NOVEMBER

by Jenna Le

November Rain - Contemporary Blue Abstract Painting by Gordan P. Junior 

November is a mammal, smoke-gray, meek.

Its lumbering body uses weighty flippers

to paddle, making short-lived silver streaks

in the surface of the bay where it’s immersed.

 

It loves the brackish waters of year’s end,

where black-green tufts of daydreams toss and seethe,

the fodder that it munches till it’s fattened

and farts its way up toward the sun to breathe.

 

At times, its blimp-like bulk, incautious, crashes

into our worries, our hurry to complete

our home improvement plans before the fractious

first snow, our human habit to mistreat

 

each other, our campaign ads, our work stress.

It wears those scars from one year to the next.

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), a Second Place winner in the Elgin Awards, and Manatee Lagoon (forthcoming from Acre Books, 2022). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch.

THANKSGIVING ON MY MIND

by George Salamon

Digital Painting of an old woman’s hands by Victoria Castro.

I confronted my fondest memory of Thanksgiving,

not long ago, as the oven door was opened to baste

the turkey with yet another coating of bubbly pan

juice, that was to make the meat more tender, when

I heard the scratching of Cleo's paw at the kitchen 

door shut to her, Cleo the golden retriever who knew

what she smelled and what she wanted, while the

humans were told not to didscuss the important things

they cared about—politics and race, the economy 

and money, having it all or having nothing at all, the

state of the union and the abuse of the environment—

while the word important made my skin crawl I

thought of Cleo's paw and glanced over to the old

grandma, eyes shut and the sensitivity in her lapped

leathery hands, that feeling in the tips of her fingers

for all living things and understood the paw and her

fingers mattered and counted, and the rest belonged

with all that stuff we sought and still seek at the mall.

George Salamon is fond of the German word Fingerspitzengefuehl—the feeling at the tips of your fingers. It seems to him that we will lose it completely with all that clicking on the computer and smart phone. Have a lovely Thanksgiving weekend —anyway.

THANKSGIVING CLIMATE CHANGE SONG

by Melissa Balmain

To the tune of “Over the River and Through the Woods,”

with apologies to Lydia Maria Child

Over the river and through the woods

To Grandma’s we planned to go,

But floods rose all day

And the bridge washed away

And a Honda is hard to row.

Over to Amtrak we went, of course,

Which would have been just fine

If wildfires had not 

Occurred on the spot

To block the 4:09.

Over our budget, we caught a plane—

We’d soon take off, we knew!

But cyclones and swarms

Of tropical storms

Had stranded the whole damn crew.

Over and over we tried to Zoom:

Hail knocked the power dead.

No time to stay put,

We’ve departed on foot

For New Year’s Eve instead. 

Melissa Balmain edits Light, America's longest-running journal of comic poetry. Her newest book of verse is The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults (Humorist Books). Twitter: @MelissaBalmain

AUTUMN ELEGY

Photo source: Plimouth Patuxet Museums

Howie Good is the author most recently of the poetry collections Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press).

GHAZAL: THANKSGIVING

by Rebekah Wolman

A painting done in 1995 by Karen Rinaldo, of Falmouth, Mass., depicts what many Wampanoag tribal leaders and historians say is one of the few accurate portrayals of “The First Thanksgiving 1621,” between the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims. —Dana Hedgpath, “This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.” The Washington Post, November 4, 2021

We’ve read the picture books about the harvest feast we call the first Thanksgiving—

no mention that for the Wampanoag it was a cursed Thanksgiving.

 

How many ways to brine and roast a turkey? Ask the food editors

what’s the virtue of this excess in which we’ve been immersed, Thanksgiving.

 

Some kids dressed up as Pilgrims; others wore construction paper feathers.

What did they learn about the Wampanoag when they rehearsed Thanksgiving?

 

In COVID quarantine, we roasted Cornish hens for one or two. Instead

of hand-drawn place cards we had names in Zoom squares at our dispersed Thanksgiving.

 

Two years after settling on Wampanoag land, the Pilgrims saw no rain

for two long months. Two months of fast and prayer and then a cloudburst Thanksgiving.

 

Family tensions linger, wrongs go unredressed, pain unspoken. Food and drink

are plentiful but other hungers go unsated at lips-pursed Thanksgiving.

 

What I’m asking, settlers’ descendants and other white folk, is what if we returned

ill-gotten gains, atoned, and then observed—a people reimbursed—Thanksgiving?

Author's Note: This poem was written in the shelter of a house built and bought and sold multiple times on stolen land...the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula.

Rebekah Wolman is a retired educator living in San Francisco. A previous contributor to The New Verse News with poems also appearing recently in Limp Wrist, she is a 2021 winner of Cultural Daily’s Jack Grapes Poetry Prize.

ON THE FOURTH WEDNESDAY OF NOVEMBER

by Peter Neil Carroll

Source: Exquisitely Unremarkable

Outside the little grocery, a woman

in a black cloth coat and feather hat

waits quietly near the electric door.

 

A shopper, stocked with pie crust,

biscuit mix, garlic flavored Velveeta

for the grits, pushes her cart

 

with one hand, the other fingers

a folded $5-dollar bill, looking  

to give it away for Thanksgiving.

Neither says a word.

 

Peter Neil Carroll's seventh collection of poetry, Talking to Strangers, will be published in 2022. He lives in northern California.  

NO JUSTICE

by Mary Saracino 

Source: Pinterest

In what pocket of my heart do I shove my grief  

over vigilante white boys being exonerated?

In this land of justice, justice was not served.

The scales of Lady Justice have been upended. 

The blindfold covering her eyes has been torn asunder.

She weeps with outrage.

She wails with sorrow.

She sees the abuse of power.

She calls us to resist.

And for the preservation of humankind

we must act

for love is a verb

and resistance is the antidote

to evil, to fear, to hatred,

the only medicine that

can heal

what festers deepest in the wounds of America's inglorious story.

No shining city on the hill,

a nation founded on unspeakable atrocities

must tourniquet its bleeding limbs

suture its oozing lesions 

nurse its traumatized people back to wholeness.

Together we must embark on this  

beautiful and necessary mending.

Or die trying. 

Mary Saracino is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet. Her most recent novel Heretics: A Love Story (2014) was published by Pearlsong Press. Her novel The Singing of Swans (Pearlsong Press 2006) was named a 2007 Lambda Literary Awards finalist in the Spirituality category.

MY PLUS TWO ECLIPSE

by Earl J Wilcox   

Photo by Peter Forister, November 19, 2021 at 04:00, Charlottesville, VA, USA at EarthSky

My plus one last night, Alexa,

awakens me right on time.

I am up—groggy, sour-mouthed,

muttering, mumbling musing,

old guy grumbling despite

a magnificent moonshine worship

moment waiting above my balcony.

 

Alexa plays some familiar Mozart,

as agreed on at my bed time. Out-

side I shiver, huddle in a small chair,

I’m overcome with a sublime scene:

in the fog of near-freezing November

and my dense macular mist, a small,

bright Beaver moon hides half its face

behind a dark somewhat ominous shadow.

 

A distant shrill of sirens, ubiquitous

revving motorcycles break my

somnolent stupor. Even with a cold

arse my heart pounds with warmth and joy.

Unique as this moon light masquerade

provides, earth is the place for me.

It is not music of the spheres I hum

—just some earth-made melodies

by Mozart, our universal plus one

making a little night music.

Earl Wilcox has been humming and howling at The New Verse News for many years.

ODDS AND ENDS

by Gil Hoy

Dan Hudson. "Garbage Can" (1992), oil on panel, 24×34 inches.

On Wednesdays, 

I take my trash down to the curb. 

There's a blue bin for recyclables, 

a black bin for regular trash

and a brown bin for yard waste. 

You can tell a lot about a man 

from the contents of his trash. 

 

Our neighbor is obsessed with Covid 

and now buys most of her things 

on Amazon. Her son got sick a year ago, 

was in intensive care for three weeks 

and then died. Her blue bin is filled 

with broken down boxes every week. 

 

Her husband stays inside and has started 

drinking again. There are three or four

empty wine or bourbon bottles 

in their blue bin every week. 

 

A divorcee a few houses down  

worries about getting old. Her black bin 

holds the week's trash from products 

promising to make her gray hair brown again 

and remove the wrinkles from her face. 

She's put on weight since her husband left her 

for a younger woman five years ago. 

There are often three or four 

empty pizza boxes in her black bin. 

 

You can tell a lot about a woman

from the contents of her trash. 

 

Another neighbor has three birch trees 

next to his driveway. His yard waste bin 

is filled with grass the yard boy cut 

and birch tree branches that once encroached 

upon his driveway. His shiny Mercedes 

can now get in and out again without a scratch. 

His regular trash bin has empty pill bottles 

used to keep his blood pressure down. He bought 

the Mercedes and keeps his yard carefully 

manicured to keep up with his neighbors.

 

A house up the road has two recyclable bins 

that are always full. The house's black bin 

never has much trash at all. The owner works 

for a company that reduces greenhouse gases 

and makes our water cleaner. The owner 

attends political events most nights 

focusing on climate change. 

 

You can tell a lot about people 

from the trash they don't have.

 

A neighbor on the next street over 

is an accountant. His blue bin is filled 

with shredded paper: tax schedules, 

financial statements and old tax returns. 

By the time April 15 comes around, 

he has three blue bins that are overflowing.

 

Another one of my neighbors 

doesn't play by the rules.  

He puts his trash out early most weeks. 

And then he's fined by our Town. 

He was arrested a while back 

for stealing money from his clients 

and had to spend a few years 

away from his family. 

 

You can tell a lot about a person  

from how they handle their trash.

  

And as for me, my trash is not 

what it used to be. My wife passed away 

suddenly and the kids have all grown up 

and moved away. I don't talk with them 

or see them much anymore. 

 

I miss the deflated balloons from birthday parties 

and worn out hockey skates that used to be 

in my black bin. And the leaves that filled 

my yard waste bin when I could sometimes 

get the boys to rake. I miss my wife's 

empty fancy shampoo bottles 

I used to put in my blue bin.

 

On a good week, when I'm eating well, 

my bins may be as much as a quarter full. 

But most weeks, they're as empty 

as an old man's broken heart.  

 

You can tell a lot about a man 

from the contents of his trash. 

Editor's note: The losses mentioned in the final four stanzas of the poem are suffered by the poem's Speaker and not, thankfully, by its author. 

 

 

Gil Hoy is a widely published Boston poet and writer who studied poetry and writing at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. While at BU, Hoy was on the wrestling team and finished in second place in the New England University Wrestling Championships at 177 lbs. He served as an elected Brookline, Massachusetts Select Board Member for four terms. Hoy is a semi-retired trial lawyer. His work has recently appeared in Best Poetry Online, Muddy River Poetry Review,  Tipton Poetry Journal, Rusty Truck,  Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Penmen Review, Misfit Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, Chiron Review, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. Hoy was nominated for a Best of the Net award last year.

AMERICA'S CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD

by Pete Mackey

I bring my gun to keep others safe

with my gun but if my gun 

makes you feel unsafe 

I feel unsafe about my gun 

and will use my gun 

to keep myself safe

from you with my gun 

because

Pete Mackey is a previous contributor to The New Verse News, and his poems have appeared in numerous other publications including, in 2021, Bangalore Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Third Wednesday, Panoplyzine, Eclectica, The Dewdrop, The Drabble, and Global Poemic along with a Pushcart Prize nomination.

ONCE AGAIN REALITY

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Source: Puzzle Warehouse

Once again reality

Has collided with fantasy.

Once again the truth

About America

Has crashed into 

Our pretty beliefs

About the basic goodness

Of our nation under God.

And once again 

All the old cliches

Will be hauled out—

“Sure, we’re not perfect,

We make mistakes sometimes,

But at the end of the day

We’re still lucky to be living

In the Land of the Free

The Home of the Brave

From Sea to Shining Sea

Amen.”

And little by little

Memory of the latest grotesque injustice

Will fade.

We will go to the movies,

Watch the Super Bowl,

Have dinner with friends,

Take our kids to the park,

And recede back into 

The collective dream

Of America the Good.

And we will be shocked 

All over again

The next time a cop murders a black kid,

The next time a governor

Poisons a whole city with contaminated water,

The next time a hospital 

Throws an indigent patient 

Out onto the street,

The next time

A vigilante gets away with murder.

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals.  His most recent book is At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging, Memory, Mortality, from Main Street Rag Publishers.  He podcasts poems on aging at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife, Cynthia, in northern California.

DUNCAN AND BRADY

by Julian O. Long

after the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict

 

Speaking of ’lectric cars,

once at a Fort Worth stop sign

a lowrider lifted a fender

like a dog might lift his leg to piss

and flipped me the bird as he took off

laughing around the corner.

That was long ago, but he knew what

he meant—and he loved it.

 

As the uptight white boy I was

in those days, I may have deserved

his contempt. These days I’d like

to blow him a kiss on the wind he stirred,

as he spun out that souped-up Chevy.

Would it were so, amigo,

would it were so.

 

Staggerlee remembers Xmas

but King Brady, he lies dead

and the ghost of old St. Louie

flew past my naked bed

when the rage for George Floyd started

up and down my street,

and the high-tailed carriages

came and went all night

breaking in the windows

knocking down the door

startling me in bed on the second floor... 

 

Busy now, containing Russia,

smug in my alabaster pink

pragmatism, I rejoiced in my country’s

apparent arrested decline. Cop who murdered

Floyd will go to jail, I thought. We threw out

the bastards who stormed the Capitol, I said—

forgetting only too eagerly

Republicans’ settled intention

to lynch the rest of us, La Migra still

lording it up at the border, catching runaways

jury finding Rittenhouse ‘not guilty on all counts.’

 

Nothin’ for it but the blues?

James Baldwin’s Staggerlee let pent up anger, blues remade,

hiss out of him like rancid air from some hack’s

rubber tire.

 

Seem like King Brady never died,

Duncan shot him,

doctor found him dead

but he just raised his hammy fist, took that doctor by the throat

and growled, “Sumbitch, you know I cain’t be killed!”

 

We’ll not overcome this last lynch mob—they’re us;

we’ll watch polite and passive as the Good Old US steals

away down Dixie one last time; no matter clawhammer steels

 

ring out from edges of fields

to tell it again

how we’ve all of us been—

 

yeah, we’ve been on the job

too long... 

Julian O. Long is a previous contributor to The New Verse News. His poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

LAWS OF THE LAND

by Linda Gelbrich

Source: Northwest Arbor Culture

In this country a young white man
goes to trial for shooting and killing
two people and wounding another at a rally.
Today he is declared—not guilty.
 
In this same country a black voter
tries to cast a ballot,
unaware she is ineligible to vote,
goes to prison for five years,
 
and a black man is in prison for decades
for a murder he says he did not commit,
is now declared innocent by prosecutors,
but authorities say his release is not a priority.
 
Perhaps this is why
some of us write about trees,
about persistently blooming geraniums
and cosmos, even about squirrels that pester,
 
about the regular appearance
of the sun and moon.      


Linda Gelbrich lives in Western Oregon among many trees.  

TO BE IN EARTH'S ORBIT

by Rémy Dambron

The US has condemned Russia for conducting a "dangerous and irresponsible" missile test that it says endangered the crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The test blew up one of Russia's own satellites, creating debris that forced the ISS crew to shelter in capsules. Astronauts on the ISS are increasingly having to take precautionary measures when fragments from old satellites and rockets come close. —BBC News, November 17, 2021

how far we’ve come

since our primitive wheels first rolled on dirt roads

and expanded our means of transit 

since our sails first met the unyielding winds of the sea 

sending us over entire oceans in search of new worlds

since we built the first railroads to journey across continents 

along iron paths only humans could pave

since our mechanical wings first presented us 

with the gift of flight

 

momentarily freeing us from the grounding force 

of earth’s gravitational pull

lifting us into lower skies to tour our globe and glide 

soaring beyond what the eye could see

since our first expedition to the moon 

launched by the thrusts of internal combustion

rockets powerful enough to achieve escape velocity 

and break through the comforts of our planet’s atmosphere 

propelling us into the perils of space 

where no soul had previously traveled 

merely dreamed...

how far we’ve come only to have become 

the very perils we feared

the very menaces we strived 

to mitigate

pieces of ourselves  

unapologetically returning to haunt us

unhesitant to disrupt our lives 

unsympathetic to our vulnerabilities 

our persistent flaws 

our stubborn mortality

an unmerciful reminder of our physiological limits

and the little chance they stand against our cerebral endlessness

Author’s note: To me this story was about more than the handful of lives that were put in harm's way as a direct result of typically destructive human behaviors. While I am relieved that the crew aboard the ISS is safe, this story was a sobering reminder that mankind remains its own greatest threat. We’ve entered a very dangerous era in our brief history as a species, where, in addition to our hazardous nature here on Earth, we have somehow managed to make space.. that cold and dark place with no water, no air, and no life, even more dangerous than it was before we got there. Where do we draw the line? When will we have gone too far?

Rémy Dambron is an English teacher and poet whose writing focuses on denouncing political corruption and advocating for social/environmental justice. With the help of his chief editor and loving wife, his works have appeared in What Rough Beast, Poets Reading the News, Writers Resist, Society of Classical Poets, Robot Butt, and The New Verse News.