LULL

by Rick Mullin




Another month of stay-at-home-or-die.
The choice is getting tougher day by day!
A toss-up in the waning April sky
as gun enthusiasts come out to play
a game with cable news. Misspelling hate
as usual. Extolling T***p and Pence,
co-opting clumsy slogans from the left
about the right to choose. Try making sense
of their disdain for science. The bereft-
of-access taking on the Nanny State?
We’d buy it if the even-less-endowed
were not in body bags at Lost and Found.
We switch to radio. It’s not as loud
and, next up, we’ll have something from The Sound
of Music—Stick around for “Bach at 8”…


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.

THESE FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED AGAINST THE VIRUS

by Eric Weil


 

with apologies to T. S. Eliot

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is a viral month, breeding
Contagion out of the air, mixing
Distance and desire, streaming
Dull shows with spring pollen.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.


II. A Game of Chess

The Lectern he stands at, like a burnished throne,
Glows in TV lights, where the ass
Between the flags flings his fruited lies
While gilded sycophants peep out
(And Fauci hides his eyes behind his wing),
Doubles the flames of narcissistic rage.


III. The Fire Sermon

The hospitals are broken, the last surgical masks
Fray and sink into wet piles.

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.


IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Epidemiologist, a fortnight dead,
Has missed the nurses’ cries, ironic memes,
Corpses lain in reefer trucks.

O you unmasked who shop and cough to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once healthy and hale as you.


V. What the Thunder Said

After the ICU lights on sweaty faces
After the agony in sterile places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and hospital hall
They who were living now are dead
We who are living now are dying
With a little patience
Shantih   shantih shantih

Eric Weil stays inside in Raleigh, NC. He's a retired English prof who has three chapbooks in print: A Horse at the Hirshhorn, Returning from Mars, and Ten Years In. Other poems have recently appeared or will soon appear in Red Planet Review, Free State Review, Pinesong, Kakalak, and Ponder Review.

EASTER PASSION AS NOTRE-DAME COLLAPSES

by Earl J Wilcox





In my town today, construction workers
digging in red clay clipped cable lines
to thousands of homes causing early
morning mayhem—no computer
access, cable news, email, stock market,
baseball scores, weekly NEW YORKER—
civilization as we know it. They say, I
learned many hours later, the fire began
in the spire while all morning I fumed
and fiddled the hours away by cleaning
listening to old CDs, feeding humming birds,
washed/dried/folded three loads of
laundry, walked for 35 minutes—all
before noon as the Cathedral burned.
Early afternoon, as the fire spread
and panic roared in Paris, I napped,
after eating a spare lunch of boiled
cabbage, lima beans and a small meat
patty, walked again, vacuumed,
angrily and with petty vengeance
sprayed carpet bees buzzing my
pergola, watered an Easter Lily,
began the first of several classic opera
CDs, strolled to the street to fetch junk
mail, texted family and friends,
(none mentioned a great fire!)
as Parisians panicked in peril, prayed
for God’s intervention here in Holy Week.
In my passion, I ignorantly enjoyed our
Magnificent Spring sunshine, took
Images of my majestic azaleas, wondering
how a pilgrim feels spending April in Paris.


Earl J Wilcox is regular contributor to TheNewVerse.News.

APRIL IN THE UPPER MIDWEST

John Savoie teaches great books at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

DON'T NAP IN THE THUNDER

by Dianna MacKinnon Henning

Give my umbrella to the Rain Dogs / For I am a Rain Dog too.

Don’t assume the springs won’t break free
from their box mattress—sheets flaunting their disarray
across the bed, or

count on scenery through unwashed
windows, or that mice, anticipating
your arrival, will vacate. If

there’s a wishing-well in the front
yard, likely its weed-clogged, so
cast no coin, make no wish. If

you should happen to rest
on the hay-stuffed sofa, and a torrential
downpour slams your solitude, or should you

contemplate buying this foreclosed relic
for a getaway, don’t ease into the solitude
of sleep. Just when such calm seduces

you on the edge of its tricky precipice, thunder
shivers the walls of your potential buy, and any sanity
you thought you possessed surrenders to the rain

dogs—their teeth slavered with hope.

Dianna MacKinnon Henning holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Published in, in part: The Moth, Ireland; Sukoon, Volume 5; Naugatuck River Review, Lullwater Review, The Red Rock Review, The Kentucky Review, The Good Works Review, The Main Street Rag, California Quarterly, Poetry International and Fugue. Finalist in Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award in the UK. Three-time Pushcart nominee. Henning  received several CAC grants and taught through California Poets in the Schools and through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program. Henning’s third poetry book Cathedral of the Hand published 2016 by Finishing Line Press.

EIGHTY-SIX ON MY SPEED DIAL

by James Bettendorf

Records fell as an April snowstorm blanketed the Upper Midwest. —CHANNEL 3000

The shadow I see in the meadow is really a sheep in wolf’s clothing.  I go swimming in the small pond but the ice is so thick I have to break it with an ax so I can’t chop the tree branches into firewood.  It is so cold in April I choke on clouds of ice.  I wrap myself in a buffalo robe for warmth but the snow keeps falling.  I wear a large wool hat but the snow keeps falling.  The sun is shining but the snow keeps falling.  Even the sunshine I feel is eight minutes old.  My congressman gives me the cold shoulder.  It is hard to believe anything he says. Perhaps I don’t get his attention.  If I see a poisonous spider I will crush it with my shoe.

James Bettendorf is a retired math teacher writing in Brooklyn Park, MN. He completed a two-year poetry internship in the Loft Master Track program in 2009 and has published a book of poems swimming in the earth which includes art by his daughter. He is also a contributor to  Gatherings, A Forward Poetry Anthology and In the Company of Others. He has had poems published in several journals including Rockhurst Review, Light Quarterly, Star Line, Ottertail Review, Talking Stick, and Free Verse along with several on-line publications.

SPRING PEEPERS

by Martin Elster

Spring Peeper. Image source: Virginia Herpetological Society

Spring peepers trill and whistle in between
the avenue (where drivers rush toward shops),
construction site, the woods, the putting green.
No one stops to listen to these drops

of sentience small as buttercups and shrill
as piccolos. They hide amid the stalks
that rise up from a liquid eye as still
as a spyglass pointed at the equinox,

Unblinking for eternity. The first
of April. The environs dance and ring
with notes from frogs who, though they’re unrehearsed,
belt out a song precisely tuned to spring.

These lusty soon-to-be inamoratos,
iconic crooning harbingers, will soon
be silent. You who ride inside your autos,
roll down the windows! Do not wait till June!

Martin Elster, author of There’s a Dog in the Heavens!, is also a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in such journals as Astropoetica, The Flea, The Martian Wave, The Rotary Dial, and in the anthologies Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 Rhysling Anthology, and New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan. Martin’s poem, “Walking With the Birds and the Bones Through Fairview Cemetery” received first prize in the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition 2014.

APRIL

by T.D. Peterson

Image source: The Project Gutenberg eBook, Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories, by M. T. W.

Cruel, I should
not mention our nation's
big celebration
of pecans, welding, and poetry
is nearing, a punishment
I believe, friends, that would hurt me
lots more than you
at the annual convention
of benevolent shindigs again this year.
Pecan pie for dessert though
if able to steel your wits through
haiku roundtable, known in some circles as the yawn
from on and on ... and the PowerPoint presentation:
Metallurgy in the Dirges of Wallace Stevens.


T.D. Peterson lives with Karen, and  dogs Honu and Sherpa in Lincoln, Nebraska, nowhere near the Mississippi.

CRUEL APRIL

by Judy Kronenfeld





                          after the Boston Marathon, and after seeing
                                the documentary, “Syria behind the Lines”


Crystalline cool days—bougainvillea
spills from our walls like rivulets
outdoing one another, like lavish
manes of brilliant, curly scarlet
tossed flirtatiously by the wind—
and in our yard, exploding galaxies
of snow-in-summer; popped up orange liqueur
poppy cups; torches of white iris…

Exploding fire, and the red ochre of blood

spattered over Boylston Street, as if a dark perversion

of Holi came frenzied through—no playful

faces splashed marigold, indigo,

saffron praising spring—leaving behind shreds

of clothes, glass, flesh…

And in Syria, somewhere, again
and again, convulsed young faces
buried in the chests of older men,
whose hands pull the faces in to blot out
what they’re seeing and their screaming,
so the fighting can go on.

Still in Syria somewhere—opulence
of nets of oranges and grapefruits
hanging above the fruit-juice stands piled
with lemons, carrots, melons? Is there hope
for cool sweetness in the throat—intensities
of blended watermelon, strawberry,
banana, milk, honey, mint—families strolling
in the cooling midnight streets, old men
playing chess on 2 A.M. sidewalks…?
             
On a talk show two broadcasters

argue almost raucously over

whether a newspaper was right

to cut off at the knees a photo

of a man’s legs blasted off below

the knees, in Boston…

And, somewhere, in Syria, again,
and again, a dreamy, peaceful
sweetness sweeps over the bearded face
of a very young man, many times wounded,
many times returned to the rebel lines—
who has already or will join al-Nusra—as he speaks
of his hope to become a martyr.

Here, at home, in California,
where the bougainvillea bursts
in a frenzy of bloom, two friends—a relative,
a poet—dead in the ordinary old way,
of early cancer, of old age.


Judy Kronenfeld’s most recent collections of poetry are Shimmer (WordTech Editions, 2012) and the second edition of  Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of The Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize for 2007 (Antrim House, 2012). Recent anthology appearances include Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse Press, 2012) and Love over 60: An Anthology of Women's Poems (Mayapple Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in many print and online journals such as Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Fox Chase Review,  Foundling Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Hiram Poetry Review, Natural Bridge, New Verse News, The Pedestal, Poetry International,  Spoon River Poetry Review, Stirring, and The Women’s Review of Books.

NOTES ON AN APRIL DAY

by David Chorlton

We returned a pigeon to the sky
where he belongs this morning.
Otherwise, it’s a quiet day

if we ignore the news
of the nuclear mouthed supreme
leader watching oriental snow
fall through his binoculars.
There’s fresh snow too

in the country we left behind
where spring comes in disguise.
Is it caused by climate change

or was the past like this
and we simply forgot?
It’s ninety degrees today
in Arizona, where the legislature
wants to take away civil unions
and give schoolteachers guns.

The mailman delivered only
the usual requests for money
while the same message keeps landing
in the electronic inbox
from a friend whose mind

we hear is becoming like snow
and melting away. What use
is information to her, from radio
or the press? Why bother
telling her the world she tried to improve
is refusing assistance? It’s better to reply

with a few words to say
how gently the afternoon has passed
and hold on to whatever peace
is ours to share.

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and still sees his surroundings with an outsider's eye. This helps his writing projects, which include a new poetry collection, "The Devil's Sonata," from FutureCycle Press.