ELECTION DAY

by Howie Good

We shout for help, but the music from a passing car is so loud our shouts are drowned out. I punch in the emergency number stored on my phone and after listening to interminable ringing get a fuzzy pre-recorded message: “All our representatives are resisting” – assisting? – “other customers at this time.” And people wonder why the Wampanoag, the tribe that taught the Pilgrims how to survive their first winter in Plymouth, still regret it 400 years later. I fear for my country. Bodies are lying here and there and walking through dark forests. 

Howie Good's latest poetry book is The Horses Were Beautiful (2022), available from Grey Book Press. Redhawk Publications is publishing his collection Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems later this year.

ISRAELIS DESTROY PALESTINIAN VILLAGE

A Found Poem from Reuters

by David Radavich

A Palestinian boy at the site of his family’s destroyed tented home in Khirbet Humsah in the Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, November 5, 2020. CREDIT: REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta

Tuesday

a Bedouin village

demolished

displacing 73 Palestinians,

including 41 children.

Tented homes, animal shelters,

latrines, and solar panels

destroyed,

mattresses, computers,

carpets strewn

across the desert

without electricity,

sewage, or running water.

Election Day in the U.S.

869 Palestinians left homeless

so far this year.

Winter is coming.

David Radavich's latest narrative collection is America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery (2019), companion volume to his earlier America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007). Recent lyric collections are Middle-East Mezze (2011) and The Countries We Live In (2014). His plays have been performed across the U.S. and in Europe.

I CHECK THE POLLS AT 5 AM

by Katherine Smith

I rise in the dark to check the last polls,

then wait for light to shine through

 

gold-green leaves before I lace my shoes.

Courage. The sun is shining on the most beautiful

 

leaf, which is dead, and glowing with light.

Everything is metaphor this morning.

 

Even the wind, even my sanity

even the mangled carcass of a groundhog

 

I skirt on the road, whispering please

don’t let it still be there tomorrow.

 

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

I WISH WE COULD ZIP UP THE ELECTION BY TUESDAY

by Phyllis Klein

Trump Zipper published October 31, 2018 by R.J. Matson politicalcartoons.com

I love the zippers in my life,

on skirts, pants, purses.

I even have a dress with three

large silver ones on the diagonal 

across my chest, torso, hips.

Me, as master of my universe,

pulling the tabs open or closed,

the teeth as they fall into a chain line

like a basketball team or a ballet troupe.

Connecting me to the openings and closings

of  the day, to other zippers and zipperers

everywhere. Oh if only everyone could fall

into a compassionate line, close out the cruelties,

open up for human rights, and critical care 

for the Earth. If money wasn’t the only thing. 

If coming together could win the day.

Phyllis Klein’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a finalist in the Sweet Poetry Contest, 2017, the Carolyn Forché Humanitarian Poetry Contest, 2019, and the Fischer Prize, 2019. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2018 and again in 2020. She has a new book, The Full Moon Herald from Grayson Books. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, she sees writing as artistic dialogue between author and readers—an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels. 

BUG

by Gil Hoy

I know it's not
what you want,
but I can't live
if I can't get
inside of you.
To be precise,
I'm not really living
at all. I have no cellular
organelles, no DNA.
I can't grow on my own
and require your genetic
instructions to survive.
I can't continue to multiply
and thrive outside of you. Soap
and water are my kryptonite. Is it
selfish of me to want to exist?
I pray you don't really think so.
Even if  what I have is not much
of a life. Please consider things
from my perspective. If I could,
I'd organize my fellow contagions.
Get us all together to create
a super Pac. I long to keep
the status quo. Both Biden
and Sanders, they scare me.
They listen to scientists. That
nescient man in the White House
doesn't understand what I'm about.
Which is fine with me. Think of me
as a microscopic, infective agent
just looking to blossom. Be kind,
be compassionate come November.
Let's keep our arrangement of quiet
indifference intact. Let's just leave
well enough alone.

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet, Democratic political activist, and semi-retired trial lawyer. He studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared, or will be appearing, in TheNewVerse.News,  Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Tipton Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Ariel Chart, MisfitMagazine, The Potomac, The Penmen Review, One Sentence Poems and elsewhere.

EIGHT HAIKU FALSE-STARTS

by Jenna Lê

Photo: Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar, November 5, 2019

my split ends crackle
in the dry November air

my goose-down coat’s nudged
my cheeks out of existence

my hairy calves scritch
inside my long underwear

the polling place lights
sweat yellow in the distance

the 5 PM sky’s
already blueberry-dark

voters in their booths
crouch walled apart like bento

I mouth my own name
through lips pale as pickled shark

the election judge
smiles sweetly nonjudgmental

Jenna Lê is the author of A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018), which won 2nd Place in the Elgin Awards, and Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear or are forthcoming from AGNI, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Rattle, and West Branch.

PROPOSITION EIGHT

by T R Poulson




Who is she, the woman whose blue eyes reach
out in ads, voice strong, hair blonde?  Her clinic
at stake, she says a thousand lives beseech

me, the voter-hero, to Vote No. I remain the cynic.
Draped with red-filled tubes like snakes, a man bids me
Vote Yes! Gown-wrapped clients refer to unhygienic

rooms where unseen life forms lurk and kid me
not.  Gloves, urine, needles, machines, puddles,
fill my mind along with missing kidneys,

those pulsing beans now shriveled, blood now muddled.
I die without dialysis, a man’s voice proclaims.
My barre-toned back holds twin flesh-cuddled

organs pulsing, cleaning. This vote-luring campaign
forms paths and forks that twist and feel the same.

T R Poulson lives in San Carlos, California.  Her work has appeared previously in TheNewVerse.News, along with Rattle’s Poets Respond, Verdad, Trajectory, J Journal, The Meadow, Delaware Review, and Raintown Review.  She enjoys windsurfing, basketball, and horse racing.

POETRY READING AT CHURCH ON ELECTION DAY

by Earl J Wilcox

Source: Chicago Women Take Action

Munching chicken salad, sipping sweet tea,
they chat amiably, push their food gently
around white china plates, look slightly harried.
They are not their usual relaxed and friendly
fellowship souls. It’s Election Day, this first
Tuesday of November. Though T***P himself
is not officially on the ballot this year, he is
there in candidates who walk like him, talk
like him, spew vile like him, scream like him,
lie like he does. No wonder church members
waiting to hear poems about hope and trust
and honesty and charity and faith—these
and other truths of the human heart—are
sober and vexed on this Election Day.


Earl J Wilcox will try to write a poem today, but even if that does not work out, he will definitely vote!

FIVE EXPLANATIONS

by Gilbert Allen

Kudzu kills or damages other plants by smothering them under a solid blanket of leaves, encircling woody stems and tree trunks, and breaking branches or uprooting entire trees and shrubs. Once established, kudzu grows at a rate of one foot per day; mature vines can be 100 feet long. Kudzu was introduced into the U.S. at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. From 1935 to the mid-1950s, farmers in the South were encouraged to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion. Kudzu is spread by vines that root at the nodes to form new plants. To successfully control kudzu, its extensive root system must be completely eradicated by cutting vines just above the ground and mowing every month for two growing seasons—all cut material must be destroyed. The U.S. Forest Service is searching for biological control agents for kudzu. —The Nature Conservancy

1. Next to that red American clay, bare
and beckoning as a billionaire’s
baseball cap, it seemed
like a giant green blessing.

2. What else to eat in Nagasaki
in September, 1945,
but its white
indestructible roots?

3. Without kudzu, April in South Carolina
would be too full of blue
skies, flowering dogwoods, azaleas
and itself.

4. Men planted it.
Pigs love it.
Why can’t men be pigs?

5. After the first cold Tuesday in November
it still gives death
a good name.


Gilbert Allen has lived in South Carolina for forty years. His most recent books are Catma and The Final Days of Great American Shopping.

THE AGGREGATE

by Rick Mullin

Somewhere out there, not so far away
from all the inconsolable commuters
solemnly interred beneath a day
they’d warded off on personal computers,
wakes the shadow of catastrophe
and rage. Certainly in Tobyhanna,
Pennsylvania, there is little laughter.
Promise fades into a knotted red bandanna
in Wisconsin on the morning after.
In New Hampshire, Pyrrhic victory
suggests a mere alternative to death.
My morning walk to Wall Street, out of phase,
slow-motion, almost out of breath,
is interrupted by a stranger’s gaze.
And I don’t like the way he looks at me.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.

HAIKU

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: Flickr

yesterday

small holes somebody shot

into the stop sign

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley. Her chapbook Various Lies is available from Finishing Line Press.

SUCCESSOR S/ELECTION

by Karen Neuberg

Image source: LevittownNow

We are unsure who to s/elect
and take a peek under. This leads
to new understanding and at least one
skinned knee. How easily the world rocks
back and forth between mystery
and revelation. Vision or revulsion
stack in individual ways resulting   
in no consensus. Someone suggests
a water test. Another fire. No one cares
to make the attempt. We continue
leaderless but full of direction until a previously-
unknown candidate emerges from behind a boulder
and behaves as though s/he knows both
what we do and what we don’t.


Karen Neuberg lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her chapbook, Detailed Still, was published by Poets Wear Prada. She has previously published at The New Verse News.