GOODBYE

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

after Jorie Graham

 

Here it comes, at last, the nightingale,

after wintering in Africa—

black eyes on fire.

 

Listen to me.

Listen.

You searched for me in all England’s 

green patches,

but the land where Keats

wrote his great poem

has lost the low brush, the woodlands

where we nest.

Our wings

have shrunk, the journey

to sunshine and back too far, too ominous.

Why are you listening only now?

Why did you not

protect?

You didn’t notice my long,

thin beak opening wide—

O—

issuing more sounds

than any other bird.

And silence, repeated, like white

between stanzas.

Now you want to learn—

you write like you talk,

without music—

do you know I’m the bird of Ukraine?

Nation

of poets and musicians.

How many are dying? Dying every day.

Our songs call lovers,

shame all who close their ears.

 

And he left then,

the bird,

taking every living thing with him

in his ballooning, throbbing throat,

before I could say goodbye.

 
 
 
Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work as appeared in The New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, pacificREVIEW, Quartet Journal, and soon, Consequence, and HerWords Magazine.

WINNING THE WORLD CUP

by Margaret Rozga

Hooray Spain!

Hooray soft kick,

hooray edge into the goal,

hooray England so close.

Hooray women!

 

I want to believe in my health,

the health of the sport, the health

of the word, the health of the world

at play on the field for all of us.

 

See the women cross field pass,

see the women head goalward,

see the women strong legs.

 

I play the we, play into the we.

If we can win, the win is for the we.     

If we lose, the loss swept into the win.

Spain is not my country, nor England.

 

What in the world, a win—

what for the world, a win—rejoice!

Here, where, how, and why for the world,

for the game, for women, whoever,

wherever, this world moment, believe.

Margaret Rozga served as the 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate and the 2021 inaugural artist/scholar in residence at the UW Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station. Her fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press 2021). Cornerstone Press will also publish her 2024 forthcoming book, Restoring Prairie.

A GRIM FAIRY TALE

by Lynn White

Dozens of asylum-seeking children have been kidnapped by gangs from a Brighton [UK] hotel run by the Home Office in a pattern apparently being repeated across the south coast, an Observer investigation can reveal. A whistleblower, who works for Home Office contractor Mitie, and child protection sources describe children being abducted off the street outside the hotel and bundled into cars. “Children are literally being picked up from outside the building, disappearing and not being found. They’re being taken from the street by traffickers,” said the source. —The Observer, January 21, 2023 PHOTO: Hove, where unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have been abducted, according to a contractor working for the Home Office. Credit: Andy Hall/The Observer

When I was a child 

my mother told me 

that Never Never Land

Is where the lost children go,

those who can’t find their way home.

My mother told me that

they stay children for ever

and can play all day long.

It sounds like a fairy tale

and perhaps 

that’s where these children have gone,

stepped into a fairy tale

or perhaps

they’ve been taken into one

by a monster

straight out of Grimm.

And now they wait.

And there’ll be others

waiting.

Waiting,

for someone to find them.

Perhaps they’ll put up a sign

hoping someone will see.

And they’ll sit by the sign

waiting for rescue,

waiting for the fairy tale ending

that can never come.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes. 

DIASPORA FOOTBALL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

It was a difficult day at the Qatar World Cup. Our American ambassadors, 

Argentina and Brazil, both with attacking teams who strike as lightning 

and sit back as well controlling the ball, dribbling it back and forth, 

 

wearing the patience down of their European opponents—had leads 

vanish with minutes to go, the European powers striking back, 

and in the case of Croatia pulling off the upset, mighty Brazil losing 

 

on penalties. But Argentina survived. Shot its penalties with clinical 

power, and their goalkeeper used his brain to anticipate the directions 

of the Dutch kicks. I am writing this to remember a Friday in December 

 

when honor lay on the field, and glory, and also bitter defeat. This is 

the field of battle, the football field, the field of dreams, the field of 

identities, how if our country loses we shift then to its natural neighbor, 

 

overcoming regional rivalries in the name of a greater continental unity. 

Imagine how Moroccans feel now as they represent their country and all 

of Africa and all migrants too, as many have grown up away from 

 

their kingdom, in exile, when they strap on their boots to play Portugal 

in the next quarterfinal? My documenting pen will dress with them. 

The diaspora team, my friend calls not only Morocco but France, 

 

England and many others. Football is the identity card, 

the passport. Borders are fluid, 2022 composed of a motley crew 

of border crossers, migrant wonders, football envoys.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

WEIGHING DAY

by Devon Balwit 

Mayor-weighing in High Wycombe, England on May 21, 2016. The custom is thought to go back to medieval times and be unique to High Wycombe. The mayor is weighed in at the start of their year in office and then again at the end to make sure the mayor is not getting fat on the back of the town. Photo by Andrew Colley, Bucks Free Press.

Hey all, Hey!  In High Wycombe, it’s weighing day.
Come, big-bellied bureaucrats, step your girth on the scale.
Let the sigh or the groan of the gears tell the tale,
show you abstemious or making loose with our pay.

Hey all, Hey!  In High Wycombe, it’s weighing day.
Time to see what the work of our civil servants has been:
Slaving hard for our good or steeping in sin,
Swilling down spirits, cheese and filets.

Hey all, Hey!  In High Wycombe it’s weighing day.
Who looks chagrined, buttons straining from stress,
the fine silk of their suits split from duress,
as they step from their town cars, chauffeurs driving away?

Hey all, Hey!  In High Wycombe it’s weighing day.
All acts leave a trace, let’s spy out their deeds,
their back-table dealings, the track of their greed,
their cronies and sycophants, let’s make them obey.

Hey all, Hey!  In High Wycombe it’s weighing day.
Ready your missiles, your eggs and your offal,
sharpen invective to make them feel awful.
They serve at our pleasure: make them hear what we say.

Devon Balwit is a poet and teacher working in Portland, Oregon.  She has poems upcoming in The Fog Machine, The Cape Rock, The Fem, and Of(f) Course.  This election distresses her.

COURTING

by Gil Hoy

Should a black man
in America

love his country?

She should be
lovely to be loved,

not my country
right or wrong.

Only White Men
wrote the constitution with
their rich quill pens

from imperial England,
and white fruits flourished

atop Broken Black Backs,
Flagellation and snapped
roped necks.

America elected a President
of all colors, perhaps Her
finest hour,

But the slave's legacy
in America is still
one of subjugation---

So an NAACP office
is bombed, white
cops kill black boys

NYC mayor warns son
"be wary", whips

speak to supremacists,
and a homeless black man

named Africa
should be careful
where he reaches.


Gil Hoy is a regular contributor to The New Verse News.  He is a Boston trial lawyer and studied poetry at Boston University, majoring in philosophy. Gil started writing his own poetry and fiction in February of last year.  Since then, his poems and fiction have been published in multiple journals, most recently in The Potomac, The Zodiac Review, Harbinger Asylum and Earl of Plaid Literary Journal.

SOILED CANVAS

by Jerome Betts


Oil in seabirds death identified --Press Association, Feb 6, 2013

Birds found on Chesil beach have been taken to the RSPCA's West Hatch centre near Taunton. Photograph: Geoff Moore/Rex Features. Image source: The Guardian

A painter's boast, one long past day,
Beside his Guillemots and Spray:
‘Such are the touches I can give
That when they’re caught in oil, they live.’

This week, his grandsons found the sands
Left grease and feathers on their hands
And told small children asking why
That when they’re caught in oil, they die.


Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, and has contributed verse to LightenUp OnLine, New Verse News, Per Contra, Snakeskin and Tilt-A-Whirl, as well as numerous print publications.

IN PRAISE OF GEORGE READER

by Lex Runciman

George Reader, the dockmaster at Watchet marina in Somerset, who dived into freezing cold waters to rescue the baby boy after his buggy was blown in by strong winds. Photograph: Ryan Hooper/PA via The Guardian, Monday 28 January 2013

Wind blows a baby stroller right off the edge
and three feet down to water.  It sinks
as a woman shouts, as you jump in.
You do not stop to empty your pockets
or remove your shoes, only your coat.
You do not notice the water's temperature,
only that you cannot move as surely
or quickly as you wish.  The stroller
floats with a current, does not entirely
disappear.  At last you grab a handle,
kick and scull, pulling it, stroller and child,
to where someone else has let down
a rope, which you knot with fingers that
have thickened.  The stroller passes you
as they haul it up, and the child buckled in
looks slumped asleep, soaked.
You are cold now.  You have climbed out
and put on your coat
as a woman you have never seen
kneels, hair in her face as she works
and works, pumping that small chest,
until she stops, leans back a little,
the child moving an arm, the child crying,
water running down your face,
the mother who has had to watch this
sobbing, covering her mouth, and even now
a helicopter angles in against the wind,
with the wind, and the mother and the child
are taken inside and lifted away.
It is the purest thing you can remember doing,
and anyone would have – this bright gift
a privilege you'd wish on no one.


Lex Runciman’s most recent book, Starting from Anywhere, was published by Salmon Poetry (Ireland) in 2009.  A new book is forthcoming in 2014.   Runciman teaches at Linfield College.