A WOMAN IN TIGRAY

by Sarah Mackey Kirby

Britain's Channel 4 recently aired a devastating report on these atrocities. One survivor recounted a harrowing 10-day ordeal to the network during which she said she and five other women were gang-raped by Eritrean soldiers. She said the troops joked and took photos as they injected her with a drug, tied her to a rock, stripped, stabbed and raped repeatedly her. Doctors who've treated Tigrayan women have said one woman's vagina was stuffed with nails, stones and plastic. —CBS

is filled with stones,

nails. By her captors.

If she is not human,

if she must be bloodline-cleansed

from existence,

then why does crying matter.

 

The sun rises all over the world

as if it doesn’t know.

And sets apricot embers

each evening.

In darkness, a woman in Tigray

is filled with stones.

Filled with soldiers.

Alone below Orion’s belt,

sharp in the night sky,

glowing fire

three stars in a row.

Sarah Mackey Kirby's first poetry collection The Taste of Your Music (Impspired) will be published in May 2021. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Chiron Review, Connecticut River Review, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere. She and her husband live in Louisville, Kentucky.

CALEDONIAN FIGHTING FISH

[Scotland's] First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said there are "significant questions" about Alex Salmond's political comeback. Her comments came after Mr Salmond revealed he would be among the new Alba Party's regional list candidates. The former first minister said his aim was to build "a supermajority for independence" after the May election. —BBC, March 27, 2021

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, and edits the verse quarterly Lighten Up On Line. His work has appeared in a wide variety of British magazines and anthologies as well as UK, European, and North American web publications such as Amsterdam Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Asses of Parnassus, Better Than Starbucks, The Hypertexts, Light, The New Verse News, and Snakeskin.

EXPOSED IN MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

by Sandra Sidman Larson

A fist sculpture is situated at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, also known as George Floyd Square, on March 25 in Minneapolis. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

As a spring storm begins to rumble outside, I wrap

my dog in his thunder shirt, yet I must remain calm

and unprotected from what bears down

on us, whether it is thunder, city coyotes howling,

the probable headlines of the Star Tribune—the paper flung

outside my door this morning, as every day, by a poor man,

his young children waiting in his idling car.

The fate of George Floyd’s murderer is soon to be

determined by twelve citizens in a courtroom barricaded

with barbed wire as have been the halls of Congress,

precautions against returning mobs, recently sicced

on the representatives of our frail democracy

by a crazed president who we supposedly ushered out

the door. But what to do about the cop who puts his knee

for nine minutes upon the neck of a Black man,

smothers him to death, stopping all our lives, turning us

to marching in the streets, while troublemakers—homegrown,

or blown into Minneapolis—set the city streets and stores afire,

inciting chaos among thousands of protesters, many of us

now realizing we need other gods or old gods to appear,

to stop us from killing each other, we who are filled with love,

hate, hope, and despair, stirred up by the fates—

so little to protect us?  All I can do is close the window

against the thunder, the smells of rain-damped debris;

note the snow almost gone from the ground, now newly bare.

Sandra Sidman Larson, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has three chapbooks to her credit: Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Over a Threshold of Roots (both Pudding House Press Publications), and Weekend Weather: Calendar Poems. Her chapbook Ode to Beautiful was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016 and her first full manuscript by Main Street Rag Publications in 2017. Her poetry has been published in many venues such as the Atlanta Review, Grey Sparrow, Earth’s Daughters and on-line in The New Verse News and others. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies, one being what have you lost? edited by Naomi Shihab Nye.  (Who nominated her for one Pushcart Prize). With a Masters Degree in social work and community planning, Sandra’s primary career was in social service and social justice work. Her poetry career began at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. As a poet with grandchildren and great nieces and nephews she longs for a world where all children are cherished and cared for and justice reigns for all.

SWEET APRIL SHOWERS

by Earl J. Wilcox

Larry Parks lip-synching to Al Jolson singing "April Showers' in The Jolson Story (1946).

Already primed by fading February

snows, brash, thrashing March

winds, come softly sweet showers.

 

Make us mindful of your spring spirit

here where pandemic surviving souls

surely long to go on pilgrimages

 

to the beach or baseball game. O,

sweet showers fall gently today on

dogwoods and azaleas in our back yard,

 

where sparrows and chickadees still

sleep with open eyes, as in Chaucer’s

day & cardinals and Carolina wrens

 

build beautiful nests. O blithe spirit

of mockingbirds, we seek only blissful

martyrs of courageous care givers,

 

vaccines’ power and glory, blessed

assurance that this April thy showers

nourish and sustain this good earth.

 

 

Earl Wilcox dedicates this poem to the spirits of all who did not live through the pandemic to see this spring’s colorful flowers nor hear the mockingbirds sing or feel the comfort of a warm April shower. 

SERMON FOR SPRING HOLIDAYS

by Catherine Gonick

Source: Image from NewVoices.org via Haggadot.com. Adapted from Dinah Winnick.

In a just and regenerative world

cooperation and honor

a given

 

no one would be made a slave

but we are all traffickers

 

                  Gloria

and violence would be only

the absence of good

but we’re all mass shooters

 

                  In excelsis

our souls

are returned to us pure

aach morning

 

                  Deo

and we repollute them

 

beggared

imaginations can’t be trusted

with much freedom

children must be taught to share

although adults

can’t do it

 

in the nineteen hundreds

sperm whales learned

to swim upwind

of sailing ships’ harpoons

but now can’t escape our noise

 

alone on rising

stolen seas

our Jonah spat out

floats on plastic

 

in our hopeful house

chametz is hunted

a beast sacrificed

another Passover feast prepared

 

we pray       tikkun olam

for whomever shall inherit     our Earth

                                   

 

Catherine Gonick’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Silver Birch Press, and in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, and Dead of Winter. She works in a company that seeks to slow the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate.

FLOWERS FOR SARAH EVERARD

by Jenny Middleton

because we have to buzz—home safe—home safe—

yes—me too—home safe

peppering What’s App with the obvious

because we walk gripping keys

between middle fingers

harrying skin

with shelled expletives

hoping the only use of their jagged

steel edge will be to unlock

the front door

we think—can’t stop

thinking of

your last walk home

caught on keyhole camera

casual, then

over Clapham Common

 

we light candles, Sarah,

watch them blink

in the shadows of ringed shadows

at the base of trees

and lay flowers in a crackle

of cellophane

against the fear

of dark emptied spaces

and words that spit

from a policeman’s mouth

sticking this in you

kidnapping, murdering, mutilating

leaving you in a builder’s sack

only identifiable by your dental records

in Kentish woodland

 

crimes unlovely as the sick

absence of spring leaves

un-grown on laurel trees.

Jenny Middleton is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the chaos of family life. She lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats.

FLASH NEWS

by Angelica Whitehorne

I heard there was a time when the news was dropped off at your front door, tightly wrapped like a present of sorts and printed with dark black importance on the backs of dead trees, your unrolling of the world’s enrichment, the first sacrifice of your morning, right after sleeping, the last sacrifice of night and right before your first ritualistic kitchen devour. And I imagine how these readers of past would go to find a place, probably the same place as last week, and flap open the butterfly wings of the newspaper, nonchalantly hungry for the best worked happenings, so they could go into the talks of their day feeling primed, well read, and ready, aficionado on stock prices, lost dogs, drug scandals. And how sweet it must have been to read the typing of the world, curated and succinct. And even more how sublime it must have been to have it all end, to put the paper down and be done with it, close your shades to society and its grimy violence, back deals, syrupy success stories, headlines of hazard. To go about your day untethered to it—now the news envelops us always. I open the app to see my friend’s faces and there it is, news of a baby falling from a 12-story building. I scroll to my home screen and Apple positions all the world’s affairs in front of my eyes, and it is like lightning across the window of my phone, who could manage to look away? Our world is like a car crash, no like a highway pile up, and all these news sites are like watching the fenders collide into each other over and over again. The notifications announce themselves to me this midday and I see that another story of nature’s revenge, hurricane or tsunami or landslide has come, I slide the message away, but I do not turn them off. Turning them off would be like turning away from the awful. I grow guilty whenever I do not hold the tragedy of these stories second hand, continual consumption seems the least I can do. Me and my entire generation have lost our ability to put the paper down, and so we read from morning to night and roll it all over a second time in our dreams, almost as penance for the bad news not having our name in it. 

Angelica Whitehorne is a New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, The Cardiff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, and Hooligan Magazine among others.

VACCINE REACTIONS

by Claudia Gary

On April 18, 1955, 8-year-old Ann Hill of Tallahassee, Fla. received one of the first Salk polio vaccine shots. Credit AP via NPR.

Seeing a needle, I slid off the chair,

ran down a hallway to the waiting room,

then circled it until the harried nurse

and my mother corralled me. No amount

of coaxing to be good, no bribes of candy,

no warnings about polio could stop

my tears that day. The rest I don’t remember. 

Autonomy, “freedom,” was everything

to a three-year-old. Last weekend I saw

a needle and shed tears of gratitude.

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Natural Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, and more through writer.org (currently via teleconference). Author of Humor Me (2006) and of chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019) and Bikini Buyer’s Remorse (2015), she is also a health science writer, visual artist, and composer of art songs and chamber music. Follow @claudiagary.

PAGE FROM A BOOK OF DAYS

by David Chorlton

Swallows at the windswept pond

this morning, quick as good fortune, make the light

sway back and forth above

the water while it keeps

its secrets dark.

                         It’s a quiet time;

Say’s Phoebes barely clear the grass before

returning to the fence from which they came,

and a Loggerhead Shrike moves down

from the desert

with a prayer in his beak.

                                         The Red-tailed Hawk

has made the streets his hunting ground

where the pigeon flock

scatters left, right and skyward

as his shadow scythes between them.

One more day;

                       another step toward

the unknown, with a moodswing peak

to peak along the mountain

as it leans back against the sky. A different

message blows

                         from each direction: another

ten killed in Colorado; the doves

returning early from the tropics; music

on the radio so old

it wouldn’t recognize the world today;

and the voice within, too long

in solitude to know

what its next word should be.

Throughout the pandemic David Chorlton has lived quietly and communicated with the local wildlife. His new book Unmapped Worlds from FutureCycle Press features poems that hid in his files for too many years and which now enjoy new exposure. 

LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF JOE BIDEN

by Chad Parenteau

The Boston Herald says

when Joe Biden falls

it is spring

 

black farmers were rescued

but press

begged for pageantry

 

for interviews

hot breathing mouths

near

 

the edge of six feet

obsessed with

closeness

 

waiting in the sun

the children

in the camps

 

incidentally

in Georgia

there were

 

the dead Asian women

but look

Joe Biden falling

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, Ibbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He is a contributor to Headline Poetry & Press and serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His latest collection The Collapsed Bookshelf was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award.

THE NEW MATH

by Howie Good

If a total of eight people

are shot to death

at three massage parlors

in Atlanta, Georgia,

 

and the following week

10 people are shot

to death at a supermarket

in Boulder, Colorado,

 

how long before

the next mass shooting

in the U.S. occurs?

 

Show all work.

Howie Good's most recent poetry collection is Gunmetal Sky, available from Thirty West Publishing.

SECOND SHOT

by Tracey Gratch

Crocuses through morning frost feign hope

that even in this time of gloom, as Cambridge

bars are shuttered tight and on Mass Ave.

foot traffic’s light, and yet, and yet it’s barely

spring, despite the losses reigning in—

The moment for a second shot; resilience

grit, on second thought.

Tracey Gratch lives south of Boston with her husband and their four children. Her poems have appeared in publications including Post Road, Mezzo Cammin, The Literary Bohemian, Annals of Internal Medicine, Boston Literary Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Her poem "Strong Woman" is included in On Being A Doctor, Volume 4, from the American College of Physicians.

LETTER FROM SOLITARY

by Katherine West

March 2021

The birds are singing 

and it isn't snowing 

We have our vaccines 

and schools are open 

It is warm enough to sit outside 

but too cool for forest fires 

In sunny spots brown grasses are turning green

from the inside out 

The cat hasn't shed her winter down

still sits on my lap for warmth

She is my most intimate companion 

on this March afternoon in 2021

I have survived the shipwreck 

that tossed me up on this desert island 

on this alien planet 

this solitary confinement 

for a crime 

I didn't commit 

And although Spring is coming 

I'm cold

I could be old and all 

my relationships memories 

I could be dead 

and all my lovers ghosts 

sitting on the side of my bed 

that empty symbol of sleep

and love 

that flag 

that empty symbol of unity 

at half mast 

Half the time 

the ghosts hold my cold 

hands in their cold hands 

whispering platitudes 

like therapists 

over the phone 

like friends 

on a screen 

They cannot hold me 

They cannot hold me down 

as I drift like old smoke 

old scarves 

as I fray

unravel 

silk skeins 

cool 

weightless 

slim 

as threads 

of red sunset 

resting like raptors 

on the updraft 

like strands

of blood 

lovely 

and unloved 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. Using the name Kit West, Katherine's new novel, When Night Comes, A Christmas Carol Revisited has just been released, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in March of 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing. She is presently at work on the sequel to When Night Comes. It is called Slave, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist.  

SPRING BREAK

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Spring Break ramps up on Fort Lauderdale beach and bars nearby. (Mike Stocker / South Florida Sun Sentinel)

They amass like mosquitoes

seasonal, thirsty

buzzing full throated

drinking from the trough

dancing bikini bar to bar

singing across hot sand

under bright sun freedom

in the Ponzi State

Where cities are whitewashed

spiritually unclaimed, soulless

coyotes nosing full garbage cans

their woods stripped bare for 

asphalt streets, pink plastic

body parts and towers 

on Styrofoam foundations

eroding narrowed beaches

while out in the rurals

abandoned washers, rusty 

cars, no jobs, lots of guns

red banners to the past

This is the place 

to party-hardy

for frontier values

fierce individualism

reduced taxes, no rules

endless cycles of consumption

just build, build and burn 

When the invaders conquered

the Natives warned them

of the inevitable loss:

the nose of the deer

will fall off... 

and that's Florida

the Underwater State

Where everyone is welcome

to the final season 

the grand finale

the greatest sunset

in American history.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes tropical noir with a dark humor. Novels include Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love, a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, UK, 2019). In 2020, Grandma Moses Press released the poetry micro-chapbook Florida Man. The Physics of Grief puts the fun back in funerals while taking a serious look at the process of mourning (QuoScript, UK, April 2021). 

ESCAPE PLANS

by Barbara Simmons

 

We do it without thinking, sighting those red block letters, 

reassuring our leaving places we have found ourselves,

or, more precisely, where we’ve found ourselves lost, 

in theaters, malls, relationships, 

those gathering spaces where, 

not sure sometimes why we're there, 

we fold away small notes to self, including routes by which we’ll leave.  

It's been a year since we took leave

from what? Routines, connections, worn out paths of

customary comings, anticipated goings,

a year of changing patterns, forswearing the habitual,

creating novel ways to meet, to share, to love, to spend

time trying not to think where we should have been, 

envisioning new plans to leave the here and now

without abandoning ourselves. What's left

when signs are not available? The word itself lies next to

others in the dictionary, including existential, 

become new guides for taking leave, and flight, and hold

of who we are

as we discover what

it is to paint our own way out of boxes, out of corners,

over all walls that restrict our freedoms

finding what we've missed seeing, how we've missed living.

 

 

Barbara Simmons grew up in Boston, now resides in California—the coasts inform her poetry. A graduate of Wellesley College, she received an MA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins. Retired educator, she savors smaller parts of life and language, exploring words as ways to remember, envision, celebrate, mourn, and try to understand more. Publications have included Santa Clara Review, Hartskill Review, Boston Accent,  The New Verse News, Soul-Lit, 300 Days of Sun, Capsule Stories, and Journal of Expressive Writing.

ELIMINATING TEMPTATIONS

by Imogen Arate

Shootings at Atlanta-area massage parlors have left eight people dead, most of them Asian women. In this photo, former Washington Governor and former US Ambassador to China Gary Locke holds a sign reading "Hate is a Virus" as he speaks during the "We Are Not Silent" rally against anti-Asian hate in response to recent anti-Asian crime in the Chinatown-International District of Seattle, Washington on March 13, 2021. Photo: JASON REDMOND / AFP/GETTY via Newsweek

Yes, something is horribly wrong with a person who kills to “eliminate” temptation. … But, that does not mean we can dismiss places where this illness festered. … Women are not the source of temptation in need of elimination. Women are made in the image of God and worthy of dignity and respect. Asian women are not objects of fetishized desire for the racialized gaze of men. So, let’s pray for the victims' families that the Lord may grant them peace in the midst of such tragedy. Let’s stand up and alongside our Asian brothers and sisters. Let’s work against twisted and unhealthy theology that maligns and distorts the image of God in women (and men). —Ed Setzer, Christianity Today: The Exchange, March 17, 2021

I tell my mom not to visit the accountant’s office

Rona’s run amuck suffocating freedom of movement

A news article said an elderly Asian woman was shoved 

to the ground Donald wants Rona to be our fault

The walls of my apartment wrap me like a protective cloak*

whose porousness admits the chilling draft of side-eye glares

I scrub myself clean of my heritage but my eyes my cheeks

my nose tell another story that doesn’t allow a really bad day

to end in a murder spree that’s for a paler lot than us

Someone told me I’m the wrong shade to opine

then flashed the peace sign because V fingers

can scissor away the pangs of exclusionary acts

when I’m standing at the back of the BIPOC line

I tell my mom there’s only so much I can do to protect her

*This line was inspired by lines 13 and 14 of "Lounging on the Couch on My 39th Birthday in Pink Flannel Donut Pajamas" by Julie Danho

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer, the Executive Producer and Host of the weekly poetry podcast Poets and Muses and co-founder of the Pan Poetry Project. She has written in four languages and published in two. Her work was most recently featured in The New Verse News, the Love Letters to 2020 anthology, the Global Poemic, and Rigorous.

DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

by Frances Davis

What does it matter?

When lighted days 

are shingled with dread

and hullabaloos have shifted

to groans and smirks?

 

We could capture it in a teacup

time’s familiar wastage, not of the essence.

Our measurements, dots on a dial

foolish in the planetary run.

Who will count the hours

When the sea rises to cover all?

Frances Davis is a journalist living in California where sea level rise is eating away at cliffs and buttresses hauled in to stop its encroachment. Harsh realities in hard times and we're wasting time with our clocks? Her essays, poetry and short stories have been published in The New Verse News and numerous journals and anthologies. See her latest short story in the enviro journal The Hopper.

SAVAGE AND IGNORANT DELIGHT

by Pepper Trail

In this photo provided by Adam Messer is a gray wolf, a member of the Nez Perce pack, seen north of Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo., on March 31, 2002. Wolf hunting policies in some U.S. states are taking an aggressive turn as Republican lawmakers and conservative hunting groups push to curb their numbers. Antipathy toward wolves for killing livestock and big game dates to when early European immigrants settled the American West in the 1800s. (Adam Messer via AP)

Wolf takes one step, one step wrong. The jaws of the trap snap.

In three days, three short days of permission, the men of Wisconsin, 

with hounds and traps and guns, have killed two hundred wolves.

 

Oh great Aldo, Dr. Leopold, what would you say

to the "Hunter Nation," these men of your beloved state 

who went to court to secure those days of death?

 

Your words are there to read in "Thinking Like a Mountain"—  

how you mourned the wolf killing that you did, 

mourned the fierce green fire dying in her eyes.

 

Young then, and full of trigger-itch, you came at last

to hear the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf,

to see that wildness is the salvation of the world.

 

You grew up, but not all men do.

You lived to see, too clear, the wilderness gone,

the waiting swarms of deer, the disease of appetite.

 

You taught the good that wolves do, that hunters can share,

but too few learned.  Two hundred wolves dead is not hunt,

but slaughter, the most savage and ignorant delight.

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

MISS CISSY TEACHES A MATH LESSON

by Sandra Anfang

George Floyd as a boy with his mother Larcenia, known as Miss Cissy, who died on May 30, 2018

.

My son George is dead. We lie 

under the earth in a quiet Houston

cemetery where we grieve together. 

All of Minneapolis is grieving.

Twenty-seven months from now

we will still be grieving.

I heard him call out for me

as he struggled for eight minutes

under the knee of the white cop

My name is tattooed on his belly.

We are connected at the core.

In twenty-seven years we will still be grieving.

I used to love the number twenty-seven:

three times three times three.

The number of black men police kill

each year has not changed since I died.

Twelve hundred sixty-five of my babies have

been felled, and they are all my babies.

Here they said. Take this money in exchange

for George’s life, but that won’t bring him back.

I cannot balance this equation. 

Three point three: the number

of millions our family was paid

for every minute that white cop 

pressed his hate into George’s neck.

Just forty-six, he was a dad and grandad.

The city has wiped the crime scene clean

but our pain is an indelible stain.

Money is a powerful mop. We will use it

to help the cause of black folks everywhere.

That white cop must be locked away

if that’s what it takes to end 

this circle of slaughter.

Sandra Anfang is an award-winning poet, poetry teacher, and editor. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including San Francisco Peace and Hope, Spillway, The New Verse News, and Rattle. Her two chapbooks Looking Glass Heart and Road Worrier were published by Finishing Line Press in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Xylem Highway, a full-length collection, was published by Main Street Rag in 2019. Sandra teaches with California Poets in the Schools and hosts Rivertown Poets, a monthly reading series, in Petaluma, California. This poem was born of the twenty-seven-million-dollar settlement for George’s life by the city of Minneapolis this week.

FROM THE CORE OF OUR WORLD

by Angelica Whitehorne

The sad leaked like ripe fruit from the core of our world

The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl 

I don’t think the politicians, protected in suits, will save us

I don’t think these issues are something they’d care to discuss

 

We woke up to close the blinds against a wildfire world

The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl 

I don’t believe life ends at Black or starts at conception

I don’t believe in law enforcement’s redemption 

 

We live in the same country but different worlds

The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl

cops / defenders / bastards they’ll come for you too,

hit you hard in the streets if you step on their shoes

 

I sent a letter to the P.O. box of our homeless world

The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl 

We’ve been taught rights are something we can negotiate  

We’ve seen first hand our systems were contrived in hate

 

We stand outside and wave goodbye to a disappearing world

The men in blue pepper sprayed a nine year old girl

I wonder if there is a point where we’re past being saved 

If this marks a civilization too utterly depraved

 

I want so bad to rescue this reckless, refuge world

I want so bad to cover the eyes of the nine year old girl 

Open your own eyes and see where the real danger compiles

in our actions, in our violence, not in the fearful, backtalk of a child. 

 

What if we gather and release this knotted up, wounded world

and teach the next generation to protect all nine year old girls?

Am I too hopeful or can we confront it, our long past of disparity?

Am I too hopeful or can we grow them, our seeds of peaceful solidarity?

Angelica Whitehorne is a New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, The Cardiff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, and Hooligan Magazine among others.

COVID LARGESSE

by Ed Ahern

Aesop got it wrong.

Or at least incomplete.

This life-long ant realizes

some of my money will outlive me.

And here comes a Covid check.

More for the kids? Not likely.

But how to best squander it?

I’m too old for expensive vices,

and already giving things away.

Spas and salons are wasted

on a wrinkled, bald man.

What’s left is geriatric dissipation.

Grasshopper trips and meals,

shows and concerts,

gorged on at sedate pace,

with lessened senses and focus

and an age restricted diet.

 

Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over three hundred stories and poems published so far, and six books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of six review editors.

MS. SOPHIE PENDER

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

Sophie Pender started The 93% Club when she was at Bristol University for students who felt discriminated against for not being rich and from private schools. Photograph: Graeme Robertson / The Guardian, March 6, 2021.

My name is Sophie. Don't look down on me!

So what, if you talk posh, and scorn low-cost?

Since I met you, at university,

Our paths have never frictionlessly crossed!

Posh accents and the privilege they buy

Have short-changed us poor chavs for far too long.

It's time the ninety-three percent decry

Entitlement for private schools as wrong! ...

Pooh-poohing state-school kids as unrefined,

Excluding us from chances to succeed,

No longer will be suffered by my kind——

Determined, as we are, that you will heed

Elitist education taught by me:

Remember to respect the Ninety-Three!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, The Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, and The Tallahassee Democrat. His limericks have appeared in Britain’s Daily Mail.

PROCTORING THE ACT DURING A PANDEMIC

by Katie Chicquette

I steal moments

scribble on scraps

pretend I am writing

a reminder, recording

the test start-time,

but really it’s this

poem, stolen line by line

from the time we’ve stolen

from them as they fill

in bubbles with something

we pretend is truth

every bubble a stolen moment

to sleep     to heal         to skate

to work     to laugh       or cry

or eat        or breathe    to reboot

retreat       recreate    

every line of this poem 

a string or scrap

a robin steals 

to build a nest

Katie Chicquette is an alternative education teacher in Appleton, Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in various journals and local publications, including Poets Reading the News, Riggwelter, Bramble, Wallopzine, and Mothers Always Write. She’s fortunate to be surrounded by so many active poets in Wisconsin. Contact her at k.chicquette.adams<at>gmail.com. 

LAST WEEK

by Anton Yakovlev

Photo via Pinterest

There used to be a rocking chair upstairs.
I’d listen to the news. The news was stark:
wildlife repopulating city squares,
containment efforts always off the mark.
Vending machines have long run out of prayers.
Torn passports waft through the uprooted park.
There used to be a rocking chair upstairs.
Last week even the poltergeists went dark.


Anton Yakovlev’s latest chapbook Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018) won the James Tate Poetry Prize. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, was published by Sensitive Skin Books in 2019.

BRAVE RED

by Ellen White Rook

Posted on May 25, 2017 by Maggie at The Magical, Magnificent, Miraculous Amaryllis Journey.

on the one-year anniversary of the last time I got dressed up

 

In this country,

there is no minister for loneliness.

We make do with general anxiety.

The wind, loose, plucks

the last pinecones and builds

horizontal crowns across the snow.

After this year of quizzical

breath and fingers pressed 

against glass walls, houseplants 

are overgrown from too much care: 

Ivies overthrow terracotta 

and aloe spikes weave 

through jades.

An amaryllis 

that hasn’t bloomed in years,

this week leapt a green arc from its nest 

of tiny stones. The thumb-bud aims 

precisely where the sun comes up

even though I turn the pot

each morning and some days, 

the sky stays winter pale. 

The red sepals unfold

precisely the shade

of that last lipstick smile.

Ellen White Rook is a poet and teacher of contemplative arts residing in upstate New York and southern Maine. In the pre-COVID-19 world, she offered workshops on Japanese flower arranging and led day-long Sit, Walk, Write retreats that merge meditation, movement, and writing. In 2021, you can find her on Zoom. Although a senior citizen, Ellen is a recent graduate from the Master of Fine Arts program at Lindenwood University. Her work has been published in Montana Mouthful and Trolley Literary Journal.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY 2021:A LIST POEM

by Mary K O’Melveny

I.  Jalalabad, Afghanistan

 

Mursal Waheedi

Saadia Sadat

Shahnaz Raufi

 

Buried in fresh graves

along with their hopes

Journalists without portfolio

 

Peace flags at half staff tonight

 

II.  Mandalay, Myanmar

 

Ma Kyal Sin

a/k/a “Angel”

Age 18

 

At the protest front lines

Garbed in bright red lipstick

her black t-shirt emblazoned

 

“Everything will be all right.”

 

III.  Bangalore, India

 

Disha Ravi

Climate advocate

Age 22

 

Helping farmers on Fridays

turns seditious

toolkits tied to treason

 

Democracy’s promise reviled

 

IV.  Rochester NY

 

Unnamed girl

“Person in crisis”

Age 9

Pepper spray

even in handcuffs

antidote for “family troubles”

 

Cops say “You’re acting like a child”

 

V.  Rochester NY

 

Unnamed woman

with unnamed toddler

Age 3

 

Allegations of shoplifting

More pepper spray

New policy questions

 

‘I didn’t steal nothing” she said tearfully

 

VI. Pentagon, Arlington VA

 

Unnamed women

Service members

Ages varied

 

Sexual assaults

reported – more than 7,800

unreported – 20,000

 

“You’re more likely to be raped by

someone in your uniform as shot by the enemy”

 

VII.  Washington DC

 

Unnamed women

formerly working

Ages varied

 

2.3 million departed

from the workplace in just one year

140,000 in December alone

 

70 cents per male dollar --“Motherhood penalty”

 

VIII.  Yambio, South Sudan

 

Margaret Raman

Single mother of five

Age 38

 

Beans and ground nuts

for sale at Masiya Market

now rotting in noonday sun

 

business stifled by COVID’s legacy

 

IX.  Maiduguri, Nigeria

 

Hundreds of schoolgirls

kidnapped by gunmen

Ages 12-18

 

Bandits in uniforms

barefoot children

education turns life-threatening

 

“Abduction is a growth industry”

 

X.  Indiana, Montana, South Carolina, Kansas, Wyoming, Tennessee

 

Anxious women

seeking autonomy

Ages unknown

 

Bills passed or pending

legislators emboldened by extreme

agendas and judicial appointments

 

Choices determined by geography

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 is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

CALENDAR GIRLS

by Julie Steiner

St. Agnes, stained-glass window in the parish church of St. George in Fritzdorf, Germany.

The head of an independent enquiry investigating church child abuse in France said Tuesday that there might have been up to 10,000 victims since 1950. Jean-Marc Sauve, head of a commission set up by the Catholic church, said that a previous estimate in June last year of 3,000 victims "is certainly an underestimate. It's possible that the figure is at least 10,000," he added at a press conference where he delivered an update on the commission's work. A hotline set up in June 2019 for victims and witnesses to report abuse received 6,500 calls in the first 17 months of operation. "The big question for us is 'how many victims came forward'? Is it 25 percent? 10 percent, 5 percent or less?," Sauve told reporters. —France24, March 2, 2021

January: Agnes—her name means “Chaste One”—
holds a lamb (a pun on the Latin agnus).
Note the flowing streams of her hair, which hid her
     twelve-year-old body,

naked, on parade to a Roman brothel.
Note the sword employed when her would-be rapists—
like the flames lit later—refused to touch her.
     Notice the palm branch,

signifying martyrdom. Note her crimson
robe, another emblem of Christian martyrs.
Patron saint of victims of rape, Saint Agnes,
     ora pro nobis.

*

February: Agatha—Greek for “Good Girl”—
bears her severed breasts on a plate, serenely.
Tortured for her chastity. Never raped, though.
     Virgin and martyr.

Spared the degradation of rape’s defilement,
though she died a sexual sadist’s plaything.
Lesson: God won’t tolerate rape’s pollution
     tainting a Good Girl.

*

Skip ahead. Miss May is Antonia Mesina.
Head and face smashed in in the nineteen-thirties.
Age sixteen when brained by a thwarted rapist.
     I was a teen, too,

when the Pope beatified her. Another
virgin-martyr patron of rape survivors.
Verified as virgo intacta—something
     ever-so-private;

something that her modesty wanted shielded;
something she had given her life defending;
something that her coroners broadcast widely.
     Waved in our faces,

alleluia. See how the Lord protects His
favored ones from genital violation?
Doctors’ probings proved that she’d kept her hymen.
     Proved she was holy.

*

Moving on: Maria Goretti, farmgirl.
Miss July. In 1902, a neighbor
stabbed her fourteen times when he failed to rape her.
     She was eleven.

How had I offended the Lord at less than
half her age—allowed to be raped, not murdered?
Even in my innocence, I was guilty.
     I was unworthy.

God withheld divine intervention, proving
I was not an Agatha, nor an Agnes.
I’d deserved what happened to me, like other
     rape-punished children.

*

Pray for us. And pray for a Church whose members
help abusers stigmatize rape’s survivors,
though Augustine’s City of God said virgins
     raped are still virgins.

Pray for us. And pray for a Church more heartless
now than when Aquinas affirmed that raped nuns—
even those impregnated—still are virgins:
     mind over matter.

Pray for us. And pray that our Church recalls that
Miss December—virgin and martyr Lucy—
claimed a second heavenly crown would honor
     those who’d been ravished.

How it would have helped me, to hear that virtue
wasn’t something stored in a telltale membrane
someone else’s lust could destroy, forever
     leaving you lesser.

How it would have helped, to have heard this message:
Virtue—male or female—cannot be graded
pass/fail, based on criminals’ choice to harm you.
     (Gruesome injustice!)

How it would have helped, to have heard Survival
isn’t proof of sinfulness. Share your burden.
Minus that, the upshot was Hold your tongue, or
     all will condemn you.

Rapists want the world to despise their victims.
Shame buys silence. Shout! Let the Church proclaim this:
Rape indeed does happen to blameless people.
     Calendar, update.

Author's references:

Stanza 13: Augustine, City of God, Book I (Chapters 16 and 18).

https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120101.htm

Stanzas 14 and 15: Thomas Aquinas (with Fra Rainaldo da Piperno), Summa Theologicae, Supplement, Question 96, Article 5, Reply to Objection 4.

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/5096.htm#article5

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego. Besides TheNewVerse.News, the venues in which her poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, Rattle, Light, and the Asses of Parnassus.

FREE RANGE BIRD

by Indran Amirthanayagam

               for J

Stumbling is generalized from

the top down the line, the pass

to the prince but not his acolytes,

and I in turn taking my name off

the poem that calls for accounting,

consistency, respect for all

the people all the time. Living

in fear of bureaucratic sanction is

the natural state of the apparatchik,

hiding behind internal assessments,

frank reviews protected from

the public eye. But the poet

feigns innocence and writes

as if free speech were the only

principle, not playing scales

the conductor directs. Into these

coordinates, orchestra pit

the editor arrives, notices

the bureacrat's vibrating,

even squirming violin,

the post-midnight fear

of exposure, his attempt

to hold the presses—the editor

the only hero left standing,

taking a firm stance,

dropping the poem from

tweet and website,

and moving on

to the next submission,

the next poem written

without shackles,

that challenges

the moderate, real

politik, that gets

the leader to draw

a clear line in the sand

before the desert wind

picks up and wipes it away

like the usual human construct,

built in a mess, two steps

forward, one back, chicken

clucking still in the coop

smelling free wind in the yard,

the fence beyond out of sight.

Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020) and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.