DRIVING ALL NIGHT IN THE RED STATES

by David Tucker

Graphic from The Georgetown

I will drive all night in the Red States
I will take backroads through towns with one traffic light.
I will shop at gunshows that stay open late,
their windows festooned with assault rifles
at discounts that will make me weep.
I will make my peace with Jesus billboards
that glow from hilltops and welcome signs decorated
with bullet holes. I will make no comments
on the sexual confusion
of flag-emblazoned pickups, the twinkle
of their gun racks. I will give in
to the longing of satellite dishes as they turn
to early bird jewelry sales at four in the morning.
I will marry a trailer park beauty
who sits in a lawn chair beside a road, winding
pink curlers into her hair, I will slouch
in a lawn chair beside her, smoking Camels
as the sun comes up. I will reject national healthcare
and Islam, I will ban homosexuals and burn newspapers,
I will denounce foreign nations, ambitious women
and abortion, I will ignore the jails overflowing
I will oppose food stamps and Spanish,
I will wave to everyone who passes
glad to see them,  glad to see them go.

David Tucker’s book Late for Work won the Bakeless Poetry Prize, selected by Philip Levine, and was published by Houghton Mifflin. He also won a Slapering Hol Press national chapbook contest for Days When Nothing Happens and was awarded a Witter Bynner Fellowship by the Library of Congress. A career journalist, he supervised and edited two Pulitzer Prize winners for The Star-Ledger newspaper.

THE YEAR THE CUBS WON THE WORLD SERIES

by David Spicer

I celebrated my 68th year without

steak, because I never cared for it anyway.

I listened to Fats Domino sing "Blueberry Hill"

over and over again day after day because I could

see him ambling down the New Orleans

sidewalk as he sang, his voice echoing in the night,

and I loved to think about the day I saw

Hank Aaron break the Babe’s record to boos.

Years before the Cubs won the Series,

I didn’t follow baseball like I did

when I was a kid: Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub,

was beautiful flicking the ball toward second

as the first part of a double play to end the inning,

and Willie Mays beyond beautiful the day he hit four

homers and a double when I was eleven.

Now, I plug for the Cubs and hope they’ll win.

But hell, I don’t even know who their stars are.

The year the Cubs won the Series

a racist, misogynistic, xenophobe billionaire

ran for president and almost won, would’ve

if he hadn’t stepped into his own stink

too many times, his opponent an alleged liar,

cuckoldette, and e-mailer extraordinaire hated

by millions because she was an aggressive woman

destined to capture the holy grail of modern politics

and break through the wall of male white lawyers.

The year the Cubs won the Series

I began reading and writing again, attended

readings where gifted wordsmiths read poems

about the day their mothers died, or the cold night

the Titanic sank. They stood at podiums, glancing

down at a published book too few people bought,

staring out at small groups of poetry lovers and poets.

I enrolled in a workshop—many times—and learned

more about craft from a master and other poets.

The year the Cubs won the Series

millions jogged streets for miles and miles

to get a high unique to themselves, millions

more received blessings of a few states

to smoke dope or eat pot brownies and giggle,

and I kept waiting for my state to bless me,

while millions breathed their first breaths

after billions made love to each other hundreds

of times, and millions breathed final breaths.

The year the Cubs won the Series

celebrities passed away, kicked the bucket,

expired, refused to be, bade the world farewell,

or just dropped dead. My favorites: David

Bowie, who sang "Young Americans,"

Patty Duke, Muhammad Ali—the Greatest—

Guy Clark, and Gene Wilder. They left

the scene, skedadled, died, like all of us do,

when it’s time to howl at Pluto and say goodbye.

The year the Cubs won the Series

Bob Dylan received the Nobel Literature Prize

and the hoity-toity crowd scoffed and griped:

He’s not a poet, he’s a singer-songwriter

or Why didn’t the Swedes give it to a minority?

Dylan remained silent, toured the country,

aloof as a spoiled cat, singing his songs

with his back to the audience, strumming his axe,

and never committed to attend the awards ceremony.

My wife almost bled to death on our porch

the year the Cubs won the Series:

On a sunny day, the corner of the steel door

slammed into her Achilles heel, the red porch

a different shade of red and the sun suddenly pale.

I broke three mops cleaning up her life liquid,

used two bottles of bleach to make sure it disappeared

after I drove her to the ER and waited ten hours,

hoping she’d live almost forever with her new blood.

I drank two glasses of Pinot Noir

the night the Cubs won the Series,

ate too many potato chips over five hours

and a rain delay. I watched a disgraced manager

wearing a bow tie hold a mic crowding his

little lips comment on the game with other

experts about the freshly minted World Champs

from the city of the first black president

crying, hugging, and jumping up and down.

The day after the Cubs won the Series

I promised myself I’d lose a few pounds

the next year by not eating potatoes or rice

or cow or pig but just fish and fruit.

I told myself I’d walk three miles a day and smile

when the sun climbed the trees to the sky

and shined while it still could, while clouds

caressed its hot cheeks. I wonder how

that’ll go for me as I sweat and starve?

David Spicer has had poems in In Between Hangovers,  TheNewVerse.News, Gargoyle, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,  Mad Swirl, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, The Laughing Dog, Easy Street, Ploughshares, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press, 1978), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Best of the Net twice and a Pushcart, and is the author of one full-length collection of poems, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press, 1987), and four chapbooks. He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

THE BRIDGE CLUB DISCUSSES THE ELECTION

by Susan McLean

Image source: Yahoo News Photo Illustration; Photo: AP/Getty)

“If he groped her, she’s a liar."
            "If he didn’t, she’s a frump.”
“If she blabs, he’ll call his lawyer.”
            “What a bozo!  One no trump.”

“Thinks he’s smart to pay no taxes:
            ‘If you pay them, you’re a chump.’”
“He’ll give safety nets the ax.” “As
            well as poor folks!”  “Three no trump.”

“He’ll wall off the southern border.”
            “And haul Muslims to the dump!”
“He’ll show blacks what law and order
            really stands for.”  “Four no trump.”

“He’ll throw Clinton in the slammer.”
            “Then he’ll lift us from our slump,
helped by Putin’s blade and hammer!”
            “What’s your bid now?”  “Six no trump.”

Susan McLean is an English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University. Her books of poetry are The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife. She has also translated over 500 satirical poems of the Latin poet Martial, published as Selected Epigrams by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her light verse has often appeared in Light and Lighten Up Online.

LO & BEHOLD

by A.S. Coomer

The stick in the shit stirs,
swirling curdling fascinations,
condensing confections of confusion,
mingling malice with malignancies
so potent the stirrer wears a mask,
a mask of indifference,
a mask of superiority,
a mask haloed orange like the burnt offering,
some poor hamster caught, killed and propped up as a sacrifice
atop the altar of jingoism,
we all feel uncomfortable seeing,
a mask bought & sold & held over our heads
higher than our grubby, working hands can reach.
A mask atop a mask atop a mask.
I’ll turn my bare face to the sun before I wear one.

The stick in the shit stirs,
the stained hand is attached to a stained arm
and the poison courses deep through the veins of a man
in thousand dollar suits, a shark’s grin & puckered lips,
eyes seeing only various shades of green & red,
a man in a mask with a stick in his hand,
selling shit cakes to the empty bellied, to the disenfranchised,
to the misinformed & the uninformed, to the belligerent,
to those holding onto the last vestiges of power by the skin
of their privileged, primered nails.
Shit cakes. For one & all. Shit cakes by the dozens. Thousands. Millions.
I’ll take my turn at the soup lines before I have one.

A.S. Coomer is a native Kentuckian serving out a purgatorial existence somewhere in the Midwest. His work has appeared in over thirty publications. He’s got a handful of novels that need good homes. He also runs a “record label” for poetry.

REFLECTING ON MOBY DICK A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION

by Wilda Morris

Image source: aNewDomain

We still have not learned
all the lessons that Melville taught:
the Union is not as united
as we once thought,
how easy it can be to drop prejudices
when we get to know
and love the pagan stranger,
the risks of empire building,
and how bowing to a self-absorbed
and vindictive leader puts us all in danger.

If Melville were writing today
the crew would grow from thirty
to fifty, as many as the states
that could sink into the abyss
if we leave this election to the fates.
We may be on the brink.


Wilda Morris has a doctorate in political science from American University in Washington, D.C., but instead of becoming a political scientist, she ended up as a poet. Her blog provides a monthly contest for other poets.

THE BRAGGER

by Martin Ott

Image source: Reptiles Guru

Told the world that the ferret on his head was his own virile pelt and the sheen of tangerine on his cheeks was the glow of courage. He promised that his body parts were wonderful to behold and hold, and that his brain was bigger than even his intentions. The tales of his successes became his job, and he could not divorce the actor from the man as easily as his early wives. He learned from an early age that suckers were made, not born, and the dramas around the world could hold him as a leading man in the narrative. There is nothing he won’t say he can do. He can stomp his feet like a lizard king and crush foes. The rich will build castles that will not be torn down by the rabble. The rabble will have fortresses made of sticks and straw, but the moral of pigs and wolves is a lie. Time is a backwards journey and the smoke rising from our planet is just the end of a cigar with the proper vantage. Words will tingle at nighttime and sleep will settle in with gasps and tiny knives on your arms. Dreams will frame his face in a flower, in the horizon, in everyone.

A previous contributor to TheNewVerse.News, Martin Ott’s most recent book is Spectrum, C&R Press, 2016. He is the author of seven books and won the De Novo and Sandeen prizes for his first two poetry collections. His work has appeared in more than two hundred magazines and a dozen anthologies. He tweets and blogs.

WORDS

by Wayne Scheer




The American presidential election
has come down to a
words matter candidate
and her
it's only words opponent.

One uses words
the way a munitions expert
approaches a live grenade,
the other
tosses the grenade
to see
what will happen next.

One respects,
considers, even fears words
while the other
sees words as fuel
and acts surprised
when an explosion results.

One selects words
as carefully
as one chooses a diamond ring,
the other
loves only the sound
of words,
unconcerned with their appearance
or meaning.

One will be elected president
and speak
for America.

Wayne Scheer has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net. He's published numerous stories, poems and essays in print and online, including Revealing Moments,  a collection of flash stories. His short story “Zen and the Art of House Painting” has been made into a short film.

A LEGAL CASE AGAINST AUTUMN

by Jo Ann Steger Hoffman

Bold Autumn Colors Abstract is a photograph by Carol Groenen which was uploaded on November 2nd, 2013 at fineartamerica.

Bold autumn steals light from summer.
Even dumber
he strips trees of lavish green dress,
forces excess
of brilliance to camouflage dying.
He’s lying.
He plans to prove summer is trying
to falsely convict him of stealth,
of hiding vice beneath radiant wealth.
Even dumber, he forces excess. He’s lying.

Jo Ann Steger Hoffman is a writer, editor, and former communications director whose publications include a children’s book, short fiction and a variety of poems in literary journals.  Her 2010 non-fiction book, Angels Wear Black, recounts the only technology executive kidnapping to occur in California’s Silicon Valley.  A native of Toledo, Ohio, she and her husband now live in Cary and Beaufort, North Carolina.

SCHOOLYARD RETORT WITH 14 LETTERS:

a found poem by Dale Wisely

i

Putin would rather have
a puppet as president. 

No puppet, no puppet.

And it's pretty clear --

You're the puppet.

It's pretty clear you won't admit —

No, you're the puppet.

ii

For the clue schoolyard retort
you can find ten possible solutions. 

Schoolyard retort with 4 letters

AMSO ISSO

Schoolyard retort with 5 letters

AMTOO ARESO CANSO IAMSO ISNOT ISTOO

Schoolyard retort with 6 letters

ARENOT  YOUARE

Sources: Transcript of 3rd Clinton-Trump debate; Crossword Solutions Dictionary.

Dale Wisely edits Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, and White Knuckle Chapbooks.

NEVERMORE

by Susan McLean

Ah, distinctly I remember it was early in November
when the hearth-fire’s dying ember cast dark shadows on the floor.
As dry leaves went whirling, flying, suddenly I heard a sighing
as of someone softly crying, “Let me in! Unlock your door.”
Only this and nothing more.

Had she come again? I wondered.  As the storm clouds flashed and thundered,
in the throes of hope I blundered, flinging wide my chamber door.
But the vision I confronted was not her for whom I hunted.
Grief arrived and joy was blunted: through that doorway I deplore,
hope would enter nevermore.

Like a ghastly apparition on a grim and solemn mission,
an unnerving politician pushed his way into the room,
and I had the premonition that his access code to fission
soon would cause our demolition. Like a specter from the tomb,
in he came: the Trump of Doom.

Susan McLean is an English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University.  Her books of poetry are The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife.  She has also translated over 500 satirical poems of the Latin poet Martial, published as Selected Epigrams by the University of Wisconsin Press.  Her light verse has often appeared in Light and Lighten Up Online.

SELF-UNMADE MAN

by Orel Protopopescu

Cagle Cartoon

Such a self-destructive talent
is a rarity on earth.
What heroic liquidation
of the gifts of chance and birth!

Could another heir to millions
have corralled the tricky skills
he expressed erecting towers
on fat piles of unpaid bills?

Who raised armies of attorneys
twisting laws to break his fall,
then retreated from his failures
like a Roman leaving Gaul?

Smartly stashing spoils of combat,
filing bankruptcy four times,
he redeemed his reputation
while committing legal crimes.

Such swashbuckling, bold bravado
took him nearly to the peak.
Cheering hordes adored their leader.
How they loved to hear him speak!

But his toxic mouth undid him,
spewing sexist, racist lies,
for what won his nomination
soon conspired  to lose the prize.

And the world gasped in amazement
at this fierce, pig-headed horse,
who could race himself to pasture
while he seemed to run the course.

Orel Protopopescu won the Oberon poetry prize in 2010 and has a commended poem in the 2016 Second Light Live competition, to be published in November. What Remains, her chapbook, appeared in 2011.  Thelonious Mouse, her fourth picture book, won a Crystal Kite, 2012, from SCBWI. A Thousand, Peaks, Poems from China (with Siyu Liu) was selected for the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age list. A Word’s a Bird, her animated, bilingual (English/French) poetry book for iPad, was on SLJ’s list of ten best children’s apps, 2013. Her poetry has appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Oberon, Poetry Bay, Light, Lighten Up Online, TheNewVerse.News and other reviews and anthologies. She teaches at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, Huntington Station, New York.

MISOGYNY ALA DONALD

by David Spicer

I agree: we need to strike with force

and hijack our favorite fetish. Shout

Shit! at our divorce depositions, buy

a bus ticket to Buffalo, Wyoming

with our lawsuit checks. Before we leave,

let’s sing our inner rock songs, wear

rattlesnake skin cowboy boots, and tickle

Heather on her tasseled tits while she’s

corkscrewing an orgasm down the grind pole

in the dank pit of The Holy Moly.

We can steal a bottle of our favorite Korean

champagne, rub it against the sunburned

barmaid’s crotch and tell her the next

round is on her. We’ll film the janitor

in flagrante delicto and crunch her

cauliflower ears, and then raid the fridge

of its last slices of Boston crème pie.

Bug anybody we can, shout horny

come-ons in our black leather

dusters, and then label each other

The Fuck Geeks of Sauerkraut Doom.

Yep, let’s break the rules every chance

we get and feel great about it, let’s be

boys being boys and climb the prettiest

willow we can find and whistle-whisper

to her so sweetly she sighs and swoons

under the mighty, cloud-kissing moon.

David Spicer has had poems in In Between Hangovers,  TheNewVerse.News, Gargoyle, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,  Mad Swirl, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, The Laughing Dog, Easy Street, Ploughshares, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press, 1978), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Best of the Net twice and a Pushcart, and is the author of one full-length collection of poems, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press, 1987), and four chapbooks. He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

NOTE TO SELF

by Thomas R. Smith

Well, we die whether we stay together or fall apart.
Finally the world goes on its way without us.
The most scourge-like name alive today will one day
be spoken seldom if at all.  To what purpose
this sighing and raging?  To what purpose this pain?
The main thing is to be a part of one's time,
no matter which side seems to be winning.  It's OK
to be a noble failure, a fool in the eyes of the world,
to die in the relentless faith of a Pete Seeger
or Rachel Carson.  The big truck taking up so much
space will one day come to the end of its road.
Insults will be forgotten.  Offended decency
will be forgotten.  In a hundred years, new
people and new problems.  And we can be
sure there will be some glory in being alive
in just their moment, as there is in ours.
Even as I write and as you read, the termites
of ruin are chewing day and night at the under-
side of the hypocrite's mask that shines with
such shameless intensity in the national
spotlight.  The time to speak is always now.
Say your truth if only for those who may be
listening from the galleries of dead and unborn,
if not the childish public locked in their
death tango with destruction.  Reserve for yourself
days of uninterrupted silence in which to hear
those things that have settled in your heart most deeply
sing their faithfulness beneath time's altering sky.


Thomas R. Smith has had hundreds of poems published on three continents.  In the United States, his poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.  His poems were included in Editor's Choice II (The Spirit That Moves Us Press), a selection of the best of the American small press, and in The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner).  His work has reached wide national audiences on Garrison Keillor's public radio show Writer's Almanac and former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. His most recent book of poems is The Glory from Red Dragonfly Press.

DON'S POSTURE

by Andrew Frisardi 

Image Source: Say No to Grump

after “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is scourged with the posturing of Don.
He will lash out, like tinsel in brash lights.
He heckles into hatred, with a wreck of rights
Crushed. Why do some then now not call his con?
Civility has gone, has gone, has gone.
All is seared with words; bleared, smeared with sleights;
And wears Don’s smirk and shares Don’s smell: our sights
Are low now, nor can truth tell, being pawn.

And for all this, his flatulence is never spent.
There live the vilest gases deep down him;
And though the last lights off the campaign went
Oh, curses, at the brown rim backside, brim—
For the Wholly Self-Engrossed over the bent
Truth broods with loose mouth and with ah! cruel whim.



Andrew Frisardi has published poems in numerous online and print journals; and his volume Death of a Dissembler was published in 2014 by White Violet Press. He has also done a lot of literary translation, most recently Dante’s Vita Nova(Northwestern University Press, 2012) and Dante’s Convivio (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2017). Originally from Boston, he currently lives in central Italy but has his absentee ballot set to go for November.

BIRTHER

by Alejandro Escudé

The word enough
to welcome back
the stone-kings

of yesteryear,
who carved out land
through betrayals.

The xenophobe
raised by feckless
tirades, citizens

bled like calves,
hordes circling
tall, cold flames.


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.

AM I DREAMING?

by Gil Hoy

Cover by Barry Blitt, The New Yorker, October 10, 2016.

Am I dreaming?
Having a nightmare?

Is the man
who would be
commander in chief
in 6 Weeks

in a Tweet-Fight
with Miss Universe
at 4 AM?

America's birds
can all be seen,
flying south.

Every living thing
that can,
is hibernating early.

Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer currently studying poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program where he had received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Hoy received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as Brookline MA Selectman for 4 terms. Hoy's poetry appears or is upcoming in Right Hand Pointing-One Sentence Poems, The Potomac, Clark Street Review, TheNewVerse.News and The Penmen Review.

ELECTION ANXIETY

by Susan Vespoli 

Swallow election anxiety
like tea;

feel its ant
hill teem, its nit

specks cling; watch it nix
your calm, axe

your peace, tie
you into a zillion tiny

knots, with no exit
so just breathe into the anxiety.

Susan Vespoli lives in Phoenix, AZ where she works a couple of jobs, writes poetry and prose, which has been published online and in  print. These days she is breathing heavily into election anxiety.

POLLING

by Gil Hoy

I read on the internet today, on
Get US out! of the United Nations

That Barack Obama
supposedly said

we deserved 9/11 because
we didn’t respect Islam
we should not repeat that mistake

With a photograph of our black President
with 80 shares, 178 likes

With readers comments:

This Muslim does not
speak for me and my family.
What an asshole.

  Obummer is anti-AMERICAN!!!!!

           NO more muslims!!!
All must return to their homeland!!

Trump 42% Clinton 44%

I want to bang a hammer
on the world’s noisiest can,

I want to set off the world’s
loudest alarm.

Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer currently studying poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program where he had received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Hoy received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as Brookline MA Selectman for 4 terms. Hoy's poetry appears or is upcoming in Right Hand Pointing-One Sentence Poems, The Potomac, Clark Street Review, TheNewVerse.News and The Penmen Review.

SUNDAYS IN THE PARK WITH DONALD

by George Salamon

"Yet it took Mr. Trump five years of dodging, winking and joking to surrender to reality, finally, on Friday, after a remarkable campaign of relentless deception that tried to undermine the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president." —Michael Barbaro, The New York Times, September 16, 2016

Important men should be honored,
But they should not be believed.
So wrote a poet from Germany.
To give Trump his due, says this
Nattering nabob of doggerel,
Build him a statue in the park,
A place for pigeons to poop and
Shrine to his character.
Create hell of a hullabaloo
For talking airheads on TV.

Some of our presidents have been crooks,
Others just moral zeroes.
But now we really need heroes.
To ride up Capitol Hill.
Guess we'll have to make do
With Hillary and Bill.

George Salamon has turned from coverage of the campaign to reruns of M*A*S*H, but does not advise that you too do this at home. He lives in St. Louis, MO, often a blue pocket in a red state.

CHILDHOOD'S END

by James Cronin

Cartoon by Cagle.

The illusion, that those in charge must know
what’s right and wrong, will fade at childhood’s end.
Dense swirls of gray, not black and white, will rend
us then, and those whose past we rest upon
be seen, like us, as flawed but dear, and so
we’ll pass, but such is not the world’s antiphon.
Its song for the alpha male lets monsters breed,
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, to name a few,
who murdered more than every breath they drew
and left a legacy of homicidal greed.

If murder will out, so too, it will go on
as Aleppo proves day to day; while in
North Korea, a gulag not a nation,
a murderous piglet—in a starving land
the double-chinned is king—wants a weapon
of world’s end to brandish in his fat hand.
At home, a smirking clown—anxious to please
Putin—sides with him on world woes; and more,
he’d tell that seated child, face veiled by gore,
he’s quarantined out as a subspecies.

After a four decade career in the law, James Cronin returned to his first love, literature. Since his judicial retirement in 2007, he has participated in three poetry groups and has served as a facilitator in numerous courses for a lifelong learning program in Fall River, MA.