REASONS FOR WATCHING FOX NEWS

by Max Gutmann

to the tune of "My Favorite Things"

Gawking at lovely harassable females,
Daily reminders of Hillary's emails,
Colorful theories Sean Hannity spews,
These are all reasons for watching Fox News.

Hearing acquaintance rape labeled as courtly,
Learning what Donald will tweet about shortly,
Laughing with anchors at liberal views,
Very good reasons for watching Fox News.

Anger at libbers and cornerbacks kneeling,
Ads for gold coins that sound very appealing,
"12 Easy Ways to Try Liking Ted Cruz,"
Excellent reasons for watching Fox News.

When the Dems win, when the news stings,
When I'm feeling bad,
I turn on Fox News for my favorite things
And soon I'll be hopping mad!


Max Gutmann has contributed to The Spectator and other publications.

WHERE IS THE SERVER?

by Lisa Vihos

Image source: @axios

                             after the question from Trump to the media

at his surrender to Putin, 7/16/18

                                       

In this, the Second Enlightenment
(a.k.a. the Demise of Science)
someone is looking for a server.
Is it a room
a box
a chip
a person?
Where are they keeping it?
What is the server saying?
Who has the goods and when
will we receive them?
When will we get supersized?
When will we get our Happy Meals
and all the refills we’ve been promised?

Let’s make a deal:
Bring the 33,000 emails
by midnight tonight,
and you will receive
a lifetime supply of bump stocks
and two free coupons
to the opioid epidemic.
Bring $800 for a DNA test
and your child will be returned.

Come forth, O Server
and tell us all the Deep State secrets
you have stored for so long.
Bring the candles
and the vintage wine.
Reveal us to ourselves
in this never-ending nightmare
that we once upon a time called home.


Editor's Note: “Face it. @realDonaldTrump does have a good point: if the 33,000 emails once on Hillary's server had been found and made public, she wouldn't be president.” —Elizabeth Drew

The poetry of Lisa Vihos has appeared in many journals both print and online including Big Bridge, Big Muddy, Bramble, Forge, Red Fez, Seems, Verse Wisconsin, and Wisconsin People and Ideas. Her fourth chapbook Fan Mail from Some Flounder is just out in 2018 from Main Street Rag Publishing. She is the poetry and arts editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal and the Sheboygan organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change. 

CLINTONATIONS

by Edmund Conti

When you argue with the GOP
Be sure to bring your best artillery.
Their argument you won’t foresee.
It goes like this:  “But Hillary.”

Your facts can sting like a bumblebee,
Dance and flit like a fritillary.
They’ll just respond with calm and glee,
“But Hillary.”

You can argue till your face is blue,
Till you get inane and sillary.
Your logic will be turned on you—
“But Hillary.”


Edmund Conti has not been published in The New Yorker nor has he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry but …

THE SKY IS THE LIMIT

by Alejandro Escudé

“Russian Dirt on Clinton? ‘I Love It,’ Donald Trump Jr. Said,” —The New York Times, July 11, 2017

There is no way to confirm what we know.
A parade of Windsor knots. The meetings.
The taking and taking of meetings. In the East,
they say the West is “out here” when they’re
here. I travel the freeway under fiery skies
listening to the bare news sans the clothing
of images—unnecessary—as the haves take
more, history theirs, the colleges are theirs,
the homes, the beaches, the pearly oceans.
How do we unearth the hoard under the blip
on the metal detector? And how many cast
members! The lawyer, the singer, the orphans.
In the age of T***p, aren’t we all orphans?
Our ageless souls stripped from our organs.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

T***P BUMPS HIS HEAD, A BIGGER

by  David Spicer  

                                         

Cartoon by Darcy, Cleveland.com, May 10, 2017

idiot than ever. No, not impossible:
decades ago he grabbed a Voodoo
princess by her pussy in his penthouse.
Curses galore at the height of your infamy,
Goldie Small Hands! T***p didn’t laugh
but drools today. Today, swastikas curve fetally.
Today, the sheets of KKKers bleed.
Beavis and Butthead chew Tic-Tacs.
T***p’s blonde miracle weeps tangerine tears.
Whitey Pence shocks himself into a coma,
handmaids arcing around him, praying to Buddha.
Chris Christie scarfs twenty cheeseburgers.
Kellyanne Conway talks circles around herself
like a carousel pony. Congress is revolting.
Eddie Munster for Prez! moderates roar.
David Duke for King! fascists yell.
I want Ted Nugent! the Alaskan nincompoop drawls.
On second thought, I want me! Anarchists, nihilists,
and poets celebrate with a three-day bacchanal.
T***p disappears, descends into the earth via ICBM,
lands in China, deported to North Korea.
SUPREME LEADER STUPID HAIRCUT
BEHEADS ORANGE FACE!!! shouts
New York Post. Putin mourns, then farts.
Throngs cheer and party in the world’s megacities.
Back home, T***p’s cronies and their carpet bags
red-eye to the North. Little Jeff Sessions preens
in the mirror of the Justice Department toilet,
tokes his Alabama Bound weed, and dances helter-skelter
like Lorde, collapsing. Eddie Munster! Eddie Munster
for Prez! Gut Medicare, Eddie! Gut Social Security!
his toadies leer and chant. We love Hillary! progressives
scream. Bill Maher, we demand Bill Maher! millennials
moan. GO FUCK YOURSELVES! Bill Maher megahorns.
You’re dreaming again, honey. Wake up,
my wife says, shaking my shoulders.
What’s he done now? I ask.

David Spicer is a retired proofreader for a medical journal and has had poems accepted by or published in Reed Magazine, Alcatraz, The Mocking Heart Review, North Dakota Quarterly, TheNewVerse.News, Chiron Review, Midnight Lane Boutique, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Nude Bruce Review and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press, 1978), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Best of the Net twice and a Pushcart, and is the author of one full-length collection of poems Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press, 1987), and four chapbooks. He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books.

JASON AND THE ARC OF KNOTS

by Richard Hacken

Image source: DonkeyHotey via Daily Kos

I, the Grand Chair of the House Committee on Oversight,
Enduring my own governmental and dental overbite,
I, Representative Jason Chaffetz,
Never go into raving fits
About being partisan.
No, I am just the leading artisan
Of ignoring with quiet ease
All conflicts of interest and improprieties
That might impinge on any fringe of my own party.
Using gymnastics of justification, quite smartly
I look the other way.

But ask about Hillary’s Benghazi: I’ve got plenty to say.

Still, I’ve decided not to take it anymore.
“Soon" I’m going to pack my beret,
My toothbrush, my blinders and cot,
And make good my getaway.
Why? Well, with T***p and his lot—
All of whom I secretly deplore,
But whose follies I feel I must simply ignore
(As a blandly mocked, land-locked ichthyosaur)—
This task of looking the other way
(Oh-Massive-Distressing-Flames-of-Heck)
Causes a passive-aggressive pain in my neck.


Richard Hacken regrets to inform you that Brazen Jason is technically “his” representative while somehow not representing him.

GUZZLING DOWN THE BLUES

a post-election ghazal
by Joe Pacheco

I wake up each morning but can’t turn on the news,
My coffee’s cold and bitter with the Sore Loser Blues.

Start to write a poem, but I can’t find my muse,
She’s run away and left me with just Sore Loser Blues.

Called up Liberty Travel for a one-way Canada cruise,
They told me they’re booked solid with the Sore Loser Blues.

I’m keeping my Clinton sign, in case we didn’t lose,
But don’t know where to hide it with these Sore Loser Blues.

Maybe I’ll jump into the mainstream and drown my liberal views,
It’ll be easier to swim the narrows with the Sore Loser Blues.

The President-elect is desperate, no Dems left to abuse,
He’s willing to twitter anyone with the Sore Loser Blues.

Our nation’s divided, Pacheco, pick a side to choose,
It’s either freeloading Red states or the Sore Loser Blues.

Joseph Pacheco is a retired New York City superintendent  living on Sanibel Island. His  poetry has been featured several times on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Latino USA and WGCU. He has performed his poetry with David Amram’s jazz quartet at the Bowery Poets Café and Cornelia Street Café in New York City. He writes a poetry column for the Sanibel Islander and his poetry has appeared in English and Spanish in the News-Press. In 2008 he received the Literary Artist of the  Year award from Alliance for the Arts. He has published three books of poetry, The First of the Nuyoricans/Sailing to  Sanibel, Alligator in the Sky and, Sanibel Joe’s Songbook.

SPECTRUM: NOVEMBER 8, 2016

by Deborah Kahan Kolb

The day the red-ones drew the curtains and chose the orange-one
to mind the white oval that had embraced the black-one
nearly three thousand days --- that day

was the day the blue-ones formed
a veined parenthesis to contain the pulsing mass
of the red-ones, spilling sideways,

was the day the red-ones and the blue-ones
never turned to purple and the green-ones
stayed scattered, shoots pushing up to be counted,

was the day the brown-ones huddled and burst, and
waited for the white-ones, the eye-holed pointed ones,
to bear a burning broken cross, its twisted arms akimbo,

was the day the pink-ones, like the blue-one who
missed her grip at the finish, snatched steel from
between their legs and bound themselves each to each,

was the day the tan-ones veiled themselves
into invisibility,

was the day the yellow-ones shifted, and strove
for the exits,

was the day the beige-ones bent double, and breathed
dios mio,

was the day the rainbows clung together, their colors melted
and shriven,

was the day a keening Hallelujah rose up from the teeming streets
and evanesced into the violet sky,

was the day I waited for the raging ones to bring a yellow star
for me.

Deborah Kahan Kolb is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Windows and a Looking Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Poetica, Veils, Halos & Shackles, and Voices Israel. She lives in Bronx, NY. 

O, SAY CAN YOU SEE

by George Held

Mr. Mammon. Posted by Fearguth at bildungblog, February 25, 2016.

Once-temperate female Facebook friends
Who’d reckoned Hillary would win for femmes
Now sound in defeat as intemperate
As the rightwing half of the electorate.

Some blacks and Latins now prove as hateful
Toward whites as the most bigoted of baleful
Enemies who supported the winner, Trump,
Who they’d supposed would land on his rump.

Now that there’s no hope for e pluribus unum,
And our petitions are voided in a tweet,
As we prepare for Armageddon in the street,
Listen up to what the Whitelash has spoken:

A land run by conglomerate Trump Bannon
& Co., in thrall to almighty Mammon.


George Held, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News, has a new poetry collection: Bleak Splendor (Muddy River Books, 2016).

LINGERIE COUNTER

by Clara B. Jones

Claes Oldenburg. Lingerie Counter. 1962. Textiles, canvas, plaster, enamel, metal stand, neon tube, mirror, and fiberboard Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest . . . with the addition of Ivanka Trump’s $10,800 “bangle” that she wore from her Metropolis Collection on 60 Minutes.

Trump is a Pop Artist with enough influence to have
poetry recover its power from the Romantics
and their natural tone inspiring Ivanka and Gucci
and other global icons—
balancing perfect acts for their new collections.
There is no rap masterpiece
since Killer Mike® didn't “get the message”
like Hillary didn't send the e-mails that Wikileaks exposed.
Obama has been sad for the last year
but we can think of several ways to thank him
though Michelle is a dealmaker
and her war with 50 Cent® is about to end
if she gets 5% of the profits
when the Oval Office is painted red.
Michelle said
I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street*
when Trump performed in the Green Room
where his show was stunning.
Call 1-800-800-1234 to order his book.
The price will never change.
Something happened
but it never got out of hand
since Trump's career is on the rise
and he fries tasty catfish.
Barak wants to end global warming
but Michelle wants to fight vile diseases—
having said that it's Thanksgiving
so what is Trump going to cook if poems are at stake?
Trump has prescriptions for migraine headaches
but knows his problems are genetic and Melania has
the right to remain silent so nothing will be held against her.

*Claes Oldenburg (1961)

Clara B. Jones is a retired scientist, currently practicing poetry in Silver Spring, MD (USA). As a woman of color, she writes about the “performance” of identity, alienation, and power and conducts research on experimental poetry. Clara is author of three chapbooks, and her poems, reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous venues.

HILLARY'S SONG

by Sue Fagalde Lick

Margot Gerster poses for a photo with Hillary Clinton on a hiking trail in Chappaqua, New York on Nov 10 2016. Photographer: Bill Clinton. Credit: MARGOT GERSTER, The Huffington Post, November 10, 2016

On Day Two, she wakes up late.
No alarm, no phone, no car waiting,
just rain streaking down the window
beyond the white lace curtains.

She hears her husband’s scratchy voice
talking downstairs to the dog,
a clatter of cups, the microwave.
She stretches and sighs, it feels good.

She reaches to turn the radio on,
then stops. What for? No.
It’s over and she didn’t win.
Still no Madame President.

She pictures her opponent’s day,
at dawn already in his suit,
the media, the press of aides
calling him president-elect.

Her followers are all in tears.
They’re holding protests in the streets
while the gun-toting, woman-hating
winners have stolen their country back.

She snuggles in her flannel sheets
and sighs again. We cracked
that old glass ceiling more
but didn’t quite break through.

They called her “Crooked Hillary,”
his voters chanted, “Lock her up,”
they displayed her husband’s mistresses,
hit her hard and yet she stood.

She stood tall, a chubby woman
in designer pantsuits and heels,
with styled hair and painted face,
looking up at all those men.

All the girls and women thought
now our voices will be heard,
but did she really want the weight
of an entire country on her back?

She could do it, and do it well,
better, in fact, than any man,
but the spotlight burned, her feet were sore.
She’d seen the job turn young men old.

Today while Trump is getting briefed—
the wars, the codes, the protocol—
she can take a bubble bath
or sit and watch the world go by.

She puts her slippers on and stands,
looks into the mirror and smiles.
It’s someone else’s problem now.
And I don’t have to style my hair.

Sue Fagalde Lick returned to poetry after a long detour in the newspaper business and a better-late-than-never MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in New Letters, Tenemos, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Windfall and other publications. Her books include Stories Grandma Never Told and Shoes Full of Sand. 

TO: THE VOTING PUBLIC; FROM: THE FBI

by Melissa Balmain

In case you're wondering what motivated
the bomb we dropped and, yesterday, defused:
We're well aware our job is to be hated,
and yours, of course, is simply to feel used.

Melissa Balmain is Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poems have appeared in such places as American Arts Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, and Poetry Daily; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and McSweeney’s. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

THE BRIDGE CLUB DISCUSSES THE ELECTION

by Susan McLean

Image source: Yahoo News Photo Illustration; Photo: AP/Getty)

“If he groped her, she’s a liar."
            "If he didn’t, she’s a frump.”
“If she blabs, he’ll call his lawyer.”
            “What a bozo!  One no trump.”

“Thinks he’s smart to pay no taxes:
            ‘If you pay them, you’re a chump.’”
“He’ll give safety nets the ax.” “As
            well as poor folks!”  “Three no trump.”

“He’ll wall off the southern border.”
            “And haul Muslims to the dump!”
“He’ll show blacks what law and order
            really stands for.”  “Four no trump.”

“He’ll throw Clinton in the slammer.”
            “Then he’ll lift us from our slump,
helped by Putin’s blade and hammer!”
            “What’s your bid now?”  “Six no trump.”

Susan McLean is an English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University. Her books of poetry are The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife. She has also translated over 500 satirical poems of the Latin poet Martial, published as Selected Epigrams by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her light verse has often appeared in Light and Lighten Up Online.

WORDS

by Wayne Scheer




The American presidential election
has come down to a
words matter candidate
and her
it's only words opponent.

One uses words
the way a munitions expert
approaches a live grenade,
the other
tosses the grenade
to see
what will happen next.

One respects,
considers, even fears words
while the other
sees words as fuel
and acts surprised
when an explosion results.

One selects words
as carefully
as one chooses a diamond ring,
the other
loves only the sound
of words,
unconcerned with their appearance
or meaning.

One will be elected president
and speak
for America.

Wayne Scheer has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net. He's published numerous stories, poems and essays in print and online, including Revealing Moments,  a collection of flash stories. His short story “Zen and the Art of House Painting” has been made into a short film.

POLLING

by Gil Hoy

I read on the internet today, on
Get US out! of the United Nations

That Barack Obama
supposedly said

we deserved 9/11 because
we didn’t respect Islam
we should not repeat that mistake

With a photograph of our black President
with 80 shares, 178 likes

With readers comments:

This Muslim does not
speak for me and my family.
What an asshole.

  Obummer is anti-AMERICAN!!!!!

           NO more muslims!!!
All must return to their homeland!!

Trump 42% Clinton 44%

I want to bang a hammer
on the world’s noisiest can,

I want to set off the world’s
loudest alarm.

Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer currently studying poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program where he had received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Hoy received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as Brookline MA Selectman for 4 terms. Hoy's poetry appears or is upcoming in Right Hand Pointing-One Sentence Poems, The Potomac, Clark Street Review, TheNewVerse.News and The Penmen Review.

SUNDAYS IN THE PARK WITH DONALD

by George Salamon

"Yet it took Mr. Trump five years of dodging, winking and joking to surrender to reality, finally, on Friday, after a remarkable campaign of relentless deception that tried to undermine the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president." —Michael Barbaro, The New York Times, September 16, 2016

Important men should be honored,
But they should not be believed.
So wrote a poet from Germany.
To give Trump his due, says this
Nattering nabob of doggerel,
Build him a statue in the park,
A place for pigeons to poop and
Shrine to his character.
Create hell of a hullabaloo
For talking airheads on TV.

Some of our presidents have been crooks,
Others just moral zeroes.
But now we really need heroes.
To ride up Capitol Hill.
Guess we'll have to make do
With Hillary and Bill.

George Salamon has turned from coverage of the campaign to reruns of M*A*S*H, but does not advise that you too do this at home. He lives in St. Louis, MO, often a blue pocket in a red state.

RIBBED FROM THE HEADLINES

by Jill Crainshaw

When they strolled in the garden alone while

the dew was still on the apple blossoms, the
man gave the woman all the credit. “She
gave me fruit. I ate.” But as limelight
illuminates Olympic garlands “There’s the guy

responsible for it all!” Her husband. Take a rib
from a Bear’s side; “Wife Wins Medal!” Suture

buttons on free-flowing fabrics to dress up
mannequins on mega-fashion magazine covers;

thirteen cents an hour in undisclosed
back rooms. No one will ever know. Sew up a

presidential nomination; plunge a whetted needle
through “abrasion resistant” waxed canvas ceiling. The
morning headlines? “Clinton claims nomination” stitched
on the front page of the Tribune, history pocketed

in a photo of him, not her. Her clothes asked for it after all,
buried on page twelve bottom left

next to an ad for half price laundry detergent.

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and a Presbyterian minister. Her work has appeared in Star 82 Review, Mused: Bella Online Literary Review, and Panoplyzine. She is a frequent contributor to the Unfundamentalist Christians blog.

IN RUSSIA WE TRUST

by Alejandro Escudé

Image source: Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off

As the giant bulldozer sets on the Pacific Ocean,
the sidewalks like lines of code, we stalk the tributaries
for the basket carrying a babe who will save us
from ourselves, rotund Botero-like madres slap tortillas
of treatises on the why and how, while u-boats listen in,
a wave breaks, five white horses carrying five bare dictators.
Some remember the Cold War, and Reagan, a nice old man,
I recall feeling for him as a child, knees pressed to my cheeks
beneath a desk, not really understanding what nuclear meant,
a helicopter with a red star, a boxer with platinum flat-top hair,
not this chaotic whispering, a country hardly unearthed
from the rubble of the last century, heroes resigned to knocking
on the president’s door for a medal, a dog bowl of decency.
This nation has gone to war for less, these protean times can’t
always can be summed up by the word “mess.” Now Putin
slams a cold coin on his desk, one head Hillary, the other Trump,
landing with a reckoning thump, a crimson wall behind him,
the words perestroika and glasnost spray-painted in white,
a black pen and a black pen, the wind, the dot of his blue eye.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

AT A BASEBALL GAME ON A HOT SUMMER NIGHT

by Jill Crainshaw

Image source: MiLB.com


class a farm team
a mid-sized southern city
girl in yellow crocs
toddler size 11
“Oh, say can you see?”

her hand over her heart
scrutinizing a standard star-showered
stalwart and still
while summer cicadas whirred and thrummed
“What so proudly we hailed.”

my phone buzzed
glass dome fragmenting
“first woman nominated by a major party”
while a hometown soprano soloed
“At the twilight’s last gleaming.”

does she see, this croc-clad citizen?
the spangled signpost unfurling
a wished-upon possibility too-long postponed
“O’er the land of the free
and the home of the brave.”

“Madam President” i whispered
into the breeze of the soaring anthem
and a girl in yellow crocs jumped up and down
as fans cheered the first batter up

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and a Presbyterian minister. Her work has appeared in Star 82 Review, Mused: Bella Online Literary Review, and Panoplyzine. She is a frequent contributor to the Unfundamentalist Christians blog.

I'M WITH HER

by Marsha Owens

Image source: Redbubble

I stood in the school lunch line, the boy behind
me snapped the bra buckled across my back,
an awkward restraint on my vanishing childhood.
My face flushed crimson, my shame hot without words
to fling into the high-pitched laughter of pimply boys.

I remember quiet talks about bleeding from wherever
so a girl could do what only a girl could do—give birth,
bloody and magnificent pushing forward a heart,
lungs, fingers, toes—in a man’s world, honey, Mom
said, a man’s world.

I heard a school principal explain how his interview
process involved breasts, how he told young women
to bend their elbows, place them against the wall
so he could determine—A, B, or C cup—all the better
to teach with, I suppose.

Years, centuries even before this 21st Century brought me
to her and her and her, the daughter, still plump with maternal
juices, smiling the mother-love of daughters and mothers, a
raucous cry trickles down my face, “Hot damn! I’m with HER!”


Marsha Owens says, “I am a child of the sixties, and my home state of Virginia still has not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. “