WAR CHILD

by Kay White Drew

“A new study of children living through the war in Gaza has found that 96% of them feel that their death is imminent and almost half want to die as a result of the trauma they have been through.” —The Guardian, December 11, 2024

of course I’m sure this war will

kill me   please wipe the slate clean

this lifetime was an error   a mistake   our home

our village   pounded to rubble   our next

home rubble too   father shot dead   mother

sister   brothers   all gone   don’t know

if they’re alive   or dead   just me out here

alone in the rubble   not a scratch

on me   why have I been spared

I beg Allah   if he even exists  

to take me   to Paradise

can’t I please just  

get this over with

Kay White Drew is a retired physician whose poems appear in Bay to Ocean Journal, Pen in Hand, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Gargoyle, and New Verse News. She’s also published short stories and several essays, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a memoir, Stress Test. She lives in Rockville, MD with her husband.

DANCING AT THE CRIPPLED CHILDREN'S BALL

at Sam Houston Coliseum in the 1950's and 1960's

by Suzanne Morris

The Southwest Citizen (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 3, No. 43, Ed. 1 Thursday, February 2, 1950

The lawyer [Aaron Siri] helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death. —The New York Times, December 15, 2024

I am staring at the bald pate of

Mr. Siri as he imparts his wisdom

to the U.S. Congress

when my years of dancing at the

annual Crippled Children’s Ball

come back to mind with a

sting of irony that

I didn’t see back then, though

the children being honored surely did

when crossing the floor

with hitching steps in

steel braces and leather stocks

in the somersaulting spotlights,

names broadcast

from high above

a Shriner in bejeweled fez

dispensing handshakes as

the audience cheered.

One by one, the survivors came,

withered limbs cocooned in

full-length gowns or creased dress pants

as each of us waited in the wings

in stage make-up

sequined bodice and revealing tu-tu:

Dancers dancing at the

Crippled Children’s Ball.

Metal rotating on hinges

propelled brave steps

into the post-polio world

of watching others demonstrate

dainty pirouettes and

fouettés en pointe

then bid farewell with

curtsies and pixie smiles

from the arena stage floor.

Dancers dancing at the

Crippled Children’s Ball.

The brief insult of a

needle prick

saved us from all

they had endured

and later still,

even less an event:

one sugar cube

drenched in tu-tu pink.

Dancers dancing at the

Crippled Children’s Ball.

Suzanne Morris resides in Cherokee County, Texas, where she writes poetry, reads a lot, and tries, with little success, to make sense of the news. 

BABY JESUS ON A KEFFIYEH

by Catherine Gonick

Beyond the manger sounds the roar—of politics,

revisionist history, replacement theology. Of

Palestinian identity and Jewish. Pogroms,

resistance, genocide. Cultural heritage, 

21st century swastika. Hope, love, and peace

to an overheated world. What the Pope

really meant. What it means when Christmas

coincides with the first day of Chanukah.

 

As a baby, Jesus can’t yet speak about symbols

or freedom of the artist. And no one mentions

on His behalf that to children, parents, even if one

of them is God, are only accidents of fate.

No child asks to be born or arrives knowing

its name. All are divine. The rest is learned.

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in a wide range of journals, including The New Verse News, Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and The Orchards Poetry Journal, and in anthologies including Support Ukraine, in plein air, and Rumors, Secrets and Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She works in a business that seeks to lower the rate of global warming.

TOO MANY / TO MANY

by Ron Riekki

Following a comprehensive investigation, the Justice Department announced today [December 12, 2024] that the Mount Vernon, New York, Police Department (MVPD) engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of rights secured by the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Specifically, the Justice Department finds that MVPD:

• Uses excessive force in numerous ways, including by unnecessarily escalating minor encounters and by overusing tasers and closed-fist strikes, particularly against individuals who have already been taken to the ground, are controlled by many officers or are already fully or partially restrained;
• Conducted unlawful strip searches and body cavity searches of individuals until at least 2023; and
• Makes arrests without probable cause.

Sometimes bodies kill bodies and bodies

haunt bodies and sometimes bodies taunt

bodies and sometimes bodies search bodies

and sometimes those bodies are bloody

from the hoods where they’re buried in

blindness and sometimes bodies are bottled

into incarceration-hungry systems and some-

times systems kill bodies and sometimes

bodies suffocate and sometimes bodies

aren’t bodies when they’re killed and

erased and sometimes bodies are innocent

and mostly bodies are innocent and always

bodies are innocent and sometimes systems

are guilty and sometimes systems are guilty

and sometimes systems are guilty and often

systems are guilty and this system is guilty.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

DIE-OFF

by Pepper Trail

Ocean Heat Wiped Out Half These Seabirds Around Alaska: About four million common murres were killed by a domino effect of ecosystem changes, and the population is showing no signs of recovery, according to new research... [The researchers] believe it is the largest documented die-off of a single species of wild birds or mammals.  —The New York Times, December 12, 2024. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photos above: A murre colony in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, seen before and after the 2015-16 marine heat wave.

Credit...

The Arctic sea-cliffs are not silent

The birds, the murres, still throng the ledges

Black and white, sharp-eyed, clamorous

Even as half their millions are starved and dead

 

The birds, the murres, still throng the ledges

As we would still fill the New York streets

Even if half our millions were dead, crushed

Beneath weight of heat, a fatality never imagined

 

We would still fill the New York streets

Though senseless with grief, with loneliness

After a heat, a fatality never before imagined

A disaster beyond our comprehension

 

Though senseless with loneliness

The birds still fly, feed, tend their young

Despite a disaster beyond comprehension

Their world changed beyond recognition

 

Here, we would still work, tend our children

There would be no choice, never any choice

But in a world changed beyond recognition

A warning that could no longer be ignored

 

We would have no choice, at last no choice

If the dying took millions from a great city

The warning could then no longer be ignored

But this happened far away, a distant warming sea

 

This dying took millions of only birds

Somewhere far away, a distant warming sea

Just another warning to be ignored

The Arctic cliffs, after all, have not yet fallen silent

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.

POEM TO RUMI

for my granddaughter

by Tina Williams

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

“Ken Paxton sues New York doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to Texas woman: This case sets up a legal battle between Texas’ near-total abortion ban and New York’s shield law that protects doctors from out-of-state prosecution.” —The Texas Tribune, December 13, 2024

A week before the election,

my neighbor next door overnight

posted a Women for Trump

sign and I was too incensed

the next day to wave to her

as she stood on her porch

with a smile as big as Texas

which is where we live

and where my 17-year-old

granddaughter could be raped

tomorrow and made to bear

the damage done

no questions asked.

 

Meanwhile Rumi 

calls from a wall

in my office

that out beyond 

the ideas 

of wrongdoing 

and rightdoing

there is a field

and that we should 

meet each other there

but, Rumi, my dear 

dead Sufi poet,

you never met

my neighbor's 

grab ’em 

by the pussy hero.

 

You never saw

freckles dance

on my 

granddaughter’s

cheeks.

 

In some poems 

there is a field 

too far.

Tina Williams’s poems have appeared in the San Pedro River Review, Quartet Journal, Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Stone Poetry Journal, and Green Ink Poetry.

DECEMBER 2024

a Golden Shovel poem based on a line from Wendell Berry’s “Sabbaths 2005 I”

by Joanne Kennedy Frazer

distressed     appalled     by all    this

     i set alight    the Christmas Candle

       illumine my soul    against

darkness of hatred    of evil      that the

          culture      carries in the wind

Joanne Kennedy Frazer is a retired peace and justice director and educator for faith-based organizations. She began writing in her early 70s, and has now been published more than 80 times in anthologies, on-line zines, and magazines. Five poems have been turned into a song cycle titled Resistance by composer Steven Luksan and performed in Seattle and Durham. Her latest chapbook Seasonings (Kelsay Books) was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She lives in Raleigh, NC.

SHORT DIVISION

by Diana Morley

Must cut says the prez-elect

in one of his cozy countless buildings

 

slipping in partners in crime

all the slime that’s fit to fill the void

the bigger the fire the better, he says,

to raise foes’ arm hair along with their hackles

to bring the thrill of campfire tales

all love to chill by, hoping they’re not real.

The public mass, like plants and wildlife,

work daily, yearly, season by season

knowing dawn’s the time to rise 

for the sun to warm, to turn us all toward others—

by nightfall there’s still the rent to pay

and a plugged-in quilt at bedtime

a kitchen cold as an unplayed banjo.

Diana Morley publishes poetry online and in journals. She published Spreading Like Water (2019), a chapbook; Splashing (2020), a poetry collection; and Oregon’s Almeda Fire: From loss to renewal (2021), a documentary of photos and poems.

A BANANA, A WANNABE OLIGARCH, AND A CONCEPT WALK INTO A BAR

by Tom Lagasse

A Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has followed through on his promise to eat the banana from a $6.2m (£4.9m) artwork he bought last week. Justin Sun outbid six others to claim Maurizio Cattelan's infamous 2019 work Comedian - a banana duct-taped to a wall - at Sotheby's auction house in New York. He ate the fruit during a news conference in Hong Kong where he used the moment to draw parallels between the artwork and cryptocurrency. The banana is regularly replaced before exhibitions, with Mr Sun buying the right to display the installation along with a guide on how to replace the fruit. —BBC, November 29, 2024

The banana would have eventually rotted
like all organic things do.  He untaped it, 
unpeeled it and ate it because he owned it.  
Of course, the banana and tape were symbols 
for the concept behind the work of art, 
the way crypto is a concept for money.  
He could have stopped on his way to the auction 
and purchased one at the bodega for half a dollar 
and not six point two mil. With the excess, 
he could have fed a school district or a senior 
center.  He probably could have purchased 
a banana plantation and eaten one every day 
for life. It was never about hunger, the way
a cigar is not always a cigar. The idea was bought 
on behalf of capitalism, its ravenous appetite 
for eating everything in its path and repackaging it, 
before selling it to a hungry public and convincing them 
there is no climate crisis; Ukraine caused its own 
invasion; or the insurrection never was an attempt 
to overthrow democracy. It is no joke   
an oligarch in-waiting ate the banana from “Comedian.” 
For the wealthy, the hoi polloi is always the butt   
of the joke. The laughter comes at our expense. 

Tom Lagasse’s poetry has appeared in Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal, The Silver Birch Press poetry series, Freshwater Literary Journal, The Eunoia Review, and in numerous anthologies. He was a 2024 Artist in Residence at the Edwin Way Teale House at Trail Wood. He lives in Bristol, CT. 

GIRLY BOY

by Jean Voneman Mikhail 

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

My little boy blue, 

as a child you wore 

girl-pink, not the browns 

of circus bears and puppies. 

Not the beiges of office walls. 

Who cares about colors now?

Wear what you like. 

As a girl child, my boy snakes hung 

down in braids past my fingertips.

They had a sweaty life all their own. 

They flicked ribbon tongues at me,

struck me on the back when I ran 

away, so I cut them off one day.

I stored them in a box of magic tricks,

decorated the lid with sequins, 

like moon disks sparkling in the light.

Who would see them in a dark closet? 

I eventually got my girl groove back. 

I liked the boys, their hawk heads, 

hooded. They blinked in astonishment

that I had actually caught up to them.

Eventually, I grew my braids back,

gave up the girl I used to love. 

I opened my legs to the bedposts. 

I had you on my favorite night of all.

You were born blue and little. 

I think of you now as a girly boy. 

A ghost of a boy-girl in a mirror.

Don’t rub off your eyeshadows

with the back of your hand,  

with your desert skin, so dry and soft. 

Your eyes are the valleys you’ve left 

behind in the rearview mirror, 

where the hills float away. 

The morning moves you, 

slides a mountain aside, as you 

drive through, around the twists 

and turns of your desires. 

The mountains widen, deepen 

their despair then disappear, 

the further into this self-love thing you go. 

Jean Voneman Mikhail has published in One Art: a Journal of Poetry, Sheila Na Gig Online, The New Verse News, The Northern Appalachian Review, and other journals and anthologies. She was recently nominated for “best of the net” by Eucalyptus Lit.