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 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.

IMAGINE

by Janet E. Aalfs

Throw pillow cover by society6.

She, as you.
She, as I.
Even the one

who stands behind
cheering him on.
Will not, does not, cannot.

All the leaves, every color
and shape, every size,
old ones, young ones, sun-washed,

rain-lashed, turn in the wind.
We see them.
As she as you as I

fluttering, lifting, fall.
Light hidden on the undersides
silver-soft, then gone.

Even the one
who swears he'll fight for her.
Even she.

Would not, did not, could not.
Hear them, so close.
Though the wind in every wave

remembered it, told it, wept.
Tides calm to raging
turned and turned and yet.

The one who smooths his brow
and kisses him to sleep.
Even she.

Janet E. Aalfs, poet laureate emeritus of Northampton, MA, 7th degree black belt, Jian Mei Internal Arts branch chief instructor, and founder/ director of Lotus Peace Arts at Valley Women's Martial Arts, has been teaching and performing weavings of poetry and movement arts locally, nationally, and internationally for 40 years. Her writing has been widely published, and her most recent book of poems is Bird of a Thousand Eyes, Levellers Press.

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.

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.

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.

LAMENTATION

by David Radavich

Is Putin on the "Trump Train"? —Scott Stantis, Chicago Tribune, July 28, 2016.

For Donald

I am hearing the dirge
of my people.

The sound gets louder
and louder, like a train
approaching a station

which has been waiting
and waiting
as an eager slave.

Soon all the passengers
will board and slowly

the landscape will pass
by windows waving
at amber grain.

I stand at the crossing
with torn eyes.

I remember when
the country rose in wings
and did not hope
for engines

hard on
their dark way.

David Radavich's most recent poetry collections are The Countries We Live In (2014) and a co-edited volume called Magic Again: Selected Poems on Thomas Wolfe (2016).  His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe.  He has published a variety of articles and is current president of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

THE DONALD SONNETS

by Llyn Clague

IMAGE OF OUTFIT VIA DEAGOSTINI / GETTY; PHOTOGRAPH OF TRUMP BY JOHN TAGGART / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY. Detail of photgraphic result published in The New Yorker, Daily Shouts, October 28, 2015.

Sonnet LXXI

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than flitting across your screen you see my obit
Announcing I am gone.  No smarmy op-ed
Will weep that I have left this hypocrite
World.  No, if you peruse these lines, do not think
Of me who wrote them: so great is your love
Of self I would not give them cause to wink
At you for my shortcomings, and so shove
You off the cliff of their so precious hauteur.
If, I say, you look back upon this verse,
My smallness must not reduce your superior
Vision of greatness, of better, not worse.
Let not the wise world mock your glory
By tying you to my too ordinary story.

Sonnet XCI

Some glory in their birth, some in their wealth,
Some in their cleverness, or in a pretty face,
Some in bodily strength or personal health,
Or cars and yachts boosted in this rat race.
Every type has its particular niche
Where it finds its special gratification.
But these trifles – even, Donald, your riches,
to me but means to ever greater action –
Are nothing: with your love of self you trump
Smooth cleverness,  a beauty-pageant chest,
The bulge of biceps, and arrogant assump-
Tions of birth certificates. I boast I’ve the best:      
Wretched in this alone, that, losing, you take
Self-love away, and wretched my heart will break.

Sonnet XXIX

When, disgraced by boss, society, and fate,
Along with others filled with helpless rage,
I cry to heaven with my unbounded hate
And look upon myself as a rat in a cage,
Haply, Donald, I think on thee, and my heart,
Like hope in a gambler in your casino,
Leaps up into a sweet realm apart,
Made magic by almighty, endless ego.
When I revel in the inebriation
Of your inspired take-downs, smears and sneers
And abandon myself to the elation
Spreading far and wide with all your cheers,
Then, bathed in the glow of your Caesarian
Narcissism, I scorn compassion from any man.

Llyn Clague is a poet based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.  His poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.  

BIG WINDS

by Neil Shepard

by grobles63

Johnson, Vermont

Big winds in the back pasture this morning.
Must have blown in from that dark bluster
in Ohio where the orange-haired dystopian
shouted himself red: a nation broken,
and only himself with enough narcissistic
moxie to fix it. What would be the fix? Short,
as always, on specifics. But the fix, so
far, fixates on anyone who crosses him.
In short, big winds blow from the little mind
of a schoolyard bully, a bull who charges
every flagging patch of red. And half
the nation’s ready to blow in his blowhard
direction. They’re small children who want
a power-daddy to fix what’s broke.
And the big winds in the back pasture
presage afternoon thunderstorms and
a dome of hot air crushing down on us
that feels like the beginning of intolerable
conditions. A whole summer and autumn
of unbearable heat, which will roast the air
to record highs. If there’s a weather god
today, he’s a strongman. All those grass-heads
below are dried-out, hollow, blown in one
direction: his. The one turkey wading
through them is the steadiest creature in the field,
flattening the unthinking reeds, feeding as it needs,
and popping out onto lawn, finally, like a reality
TV star to shake off its crown of fluff and seed,
and now I see he’s no turkey, he’s a red-faced turkey
vulture, perfect for the clean-up work to come.

Neil Shepard’s sixth and seventh books of poetry came out in 2015: Hominid Up (Salmon Poetry, Ireland) and Vermont Exit Ramps II (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear in many places, among them Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), as well as in Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, and Southern Review. Shepard taught for many years at Johnson State College in Vermont and edited for a quarter-century the Green Mountains Review. 

IN RUSSIA WE TRUST

by Alejandro Escudé

Image source: Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off

As the giant bulldozer sets on the Pacific Ocean,
the sidewalks like lines of code, we stalk the tributaries
for the basket carrying a babe who will save us
from ourselves, rotund Botero-like madres slap tortillas
of treatises on the why and how, while u-boats listen in,
a wave breaks, five white horses carrying five bare dictators.
Some remember the Cold War, and Reagan, a nice old man,
I recall feeling for him as a child, knees pressed to my cheeks
beneath a desk, not really understanding what nuclear meant,
a helicopter with a red star, a boxer with platinum flat-top hair,
not this chaotic whispering, a country hardly unearthed
from the rubble of the last century, heroes resigned to knocking
on the president’s door for a medal, a dog bowl of decency.
This nation has gone to war for less, these protean times can’t
always can be summed up by the word “mess.” Now Putin
slams a cold coin on his desk, one head Hillary, the other Trump,
landing with a reckoning thump, a crimson wall behind him,
the words perestroika and glasnost spray-painted in white,
a black pen and a black pen, the wind, the dot of his blue eye.

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.

FATAL MISTAKES

by Melissa Balmain

Image via Pinterest

The pill you're sure is good for you,
The mole you think you can neglect,
The ache you blame on winter flu:
It's always what you least expect.

The mat that pads your shower floor,
The flight you take from home, direct,
The car that's never stalled before:
It's always what you least expect.

The oddly coiffed New York tycoon
Whom no one ever would elect
Because he's nutty as a loon…
It's always what you least expect.

Melissa Balmain is the Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (Winner of the Able Muse Book Award), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.