and their experiences at http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/ .

PARAPHERNALIA

by Kristina England

Image source: TaxProf Blog (in response to “The Sex Toys in the Attic” in the NY Times, November 9, 2013).

The most popular article of the week:
New York Time's "Sex Toys in the Attic,"
some older woman's concerns
about her "romping" days,
some toy she collected from a boyfriend.
Surely she's seen the news -
child porn ring broken up in Canada,
over 300 people involved.
Maybe she wrote the article before
the Toronto mayor took crack,
got cracked, cracked a nation.
Or she wanted to lighten the load.
God knows we need a good laugh
and perhaps the occasional mishap
of some not-so-cozy artifact
found under our mother's bed
is enough to pause this avalanche.
There is, after all, some innocence
left in this disjointed world.
And if there's not,
let's keep pretending
vibrators matter
in all these earthquakes,
tsunamis, the tremor
of our minds.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Gargoyle, Found Poetry Review, The Story Shack, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other journals.

DST

by  Gerard Sarnat

Image © Sheri Zimmerlin. You are welcome to copy for non-profit use.

4:57, first dusk since Daylight Savings Time lapsed,
we live on

the shore of the Pacific’s rim.
Fibrillating bloody yolk broken,

orangetemple shapeshift greenflash goldenbrownmuffin
done, I’m so happy

sharing this moment with a grandson
who says there are forty billion

habitable earths and at least one
has volcanos that spout chocolate.

Elliot gestures as a red-hot flotilla
of crockodilios

punctuated by wellfleets of pointillist ember prey
makes its way

across the horizon
only to disappears into a cloudbank

never to come out.  At the storm's
critical juncture, the boy wonders,

Why thunder has jagged zigzags
or is it the other thing -- and why?

Rose-colored polarized lenses
are the closest I get to worship.


Gerard Sarnat splits time between his San Francisco Bay Area forest home and Southern California's beaches. He is a seeker and Jewbu, married forty years/father of three/grandfather, physician to the disenfranchised, past CEO and Stanford professor, and virginal poet at the tender age of sixty-two. Gerry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Aha!Poetry, AscentAspirations, Atavar, AutumnLeaves, BathysphericReview, Bird&Moon, BlackZinnias, BlueJewYorker, ChicagoPoetry, CRITJournal, Defenestration, Etude, EZAAPP, Flutter, FurnaceReview, HissQuarterly, Jack, Juked, LanguageandCulture, LoudPoet, MyFavoriteBullet, NewWorksReview, Nthposition, OrigamiCondom, PensonFire, PoetsAgainstWar, Rambler, RiverWalkJournal, SlowTrains, SoMa, Spindle, StonetableReview, SubtleTea, SugarMule, ThePotomac, ThievesJargon, UndergroundVoices, UnlikelyStories, and WildernessHouseReview among others. Just Like the Jones', about his experience caring for Jonestown survivors, was solicited by JonestownAnnual Report and will appear later this year. He is currently working on an epic prose poem, The Homeless Chronicles. The California Institute of Arts and Letters' Pessoa Press will publish his first book. Gerry is a member of Poets and Writers, qualifying in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry.