The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
Guidelines
Submission Guidelines: Send 1-3 unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.
Showing posts with label #StandWithCharlottesville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #StandWithCharlottesville. Show all posts
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.
Lies and lies are everywhere,
and racist slogans fill the air
and hatred oozing everywhere.
We didn't know this way.
And now these folks they block the sun,
they ruin love for everyone.
So many things he could have done.
His base got in the way.
He looks at hate from both sides now. The KKK's okay somehow. His father marched, you will recall. He really doesn't care about us at all.
His id rides on a Ferris wheel,
spins dizzy, hurtful tweets he feels
as all delusional goes real.
We didn't know this way.
So every day another show.
We cringe wherever he doth go.
And what will happen, we don't know
until the lies give way.
He looks at hate from both sides now and white supremacists somehow are good, he said, you will recall. And Sheriff Joe isn't really bad at all.
Our tears and fears, not feeling proud
to say our country right out loud
is led by hacks and circus crowds.
We didn't vote this way.
Our senators are acting strange.
They shake their heads, but what will change?
Transgender troops may lose what's gained
in fighting every day.
He looks at hate from both sides now. His nemesis is love somehow. Dark clouds will reign, you will recall, when Fascists really aren't that bad at all.
Judith Terzi's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as BorderSenses, Caesura, Columbia Journal, Good Works Review (FutureCycle Press), Raintown Review, Unsplendid, You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Casbah and If You Spot Your Brother Floating By are her most recent chapbooks from Kattywompus Press.
Words travel dark back roads of my brain, seep into aching fingers
that strike the keyboard then ricochet off the page like a human pummeled
and tossed.
—a slight body can dent the grill, a car the weapon of choice,
and headlights grab strands of blonde hair later smoothed around her
young face by her mother’s trembling hands—
and we, shocked, shocked I tell you
step lightly across the abyss from then into now,
collective arms drop in surrender, heads hang resigned,
eyes look away then glance back to watch America turn
rancid, its remains ooze behind clanking gates, huddle with ignorance,
kick the dirt in search of morality and decency once treasured.
And we still don’t believe the signs and symptoms—
even though the heart has stopped beating.
Marsha Owens spent her career in public education and is now happily retired. Born and raised in Richmond, VA, the recent events in Charlottesville hit too close to home. She is pleased that her work has appeared at Rat’s Ass Review, The Wild Word, TheNewVerse.News and is forthcoming in Streetlight Magazine.
One million dead in the Civil War,
if you count the mules.
Which I do.
I say, blowtorch the rebel statue
men off their mounts and keep
the horses striding on their pedestals.
They were not traitors
to their country, showed no sign
of caring who they carried,
black or white, male or
female. Their integrity
is without question.
They did the work
they were asked to do
without a nod at glory.
Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet with a deep fondness for horses. I can see these statues with newly installed saddles replacing the old white men, perhaps ladders for children to climb up on.
solidarity’s question: who will embrace such present sorrow I am only one, but still I am one . . . but I can do something. —Edward Everett Hale, "Lend a Hand"
i sit here
alone in the chapel
a dark desert night
Jesus, have mercy on me a great sinner
i breathe in then out
Jesus, have mercy on us
i breathe slower
Jesus, have mercy on me a great sinner
slower into the dark
Jesus, have mercy on us
the clock chimes the quarter hour
Jesus, have mercy on me a great sinner
i sit before All Hunger, Thirst and Longing
to plead in the silence for grace among the violences
Jesus, have mercy
Sister Lou Ella Hickman, a member of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament, has been a teacher on all levels including college, and she has worked in two libraries. Presently, she is a freelance writer as well as a certified spiritual director. Her poems and articles have been published in numerous magazines as well as in After Shocks: Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo and in Down to the Dark River and The Southern Quarterly both edited by Philp Kolin. She and Pam Edwards co-authored Catechizing with Liturgical Symbols. Her first book of poetry, she: robed and wordless, published by Press 53, was released in the fall of 2015.
Locate them in Baltimore.
Give no advance notice, little fanfare.
Do it quickly; do it quietly
under cover of darkness
in the wee hours of the morning.
Allow flashing red lights and backup beeps
on heavy equipment.
Hire crews in T-shirts and hardhats.
Use crowbars, cranes, and cargo straps.
Hoist statues whole, bronze tons,
onto flatbed trucks.
Procure police cars to escort statues
out of town at sunrise.
Let the new day's rays
illuminate empty pedestals.
Next?
Find cranes strong enough
to hoist hatred from hearts.
Patty Mosco Holloway is a writing teacher. She lives in Denver, Colorado. She often "hears" the starts of poems in conversations. Advice: Don't talk to her.
On this grass in 1984
I met my true love
in front of the bookstore
where men in camouflage
brandish torches and a few women too
in fluttering skirts, march
not far from the Rotunda.
They chant of the past
but these men aren’t the past.
The past was 1984 when
we lay under the ginkgo
the man who loved
the Ivory Coast and I,
and music from Mali
played on the lawn now lit
by confused torches.
In the future
where the black-shirted men
leave their shadows
behind them in the grass,
lovers will hesitate
to lie under the ash 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.
I shouldn’t be but I’m scared to near-death
at 4:32 in the morning after reading Huff Puff on my computer—expecting this country’s
demons to jump from it and give me a heart
attack but I’m not that lucky, and for all it’s
worth, Stephen Stills sings into my ears so my wife
won’t wake up and then Ozzy hoarse-screams,
making me more paranoid than I already am,
while more impotent boys in Challengers kill
more women, and I haven’t slept in days—
I’m worried about the world, I’m a world-class
worrier, who am I to worry, though?,
just an old man with hair that won’t gray
and a heart that strives to stay pale, but the mad king
with the orange face—he scares me to near-death,
and I should be scared—I haven’t escaped
from my bungalow in weeks--the mad king
with the orange face haunts me: he is me,
he is you, he is himself, he is the worst thoughts
in every one of us, the worst that have invaded
every one of our hearts at one time or another
until they grow darker than evil and then the
worst thoughts escape when he beckons them
but does he have real power since he’ll self-destruct?
because we can’t give him that kind of power—
America is now the Jerusalem of the West
over something as stupid as the color
of one’s skin when it’s really one color—
the color we’ve never seen, the color
of a nation’s soul, the color that scares me
to near-death—I shouldn’t be,
and I still cower in my bungalow waiting
for the answer that may never arrive:
the hero that’ll challenge the mad king
with the orange face and the golden children—
yes, let’s have a pay-per-view of Wrestle-Kill—
we deserve this, I say—starring
The Mad King with the Orange Face
and His Golden Children against Fake News
wearing bloody zebra-skin coats, headlines,
nuns’ habits, and potpourri—we deserve this,
I say, but I’m scared to near-death
and I should be at 7:06 in the morning when
light is eons away because we’ve embraced
the night in all its Wrestle-Kill hype
and that scares me and I should be scared
and you should be, too.
David Spicer has had poems in Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, Santa Clara Review, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. The author of Everybody Has a Story and four chapbooks, he’s the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books and is scheduled to have From the Limbs of a Pear Tree (Flutter Press) released in the early Fall of 2017.
Detail from the Cable Street Mural, a large mural painting in the East End of London apinted by Dave Binnington Savage, Paul Butler, Ray Walker and Desmond Rochfort between 1979 and 1983 to commemorate the street battle in October 1936 against Oswald Moseley and his fascist Black Shirts’ march down Cable Street.
Why the Nazis came to Charlottesville. And why I was wrong not to confront them.
There are barbed wire fences in my dreamless nights.
And hands caught in nets, children growing who cannot whirl.
There are torches tonight, and chants to drown saints.
And simple good people who want a steak at lunch, or hummus with a carrot.
I have had friends in great numbers, who watch with prescient eyes
of brown and green and black and gold and hazel and azure-
The marches of hatred, the chants of those with bludgeons for
Writers, and I am one, journalists, and the films in black and white
Reeling through the avenues where magnolias should bloom,
Where souls are not crushed , because we will not permit it.
Where freedom fighters/writers are ploughed down like deer on the highway
In the nights of barbed wire fences in my dreamless dreams.
Because we will stop it, my friends.
I could tell you, my friends, who will come into my garden of ripening tomatoes, roses.
Who will give me echinacea with pink flowers, who will swim with me in sweet lake water,
And who will read my poetry for 40 years, keeping it a secret until the most crucial moment
That determines a hidden mountain behind the mist of decades.
I have had friends in great numbers, who take me to the ocean, and we have shared
The small rises and falls of our children in laughing texts. We will not tolerate
We will not accept, these marches from a haunted hunted slaughtering, a genocide past, a genocide that echoes other genocides, and other genocides, and others
To be revived? Forget it. We’re here. We know the score.
The lurid lips of nazi clowns shouting hatred slogans, the mowing down
Of friends? We will speak/act now, we will stop this insanity.
Judy Katz-Levine is the author of these books: When The Arms Of Our Dreams Embrace, Ocarina, and When Performers Swim, The Dice are Cast. Her new collection The Everything Saint will be published by WordTEch in August 2018. Poems have appeared recently in Kritya (India), Stanzaic Stylings, Ibbetson Street, Salamander, Blue Unicorn, Springhouse Journal, Peacock Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, and many others. Also a jazz flutist, she just played a 3 hour gig at the Farmer's Market in Needham MA.
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.
