TWO NEW NEWS BROADCASTS

by Alice Twombly

                      I

The Evening News: July 4, 2018

A stag, with a full rack of antlers,

stands stationary on my front lawn  at dusk.

I run outside with my only weapon—

a mop still damp from washing the floor,

point it at him, shouting: Nothing.

I charge him, waving the wet rags back and forth, like a flag.

He moves a few feet away and stares at me.

I advance further, but each pause generates only

small indifferent changes. Finally, I run towards him screaming with all the energy

I possess. He bounds at last into the next yard,

turns for a final look, and disappears into the dark.

The next morning, I see what he had done before I’d noticed  him—

petals strewn everywhere, and every plant I’ve nurtured

all  summer, decapitated at the bud, eaten, and destroyed.

                            II

The Midday News: July 16, 2018

He sells the farm, the antiques and the wall hangings,

chases away the loyal dogs,

poisons the wells, floods the crops with leaded water,

jacks the flagpole, torches the flag

and takes down those old Post Magazine covers of the Four Freedoms

that had hung on the wall since World War 11.

Driving the landowners off their historic land

he buys it on the cheap,

and using the unskilled, dazzled, and defrauded labor that remains

begins erecting the first stages of the Putin Trump Tower

on the burnt fields of that defruited and polluted plain.

Alice Twombly is a teacher, photographer, poet, and political junky. A New Jersey resident, she curates a monthly poetry reading in Teaneck, NJ: “Thursdays Are For Poetry at Classic Quiche.” She teaches adults at The Learning Collaborative in New City, NY and lectures at local libraries. A member of “Brevitas,” an online poetry collective in NYC. Her work has been published in The New Jersey Poetry Monthly, First Literary Review-East, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Brevitas.

LYRICS FOR TREASON DAY, JULY 16, 2018

by Michael Brockley

“Send in the Clowns” trumpet solo performed by the US Air Force Brass in Blue.

What if the king wasn’t caught in a trap, and we were no longer stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues? What if we had never stood on a corner in Winslow, Arizona? Or lost our driving wheel? What if we weren’t running on empty and were still too proud to beg? What if we quit holding out for a hero? What if the king couldn’t find a new place to dwell while midnight no longer fell on the oasis? What if we know who stopped the rain? What if she wasn’t a black-haired beauty, and there were no diamonds on the soles of her shoes? What if she hadn’t had Bette Davis eyes, and the king hadn’t seen her first? What if she hadn’t been Jessie’s girl? What if a peaceful man hadn’t pulled into Nazareth, and the knight hadn’t been on the run? What if there hadn’t been a wino in the road? What if we’re no longer living in a Cheerio world and God hadn’t kissed this guy? What if we miss our water? What if there isn’t a piece of our heart left to take? What if there are no more clowns to send in?

Michael Brockley is a 68-year old semi-retired school psychologist. He has been publishing poems for approximately four years now and recent poems have appeared in The Blue Nib Magazine, Zingara Poetry Picks and TheNewVerse.News.

RUSSIAN FELLOWSHIP

by David Feela

Just as Quakers sit in silence
moved to stand
when the spirit insists

so does the American public
occupy its bench
in perfect contemplation

of the moment.
Then Democracy quietly rises
without speaking,

shuffles into the bathroom
and with uncharacteristic clatter
bolts the door.


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. The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. A Collection of his essays, How Delicate These Arches, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Unsolicited Press will release his new chapbook, Little Acres, in April 2019.

REVERSALS

by Terese Coe

In loss is meaning,

in emptiness, seed,

in ruin, a mirror

of wholeness and deed. 

A seed reserves need

and comes to birth

in the presence of water

and sunlight and earth.

And well we may wonder

when there is no birth

when there is no water

what life has been worth.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection Shot Silk was nominated for The Poets Prize of 2017.

SONG FOR PATTI

by John Azrak

Patti Smith’s books, particularly Just Kids and M Train, reflect the same humanitarian, progressive, genuine spirit found in her eclectic music, a catalogue that spans over fifty years. Patti has been nominated this week for the New Academy’s alternative to the suspended Nobel Prize in Literature for those “who have told the story of humans in the world.” Photo: Patti Smith performs at Glastonbury in 2015. Credit: Dylan Martinez/Reuters via The Guardian.

In the early days of rock ‘n roll
when licensing was free
Patti Smith crossed her poem “Oath”
with Van Morrison’s garage rocker “Gloria”
on her album Horses turning her disavowal
of her family’s Jehovah’s Witnesses
into a punk anthem
with a scorching opening refrain
Jesus died for somebody’s sins
But not mine—

Just a kid when she turned her back
on religion (critics clamored atheist)
living with Robert Mapplethorpe,
avant-garde photographer and lover
who broke her heart when he came out
of the closet in her wiry arms,
nearly shattering her self-esteem—
a woman was expected still
to convert her man; and hadn’t Patti
read that Rimbaud regretted never finding
the perfect woman! –-but she remained
ever faithful to their soulful bond,
returning to NYC (though newly married)
to nurse Robert, stricken with AIDS,
holding him in her arms unafraid
when there was everything to fear
Jesus died for somebody’s sins
But not mine—

She married guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith,
band mate and muse, not on the rebound
but so she didn’t have to change her name,
she joked, choosing a life of relative seclusion
in his native Detroit where they worked
on their own music and in tandem
raised two children, performed locally
until she returned thirteen years later
to a jam packed Central Park SummerStage
to read from The Coral Reef, her mystical
prose poems about Robert, a tribute
to his art four years after his passing,
with the support and musical backing
of her self-made, selfless husband
Jesus died for somebody’s sins
But not mine—

Fred died suddenly of heart failure
the following year and then shockingly,
not six months later, her beloved brother
(and road manager) Todd’s heart gave out
but somehow Patti’s remained strong,
dedicated as she was to her children,
Jackson and Jesse, holding them together
with an unbroken faith in love and music
and the gift of life she kept in motion;
in the wake of her unthinkable losses,
Bob Dylan, old friend from their Village days,
asked her to join him on the road—
a short stint to decompress, exercising
her voice until “magnified,” she later wrote,
by the loved ones she’d lost
Jesus died for somebody’s sins
But not mine—

Patti and Dylan sang his “Dark Eyes,”
their first duet reprised on occasion
over the twenty years she regained her voice
as a prime mover of humanitarian causes
on the international stage; so no surprise
when Dylan asked her to stand in for him
at the Nobel Laureate’s ceremony
where she sang “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”
(her selection) winning over the strait-laced
audience with a poignant interpretation
and pregnant pause over a lost lyric—
the moment of silence capturing it seemed
her dear ones missing— the rising applause
befitting a woman who was a minder
of her fellow man, and as fate would have it,
soon after bound for Kentucky to care for
and work alone with Sam Shepard,
the signature playwright of her generation,
Pulitzer Prize winner of Buried Child, Off-
Broadway icon, poet, songwriter, musician
chronicler of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review,
virile screen actor and Patti’s former lover
who remained her friend for fifty years
now suffering the crippling and devastating
symptoms of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS)
robbed of the ability to write in his preferred
longhand or type drafts of his final novel;
Patti visited Sam’s ranch faithfully
to help transcribe his recordings,
to work out scenes and revisions orally
to help guide the novel to completion
never letting Sam believe, she responded
in a recent interview, that they were working
as if there were no tomorrow
Jesus died for somebody’s sins
But not mine— 

John Azrak lives in New York and has published fiction and poetry in a wide variety of literary journals and anthologies. 

TIMEOUT FOR PROGRESSIVES

by George Salamon

T***p May skeletons dance at 2017 BRIT awards.

after Mary Hopkin's “Those Were the Days”

A poem without a view,
No endless outrage, no
Social conflicts or
Racial clashes.
A poem to be seen, but
Not to be heard.
We sang and danced
In the Tavern of
Once Upon a Time.
Those were the days,
But they did end.
What are the great things
We're dreaming of today?


George Salamon lives and writes and dreams occasionally in St. Louis, MO.

TRADING FLESH FOR METAL

by Austin Davis

On Monday, police said [Matthew] Edwards shot and killed his wife and their three children — Jacob, 6; Brinley, 4; and Paxton, 3—before turning the gun on himself. The family instantly became five of the 1,200-some people killed that way each year in the United States. —delaware online, July 12, 2018


House Republican appropriators Wednesday rejected a proposal to designate millions of dollars for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for gun violence research, voting 32-20 to keep the language out of a fiscal 2019 spending bill. —Politico, July 11, 2018

I.

I realized that poems nowadays
are measured by the lull between bullets
instead of a lover’s heartbeat
after I got my haircut at Supercuts
by a woman with a Pink Lady Handgun
staring me down from her hip.
The woman looked as if
she’d been attacked on her way to work
by the bubblegum monster
I used to draw on all my math homework
but she had a smile on her face,
something that was missing from me.

It’s SO CHIC—
my husband makes me take it
with me wherever I go
and at first I was against it
but then I got used to it
and now I feel SOOOOOO
safe and protected
and are you okay
because you look a little bit like
a skydiver wearing a paper parachute
who just noticed
he was a foot from the ground.

II.

Well, last year I had a vase
thrown at my head in Greer, Arizona
after I told a white man in white pants
that he was cleaning his assault rifle
as if it was a porcelain doll
because he felt naked without it,
not because of his OCD.
I told him that keeping
his bullets in a different room
could never stop them from crawling
under his pillow every night

and if I wasn’t holding his gun right then,
the man would have shot me
and ended my life right there.
One moment would have shattered
into a million, but instead,
there was a silence
deeper than any grave.

The crickets outside
went back to their small talk,
the trees held back their laughter,
and the scared old man
cried with his head on my shoulder
until morning.

III.

During March for Our Lives
almost a month ago
I watched Donald T***p
ride his motorcycle
to his Palm Beach Golf Course
and complain about
those young, idiot protesters
over a little wine and cheese
when just four years ago,
T***p had accused Obama
of “playing golf on the job.”

IV.

If saving 600 women
from being killed every year
because their insecure boyfriends
are overcompensating
isn’t “part of the job,”
then I think we need to change
T***p’s job description
from ‘President’ to ‘orange cement.’

If standing between 2,555 children
and the bullet their fathers
forgot was in the rifle
isn’t “part of the job,”
then I think someone better add
“20% chance of death”
to the weather forecast
on the school announcements
every morning.

If preventing 13,000 homicides
and giving more than 35,000
Americans another day
to tell their girlfriends and boyfriends,
wives and husbands, sisters and brothers,
and mothers and fathers
that they love them
isn’t “part of the job,”
then I think we’re just letting
those who are malnourished of power
but are the least suited to hold it
trade our human flesh for metal.

Austin Davis is a poet, writer, and spoken word artist from Mesa, Arizona. Austin's poetry has been widely published in literary journals and magazines, both in print and online. Most recently, Austin's work can be found in Pif Magazine, Ink in Thirds, Folded Word, The Poetry Shed, In Between Hangovers, One Sentence Poems, and Tuck Magazine. Austin’s first chapbook The Moon and Her Ocean was published in 2017 by Fowlpox Press. Cloudy Days, Still Nights, Austin’s first full length book of poetry, was published in May, 2018 by Moran Press.

BY THE RIVER

by Jan Steckel

“Happy is he who takes your little ones

and dashes them against the rocks.”

—Psalm 137:9

By the waters of the Rio Grande
our hands were cuffed,
our children taken.

We didn’t know in Bohemia’s Terezin,
Theresienstadt was a model camp.
Propaganda film: a Jewish orchestra
before it went up in smoke.

We’d heard Argentina
stole babies for barren
military couples, dropped mothers
from helicopters into the sea.

Tornillo in the Texas desert:
white tents pitched overnight.
Drone-photo of boys marched in lines.
Journalists not allowed inside.

In jail I got a receipt
for my wallet, but none for my son.
By the Rio Grande,
I lay down and wept.


Jan Steckel's poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus, and elsewhere. Her work was nominated three times each for the Pushcart and Sundress Best of the Net anthologies, won the Goodreads Poetry Contest three times, and earned various other awards.

OPERATION SARAH

by Matt Witt

LONDON — Facebook was hit with the maximum possible fine in Britain for allowing the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest the information of millions of people without their consent, in what amounts to the social network’s first financial penalty since the data leak was revealed. The fine of 500,000 pounds, or about $660,000, represents a tiny sum for Facebook, which brings in billions of dollars in revenue every year. But it is the largest fine that can be levied by the British Information Commissioner’s Office, an independent government agency that enforces the country’s data-protection laws. —The New York Times, July 10, 2018. Photo via MadhouseNews.

I asked Facebook
for the key words
they have been selling
to anyone who wanted to
target me
for any purpose.

There were 139 words or phrases.

This data about a person’s interests
is valuable
to help someone to
sell you a product,
decide whether to hire you,
rent to you,
accept you as a student,
or disrupt your community group
or social movement.

Many were accurate about me,
or I’d like them to be.

“Fine-art photography.”
“Hiking.”
“Lakes.”
“Community organizing.”
“Working families.”
“Racial equality.”
“Feminism.”
“Climate change.”

But bots are only human.
So Facebook was also selling
fake news
about me
with irrelevant words
out of the blue.

“Lotus Cars.”
“Salerno.”
“Beetroot.”
“Pro-Ject.”
“Bible.”

And “Sarah.”

Maybe because I have 16 Facebook friends named Sarah.
A community organizer now on the city council.
A muckraking journalist.
A longtime neighbor.
A local painter.
And a dozen more.

Or maybe the same bot
that mistakenly included “Bible”
thought I might be a student of
Sarah, biblical wife of Abraham,
who at the age of 90
gave birth to Isaac,
and lived to be 127.

Last night I dreamed that
all two billion Facebook users
started occasionally “liking” things we don’t like,
commenting about topics of no interest,
inserting random words into posts,
forming strange sounding groups.

Since we were all doing it from time to time
our “friends” were not confused,
but, together,
we made Facebook’s data worthless
so no one would buy it.

In my dream, we called it “Operation Sarah.”

Matt Witt is a writer and photographer who lives in Talent, Oregon. He was recently selected a Writer in Residence at Mesa Refuge in California and has been selected an Artist in Residence at Crater Lake National Park, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, and PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon. His writing has been published in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, the literary journal Cirque, and many other publications.

RESCUE EFFORT

by Catherine D’Andrea 

“Rescue Effort Still Underway to Save Boys Trapped in America” by Pia Guerra TheNib, July 9, 2018

A cave in the earth holds
rushes of water
foreign hearts
trapped in a hidden chamber.

Rushes of
familiar blood
move
with atrial
ventricular
compulsion.

The dark
pump and pound
whooshes
inside and around us.
We dive
into waiting
the drain
the exchange
knowing each other’s need
to breathe.



Catherine D’Andrea lives in Connecticut with a fat, orange tabby, a crazy calico, and a funny husband. She is a mother, teacher, and student, who believes life is a mystery, not to solve, but to explore. Poetry helps her do that.

THE PETITION TO END THE RUSSIAN DANCING BEAR ACT

by Tricia Knoll

Statues of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus are shown in a cage of chain-link fencing on the lawn of Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Indianapolis on July 3. The statues were placed there to protest the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. (Ebony Cox/The Indianapolis Star/AP via The Washington Post, July 3, 2018)

A signature is one wave in the ocean of sound
that may wash up on shore with a sigh.
Tired cursive words that feel like twigs
scratching recycled paper to beg for ending
the torture of whales with sonar blasts
during naval exercises. Exercises … those acts
of the puissant against those under the club
who are forced to dance. Without needing
words or even a name, a rector hauls
a nativity scene out of storage
and locks Joseph, Mary and her baby
behind chain link on a lawn in downtown.
Urgent, visible truth. Images of right whale dolphins
torn apart from blood in their ear canals
lined up on the beach. Isn’t that how
panic rises fast under pressure?
Trying to do something even if it feels
like rushing to scrawl your name in sand
before the next wave erases it.


Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who necessity drives to sign petitions. Her recent collection of poetry is How I Learned To Be White (Antrim House, 2018).

THINKING ABOUT MANNERS

by Mary K O'Melveny

Man’s Incivility to Man by Tom Tomorrow posted July 3rd, 2018 at TheNib

Aisles that were once filled with jeans
house metal cages built from cyclone
fencing.  One can hear toddlers’ screams
filling up the air, cutting to bone.

Across the country, mothers’ keens
echo into night.  They too are prone
to constant sorrows. Who can shed such scenes?
These are sins for which we must atone.

Surely, thoughts of disappeared teens,
breast-feeding babes, disoriented, flown
by night to unknown places, unseen
by anyone who knows them, alone

in their fears, fates left to news magazines
or strangers who cannot translate each moan
and wail and are not paid to do so, means
that public outrage can be shown

to those who devised such schemes,
oblivious to their human toll, backbones
bending like prairie grasses.  Perhaps it seems
right to them, stealing children at border zones,

sending a tough message to libertines
who would welcome anyone, who drone
on about human rights while the world’s seams
unravel like some cheap suit.  Those who bemoan

these desperate stories, as cold machines
of detention and terror ramp up, are prone
to sympathy for families steeped in scenes
of unfathomable anguish and unknown

outcomes.  Some know these horrors mean
lifelong damage, not just tears caught on cell phones.
Inevitably, reactions fill up with spleen,
Commentators and politicians bemoan

a lack of civil discourse.  Fury, it seems,
is too raw for a democracy, even as we alone
return to old auction block agonies.  Between
families rendered helpless and politicians prone

to lies, how can we react as if our TV screens
are filled with Mister Rogers?  The gauntlet is thrown.
Moments for calm debate have long passed.  Ravines
divide us now.  Stolen children have set the tone.

When horrors perpetrated in our names are too extreme,
much more is required than consulting tomes
of manners.  Speaking truth to power may not be routine
but politeness won’t save the world we had known.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals.  Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age will be published by Finishing Line Press in September, 2018.

ON NOTICING HOW MANY PRO-LIFE MEN ARE SMOKERS

by Julie Steiner

Sing about the sanctity human life has.
Preach with all your passion: Abortion’s murder!
Afterwards, wind down with a soothing ciggie,
     smug in your maleness.

Suck the calming poison that causes cancer.
Taint the perfect organs your Maker gave you.
Human life is precious in women’s bodies.
     Not in your own, though.

Slowly self-destruct, in a way that rules out
making any life-saving gifts to others.
Maim your liver, pancreas, kidneys, heart, lungs.
     Damage them. Waste them.

Vandalize these treasures, so you and others—
patients needing transplants—will perish sooner.
God made women vessels of life, not you, right?
     Men don’t get pregnant.

Smoking? That’s your medicine. Helps you function.
Helps you fight anxiety, which unmans you.
If you quit, you’ll crumble. Complete your mission!
     Think of the children—

millions—who will live when abortion’s outlawed.
(Care about them only until they’re born, though.
Vote against the programs that help support them.
     Kids are expensive.)

Think of justice: women should feel the birth pangs
God assigned to Eve, in His perfect wisdom.
Sin and death were caused by a wayward woman.
     Women should suffer.

Virtue equals maleness. Its root's the Latin
vir, “a man” . . . not homo, “a human being.”
Eve is evil. Punish, control, subdue her,
     adamant Adam.

Let your male self-righteousness rise like incense.
Smoke like that proverbial chimney, built on
hearthstones far beneath you, where women labor.
     Tower above them,

fiery martyr. Fume at the fallen females.
Wheeze your hymns to Him—to Almighty Maleness.
God forbid that women should say, as men do,
     This is my body.

Julie Steiner lives and writes in San Diego. Besides the TheNewVerse.News, the venues in which her poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, American Arts Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, First Things, Rattle, and the Rat's Ass Review.

PRUITT’S PSYCHO FANCY

an erasure poem by James Penha
derived from Scott Pruitt’s resignation letter

It has been an honor to serve you
Truly
your confidence in me has blessed me personally
beyond what anyone anticipated
at an unprecedented pace
and I thank you for the opportunity
to achieve those ends
it is extremely difficult for me
to cease serving you
because I count it a blessing to be serving you
in service to you
to bless you serving
as President today because of God’s providence
that same providence brought me into your service
as I have served you
I have blessed you
and enabled you
Thank you again Mr. President
for the honor of serving you
in all that you put your hand to.


James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News .