MY SYMPTOMS APPROACHING ELECTION DAY

by Paul Hostovsky

I’m shaking my head all the time

and it looks like a tremor, it looks like

Parkinson’s. But in fact it’s negation.

It’s: No, no, no, no, no, no, no!

It’s disbelief and disapproval,

refusal to accept what’s unacceptable,

what’s so unspeakable I can only

cover my mouth and wonder how such people

can think such things. It’s unthinkable,

yet we who think it’s unthinkable

could very well be in the minority. I shake

my head and cover my mouth

and groan. Are you sick? a man asks me

at the post office. Here, take this.

And he hands me a red tote bag 

with MAGA emblazoned on both sides. No 

thank you! I say, and vomit directly into it,

cover my mouth, and shake my head

and leave him there holding the bag.

AI-generated graphic from Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.

WAKING UP COLD

by Thomas R. Smith

Watercolor painting by Judys Art

October 2024

Change of the seasons, woke up cold.

Time to pile on extra blankets.

Thought of the people living in rubble,

huddling under whatever scrap of comfort

they can pull around their bones—sick,

hungry, broken, families blown away,

entire bloodlines erased.  With no plan

to rebuild, it could take generations.

How to face such a dawn knowing children,

grandchildren, great-grandchildren pre-condemned?

Nor to forget among the tens or hundreds

of thousands dead those double hostages

of Hamas and Bibi.  God help us all.

Woke this morning, cold from a year of war.

Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.

LIVE-STREAMING GENOCIDE

by Bonnie Naradzay

On the one hand,
A 19-year-old journalist, Hassan Hamad, 
was assassinated by Israel’s army;
they’d warned him on WhatsApp to stop 
filming the killing of Gazans by the IDF, 
the most moral army in the world.  
That they’d come after him. 
This is your last warning, they said. 
And they did, with a drone strike
on his home in Jabaliya, 
a refugee camp in northern Gaza. 
You can see on this video
a few journalists collecting 
what remained of his body in a shoebox 
for burial.The inscrutable grief.  
On the other hand, Israel’s army
freely shares videos of their massacres
of unarmed Gazans, on Israeli dating apps, 
for clicks, with mocking songs:
“We’re launching Operation 8th Candle
of Hanukkah, the burning of Shuja’iyya
neighborhood. Let our enemies learn 
and be deterred. This is what we’ll do 
to all our enemies, and not a memory 
will be left of them for we will annihilate 
them all to dust.”  With impunity.

Bonnie Naradzay's manuscript will be published in 2025 by Slant Books. For years she has lef weekly poetry sessions at day shelters for homeless people and at a retirement center, all in Washington DC. Three times nominated for a Pushcart, her poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review Online, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, Cumberland River Review, New Verse News, and other places.. In 2010 she won the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize—a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary; there, she had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read Pound’s early poems.

RHAPSODY FOR RAFA

by Dick Altman

A lefty,

with bulging muscles

of terror,

for those unfortunate

enough to be playing

on the other side

of the net.

So strong,

it is said,

his top spin was

clocked at three

thousand revolutions

a minute.

No one else

in the pro game

came close.

 

I once ranked high

in the amateurs.

With his speed of ball,

playing him

would have been

less play,

than chasing

after a sphere

expelled

from a tornado.

 

So fast did the ball

come at you,

you hardly had time

to swing.

So fast,

you spent

most of the time

running deep

into corners,

that left you

breathless

after each point.

And he hardly

taking a breath.

 

Against Federer’s

eternal calm,

his face

was a study

in rictus,

every point,

so it seemed,

a matter of life

and tennis death—

a lost point

he should never

have lost.

 

Only late

in his career

did a smile grace

his face.

Was he letting up

a little,

I wanted to ask.

He had reached,

as I saw it,

another plain

of happiness,

where few

tennis angels

perched.

 

Rafa,

I might have

hated to play you,

but damned

if I didn’t love

your game.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Wingless Dreamer, Blueline, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad.  His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 250 poems, published on four continents.

ZEUS REDUX

by Steve Deutsch

We do it by ionizing

the radiation and shifting

the polarization of the earth’s

magnetic core

 

millions of times per second.

We control it

from a basement apartment

in Hoboken—

 

that bluest of blue towns,

paid for by the DNC.

The four of us

do the weathering

 

on two old Apple laptops.

Our biggest concern

is the intermittent loss of the internet.

Damn Comcast.

 

We do our best

to make the heat and storms

believable—

blamable on climate change.

 

What a hoax.

Few have noticed

it is only the red areas

suffering the ill effects.

But now, one or two of the wise

have picked up on it,

I assure you that will end

with completion of our next project.

 

Lightening bolts.

Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and once for The Best of the Net Anthology. He has published six books of poetry. One, Brooklyn, was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press.

VOTING IS FAR MORE POWERFUL

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

with apologies to Emily Dickinson

Who is leading national polls?
Harris has been ahead of Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July, as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

Kamala Harris: 49%

Donald Trump: 46% —BBC, October 9, 2024

 

Voting is far more powerful
Than Trump's attempt to rise.
So many times this sinking man
Attempts to reach the skies.
So push him down forever
To that abhorred abode,
Where hope and he part company—
His dreams morosely stowed.
The felon's sneering visage,
Most odious to see,

Let's shun without compunction
As an adversity.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 300 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), Politics/Letters, The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had nine previous poems in The New Verse News.

ADMONITORY ODE TO MOUNT RANIER

by Joel Savishinsky

The top of Mount Rainier is no longer the top of Mount Rainier. The frozen ice cap on top of Washington’s iconic mountain—recognized for generations as the tippy top—is melting as the atmosphere warms. Now, that frozen dome has sunk below a rocky patch on the mountain’s southwest rim, crowning that spot as the new highest point. —Seattle Times, October 6, 2024. Photo: Eric Gilbertson poses Sept. 21 on Mount Rainier’s southwest rim, the new highest point of the mountain, with the Columbia Crest, the mountain’s former highest point, in the background. (Courtesy of Ross Wallette)

Perhaps it is too much 
to expect any of us to
stand tall in these times,
to measure up to what
we once were at 
the peak of our reputations.
 
Maybe this is what happens
when you’ve stood for ages
with your head in the clouds,
unaware of how each year
grinds you down a bit,
too busy looking down on
everyone else to notice
that people don’t 
look up at you quite 
in the way they used to.
 
Yes, your admirers will still
grapple with your magnitude,
admire your posture and
profile, but as the decades 
wear on and wear you down, 
like the rest of us you will
probably need to learn
to get over yourself.
 
If not, you’ll only get more
upset, lose your cool,
blow your top, and
shrink even more
in our estimation.
 

Joel Savishinsky moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2014 at the age of 70. In the years since then, he has lost at least 1 ¼ inches of height. He is a retired professor of anthropology and gerontology, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and author of Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, winner of the Gerontological Society of America’s book-of-the-year prize. In 2023, The Poetry Box published his collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging. His work has also appeared in Beyond Words, Blink-Ink, The Decolonial Passage, The New York Times, The New Verse News, Passager, and Willawaw.

EAGLE ELEGY

by Susan J. Wurtzburg

Once an endangered species, bald eagles, including at Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota, came roaring back to life. They now confront a new foe: avian flu. —The Washington Post, October 5, 2024

Iconic American bald eagle, feathered vigilance,

predatory golden gaze far-focused 

across the valley, where coyotes jump-kill 

mice and voles. Fur-encased small prey,

meaty morsels for white-headed sea eagles.

 

Yellow hooked beaks prominent on the Great Seal,

where bald eagles unfurl their wings, a defiant

symbol of the USA. Environmental laws nurtured

these raptors, saved from harms: DDT, hunters,

lead bullets. Biologists lauded their soaring story.

 

Exaltation for these wide-winged fliers slumps 

with the advent of avian influenza. 2021: year

that birds begin to fall from the sky, falling, falling,

across the USA. Now, 2024: talons clench, beaks twist,

wings flail: collapse of iconic bald eagles widespread.

 

Emblematic birds, do you auger an apocalypse?

 

Susan J. Wurtzburg received 1st place in the Land of Enchantment Award, 2024, the Save Our Earth Award, 2024, and the Elizabeth M. Campbell Poetry Award, 2022, and was a semi-finalist in the Crab Creek Review Poetry Competition 2022, and in the Naugatuck River Review's 14th Narrative Poetry Contest, 2022. She was a Community Poet in the Spring 2023 Poetry Workshop, Westminster College, Salt Lake City. Wurtzburg is a Commissioned Artist in Sidewalk Poetry: Senses of Salt Lake City, 2024. Her poetry book, Ravenous Words, with Lisa Lucas will appear in spring, 2025.