FACING YOUR OFFICIAL END

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Tweeted by Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes.

Some men aren't content with breakage, they have to burn you to the ground.

—Kim Addonizio, "The Matter"

The moon hangs there
like everything is white
in your world.

The sun bobs and rises
from the orange sherbet horizon
as if today
will be another
beautiful day.

The headlines blinker
across sky blue screens
in hectic offices
on crowded planes, trains
in cars with distracted drivers.

All that light reveals
more darkness
in the marrow,
more dirt unearthed
from the bottomless pit
the grave, the bone cancer
of past and present
crime, amorality, lies.

By the time the moon eases
from behind the black trees
the world has darkened again.
Only the night glow
casts light
on your tomorrow.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes Florida noir with a dark humor. Poetry has appeared in Fourth & Sycamore, Flatbush Review, And So Yeah, Penny Ante Feud, ink sweat and tears, r.kv.r.y quarterly literary journal, Scrittura, Fauna Quarterly, borrowed solace, TheNewVerse.News, and elsewhere. Chapbooks include The Art of Bars (Finishing Line Press, 2016), Days' End (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2017), and Final Arrangements (Prolific Press, 2019). Project XX, a novel about a school shooting, was published in 2017 by Salt Publishing in the UK.

45

by Gil Hoy

Members of a family reunite through the border wall between Mexico and United States, during the "Keep our dream alive" event, in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico on December 10, 2017. Families separated by the border were reunited for three minutes through the fence that separates Ciudad Juarez Park in Mexico and Sunland in New Mexico, United States, during an event called "Keep our dream alive", organized by the Border Network for Human Rights on the International Human Rights Day. HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES via Texas Public Radio

In this poem, proper sentence 

structure will be followed.

For example, sentences will start

with a capital letter and end

with a proper punctuation mark.

Sentences will be grammatically correct.

Some may say that this will likely detract 

from the poem’s poetic quality,

but I’m not sure I can agree.

I’m also not sure real poems require words. 

I italicize for emphasis.

For example, is an image held 

in the mind of crying children—

of thousands of immigrant families

separated at the border—never

to be reunited, poetic?

Is the image symbolic and evokes

strong emotions? Is it repetitive 

and sick at heart?

Are the precise words of one’s 

internal dialogue describing the image 

what make it poetic or not?

Can a number be a poem, or at least poetic?

Such as the title of this poem?

I will never think of “45” in the same way again.

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and semi-retired trial lawyer who studied poetry 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. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared most recently in Chiron Review, TheNewVerse.News, Ariel Chart, Social Justice Poetry, Poetry24, Right Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, I am not a silent poet, The Potomac, Clark Street Review, the penmen review and elsewhere.

SONNET: AMERICA IN 2019

by Robert Darling

Donald Trump — Riding the Wrecking Ball, by DonkeyHotey

A would-be tyrant and accomplished liar

as president, the courts deaf to the poor,

and Congress filled with dotards up for hire;

the churches silent on what they should deplore

with priests and pastors who serve their own desire,

and conscience quiet in communities at war

with common sense.  As once the drivers of slaves

claimed they were slaves themselves, is hypocrisy

the driver of our facts? We build on graves

of genocide and treat our history

as promised consummation, the end of days,

and claim our innocence has kept us free.

And if bare, battered Truth somehow appeared

would we have eyes to see or ears to hear? 

Robert Darling has published two full-length collections of poetry, So Far and Gleanings, three chapbooks of poems, Boundaries, The Craftsman’s Praise, and Breaking the Silence and a volume of criticism on the Australian poet A.D. Hope. He has contributed poems and reviews to over fifty magazines and articles in several reference books in the US, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia.  He is Professor in Humanities and Fine Arts at Keuka College. The above poem is a response/updating of Shelley's "Sonnet: England in 1819."

A GOLDEN SHOVEL FOR THE RESISTANCE

by Lynne Knight

Image source: Greenpeace

The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

All that weekend, checking our phones while

we waited, some of us praying, all of us thinking this

might be it, this might be the day the report

says what we want it to say, telling us what he does

is what he’s always done, he lied, he lies, sometimes not

even big lies, from which it’s easy to conclude

many things about his psyche, most of all that

he’s deeply insecure, so insecure it’s hard to see the—

the what?—extent of his neuroses? but a president,

carrying on like a child—maybe he should be committed,

we say, his rants are so wild, maybe he’s just totally a-

moral, and while that’s nothing approaching crime,

it does show how asleep we are, how numb, moreover it

shows how power corrupts, no one’s exempt, even us, and also

it exposes the deep fault in the national psyche, it does,

it does, we are split, fractured, broken, divided, there is not

much time for healing, and since nothing will ever exonerate

us for our silence, let us say what is, let us dig in against him.

Lynne Knight has published six full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks, along with I Know (Je sais), a translation, with the author Ito Naga, of his Je sais. Her awards include publication in Best American Poetry, a Poetry Society of America award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a RATTLE Poetry Prize.

WHAT WE CALL NEWS

by Joan Mazza

Nambia, a shock! was in the news, and now
the town of Pleasure, burned so hot that cars melted.
Families hope for messages of bones of those
who didn’t escape, an answer, end to their search.
A president not mine promises Great Climate!

advises raking forests. Behold! His followers follow,
like those who thought they’d board Hale-Bopp,
dressed for this special occasion in jeans and sneakers,
pockets filled with quarters, plastic bags over their heads.

Ho-hum to a journalist’s murder, dismemberment.
His memory dissolved in acid. Business as usual
for those who value money over integrity and human
rights. Let’s carry on and kill those turkeys, worry
about stuffing and whether it’s safe to eat the lettuce.

I can smell those foul family members arguing
from miles away. It’s the age of FFS and WTF, when
evidence provides the excuse to dig in deeper, yell,
Fake News! when you don’t like the turn of events

or intelligence communities that bring facts. Ho-hum.
We carry on like those in Poland, not Jewish, not gay.
No risk of being chosen, hauled off. What’s for dessert?
Here it’s apple pie with ice cream and whipped cream.
We’re grateful, and we write our long list of blessings.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and has taught workshops nationally with a focus on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her work has appeared in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Streetlight Magazine, Valparaiso Review, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia.

LITTLE THINKING

by Kathleen A. Lawrence

Source: Boedaq Lieur



Little boy man
with hair of straw
and bubble gum cheeks
hollers at the crack of dawn
for not coming when he called,
orders the morning plans changed
so he can ride his Flintstone car
for 9 holes of golf instead of work,
but pouts if the clouds don't shade
his eyes from happy, babbling brooks.
(he hates the sound of laughing water,
“stop laughing at me” he bellows)

Little big shot
with sticky hands
in ill-fitted Brooks Brothers suit
snaps at the afternoon sun
for not shining bright enough
to polish his dull and tarnished lies,
screeching at the nap time hour
refusing to quiet down
to let the world sleep.
(“shut up” he squawks like a magpie
awake and wanting attention
through the autumn air)

Little baby boss
with sleep in eyes
red helicopter cap
wails at the Man-in-the-moon
calling him names, mocking his craters
blaming him for not casting
a longer shadow
on his tiny little form,
turning his back on the North Star
for stealing his limelight.
(“Damn, stupid moon”
who said it could orbit his earth?)

Little brat-in-chief
with mouth full of teeth
to chew his candy lips
stomps around the penthouse
screeching to the shimmering stars
for sparkling too much,
cursing out the rotating planets
for moving too quickly
and without his permission,
“I get to sign the documents.”
(Swatting at the constellations
like he was bringing down
pesky spider webs that had startled him)

Little monster boy
with orange mask
concealing scary supervillan
who rages at the grass
for growing too soft and green,
and screams against the mountains
for looming tall, purple, and majestic
and breaking the view
from his expensive toy plane.
(in a tantrum he insists that
“everybody sit down, sit down,
so I’m the tallest!”)

Little baby man
with giant demands
snaps his tiny, itty-bitty fingers
demanding the help clean up
his messes while fixing more food,
gobbling treats and tonguing
disapproval he claims his greatness
“I’m big— really, really big”
and the rest of us are just losers.
(he folds his arms and turns away
saying "you're fired" and “dumb,
really really dumb”)

Kathleen A. Lawrence likes the idea of writing poetry under a Cortland apple tree on a crisp afternoon, lifted by a scented autumnal breeze. She longs to write of love and beauty inspired by the loveliness of the world. However, she typically is compelled to write while watching the news explode reality across her flat screen, in her small suburban bungalow, painted an optimistic shade of periwinkle blue. 

BE CAUTIOUS

by Ron Riekki

“Thumbs-Up,” by Barry Blitt / The New Yorker cover July 30, 2018

                    My French girlfriend says,
                    “Your President loves all caps,
                    especially dunce caps,”
                    loves to yell,
                    to scream in fifth-grade language

               as if everything is a storm,
               as if he’ll make porn-$ize money
               if all hell breaks loose,
               as if we can’t lose,
               as if hell

          has no empty space,
          as if we all won’t suffer
          if suffering
          becomes the ring
          we must wear,

       where his words are slapped together
       like
       WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY
       and
       the threat

               of
   NEVER, EVER THREATEN
   and
   in the mall
   my girlfriend points

and says,
“Look, it’s Trump”
and I ask what she means,
And she says,
“An escalator,

that’s what he does.”
Except this escalator
is broken
and she doesn’t even have to say
how much more fitting this is.

Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and Undocumented (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).

DOLICHOVESPULA MACULATA, or THE BALD-FACED HORNET

by Tricia Knoll

We look to the animal kingdom
to describe some people we know—
shark, worm, fox, hawk, lame duck,
skunk, sheep, rat, sloth, snake, ass—
mostly to describe the worst
traits humans bring to the table.

What strikes fear in me is the face
of the bald-faced liar, a North American
hornet. Its willingness to commit
matricide. Aggressive when
threatened. Defensive.
Clearly striped in black vs. white.
The struggle within its own nest
between a ruler and the workers.
How they chew live pray into gray
fibers to paper their elaborate nest
in blandness. Work with professionals
to take down a nest too near humans.
One can squirt venom
that blinds you
right into your eye.

Beware the bald-faced liar.


Tricia Knoll is sick and tired of hearing T***p's repeated lies and lies and lies. Her most recent collection of poetry is How I Learned To Be White.

TWO NEW NEWS BROADCASTS

by Alice Twombly

                      I

The Evening News: July 4, 2018

A stag, with a full rack of antlers,

stands stationary on my front lawn  at dusk.

I run outside with my only weapon—

a mop still damp from washing the floor,

point it at him, shouting: Nothing.

I charge him, waving the wet rags back and forth, like a flag.

He moves a few feet away and stares at me.

I advance further, but each pause generates only

small indifferent changes. Finally, I run towards him screaming with all the energy

I possess. He bounds at last into the next yard,

turns for a final look, and disappears into the dark.

The next morning, I see what he had done before I’d noticed  him—

petals strewn everywhere, and every plant I’ve nurtured

all  summer, decapitated at the bud, eaten, and destroyed.

                            II

The Midday News: July 16, 2018

He sells the farm, the antiques and the wall hangings,

chases away the loyal dogs,

poisons the wells, floods the crops with leaded water,

jacks the flagpole, torches the flag

and takes down those old Post Magazine covers of the Four Freedoms

that had hung on the wall since World War 11.

Driving the landowners off their historic land

he buys it on the cheap,

and using the unskilled, dazzled, and defrauded labor that remains

begins erecting the first stages of the Putin Trump Tower

on the burnt fields of that defruited and polluted plain.

Alice Twombly is a teacher, photographer, poet, and political junky. A New Jersey resident, she curates a monthly poetry reading in Teaneck, NJ: “Thursdays Are For Poetry at Classic Quiche.” She teaches adults at The Learning Collaborative in New City, NY and lectures at local libraries. A member of “Brevitas,” an online poetry collective in NYC. Her work has been published in The New Jersey Poetry Monthly, First Literary Review-East, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Brevitas.

PRUITT’S PSYCHO FANCY

an erasure poem by James Penha
derived from Scott Pruitt’s resignation letter

It has been an honor to serve you
Truly
your confidence in me has blessed me personally
beyond what anyone anticipated
at an unprecedented pace
and I thank you for the opportunity
to achieve those ends
it is extremely difficult for me
to cease serving you
because I count it a blessing to be serving you
in service to you
to bless you serving
as President today because of God’s providence
that same providence brought me into your service
as I have served you
I have blessed you
and enabled you
Thank you again Mr. President
for the honor of serving you
in all that you put your hand to.


James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News .

OUR DULY ERECTED PRESIDENT

by Edmund Conti

“Every time I issue a pardon
I get an executive hard-on.”


Edmund Conti writes straight-up poetry.

MUSINGS ON A LINE BY REDD FOXX

two triolets
by Julie Steiner

"Trump finally calls Waffle House hero." —Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2018

"'I'm Not A Hero,' Says James Shaw Jr., Acclaimed As Hero Of Waffle House Attack." —NPR, April 23, 2018

"Trump on Florida shooting: 'I really believe I'd run in there, even if I didn't have a weapon.’" —CNN, February 26, 2018


Heroes ain’t born—they’re cornered.
They say, “I wasn’t brave!
I had no choice,” when honored.
Heroes ain’t born—they’re cornered.
What accolades they’ve garnered,
they claim they don’t deserve.
Heroes ain’t born—they’re cornered.
They say, “I wasn’t brave.”

That puffed-up politician
who claims heroic courage
and lack of hesitation—
that puffed-up politician—
has trademarked truth-distortion.
Disgusted, I disparage
that puffed-up politician.
(Who claims heroic courage?)


Julie Steiner rolls her eyes in San Diego, California.

BLIGHT

by Katherine Smith

I was born for the same journey as the birds,
the poem about the poem, the pure lyric
of the ovenbird in the wood
calling for a mate to end its solitude
from the top of the American chestnut tree.
I learned to distinguish the American chestnut
from the oak chestnut by the serrated edge,
from the beech by the clasp at the hooked tip.
I learned to recognize my kind by its serrated song.

I step into the woods this morning,
chasing the ovenbird, stepping around a pile
of mating dung beetles. Pure lyric
was once mine. I woke this morning

to fungus on the radio: sixty Palestinians
shot at the border the day the embassy opened
in Jerusalem, the president’s Indonesian resort
paid for by China, and the Russian oil company sold
to Qataris to pay off the president for lifting sanctions.

Pure lyric was once my everyday speech.
The ovenbird calls in the tree canopy
of hickory and oak.
All winter I taught writing
to teenagers from Honduras
now scheduled for deportation.

I’m part of a vast experiment
like the Lego experiment
in which people are given Legos
and told to build, then watch
as their creations are destroyed
while their despair is measured
and recorded for eternity.

I fantasize about what I’d do
if an ICE officer came to the classroom door.
The sweeps never happen
where I can see them.
One by one my students—
Transito, Luis, Fernanda—
will be dropped off at the border
with their English composition skills,
their aspirations and their associates degrees.

Now it’s May and I’m mildly depressed.
Pure lyric hasn’t been my style for twenty years.
The ovenbird calls deliriously from the top
of the American Chestnut tree.

Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

SWAMP CREATURE

by Howard Winn

Emerging from the slime
accumulated over past time
it rears its frightening head
licking its lips preparatory
to swinging its massive
posterior shaking off the
gunk which never the less
clings as if a growth on
this beast of the slime
out of the past seeking
a future in the muck of
self-satisfaction at being
an organism that knows
without knowing that it
is the future unless we
eradicate it in its present moment
as it rises out of the self-
serving stinking quagmire








Howard Winn has just had a novel Acropolis published by Propertius Press as well as poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

SELF-REVELATION

found poetry by Diane Elayne Dees

I have the right temperament,

I try to learn from the past.

I thought being president

would be easier than my old life.

I'm an honest person, I thought

it would be easier. Bing bing,

bong bong, bing bing bing.

I have embraced crying mothers

who have lost their children

because our politicians put their personal

agendas before the national good.

I have a great relationship with the blacks;

I wouldn't mind a little bow.

Despite the constant negative press

covfefe, they don't know how to write good.

I know more about ISIS than the generals do;

why can't we use nuclear weapons?

I'm their worst nightmare, my fingers are long

and beautiful. Even if the world is going to hell

in a hand-basket, I won't lose a penny.

Who’s doing the raping?

Who's doing the raping?

Diane Elayne Dees’s poems have been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane, who lives in Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women’s professional tennis throughout the world.

STATE OF THE UNION

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck
via The Progressive Populist

While T***p looks presidential
reading words slowly on the networks,
on the classic movie channel
King Kong the giant ape runs amok,
first on Skull Island,
then in Manhattan.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya can't. She just can't. The Book of Knots and Their Untying is published by Kelsay Press.

THE RELUCTANT PROTESTER

by Elane Gutterman

“As a woman, I feel it’s my responsibility to be here. Practice the privilege you have. I came from a land where people had to die to vote. Americans can change their history by protesting.”  Awalin Sopan, 33, from Virginia, dressed as a character from The Handmaid’s Tale. Ms. Sopan, originally from Bangladesh, became a United States citizen in 2017. —Photograph by Andrea Bruce for The New York Times

 “Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.” —Martin Luther King, Memphis, TN, April 3, 1968


Why not let others
Demonstrate, agitate, escalate?

Stretched in yoga, weekend routines we
Equivocate, abdicate, meditate.

We rely on the media and courts to
Investigate, adjudicate, mitigate.

We’re overwhelmed by the acts of the 45th to
Disintegrate, contaminate, perpetrate.

The way his core of supporters
Adulate, gravitate, accommodate.

We’ve grown accustomed to a mind set to
Dominate, fabricate, fulminate.

On MLK day, I heard his speech evoke dogs and firehoses to
Activate, necessitate, consolidate.

At the Women’s March, last Saturday,
I stood my cold ground to demonstrate.

Elane Gutterman is a health researcher and poet, whose poems have appeared in the Kelsey Review, Patterson Literary Review and the US1 Summer Fiction Issue. Living in West Windsor, NJ, she attended the Women's March on New Jersey in Morristown. 

THE NORWEGIAN QUESTION

by Gail White

Cartoon by Peter Kuper for The New Yorker.

Why don’t we get more immigrants from Norway?
All winter long they never see the sun.
But their health care’s taken care of
And they’re not, that I’m aware of,
Very likely to be murdered with a gun.

What is it with these ignorant Norwegians?
Don’t they want what all Americans receive?
But they love the smorgasbords
And the mountains and the fjords,
And on top of that, they get parental leave.

Why do I sometimes wish I were Norwegian?
Am I really quite as socialist as that?
Yes, the dream that I aspire to
Is to sit beside the fire to
Caress my own Norwegian forest cat.

Gail White is a formalist poet with work in many journals, including Measure, Light, First Things, and Hudson Review. She is a two-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her latest book Catechism was published in 2016 by White Violet Press.

BEGIN OVER AGAIN (BOA) BUDGET

by Tricia Knoll

Image Source: Hasbro

Whoever coined that penny-dreadful acronym BOA played too much
Monopoly. Report to Jail. No go by go. No payment for the work
you did, for what the artists painted beneath the bridges, for the songs
that mothers wet with milk dripped into their baby’s mouth or
that fathers moaned as regrets of what they hadn’t done to help,
you know, the sounds you could hear once in a while on public radio.

The beginners-again movement men whacked all the monuments
to pieces, loved it that Ramses’ head showed up in a sewer works hole.
When they carved out human services, they cared not a whit
(and I have it from a very reliable source that whit is much smaller
than bit), that zombies, the victims of flesh-eating cut-backs,
careened around downtowns with nowhere to go, washing in McDonald’s
restrooms, or giving up and pitching a tent in the graveyard
next to the wild sweet peas and the four-leaf clovers.

You won’t have this. You won’t have that. That refrain echos
in the school yard recess warning bells and the sirens that get people
to the hospital emergency rooms where they might be treated
depending on their documents. If they are legal people.

You will have bombs and walls. Lots of bombs and because we have big
sticks, we can use them wherever we want. We don’t have to lend them
to friends because the nations we once called friends aren’t very nice.
We can keep them all for ourselves. The BOA men don’t believe
it will go nuclear. BOA work, choking and squeezing, is not noticeable
to the average person who doesn’t care about tax returns or Putin.
The hungry might feel tightness in the gut. The sick or the less abled
may make unhealthy comparisons to the old play board
where they did collect $200 every once in a while.

What you will notice is how BOA men get new black suits,
gleamy gold badges, and red hats with bills

to keep the sun from blinding them.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who has been writing poetry of protest for some months. Her collected work includes Ocean's Laughter (Aldrich Press) and Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press).

CHRONICLES

by Judith Terzi

They are taking something away in America.
They have stolen all the cows in South Sudan.

They are hawking their egos on minor stages.
They have forced villagers to flee South Sudan.

They will forsake the poorest among us.
Their women cup hands in dust in South Sudan.

They will not succumb to offerings of reason.
Their women search for grain under straw in South Sudan.

They camouflage their fortunes under the radar.
They offshore in the West stolen assets from South Sudan.

They inhabit the wilderness of equivocation.
They create wastelands out of farms in South Sudan.

They speak in fiction to preserve potency.
They have massacred for power in South Sudan.

Now, they are taking compassion away in America.
Now, one hundred thousand facing famine in South Sudan.

Judith Terzi's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in BorderSenses, Caesura, Columbia Journal, Raintown Review, Spillway, Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Web and Net, shortlisted in the Able Muse Write Contest, and included in Keynotes, a study guide for the artist-in-residence program for State Theater New Jersey. Casbah is her latest chapbook from Kattywompus Press.