THE UNITED STATES OF BRAZIL

by Indran Amirthanayagam 

I throw up my hands. I cannot 

understand how half the country 

votes for stepping off the cliff 

of righteousness, the rule 

of law, protection of the weak 

and the other; how so many 

can see only belly button,

door lock, money swirling

on line, quick payments 

and the roaring feijoada, 

caipirinhas flowing 

and no more focus

on that favela up the hill.

Pied Piper and the Bible,

holiness and the puritan’s

American dream, wealth 

equals God’s blessing,

but aren’t we in Brazil…

the evangelical globalized,

localized, homogenized, 

two frontier myths become one, 

the United States of Brazil,

at least half the residents

singing hymns, marching 

to the sea to build beach-

front property, marching 

to the forest to burn it down.

Indran Amirthanayagam received Sri Lanka's State Literary Award for White Space Sonnets.  He won the Paterson Poetry Prize for The Elephants of Reckoning. His Lettre aux residents du monde is forthcoming from L'Harmattan. Amirthanayagam edits Beltway Poetry <www.beltwaypoetry.com>publishes at Beltway Editions >www.beltwayeditions.com>. He writes indranmx.substack.com

MISDEAL

by W. Barrett Munn

Cartoon by Clay Jones

Once there was a leader who wasn’t ready

for the effects his warring caused.

He tried to create an army out of blather,

and ordered his followers to blather, too.

He’d drawn a line in the sand

and crossed it off his to-Bi list,

having placed his faith in himself

to prevent missteps—

The people got pissed.

Terrified of losing control, the man in charge

sold his soul to the same devil

he’d been embellishing as a threat.

The leader swore

on a gold bar that sat on top a Bible

that his soul had always been hidden

inside a sack full of cash. A deal was struck—

The enemy got to win the war,

got all the cash, and all the rockets

as long as they promised—which they did—

while keeping their fingers crossed.

Winston Munn writes as W. Barrett Munn because initially he thought that sounded cooler and he had been named after Elizabeth Barrett, later Browning, his mother's favorite poet. He's been fortunate to have been selected before for The New Verse News along with a number of other publications. He lives in Oklahoma and rarely comes up for air as in Oklahoma it's always open season on progressives.

ANOTHER DEADLY ONE

by B. N. Faraj

If God decreed the Book to be revised

to make the seven eight and add a sin

with which do you suppose he would begin—

the deadliest, the one that's most despised?

Do you believe there is a bigger vice

that tramples decency and butchers grace

and puts to shame our fumbling human race

than what is being committed by ICE?

B. N. Faraj is a writer and poet living in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Detroit and a master’s degree from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in Transference, the anthology Mother, a Title Just above Queen, and elsewhere.

ANTHEM

by Thomas DeFreitas

America is Bible and battery acid, Krispy Kreme and Christian soldiers, MAGA hats and “good people on both sides.” Forced birth, illegal miscarriages, classrooms from which history is deleted, whitewashed. Here we lock up refugees and confiscate their rosaries only to throw them away. Here we threaten families who display the wrong yard-signs. Here we say the Lord's Prayer at the end of twelve-step meetings, “not allied with any sect.” Liberty’s arm is tired from holding up that torch for all these bloody years. A voice-over announces the death, by embarrassment, of The New Colossus.

America is Deliverance and Don’t Say Gay. Fireworks on the Esplanade, the cannonade of 1812. Senatorial thoughts, congressional prayers. Spare the machine-gun, spoil the child. Wives submitting to their husbands, who give them black-and-blue merit-badges for overcooking the lasagna. America: a hot flat ounce of cola in a patriotic can. Plastic and persimmon. Sassafras and sadism.
 
America welcomes you if you’re One Of Us.

Thomas DeFreitas was born in Boston in 1969. A graduate of the Boston Latin School, he attended the University of Massachusetts, both in Boston and in Amherst. His poems have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Plainsongs, Ibbetson Street, Pensive, and elsewhere. His latest collection is Walking Between the Raindrops (Kelsay Books, 2025).

TRUMP AI GENERATES HIS SECOND INAUGURATION

by Chad Parenteau

Holding, staring at open bible
with no words. He knew it.
God’s law is whatever you want.
 
Behind him, swiftboat Swifties
dressed in handmaiden style,
coats, blouses buttoned to nape.
 
Harem of doting daughters, 
great grab bags of grabbables, 
whole cabinet of nondisclosures.
 
Blonde broken up by added spots
of colored faces, hands in gnarled
prayer, proof they weren’t paid.
 
He swears off to imagined duties 
under a dome of glass as strong
as his faith in this divine design. 

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His latest collection is The Collapsed Bookshelf. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and anthologies such as French Connections and Reimagine America. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. Chad generated these AI graphics on behalf of the former guy.

DANGEROUS STORIES IN THE AMERICAN PSYCHE

by Marilyn Letts

When I was a child                 in the 1970s

            I lived in Calgary

            I heard Jesus died for me at Calvary

I spoke as a child                     “Are they the same?”

            People laughed, showed me a globe

            Israel on the other side 

I felt as a child               when in the Bible, God said

            Don’t touch my chosen people!

            He meant me and Israel

I thought as a child                 Israel

            in the book of Exodus & the Calgary Herald

            fought their enemies, yet again

When I became a woman  the texts (and the news)

            read genocide  

I put away childish things   and grieve

Note: Italicized phrases in the poem reference 1 Corinthians 13:11, 1 Chronicles 16:22.

Marilyn Letts is a poet and writer who loves to experiment. Her poetry publications include FreeFall Magazine, Feathertale Review, and Other Voices. She lives on the traditional territories of the peoples of the Treaty 7 region and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Districts 5 & 6.

MEMO FROM THE PRINCIPAL OF ANTONIN SCALIA HIGH SCHOOL, CHARITY OK

RE: AMENDED COURSE OF STUDY FOR THE 2024-25 ACADEMIC YEAR

by Matthew E. Henry

AI-generated photograph of the Library of our fictitious Antonin Scalia High School

Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Requires Public Schools to Teach the Bible. —The New York Times, June 27, 2024

happy final days of summer. as you can imagine, central office

has been inundated with queries on how you—our intrepid educators—

will meet superintendent Walter’s mandate to immediately “incorporate

the Bible…as an instructional support.” while the Bible has important 

cultural, literary, political, and spiritual significance, most educators                                                                       

outside the English and social studies departments are unsure how 

to accomplish this without running afoul of parents, the school board, 

the dept of education, state senators, the ACLU, and the myriad

acronymed mother groups multiplying in our midst. the admin team,

with help from your dept heads, composed the suggestions below.

divided by content area, the following should be read as inspiration,

not limitations to your academic freedom. the endnotes are provided

only as a resource, should you choose to familiarize yourselves with the texts. 

 

Drama/Performance Arts: students can compose monologues 

on the benefits of feigning mental illness,¹ stage a morality play 

focusing on the perils of drunken fathers being sexually assaulted 

by their children,² or send up a musical about a king singing 

and dancing before his subjects, his penis flapping in the wind.³

 

Foreign Languages: compose conversational scenarios imparting 

the importance of language as a means of bridging cultural gaps,⁴

communing with spiritual beings,⁵ and mitigating the slaughter 

of 42,000 people for mispronouncing a Hebrew word.⁶

 

Government/Economics: stage a mock trial for a woman who 

grabbed the penis of the naked man dominating her husband 

in a physical altercation—should her hand be cut off without pity?⁷

host a debate on the fairness of a prophet being mauled by a lion 

for not disfiguring another prophet.⁸ present case studies of God 

smearing fecal matter on the faces of corrupt politicians⁹ and 

how acts of personal violence are Jesus’ preferred method 

of addressing the harms of unfettered, exploitative capitalism.¹⁰

 

Health/Sex Education: have students build interactive websites 

or slide decks on donkey-sized dicks with horse-volume emissions,¹¹

the nature of wet dreams,¹² reasons for avoiding menstruating women,¹³

the risks of ‘pulling out’ as a birth control method,¹⁴ and how to craft 

sex toys from precious metals.¹⁵

 

Home Economics: experiment with recipes for barley bread baked

with pellets of human waste,¹⁶ mixed drinks appropriate for political 

assassinations,¹⁷ and patterns for sewing sackcloth coverings 

for repentant cows.¹⁸

 

Mathematics: construct word problems to calculate the number of nights 

one could survive in a big fish,¹⁹ how many horsemen are needed 

for apocalyptic destruction,²⁰ how large a skin-scarf one could quilt

from 200 Philistines foreskins,²¹ and the means of equally distributing—

around a set geographic region—the remains of a woman gang-r*ped 

to death and then hacked to pieces by her husband.²²

 

Physical Education: teach the importance of conditioning by placing 

students in the athletic shoes of the murdered prophets of Baal²³

or the young men unable to escape bears sent to avenge the bald prophet 

they mocked.²⁴ dodge ball can be supplemented with a mini-lesson 

on throwing the infants of one’s enemies against jagged rocks.²⁵

 

Science Classes: students can calculate the impact of a boy falling 

from a window after dozing off during a sermon that ran too long,²⁶

and the amount of refracted light needed to prevent another watery geocide.²⁷

they can also determine the physical and chemical changes needed 

to liquify a golden statue enough for forced human consumption,²⁸

and the active ingredients in a potion to impel hysterectomies.²⁹

 

Speech/Rhetoric Class: suggest the usefulness of ad homien attacks,

such as referring to your enemies as aborted fetuses³⁰ and openly praying

they fall victim to botched circumcisions.³¹

 

once again, these are only suggestions. if you have any further questions, 

please bring them to the attention of your dept head, building admin, and 

the four new “biblical coaches” the district has hired to support you.

unrelated, recent budgetary concerns leave us unable to maintain

funding for professional development, academic conferences, and 

continuing education efforts of faculty for the foreseeable future.

here’s to a wonderful beginning of the school year: GO CRUSADERS!

 

11 Samuel 21:10-14 | 2 Genesis 9:20-27 and Genesis 19:31-38 | 3 2 Samuel 6:14-20 | 4 Genesis 11:1-9 | 5 1 Corinthians chapter 14 | 6 Judges 12:5-6 | 7 Deuteronomy 25:11-12 | 8 1 Kings 20:35-36 | 9 Malachi 2:1-3 | 10  John 2:13-17 | 11 Ezekiel 23:20 | 12 Deuteronomy 23:10 | 13 Leviticus15:19-30 | 14 Genesis 38:8-10 | 15 Ezekiel 16:17 | 16 Ezekiel 4:12 | 17 Judges 5:24-27 | 18 Jonah 3:7-10 | 19 Jonah chapter 2 | 20 Revelation 6:1-8 | 21 1 Samuel 18:27 | 22 Judges chapter 19 | ²³ 1 Kings 18:16-40 | 24 2 Kings 2:23-24 | 25 Psalm 137:8-9 | 26 Acts 20:7-9 | 27 Genesis 9:13-17| 28Exodus 32:20 | 29 Numbers 5:11-31 | 30 Psalms 58:8 | ³¹ Galatians 5:11-12.

Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of six poetry collections, most recently said the Frog to the scorpion. He is an educator and editor who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. He writes about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground at www.MEHPoeting.com .

KING DONALD VERSION

by Rick Mullin

by Dave Whamond

I’m very friendly with the Pope of Rome.
In fact he likes the Bible I put out.
I have many, many copies in my home.

Bound in leather and embossed with chrome,
Trump Bibles make the stories sing and shout.
I’m very friendly with the Pope of Rome

who’s traded in his New Revised, that tome
of lies, for something we can talk about.
Trump Bibles. Home just isn’t home

without my Book of Acts. Amen. Shalom.
My TV pals agree the Book has clout—
Joel Osteen and the Pope of Rome.

And I mean all of them. The Astrodome 
has never seen the crowds that we turn out.
There are many mansions in my home

and proverbs in the many fields I roam.
I spread the Word and rid the world of doubt.
A holy boatload’s on its way to Rome.
I have many, many copies in my home.

Rick Mullin is a painter and poet living in northern New Jersey. His latest books are Huncke, Exot Books, and The Basilisk, Dos Madres Press.

THE GOD BLESS THE USA BIBLE

by Gilbert Allen

by J.D. Crowe

What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?

And they bargained with him for thirty pieces of silver.

                                                              —Matthew 26:15

Verily, verily

Donald Iscariot

hawking the Holy Word

with MAGA zeal

offering Jesus Christ

pseudoreligiously

for sixty bucks. Just twice
thirty! A steal!

Gilbert Allen, a member of the Travelers Rest United Methodist Church, already has a Bible. For more information about him and his work, check out the interview at https://slantbooks.org/close-reading/interviews/belladonna-beautiful-but-deadly-qa-with-gilbert-allen/ .