POOL PARTY CANCELED DUE TO HEAT

by Marsha Owens


Above: New York children read the words of their peers held in U.S. Border Patrol facilities.


like cancelling Christmas due to December
we celebrated my friend’s birthday in air conditioning instead
her 2-month-old great-granddaughter slept among us, fourth generation sweetness
all had a turn to cuddle, I held on to her innocence like a prayer
until my mind circled back to those tiny faces in, well, you know, cages
children I take to bed with me every night, every night I see bright lights stalk
     across cement floors, babies in puddled urine (never cuddled in this life)
     tear-streaked faces of 2-year-olds, eyes wide open to terror
suddenly my eyes open wide, I’m underwater, I hold my breath, kick to the
     surface to find I wasn’t in water at all.

I was in hell

children’s arms and legs flailing beside me, trying to stay afloat, I swam to the
     surface stumbled into another day, someone’s birthday maybe, read the headlines:

Life Canceled Due to Hate.

sun blazing over my roof today will cool in September


Marsha Owens’ poems have appeared in both print and on-line publications, including Streetlight Magazine, Huffington Post, TheNewVerse.News, and Wild Word Anthology. She co-edited the newly released poetry anthology, Lingering in the Margins.

BEHIND TRUMP AT THE RALLY

by William Aarnes

Standing behind him,
you’re in heaven.

Not even praying
feels as righteous

as adoring him.   
The rapture of knowing     

the cameras will show you
nodding and smiling

thrills you and your wife
(in her Women for Trump tee)

more than making love.
There’s no explaining

the joy of cheering on
his cheerless babble   

but it sure beats thinking.
And, oh, yes, you’re exercising

your lethal right to loathe
the losers he derides.       


William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.

AGAIN

by George Held

Oct. 27, 2018 Squirrel Hill is home to a large Jewish population. Above, Tree of Life synagogue. Pam Panchak/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/AP via The Washington Post

Jews are being slaughtered again, ho hum –
In serene leafy Squirrel Hill this time

After days of pipe-bomb deliveries
To Dem bigwigs, enemies of the T***p state,

As reported by those enemies of the state,
The media; now the Jews again, those

Enemies out of central casting always
On call for the demented demons

Of domination as they once again
Focus their hatred and execute scapegoats

In the name of some Judenfrei utopia
That can never exist, because once

Judenrein, those left will turn on the weak
And most despised among them

And the executions will begin again…
So don’t look for barbarians at the gate

They already are right here inside –
Inside our borders, inside our hearts


George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, writes from New York. His twentieth collection is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle, 2017). Under the Escalator, his dark fantasy for children, came was released last month.

CHARLOTTESVILLE ECLIPSE

by Sally Zakariya

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.

THE CANDIDATE

by Aaron Poochigian

Get up, Fernando. We must try again.
I know, I know, this is the age of shrill
abhorrence, but we are American—
the future is a family picnic still.

It’s bad we two have dozed through early summer
here on the peeling stoop of unsuccess
while truth got slaughtered, and the numb got number
to slurs, massacres, treason and the press,

so go put on a suit and running shoes.
We’ll knock like missionaries. If they spit,
whip out their Colts and sputter toxic nonsense,

we can at least yield with an easy conscience,
at least have done our best to do a bit
of good, Fernando, when we hugely lose.

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His first book of poetry The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press) was published in 2012; his second book Manhattanite, winner of the 2016 Able Muse Poetry Prize,  came out in December of 2017. His thriller in verse Mr. Either/Or was released by Etruscan Press in Fall of 2017. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement.

AGAINST PURITY

by Judy Kronenfeld

My father slipped out of Nazi Germany 

in history’s hidden pocket, but the sister

and her family he never talked about stepped 

over the crack between everyday

and juggernaut (deportiert 1942, verschollen
in Auschwitz, or für tot erklart

in the same hell). 

Briefly paused in Recife

on the way to Ascension Island,

courtesy of the U.S. Army, 1944, my father took in

the faces in gradations of brown,

and said, according to family legend:

“We should all intermarry

until we blend.” As if, to fuse 

the blacks and whites, the us

and them tense in his newly beloved

America would move us towards

a gene-pool Esperanto, one flavor, nothing

sticking out, nothing to hoist

a flag, or cross or crescent on.

Even a star. 

        

He dipped his pinky

in the Passover wine to spill the ten drops 

for the plagues God visited on the Egyptians,

and with his post-retirement

congregation, bowed to praise

the Creator “who has set us apart.”

But never held himself

apart or wished a plague

on anyone. In his decline, when congregants

visited the dementia wing, he could still mumble

the Hebrew prayers he’d learned by rote

as a kid, though almost everything 

in his life—including Paula, Mendel, 

Hermann and Charlotte—

was by then verschollen.

But someone is always saying

We’ve fallen from our ancient  purity—
take back our country!

        

Someone like Anders Breivik, self-trained in pure

ruthlessness, whose bomb and bullets 

shattered the charm enclosing open Norway. 

I remember  all of Oslo—like a village—

celebrating light in the dark 

of the autumnal equinox, 

gathering for the River Walk, 

the mud-slick banks of the Akerselva glowing

with candles and torches, spangles flickering

off the silver foil the school kids used 

to decorate the trees, all families—adopted African

or Asian children, Muslim mothers

in their sculpted head-scarves—

safe as houses.

And someone else, afraid to disagree,

will wave a torn and faded

flag, so long suppressed,

and holler yes!         

        

Like the proud father who bows

to God when his wife-and-kids-abandoning son 

fighting for Islamic State in Syria

is killed, who celebrates that son’s

martyr’s wedding (though the mother says

‘it’s a funeral for me’) in a great tent 

draped with black. 

        

It makes me want 

all things maculate, muddied

mottled, pocked, all things

tainted,     

stained,

blotchy, motley,

mongrel, splotched,

hybrid, scrambled,

half-caste —

If that’s what it takes

to defy Ein Volk, Ein Reich
Ein Führer, the wished-for

Caliphate, Judea and Samaria,

Trump’s Muslim- and Latino-

free America.         

Judy Kronenfeld’s most recent books of poetry are Shimmer (WordTech Editions, 2012) and the second edition of Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (Antrim House, 2012), winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her fourth full collection, Bird Flying through the Banquet, will be published by FutureCycle Press in the spring of 2017. Her poems have appeared widely in  print and online journals including American Poetry Journal, Calyx, Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, Connotation Press, DMQ Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Louisville Review, Natural Bridge, The Pedestal, Portland Review, Sequestrum, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stirring, and Valparaiso Review, and in more than twenty anthologies. She is Lecturer Emerita, Dept. of Creative Writing, University of California, Riverside, and Associate Editor of the online journal, Poemeleon.