IN THESE DESPERATE TIMES

by Joan Mazza 

Image source: WikiHow

I’ve taken desperate measures.
In my bedroom, I’ve hung a horseshoe
to prevent nightmares. Perhaps
I should take down the feathered
dreamcatcher gifted by a right-winged

lover. In these times, I say rabbit each day
on waking, consult the oracle
at the east end of the pond. It hops
away on Basho’s splash. I’ve taken up
a forked stick to walk the property
and search for water. It dips

everywhere. Pointing to the four directions,
I’ve drawn the number 8 in the ground,
added pebbles to the grooves—insurance
of good luck. Time to replenish my stock
of supplies. I’ve eaten through

my stash of dry and canned goods bought
when I feared Ebola, used up the sprays
for killer bees. I’ve dumped all the pots
with collected water for mosquitoes
breeding Zika. On my head, I plan

to make a nest to wear a ferret or a rat,
train it to defend my chastity and sacred
honor. I wear clothes inside out, careful
not to break a mirror, know empty vessels
rattle loudest. I drink quiet to calm down.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Slipstream, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art. 

THE BURIAL BOYS OF EBOLA

by Alexa Poteet

Sherdrick Koffa, estranged from his family because he helped burn bodies during the Ebola outbreak. Credit Samuel Aranda for The New York Times, December 10, 2015

In Monrovia,
the wakes used to go on for weeks.
The living applied ointment to the dead
with gentle fingertips, kissed
their eyelids shut. Scrubbed under fingernails,
pressed through earrings. Sewed garments of gold, green
for those who would never dress themselves again. Bodies
were not washed but made new and dirtless
for the next life. Their pockets stuffed

with coins. Working men
went days without food to buy
mahogany caskets, marble markers
and plots large enough for houses.
On Decoration Day, brigades
of families brought bleach and good towels
to polish the hand-chiseled tombstones.
This, Liberia once said, was how to cross
into the next life. To keep ghosts
from weeping at your bedside in the night.
There were no burial boys then, you see.

Now—goggled, gloved, otherplanetary—they arrive. Breath
and sweat trapped in a terrarium of plastic. The medical
membrane that keeps good in and bad out. Underneath,
the pockets of their oil-stained clothes
brim with matchbooks. The tools
of this trade are plain.  The boys don’t cry
anymore because the masks fog in the heat. Burning,
the state says, is the only way

The mourners scream, beat their heads with fists
for children set ablaze. Their hair curling into
charred sulfuric tendrils, skin blistered
black.Their pooled blood—an acrid human ore.
Burial boys is a misnomer;
usually, they don’t have to.

Guardians of a safety no one can bear
to want, their belongings litter the street
outside childhood homes. Familiar voices break
in the telephone: You burning body?
Then I’nt want see you no more around me.
The Ministry of Health did not invite them
to the ceremony where foreign doctors
clasped hands with the president.

It sends them moonshine in old cassava crates
once a month. Easy, because they live together;
there’s nowhere else. At night, they pour
cloudy liquor for each other. Clean fingernails
before shooting up
until their minds are spotless.


Alexa Poteet is a poet and freelance writer from Washington, DC with a master’s degree in poetry from Johns Hopkins University. Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, Lines + Stars, and PennUnion among others. She has also enjoyed staff positions at the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The National Interest.

DON’T JEWISH

by Max Ochs

from Moby Dick or, The Whale. Illustrated by Rockwell Kent published by The Modern Library, New York, 1930

“I have no objection to any person’s religion, be that as it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person doesn’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; and makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him. “   —Herman Melville


1
Attending Eastport Methodist’s annual Interfaith
New Years Eve service, I hear an Imam’s lovely voice;
it hearkens me to myriad wondrous childhood hours
in the synagogue we called Shul, where I loved to hear
my Hebrew cantor in prayer. A number was tattooed
on his forearm; his fierce eyes had witnessed the camps,
unspeakable things. Blessed be Reb Hammer, who taught
me to sing: Boruch Atah Adonai.
This Imam was singing  in the same heartfelt, earnest
and strict way as Rev. Hammer. That made me love
the Imam, as he called upon Allah, as a cousin. As family.
He disappeared before I could shake his hand,
look him in the eye and say: Salaam, you and I
both spermed down from one ancestor, Abraham,
upon whom God called, demanding sacrifice;
the same son I call Isaac and you call Ishmael,
a name which now narrates Moby Dick.

The image of Ishmael looking to knock someone’s
hat off in New Bedford, summons the mythology
of my father’s stories of being a tough
young street fighter, ready and rough.
Sound his name, Isaac, as a sudden laugh aloud.  
In 1927, Izzy clenched his fists in Far Rockaway,
and felt just as  punchy as brother Ishmael had
100 years before, opting to up with Ahab, aside
a devout cannibal, the harpooner Queequeeg;
Ahab the white-whale-chasing monomaniac.

1927, in Queens, a politically dangerous time
and place to out as Hebrew, around rival gangs.
Don’t Jewish (you were white). Don’t signify.
Not only Medical schools, even city sidewalks
had Jewish quotas; the system was biased then,
we heard, in favor of [LOL] waspy men.
Don’t you wish you were not? All that singing,
with a crying voice, like gypsies! Opt for the above
and kiss shiksas under the Brooklyn boardwalk.
Let them play tennis, where nothing means love.

Neither today is it fun to be statistically sucked in
to prison by society’s vacuum for being like Queequeeg
or Huck’s Jim, a brown male. My friends, already tired
of Ferguson, can’t identify; Ebola hemorrhaging in Africa,
eyesore ISIS spreading down Levant its blue videos of death
by beheading. My friends still watch TV, but any more
news and they’ll get depressed. I start to spout
war-warn rhetoric, my sermon about our future.
Our weary globe’s a-warming; no peace for Arab, Jew;
holy elephants poached for tusk, rhinoceros for horn;
Chestnut trees, honey bees, cod fisheries disappear.
Old species gone, sperm whales sure as you’re born.

Queequeeg’s Black Yojo Doll, Ishmael accepts;
The entire world’s other brands of religion too.
As long as it doesn’t insult or try to kill him.
Okay, for once, irony: darkness escapes light.
Ain’t no fluke, an enemy compels us to war.
Again. Honey, I know, but this time, even if
this be our fathers again, looking for a fight:
Maybe we’ve got just cause, and we ought.
And Jim shall have a song in scary cells of jail.
One sermon sold “inherent dignity”; I bought.
Avast, thou!  Ye haven’t seen the white whale?

When the Imam calls the population to prayer,
so all may pray together to the all-powerful creator,
remember Ishmael’s example: tolerate anybody’s
faith if they will, in turn, tolerate yours. Don’t
you wish you were free? Then pray on your knees
in the hospital with Ahab and the other amputees.


For decades, Annapolis poet Max Ochs used “stolen moments” to scribble poems at night while working by day for his county’s anti-poverty agency and the local conflict resolution center. Like his famous cousin, songwriter Phil Ochs, Max has maintained a faith in what organizers can do for just causes. Many poems reflect on his career as mediator, activist and teacher; others chronicle an ongoing dialogue between a “failed atheist” and the gods. Archived podcasts of his poetry and music can found on Grace Cavalieri’s “The Poet and the Poem” (Library of Congress website).  A “primitive American” musician, Ochs learned his licks from some blues greats: Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House, all of whom stayed with him in New York City. Tompkins Square records, which depicted Ochs as an “Obscure Giant of Acoustic Guitar," featured four of Ochs’s poems on the 2005 CD, Hooray for Another Day. Ochs lives with his wife, Suzanne, on the picturesque Severn River, just north of Annapolis, Maryland.

SCARED S#!TLESS IN MAINE

by Paul Dickey

They say you may get Ebola

if in public you sip a Coca Cola,

or just being in Maine,

or in Dallas deplane.

They don’t know s#!t from Shinola.

She just went for a ride on her bike,
but was followed by folks with a mike.
They wanted to know
she’d stay home with her beau,
but her answer the Guv did not like.

The reporters were terribly scared,
but it was for our safety they cared.
They got near her so close
with their questions so gross
to warn it’s our air she has shared.

But soon, 21 days will pass
though the Guv won’t admit he’s an ass:
“I just did what’s right
though it caused quite a fright,
but next time, I won’t mess with this lass.”


Paul Dickey’s most recent volume of poetry is Wires Over the Homeplace from Pinyon Publishing.  He published They Say This is How Death Came Into the World with Mayapple Press in 2011. Dickey’s poetry has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Potomac Review, Prairie Schooner, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Mid-American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Pleaides, Bellevue Literary Review and many other journals, both print and online.  Additionally, Dickey daily posts humorous political limericks such as these at his Facebook site, The Liberal Limerick and has published an e-book of his witty verse Liberal Limericks of 2012 (available free at Amazon.)

O BEAUTIFUL

by George Held

Image source: I am a Liberian not a virus

Liberia:

African nation created by and for freed American slaves in 1820;

name derived from “liberty”

The stout ebony man in the navy pinstriped suit
And steel-rim specs and white hair and goatee
Speaks into the mike of the lone news station
To cover his presser. His voice is strong, his speech
Articulate, with a faint African lilt. He just wants
To say that he is a Liberian, a West African,
And a healthy man; he is not ebola, he does not
Have ebola. Please do not stigmatize me
Or other West Africans or Liberians as though                        
We are a virus. We are human beings.

What he leaves for his American audience
To think is that he is a despised black man,
He is a cursed West African, a Typhoon Mary
Of a Liberian trying to excuse his type of danger
To our spacious skies, that he should be deported
From our fruited plains, our purple waves of disdain;
O say, can’t you see the fearful American faces,
The hateful American resentment that wants him
Gone from our midst? O God, bless America
And preserve its totally deserved purity.

George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

WAITING GAME

by George Held

What’s His Name, the Liberian
In Dallas, has died of ebola.

“When will it get me?” That’s what
Our self-absorption wants to know.

We are now in the medieval
Days of the plague updated.

Which will get us first, ebola
Or Islamic State warriors?

That’s what we want to know.
Is it better to die instantly

From a slash across the throat
Or wretchedly after days

Of dehydration from vomiting
And diarrhea?

What happened to Sanctuary
America, the great safe place

With a dependable government
And public-health system?

Where is FDR assuaging
Our fears, TR assailing

The enemy, or swoony Ronnie
Grinning our troubles away?

When have we ever felt so feckless,
So vulnerable, so hopeless

As we witness this waiting game?

George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

THE CRUELEST ANIMAL

by Howie Good

Image source: Love the Giver

I don’t know what to do
about the deaths from Ebola,
or the distress in republics
of the former Soviet Union,
or the hunt for the Taliban,
but the mammoth sunflowers
I grew from seed will tell me,
by the bend in their necks
& the stricken look on their faces,
that it’s finally time to remove
(with new titanium shears!) their heads


Howie Good's latest book of poetry is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014) from MadHat Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely, who does most of the real work.

EBOLA

by Michael Shorb

The deadly Ebola virus that’s killed more than 600 people so far in West Africa may have been smoldering there for years and has almost certainly sickened people who thought they had something else, researchers say. --NBC News, July 20, 2014

From Pointe-Noire to Mombasa
the AIDS Highway
runs through villages
hunched in smoky blue-gum
cooking fires, veers north
into unbroken rain forest
tracts, peels east at Kisangani,
where ageless women walk
its red clay shoulders.

Goes into Uganda, past
immense and turgid
Lake Victoria, past
the Isle of Plagues
where infected monkeys
shriek and gibber bearing
inner leaf storms
of microbial marauders.

Toward Mt. Elgon's
mantle of blue hills
laced with fever trees
and floods of native corn
where warning calls
of Colubus monkeys
explode from the green
crowns of podocarpus trees.

Elephant herds thundered
on this mountain once
scraped Kitum Cave with
salt-hungry
           thrusting tusks
now their
         withered gray skins
are left for roaches
now burnt huts and
blackened rubble bear
broken
Coca Cola bottle
testimony
  of human scale.

Look, you can't kill
all this life without resistance
somewhere along lines
                    of DNA and RNA leading
back in time,

back to our own
brooding progenitors
coming to in Eden,
new in the forest,
learning the art
of trapping fire
just getting their
brain cells wet.

You nailed the biggest
ones with ease
the huge in their lumbering grace
elephant clans
              thirsty water buffaloes
              bitten by fruit bats
no match for jeeps
night vision scopes automatic
rifles, even galaxies
of primal forest
are going under as
populations spawn.

Now villages in Zaire, Guinea, Sri Lanka
boil over into bloody death
first shotgun blasts
to the pineal
eyes running red
as unseen predator armies
                         open maws
sharks in feeding frenzy
multiply fission-like inside
besieged cities
               of liver lung and heart.

Man is meat to this thing
fluid a highway
AIDS a warning shot against the enemy
of human reproduction.

Somewhere earth fights back
will not go down without
clawing the faces of its destroyer.

It waits.

Inert mobility endowed with talent
for change,
         
           easy traveler, breath propelled
villagers afraid Ebola escapes from Grave

dance of microscopic sticks:
Ebola, little sisters of extermination
fire in the cells.


Michael Shorb was published in more than 100 poetry magazines and anthologies including Michigan Quarterly, The Sun, and The Kyoto Journal.  He was nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Award and won a Merit Award for the Franklin Christoph Poetry Contest. Michael succumbed to Gist, a rare form of cancer in August 2012. His book of poetry Whale Walker's Morning was published posthumously in Winter 2013, by Shabda Press.


Editor's note: Michael Shorb wrote this poem when the virus was running amuck in East Africa several years ago; his wife Judith Grogan-Shorb updated it for The New Verse News.

from BECAUSE FEAR NOW IS NEVER FOREIGN TO ME

by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Image source: Postnoon

In Laurie Garrett’s book, The Coming Plague,
death is microscopic, indifferent,
hovering in a friend’s sneeze
or riding piggy-back
on the kiss of reassurance your husband gives you
before he leaves for work in the cotton mill
Joe McCormick later figures out
is where N’zara’s Ebola epidemic started—
a microbe no one in Sudan had seen before,
or anywhere else for that matter,
and so, in the makeshift hospital
that took your husband in the day he started bleeding,
how could they have known what they were facing?

And when nothing they did to treat you helped,
and you died a few days after they buried him,
and your family came to push and pull the waste from your bowels
and to make your corpse vomit
the food sitting undigested in its stomach,
how could they have known
that curled inside this cleansing
meant to send you as pure to your grave
as you were when you fell from your mother’s womb
a death waited to be born
that would cleanse the earth of them as well,
and of all who came to make sure their dead too
had left behind in this world
the last things they’d taken from it?

Or sometimes death is a darkness honing in on you,
a Muriel Degauque, whose Roman Catholic life began
in the coal-mining black-country corner of Belgium.
Handpicked, The New York Times suggests,
for the color of her skin
and the way the voice she spoke her language in
could pacify suspicion, Muriel
stepped off the edge of her days
on November 9, 2005 in Baquba Iraq,
a Muslim come to kill American soldiers,
choosing, though no one knows why—
after she exploded herself,
they found her passport and some papers
but no explanation—choosing
the world to come promised to its martyrs
by her new husband’s religion.

Now, sitting here by myself
in the garden’s south end,
the morning quiet more quiet than usual,
I’m remembering those bullets years ago
that you and Shahob fled,
even though they were fired
far from where you were shopping,
and the shooters were apprehended
before you reached the mall’s exit.
You told me the story that same night,
and after I closed my cell phone,
I went out to walk
beneath the lowest
full moon I’d ever seen,
across the tree-lined campus in Hamilton, NY
where I was writing poetry for the week,
down to the lake,
passing without thinking
close enough to the swan’s nest
my friend had found the day before
that the cob—I was surprised
he was awake—stood up and hissed at me.
He followed behind me a few quick steps,
though he probably thought of it as chasing,
and only when I was safely distant,
returned to his post,
confident his mate and soon-to-be cygnets
were, at least for the time being, safe.

“Stray bullets kill no differently than well-aimed ones,”
you’d said before we hung up,
and as I turned to watch that male bird
settle back down—
one eye, I’m sure, locked on me—
and I plotted a way back to my room
that would not disturb him,
I thought how no vigilance
would have been sufficient
if the force pushing one of those bullets
through the commerce-filled air
of middle class Long Island
had pushed it instead at an angle
precisely intersecting the path
you thought meant safety.

I did not then, as I do not now,
pray, and the gratitude I felt,
large enough though it was
to hold the moon now risen high
and all the endless stars
trying to fill infinity with light,
invoked no debt,
though sometimes
I wish it had.

Richard Jeffrey Newman writes about the impact of feminism on his life as a man and of classical Persian poetry on our lives as Americans. He has published four books, three of which are translations from classical Persian. The Teller of Tales (Junction Press 2011) is the most recent. The Silence of Men, a book of his own poetry, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2006. Newman is Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY. He also curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Queens. The poem published here is one part of a longer piece called Because Fear Now is Never Foreign to Me.