The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Showing posts with label #Charlottesville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #Charlottesville. Show all posts
Sean Doolittle decided to decline an invitation to the Washington Nationals' World Series celebration at the White House on Monday. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
I put thought into this:
I just can’t go.
It has to do with rhetoric
enabling conspiracy theories,
widening the divide.
I just can’t go.
People with those beliefs
feel empowered, feel like
they have a path. I don’t want
to hang with somebody
who talks like that.
I just can’t go.
My wife and I
stand for inclusion and acceptance,
and we work with refugees—
people from "shithole" countries.
I just can’t go.
I feel very strongly
about race relations,
the Fair Housing Act,
the Central Park Five,
Charlottesville.
I just can’t go.
My wife has two mothers
in the LGBTQ+ community
I want to show support for them.
That’s an important part of allyship.
I don’t want to turn my back on them.
I just can’t go.
My brother-in-law has autism,
How would I explain to him
I hung with somebody who mocked
a disabled reporter, the way he talked,
the way he moved his hands?
I just can’t go.
People say you should go because
it’s about respecting the office.
I think he’s done a lot of things
that don’t respect the office.
I just can’t go.
Note: This found poem, based on The Washington Post's interview with Sean Doolittle, was compiled and organized by the Editor of TheNewVerse.News.
Simeon Wright died 2 years ago. A faithful cousin of Emmett Till.
Heather Heyer's also gone. A victim of hatred like Emmett Till.
Two men shot Emmett, 14, sank him with a fan from a cotton gin.
One man killed Heather with another machine. Like Emmett Till.
Simeon, 12, saw the men point the gun, grab the teen from his bed.
His life spent haunted by the abduction of his cousin, Emmett Till.
Heather followed her conscience. She marched to oppose the rage.
A street for her in Charlottesville. In Chicago, one named Emmett Till.
Heather was murdered while crossing her street not too long ago.
Sixty-four years have passed since the murder of Emmett Till.
Judith Terzi is the author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay Books, 2018) as well as of five chapbooks including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By and Casbah (Kattywompus Press). Her poetry appears widely in literary journals and anthologies, has received nominations for Best of the Net and Web, and has been read on the BBC. She holds an M.A. in French Literature and is a former educator who taught high school French for many years as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.
and the shape of the U.S. right now is a toilet,
or a gun,
a toilet-gun,
toilet=gun,
and—swear to God—
this morning
my girlfriend asked me if I wanted to go to the Garlic Festival in Gilroy
or the Kite Festival in Berkeley
and we chose the Kite Festival
because it was closer
and after 5pm, when the massive whale kite was lowering,
the kite she said she loved,
it was the same moment when
another shooter—
and there are so many shooters now—
here,
in the U.S.,
because this is T***p’s U.S. now—
let’s call him T.P. for short—
T.P.’s U.S.,
which resembles the worst horror of Peele’s Us,
violence as normal,
and be afraid when
violence is normal,
and we need to repeal
and I’m tired of the violence
and the White House is filling with ghosts,
all of the ghosts
of those
shot and killed
and in EMT school, the best student in the class had a kid who was shot,
a child who was shot,
in Orlando
and she did CPR in the back of the ambulance
and the boy did not live
and she left
the class, because she couldn’t take the violence of America,
and this was a few years before the Pulse nightclub shooting,
which my old ambulance unit helped at—
with 49 killed, 53 wounded,
and I had a guy pull out a gun on me
when I was delivering pizzas
in Charlottesville
because he thought it would be funny
to see my expression
and my expression
was nothing
because my counselor asked,
“Have you ever had a weapon pulled on you?”
And I said, “Yes”
And she said, “When?”
And I said, “Multiple times,”
And she said, “Like when?”
And I said, “Do you want me to list all of them?”
And I had a student at Auburn
who told me he used to get down low
and shoot his gun
so that he’d try to skip the bullet
ever so gently along the water
and I asked him if he thinks he could have killed someone
doing that
and he said, “No, of course not”
and the gun that was pulled out after the basketball game
and the time in Detroit when the guys who were all in line
started sharing their bullet holes,
pulling up shirts and pant legs
and the guy in class who said he shot himself once by mistake
and he can still feel the bullet under his skin
and someone asked, “Didn’t they take it out?”
and he said, “No,”
and the guy who pulled out a gun at a party
and said, “Relax, it’s not loaded”
and my old poetry teacher
in Virginia
who told the class that he shot and killed his brother
by mistake
when they were both little boys
and the guy from my Religious Studies class
at Central Michigan University
who showed me he keeps a gun under his couch
and he slid the gun back under the cushions
and tried to start talking about God again
but God was overshadowed by the gun
where I couldn’t think about God anymore,
just about what direction the gun was pointed right now.
Messages are left on a chalkboard in Charlottesville on Aug. 10, 2018. (Jim Urquhart/Reuters via The Washington Post)
The light went out that week.
A violent march, a loathsome flag
a stunning show of moral blindness
and then the sun itself went out
hiding its light, ashamed to see
such darkness in the world.
Closing its fiery eye, the sun shut out
the hate, the taunts, the torches
the brutality and bigotry
the disregard of justice.
Earth turned, the moon moved on
along its cosmic path, and sunlight
shone once more. And now another
year, another march. But the light
of reason still has not returned.
Sally Zakariya’s Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry has appeared in 70 print and online journals. She is the author of When You Escape (Five Oaks Press, 2016), Insectomania (2013) and Arithmetic (2011), and the editor of Joys of the Table (2015). Her chapbook Personal Astronomy is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
Wands ablaze, heads of skin, howling blood and soil.
Tell your Jewish son. Repeat the story. Pray.
Tell him he will never replace the whiteness of their line.
He will never replace never replace the blood pooled in the soil.
Tell your son the truth about the trains of yesterday.
When children came in cattle cars and left as clouds of ash.
When memories were skin, bones, weeping bloody soil.
In Charlottesville the torches turn the nighttime into day.
Long ago these torches fired ovens for the Jews.
Step-children of goose-steppers want blood spilled on their soil.
Tell your Jewish daughter. Find the words to say
They are raging to destroy her with fire and a flag.
Swear never again never again. No more blood for soil.
Now you’ve told the story that bears repeating every day.
You’ve told your son. Now try to drain the olive from his skin.
You’ve told your daughter. Try to drain the darkness from her hair,
Fix the hook that is her nose. Bury the blood lost in the soil.
Deborah Kahan Kolb is the author ofWindows and a Looking Glass(Finishing Line Press, 2017) and the recipient of numerous poetry awards, including the 2018 BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) award. Much of her poetry is informed by the unique experiences and challenges of growing up in, and ultimately leaving, the insular world of Hasidic Judaism. Her work has appeared in various print and online publications, includingPoetica, TheNewVerse.News, Literary Mama,3Elements Review,Poets Reading the News,Tuck,Rise Up Review,Writers Resist, andMom Egg Review.
The mercury was in triple digits, the moon
ocherous with smoke, cities submerged.
An orange gibbon necklaced in skulls
drop kicked brown-skinned Americans
over borders, polkaed over illegal bodies.
We sandbagged against the Klan,
stored water for dousing crosses,
hoarded fuel to flee Brown Shirts.
Cyclones whirled clockwise
south of the equator,
widdershins in the North.
We covered windows with plywood.
Black Bloc buffeted the downtown.
We all renewed our passports.
Churches built secret shelters
for the undocumented.
It was too late to evacuate the States.
We sheltered in place,
hunkered and braced for
depressions and disturbances.
A brassy trumpet’s wall rumbled up. The Daily Stormer surged.
The Republic came tumbling down.
Jan Steckel was a Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician who took care of Spanish-speaking children until chronic pain persuaded her to change professions to writer, poet and medical editor. She is an activist for bisexual and disability rights who lives in Oakland, California. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her work won the Goodreads Newsletter Poetry Contest, a Zeiser Grant for Women Artists, the Jewel by the Bay Poetry Competition, Triplopia’s Best of the Best competition, and three Pushcart nominations.
O Crying Nazi, cry all night long
because you’re a goddamn human being,
Crying Nazi, you weep like a mourning
mother at her son’s closed casket.
You weep like a goddamn lynching victim on his nickering horse.
You weep like a maniac suffering a nervous breakdown.
Crying Nazi, I don’t feel sorry for you.
Crying Nazi, are your parents proud of you?
Does your sister call you a creep?
Do you hate yourself, deep down in the coal mine shaft of your soul?
You’re embarrassing yourself, Crying Nazi.
Will you forgive yourself for your crybaby tears, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, will you ever cry again?
It can’t go well if you do.
Have you cried many times as an adult?
Did women think you’re too sensitive to straddle you?
I don’t understand you, Crying Nazi.
Does the sun ever shine on your glossy pate when you sin?
O Crying Nazi, how many people have you stabbed,
how many Mexicans have you tarred and feathered?
Have you ever prayed in a mosque or synagogue?
I saw you blubber on tv, Crying Nazi, and I’m not empathetic.
You’re a sissy.
Were you a good little boy playing Cowboys & Indians,
always the cowboy?
O Crying Nazi, are you a misogynist, too?
Or do you love all women as long
as they’re not black, brown, yellow, red, or Semites?
Will you ever fall in love with someone?
When you cry, Nazi, do your fellow Nazis
bristle that you’re such a pussy?
Crying Nazi, is acid in your tears?
Do you chew your bile at breakfast or supper?
Do you hate yourself, Crying Nazi?
Crying Nazi, did you study a lot of Hitler books?
Did you read them in lotus position on your easy chair?
Do you idolize Sheriff Joe and David Duke?
Could you ever be your own hero, Crying Nazi?
What shade of red is your blood, Crying Nazi?
Do you bathe yourself with your tears?
Has life been easy or hard for you?
Can you look into the eclipse and see the blackness
in your fellow Nazis?
Will you immolate yourself until your skin
barbecues into blackness?
When did you learn to hate, Crying Nazi?
Did a black boxer beat the hell out of you in the ring
and then brag about it?
Do you cry yourself to sleep in your cell at night?
I wonder if you regret your twenty minutes of infamy.
I wonder if God loves you, Crying Nazi.
Do you hang out with your Nazi buddies in chow hall?
O Crying Nazi, cry for the Charleston Nine.
Cry for Trayvon Martin.
Cry for Ferguson.
Cry for Buchenwald.
Cry for the martyred saints.
Most of all, cry for your fellow Nazis.
Stop crying for yourself, Crying Nazi.
Maybe you’ll meet a girl who loves you
because you’re bald.
Maybe she’ll love you because you’re cute.
Or maybe she’ll love you because you’re a Crying Nazi.
Then you can father crying Nazi babies.
Crying Nazi, you’re an oxymoron.
Do you get high, Crying Nazi?
Do you eat a lot of beef or are you a vegan?
I know you don’t eat nails, Crying Nazi.
They’d make you bawl, Crying Nazi.
Do you jack off in your cell at night, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, I feel your hateful pain.
How many guns do you own?
I saw you wearing your zebra outfit in jail the other day, Crying Nazi.
You looked sad as a fallen cake.
You looked sadder than a Syrian orphan.
Sadder than a basset hound who’s lost his best friend.
Sadder than a starving cat.
Sadder than a melting snowman.
You didn’t look proud, Crying Nazi.
Where was your Sieg Heil! when you needed it, Crying Nazi?
Will your hate buddies protect you against the Mexican Mafia?
The Black Brotherhood?
High prices in the commissary?
I’m sorry I judge you, Crying Nazi.
So, when you get out of jail, I’ll buy you a Heineken
and a one-way ticket to Death Valley,
throw in a Bible to read on your bus trip
and leave a two-dollar bill in it, Crying Nazi,
along with a little note reading Prove you’re a goddamn human being, Crying Nazi: Love yourself a little more, and maybe, just maybe you can love the rest of us, too, because we’re all goddamn human beings, Crying Nazi.
David Spicer has had poems in Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Easy Street, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, Santa Clara Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Midnight Lane Boutique, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. The author of Everybody Has a Story and five chapbooks, he’s the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. His latest chapbook is From the Limbs of a Pear Tree available from Flutter Press.
The Robert E. Lee statue for which the "Unite the Right" rally was organized to protest its removal in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 13, 2017. (Tasos Katopodis / EPA via The Chicago Tribune)
It makes me want to hurl myself
off a cliff.
They are still here.
With permission to be unashamed
and a hall pass from the president,
who hand feeds them Ensure
and protein bars on weekends.
They slither the streets
as if they have something new
to add to the national discourse.
Swastikas.
Confederate flags.
Once I pretended they were rats.
Annoying, but you didn’t really
see them that often.
They have been breeding in the dark,
spreading disease across sidewalks
and playgrounds.
No antibacterial soap in the world is strong
enough to cover that kind of stench.
My eyes, lately a little stunned,
cast themselves on photos
of Charlottesville. They stutter when
reporting back to the brain,
who rubs its ears, slaps its cheeks,
reaches for dilapidated walking shoes.
Dips a finger into an ink pot and
traces NO across her forehead.
Lyndi Bell O’Laughlin’s poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, Fall, 2017), Troubadour: An Anthology of Music-inspired Poetry (Picaroon Poetry Press, 2017), Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016), Gyroscope Review, TheNewVerse.News, Picaroon Poetry, Unbroken Journal and elsewhere.
The call came out to come with candles.
To stand up. Be counted. A vigil, a word
I learned came from awoke, Latin.
Bring your candles. Hold your fingers
around the flame if the wind blows.
We cannot let hate extinguish us.
Calling us to this city corner at this
time for what happened in that city
some moments ago. What runs
through my head, but those white men
carried torches! Torches designed
to discourage bugs. Though my tears
threaten to douse my candle,
I will keep my light shining,
to call forth our angels of good will.
Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who saw her city and the nation in bereavement when men trying to stop racial bigotry on a train were killed and hurt. And now Charlotteville.
Watchin' their heads in the toilet bowl Don't see supremacist hate Right wing dicks in their boiler suits Picking out who to annihilate —David Bowie, “Under the God,” Tin Machine (1989)
Forgive us our Confederate bedsheets & the flag above the headboard.
Forgive us the need to be right.
Forgive us the Civil War was never really about slavery.
Forgive us Emmett Till we love our heritage.
Forgive us a matter of pride carrying torches through your campus.
Forgive us blood & soil.
Forgive us fashionable alt-right haircuts & Duck Dynasty beards.
Forgive us whatever will get us laid.
Forgive us fuck the immigrants & Muslims what’s wrong with America.
Forgive us Alex Jones says.
Forgive us it’s Black Lives Matter who’s racist.
Forgive us T***p’s sending a message.
Forgive us whatever pisses off the liberal snowflakes.
Forgive us George Lincoln Rockwell didn’t buy evolution either.
Forgive us Michael Brown & Trayvon Martin were thugs.
Forgive us it’s in our economic interest.
Forgive us our First Amendment rights.
Forgive us & leave the statue.
Forgive us our white fathers never did anything wrong.
Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.'s poems have appeared most recently in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cutbank, Numero Cinq, and Verse Daily.
