Saturday, August 31, 2024

ALTERCATION IN ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

by Jerome Betts




The war-time dead, thanks be, sleep sound
Where laid to rest in hallowed ground
Immune to campaign cheers and boos
Or use by self-obsessed yahoos.


Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the quarterly Lighten Up Online.

WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

by Steven Kent


“Last week Starbucks made headlines after it was revealed its new CEO, Brian Niccol—who has been described as the “messiah” the ailing coffee company had been searching for—will be commuting to the office via private jet. Niccol, you see, is generously going to abide by the company’s policy of being in the office three days a week. But since he lives in California and the Starbucks HQ is more than 1,000 miles away in Seattle, a corporate jet is really the only way to go.” —Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian, August 27, 2024



My firm supports the planet's cause;

It's why we switched to paper straws!

Friends, please reduce your CO2

By changing little things you do—

We really have to make a start,

And everyone must play his part.

We'll solve this climate crisis yet,

But now I have to catch my jet.


Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.

Friday, August 30, 2024

THE COMING RENAISSANCE IN HIGHER ED

by Philip Kitcher


AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.


Is there a deeper problem with campus unrest?  One not solved simply by replacing presidents?
 
 
The point of any university or college:
Discover, advertise and sell new knowledge.
We can expect to make big money off it,
Provided that we maximize our profit.
Pernicious liberal miseducation,
Re-fashioned as a thriving corporation,
Led by a practical economist,
Strives to appear on Forbes’ Best Business List.
To reach that rank requires a stable anchor.
The CEO we’ve hired? An ex-World-Banker!
 
Obnoxious humanistic psychobabble
Incites the young to form a mindless rabble.
Recurrent demonstrations by this mob
Divert attention from our proper job.
After reflection, we have deemed it prudent
To expurgate the useless role of student,
Replacing faculty (eternal moaners)
With affluent trustees and docile donors.
Columbia, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale
Will learn their lesson: profits must prevail.
 
A needed Reformation!  We who led it
Will take away some cash—and all the credit.



Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.

Thursday, August 29, 2024

MARY ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

by Suzanne Morris




The irrepressible
Mary Richards has

seized the cap she had
tossed in the air,

shined up her high brass
walking boots, and

temporarily stepped down
from her iconic pedestal

on Nicollet Mall at the
corner of 7th Avenue

in Minneapolis.

At the urging of
the Vice President and

the Governor, who
wholeheartedly agreed

nothing could be
Minnesota Nicer than to

have Mary on board
as a campaign adviser,

the 1970's TV character
who cheered women on

in the chase for their dreams

recognized at once
the meaningful encore

to her long-running
top-rated sitcom:

cheering on the first Black/
Asian American woman

in her quest for the
highest office in the land

right up to the
5th of November

when–God willing–
the VP and the Governor

will carry the day and
all the joy

into the White House
for the next four years.

Then, with parting advice
for the new President

to remember her example

Mary can climb up
on her pedestal again,

toss her cap
in the air, and

turn the world on
with her smile.


Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, and a poet.  Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, and in online poetry journals including The New Verse News, The Texas Poetry Assignment, and Stone Poetry Quarterly.  She resides in Cherokee County, Texas.

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

NOTHING

by Lynn White


ABC (Australia), August 27, 2024


In those streets

of men and boys,

in that country 

for men and boys,

she feels like a person with no face,

her face space covered,

her identity occupied

by a swirling mist of confusion

like nothingness being born.


Sometimes 

she wishes for a blank space

that she could fill herself

with a Magritte apple

or even a woman

even herself

un-blanked

and visible.


Now, in those streets

of men and boys,

in that country 

for men and boys,

she feels like a person with no voice,

Magritte’s apple is choking her,

muting her

so even in her home she whispers

her songs and curses.


Only in her head does she shout

that something will come of nothing,

that something must come of nothing.



Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

HEAT DOME FORECAST AS A SCENE FROM A ROMANCE NOVEL

by Laura Shovan


Illustration by Alex Kiesling for “What a Heat Wave Does to Your Body,” The New Yorker, August 25, 2023.


“Heat dome builds in central US, forcing some schools to close.” —Scripps News, August 26, 2024


The atmosphere hangs poised above me.
It licks its moist lips, heating the space 
between its expanding dome
and my sweating body. I broil
with the intensity of want—to be human
is to consume. The heat sinks down, 
pressing its bulging temperatures
into my vulnerable places. 
The pressure builds in unbearable waves.
A little death is worth it, I tell myself, 
wishing the brute would finish already.


Laura Shovan is Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work appears in journals and anthologies for children and adults. Books include Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone (Harriss Poetry Prize), The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson ElementaryTakedown, and A Place at the Table (Sydney Taylor Notable), written with Saadia Faruqi. Recent poems appear in GargoyleGreening the Earth, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Monday, August 26, 2024

THIS COUNTRY IS NOT FOR WOMEN

by Pulkita Anand


Is India a Safe Place for Women? Another Brutal Killing Raises the Question. The rape and murder of a trainee doctor at her own hospital has brought up, once again, uncomfortable truths about a country that wants to be a global leader. —The New York Times, August 22, 2024


This country is not for women
Its daughters are scared in the womb
This country is not for women
Its wives are pleading for their lives
This country is not for women
Its sisters are trampled by its brothers
This country is not for women 
Its friends are betraying and selling friendship
This country is not for women
Its air is filled with lust
Where leery eyes want to defile innocence
This country is not for women
Its voices are crushing their voices
This country is not for women
Its growth lies in pushing them in the name of culture
This country is not for women
Its men feel pride in demeaning them
This country is not for women
Its fathers are not desiring their daughters
This country is not for women
Its character lies in cursing them


Pulkita Anand is an avid reader of poetry. She has translated one short story collection Tribal Tales from Jhabua. Author of two children’s e-books, her recent eco-poetry collection is we were not born to be erased. Various journal publications include:  Setu Journal, Shortstory Kids, The Criterion, Twist and Twain, Tint Journal, Indian Ruminations, Langlit, Ashvamegha, Lapis Lazuli, Conifer Call, The Creativity Webzine, WinC Magazine, Stanza Cannon, Superpresent, Madwomen in the Attic, Poetica, The Uglywriters, Impspired, Literary Yard, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Kritya, The Amazine, Carmina Magazine, and Asiatic.

Sunday, August 25, 2024

KAMALA: A SANSKRIT WORD MEANING LOTUS

by Lana Hechtman Ayers



 

This morning I realized I was feeling something

I hadn’t in a long time,

though the cedar and spruce may not have noticed me,

themselves dancing in the cool late summer breeze,

nor the robins threading the grass with their beaks,

seeking worms, nor the sky the color of humpback

whale milk, or so I’m told, nor the river that listened

to the plucky birds, but the wind, perhaps, intuited,

suddenly glistening as if the air were filled

with thousands of tiny silver glass beads,

and the robins hopped, 

and that feeling I barely recognized, hope, 

hope rose from the back of my throat

like a love song I wanted to croon to no one in particular,

or to everyone, proclaim that all is not lost,

rain is coming, and more sun, and worms are wiggling

in the ground, some not to be found, living on,

and the lotus continues blooming in our pond,

all is not lost, not lost, not lost,

not even the darkness that holds the stars together

in this glorious poem of a shared cosmos we call home.



Lana Hechtman Ayers, managing editor of three small presses, writes over a garage in coastal Oregon where she lives with her husband and several fur babies. Her latest collection of poems, just released from Fernwood press is The Autobiography of Rain

Saturday, August 24, 2024

A PRAYER FOR THE LIVING, FOR OUR COUNTRY: AFTER THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION, AUGUST 2024

by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt

 

in response to Deborah Digges’s “The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart”


 




Let the wind break through

the walls of our chests

draw out curdled breath  anger

from past reckonings.

 

Let the wind race through the chambers 

of our hearts   cleanse the pathways  

erase the stench of hatred 

strip away the detritus of ridicule.

 

Let the wind eddy through us 

through small openings  

dissolve the particles of despair

that clog the beating heart.

 

Sweep them away, sweep

away passivity   turgid like

the air after a tropical storm.

Pointless static gone from our brains.

 

Clear out the darkness in  

our house of gall  darkness hardened like dried

blood   until we are again open-hearted

joyous   vessels of infinite worth.

 

Jan Zlotnik Schmidt’s work has been published in many journals including Kansas Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review. Her poetry volumes include We Speak in TonguesShe had this memory (the Edwin Mellen Press), Foraging for Light (Finishing Line Press), and Joseph Cornell: The Man Who Loved Sparrows, co-written with Tana Miller (Kelsay Press).  Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize.

Friday, August 23, 2024

MOUNTAINS OF AMBIGUITY

by Dick Altman


ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP, August 16, 2024) — Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons. A Northern Arizona University professor emeritus who analyzed soil, water and vegetation samples taken along a popular hiking and biking trail in Acid Canyon said Thursday that there were more extreme concentrations of plutonium found there than at other publicly accessible sites he has researched in his decades-long career.


Northern New Mexico


How many daybreaks

have I risen

to the drum/chant/flute spirit

of high desert’s Jemez,

sacred Indigenous mountains,

dancing my western skyline?

 

I wanted to escape Manhattan’s

work encampments, 

false pinnacles of glass

and steel,

to find here, 

at seven thousand feet,

gifts of earth/air/water,

untrammeled 

by humanity’s heel. 

 

The breathtaking cleft

that serves as the gateway

into the Jemez—

like a canyon pathway 

into the clouds—

lofts me,

calls me 

into another world.

 

Nature’s handiwork in the Jemez

expresses itself 

in a thousand volcanos,

asleep for now,

fanning out from Valles Caldera,

planet’s largest,

grandeur that, 

across Rio Grande’s valley,

seems all mine.

My hiking ardor leaves

its imprint 

in that elk-abounding

encirclement, 

a trail of joy,

marking every season.

 

Yet not without sadness.

I have first to pass 

Oppenheimer Alley,

where the brain of man

explodes an idea,

whose remnants scatter

the countryside,

forces unseen

that torment the Jemez

without known end.

 

Los Alamos’ lights

at night snake downslope,

pointing at me,

atomic city’s

unrepentant reminder

that my escape

was less promise,

than dream.



Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Wingless Dreamer, Blueline, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad.  His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 250 poems, published on four continents.