EYE OF MILTON

by Jennifer Davis Michael

O Hell, hello, an O of grief:

the eye of Hurricane Milton 

spends its wide wrath,

darkening the world.

Climatology a talent

useless against false shepherds

swollen with profane wind.

 

Once the blind poet

rose from the pool of Styx,

invoking holy light

to flood his song. “Blind mouths,” 

he called those sham prophets

while he still had sight.

The contrary: the muteness of an eye.

Jennifer Davis Michael is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of two chapbooks, both from Finishing Line Press: Let Me Let Go (2020) and Dubious Breath (2022). Her poem "Forty Trochees" was selected by Rachel Hadas for the Frost Farm Prize in Metrical Poetry (2020). She has published several poems previously in The New Verse News.

AMERICAN RUSH HOUR

by Peg Quinn

AI-generated at Night Café

Traffic so heavy I sit, idle, on a freeway overpass 

watching four lanes stalled below me.

I listen to the radio.

Then notice someone, bent over, 

head pressed against a fence.

Maybe a hood, or corner of a blanket

covering their face, draping down their back

leg’s sunbaked, bare feet.

I wait for them to shift their weight

rise up, blink into the day.

They stay locked in place.

I worry. 

No one bends, frozen, immobile 

at a freeway exit unless in serious trouble

—or lost in prayer—

I shouldn’t make assumptions,

so grab my phone as my lane rolls forward.

The Sheriffs Department will send someone over,

though I’m haunted by this random gathering,

thoughts intent on work, 

appointments, deadlines, lovers,

merely glancing as we pass one of us,

a fellow traveler, struggling in silence. 

Bent.

Head pressed against a fence.

Peg Quinn’s poetry and non-fiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and four times nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection Mother Lode was published by Gunpowder Press in 2021.

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.