BECAUSE OUR GUNS ARE OUR FUTURE

by Dick Westheimer

A 15-year-old sophomore surrendered after firing a semiautomatic handgun. The dead included a 16-year-old boy, a 14-year-old girl and a 17-year-old girl. Michigan’s governor condemned the attack, saying “no one should be afraid to go to school.” —The New York Times, November 30, 2021. The author of the pictured tweet is Oakland County Democratic Party Chair.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” 

—Eleanor Roosevelt

Because I live in the United States of Guns

Because the gun is mightier than the sword

Because a gun in the hand is worth two in the carry-on bag

Because all that glitters is guns

Because the gun’s got my tongue

Because only guns will tell

Because I am as old as guns

Because all is fair in love and guns

Because any gun in a storm will do

Because guns make the world go ‘round

Because they don’t make guns the way they used to

Because guns are money

Because a fool and his gun are easily parted

Because you only hurt the ones you gun

Because guns are blind

Because guns love company

Because guns are the best medicine

Because guns are more than skin deep

Because one bad gun spoils the whole bunch

Because there’s no such thing as a free gun

Because that’s the way the gun bounces 

Because I fear the future belongs to those who believe 

in the beauty of their guns.

Dick Westheimer has—in the company of his wife Debbie—lived, gardened and raised five children on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. In addition, his recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Rise Up Review, Sheila Na-Gig, Snapdragon Journal of Art and Healing, and Cutthroat.

METAMOLOGY

by James Penha

Andertoons Word Cartoon #2815

NFT beats cheugy to be Collins Dictionary’s word of the year 

—The Guardian, November 24, 2021

Before these words become as cheugy 

as Regencycore or climate anxiety this 

pingdemic opens a metaversal auction—

open only to the double-vaxxed for crypto 

or cash—on an NFT of this poem penned 

in mī (that’s mī neopronoun just coined) 

hybrid working spaces hither and thither.

Author's Note: The top ten words of 2021 according to Collins: NFT, cheugy, climate anxiety, crypto, double-vaxxed, hybrid working, metaverse, neopronoun, pingdemic, Regencycore

James Penha edits The New Verse News. Twitter: @JamesPenha

BLY AND SONDHEIM: ELEGAIC DUET

by Earl J Wilcox

Making music that puts to shame a few

classic muses, you two gave us power

in poetry, in song—day after day

night after night, anytime we felt down-

hearted, no blues for you just strong

& virile and passionately human songs

for the soul. For words, we lift high

Robert, for lyrics we can never go

wrong with Stephen: harmonics

Not hysteria. Never mute, ever live.

 

Earl Wilcox, a Broadway buff and a deeply rooted poet for activism, grieves the loss of these two iconic word warriors.

THEY WILL SEE YOUR LOVE

by Alejandro Escudé

For Robert Bly (1926-2021)

When you passed, I entered the forest and walked further than 

I have ever walked. Beyond the shaded path, I found you in the sun.

You sang to me about the old trains that wait in the falling snow.

I took a train just like the one you rode on. There were stars,

And castles erected for me, in the valley below the dictator’s citadel.

And there, we danced dressed up as knights, like so many Don Quixotes.

No one ever came to plow us into the ground with spears as sharp as 

Inadequacy. Afterward, some drove back to the Christian hospital,

Others wept in their anxious offices. Some made it back to their home,

Where their dogs waited dutifully to be walked for a short time.

But I want to thank you for your stories. The pity and confidence,

The marginalia of dragons, and the wise women who danced

In your honor, beneath the flaming cables of industry. Poet king,

I am not going back to the misery factory, where I turned

The levers like vipers, each bite a bite for eternity. I am here for you.

You branded me with the confidence of the son. I see bonfires

Flickering beyond the forest, they have welcomed me for centuries.

They tell me, the men living there, “We see you. And we see your love.”

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

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. 

WHITEWASH

by Eileen Ivey Sirota

About 100 people, many of them Native Americans, held a protest in Pierre in September to push for improved teaching of Native American history and culture in South Dakota schools and to decry removal of Native references from proposed social studies standards. Photo: Courtesy DRG Media Group via Kelo, November 14, 2021.

All the white pages lovely, unspoiled

by time, untouched by torment.

All aboard. 

 

An uninterrupted arc of progress. 

Heroes on horseback.  See Dick and Jane

in their triumphant ignorance. 

 

We have torn you

from our history books, those fairy tales

for innocents and children.

 

Unseen and unheard are the children we ripped

from their mothers, sent away

to boarding schools to be laundered

and whitened, their mother tongue ripped out.

 

“Kill the Indian and save the man,” proclaimed Richard Pratt. 

At the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania,

one hundred eighty-six graves

cradle their small bones.

 

From your mouths we tore         

the sacred place names and stamped them

on our suburban street signs.                                                 

 

So many ways of killing—the bullet, the blanket,

the exile, the pretending, the silence.                                   

The silence.

 

 

Eileen Ivey Sirota is a poet and psychotherapist, the author of a chapbook, Out of Order, published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.  Her poems also have appeared in Calyx, Ekphrastic Review, District Lines, The New Verse News, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly. 

REFUGE SEASON

Art: Banksy, Mediterranean Sea View 2017, detail of a triptych. Photo courtesy of Sotheby's London via artnet news.

Adam Day is the the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, from 1913 Press, and his work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

FOR THE BOY ON TRIAL

by David Southward

From left, Judge Bruce Schroeder, Kyle Rittenhouse and defense attorney Mark Richards watch a video Nov. 12 during Rittenhouse’s homicide trial in Kenosha, Wis. (Mark Hertzberg/Pool/AP via The Washington Post)

I don’t wish death

or solitary confinement

or even the hell

of half a life wasted

behind bars. No:

I want him to be stricken

with disgust—at the blood

he’s spilled, at the horror

of his rash heroics. I want God

to part the clouds of his mind

and set afire

its nest of fear and folly.

I want the clearing smoke

to open his eyes

to true manhood: the facing down

of an enemy hiding

within—the answering

of a people’s need

for sobriety, not messiah.

I want him to rise

above the buzzfed grapevines,

the twitter of rumor

and rumble of propagandas

and remember history:

to become his republic’s

most disarming

spokesman. I want him

to march and preach

civility—to be Prince Hal

to a nation of Hotspurs,

to become (in the unpredictable

flowerings of time)

our next King

of change.

 

 

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of Apocrypha (Wipf & Stock 2018) and Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020). 

IT'S NOT OVER TILL IT'S OVER

by Katherine West

In Brazil 600,000 are dead.  The Brazilian jazz band, Farofa, says nothing of this.  They are too immersed in the blessing of music, too busy following and blending genres, traditions, grooves.  They play a Brazilified Tears for Fears song, appropriately, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World."  What happens when there is no world to rule?  Is politics a board game, continuing in heaven?  Do politicians believe they're even going to heaven after selling the planet down the river for a portfolio in their great-grandfather's coal company?  

The violin player is from L.A.  That's where the band met, of course.  He dances as he plays, dances as if he were born in Rio.  The bass player is a comic book character.  If peanuts had a bass player, he would be it.  His big head, with even bigger hair, wobbles without any help from the body whatsoever, like one of those plastic dime store toys I grew up with.  At one point he does a 1970s funk solo.  I close my eyes.  Try to enter the naiveté of Watergate. 

For just one second I've got it:  bell bottoms, afros and ideals, Muddy Waters playing in Peace Park my first year at Mizzou, streaking across the quad to protest the war.  An abstract concept for most of us.  I had never seen anyone with the after-effects of agent orange.  Never seen a metal leg.  Never met anyone with PTSD.

Blindly, I wanted to do the right thing.  I wanted to leave the world a better place for having birthed me, for having said yes to my orphan soul.  

The funk solo ended.  The 70s vanished, leaving nothing behind but that stubborn soul, tossing aside the boring board games to come up to bat one last time, to suss out the pitcher, to grand slam around the bases, run like hell, and hope to reach home before the ump calls me out. 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She hs 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 came out in 2020, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing for whom she also teaches Creative Writing workshops.  The sequel to When Night Comes will also be released by BRP in 2021. It is called Slave, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist. 

GIRLS SAY YES

Poem for Veterans Day

by Sandra Anfang

Pictured L to R: Joan Baez, Pauline Baez Marden, Mimi Farina in this 1968 poster, from a Jim Marshall photograph, promoting draft resistance during the Vietnam War. Source: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

to boys who say no.

The words ring hollow

in my ears like a looped refrain

from a scratched LP

a not-so-distant memory.

 

Aligned with the movement

I nodded and signed on. I never

gave my body—much less

heart—to a man in uniform, unless he worked

in the service of people, animals, or trees.

 

But what about the other war

the one that ogled us

from leering unshaved faces

from portraits on greenbacks

from slave ships and pedophile priests?

 

Blissfully unaware of the battle

that raged behind clenched teeth

we sailed along, soothed by the

waters of our beliefs, decades

before our lips would shape the words me too.

Sandra Anfang is the author of three poetry collections and her work has been published in numerous journals. She's also a visual artist, editor, poetry teacher in the schools, and host of a long-running poetry series. She lives in Northern California, where she looks for good trouble every day.

SAY SOMETHING NEW ABOUT NOVEMBER

by Penelope Scambly Schott

Source: Photos Public Domain

Nothing new.

Eleventh hour of the eleventh day

of the eleventh month, the end

of World War One. I was eleven

and stood with my young mother

in that railroad car on the siding

where back in 1918 they signed

the Armistice.

I was twenty-one, a new mother

scarcely able to mother myself,

that November twenty-second

when JFK was murdered. This

November I expect nothing, not

peace or murder, birth or death.

I should go outside and rake up

my fallen leaves.

I’ll stand under the cottonwood.

I’ll rake and rake and rake and

stuff leaves into a sack. Every

leaf is yellow or brown. My bag

will keep wanting to tilt over. I

won’t let it. I won’t let it. I won’t

let it.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

GHOST FORESTS EXPLAINED

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Ghost forests occur when high tides push seawater into forested areas and salt poisons the trees, turning them a bleached white. Ghost forests are currently appearing up and down the east coast of the US at an alarming rate. Photo: Cameron Pollack for NPR

The sun comes up

the sun goes down

the trees turn white

the beach looks skeletal.

The rain comes down

the sea comes in

the trees soak in salt

instead of fresh water.

The storms come up

the sea washes in

our forests poisoned

dead limbs in the sand.

We walk the beach

stuffing our sandbags

as storms come in

more storms come in

the tides rise up 

the tides rise higher... 

our bones flash white

littering the shore.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes tropical noir with a dark humor. Novels include the mystery pandemic tale Songs of the Maniacs (Salt Publishing, 2014), Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, 2017), and What I Did for Love, a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, 2019). In 2020, Grandma Moses Press released the poetry micro-chapbook Florida Man. 

PALLAS (ATHENA) AT A SUMMIT

by Dawid Juraszek

Countries’ climate pledges built on flawed data, Post investigation finds. Photo: A large plantation of palm trees, which produce palm oil, borders an undrained peat forest in Simunjan in the Sarawak region of Malaysia. When peat-rich bogs are drained and converted to farmlands, they release a rapid pulse of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as the once-waterlogged plants’ remains degrade with the sudden exposure to air. —The Washington Post, November 7, 2021

The ways the wise ones of our pasts

warred on the bodies of the land

all the while

crafting key words and ideas

for you and me

to grow up with

shaped and scarred us for life

Mountainsides stripped bare

underneath the blazing Sun

is not how it always was

a side effect of wanting more

shrugged off

or sorrowed over

then accepted and assimilated

A shortcut to wisdom

when exploring a narrative

what & who & why & how

hindsight is best

not indulged

as belated foresight

everything so very clear all along

Words and ideas now being crafted

justify unjustifiable

with solutions that could truly impress

only in hindsight

premised on there being a future

to look back on this moment

and give us a thumbs up

Dawid Juraszek is the author of Medea and Other Poems of the Anthropocene (Kelsay Books 2020). A bilingual writer and educator based in China, he is working on a PhD project in cognitive ecocriticism at Maastricht University. His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in multiple venues in Poland, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

SPOTTED FROM SPACE

by Martin Elster

In recent satellite imagery captured by Planet, which operates the world's largest pack of Earth-observing satellites, large groups of walruses can be seen crowding Earth's coastlines, all the way from space. The image shows ambiguous, "distinctive red-brown" blobs decorating the Alaskan coastline. Previously, walruses would gather in groups of up to many thousands, called "haulouts," on Arctic sea ice far from the shore. But with sea ice melting at rapid speeds due to climate change, they have no choice but to gather on land. —Space.com, November 5, 2021

Thousands of walruses (called “haulouts”) gather

along Alaskan shores, spotted from space.

They’re resting ample bodies, but they’d rather

veg out on sea ice. Yet there’s not a trace

of frozen H2O. A satellite 

has taken photographs. How can they eat

or sleep now? Humans may create a fright.

Many will perish in their mad retreat,

tumbling en mass to the safety of the ocean.

Monitoring their populations might

show how, through climate change, they may persist.

Yet when at last they’re gone, will they be missed?

These mammals know this world is not all right.

These mammals know there is no magic potion.

Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, was for many years a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra (now retired). He finds contentment in long woodland walks and writing poetry, often alluding to the creatures and plants he encounters. A full-length collection, Celestial Euphony, was published by Plum White Press in 2019.

PANDEMICS, SO CALLED

by Julian O. Long

Tweet from the bouche du grand oiseau

A federal appeals court suspended the Biden administration’s new vaccine requirement for private companies, delivering a major blow for one of the White House’s signature attempts to increase the number of vaccinations to corral the pandemic. The decision was issued by a panel of three judges appointed by Republican presidents in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The judges wrote that there was “cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the mandate,” staying the order while the court assesses it in more depth… The court gave the Justice Department until 5 p.m. Monday to respond to the challenger’s request for a more permanent halt to the mandate. —The Washington Post, November 7, 2021

So, could there be

pandemics, like georgics or

bucolics? To what lore might

they defer, not farmer talk

from the demobbed or mythic tales

cribbed from here and there.

They’d need to be straight

from the bouche du cheval

so to speak, hot off the press

pitch perfect, on point

get to the heart of the matter

etc., etc. And what if the heart

of the matter is no heart at all

now that three judges, appointed

by Trump and Reagan have delayed

the president's vaccine mandate

citing 'grave statutory and con-

stitutional issues'? Constitutional

issues, my ass! In all the blather

and politics of vaccination ob-

struction, there’s nothing to be

found resembling a constitutional

issue, or a human being for that

matter, except flipped upside down

and dying on a ventilator..

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.

CRITICAL THINKER

by Cody Walker

"Look, I'm not some sort of anti-vax, flat earther. I am somebody who's a critical thinker. You guys know me. I march to the beat of my own drum. I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and the ability to make choices for your body, not to have to acquiesce to some woke culture or crazed group of individuals who say you have to do something. Health is not a one-size-fits-all for everybody. And for me, it involved a lot of study in the offseason, much like the study I put into hosting Jeopardy! Or the weekly study I put into playing the game." —Aaron Rodgers

Aaron Rodgers

mixed some codger’s

tooth powder with horse dewormer and molten gold. (His credit card: maxed.)

“Look!” he cried. “I’m vaxxed!”

Cody Walker is the author of three poetry collections, all from the Waywiser Press. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor.

Our Pushcart Prize Nominees

The New Verse News is proud to announce its nomination of the following six poems, published here during 2021, for the next series of Pushcart Prizes:

"Thinking About Love During Covid and Coups"

by Susan Vespoli 

"Mandate"

by Laura Rodley

"Brave Red"

by Ellen White Rook

"Free Range Bird"

by Indran Amirthanayagam

"Displacement"

by Erik Schwab

"Postscript to an Activist's Life"

by David Chorlton

COMES NOW

by Earl J Wilcox

Picture taken on March 23, 2018, shows a technician working on the clock of the Lukaskirche Church in Dresden, eastern Germany. (Photo by Sebastian Kahnert/DPA/AFP via Getty Images via AL.com)

That time of year

When we fall

Back

When time’s

Breath stirs

Our solitude

When nature’s

Calendar

Does not trick

Nor does our

Body fail

Though

Formidably

Confirms our time

Here changes

Course

Assuredly

As yesterday

Tomorrow

Forever remain

Unchanged.

 

Earl J. Wilcox has been writing for TheNewVerse.News through many turns of the clock.

PANDEMIC PANTOUM

by Catherine McGuire

KALISPELL, Montana — The October death by suicide of the ninth local teenager in 16 months prompted offers of counseling, training for teachers and visits from national suicide prevention experts. But it also whiplashed into partisan recriminations, as residents lashed out in public forums against the superintendent of schools for failing to impose dress codes and discipline, against parents for not securing their plentiful firearms — used in several suicides — and against the supporters of masks and other pandemic restrictions for stifling teenagers. An issue the valley might have rallied around, in another time, risked dividing it yet again. Photo: The Flathead Republican Party float drives on Main Street in Kalispell. (Tony Bynum) —The Washington Post, October 25, 2021

It started in panic, pulling in—

closed doors, empty roads,

huddling—unseen killer abroad!

Whole towns went still.

 

Closed doors, empty roads,

displayed by drones, at first.

Whole towns went still with

the novelty of crisis

 

displayed by drones, at first.

We drank in urgent news,

the novelty of crisis,

but weeks smudged together.

 

And we drank, as urgent news

became the same old: needles into arms.

The novelty of crisis

morphed to anger at refuseniks.

 

And now the same old needles into arms

became a rallying cry,

morphed to anger at refuseniks:

“How dare you endanger me?”

 

The same rallying cry,

spread like a virus on both sides:

“How dare you endanger me?”

revealing a comorbidity

 

that spread like a virus on both sides:

or like a wildfire flaring from a spark

to reveal a morbid comity:

we’re right; no sympathy for them!

 

And like a wildfire flaring from a spark

that falls on parched, unhealthy ground

this drought of sympathy for “them”

ravages communities more than virus did.

 

Self-absorption is parched, unhealthy ground.

How will we explain to grandkids that what

ravaged our towns more than virus did

was the climate that turned townsfolk into enemy?

How will we explain to grandkids that what

had us huddling—unseen killer abroad!—

was the inner climate that turned townsfolk into enemy?

It starts in panic, pulling in.

Catherine McGuire is a writer and artist with a deep concern for our planet's future. She has four decades of published poetry, four poetry chapbooks, a full-length poetry book Elegy for the 21st Century (FutureCycle Press), a SF novel Lifeline, and book of short stories The Dream Hunt and Other Tales (Founders House Publishing).

NO LAST HOMELY HOUSE IN LUETZERATH

by Frank Joussen

The yawning black-brown scar in the earth that is Germany’s Garzweiler coal mine has already swallowed more than a dozen villages. Centuries-old churches and family homes have been razed and the land they were built on torn away. Farmland has disappeared, graveyards have been emptied. “All destroyed for coal,” says Eckhardt Heukamp, surveying the vast pit that drops away from the edge of his fields, 20 miles west of Cologne. But there’s still more under his feet to be mined. Six more villages are threatened. —The Independent (UK), October 31, 2021

The last house in Luetzerath is white.

White like the presidential palace in Washington?

White like Thomas Mann’s house of exile in California?

White like a blank sheet of paper!

Words fail me to describe

the camp, the tree houses,

the posts of activists

directly in front of the oversized pit.

 

On my long bike tour, in the headwind,

from Erkelenz I planned on

calling it The Last Homely House.

Why not? Is the fruitful homeland of Erkelenz

with its old farms and villages

not a cosy, peaceful Shire?

Isn’t it the Fellowship’s aim,

en route to unknown, unprecedented dangers,

to gather strength at The Last Homely House

before the annihilation of the Evil

so that all of the cultivated world

won’t be destroyed?

 

Sure. But a homely house

needs homeland around it,

needs safety for heroes

recognized by all and sundry

instead of a stand-off between

silent security men

and masked activists.

The latter are friendly, talk to me.

Why not? Doesn’t the land

they wish to protect

belong to all plants, animals, humans

on it?

Even to the security men

when they, without their bright

yellow and black vests,

are back home with their loved ones,

reading their children stories

about the great adventure

to save the world?

 

 

Frank Joussen is a German teacher and writer, peace and one world activist. His publications include two selections of his poetry. He has co-edited two international anthologies of poetry/fiction in India and one of short stories in Germany. His poems and short stories have also been published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies in India, Australia, G.B., the Republic of Ireland, Germany, Romania, Malta, the U.S.A., Canada, China, Thailand and Japan; some of them have been translated into German, Romanian, Hindi and Chinese.