VOTING IS FAR MORE POWERFUL

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

with apologies to Emily Dickinson

Who is leading national polls?
Harris has been ahead of Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July, as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

Kamala Harris: 49%

Donald Trump: 46% —BBC, October 9, 2024

 

Voting is far more powerful
Than Trump's attempt to rise.
So many times this sinking man
Attempts to reach the skies.
So push him down forever
To that abhorred abode,
Where hope and he part company—
His dreams morosely stowed.
The felon's sneering visage,
Most odious to see,

Let's shun without compunction
As an adversity.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 300 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), Politics/Letters, The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had nine previous poems in The New Verse News.

LIKUD LEGITIMIZATION

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

with apologies to Emily Dickinson

An Israeli military investigation that has roiled the country with allegations of sexual abuse by its own ranks was set in motion by doctors who reported injuries to a Palestinian detainee that were so severe they required surgery, medical staffers familiar with the matter said… In a heated exchange in Israel’s parliament last week, one lawmaker asked another, “To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is that legitimate?” “Yes,” replied Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Likud. “If he is a Nukhba [member of Hamas’s elite fighting unit, which was involved in the Oct. 7 attacks] everything is legitimate to do to him. Everything.” —The Wall Street Journal, August  6, 2024

We'll maim our captured foes and show
No mercy or respect.
We'll soon be lords of all the land
With all rebellion wrecked.

We know we'll be condemned and yet
We forge ahead like kings
Triumphantly. What liberty
Unfettered vengeance brings!

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 300 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, The Galway Review, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had eight previous poems in The New Verse News.

IN THESE FEARFUL TIMES I FIND THE THING WITH FEATHERS AT HOME DEPOT

by Lois Marie Harrod

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News

It’s been dismal—

the mice began invading my cupboarded coconut flakes

because, said my neighbor Ed, who knows about such things,

it’s so hot outside they come into the cool, and my neighbor Cheryl

started calling me The Mouse Slayer,  

because I snapped seven of their hot little necks,

and then a thunderstorm wedged the roof vent flap open,

letting the storm leak onto the toilet where I was sitting,

and a dead squirrel deposited himself in my yard,

and because my dead husband can no longer do it,

I had to shovel the desiccated little rodent into a garbage bag

because the ground is too dry to dig a proper grave,

and then the spin switch on my forty-seven-year-old washing machine

gave up like democracy, and I had to wring out the bath towels,  

hand by arthritic hand, and scoop out gallons of water with a measuring cup.

Next I had to go off to The Home Depot where I spent more than I hoped

on a new ecologically-friendly washing machine, 

and when the bearded salesman gave me the receipt,

he said, And what do you think of what’s going on in this world?

Who are you voting for?

 

And, yes, I was afraid to answer. I knew what was coming . . .

 

but I said Kamala anyway, because what could this 6-foot bearded guy

in an orange apron do to a less than 5-foot customer in The Home Depot?

Shoot me?

But his beard spread into a grin, and he said Good,

and spent another 27 minutes telling me about his grandfather,

a holocaust survivor, and his uncle who saved 19 people at Pearl Harbor,

and how Hitler came into power and just how would-be dictators

are still coming into power—all of which I knew—but he needed me to listen.

 

And, yes, as I left, Emily Dickinson’s Hope,

that little thing with feathers, flitted down the paint aisle—

but Emily, are you listening from your grave?—

you are wrong, that little bird does demand a crumb from us,

many crumbs from us.

We must feed her.

Lois Marie Harrod’s recent publications include her 18^th  poetry collection Spat (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and her chapbook Woman (Blue Lyra, 2020). Dodge poet, life-long educator and writer, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3.

A LOADED GUN

by Ann E. Wallace

after Emily Dickinson

by C.B.

Had my life but stood 

a loaded gun, I might have 

roamed these sovereign states

with ease and in the open.

 

But though this woman’s body

may live longer than its lover,

or its foe, it receives no such 

constitutional protections.

 

We grant inalienable safeguards 

to our guns, as to the men who

cock and press the sacred trigger

with force and as they please.

 

If I were indeed that loaded gun, 

my liberty to choose, to carry 

or to abort, would be a right 

that is secured in perpetuity.

Ann E. Wallace is a poet and essayist from Jersey City, New Jersey. Follow her on Twitter @annwlace409 or on Instagram @annwallace409.

PILGRIMAGE TO EMILY DICKINSON'S HOUSE ON NINETY-TWO DEGREE SUMMER DAY

by Laura Rodley

What would Emily say? The driveway to her brother Edward’s home

is gated, the property surrounded with orange crisscrossed plastic

fencing, plastic not yet invented in her time, nor the cure for her kidney

ailments. Today her condition would have been aggravated by the chlorine

and other astringent agents the town uses to clean the water pumped

to the homes. She would have drunk water from an artesian well

in her Victorian home, writing poems at two a.m., loving someone

she could not have, not from the future, but from her own time period.

Was she ever pregnant as some suggest? Was she virginal as her white

dresses? Did she actually suffer from hypertension? Was she able

to see the future? Her poems crossed realms of time and space.

Would she have cut the crisscrossed orange fence, crushed it down,

or felt more secure to be enclosed, secure in her hermitage

peopled with family, cooks, and Irish workmen, six of whom carried

her casket to her grave in West Cemetery, where she walked in the evenings.

She was nourished by a garden that is no longer open to the public

due to Covid. A garden that fed her, kept her poetry

alive, already passed through the gates into other’s hands through letters.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

NOTES ON LEAVING A HOUSE AFTER 50 YEARS

by Earl J. Wilcox

“Puff of Wind,” painting by Tonya Schultz.

By some ancients’ reckonings

Five decades are a puff in the wind

A tick in the tock of time.

Summing up by comparison needs

Too many tropes to catalogue—

As Milton or Whitman might—

A few more than Miz Dickinson

Did nearing the end of her years

In the same house, rooms familiar

To her as butterflies or gentle poots.

My leaving this house feels more

Like Frost traveling to Florida

Near wintertime or south to Boston

On occasion—journeys which

Beckon or intrigue may satisfy

The urge to know what lies

Ahead more than gone before.

 

 

While it is not true that Earl Wilcox has been sending poems to The New Verse News for 50 years, he has contributed about two dozen in the past 15 years.

HOPE: APRIL 2020

by Marjorie Maddox

Print by jolieguillebeau

A “thing,” perhaps,
and fowl,
       but bloody-
plucked,
dipped in disease
and plummeting,
the sky-high                       yours/mine
                   violently de-plumed,
bald as a vulture,
               fickle flight undone
in this freefall frenzy of fear
to doom
become dust
 become

what we don’t know
                        become
before
            and void
become dark, become
                         the dawn crack
of Eden on replay
and maybe—hope against hope—
become
the “warm breasts, bright wings”
of Spirit hovering,
                        warming,
readying its weary-
world nest
once-again
for wings.

Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry, a short story collection, an anthology (co-editor), and 4 children's books.

TO THE KNOW-IT-ALL

by Terese Coe 

Image from boingboing

After Emily Dickinson

I’m nobody and, as for you,
I frankly cannot construe
how you manage to think mere contempt
could possibly make you exempt
from being a nobody too.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection Shot Silk was nominated for The Poets Prize of 2017.

AFTER EUPHORIA

by Ralph La Rosa

A post-Obama meditation

After Emily Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (372)

After Euphoria, formal feelings come –
Once Tuning Forks, the Nerves won’t hum
And numbed Hearts wonder, “Where is the Sage who bore
Such sane Good News – out of the White House door?”

Eyes widen, dim, dart around –
Ears ache so
From toxic Lies – all Oughts –
In offal sown,
The requiems for loss – alone –

This is the Hour of Dread
For those who were misled –
But Sickened watchers of the Trumped-up show –
Rest – Regroup – Resist – their Hearts say he must Go


Ralph La Rosa’s work has been published online, including at TheNewVerse.News, and in the books Sonnet Stanzas and Ghost Trees.